Don’t forget: we are hosting a Longer Ledge Jam @ Tompkins with Adidas this Wednesday, September 30 from 4 P.M. onwards. Cash for tricks. Flyer here 🌊
Videographer Simone Rocca just dropped his Rome scene video, AWFUL BLISS, which him and his crew spent the past five years filming for 🇮🇹
The morning after • 📷 Photo via @_newthings
Catalytic converter thefts are down, shark sightings in Rockaway are up, word is that the watermelon slush spot across from Labor is turning into a wraparound French restaurant 😒, and Antonio is switch flipping the Banks rail for the timeline — that’s Hollywood New York babyyyyyyyyy!
“Sometimes I go overboard and end up with too many spots to choose from. Last summer, I had so many spots saved that I got overwhelmed. It was stressing me out trying to figure out which one to focus on.” Nik Stain gave a #longform interview (first ever?) to Jared Sherbert for Thrasher on account of the new Hockey video.
“Street are popping. Somebody is playing the trumpet. This is Queens.” Elisa Martini skates Flushing and supports her local in the latest installment of Skate Jawn‘s “$100 Chill” feature. Someone’s really gotta hit Queens Night Market for one of these.
You might remember us clamoring on about last winter’s sleeper hit, Sucks To Be You, which was a …portal into the skate scene in …Portland, Maine ;)
Michael Babbitt dropped Idiot Boy yesterday, a follow-up and even more refined portrait of the east coast’s northernmost place that could still be called a city. (69,000ish people.)
📝 Words by Mike Munzenrider
🎨 Collage by Francesco Pini
One of the most remote skateboard demos ever happened more than 20 years ago in a village north of Madang in the lowlands of Papua New Guinea. Located off Australia’s Cape York, Papua New Guinea is the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. Some 840 different languages are spoken there — more than anywhere else in the world. Just around an eighth of its population lives in cities, so it is very rural. “It’s not developed at all,” says former pro skater Kenny Reed, who in the early 2000s, read a book about the place and decided to go there by himself following a skate trip to Australia.
Reed says he had hoped to get deep into the country’s highlands, but the travel agency with which he booked his trip said such excursions can take six months of planning. He was coming on short notice and was given a more simple itinerary. “It wasn’t as far out as I wanted to go but it was really far from civilization,” he says. The people he met were subsistence farmers who didn’t wear shoes. He’d brought his board and folks were curious about it, though hard surfaces were tough to come by. “The king of the village had a plywood floor in his hut [so we took it out] and we used that,” Reed says of the resulting one-man demo. “After that, they taught me how to throw spears and shoot bows and arrows.”
📷 Photo by Zach Baker
Though a bit lagging on concrete specifics, The New York Times had a feature last week about the pending restoration of the Brooklyn Banks, which apparently has the mayor’s support? (2023 is actually what they said when they pulled all the bricks out three years ago.)
Cutty spots and familiar faces in Nick Kassebaum’s Sinkhole video, which is almost entirely filmed in New York.
Does this spot have an agreed upon name yet, or is everyone going to do the whole civil war over naming rights? Neema Joorabchi posted up a two-minute edit from the new, blue and yellow recycled plastic ledges on Essex Street.
“I’m in the midst of a battle right now, I’ve gone back down to riding a 7.75” board.” The Slam City Skates blog interviewed Danny Brady for their “First & Last” series.
