Peter Smolik | Quartersnacks

No Top on the Wagon, Fisherman Gear

Daily News September 4th, 2012 · 12:31 pm · 4

Tony Trujillo at the original KCDC, when it was on N 10th Street. 2004. Photo by Jonathan Mehring, who recently unearthed a bunch of great New York photos from the 2000s.

As the fall begins, Quartersnacks welcomes the prospective NYU, New School, SVA, etc. classes of 2016 to New York. Please read this guide before going outside, so you are not quickly exiled from civilized New York skateboard society.

It is crazy that Peter Smolik’s body of work continues to be so underrated, even beyond contributions to technical skateboarding. This past weekend, Joe Budden, a perennial favorite of those who insist they only listen to “real hip-hop yo,” made headlines by switching his default Twitter avatar to a photo of his face buried in a vagina. Smolik was WAAAAAY ahead of the curve on that one, and continues to not receive any credit for it.

Eight-minute iPhone clip of a bunch of younger kids ripping around the city this past summer. A lot of parks, but some street clips as well.

Vans is currently having a “Jason Dill Week” over on their site. Yesterday’s feature was an archive of Dill’s old magazine interviews, and today’s is a look back at his old Workshop ads with commentary on each one. (In case you missed it, there’s a long interview with him and Van Engelen over on the Syndicate site that chronicles both of their skate careers in great detail.)

Apparently, The Financial Times now covers the skateboard industry.

Our good friend, Alex Dymond, designed a sick Woessner shoe for the Vans OTW collection. You should scoop it up if you’re going for a grown and sexy vibe this fall.

There are some more parts from the Westchester-based PFP2: See You Lazer video now up on YouTube.

Some throwaway clips from A Stone’s Throw, an upcoming video out of Buffalo, NY.

There are some throw-your-board-down round handrails at the new BMCC building on Greenwich Street. There’s no security in front now, but that probably won’t last. Also, they might suck, because nobody here knows anything about rails.

Quote of the Week:

Yeah dude, skating here sucks. The hipsters, thug wannabees and Supreme employees hurt everyone’s feelings non-stop. Good to see people took our advice from the beginning of the year to heart. “Its all about the image hear.”

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Starting today, your party budget is going to take a serious hit.

Where Were You The Day Smolik Was At BAM?

Time Capsule January 24th, 2012 · 2:32 pm · 3

How sick would it be to have a custom “New York” version of the Shorty’s wave logo on a tee? In another life, would Shorty’s be Max B’s favorite skate company due to the wave imagery? After all, he did shout out San Diego at the end of this song.

The history department at Frozen in Carbonite came through, yet again, by bringing to everyone’s attention this seldom-seen gem from the 1998 Church of Skatan video, Wild in the Streets. It features the Fulfill the Dream-era Shorty’s team riding around the east coast in a van containing a young Giovanni Reda, stopping off at the Hackettstown skatepark, Boston, and Philly, presumably in the days of heightened Love Park/City Hall police presence, as the section is all FDR and Burnt Cat footage. The New York ender is the best part though. Aaron Snyder was the only one with any New York footage in Fulfill, right? Smolik remedies that fact by destroying Pyramid Ledges with some tricks that would still hold up today. No real surprises there, he’s ahead of his time, blah, blah, blah…

It’s easy to imagine the day Smolik was at BAM as the nineties equivalent of the day Waka Flocka came to 12th & A. We’re all still kicking ourselves in the teeth for missing it…

The Most Underrated Skater in the Game

Time Capsule December 22nd, 2011 · 12:26 pm · 11

“…but everybody wanna ~~use my slang~~ do my tricks…”

Transworld put their “30 Most Influential Skaters” cover story online this week, and it reaffirmed that Peter Smolik is essentially skateboarding’s E-40 in terms of unheralded influence. Whether or not he is self-aware as 40, or cares enough, is besides the point, but you can re-apply nearly everything said in this song to Smolik’s legacy. The only tough part would be figuring out who skateboarding’s equivalent of Mystikal is for the “They left us out the top 40, me and Mystikal” part.

Smolik was ten years ahead of the game with everything that has happened in skating since Fully Flared came out. Though his influence had to trickle down and be filtered through horrors like Tactical Manual, Manual Labor, and a bunch of parts in Logic issues from dudes doing nollie front tail 270s who you never heard from again, it came full circle to inspire probably everyone in the new Sk8Mafia video.

It’s possible that the editors at Transworld never forgave Smolik for inventing an anti-sag pant and shoe combo in the late-90s. It’s also possible that they have a loose understanding of what the word “influence” means, because we all know Smolik’s influence is in every kid that has done a slide-shove-it-slide combo (there are five in every video circa 2011), or decided to learn back tail big flips before kickflip back tails. Not sure who in the 30 you’d take off, but his “influence” is definitely more widespread than at least one person on there. (There’s obviously a small overlap between Daewon, who is on there, and Smolik, but Daewon is his own genre of skateboarding.)

Play them classics!

A Comprehensive Guide to Rap Video Skate Parts

Features & Interviews May 20th, 2011 · 10:03 am · 35

It seems that whenever Jereme Rogers releases one of his “rap songs,” conventional skateboard media outlets continue to grant him exposure. These videos usually draw the ire of those nostalgic for the Coliseum era, when Jereme was switch flipping stairs to Buena Vista Social Club. Even non-skate related circles have given his frequent masterworks of second hand embarrassment some contemplation. We’re all guilty of (well, not Quartersnacks…not until this post anyway) offering Jereme airtime, instead of ignoring him in hopes that he would simply disappear or get committed. He, like many other inadequate rappers, subscribes to the fallacy that equates having “haters” to success. The only way we could win is by not paying attention.

However, his recent rap videos and audition tapes for a potential sequel to Whiteboyz are not the first instances of skateboarders attempting to mesh themselves with the mystic world of rap music. The following is a (cautionary) guide to the occasional rap video skate part, and why it has typically been a bad idea, long before Jereme Rogers made us wonder if he bumped his head too hard when he fell off the mattress in Wonderful Horrible Life.