One of the most remote skateboard demos ever happened more than 20 years ago in a village north of Madang in the lowlands of Papua New Guinea. Located off Australia’s Cape York, Papua New Guinea is the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. Some 840 different languages are spoken there — more than anywhere else in the world. Just around an eighth of its population lives in cities, so it is very rural. “It’s not developed at all,” says former pro skater Kenny Reed, who in the early 2000s, read a book about the place and decided to go there by himself following a skate trip to Australia.
Reed says he had hoped to get deep into the country’s highlands, but the travel agency with which he booked his trip said such excursions can take six months of planning. He was coming on short notice and was given a more simple itinerary. “It wasn’t as far out as I wanted to go but it was really far from civilization,” he says. The people he met were subsistence farmers who didn’t wear shoes. He’d brought his board and folks were curious about it, though hard surfaces were tough to come by. “The king of the village had a plywood floor in his hut [so we took it out] and we used that,” Reed says of the resulting one-man demo. “After that, they taught me how to throw spears and shoot bows and arrows.”
“Forced into the wilderness for years first by cords, then by Dickies, Carharts and assorted chinos, jeans now are the stuff of kingdom-making and eternal glory.” And on that very same note, Boil the Oceans offers some analysis on how jeans have climbed to become the north star of the skateboard industry.
Summer nights, once upon a time. Photo by Jeremy Cohan.
New York’s voter registration deadline is this Friday, October 9th. New Jersey’s registration deadline is next Tuesday, October 13th. Visit Skaters Vote if you’re in another state for information. You already know the drill — if you regularly read QS and don’t vote (assuming you’re eligible), may every karmic force available in the universe roll the fuck out of your ankle on the morning of November 4th, may all your coffees spill onto your crotch for the entire time you’re recovering, and hopefully, you get fucking wheelbite and fly face first into a dirty puddle in front of all your exes on your first day back skating.
Some more Keith Hufnagel tributes: 1) The Warm-Up Zone wrote about Huf’s Non Fiction part, and that brown marble 360 flip that got reposted so much these past two weeks, 2)Free and Sneep / Memory Screen teamed up for a Huf video retrospective, 3)The New York Timesran an obituary for one of New York’s own, and most influential ♥
Frame via Mehring. Sorry that Rob’s a bit blurry. Hate hate HATE that Instagram replaced Tumblr for things that Tumblr was way better at doing, e.g. not compressing skate photos into goddamn 700px size, but then again, I’m sure someone was going on about the same thing when all the mags were going under, so…
The first Blobys edit in over a year! This one got a good deal of burn these past few days. Roman Gonzalez is the all-time leading scorer of making visual poetry out of tricks nobody else is getting away with :)
Lurker Lou premiered his new part — filmed entirely in purple Adidas Campus shoes he kept finding in Cape Cod Marshall’s locations — on a box truck decked out with L.E.D. screens this past weekend. Village Psychic made a video profile with Lou about his footwear-based artwork over on their site.
Somehow only catching this one now, but Embassy Skate Shop (Columbus, Ohio) put together one of the best videos of the year thus far. It is tightly-edited, each skater is distinct from the other, and it maintains a tight-knit hometown vibe even though ~half of it is filmed in S.F. Add this and Adam Bos’ “Steel” to your morning rotation.
“With this risk spectrum in mind, when I see a skateboarder do a trick while smoking a cigarette, I can’t help but feel inspired by the sheer audacity involved.” Here is a brief reflection of cigarettes’ role in skateboarding, though it inexcusably writes Mr. Butts out of history. “To young kids, don’t smoke. It’s a horrible habit.”
“Among the improbably growing ranks of skateboard filmers, the thrill of the hunt tends to scale alongside duration.” Since everyone is pissed about our Artforum MasterCard coverage of the Converse video, perhaps you will find Boil the Ocean’s take on Purple less triggering — and maybe laugh at the phrase “something of a freethinking homicidal” as much as I did ;)
Connor Champion ♥ has a new edit for Grand Collection *airhorn*:
Even though Shorty’s has been demolished for nearly a year, the “last days” clips are still coming out. It’s with Freddy and Tommy Cuba, so nobody’s complaining :)
Life before cell phones = keeping a foldable card of every skater you’ve ever skated with’s handwritten number in your wallet.
Can’t say Helly Hansen was at the top of the imaginary list of brands to collab with a skateboard company, but they chose a pretty perfect crew to do the “wear test” video for it. QS Budapest 2019…we out?
QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: This week, the Rap Desk is filling in for the Sports Desk, and giving the P.O.T.W. to to Young Dolph. (Do you think people will ever stop overreacting to Lebron losing a game in a playoff series? This shit happens every year and it is so annoying. Still hating Lebron in 2018 is like not being at terms with Drake in fucking 2018 — like, who has the time to hold onto some stupid 2011 grudge? Just let go and move on in peace ♥)
Quote of the Week: “She’s like the Jamie Foy of lying.” — Charles Rivard
