Favorite Spot With Lucien Clarke on Victoria Benches

Although good ledge spots are hardly synonymous with British skateboarding, it’s a surprising reality that they were missing from even the country’s capital until the turn of the millennium. Such was the landscape of London until, in the late 1990s, heaven was discovered in an unassuming patch of greenery just down the road from Victoria Station. Jacob Sawyer’s wonderful “Ode To Victoria Benches” story for Slam City Skates pinpoints the spot as having been discovered somewhere around 1997. The Blueprint Skateboards team and friends would go on to localize it, with the benches appearing in Waiting For The World, Headcleaner, and First Broadcast.

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Munchie Mart

Congrats to Beatrice on the pro board. Stephen Ostrowski has a cool story about the guest trick that she had in his Glue part on IG.

Austin Bristow dropped a seven-minute edit of the Palace boys, entitled “Laust in Translation.” Includes what is effectively a full-ish Rory Milanes part, and an ender part from Lucien Clarke, which wraps up with him hitting some of the same locations from the very first Palace trip to New York edit from 2011.

The Jenkem dudes snuck into what can without hyperbole be called the biggest bust in New York City (the Roosevelt Island Monument), so Julian Lewis could pull off two N.B.Ds. Fakie flip was worth a summons though :)

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Expensive Navy

This is the last week it gets dark before 7 P.M. 🤞

Shadow is a full-length Long Island scene video (though obviously much of it is filmed in the city) by David Rind. Last two parts are fire, though you may have caught the link for Max Rowlette’s section last week when Skate Jawn ran it.)

Not sure there has been a Johnny Wilson trip edit since that “Roadtrip” one way way back. Tom Knox, Nik Stain, Eric Koston, Louie Lopez, et al. in Texas with Miles Griptape, ICYMI. Love that this roster could come together for something as arbitrary as a griptape team trip, and have it feel like an actual homie edit ❤️

“If, when I was 15, somebody told me to stab someone and they’d give me this, I would’ve done it.” Greg Navarro — creator of The Upper West Side Curb Club — hung around …the Upper West Side with Eli Gesner to get a breakdown of the neighborhood’s landmark spots for a new Jenkem video series called “Neighborhoods.”

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The Best Skate Video Parts of the 2010s — QS Reader Survey Results

Illustration by Cosme Studio

Back in October, we asked QS visitors to choose their favorite video parts of the 2010s. If civilization and skateboarding were to end today, which five parts would you bury in a weather-and-nuclear-proof time capsule for post-apocalyptic earth dwellers to reference when they rediscover skate culture of these past ten years?

QS prides itself as being a destination for people who think a lot about skateboarding. Rather than poll a few close colleagues for their favorites, we felt we had a wide enough reverberation in the skate nerd universe to try and crowdsource a canon of the 2010s from anyone willing to sit down and think about it. I can emphatically say that in reviewing the mountain of ballots, everyone took their votes seriously — save maybe the guy who voted for five Micky Papa parts.

As we tallied the results, consistent trends in the count were apparent. Any fears about a recency bias went out the window; there’s only one part from 2019, and the average year of the top 25 is 2014. QS obviously has its own breed of skate nerd audience — this poll would look different if taken by Thrasher or Free — but I would bet that their lists wouldn’t be TOO far off from this one.

Presented without comment for the top 25-11, and then via a lot of favors from writer friends on the internet for the top 10: here are the 25 best video parts of the past ten years.

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#LUXURYWATCH2019

Sometime during those drunk final ten days of 2018 when no e-mails went answered, an associate mentioned the difficulty of isolating “trends” as we approach the final year of the decade. In this era of post-everything where the past exists at the same time as the future, what even qualifies as a #trend? Gone are the simple days of noticing a sudden spike in camo-panted legs at Tompkins, or bleached heads doing no complies and being able to declare: “trend!” No, in recent years, the #trendwatch has leaned towards psychological states of being, and on occasion, fully fallen short of fruition. Even something as under-a-microscope as “BLESSED” is a more refined version of what the same cast had already been molding since 2014.

And then, the associate says [name redacted for fear of “YOU’RE WHAT’S WRONG WITH SKATEBOARDING!” retribution], “What if the 2019 Trend™ is simply skating in really expensive shit?”

This goes beyond Dill or Dylan being inspired by Prada shoes, or Pappalardo waiting for a flight with his Louis luggage. Obviously skateboarders have been documented with nice shit before, but now, you open Instagram and see Lucien Clarke and P-Rod posting photos of them in Louis Vuitton outerwear within an hour of one another. Further out in the Instagram universe, in a galaxy most-closely observed by those who list their favorite skaters by handles rather than government names, there is a burgeoning sect of volunteer teamriders for Gucci, Versace, and Burberry. At a cultural crossroad where Playboi Carti is one of Jay-Z’s biggest influences, there seem to be two choices across all spectrums: reenact a skate version of the intro from John Shanahan’s It’s Time part, or take advice from the other Jonah Hill sports movie, which is, of course, “adapt or die.”

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