Sanguine Paradise

Please sign the petition to show your support for keeping the asphalt at the Tompkins Square Park courts. This space is as sacred to skateboarding and the East Village as the Rucker or the West 4th Street courts are to basketball. It would be a massive loss to the youth and cultural fabric of the neighborhood if they were covered with synthetic turf. We are a few hundred shy of 25,000 (!!!) signatures, so please please please share the petition with your friends, and on your respective social channels.

After many years of captivity, the Zipper Ledge is finally free and dressed with a fresh, yellow paintjob, as first reported by @mini_spots. (Don’t ask for pin! That’s like asking where the Empire State Building is!) If only the park starts opening the gate at Yellow Rail, then the entire Morningside little kid skate scene circa 2003 will be in full revival.

Jesse Alba is the latest guest on The Bunt, and really happy that he no longer lives at 51 Eldert Street.

…aanndd Max Palmer is half the man he used to be in Jesse’s new #longform iPhone edit.

One of the hardest things about interviewing skateboarders is not asking the same ten things that the last few interviews they did asked. It’s special and rare when you get someone for their first one. Caleb Barnett did his first ever interview with the Slam City Skates blog.

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An Arm & a Leg & a Monday Link

Jesse Alba made a bro cam edit from a trip to London with Cyrus, Diego Todd + some cameos from the Atlantic Drift dudes.

Alex Olson explains why Mike Carroll is the best for eight minutes.

Naquan uploaded a five-minute “remix” of Gang Corp’s Black Business video, though it feels like a solid chunk of those clips weren’t in the original video.

A wider net for skate interviews this past week than the typical guys talking about their first sponsor type of thing — 1) The Wall Street Journal interviewed Beatrice Domond. There’s a pay-wall involved, but it seems like they let you rock on one free article. 2) “I just really like New York.” Elissa Steamer interviewed Alexis Sablone for Thrasher. 3) Skateism interviewed Forrest Kirby, in what I believe is his first interview since he publicly came out last year.

“Are we already in the Matrix?” Skate Jawn interviewed Jawn Gardner about astrology, the afterlife and time travel + they also have a quick one with Kyota that includes some rad photos.

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Frog Skateboards & Friends in Atlanta

Just because you’re a thorn in the side of every skater guy yelling at a cloud on the internet, doesn’t mean you can’t MS Paint art direct your way into having friends in high places. Facing the dilemma of promoting a Nike SB collaboration with limited Nike SB riders on their amphibious roster, the Frog team called in a couple favors.

They borrowed Numbers’ Antonio Durao (apparently on his way home moonlighting at a catering gig, so the answer to the age-old question of “how much do you pay Antonio?” is “not enough”), 917’s Nolan “Every Time He Focuses A Board, That’s $20 Out Of Alex Olson’s Pocket” Benfield, Stingwater C.E.O. Daniel Kim + several others who consistently gyrate around the Frog universe, but earn their check elsewhere — and headed down to Atlanta.

Filmed & edited by Jesse Alba Hjalte Halberg.

Snow Day Links

There’s snow on the ground, and not a ton of links to recap from the past few days, but at least we get post-7 P.M. sunsets back on Sunday. Tiny victories.

Rest in Peace Dillon

New car and live with your parents, or move to New York and live in a basement apartment in Bushwick? Jesse Alba has a new interview / Day in the Life thing.

“For Heitor what’s funny is that we saw that he’d bought shit on the website so I hit him up and told him I could send him some clothes.” Like a brand? Looking for a sponsor? Buy their stuff (using your real name!) and maybe you’ll end up riding for them and getting your entire order refunded ;) Danny Brady has an interview over on Free about his current role as the Palace team manager.

Always stoked to see footage of this dude (he has the best line of 2019 thus far, based on QS office chalkboard rankings…), but didn’t really know much about him until now: Korahn Gayle is the latest guest on The Bunt.

Any Skate Perception alumni read QS? Ty Evans and some other camera nerds created a microphone that can be plugged into modern cameras to record sound that mimics the audio from the VX1000. 300 bucks and still only available for pre-order. (No, this isn’t a sponsored post. Just crazy that’s where skate video technology is at right now.)

Kyota went to L.A. for the first time, and spent his days at skateparks, and his nights downtown.

Monster Children has a photo feature with Brad Cromer skating around New York.

Austin Holcomb has an all-New York part from the Challers video playing over on TWS.

New video blog edit from Extra Crispy, pretty much a go-to resource for anything that goes on at L.E.S. Park.

Always fun to see people take New York skate filmmaking in a direction beyond just straight up skate clips. “{SLING]” is a short film directed by M.Fig.

No matter the decade, people are gonna keep ollieing off that slanted grey wall on Water Street. Geeked is a full-length video by Bernie Leonor that looks like it’s mostly filmed on a GoPro, all throughout the city.

This dude’s organs probably began to disintegrate as soon as he walked out, because I can’t imagine how bad the curse you get put under for stealing a cat from a bodega is. No wonder he returned it.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: D. Wade with maybe the wildest buzzer beater of the season, at home, and at his final career game against the Warriors.

Quote of the Week: “Heelies were so sick.” — Troy Silwell

Deep Rich Sepia Tone

Via Hopps on IG

We have a small run of new hoodies, and we found a box of the old “Vacation” tees in the warehouse. Everything is over in the shop.

Someone mashed up five minutes of Tyshawn loosies and b-sides.

Brad Cromer skates New York with the enthusiasm of someone who hasn’t been burned out by seven thousand consecutive weekends of “where do we skate?” / “that spot sucks” conversations. Also, that kickflip back smith at Man Ledges was ~beautiful~.

“There’s so much bullshit in that fuckin’ thing.” Bobshirt interviews Aaron Meza for an hour and twenty minutes to find out what parts of FTC videos are lifted from Scorsese and Godard. (Also kinda crazy how pretty much anybody in the “content business” has been inspired by the Ego Trip Rap Lists book.)

And editing an artsy clip to movie quotes from probably the most quoted New York movie in existence is a bit too, um, on the nose, but footage of Appleyard skating the city was a nice surprise.

Mike Munzenrider explores the trajectory of how skating in shorts became an industry standard practice.

“Born of those spastic curb cauldrons in the early 1990s, the crooked grind to backside lipslide lay low for a certain number of Earth years until Bastien Salabanzi donked one down a semi-legit handrail in Sorry, drawing immediate reprisals in the shallow backwaters of the early message-board days and inspiring several other related atrocities over the years to come. It was a time of war, girth and widespread musical pirating.” Can’t say I was too worried about the crooked grind to back lip feeling it its been neglected these past ~15 years, but Boil the Ocean felt otherwise.

The perpetually making-clips-that-look-like-no-one-else’s collective of Russia’s Absurd Skateboards went to the seaside city of Sochi in the offseason to search for spots.

Skate camps, self celebrations, and reeaallyy long manuals — Chromeball runs down a history of nineties skate video clichés for TWS.

Of course Tompkins is on a list of the the 69 best places in New York, for better or worse.

Posed another hypothetical “how long until” over on the ol’ Twitter now that T.J. got the 33rd Street subway station ollie out of the way: how long until / is it actually possible for someone to ollie the eight-flat-eight at the Met?

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: About due time we got Luca on here.

Quote of the Week
Observant Gentleman: “I think you’re not supposed to order seafood on Sundays or something.”
Jesse Alba: “Yeah, you’re not supposed to skate on private property either, and here we are.”

Stumbled on this two-hour mix of New York jams that appeared on DJ Screw mixtapes, which made me never want to listen to some of these songs at regular speed ever again. The Rakim one is insane, and never would have thought that Tribe screwed would sound so good.