What A Time What A Year

Photo via @inkwellcommons

Thanks to everyone who supported the QS for Nike SB collaboration, and all of you who came out to the first annual Quartersnacks Cup on Saturday. We have some pairs left in the webstore, though you’ll have better luck on sizes if you’re going for a navy pair ;) Use the code “MONDAYLINKS” to reward yourself for reading the words on this website, and get free U.S. shipping on the shoes until midnight tonight E.S.T. Everything else you gotta cover the shipping on though.

We uploaded the IG story of the contest as a placeholder. Official recap coming soon.

Max Palmer went pro + Aidan Mackey went pro.

“Drifting toward the childhood and the feminine. It’s not always about masculinity, and drinking, and fucking skater guys…Everybody has that inner child or feminine side. It’s cool to embrace that.” Shout out Genny, Conor and Humble. The Fader did a rad feature on their operation that reads different than much of the “small skate brand” stories you see out there. Show them some love.

Surprised that lines through the entire block aren’t more of a thing in footage from Big Screen Plaza. Bret Gregory’s Hombre Hardware part is a good time.

“Just liking something doesn’t support it.” Love Skate Mag did a series of interviews about why all the best skateboard magazines end up going out of print.

Chris Mulhern uploaded another teaser for his upcoming Love Park documentary, 15th & JFK. His comments also seem to indicate that it may end up being a series. “I won’t be able to tell this story in two hours or less, which was my original plan.”

Here’s the winter 2013 edition of Jeremy Elkin’s raw tapes. That double-set pole jam spot Aaron skates at the start is insane. The legend Alex Mosley tried to clear the entire double-set off it ♥ ♥ ♥

75 degrees on Saturday, and none of you scored a Missed Connection? So disappointed in everyone.

Interesting time capsule: Scenes from the DNA Distribution (Alien & Habitat) catalog, circa 2005. I think Waste still has a bunch of the Aesthetics catalogs — been meaning to scan them for like…the past five years.

Want another time capsule? TWS uploaded the first-ever issue of 411.

The moral of the story in this sorta bad / sorta borderline still readable Wall Street Journal article about skate pilgrimages to China is: stop snitching.

Free has an interview with Gustav Tonnesen, perennial #QSTOP10 fave.

Attn: All SVA & Pratt sculpture majors. Jenkem has a chill feature about the world’s most high-con D.I.Y. spot.

Hate it or love it, The Bunt’s new one is with Jamie Thomas.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: Let’s give it to the end of Celtics-Bucks Q4.

Quote of the Week: “Could I do the fried shrimp…just with some toast?” — Kevin Tierney’s Diner Order (fyi, the waiter refused to serve him fried shrimp and toast.)

Flu-shion Week

Photo by Colin Sussingham

Happy birthday Zach Baker ♥, breaker of 4 boards in 40 minutes.

R.I.P. (?) Le Dome. Based on documentation available on this side of the Atlantic, it’s tough to tell whether the plaza is getting demolished in full, or they’re just resurfacing it with Skatelite. (Yeah, it’s not local news, but recent local skate spot news stops around, um, that wallride / drug-use area outside of Newark Penn Station being skate-blocked / crack-blocked.) In presumed memoriam, here is an old #PFW QS compilation of all Flo Marfaing’s Le Dome hubba tricks, an old post about the greatest line ever done there, an old post about the only 5050 kickflip that ever mattered, and a clip of The Shady One going all-in #respect on a 5050 after a plane claim.

“Kevin Tierney wouldn’t shut up about how he was going to switch laser flip the Le Dome double set even though it had already been done 15 years ago.” Solo has an appropriate article about the Bronze crew’s most recent trip to Paris.

Matt Velez uploaded Calzone is full, and John Valenti uploaded N.Y. Archive in full.

What the fuck: “You have to take a blood and piss test to skate [the indoor park] so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most locals skip that option.” Medium skate mag has a short feature about how people manage to skate in Russia during the winter.

“This is the best time to skate Rick Owens.” There’s a fun new Bluecouch edit up.

The summer 2012 edition of Elkin’s raw files is now live, featuring a bunch of footage that would end up in Leo’s 2013 Q.S.S.O.T.Y-earning Brodies part.

Village Physic interviewed Reda about the rules of being a skate photographer in the social media age. (Unsolicited link to Reda’s Bobshirt interview because it’s the best.)

There have been a few of these over the past couple years, but Vice has a feature about skateboards’ three-decade avoidance of inflation. I have a feeling that if we keep writing these things it’s gonna be some “be careful what you wish for”-shit and we’re going to walk into a shop and boom, $85 for a deck with grip. Thanks everyone!!!

There’s a Brujas x Gang Corp event at the Spin Club on 23rd Street tonight, 8-midnight + there’s a Deckaid show at NJ Skateshop in Hoboken on Saturday, from 7-10 P.M.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: Everything fun in the NBA last week mostly happened off the court, so let’s get weird and give play of the week to the most complicated way of preventing a ball from going out of bounds ever.

Quote of the Week
C.J: “How long is fashion week?”
Fashionable Gentleman: “A week.”

A Short History of New York’s Longest Lines

Ricky Oyola, godfather of the east coast “filming a line via just skating random shit on the street”-practice, once expounded on his peak skateboard dream: doing a line through Philadelphia’s then-standing City Hall, into the street, up into the Municipal Services building, back down the stairs, across the street, into Love Park, through Love Park, and end at Wawa.

The closest he got on record was a line from the end of City Hall, through the intersection, and into Love Park in Eastern Exposure 2, but it did establish a lingering precedent for connecting spots. Apart from Ricky and that Joey O’Brien Sabotage 4 line where he starts at Love and ends up in the garage beneath it, spot connecting does not have a rich history in Philadelphia.

Or anywhere, really — because doing a line from one spot, through the street, and to another, is fucking hard. There are variables (people, traffic, pebbles, maybe two sets of security, acts of God), and a pressing anxiety of missing the final trick in an already-long line, which gets amplified by the fact that fifteen other things went right up until that point. As you will soon learn, spot connecting is something most people do for the sake of doing it. In the majority of cases, they stick to their safe tricks.

Like Philadelphia, New York is a dense and layered city. Many of its streets are narrow, and depending on where you are, three or four spots could be across from one another. New York never had a “Big Three,” but it does have three different types of benches on four different street corners, and over the years, skateboarders here have kept their third eyes open and far-sighted.

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America’s Next Top Triangle

To everyone still @ing us on social media to let us know that The Triangle™ is back: no the fuck it’s not. The cement is shit, the pink bumps are shit, and nobody on the Frog team has responded to a “are you skating?”-text in a month :(

But we’re no less still hooked on triangles, desperate to restore the joy of E. 9th Street’s onetime premier destination for a 50% chance of getting hit by a car. Philly skaters forced Love Park into resurrection once City Hall was destroyed, and Muni became a natural alternative once Love met the same fate. However riddled with champagne problems New York skateboarding may be — we never had the luxury of being able to replace something as special as Love by walking across the street to a nearly-as-good spot.

Like an opioid epidemic, once the good designer shit runs scarce, the demand for shittier alternatives rises. And lately, people have been skating some shitty triangles.

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Bump To Bleacher 2.0

You can take the Bostonian out of Boston, but you can’t take the Boston out of the Bostonian. In the days of Joey Pepper’s Aesthetics section and Jahmal Williams riding for DNA, Boston was the epicenter of bump-to-bleacher skateboarding. Longing for those sweet green metal days and displaced from their homeland, some savvy New Englanders decided “Fuck going to Reggaeton Ledges” this past summer, and began their own propped up empire nearby. The crowd followed suit.

Other notable developments in Grand’s latest are Spencer Hamilton bringing his two signature moves to Columbus Park, and the QS Spot Desk being wrong about people needing Bondo to skate the one surviving bank under the 125th Street 1 train ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Features Spencer Hamilton, Nick Ferro, Dana Ericson, Connor Champion, Kevin Tierney and Brian Delaney. J.P. Blair on da lens.

Previously: 25 Grand Remix, “Naomi,” “Cindy

On an unrelated note, congrats to Cyrus for going pro ♥ Revisit his Mama’s Boys part below, as it was the first Cyrus part we ever posted on QS and the first one any of us ever saw. Solid batch of those tricks could easily still fit into a 2017 Cyrus part :)