It’s Our Holiday, and They Wanna Take It Away

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Some fucking balls, badmouthing America. Especially now.”

You should re-watch Nik Stain’s Bruns part just because.

There are some Photosynthesis-era outtakes plus one-pants-leg-pulled-up extras from Andy Bautista’s INFMS part in the latest installment of In Absentia C-roll.

New part from Lurker Lou for Prizefighter, which features a ton of chill avant-garde noseslide maneuvers. Slappy Flushing is up there for N.S.O.T.Y. honors.

For anyone keeping track of WATTBA #musicsupervision… Free’s Lucien Clarke + “I’m The Plug” compilation part is great, and the new Cell Jawn video features a sslloowweedd rendition of “Plastic Bag” + an emphasized Conor Prunty flick. FYI your “Summer Trip To N.Y.” clip prob isn’t good enough to waste “Scholarships” on ;)

Was wondering when footage on that abandoned BMW at Lenox Ledges would begin to surface. Surprised that thing wasn’t the most popular spot in New York this summer.

Green Zine has a detailed and rather biographical interview with James from Labor.

Interviewing young skaters without ~a decade’s worth of coverage is a tough assignment, especially if you’re trying to avoid asking the same shit you asked the last young skater (“Soooo, like Instagram and Street League? So crazy right?”). The source shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but Chromeball pretty much did an under-25 skater interview as best as you could possibly do it with Ishod Wair.

The guy behind Fakie Hill Bomb, one of my favorite skate sites with words on it, wrote a piece about knobs and other prohibitive architecture for The Guardian.

Boil the Ocean re: Love Park, Sabotage 4, and the discontinuation of Actavis. Here you were thinking it was a drought

The body varial has had a bit of a resurgence in recent years, and there’s still a raging battle in ballcourts throughout the city for someone to do it over a vertical can (sans bump.) SMLTalk stops to contend that the best has already happened for said trick.

Ever want to glo up at the skatepark before? (You gotta.)

Village Psychic interviewed Mehring about his new book, Skate the World.

The Theories guys give an #authenticportrait of what skating in [north] Brooklyn is like.

When I was a little girl in Poland, we all had ponies.

QS Sports Desk: Can’t wait for the season to start man.

Quote of the Week: “Do you think Johnny’s complete disregard for anyone’s feelings is the real source of MPC’s productivity?” — Nick Boserio

Three weeks late on “Thotline Bling” :(

Dress It Up & Go To NASA

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Photo via @jkjhnsn

Still some #TFReport tees and other stuff left in the webstore.

As expected, Hjalte’s new part has some great noseslides in it.

Don’t smoke weed.”

On that same note, Boil the Ocean offered up some observations on the era of the “functional Baker Boy” — with some alarming data on the sole still-drinking Piss Drunx member and his sober former colleagues. (Basically, drinking is great for skating. )

Jim Hodgson put together a ten-minute outtakes reel from In Absentia, in which Bobby Puleo apologizes to the city of Secaucus.

Life is Goodie is online in full.

Genesis has some fire footage in this new summer montage.

The best boardslider working today, Jesus Fernandez, takes you around Barcelona, a place where Universitat is described as having “pretty good marble.”

Our friends at Chapman Skateboards were on CNBC’s Made in America show about preserving their history of domestic skateboard production. (Always love reading the comments when those sort of outlets cover skateboarding: “Personally I think NASCAR or Bowling are better sports to teach children life’s lessons.”)

Dime already did the necessary research into the best flatground tricks ever done, but Ride took a pass at list-isizing skateboarding’s greatest flatground moments, though a William Phan omission is inexcusable.

SMLTalk on Ronnie Creager’s occasionally under-appreciated career.

The whole doing ollies onto cars thing has turned into one big game of who’s going to get shot first. The Ferrari dealership is on Park and 55th Street, btw.

Village Psychic profiles Scumco, Mother, Send Help and Iron Claw on what it’s like to run a small skateboard brand in 2015.

Supreme v.s. Chanel, circa 1995.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: I think Steph used up all his luck on this yesterday.

Quote of the Week: “I gotta rewatch some Jackass.” — Keith From Nike

If you are fire with the Final Cut timelines, be sure to enter to Jason Byoun re-edit contest to win some free QS gear. Deadline is June 30th.

In Absentia: The Newport Remix

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After yesterday’s #controversial post, it felt necessary to quell the tension and focus on the waterfront utopia that existed on the opposite side of Manhattan island, some fifteen years ago.

Jim Hodgson was generous enough to lend us all the Newport footage from his In Absentia series for this QS remix. Out of all the romanticism that surrounds east coast skateboarding, the Love Park / City Hall / Photosynthesis era carries the most weight. These wooden blocks on the East River waterfront were New York’s concurrent answer to what was going on 100 miles south on I-95 at that time. The baggy carpenter jeans, bulky shoes (be on the lookout for D3s), steadyshot turned off, and above all, the first-ever sight of advanced technical skateboarding within New York City limits remain points of nostalgia for all late-nineties / early-2000s skate nerds. Consider it the video companion to July’s “History of Skateable Seaport” post.

Also, let this stand as a prime example of how easy-to-solve the issue of skateable space in New York is: A few wooden blocks with metal affixed to them, and we’re still talking about it a decade-and-a-half later. It’s not that hard. You don’t need California Skateparks to figure that one out.

Features Bobby Puleo, Albie, Mike Wright, German Nieves, Andy Bautista, Rodney Torres, Brian Wenning, Anthony Pappalardo. Filming by Jim Hodgson.

P.S. While on the topic of 90s-themed QS remixes: This past summer, a prominent Danish skateboarder told me that his “favorite video part” was the Quim Cardona QS remix. He was probably just trying to be nice, because, like, why wouldn’t the Non Fiction part be your favorite if you’re going that route? — but in any event, I always felt bad about the aspect ratio being f’ed up in that clip, so we fixed for 4:3 viewing over on Vimeo. For that guy, and all others. Have a good weekend.

We Never Hungover

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Quartersnacks colorway Alltimers Lambo cruisers now available at Supreme NY. They have tees, too. Webstore is still cracking, but we’re sold out of cruisers.

Skateboard tricks are sorta just stupid now.

Diamond Days #76. This one is fairly street.

New Ishod and Seaport 5.1-heavy video blog from Johnny Wilson and friends.

Blonde Reider is pretty sick. 99% sure he’s the first one to skate the second level of the Columbus Circle statue ledge from flat. Someone good should noseslide it.

You probably caught the Puleo and Wenning sections from In Absentia, but you might’ve missed the more under-the-radar parts from Rodney Torres, who has always been a bit ahead of his time, especially by east coast standards, and Andy Bautista, which contains tons of Logic #6 B-sides. R.I.P. Hoboken Ledges.

“This is a bad example, but you know like in Dodgeball, when the evil team comes out and they’ve got the best uniform, and everyone else has mixed shirts? I like that look.” Complex has a rather detailed interview with Lev Tanju.

DC Shoes is five years late on trying to merge the scene with the board. Who on their team is even partyboy-enough (in the #nyfw sense of the word) to legitimately be the face behind that shoe? Is Nyjah poised for a more fashionable rebrand?

This is what skateboarding in Alaska looks like.

The landing for that first 360 flip is literally cobblestones.

The Gonz doesn’t like Brooklyn, and Kevin Lowry cruising around non name brand New York spots is a fun watch. (Do any NBA fans find it confusing that there is a Canadian skateboarder named Kevin Lowry, and a basketball player on a Canadian team named Kyle Lowry? Or is this only a problem in the QS office?)

VHS Mag has a new interview with the first or second best skater from New Jersey, Quim Cardona.

“Best duo since Outkast” might be a hyperbole, but who really cares.

Quote of the Week: “We wanted to send PLG [Pierre-Luc Gagnon] some Dime gear, and asked him what size he was. He goes, ‘I’ll take larges for skating, and mediums for the club.'” — Antoine Asselin

How long is that new T.F. box going to stick around? How long until there’s a 24-hour police patrol at that new concreted spot downtown? Sorry for so many questions today. We are feeling very #existential.

Happy Birthday Dre

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If you follow NY Skateboarding, you have no doubt caught onto In Absentia, a late-nineties, early-2000s B-roll video from filmer Jim Hodgson. A bunch of the footage is semi-recognizable from sessions that yielded tricks in Photosynthesis (+ the QS-favorite Pops/Wenning commercial), Logic, and the first two issues of Zoo York’s EST video magazine. The most widely circulated editions are Tim O’Connor and Anthony Pappalardo’s sections. Today’s post of Bobby Puleo skating in a chain and doing switch frontside heelflips is sure to get passed around a bit as well. There are still five videos in the playlist locked on private, and based on the BGPs in other editions, you’d think at least Wenning and Andy Bautista sections are on the way.

BUT, we’re not here to talk about those guys. Today is Andre Page’s birthday. In Absentia has a lesser-seen Andre Page section.

The past few interviews on QS have coincidentally taken a “no excuses” theme. Not to put him completely on blast, but Dre is really pushing 40 today. A lot of the names popping up in this video are way from the past; you haven’t heard about many of these dudes skating in years. Dre, on the other hand, hit me up to meet at T.F. after work today. He then told me he took tomorrow off…so that he could skate. Next question: “What are you doing this weekend? I’m trying to have a pizza party at Tompkins.” If you have two functional legs, there really are no excuses. Unless you spent yesterday skating D7 (you idiot), there really is no “I’m too sore” in your twenties. Break out the foam roller. Someone ~double your age is out here trying to front shove a bump-to-bar.

Happy birthday Dre. Loving father to dozens of lost skateboarders, humanitarian, eccentric entrepreneur, and practitioner of one of the highest ollies in New York City…at damn near 40.

“I have probably spent a million dollars on skateboarders in my life.” — Andre Page

There are a lot of good sections in In Absentia, but we are going to keep it Jersey-centric for the bonus inclusions:

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