Out of Office Reply / Holiday Season

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Photo via Pryce Holmes for National Geographic

Faced with the brutal difficulty of skateboarding in the United States and all its sue-happy rules, we wound up back in Europe for the second time in one month. Between the ~four weeks spent here this summer, we’ve still only been kicked out of one spot, and that was via a knife-weilding hash dealer in Copenhagen. It’s become a recurring theme on the site, but America sucks for skateboarding.

August will inevitably be a stacked month around here for a variety reasons, so we’re taking summer “holiday” now. If you ordered anything that remains in the webstore over the past week-and-a-half, it should ship early next week at the absolute latest. Maybe expect to see a content update squeezed in before the week is out?

On the slim chance that you missed it (came out a few hours after Monday Links went live), Eli has an awesome new welcome part out for Organika, with a Quim cameo at the start (as promised!) His lavish fashion sense from his first part is a lot to live up to though :) Labor also has a quick new video with its three shop riders, one of whom is reigning QSSOTY, Leo Gutman.

Back on Monday for good. Or Friday for temp.

Also, anyone asking for a Sinner re-edit (there are a lot of you) — think for a second — how would the weed-bandana guy who does switch drop-ins into double-kinked ditches NOT skate to three dubstep songs? The part is absolutely perfect as it is.

Video Review: All City Showdown NYC 2013 DVD

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There’s that old line about “eight million stories in the naked city.” Skateboarding’s variant is something like 27 minutes of footage in a day, at least according to this DVD. For the few who may not know, the All City Showdown is a contest in which three skaters and one filmer are allotted eight hours to get as much footage as possible within city limits. (Staten Island was conveniently ignored.) The best team wins two grand that one could assume will be spent on art supplies or alcohol.

The final result is a footage dump by design, but it’s tough to not watch it with “Wow, this all happened in one day?”-sentiments throughout. Compare this to say, ten years ago, when an east coast footage dump like E.S.T. took over twelve months to come out. All City Showdown features almost every young not-pro you have seen in a New York web clip or homie video before. The real pleasure of a video featuring non-curated, sometimes B-level footage from people you could easily YouTube a cohesive video part from is that it encompasses everybody at once. Practically every recognizable crew is represented. (Except Quartersnacks, obvs. We declined participation because we can only skate flat, and also don’t start skating until 5 P.M.)

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The Events That Defined New York City Skateboarding in 2012: 15-11

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Previously: #s 25-21, 20-16. Have a good weekend.

15. The Average Completion-of-Construction-to-Knobbing Time Frame For New Skate Spots Reaches an Unprecedented Low

New York continues to have issues with underreported hate crimes. For the first time ever, the under-construction spots that we have been eyeing for months have begun coming with pre-installed knobs (cue up Rob Welsh’s Free Your Mind intro.) Consult the too-good-to-be-true “Late Show Ledges” on Broadway, and even bad spots like those marble blocks across from the Hilton on Sixth or those shitty wooden ledges at the hospital by the Banks for examples, all of which got knobbed within a month of blockades coming down.

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