It feels like it has been an eerily quiet season for New York scene videos. You can blame the worst winter in a decade, but winter has typically been the perfect time to edit shit from the past year. This week, we’ve ran stuff from Chicago (statistically worse weather than us), Lisbon (where it’s been raining all winter), and today, Maine (look at a map.) I guess we gotta work more to afford to live in this fucking place or something like that.
ANYWHO, we at the QS office love a seasonal skate video franchise: think Jeff Cecere’s 2022-2024 December three-peat or that era when every summer came with a Bronze video. For three winters now, Michael Babbitt and his crew have been reporting on the happenings up in Portland, Maine in skate video form. Three videos in, it feels like Portland thrives on the sort of spots that pop up in that liminal period between construction projects and may not last more than a week, or the sorts of things that can only be skated while negotiating with someone already halfway into calling the cops. Between the trio of projects, it barely feels like they repeat spots. We asked Mr. Babbitt how such a small scene manages to cast such a wide net: “did you guys barely repeat spots through the past three videos?”
