Footage Is Footage

You can’t jam the pole and then be mad people are skating the polejam ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Spitfire Wheels: Bringing People Together. Mark Gonzalez skates around downtown Manhattan with Max Palmer, Gus Gordon (!), Nick Matthews, Karim Callender + more. (Why does it always seem like everybody else’s downtown session if better than yours?) Really hope somebody got a photo of Karim’s crook at Rector Street. Almost made the screengrab the headline photo.

Price to Pay is a new Texas-based video by Andy Nguyen with a ton of New York footage in it. The whole crew makes a pilgrimage to the Canal Fountain, and there’s a Trung guest trick in there ;)

More »

Seven Steps To Tompkins

Jenkem has an interview with Trung Nguyen, the architect behind last year’s most talked-about trick, and Big Parody.

“We are sad. People can say we are overreacting and that this spot will likely be liberated, but there is a gross feeling seeing the city prioritize something like this.” Village Psychic made a tribute to their local curb on the occasion of… the city knobbing a curb — appropriately titled, “Sadman Plaza.”

The QS office favorite Rios Crew out of Budapest just dropped a new video, entitled Uccsó. They’re as atmospheric and third-eye-open with the spots as ever, but it’s the filming that truly took on a new dimension in this one.

More »

That’s An Awful Lot Of Bad Ledges

95th and Columbus might be the *original* Forbidden Banks, as explained by Eli Gesner in Jenkem’s “Neighborhoods” video on the Upper West Side. 📷 Photo by Greg Navarro.

Pretty much the only Go Skate Day edit worth your time, year after year: Sabotage’s GSD 2022 is now live.

“Can post-Olympics, post-Instagram, post-Phelps skateboarding still maintain the purist allegiance to the etiquette and rules of old?” Free has a #longform piece on the politics of finding spots, preserving the secrets of spots, and being the first-and-second to get tricks on certain spot up on their website. (For additional reading, Mike Munzenrider interviewed Atiba, Tim Fulton and Mike Heikkila about this same ever-complex dynamic back in 2020, and QS ran an interview with the creator of Skhateyou, the website every single skate tourist has used when traveling in Europe, back in 2017. Things haven’t gotten any clearer, as you can tell by the Free article having the widest net of perspectives yet.)

More »

Unknobbing Rails on the Run

Lebron is battling Carmelo in the NBA Playoffs …in August, and Nas made a new song with Foxy Brown, AZ and Cormega. Who really knows what fucking year it actually is, what’s going on — or anything, really.

Incredible manuals, great spots, and chic skate noises in Japhey Dow’s Heirloom part, which traverses all around New York state.

“If skateboarding is the quilt and all of these other interests that make up so much of skateboarding, if those things are the patches, just keep adding patches.” Sage Elsesser interviewed Ray Barbee for Thrasher.

More »

Free Agency

You may have heard that the city approved plans to cover Tompkins with synthetic turf after a hearing this past May. There is very sparse information about this, outside of the Tompkins courts being outlined with a rectangle in a PDF. Several friends with, um, knowledge of how to navigate these things have begun to reach out for more info, as groundbreaking looks like it is set to begin this winter. Anyone with insight into how this could be debated and compromised with Parks, even after it has been approved, please feel free to share what you know. We’ll try our best to keep you updated as well.

“My project in Malmö felt unreal. Imagine that happening in New York. I wouldn’t even know where to start.” Hmm, on that note… MIT Masters degree holder, Alexis Sablone, has been heavy on the interview circuit lately, and everyone is happy about it. Alexis for president of skateboarding :)

Josh Kalis re-did the ender that capped a video part he filmed at age 23… at 43

Go Skate Day videos aren’t exactly the first things that get clicked on around here — unless they’re from the Sabotage dudes, who, rather than running the whole “this is the one day I refuse to skate” thing that contrarian “core” guys do, went out and got nine minutes worth of Philly footage in 24 hours. (Yo, where is that mini windowsill ledge? Figure it’s Center City somewhere and sucks IRL, but that thing looks super fun.)

More »