The Stingwater video is on the way. Pretty excited because Daniel has a way of capturing Antonio’s magic unlike anyone else.
Obvs no shade to anyone else out there pointing lenses at Antonio intended! “Vue” by Stephen Spilker is a rad L.A. montage that also has a good bit of clips from 2018’s GRoER of the Year. Shout out to everyone out there creating plain, old fashioned montages. Should probably start working on a QS one right about now…
Gang Corp put out a sick five-minute summer edit. (The one line into the parking garage got me thinking about if anyone would ever do an all-parking garage montage, kinda how there was the all-subway one from Spirit Quest. So many insane spots in those.)
However, documentarians of #theculture have largely overlooked the ancillary dining establishments that fueled — on a molecular level — the innovation and unforgettable sessions at spots like the Brooklyn Banks, Pulaski, Embarcadero and Love Park.
Until the rise of “foodie” culture, Yelp and the general trend of eating healthy and shit, most skaters’ palates trended towards the most convenient fast-casual options.
With that in mind, and in conjunction with New York Restaurant Week (which is apparently almost a month long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), we present Quartersnacks Restaurant Week — an oral history of legendary spot-adjacent fast food restaurants. Over the course of conducting the interviews, some common themes emerged, i.e. most skaters favored carb-heavy menu options as an easily accessible energy source. In addition, at most spots the skaters and food service workers formed alliances — an interesting anthropological wrinkle in terms of how different cultures interact.
It’s one of those “more words than videos” weeks :)
“But skateboarding’s worldview can often become so totalizing that commitment to it far into adulthood, past the age when it’s socially acceptable to ride around in a school bus smoking weed and listening to Slayer, can look like protracted adolescence. This is why skateboarding, for a large chunk of the country, will never fully outgrow its degenerate associations. And that’s fine.” It is notoriously difficult to produce a genuinely great piece of writing about skateboarding, but Noah Gallagher Shannon’s profile of Grant Taylor ticks all the boxes. Send it to your mom.
QS Sports Desk: More excited for the off-season, than we were for like, the entire second half of the postseason. And if you think Lebron is coming to the Knicks you need to move to Mars.
Quote of the Week: “Hell no I don’t watch soccer. A bunch of buddies kicking balls? I’m good.” — Meatball
QS is perpetually giving 90% of skate video editors a hard time for their uninspired marriage to Big L + and this idea that basically all rap still needs to sound like nineties rap (how boring does that sound tbh?), but we’ll throw you guys a bone here because there’s a substantial chance you haven’t heard this one before, and it’s really fun:
“So, you’re smoking weed on the plane at…13-years-old.” This Steven Cales “Nine Club” interview is full of gems from late-80s and early-90s New York. If you want some footage accompaniments to the people/companies/places/era he talks about a lot, check these 88-92 Skate N.Y.C. videos that surfaced on YouTube back in 2011.
Theories of Atlantis is at the helm of a new wheel company called Dial Tone MFG. They have a new edit up featuring teamriders Jahmal Williams, Alexis Sablone, others.
With every New Yorker’s favorite L.A. spot reaching an unfortunate demise, Andrew Allen provides us with the story behind the day when he backside flipped into the main bank at L.A. High.
QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: By the looks of it, this might be the final installment of the Sports Desk until the fall, but gotta give it to J.R. Smith running to the liquor store in the final two seconds of an NBA Finals game.
Quote of the Week: “So, Die Antwoord is these white people who rap.” — E.J.
Now that that’s out of the way, this is maybe the first Monday Links post ever where there are more links to articles (i.e. written words) than videos…
“After drilling his truck bolts back for a bigger nose and noselsliding ledges in the ’80s, Mark had one of the first noseslide photos on a rail (one where he’s actually sitting on it rather than just dinging it) as a sequence in his June 1990 Poweredge.” As per an indirect solicitation, Mackenzie Eisenhour enlisted Guy Mariano to chronicle how the modern noseslide was invented. As suspected, Mark Gonzales is responsible.
“As he flies through the air, he is caught between life and death, suspended in the void of nonexistence — the ultimate Kleinean motif.” Jamie Thomas’ “leap of faith” as a work of avant garde art juxtaposed against the art of Yves Klein. Yeah, fuck it, why not.
Vice has an interview with Jonathan Rentschler about documenting the final years of Love Park for his book, Love. QS review for it here. And you can should buy it here ;)
This is oddly…not bad? Deadspin (of all places) has a #longform article about the full history of Rodney Mullen V.S. Daewon Song — though idk about it “changing skateboarding forever.”
Boil the Ocean offers some thoughts on J. Scott Handsdown and Dan Pageau taking crowdsourcing via the skateboarding community to newfound heights. To be fair, they ain’t special — Meatball pioneered this concept when he tried to GoFundMe a ticket to Australia so he could tag along on a Hardies trip.
