You know how our twisted reality had to adopt the widespread use of “not The Onion” because real-life gradually surpassed parody? Sometimes it feels like these 2020s skate spots are experiencing the same thing, only relative to their resemblance to a Brother Merle illustration. You really gotta hand it to skateboarders for continuing try to and make the Chinatown Banks “work” for 20+ years.
“What is this fucking website called? ‘Quartersnacks’? We don’t have time for this.” Farran Golding spoke to Ian Browning for the first episode of the Skate Bylines Podcast, about his 2022 profile of the L.E.S. Skatepark for QS, on the occasion of the park’s tenth birthday.
“Main Character” is a tightly-knit upstate crew video, filmed largely around the Rochester, New York zone. Shout out to to all our people who have warrants from Cornell campus police.
“Took this at the corner of 3rd Street and 2nd Avenue almost eight years ago to the day. DMX was stopped at the intersection waiting for a red light. I nervously fumbled to get my phone out, framed him up, snapped one off and gave him a nod. He smiled, nodded back and told me to buy his record. The light turned green and he was off… R.I.P.” — Keith Denley, 4.14.13 / NY, NY
As you likely heard, on Monday, current subscribers to Transworld received notice that March / April 2019 would be the magazine’s final print issue. And in what made me initially think they had to be trolling, the remainder of everyone’s subscriptions would be replaced by issues of Men’s Journal. Associate editor, Mackenzie Eisenhour, wrote on Instagram that TWS would continue producing digital content, though he will no longer be with the mag.
I sat for a couple of days thinking what to write about the #2 Skateboard Magazine’s demise (which spent some years as the #1 Skateboard Magazine, depending on who you ask) without only veering into nostalgia that has very little to do with how we got here, and without “print is dead! long live print!”-isms. The average 2019 skateboarder’s attitude to legacy media can be summed up as “I’m happy magazines exist” at best — and that is simply a symptom of where media and our collective attention spans are now.
Late start to the day. Congrats to Yaje Popson, one of remarkably few T.F. native sons to have the distinction of his name on a pro board. Proud of you bud ♥
The largest tall tee Wade Desarmo ever wore was a 5XL. That and an examination of why so few objectively superior skateboarders make it out of Canada in his interview with a competing podcast. Even if you’re not a “Nine Club” guy, this one was great.
As far as our *favorite* skate podcast goes (and the one Wade is currently M.I.A. from because nobody is “in the streets” in Toronto…), The Bunt’s latest is with Stefan Janoski. Always felt in the minority of preferring his Inhabitants part over Mosaic, but good to to know it’s his fave too ;)
More podcasts?! You may remember a simpler time back in 2012 — before the world began to implode — when our biggest concern was a man named Louis Sarowsky forever ruining the act of skateboarding via a Mountain Dew-sponsored reality show…He has a new interview over on “Max White Presents.”
The angel who put together the Jesus remix from last weeks’ links rounded up all of Mike Carroll’s B-sides since Pretty Sweet and edited a four-minute part with some garnishes from the past. Rick Howard next or are those too few and far between?
Enjoyed this piece on why the death of DVD will haunt consumers. Skateboarding has the benefit of skate shops preserving community — unlike film, which lost its cultural hubs with the death of video stores (R.I.P. Kim’s) — which is all the more of a reminder to give your shop some money today.
Was gonna embed “My President is Black” or the Honey Drippers or some shit for a President’s Day themed soundtrack, but the song below has calmed my nerves more than anything else the past couple weeks, so give her a whirl.
Despite being one of the first dudes to ollie into the Love fountain, first-gen CKY ties, the best wheel ad ever, etc., Mike Maldonado never fit in a convenient Philly nostalgist narrative the way Kalis + Stevie, Wenning + Pappalardo or Ricky + Reason et al. do. Even so, he’s managed to keep a place in our hearts and minds in recent years by giving some of the best interviews of any nineties pro. The dudecan tella story.
The squad behind Plain & Simple, a mid-2000s Pennsylvania video that emerged in the post-apocalyptic era when Love was completely pink-plantered and impossible to skate, just remixed a bunch of his footage from that time. There’s a forgotten hole in the greater understanding of Philly skate history, roughly from The DC Video til the Ishod/Suciu/Sourbeer Love Renaissance that came with Sabotage 3. Videos like Plain And Simple and Stop Fakin’ were around to fill the void if you bothered to look for them (although the latter had a bit of Love footage.)
Mike Maldonado is first-ballot candidate for the tough Pennsylvania working-class sports skate hero archetype that Frozen in Carbonite outlined in the wake of Creed and Sabotage 4. As interest in purported “robots” has waned in the Everyone is Good 10.0 era, there’s something special in watching a guy who looks like he tries. This era of Maldonado made skateboarding in faceless strip mall parking lots look cooler and tougher than it was ever supposed to have the capacity to be.
