Today is the ten year anniversary of two of the last decade’s top ten rap records (number one, and number eight or nine, respectively). This date marked the beginning of the end for New York’s hold on musical relevancy that expired around the time Trap Music came out, and has not experienced a resurgence since. And probably never will. (Disclaimer to casual readers: Quarter snacks does not acknowledge modern genres of music outside of rap, so MGMT, Animal Collective, and other gay Brooklyn bands do not have any effect on the city’s musical relevancy.)

In the midst of all the Banks-being-closed-for-four-years talk, the dream topic of the Little Banks’ reinstatement is something that should be addressed. If you have any ideas as to how to convince the idiots in the public works department who prefer overgrown weeds, homeless people and heroin needles over skateboarders that a revival would be a good look, please share your ideas here.

Anthony Pappalardo is like the Stephan Marbury of skateboarding. He’s somehow Converse’s star player, but literally doesn’t do anything. I know that half of Long Island will be out for blood upon reading that, but after about a decade, old video parts don’t really subsidize a lack of heart when the rest of the team is out there on the court killing it every night. Someone give Sammy Baca a shoe, he actually skates.

So much for the Parks Department’s age-old excuse of kicking us out because we’re “damaging the property.” Last time I checked, snow doesn’t experience “property damage.” But they seem to feel otherwise. At least we’re not the only ones suffering at the hands of discrimination.

Still pretty much the best European on a skateboard after all these years.

What an idiot.

Quote of the Week: “He has yellow fever. I don’t like niggas who got yellow fever.” - B.B. the Boss

You can still hop that joint?

Stereo sucks, but they posted some footage of Adrian Vega that is more than worth your time. Perhaps the only redeeming factor of the Union Square demise that occurred last year is the (hopefully) impending trend of propping up tree grates Temple University style over the seemingly useless metal posts scattered about the perimeter of the the park. [*I’m actually not 100% sure that is Union but it looks like it.]

I know people around here tend to get offended whenever there’s a God forbid, non-skateboarding related post, but if you are a fan of Switch Michael Strobert’s work on the Mind Field Re-Edit, you should probably give this a quick watch. If you hate it, oh well.

The previously discussed lack of a rail over the six at FedEX is no longer.

Good luck with this one.

I completely forgot that this was even put online, but watch Can’t Ban the Snackman 2 if you haven’t seen it already.

Quote of the Week: “Only real fucking whores go out in January.” - Roc

Normally, this is the sort of thing people would want to keep under wraps. However, it is in Midtown, and already a bust, not to mention the inevitability of the entire city finding out about it by the end of the week. Also, nobody that’s a part of this site skates anything involving more than three stairs, as evidenced by the Christmas Clip, so we’re not losing anything by spoiling anyone else’s super-low-key rail cutting mission result.

And if it was you the happened to cut it… it’s in Midtown, that whole secret shit doesn’t really fly south of 125th.

Go to Fedex and get your Lucas Puig on, it won’t be around for too long.

Rodriguez says this image “shows the area that will be closed for the 4 years after they paint the overpasses. Everything to the left of the red line will be behind a temporary wall (the line goes all the way to Rose street- that is the closed road between the big banks and the small banks) This will pretty much make the actual ‘banks’ unrideable because as we all know it is very difficult to ride them from such an extreme angle.”

If you want to read all the details, they’re all over here.

We’ve seen a fairly unfortunate blossoming of the “death comes in threes” superstition this year (well technically, The Banks might be saved come 2014 according to a statement released by the Department of Transportation, so we have not exactly suffered the greatest symbolic loss yet, and the Flushing situation remains up in the air). I passed through Ziegfeld last Tuesday afternoon on a coffee run and noticed all of the benches removed from the floor, and all the picnic tables unbolted and caution taped off — uh oh. Writing it off as a routine power-washing of all the slide marks on the floors, today’s morning coffee run pass-through yielded a heartbreaking sight. They completely re-did the floor surface, rendering it a hard version of essentially the harshest sandpaper you could imagine. Lets just say if you skate here five nights out of seven on a given week and a board usually lasts you a month, it will probably live two weeks less now if you continue that same routine. Beyond the fact that the entire spot was essentially built on some of the best ground in Midtown and now has a similar texture to a shitty patch of concrete, speed and flat in and of themselves have become a lost cause here. Nevermind that fact that it’s literally impossible to finagle a “270″ out of a slide trick by turning the last 180 degrees on the floor. And I am not going to even begin to theorize on what would happen if your skin just so happened to skid across the surface. If this is what skatestopping is turning to (I’m guessing it was a calculated measure, as our wheels weren’t exactly the friendliest marker towards their off-white floor), I am terrified for what the future holds.

Photo by Keegan Gibbs

And in the realm of Quarter Snacks updates, I am fully aware that this has probably been the slowest fourth quarter of updates in this website’s four-year history, particularly when people from Boston are walking into certain gay skateshops on Lafayette Street and complaining about the lack of updates. I am not fortunate enough to live Matthew Mooney’s bohemian (good call on whoever coined that one) lifestyle, and have had other, boring life obligations ruin my updating habits these past few months. Hopefully the Christmas clip will make up for it, but who the hell knows. Otherwise, I’ve been “working” on a large scale revamp that should launch this winter, but that’s been taking um.. a bit longer than expected.

The prospect of a Trap or Die 2 mixtape will inevitably skyrocket my productivity level, as the Snowman’s early-summer mixtape release did not necessarily meet his otherwise extremely high standards of motivational music, and Gucci Mane, despite all his merits, is nowhere near as an inspirational figure as Mr. Jenkins, so his output has fallen flat in that realm. Jeezy’s status as pretty much the only southern rapper not in jail for parole/probation violations or gun charges right now will inevitably propel Trap or Die 2 into classic status of inspirational literature.

Shawn Powers’ nighttime visualization of Queens as San Francisco

Random clip featuring Kerel and others

Flipmode = the Best

Skateboarding needs more Quim Cardona. More New Jersey and less Ohio and Brooklyn.

Pimp C died on this day, two years ago, and rap music has pretty much sucked ever since. If half of these bums on records nowadays put in half the passion on their songs that he had when discussing female pubic hair, we wouldn’t have such an awfully boring corpse of genre on our hands right now.