“I will do anything for skateboarding. This episode can save lives, it creates communities. It’s the closest thing to music, and the coolest thing about music is that there’s no place on earth where it doesn’t exist.” Skateism has an interview with Buddy and Rick about making the LGBTQ+ episode of Love Letters to Skateboarding. There is also a supplementary “Love Note” with Cher Strauberry and Barker Barrett about how to be a better ally.
What’s with this sudden spike of interest in King of New York? Does the guy responsible for the Total Recall remake with Colin Farrell have a vendetta against all great movies from 1990, and is he considering a King of New York remake next, with Jake Gyllen Halal in Christopher Walken’s role, and Terry Kennedy in his big-screen debut instead of Laurence Fishburne? What does this have to do with anything? Linsanity is over (clearly), so we’re running on empty…
Jake Johnson followed through on his idea of a small town, “grassroots” skateboard tour. Though you’d only know about Map Masquerade if you check the Slap forum (hence us being three weeks late on it), him and several others have driven from San Francisco to Vegas to Albuquerque to Austin, and are currently in New Orleans, not doing demos or signings, but simply “skating with a group of [local] skaters in the way they skate.” They’ve been hiding product in every city on the list, and you can follow the tour on A Sense of Direction.org (it also has a list of Instagram accounts associated with it, which give clues as to where product is hidden.)
Is this the greatest shirt to ever be featured in a Quartersnacks clip?
This was originally supposed to go online yesterday, but after falling into deep depression at around the 11:15 P.M. mark of a certain sporting event on Thursday night, Friday wasn’t the productive day the Quartersnacks office had envisioned. (To any Chicago readers: Has Scottie Pippen been temporarily banned from the city yet?) But life (barely) goes on, and enough emotional strength was gathered to put together our traditional beginning of summer / Memorial Day weekend montage. It features plenty of diamond plated ledges, long 5050s, a lot of 180s (both backside and frontside), a No Limit classic alongside its respective eastern remix, and even a Brengar cameo.
Features Josh Velez, Alex, Pad Dowd, Matthew Mooney, Galen Dekemper, Alexander Mosley, Billy Rohan, Dave Willis, Stephan Martinez, Kevin Tierney, Shawn Powers, and Ben Nazario.
P.S. We don’t condone lying on dirty mattresses in SoHo so your friends could ollie over you.
P.P.S. Young Jeezy has a new mixtape out for Memorial Day weekend. Normally, this would get its own, dedicated post treatment, but he has been spending the past year recording Rick Ross bites (things have really changed, huh), so expectations for it aren’t as high as they were in the pre-Lex Luger/Fake Lex Luger beat and celebrity name as a hook era.
If you’re in the handful of individuals reading this right now with a headache, just out of a sleep marred by alcohol, at least you have a solid, new skateboard video to distract you for seventeen minutes.
Goin’ Ham is a project by the same crew that brought you the Film Me video, released this past summer. There are full parts from Nate Rojas, Ray Macken, and Stephan Martinez. It’s tightly edited, fast-paced, and an all around thorough watch. Right now, it is being downloaded from Vimeo and converted to a .m4v format so it can play off a phone. That hasn’t happened with a new video in a fairly long time. (Well, not since August 22nd.)
A real stand-out part of the video is the immense array of local terrain that it covers. While any bum on wheels flying into New York from Burbank, Europe, or Australia for a few weeks in the summer could have kickflipped the Fifth Avenue Apple Store ledge to street gap, or front crooked the CBS eight-stair rail at this point, given how far skateboarding has come in the past ten years, these kids actually made it happen. It’s easy to drive out of state to find better versions of basically every New York spot, but making do with the whole city and its myriad of pretty, but endlessly flawed skate spots is a whole different story. It’s like 1999 or 2000 all over again (except with much better skateboarding), where tricks go down all over the place, not just within the same routine boundaries that have become guidelines for where to film these past couple years. Lines at CBS in 2010 are something to genuinely be psyched on, and it gives everyone a reason to break out the wax and re-energize some spot that we have been neglecting for years.
As with the also great Film Me video, certain critical corners of the Tompkins bench might write it off for “little kid style,” or other similar deterrents that exist for the aging skateboarder population of New York. The truth is, between this and the last video, there has been less than a year’s span, and every single person’s part is a notch above the last one (and some of them have been visibly affected by growth spurts.) The video goes hard, and the third one will undoubtedly be on a different level. Parts with residual little kid style, but sprinkled with evident motivation, are always more fun to watch than half-assed pursuits at video parts that are filmed in between brunch and happy hour.
Mildly related: If anyone had seen even half of the things that have gone down in the Ziegfeld fountain that we have seen, it would inevitably lead to a second thought before neglecting the potential health risks that reside on the opposite end of any comic endeavor involving contact with its contents.
