The 30 Most Influential Skaters of All Time

Going Solo, First CD Out That’s Not Slow-Mo

Daily News July 23rd, 2012 · 9:28 am · 4

After repeatedly giving The New York Times a hard time about this awful article, we have to give them credit for a great Times Magazine feature on skateboarding in Uganda. Is there any way this generation’s student loan debt could get funneled towards building skateparks in Uganda instead of going back to some stupid bank?

Also in the realm of reputable-mainstream-publications-writing-about-skating, The New Yorker has a solid article about Transworld‘s “30 Most Influential” list. (Here’s the QS post from last winter regarding the “most influential” subject.)

Most have seen this by now, but Josh Stewart filmed a “Night in the Life”-type segment with Jahmal Williams and the Hopps team for the “RIDE” channel on YouTube. Jahmal Williams footage + black & white = always a win.

“As PJLWHL recedes into skate lore, the narrative of how a couple dudes from Boston with impeccable musical taste founded a shop that produced the one of the most transcendent video parts ever remains almost as interesting as the video itself. Shit would be a sick movie. Kids meets Empire Records, if you will.” Frozen in Carbonite on The Beatles, The Stones, Oasis, Stereolab, dubbing skate videos, PJ Ladd’s Wonderful Horrible Life, Palace, and City of Rats.

Cutty Brooklyn spots and annoying video effects. Thanks, art school.

One of those kids who slept outside Supreme for a pair of sneakers last week got caught out there so bad. “Sneaker culture” taking cues from frat / drunk-white-people-at-college-parties culture.

Coda Skateboards took a trip up to Boston.

There’s another part from the 2nd Nature-endorsed PFP2: See You Lazer video on YouTube. That bump-to-5050 on University and 13th is gnarly (@ 1:15) considering he’s more-or-less grinding a concrete booger sticking out of a wall.

People are making ceiling fans out of skateboards. People are bored.

In a tremendous blow to the world of online skateboarding content, Skate.ly removed all 411 issues from its library. Does anyone have a link for the Roc-A-Fella issue?

Spot Updates: 1) The Parks Department filled in the crack at Tompkins. E.J. is bummed. 2) Those rails on 95th and Columbus, which maybe three people skate every year, are blocked off by scaffolding.

Quote of the Week: “My day date got rained out, so I texted her that night saying ‘It looks like a dry evening, unless I make you wet later.'” – G-Man

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Slim Thug, T.I. & Bun B > Clooney, Cube & Wahlberg > Rick Ross, Dr. Dre & Jay-Z

Tryna Live Comfortable…

Daily News January 23rd, 2012 · 8:30 am · 12

It finally snowed. Can you people shut up now? Did you get a chance to rock your ‘Lo boots? It’s supposed to be 52 and rain today, so hopefully, this is all gone by Tuesday. Photo by Ian Reid.

New York is kinda hurt, huh? Our baseball team doesn’t have a soul, our basketball team is permanent garbage, our hockey team is irrelevant, our best rapper is 42 (thus also garbage), and our best rapper of the last ten years is serving a 75-year prison sentence. So, it makes perfect sense for our hopes to rest on a doofy whiteboy quarterback…

Shout out to the Lev and the Palace crew. They won a European Skate Brand of the Year award. They’re also riding around and getting it.

E.J. put together a nine-minute homie cam montage featuring Yaje shredding flatbars, people dressed as robots vibing out to 2007 electro hits, and Juicy J cameos. This clip makes E.J. the first person to edit footage of Black Dave the Skater to music by Black Dave the Rapper. If you’re into art and shit, check out this video of E.J’s recent show, Inimicus.

Some nostalgic reflections on Slap, and the generally grim future of print skateboard magazines from a shop owner. That blog also has a respectable alternative list to Transworld‘s “Top 30 Most Influential” from last month.

Skate Mental pays homage to skateboarding’s most infamous shoe and the largest overlap between early-2000s skater and graver (goth + raver = gothic raver = graver) culture, the Osiris D3, in their spring 2012 catalog.

Be Pretty is a NY-based video by Esteban Jefferson. They have been putting it online piece-by-piece throughout the past week. Young kids shredding cutty New York spots. Not mad at it.

Late, but the DQM site has an interview up with Brian Delatorre discussing the Skateboarder cover, iPhones, Instagram, and falling victim to technology. Speaking of falling victim to technology — This is next level insane.

~~The young don of the T.F.~~ Roctakon’s intern, Slicky Boy, has a new freestyle out over the How To Make It In America theme… “Made me spend all my ones on 2 Bros. / I want two of those slices / ’cause my mind is feelin’ real righteous.”

Already posted this on Facebook, and it has nothing to do with skating, but in case you missed it, this is the most G shit ever. If a skater was going to jump out of the ninth story of a Wilshire Boulevard office building, who would have the best chance of talking him down? Carroll? Rick? The Muska? Rob C? Tony Hawk? Peter Bici?

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Torey 2 Beerz video on Wednesday. Ishod video on Friday. The NPBS mixtape celebrates its one-year anniversary around this time. If you didn’t download it a year ago, 2011 probably sucked for you.

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!