Interviews | Quartersnacks

Dreamchasin’ — An Interview with J. Scott Handsdown

Features & Interviews February 17th, 2016 · 5:20 am · 12

handsdown

Words and interview by Zach Baker

I’ve recently put off going skateboarding to: eat pho; be hungover; sleep; watch The Waterboy; stare at a screen all day doing nothing; be horny; hit the streets with dreams of sex that result in merely passing out on the subway until seven the next morning. I’m sure you have excuses that are even more legitimate. I bet you work all the time, or your girl likes to day drink and do brunch on weekends. Everyone has excuses and they all stink.

If you’re not familiar with the recent Insta-celebrity of @jscott_handsdown, you’re in for a treat. He has around 10k followers due to his frequent, highly-inspirational posts. Whether it’s in his tiny garage or the rusty local skatepark, he manages to skate more hours a day than even the most unemployable New York skateboarder, while working a schedule more grueling than any legal U.S. citizen’s should be. J. Scott’s motivation is simple and pure: he does it for the love of his family. I caught him one Monday morning as he was getting home from his graveyard shift.

+++++++

What’s your name, how old are you, and where are you from?

My name is Joseph Scott. I’m from Fort Austin, Texas and I’m 26 years old.

Where do you work?

I work at Exxon Mobil. It’s a local refinery in Beaumont, Texas. I’m a painter, or, I’m what’s called a painter. I sandblast the tanks at the refinery, and any tanks that corrode, we do all the repair work on those.

How long have you been skating?

Four years. I was painting blast at the refinery, and I just happened to get off early one day. I saw a little white kid on a skateboard grinding a rail outside. I was interested and said to myself, “I wanna try this.” I was grocery shopping and saw some fake board, I think it was a Mountain Dew board. I picked it up, rolled on it, and ever since then I’ve had a love and passion for it. I bought the fake board and ever since then, I’ve been skating. That’s all I live for now. Trying to learn tricks is challenging and gives me something to do, and I love it.

An Interview With Jason Byoun + Remix Contest

Features & Interviews June 3rd, 2015 · 10:52 am · 25

Photo via Colin Sussingham

The most experimental, controversial, subversive, and Vine-friendly skateboarder working in New York City today. Interview by Jesse Alba and Genesis Evans. Scroll to the bottom for details on the re-edit contest.

+++++++

Where are you from and what’s your favorite board company of all time?

I’m from Monteville, New Jersey, which is near Parsippany and Towaco, and my favorite board company is Creature.

What nationality are you?

American.

But what about ethnic background?

Korean. 100%.

How did you start skating?

My friend Lynden from New Jersey got me into skating. He had a Popwar board, with Phantom Two trucks, orange Spitfire wheels and riser pads. We were chilling in my basement and he had to take a shit. My basement is carpeted, so I stood up on his board and learned how to ollie in the time it took him to take a shit. Then I got on CCS and ordered a board.

When I was learning how to ollie, my cousin told me that Stevie Williams learned to ollie on his second try.

In my first week of skating, everyone I grew up with told me it took them years to learn tricks. I was just like “Nah, first week, I’m gonna learn how to kickflip,” just so I could call them and tell them I did it.

Where did you skate in New Jersey?

I grew up skating in a town where the main spot was a basketball court and rec center, sort of like Tompkins. It was outside, but in the wintertime, they’d put an air bubble over it. My mom had a mini van and we’d put a box and a Zero flatbar in it to bring over there.

How about Chris Cole leaving Zero for Plan B?

I haven’t been keeping up with that to be honest. Chris Cole was actually my first favorite skater. Ryan Sheckler and Chris Cole.

Who are your favorite skaters now?

Paul Rodriguez, Phil Rodriguez, Brian Tober, Adam Zhu and Nate Rojas.

An Interview With Budapest’s Rios Crew

Features & Interviews April 17th, 2015 · 4:55 am · 10

There aren’t many videos coming out today that don’t remind you of twenty other videos that came out today. Skaters love to think they’re special ‘n shit, but fall back on formulas just like Hollywood. (Currently kicking an idea around the editor’s desk where we rank the Bronze knock-offs the way NY Mag ranked the Taken rip-offs.)

Last year’s Toló video was something different. Not that it didn’t have it’s influences — the QS post for it made a tongue-in-cheek comparison to New Jersey vids — but it didn’t look like anything else being thrown out on the internet at that time or time since. It helped that it came from a secluded (by skate industry standards) former Soviet-bloc country known as Hungary, via the “Rios Crew.” Their subsequent projects have been frequent and just as fun to watch. They’re on the shortlist of videos left in Hella Clips/IG-era skateboarding that are fairly certain to earn repeat viewings.

These guys speak varying levels of English. Instead of doing a massive group interview, we had the dudes with the best command of the English language mold the crew’s answers into one unifying response. Most of the names wouldn’t make individual sense to you anyway, so here is an interview with Hungary’s Rios “Crew.”

+++++++

What is the skate scene in Hungary like? Is Budapest the capital for it?

The skate scene is just as colorful as in the States, but with less skaters. The total population of Hungary is around 8.5 million, which is the same number of people you have in New York. There are maybe a thousand skaters in Budapest and let’s say another thousand spread throughout the country.

Skateboarding has been around in Budapest since the early eighties, but Hungary was still a communist country until 1989, so the first shop and park didn’t open until about 1991. Before that, you had to get gear from western countries. There are stories about guys who were selling H-street boards and other stuff before the first shop opened. There were skaters around back then, but it was never a common thing. The scene got quite heavy in the nineties and 2000s. We even had names like Rodney Mullen, Ed Templeton and Ethan Fowler in Budapest giving demos around in those years.

Every generation had a different central spot and shop. Our generation’s central spot was a square that was surprisingly built for skating around 2003, but after an accident, skating got banned there and it turned into a typical shitty pre-fab skatepark. It’s in the total center of the city and always crowded. We don’t go there.

We always meet at our D.I.Y. spot, Rió.

An Interview With Philly Santosuosso

Features & Interviews April 10th, 2015 · 4:00 am · 16

Photo by G. Dagostaro

Most people do not know much about skateboarding in New Orleans. You can walk down a major city’s downtown anywhere in America and bet on seeing at least a few skateable things. When you walk around downtown New Orleans, where the few tall buildings are, and there’s next to nothing. (Places like that make me feel bad about writing things like this, even as a joke.) Its first public skatepark has been entangled in red tape for years. Its most recognizable skater might be Lil’ Wayne.

Philly and Humidity have been our lens into New Orleans’ underreported skate scene for years now, a city that manages to make something out of not very much.

+++++++

Not many people think of New Orleans as a skate city. How did you first get into skating down there?

My half brother got into skating when I was eight or nine, then quit, and I kept going. There was a small indoor park called Second Nature, which was run by the best skaters in the city. I hung out there, and they had a skate shop that you could rent skate videos from. I would watch a lot of 411s, video after video, and that exposed me to what was going on in skating. I ended up riding for the shop inside the park when I got a little older.

What was the scene like at that time? It feels like it never gets much coverage.

Duane Pitre is from here, and was riding for Alien Workshop around that time. The first actual skateboard I bought was off his grandma, who owned poodle grooming shop where she also sold his boards. Dyrdek would come down — when Dyrdek ollies over a shopping cart off a little bump in Mind Field in one of his little clips from when he was younger — that’s actually in New Orleans. Sal Barbier is also from here, so there was a good community of skateboarders at that time when I was first starting to skate.

I didn’t even know New Orleans sucked for skating until later.

Filmed by Thom Musso / The Man Who Films

Why do you say you realized it sucked?

First, the park closed down. Then, the first Zero video came out, which was sick, but really bummed me out on skating. I saw that everything was about jumping down shit. In New Orleans, we have like one eight-stair and couldn’t really follow in that direction. I was young, so I got a bit more into BMX instead, building dirt jumps and shit, being a kid, you know?

‘What Is Dime?’ — An Interview With Antoine Asselin & Phil Lavoie

Features & Interviews April 3rd, 2015 · 5:00 am · 7

This originally appeared in Dank Skate Mag issue number 8. We felt this was worth sharing online, given the slim chance that you have difficulty obtaining Norwegian skateboard magazines where you live.

Dime is one of the greatest “things” in skateboarding. I say “things” because even they don’t exactly know what they are. A brand, a crew, a series of videos, something? Being funny is hard enough, but being a funny skate crew — without falling into the same overused tropes of weed and dick humor as every other skater on Instagram — is impossible. These dudes somehow figured it out, all while embracing the relative invisibility of Canadians in skateboarding.

+++++++

What is Dime?

Phil: It’s a bit different than what it started out as. Now, it’s a brand, but it became one accidentally. At first it was a crew, and we just skated together and made videos.

Antoine: It started as a shitty website that we never updated. We were fifteen-years-old, just posting shitty web clips. We started making full-lengths and it grew from there.

P: We sell some clothes, but it’s not really a clothing brand or a skate video brand. Everything we make is just for fun.

It’s kind of a good era with the internet and all to have the luxury of not knowing what you’re doing.

A: We’re not too sure what it is ourselves. We’re just going with the flow. I think people like not knowing what it is.

P: It’s nice being able to do whatever you want whenever you want. Whenever we have a good idea, we do it. Real clothing companies have timed fall drops, and we’re completely lost on that. We’re trying to learn everything as we go along.

Alexis Lacroix in the back: No definition, no limits.

P: Our goal is to skate. Anything to keep us around skateboarding. That’s what we like to do. I’m never going to become a professional skateboarder, so I might as well make something I want to do in skateboarding. Antoine makes money off his sponsors and all, but I quit my job to focus on Dime.

So, the goal of Dime is to keep you dudes from having real jobs for as long as possible?

A: To us, it’s not work. Now, we have clothing in stores, so we have to be more on point, but it doesn’t feel like work. We want to do this.