Link or Drown 2

(Colors.)

The week’s best piece of skate content: The New York Times with an illustrated story about Chico Brenes’ journey from asylum seeker fleeing Nicaragua, to pro skater, to the present day in his home country.

“I kind of consider 2000 to 2009-10 the dark ages of skating. It was just like, the filmer and photographer decided what a skater would skate. If you were good, you got shipped out to California and you would skate with people that would be like ‘You need to do this.’ Almost like there were requirements. ‘Do this handrail.'” Spot-finder extraordinaire, Dave Caddo, has an interview with Village Psychic about the rules of skating new spots, blown out spots, and unlocking spots.

Spent a month or three mulling about whether to write something about the three skate movies that came out in 2018 on here. Quite obviously, nothing on that end came to fruition, and this Paris Review piece on Minding the Gap is nine zillion times better than anything I could have written on what is, far and away, the best “skateboard movie” ever made. Get that free Hulu trial if you haven’t seen it yet.

i-D has a long feature commemorating Palace’s ten-year journey from a brand conceived in a dilapidated skate house by Southbank to what it is today: employer of Torey Goodall, Jamal Smith and Tico ♥

Slam City Skates has a long interview about the current status of the Long Live Southbank project, and it being on the cusp of reaching its massive fundraising goal to open up + reconstruct the closed-off portion of the spot.

LANDLINE” is a rad, mostly NJ-based mini video by Matt Hilzenrath.

Brad Cromer has an all New York part (with a couple Jersey clips) commemorating the release of his new Huf pro model.

Unclear if he’s been reading more women authors or not, but Mark Suciu has a bunch of New York clips in his new Thunder part. Pretty sure he’s the first one to get a clip at those year-old, two-second bust ledges by IBM, and that rock ollie in front of Corner Bistro is fucked.

Ciao is the latest all-New York video by Ricardo Napoli. Teaser here.

Here’s the preview for Virgin Blacktop, a documentary about a 1970s skate team based out of Nyack, New York.

Jahmal Williams is the latest guest on the Mission Statement podcast, and Joe Castrucci is the latest on The Bunt.

More post-“BLESSED” content: New Order Mag has a quick “Five Things” interview with Bill.

Stuff You’ve Probably Caught Already: Frog has a team montage over on Thrasher, Eli Reed has a part that is 70% filmed in New York and made this guy’s girlfriend think he died + Franky Villani and Jakes Hayes skate two or three city spots in their Duets section.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: Trae Young with the magic trick.

Quote of the Week: “When two skaters have babies, a VX dies.” — Shawn Powers.

One Day It’ll Be Summer

Photo via @mvrcog. Shout out to Humidity and everyone in New Orleans.

The past week has been BRUTAL for rounding up content pertinent to the interests of our office. Everyone kinda needs it to be warm again — I don’t think a single piece of non-Instagram footage from New York emerged in the last seven days besides Dick Rizzo’s switch front shove over the can wearing a Hardbody hoody in the Huf video

That and Young Jeezy, this website’s longtime spiritual guide, announced that he will be retiring. Though he taught us all we need to know to continue on this journey of life long ago, we can’t deny the melancholy feeling that fell over our staff last week.

How many times did everyone watch *the* Louie Lopez wallie video before they figured out what he actually did?

As they countdown to whenever their video is supposed to be proven real, Quasi has a photo feature over on Heaps Chat from a filming trip down in Miami.

“You already know about that Dirty Ghetto Kids Skateboards but we talking about that Alltimers Skateboards thing.” Wish this video was 5x as long, but Tyler Warren made a wrap-up video of the most recent Alltimers trip down to — you guessed it — Miami.

“As the ‘#MeToo’ movement claims celebrity scalps and forces industries from media to politics into uncomfortable self-examinations, the increasingly upward-mobile skateboarding biz might ponder its own richly checkerboarded past.” Boil the Ocean examines what happens when people come forward about enigmatic, storied skateboarders get revealed to be jocks in today’s contentious climate.

He also wrote some existential shit about “Christmas completes” too.

The Bunt’s latest episode is with onetime QS contributor, Ted Barrow.

We threw some odd sizes and leftovers from the holidays on sale in the webstore.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: While the majority of Americans tuned into 60 Minutes yesterday to watch an interview with a lady of the night about her time spent with an orange man, afterwards, there was a segment that told the story of Giannis Antnteteoektekompo that will melt your heart and make you happy.

Quote of the Week: “Today, I started thinking about how much money I’ve spent on caesar salads in my life” — Pryce Holmes

Happy birthday Connor Champion! ♥

A Sense of Seriousness…

Screen Shot 2016-08-22 at 9.14.40 AM

Emilio Cuilan’s DANY video is now available for purchase from TheDANYstore.com. Supreme and Labor also have copies for sale. The video features full parts from Shawn Powers, Genesis Evans, Jason Byoun, Adam Zhu and Yaje Popson, plus appearances from a whole lot of others. Minute teaser for the video can be found here.

Happy birthday Keith Denley.

There’s this video of Kenny Anderson and Vincent Alvarez skating Lenox Ledges (Antony Correa cameo!), and yes, Kenny footage is always a pleasure, but there’s only one bit of Lenox footage from the past week that anyone was talking about. Good lord.

Trife alumnus, Black Dave Willis, has a new part live on the Thrasher site entitled “NYBD.” Gap to front blunt on the out ledge across from World Trade is a wild one.

Can’t Ban the J.B. Man.

Tredje Akten is a rad 20-minute video by the homie Tao from the Malmö + Copenhagen scene. Features Ville, Hjalte, etc + a full Polar section at the end.

NY Skateboarding posted part one of apparently a three-part series of video interviews with Keith Hufnagel. This one talks about meeting Keenan Milton, the infamous Ryan Hickey house that housed all homeless skateboarders of the era, moving to San Francisco, skating Embarcadero, etc.

Gotta #respect a ten-minute Boston video that doesn’t hit Eggs once. Not easy. “Mean Streets Volume 2,” A.K.A. the LurkNYC boys go to Boston.

Two teasers for upcoming videos that should be a good time: Division from Politic Skateboards (#caddoalert), and Elan Vital from Studio Skateboards.

What Youth did a quick video interview with Challex Olson. He slipped on a sandwich.

Who’s going to lug this parking block to Tompkins T.F. West?

This is tasteless and insane, but you can visualize every scenario of this hypothetical Seinfeld script that imagines the characters’ lives in the week after 9/11.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: Who cares about Melo’s Olympic postgame interview, Russell Westbrook’s “Now I Do What I Want” video is singlehandedly the most inspirational sports moment of 2016, and the only promotional material the NBA needs for the 2016-2017 season. #MVP.

Quote of the Week: “I’m so glad I didn’t go to double town China set.” — John Choi

Started the past week worth of mornings with this, and it worked out pretty well :)

Real Chill

astor riviera

Astor & Lafayette, in a galaxy far, far away. Jacked from That’s a Crazy One.

It’s the end of the summer, 100 degrees out, and people are fucking pissed.

“In fact, they feel it was exploitative, that Clark capitalized on the brilliance of the crew while failing to capture the true beauty of their world. They weren’t as sex crazed as the film portrays them, for one. More important, in Kids, it seems all the boys want is to fuck the girls, but in real life, the girls weren’t sexual conquests. The boys and girls ran neck and neck and were best friends.” Ok, so lately been wondering about the origins of the photos from @thatsacrazyone on Instagram, which has tons of early and mid nineties stuff around Astor, Washington Square and the Banks + some same faces from Out & About, etc. (This Loki photo is the coolest a slappy crook on a six-inch curb will ever look.) Turns out its for an upcoming book of the same name, whose website hasn’t been updated in a year-and-a-half, but apparently is still coming out as per this feature in August’s issue of Vice. Really looking forward to this one :)

Byrd Gang videos are my new favorite videos out of New York. Teaser for the new one.

File Jawn Gardner’s Bruns 2 part under: Video Parts That Made Me Yell At My Computer Screen More Than Three Times in 2016.

Probably listened to The War Report more than any other venerated nineties New York rap album as an adult, so this’ll be a nice addition for the wall.

“Rifuckingdiculously Sorry” is the forth and final installment to Flip’s Sorry series, oddly starring a bunch of Canadians skating in Toronto.

The history of skateboarding unfolded pretty much alongside the development of trucks, and plot-twist — women run everything in skateboarding. Part two of Jeff Grosso’s history of skateboard trucks is now live. (Part one went live last month btw.)

Andrew Allen interviews Austyn Gillette.

Village Psychic with another round of strange skater + sponsor match-ups.

Probably the best *sounding* video of all time, Tim Dowling’s Listen, in full.

Speaking of videos that sound like they look, Budapest’s Rios Crew A.K.A. the New Jersey-ians of Europe just dropped a new one called “Nap Mint Nap Volume 3.”

You probably already saw this: Austyn’s TWS cover footage and Brad Cromer front blunting a Seaport bench in Huf’s new NYC edit.

This is six-years-old and has nothing to do with skateboarding, but I read it on the plane twice. “If journalism’s more vital traditions of investigating corruption and synthesizing complex topics are going to be restored, it will never be at the expense of the personal, the sexual, the venal, or the sensational, but rather through mastering the kind of storytelling that understands that none of those things exists in a vacuum.”

Quote of the Week: “They make MTV music that I want to listen to.” — Pryce Holmes’ Sremmlife 2 review

Morning Report

huf bronze josh wilson

Both of these missed Monday links yesterday*, and both deserve special attention.

Bronze just dropped a video for their now-available Huf collaboration, chopped up to the plethora of newscasts about footwear-related violence. It’s basically a real good mini Josh Wilson part, which contains a First Annual Regular Stance Heelflip of the Year Candidate. The second GS9 part has Tierney exploring even more griptape colors, and Dick Rizzo furthering the ongoing resuscitation of the Verizon Banks. Dude, why does everyone hate the VX so much these days? ;)

The other day, we were having an office discussion about how Last of the Mohicans is low-key one of the more influential New York videos of the past decade or so. Even though ~75% of the footage was from Florida etc, the New York bits rewired how visitors and recent ex-pats went about filming in the city. It was one of the first vids to entirely ignore skating below triple-digit Manhattan streets. Before Mohicans and those early Dobbin Block montages, few people gave a shit about trekking out to East New York or Morris Heights to skate some rugged brick bank spot you could get stabbed at. Nowadays, that’s some people’s entire M.O. That was one of the first videos to really prioritize sticking its nose in outer borough crust.

ANYWAY, Caddo was a big part of that whole era, and he dropped a wallride-heavy L.A. trip part for Politic yesterday. No music, just urethane screeching against walls. The Politic guys even went the distance of calling it a “casual” part — not like footage has ever done justice to how insane this dude’s skating is anyway :)

ICYMI: There’s a great noseslide in the video that Politic dropped last month, and here’s a .GIF 4 da Tumblr of the Caddo kickflip at the biggest bust in New York.

*Unrelated to this, but related to yesterday’s Monday Links post title: This is still the best Meek Mill song of 2015.