Kicked Out the Tiki Bar

moe

Webstore orders from last week were caught up on by Friday afternoon. If you’re in the U.S. and don’t receive your goods by the end of this week, feel free to get in touch for tracking info. Hats are sold out, hoodys are still available :) Thank you everyone for the support.

Shout out to all the free thinkers who are thinking outside the box.

“The stories I wrote were shit, it turned out. I hate to spoil the ending, but it’s true: skateboarding really is super fucking difficult to write about. How am I supposed to fix that?” — “Skateboarding in Fiction: A Brief History in Failure,” a smile-inducing article on the daunting task of writing fiction about the act of skateboarding.

“‘People always call me an asshole,’ he said over the dull roar of our wheels as I caught up to him. ‘That’s because I don’t stop.’ As if to punctuate his point, he ran the next red light. I watched from the limit line as a truck driver slammed on the brakes.”

There are a handful of Bloby Instagram compilations out there, but this new one of Vincent Touzery is the best Bloby IG comp out there #skatevideohouse.

An interview with Brian Panebianco about the final days of Love. They’re still skating.

Andrew Wilson, Loose Trucks Max, Nik Stain, and Mitch from Philly all went out to Los Angeles and came back with an extended edition of Cell Jawn.

Volume 15 of LurkNYC “New York Times” B-sides. VHS cam + some midtown spots that are seldom skated in our modern era give this one some extra nostalgic vibes.

Here’s an artsy New York edit from Antosh and the Club Gear dudes who came through with one of the better “Summer Trip To…” clips in recent memory last fall.

A new mostly Rhode Island / some New York video from the Mood NYC crew: booM.

An interview / podcast with Roxanne Oldham, the music supervisor on “cherry.”

Before Slap was the behemoth of skate gossip that it is today, it was…a magazine?

Three straight ledges in a row from the nineties, and not only talking about them but also remaking them fifteen years later. Meanwhile, there aren’t two consecutive ledges within a two-mile radius of the QS office…

Aaannnddd here’s a five-year-old skating Chelsea Park.

QS Sports Desk: During some very bleak years — actually, they’re all pretty bleak — David Lee provided Knick fans with a flicker of hope. He’ll always hold a special place in our hearts, just like Kristaps will once Dolan decides to trade him in hopes of signing Paul George in three years or some shit. Glad to see the bro finally get his ring.

Quote of the Week: “I didn’t know I was beast until I varial flipped a trash can.” — Genesis Evans

I listen through this a dozen times once it starts getting warm every spring.

Maybe the Reason Alien Workshop Went Under, Maybe

alien workshop out of business

The skateboard gossip machine isn’t the most logical thing in the world. Skaters are privy to shortsighted conclusions e.g. “Reider is totally tight with Dill so he went to F.A., Grant is totally hesh so he went to Anti-Hero, and everything started to fall apart from there,” but there is one and only one reason for why companies of any sort cease to exist: money (baby!) When your employees the best skaters on earth start to leave, there is obviously something wrong at the top, no matter how romantic those employees’ reasons for leaving may have been in their exit interviews.

So yeah, money.

Friend of the website and frequent recipient of hate mail from l*ngb**rders, Willy Staley, put resources outside of the Slap message boards to work, and dug into the real financial nuts and bolts of the situation. Using earnings statements, current stock quotes, etc., he pieces together a plausible map of how Alien fell apart: “[Dyrdek] held onto it for just about 18 months, before selling DNA for $1.5 million and some stock options to a Carlsbad-based firm called Pacific Vector Holdings, which is described in the press release as ‘a premier action sports retail and consumer brands company.’ This is, if you can’t already tell, where things start to go wrong…”

Read the full post over on his site before ensuing the “Jake to Polar?!” speculation. (2014’s free agency period might be even more insane than last year’s. Our interns are grinding on them pie charts b.)

And just because, here’s another one from the vault for all the Photosynthesis fans:

Never really been sure of that video’s origin, but [*blasphemy alert*] is it okay to like it as much as (if not slightly more than) these two guys’ actual parts in Photosynthesis?