Take Off No Jet Lag

Photo via That’s A Crazy One

Ben “Actually, I Like Wearing Wack Gear” Blundell receives redemption after barely any clips in Courtesy. Go watch his “OJO” part over on Thrasher. Rest in Peace Dillon ♥

Boil the Ocean wrote the longform Transworld obituary.

Gotta hand it to Europe’s Most Productive Crew™ for consistently doing something that feels so natural and different than everything else out there, year after year — especially in a country without much of a skate industry. Also ~love~ the recurring role of dogs in their videos. “Nap Mint Nap Volume 4” is the latest from the Rios Crew. We really gotta make it out to Budapest, pretty much everyone says nothing but good things…

In hindsight, it’s pretty crazy that a peak shiny suit era Bad Boy song ever slipped into an Alien Workshop video, even for 45 seconds. And guess what! Twenty years later, we get the full [re]edit: Manolo remixed two decades of Kalis footage to the complete extended version of Black Rob’s “Whoa.” FWIW, that album has some sleeper gems.

Frog has a b-roll clip of some leftovers from their “Bossa Nova” video that went live a few weeks ago. Jesse also threw up a random 15-mintue B-roll edit on his YouTube.

“Pornography had already been done, and the skate/fetish graphic thing said all that needed to be said on the subject. Take away the black bag and the sticker about censorship, and you just have a dumb idea repeated endlessly. For nearly 3 decades.” Ted Barrow wrote a nice piece on the history of the black bag World Industries board, and everything that followed it over on Skateism.

The Slam City Skates blog did a profile on Skateboard Cafe, which already made one of 2019’s best videos.

Krak put together a trick history clip for the other famous grate gap ledge (which is def a few feet longer than the Flushing one, and has a curb before the backside for regular side) in the event you need to be reminded of how awful 75% of combo ledge skating looks. Leaving out the backside noseblunt is crazy tho…

Solange in a skate clip ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Def worth the watch from Peter Deigaard + Drew, Hugo, Ville, and all the Copenhagen boys, which will make you feel the summer even if you have no Danish travel plans :)

Caleb Yuan and Marcello Campanello skating around Penn Station and Soho for Canal.

DOA RMX” is a video featuring some upstate dudes (pretty sure…), and has a random ass remix of Pat Washington footage from the early 2000s at the end, which is timely given Jamal Smith reminded us about his iconic Got Gold? part last week.

Sean Pablo is the latest guest on The Bunt, and Alex Olson is the latest guest on The Mission Statement Podcast.

Didn’t know this existed until Bill posted the T.J. one on IG, but these one-off skater action figures by Milk Saggers Studios are pretty rad.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: Luka’s Hail Mary.

Quote of the Week
Inquisitive Gentleman: “E.T, who were your favorite skaters growing up?”
Etienne Gagne: “Umm… Ryan Sheckler and Hugo [Balek].”

Realized the other day that Tao’s “KBH MIXEN” video is the 2018 video that still gets the most revisitation in 2019. Felt Ville’s section deserved it’s own upload :)

Summer Reading* Round-Up: Love, That’s A Crazy One & A Skateboarding Annual 3

*Asterisk because two out of three of these blurbs are for photo books, with one of them (the first one) having probably less than a thousand words overall. Anyway, all three of these came out over the course of the past few months, and all of them deserve your time, especially as August grinds the skateboard news cycle to a near halt. Shout out to everyone putting cool shit on pieces of paper and sharing it with the rest of the world, whether it’s a ‘zine, a book or whatever the hell else ♥

Love — Paradigm Publishing

Love is less a book of skate photos, and more a visual essay of what skateboarding looks like when it’s forced to become a form of protest.

Jonathan Rentschler’s book tells the story of Love Park’s final years — a period most visibly represented by Brian Panebianco’s Sabotage series — in black and white photographs. Love was the first time I felt genuine anger while looking through a book about skateboarding: anger at the cops raising up skateboards in smiley triumph as they confiscate them, anger at police officers pulling people by the hair after they throw them to the ground, anger at the politicians attending a groundbreaking ceremony for the park’s destruction, who will no doubt spend as little time in its remodeled incarnation as they did when they were leading a stubborn crusade against the thing giving it life. These images are interjected with a portrait of the community that corralled in a place they were told was not for them. This is not limited to the skaters, but also fringes of society who those same faces of civil service often prefer to ignore.

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Real Chill

astor riviera

Astor & Lafayette, in a galaxy far, far away. Jacked from That’s a Crazy One.

It’s the end of the summer, 100 degrees out, and people are fucking pissed.

“In fact, they feel it was exploitative, that Clark capitalized on the brilliance of the crew while failing to capture the true beauty of their world. They weren’t as sex crazed as the film portrays them, for one. More important, in Kids, it seems all the boys want is to fuck the girls, but in real life, the girls weren’t sexual conquests. The boys and girls ran neck and neck and were best friends.” Ok, so lately been wondering about the origins of the photos from @thatsacrazyone on Instagram, which has tons of early and mid nineties stuff around Astor, Washington Square and the Banks + some same faces from Out & About, etc. (This Loki photo is the coolest a slappy crook on a six-inch curb will ever look.) Turns out its for an upcoming book of the same name, whose website hasn’t been updated in a year-and-a-half, but apparently is still coming out as per this feature in August’s issue of Vice. Really looking forward to this one :)

Byrd Gang videos are my new favorite videos out of New York. Teaser for the new one.

File Jawn Gardner’s Bruns 2 part under: Video Parts That Made Me Yell At My Computer Screen More Than Three Times in 2016.

Probably listened to The War Report more than any other venerated nineties New York rap album as an adult, so this’ll be a nice addition for the wall.

“Rifuckingdiculously Sorry” is the forth and final installment to Flip’s Sorry series, oddly starring a bunch of Canadians skating in Toronto.

The history of skateboarding unfolded pretty much alongside the development of trucks, and plot-twist — women run everything in skateboarding. Part two of Jeff Grosso’s history of skateboard trucks is now live. (Part one went live last month btw.)

Andrew Allen interviews Austyn Gillette.

Village Psychic with another round of strange skater + sponsor match-ups.

Probably the best *sounding* video of all time, Tim Dowling’s Listen, in full.

Speaking of videos that sound like they look, Budapest’s Rios Crew A.K.A. the New Jersey-ians of Europe just dropped a new one called “Nap Mint Nap Volume 3.”

You probably already saw this: Austyn’s TWS cover footage and Brad Cromer front blunting a Seaport bench in Huf’s new NYC edit.

This is six-years-old and has nothing to do with skateboarding, but I read it on the plane twice. “If journalism’s more vital traditions of investigating corruption and synthesizing complex topics are going to be restored, it will never be at the expense of the personal, the sexual, the venal, or the sensational, but rather through mastering the kind of storytelling that understands that none of those things exists in a vacuum.”

Quote of the Week: “They make MTV music that I want to listen to.” — Pryce Holmes’ Sremmlife 2 review