“I went from being a kid skating on my block to hanging out with all the best skaters in New York City because I learned how to do a frontside 360 boneless.” A friend once had a story about how their book club took a razor to The Powerbroker and sliced it up into three books to make it more reasonable of a read. This isn’t that dramatic, but a blog interview that takes over two hours to read is a lot for most people in the era of byte-sized #content — but we’re *SO* happy that people are putting detailed, rich content on the internet that requires a commitment! Isn’t that what it’s for?! The Slam City Skates blog’s interview with Eli Gesner about skateboarding + graffiti in New York in the 80s, night clubs in the early 90s, the beginnings of Shut + Zoo York, etc. is like a little history book :)
This past year, nobody else incited as many smilesand remindersof the gloriousescapism that skateboarding provides. Thank you Jamal Smith, 2017’s Q.S.S.O.T.Y., for inspiring us to enjoy the world on a skateboard. Sadly, we can’t fly you to Canary Islands like Thrasher can (…not yet), but just wanted to say thanks :)
Even as an institution that often gets chastised for Rihanna songs in skate clips and bad filming, we gotta chime in here: wtf is with the choppy frame-rate, wtf is up with the darkass clips, and wtf is up with that Morrissey song in Antonio’s new Berrics part? The skating though…is absolutely F U C K E D.
Oddly enjoyed this way more than expected, probably because they skate a bunch of weird shit that nobody bothers with, e.g. they got two clips at the Gristedes on 96th Street — a Weed Maps “Summer Trip to New York” clip with Jaws, Tommy Sandoval and Boo Johnson. I think we ran into Jaws at a rave when he was filming this.
…aaannndddd Village Psychic made a “Best of 2017” mix of the year’s ACTUAL S.O.T.Y., regardless of what the yellow t-shirts may have told you.
“Belgrade is the best city I’ve ever been to in my life.” The Rios Crew continues to inspire skateboard travel dreams far outside the conventional Euro destinations with each new clip. “Dunja,” their latest, hits Serbia’s capital, Montenegro and Croatia.
QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: It’ll never not be funny that Kyrie was just like “nah, I don’t wanna play with this dude anymore.” He lost yesterday, but this was sick.
Quote of the Week: “You should just make Q.S.S.O.T.Y. ‘The Max Palmer Award.'” — John Choi
“In March, Kelvin and the other patinetos left San Salvador in the dead of night, and skated three hundred and fifty miles through Guatemala to the border town of Tecún Umán. That was the easy part. It’s fifteen hundred miles across Mexico, much of it past growing ranks of Mexican immigration security agents, kidnappers and extortionists.” How four dudes skated from El Salvador to the U.S. to flee gang violence …and here we are complaining about how some spot in Bushwick is too far.
Much respect to the guys at Blue Tile Skate Shop and Jim T. at Real for their protest against a Klan rally that happened in Columbia, South Carolina this past weekend. (Yes, this country still has fucking Klan rallies.) Here’s a good article from earlier this year about the creation of Jim’s “Hanging Klansman” graphic.
As DS2 blares through portable speakers for the remainder of the summer, let’s take a moment to revisit the classic intro off the ANCIENT original Dirty Sprite mixtape from 2011. Amazing how probably zero other “hot” rappers from back then are #relevant now. The game’s rough man.
