Unknobbing Rails on the Run

Lebron is battling Carmelo in the NBA Playoffs …in August, and Nas made a new song with Foxy Brown, AZ and Cormega. Who really knows what fucking year it actually is, what’s going on — or anything, really.

Incredible manuals, great spots, and chic skate noises in Japhey Dow’s Heirloom part, which traverses all around New York state.

“If skateboarding is the quilt and all of these other interests that make up so much of skateboarding, if those things are the patches, just keep adding patches.” Sage Elsesser interviewed Ray Barbee for Thrasher.

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Summer 2k19 4ever

Photo via Stafhon

#SaveTompkins in The New York Times. Sign and share the petition to keep synthetic turf off the courts at Tompkins.

The JHAKX video from Takeshi Nagamatsu has a New York section to start it off, plus a lot of familiar faces. It’s funny to see the metal strips across the Cooper Union bank get defeated one at a time over the years.

Pleasure” is a 20-minute NJ/NYC/Philly video by Hugh O’Hare, and “Don’t Smoke That Wood In Here” is a 10-minute NJ/NYC/Philly video by the Lottery Boiz. Shout out to the enduring badness of bust-free ledges in the greater New York metropolitan area, which causes all of us to still drive out to Staten Island to skate P.S. 6…in 2019. Also, of course skaters wasted no time editing something to Young Thug’s late summer beach anthem, but tbh, “went from boogie board shorty and now I’m the big kahuna” is a lot to live up to.

#Mandatorypost of #TylerTuftycontent for our core readership.

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One Link At A Time

Congrats again Bob LaSalle on the pro model basketball. Photo via Antosh.

“Day in the Life” videos warrant a cursory skimming through at best, but this one with Jawn Gardner skating around Long Beach and making friends with everyone kicking him out of spots could have gone on for twice as long :)

You’ve probably caught this one already — but Go Skate Day in Bogota, Colombia was insane. Hope everyone is ok.

Philly from Humidity, Tyler Tufty, and Keith (!) Denley (!!) all have cool clips in this Nike SB wear test montage from Minneapolis a few weeks back.

People are still flying down that hill from the Long Island Expressway by Queens Mall, huh? Iconic 2008 spot. OMW is a twenty-minute video by Angel Delgado that Skate Jawn posted up last week. Features a bunch of familiar faces.

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Halo Effect — The Oral History of the First Hundred Dollar Skate Shoe

Collages by Requiem For A Screen

There’s no shortage of talk about a deck’s notorious resistance to inflation. But what about shoes? While something like a Lebron in 2019 is substantially more expensive than a Jordan in 1999, skate shoes have hovered around the same average $70-80 price tag for the better part of two decades, even as skateboarding itself has grown and adapted to new trends, technologies, and customers. Meanwhile, every fashion house in Europe has been raking in the money these past few years, pushing puffy sneakers reminiscent of old skate shoes.

We tracked down the principal figures behind the first three-figure skate shoe, released in 1997, and got their story on what was as much of an anomaly as it was a watershed moment for skateboarding as a cultural phenomenon, and style of footwear design. (Keep in mind that, adjusted for inflation, $100 in 1997 is the equivalent of $156 in 2019.)

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What was the skate shoe landscape like at the start of the nineties?

Don Brown, Chief Brand Strategist at Sole Tech: Airwalk, Vans and Simple were the only other shoe brands. They had become so mainstream and rigid — and there was a dip in the economy, so they scrambled to get sales wherever they could. Pierre [Andre Senizegues, founder of Sole Technology] was doing the distribution for Etnies at the time, bringing it over from France. When skateboarding crashed, vert and freestyle were pretty much eliminated. There was a whole generation of upstarts, like Rocco and them, and everyone in skateboarding rode for Etnies at some point.

Chad Muska: There were a hundred riders on Etnies, or something crazy like that. Even that High Five video had so many people in it. The shoe industry then was like, “Oh, this company is going to give you free shoes. Maybe there’s a chance you get paid.” It was so secondary to boards. There were early pro shoes, like the Half Cab, the Natas, and the SLB, but I think the real start of the skateboard shoe industry being serious was when they began making videos.

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