The Long, Strange Trip — How Travel Took Over Skateboarding

📝 Words by Mike Munzenrider
🎨 Collage by Francesco Pini

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.”

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For Days

Thanks to everyone who came through Uncle Leroy’s Sidewalk Sale yesterday ♥ Will keep you updated on if there’s another one coming up.

“You just got to find nice people you love and hold the fuck onto them.” Grosso’s final episode of Love Letters To Skateboarding is a beautiful salute to the LGBTQ+ skate community.

Not much you haven’t heard by now, but it makes a particular impression with the overhead shots of skateparks in the city that have sat empty for months now: a twelve-minute look at how COVID-19 has affected the skate industry in New York, and in many ways, made the act of street skateboarding come full circle to an approach that existed before the skateparks were built everywhere.

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Mango Mojitos

reed cali

Has the site fallen off a bit as of late? Sure. Was Quartersnacks Vogue week (see #19) just a really high concept editorial week where we barely post anything on the said theme because we’re under-qualified to report on it? Definite possibility. Are we looking towards a bright future of reportage on New York skateboard minutiae, silly remix videos, and mediocre skate clips? Absolutely!

Jasper Dohrs’ Thirty Purse part is full of quick-footed curbery, wallrides on chain links, ambitious heaves over the First Avenue bike lane, and is entirely filmed in New York.

End of an era, although it probably needed an update unless you’re a nostalgia over function type of guy ;) Riverside Skatepark is getting a cement re-design, which includes a bowl and halfpipe. And wait, is that a…regular, straight ledge?!

Gucci Mane for Supreme.

Genesis made made a July 4th clip to the Song of the Summer, circa 2000.

Pep Kim made a quick mini doc on Aaron Herrington’s rise to sketchy 5050s on sketchier handrail fame. The 5050 on the Riverside Drive & 111th rail is still ♥

Diamond Days #89. Keith is proud of this one, but his QS part is still R.I.P.

Always nice to see Newark footage. “Cityscapes” via Municipal Skateboards.

Oh you thought this early-2000s nostalgia shit was a game? The D3 is coming back.

Village Psychic runs down a history of strange skater + sponsor pairings. Weird, because I have Greg Lutzka’s one and only Krooked pro model hanging on the wall above my computer…

Carroll and Chico at the L.E.S. Park on the week of It Was Written‘s 20th bday.

Gotta appreciate people’s optimism when embarking on the uphill journey of rebooting a once beloved but ultimately short lived skateboard company. Here’s an interview about the Menace reboot.

Quick B-sides clip via Russian Bob.

Hey, I’m here for the half cab flips and Alicia Keys samples.

QS Sports Desk: Signing Joakim Noah for four years was, um, an interesting decision, but gotta admit that this interview rewired some of the headscratching, although it probably won’t mean much once November rolls around, and who’s really stupid enough to care about the Knicks anyway I dunno I’m out man.

Quote of the Week: “It’s like The Berrics, but for art.” — E.J.

Have a good week everyone! :)

The 10 Best Noseslides in Skateboard History

“He [Jereme Rogers A.K.A. J. Cassanova A.K.A. J.R. Blastoff] leads off this latest offering with a noseslide, the building block of modern skateboarding…Indeed, the noseslide serves as the basis for his entire repertoire. This is the main thing he has going for him in 2012. Shit is relatable; it’s still the first trick I do in any session. Dude also does a lot of switch tailslides, which are, of course, an inverted mirror-image way of getting into a noseslide. And whether you are switch inward heelflipping into one or f/s switch bigspin kickflipping (or some shit like that) out of one, a noseslide is still a noseslide. His ender even incorporates two different noseslides into a three-trick ledge combo that the editors of Transworld probably hate. More importantly, as we have seen in the recent Gino x McEnroe internet video clip, noseslides are highly relevant in 2012 because most people can do them, but few can do them well.” — Frozen in Carbonite: Bookmark Me, Maybe? – 2012 Song of the Summer/Video Part of the Summer Retrospective

There is not much to be said about the obvious significance of the the ollie, kickflip and Osiris D3 in skateboarding history. But there *was* something to be said about the oft-forgotten cornerstone of skateboarding known as the noseslide, until the above paragraph conveniently took care of that two days ago. Consider this an addendum to our “30 Phattest Outfits” study. It should come as no surprise that there is an overlap between the two lists — any skater who knows how to dress, knows how to do a proper noseslide. Thanks to Sweet Waste for compiling this list.

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