Spike Lee Need To Get This Shit On Film

Nothing like a good front shove. Ishod Wair at some secret gap spot. Photo by Zander Taketomo.

As if Matt Mooney getting busted for the croissant heist of the century after tweeting about it wasn’t enough, here’s further evidence that you should avoid social media after committing idiotic hilarious “crimes.”

Chris Nieratko interviews the judges, skaters, and producer from this year’s mess of a One in a Million series. What are skateboarders who spend an unhealthy amount of time typing YouTube comments going to complain about now? (Full QS interview with Lurker Lou coming this week or next at the latest. Weather has been nice, so transcribing/editing has been slow.)

Called it. Lil’ Wayne inks an endorsement deal with Supra. (Original post here.)

Here’s a New York-based “Day in the Life” clip with Danny Supa. More “lifestyle” stuff than actual skating, but the song makes it great. Any skate clips edited to a song off AZ’s first few albums are more or less guaranteed a link here — maybe even that Tyrone Olson part where he skates to “Sugar Hill.”

Someone is making a documentary about Harry Jumonji. The interviews in the trailer seem real honest and unfiltered, so it definitely has the potential to be great. Watch the trailer here.

Andre Page flatground lines at the T.F., Hawaiian shirts, strobe lights, and an avoidance of the most notorious line off that “Ass” song, all in this GoPro clip.

The VHS aesthetic continues with Twomanji, a video whose description boasts the revitalization of laserdiscs.

Pro skaters giving back to the community, one worn-out ledge at a time.

Some new photos over on the Dunions Tumblr, including one that solves the mystery of what happens to Tompkins’ legendary cones. (A dog ate them. No, really.)

KCDC temporarily moved to 68 N. 3rd for the summer. It’s still off the Bedford stop, but a bit further west than before (closer to the bridge, as well.)

Bill Strobeck recommends some music over on The World’s Best Ever for people who don’t mind playlists that exclude Meek Mill. Oh, and Dreamchasers 2 comes out Monday, May 7th.

R.I.P. Os Dias Do Video, the internet’s leading destination for pirated skate videos.

Quote of the Week:


FOR THE 21.3% OF QS READERSHIP THAT FOLLOWS SPORTS: In commemoration of the regular NBA season ending this week, here are JaVale McGee’s top eight dumbest plays. The most entertaining player in the league, but not in a Derrick Rose sort of way. We’re eternally grateful that he got traded to a playoff team, because it means at least an extra week of this.

Footage Footnotes to Pt. 2 of the Ricky Oyola Epicly Later’d Episode

“My dream in my whole life of skating, was to do a line from before City Hall. Ollie off into the street, ollie up those stairs [at the Municipal Building], do a line in there, then hit the stairs, and into Love Park, through Love Park, and then to Wawa.”

Someone still needs to do a line from CBS to Paine Webber.

Stepping into the putrid abyss of bickering that is the Slap Message Board is often an emotionally draining exercise. However, the leap was made last night to look for some skate nerd enlightenment on the 1993-1994 footage in Oyola’s latest Epicly Later’d episode.

And success!

Someone came through and uploaded Eastern Exposure 2 (the rare one…the one that wasn’t on the DVD that Dan Wolfe released a few years ago, which only had the first and third Eastern Exposures.) Full 700MB .avi download here. Thank you to whoever on Slap rigged that, you have restored some faith in one of the internet’s most polarizing institutions.

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The Love Park Story

“I saw a 411 opener of Ricky olling two cans off a propped up tile, and I thought that was the dopest looking thing I have ever seen on a skateboard. I told myself when I go back to Philly, I’m propping up them tiles and skating over those cans.”

If you spend any time on the skateboard-related part of the internet, you have no doubt seen part 2 of the Josh Kalis Epicly Later’d series. The series has already began dwelling on a lot of the east coast “golden era” stories, namely some of the lesser known political alliances that existed in Love Park as it was beginning to rise to prominence in the early-to-mid-nineties. Since the series is obviously more biographical of an individual (i.e. there’s more to Kalis, Stevie, Ricky Oyola, etc. than just Love Park), it makes sense to share some biographical work that was done on the actual spot from seven years ago.

“Saga of a Skate Landmark” was a thirty-minute segment that originally appeared in the Winter 2004 issue of On Video Magazine. (For the few who may not know: On was a more documentary-esque approach to skateboard video magazines that lasted for the first few years of the 2000s, they would cover tours, skaters, and things like that, but their real strong suit was well-researched pieces like this, with solid interviews and archival footage. Basically, a lot like Epicly Later’d but less focussed on specific individuals as opposed to events, spots, etc.) The segment expands on a lot of the Kalis meeting Stevie story, and the Kalis versus Ricky angle, but overall, it is definitely wider in scope towards the actual spot, as it features interviews with the park’s original city planner, Photosythesis-era anecdotes, and plenty of amazing footage. The video used to be on Google Video, but has been giving “Not Available” errors for quite some time, so here it is on Vimeo.

Here’s the text message I received prior to seeing the new episode, as I was watching the Knicks embarrass themselves against the Clippers on Wednesday evening. It’s a humorous summary. Quote of the Day. Via Roctakon:

Alien Workshop’s Photosynthesis Video: Ten Years Later

(Or how hamburgers remain to be one of the greatest instruments of eating.)

One of the major footnotes to Habitat’s ten-year anniversary video is that it marks a decade since the release of Photosynthesis, the finest skateboard production of the 2000s. It was the video that taught New Jersey what to do with its shoulders when it does a backside nosegrind, gave one final hurrah to Long Island’s seemingly endless allegiance to the swooshy tan cargo pants, and provided a small dent to the ozone layer due to the surge of Philadelphia field trips that proceeded it.

If that is not enough to back up a longstanding cultural impact, the homie from Boil the Ocean summarized the video’s main contributions to the act of skateboarding fairly well: “Van Engelen’s grease-fire ledge attack, Pappalardo’s clockwork precision, Fred Gall with one pants leg up, Danny Garcia demonstrating how to pop out of a backside tailslide, Wenning’s backside nosegrinds and switch heelflips, Josh Kalis doing ‘the’ 360 flip and the walk down into Jason Dill’s bent world, back when he was doing all those 180s the hard way into ledge tricks and settling into New York.”

But skateboarding alone does not make classic skateboard videos, as ironic as that may sound. Before high-speed internet, it took a few years for tricks to get outdated — not to mention the turnaround on editing, production, and shipment of physical VHS tapes that preceded the release of the said tricks. Simply running down a list of maneuvers in a post-millenial video is not enough to surmise it being worthy of the “classic” label, e.g. when was the last time you watched Menik Mati? Once a video reaches ten years of age, the atmosphere and feel of an era gone by is what makes or breaks the chances of you unearthing the tape from its dust jacket. If you find yourself justifying any portion of an older video as “good for the time,” it’s not a classic. The whole thing requires a timeless quality.

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