People change. It is a pretty standard fact of life. Whether it is you, and your gradual shift in music tastes, as you discover the artistic merits of Morrisey and the ignorance that accompanies records focused on being shot nine times, or your high school sweetheart coming back a lesbian after her first semester of college — our lives are peppered with moments of dissonance that call for reevaluations, both small and large, of those who we call friends.

One day, I started to notice that my friend Michael Gigliotti was starting to change. He wasn’t growing breasts or going bald, but there was something different about him.

I first met Michael in the back of Union Square. Several friends and I had played him in a game of skate, and he inevitably won in a shut out since he was in fact from Santa Monica, and thus grew up skating the Hollywood High School 16 stair, while me and my friends grew up skating the Seaport and Red Benches, so frankly, it was a really unfair game.

From that point on, we were really good friends. We would see obscure, black and white, Scandanavian films in revival houses together, get later’d at the Fish, write poetry in our blood on yellow looseleaf sheets of paper and subsequently paperclip them to unsuspecting girl’s scrunchies, and occasionally skateboard when the New York City Board of Fashionability deemed it fashionable (typically, this happened three times a year between 2005-2007 and has happened once a year since 2008).

But slowly, Mike decided to lose interest in skateboarding. He’d show up to our favorite ledge wearing maroon eyeliner. Oftentimes, he’d wear platform shoes with weird escriptions carved into the sole that had cryptic messages about how life was obsolete and how the worthlessness of the human condition was a product of the government and George Bush’s plan for destroying the rain forest so it could be traded to Al Queda in exchange for trendy Arab scarves worn by college students and maybe oil wells. He would still skate sometimes, but usually, he would try tricks like shove-it willy grinds on handrails, and heelflip body varials down double sets in Midtown Manhattan. One day, I tried to learn nollie half cab flips and he told me that I was a “conformist that would lead a life subservient to the government while being wholly complacent with my ignorance to George Bush’s great plan for wiping out New Jersey and deporting every great indie band.” I asked him to clarify, and then he focused my board and I have not seen him since.

Yesterday, I opened up my e-mail and say a message entitled “Long time no see” from an e-mail account that I soon learned was connected to a radical environmentalist group located in desert that is responsible for fundraising so they could campaign a freegan president in the 2012 election, just about a hundred miles outside of Los Angeles in the desert (although some reports say he has been spotted at Cafe Orlin on Saturday mornings.) Attatched to the e-mail, was this clip. A large departure from Michael’s former Westside Connection, Late-90s No Limit and Cramps inspired filmmaking, but I guess he’s changed. Whether its for the best or the worst, you be the judge.

Clip embedded after the jump. Features Miles Marquez, Michael Gigliotti, Alex Olson, Watermelon Alex, some jerk. Read the rest of this entry »

Unless Black Dave puts out a video part this year, Billy Rohan will be awarded the New York Skater of the Year Award.

Torey Goodall will be awarded the non-tri-state-area Skater of the Year Award.

Diamonds in my piece and chain. Courthouse drop attempts officially count as landings.

Another king gone.

You already know the drill. Dirty lenses, excessive cross dissolves, curbs, the worst filmed Jake Johnson footage you’ll ever see, Lenox Ledges, etc.

Download: Like it was 1979 [80.9 / 5:46]

Features Miles Marquez, Ty Lyons, Matthew Mooney, Tyler Mate, Jack Greer, Tyler Tufty, DJ Roctakon, Ian Reid, Galen Dekemper, Jake Johnson, Billy Rohan, Charles Lamb, Brendan Granstrand, Konstantin Satchek, Justin White, Negative, Taji Ameen, Benjamin Nazario and Michael Gigliotti.

Contains cameos from Switch Michael Strobert, Thando Beschta, whores from Washington Heights and Danny Weiss.

Thanks to Justin White, Jeremy Cohan, Alex Rialdi, and Brengar for contributing footage.

There is an alternate edit of this that was unfortunately suppressed by the Quartersnacks Board of Trustees as it was declared too racist and ignorant for public disclosure. While I still feel that is not the case, it is better to keep it buried in a folder of random edits to ensure that nobody gets offended.

In a recent episode of internet-skate-tv-related-entrepreneur Pat O’Dell’s second effort at Slap message board gold (known as “Skate Talk”), a person whose identity is still unknown to me (honestly, I have no clue who it was) called up, speaking in a stereotypical Hindu store owner’s accent and inquired as to whether or not the host, Lizard King, and a bunch of people that I don’t know, were familiar with Quarter Snacks, and subsequently, with the work of one of modern art’s most prolific figures, Geo Moya.

While I will spare you of going into the details of why being unfamiliar with Quarter Snacks equates to a massive loss of points (nothing short of a twenty-episode Epicly Later’d segment on Ryan Hickey will allow O’Dell to regain credibility in my eyes, and let’s face it, that’s never going to happen), but the fact that someone who makes a living off skateboarding-related deeds is not familiar with Geo Moya and his immense body of work is simply inexcusable.

I am not going to dwell on particulars, or provide a synopsis on Geo Moya’s genius and why he is one of the central pillars of American culture, because frankly, it is insulting to belittle his legacy to a few bulletpoints and superlatives. Conveniently, I have been provided with an alternative in the form of a video artifact that recently surfaced on the internet.

Jimmy Marketti, of taxi cab driver fight fame, uploaded Alphabet City, ABC skateshop’s 2004 video that was released after the shop had already been evicted from its 13th Street and Avenue A location, and after it had given up on trying to reestablish itself via the front room of Adrian’s apartment on 13th between A and B. Only in New York do skateshops release skate videos after they go out of business. I really wish I still had an ABC shirt, but obviously I’m a retard, and you never realize you should have held onto certain things until they’re actually gone. Similar to the time I let someone “borrow” my copy of the Infamous video that I stole from Danny Weiss.

The video itself, in hindsight, would seem pretty awful by outsider standards, considering that in its day, it was being paraded around by locals and minor shop affiliates well-versed in the art of hype as “the New York version of the PJ Ladd video.” Obviously, its position as a long-forgotten document of northeastern skateboarding relative to Coliseum’s entry, which is well nestled in the canon of classics, is the only indicator you really need to verify the falsity of the hypebrewing statements being tossed around the Tompkins Square Park benches circa 2003-2004.

The editing looks like it informed a lot of the 2004-era 5050skateboarding.com clips (by no means is that a compliment), the music-choices are up there with some of the worst decisions in skateboard video history and certain portions of it look horribly dated. In retrospect, it is not much of a ways off from the universally (and unfairly) hated Remedy video from 2001. That’s beside the point though. Because I reviewed the video when I was 15, and at the time, it was the greatest thing I had ever seen.

And that has a lot to do with Geo Moya, because he is one of the anchors that just slightly brings this thing back into the pool of relevancy, as his inward heelflip 5-0 grinds and backside 180s will forever be timeless maneuvers, long after all the assholes in the latest Transworld succumb to the scene and begin placing drugs in their noses and doing art in exchange for their skateboards.

Kerel is obviously the other crucial part that renders this thing a New York artifact worthy of a revisit, as it is the only part he ever had or will have, and it happens to be an insanely good part, bent with the misfortune of being edited to the WORST song ever (not in a “oh, that dude’s the worst!” sort of way exclaimed by skateboarders in the East Village over 100 times a day, but in a genuinely “wow, this really, really sucks” sort of way.) Lord only knows what subsequent parts from him would have looked like, but New York skateboarding definitely could have used someone who would learn switch flips, and then a month later, be landing on them down the Martin Luther King High School 13, in addition to someone who would do flip-in-to-slide tricks down nine stair handrails without cameras and make double heelflips look good.

Unfortunately, this was the last part that Geo Moya, the hero responsible for my outrage in concocting this write-up on a five-year-old video, had. Same for Kerel. A lot of the other people in it have had parts since, so they don’t matter. Combined with the inclusion of P.B.ER / Party Boy Eric / Union Squeric’s footage in the beginning of the video, these two parts will mark this video as a minor classic on the New York section of video shelves down the line. Chances are, if you were not around for its release and cannot understand what a massive cultural event it was, you’re going to think it sucks, which by most standards, it does. It all depends on how you relate to it, either it will usher in nostalgic notions of things past, or a wave of hate and “what the fuck were they thinking” comments. Either way, it is worth a watch. And yeah, like with most videos released in the past five years, the Flipmode video is better.

Alphabet City Skateboard Operation: Alphabet City - 2004 [Vimeo Link]

The video that Brengar famously declared as having “taken longer to make than The Passion of the Christ” is available for purchase online in addition to Autumn, Supreme and KCDC. The video features Yaje Popson, Dan Forkin, Brett Land, Pryce Holmes, Bradley Shepherd, Torey Goodall, Luke Malaney, Keith Denley, Brett Nelson, Billy Rohan, Taji Ameen, Lurker Lou, and The Terminator.

View the trailer here to convince yourself of a purchase

The video costs ten american dollars

**Quartersnacks is not processing these orders so if you have any questions, e-mail robharris3@gmail.com.