Much in the vein of how rappers release songs condemning “snitching” when they are caught up in massive controversies of potentially being snitches, or members of their crew get rooted out as federal agents, just so their audiences know how they stand on the issue, I felt it should be necessary to draw a line in the sand to let the world know the Quarter Snacks stance in light of recent controversies. Clearly aligned with the now nearly-extinct twenty-five cent snack cakes that the site is named after, this website is down for the meager corners of a metropolitan existence, and not a trust fund enterprise by any means. The issue of “trust fund-ed” skate / internet institutions is clearly a very prominent topic in the changing landscape of this wonderful city, and it has caused the greatest uproar in the Quarter Snacks comments section since its previous summer 2007 high point of hate when Thando and Mooney were on the most-hated list and the Green Diamond first announced their impending endeavor of releasing a full-length video. At least I figured out that if I don’t update the site for two weeks, the invisible hand intervenes and updates it for me. I have no insight to offer on this controversy and hope that you guys have all settled your quarrels so we can continue to go about discussing Proust, Tarkovsky and Gucci Mane like we typically do here.

Now, here’s the bad news — this isn’t a real update. Sorry. I have a block of free days in the coming week, in which I am hoping to get done the bulk of the re-formating work I have been talking about since maybe ten months ago, but you know, that’s if I’m lucky. Updates should hopefully coincide with that. If not, it’s getting warm, clips soon. You know.

Here’s some shit to watch that I’m super late on.

Howard Glover — Manhattan Montage from 1998
Howard Glover — Brooklyn Banks Montage from 1998
I don’t know who this dude is, but he just dropped these two clips (which you have probably already seen), that I simply hoped would never end. Late-90s, raw New York stuff. Kind of like Revisited, but almost better in that I don’t think ANY of it has ever been in any other videos. What’s really striking about them, especially with the non-Banks one, is that people really haven’t gotten that much better in the past ten years. Take out some of the tricks, switch up the gear, and a lot of the tricks would look perfectly up to par with a lot of videos these days. Especially Rodney’s footage at Newport. If this guy has any more footage, he needs to make a Revisted-esque DVD with it, because who the hell knows if the mythical “in-the-works” Strobeck video of unreleased late-90s/early-2000s footage will ever come to fruition before all the DV tapes on this planet disintegrate. This might be the next best thing.

Jame’s Frankhouse’s S.O.N.2 is worth a watch if you haven’t caught it yet. Like the first installment from last winter, its a homie-cam formatted type deal, which is pretty much the only format that I’m backing these days, seeing as how VX1s are obsolete and HD is too expensive for an institution like this one where good (or even borderline competent) filming has never been a priority. It has the added bonus of a soundtrack select by DJ Dirrty from East Village Radio’s wonderful Baller’s Eve program, which has become a part of my Wednesday night routine for the past few months now. Pretty much the only place you can hear new Pastor Troy songs or Alabama rap these days. They don’t play enough Boosie, Z-Ro or All Star, but you can’t have it all. Oh well.

5050 Skate boarding Forums “Where are they now?” Series: Volume 1 — “Neuman”

Quote of the Week: Fourteen-year-old Asian kid at Sayreville skatepark: “Hey dude, has anyone ever told you that you look like Dill?”
Watermelon Alex: “Fuck you, you look like Pat Chanita.”
Fourteen-year-old Asian kid at Sayreville skatepark: “Who’s Pat Chanita?“

Given that most mainstream media outlets tend to make skateboarders look like complete retards when they’re on TV (Dill, Bam, Sheckler, etc.), it is always nice when they don’t fall victim to the otherwise inevitable propensity for fucking up anything skate-related. I say this with wholehearted acknowledgement that skateboarders dominantly are retards, with a select few exceptions, so making them come off as seemingly coherent and competent of existence in modern society at large is a feat in and of itself.

I haven’t seen HBO’s latest show, “How to Make It in America,” largely due to the fact that, like 70% New Jersey-ians, the one cable-having resource I had canceled HBO the morning after the series finale of The Sopranos aired. However, according to what I have been told, it hasn’t really dealt as explicitly with skateboarding as people had expected when they heard Javier Nunez had been casted for it. That’s probably a good thing, as seeing Kid Cudi doing kickturns at the Banks with a film crew would be an unfortunate image to see.

The promotional video for it is great though, and almost the sort of thing that you wouldn’t expect from a network tailored to reaching a fairly wide audience, as I’m not exactly sure how well it would resonate with a audience that doesn’t know who Sean Sheffy is. The whole thing is an account of Javier’s character, who is otherwise seldom seen in the series, but supposedly a very large background player. It’s not hard to figure out what cast of characters is responsible for informing the cocktail of seemingly fictionalized accounts of “Wilfredo” by everyone from Gino to Reda to Luis Tolentino to Koston. There’s a handful of actual tricks in it too, which I’m not mad at. It’s the best thing on TV since Jersey Shore.

Watch it over at HBO.com, The Legend of Wilfredo Gomez.

Around halfway into the decade, an oft-discussed Quarter Snacks personality, one who has been an integral part of this website’s existence both in its current incarnation and various other forms of existence it had taken up in the past, by name of Danny Weiss, took up the hobby of photography. He recently released a wide array of photographs dating midway back into the long-forgotten 2000s, an era when the TF reigned supreme and youthful possibility seemed endless until the sun began to pierce through the darkness and the sweat started to dry into uncomfortable crust at Union Square.

He has a website called The Great Books Have Been Written, which I have deliberately neglected adding to the links section after all of these years, partially because of its absurd and overlong name that has been the a part of various explanations all rooting back to the way Danny wishes to present himself as an artist (he recently suggested the much more favorable “Quarter Snaps” as a name for his website, which I support 100%), but otherwise due to the often imbalanced relationship that I have had with Danny Weiss over the years. Perhaps I don’t exactly know how to wrap my mind around his standing as an artist. He’s a total sweetheart either way.

I have included several selections from his website to entice you into going there. The selections tend to lean in favor of content over composition because this is in fact a skateboarding, southern rap, New York lifestyle, etc. website, and they seem more relevant than mandatory Robert Frank homages and pictures of cops and snow.

So without further ado… (more…)

I recently regressed about fifteen years into the past technologically, as I no longer own a computer, or at least a working one. Which you know, means that it is a bit hard to maintain a website. Maybe they’ll orchestrate a fundraiser on password night at the Bowery one day, but until then, we’ll see how this goes.

Speaking of technology, skateboarding seems to be headed fast into two different directions. While everyone is taking out student loans to they could buy the latest HD device for their “film” and/or profound excavation of the beauty and brilliance that coincides with a bunch of skateboarders sitting in a cargo-van littered with McDonald’s wrappers and Coors Light cans, the opposite end of the spectrum is moving in a wholly different direction — the low resolution Flip Cam / Cell Phone Cam / iPhone 3GS. Frankly, this is the more honorable option, but that should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with this website’s aesthetic biases. Long-gone are the days when the VX1 was the sole standard, and you were a failure for owning a TRV or Canon according to a bunch of message board geeks. The real format war has come.

Anyways Adam Abada made a flip cam video, as did everyone’s favorite Nolita degenerate, Matthew Mooney. And here’s one of Pryce and Francesco in Malmo. Where they skate in zero degree weather.

Bryan started posting out takes footage from the mid 2000s over on Official. Luis Tolentino and Jasonwear sections are the first to be up, and they should bring you back to a time when life was much simpler.

Due to a Ryan Hickey thread on the Slap Message board, someone posted a link to this unreleased interview footage of Ryan Hickey that wasn’t included in the DVD release of Deathbowl to Downtown.

Camo pants!

Ty is famous.

The takeover! I can do without the screaming dread though. It only works in Smif-N-Wessun songs.

“I saw her at Lit years later, and she was like, ‘What are you doing here?’ What am I doing here? I’ve gotten into like thirty fights here. What are you doing here?” - Marquez.

Happy February. Doesn’t it feel like New Year’s was two days ago? Oh, did you see the seventy-percent chance of snow for the weekend forecast? Yeah man.

In light of our just slightly-below-freezing but enhanced by wind-chill temperature, along with the impending snow showers, what better way to celebrate than a Hawaiian themed skate clip that was filmed when it was at least eighty-degrees outside?

Put together by Justin White, featuring Scotty Moore, Taji Ameen, Brendan Grandstrand, Negative, Luke Malaney, Jersey Dave, Eby, Jeremy Scott, Mr. Wilson, Isak Buan anddddd.. Justin White.

Absurd Hawaii [84.3 MB / 6:00]. I got a Vimeo upload of this perculating right now, just in case you don’t want 80 megs of Quicktime taking up your harddrive space. Vimeo here.

Chain shining hard, it just gave my neck a tan. It has been over a year, and that song still hasn’t got old.

Recent college graduate, Michael Gigliotti, has produced a flip-cam clip of the L.A. homies featuring himself, Dylan, the Berrics, surfing, and includes cameos from several non-310ers in like likes of Weiss, Rob Campell, Marquez, Pad Dowd and others.

You can watch it here

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

UPDATE: COMMENTS AND ARCHIVED CLIPS NOW WORKING AGAIN.

Jimmy Marketti threw together a clip of some Rob Campbell footage from the past year or so over one of the few listenable songs from some Nas-guy-from-Queen’s worst album. Not an full official part or anything, but a pleasure to watch. I believe that Substance is still making a video, and the official part should be in there, but I could be wrong.

The Rob Campbell Mixtape [Quicktime] [53.8 MB / 4:10]
The Rob Campbell Mixtape [Vimeo Link]
The Rob Campbell Mixtape [Youtube Link]

Also, as an administrative announcement, the whole clip archive downloader basically lost its mind and decided to stop working and allowing downloads of older, archived clips. So only the top ten most recent clips on the archive pages are downloadable. That, in addition to 2009’s promise of a spot section update should be a part of that often-promised administrative overhaul that should take place around here and take up whatever time I decide to spend working on this site during the winter, considering I won’t have to dedicate any time towards re-editing any videos as we head into the darkest months of New York’s winter like I had to last year. If you’re looking for older QS clips, I’d recommend our Youtube page.

And as an end-note to the Decade 100 list, thanks to Slap, The Chrome Ball Incident, Frozen in Carbonite, Skateboarder Magazine, NY Skateboarding, Nancy Reagan and In the Gnar for the support and the linkage.

Also thanks to the homie at Boil the Ocean and Josh Stewart for their inclusion of the Mind Field re-edit on their respective year-end lists.

Independent but I’m ballin’ like I did a movie!

Over on Vimeo, there’s an eighteen minute long “Bro Cam” video put together by KLS-1 and Ryan Gee.

Its dominantly Habitat/AWS TF outtakes, but there are a whole bunch of extras sprinkled in between, including DC video-era Macba footage, a bit of Love & Post-Love Philly footage, a few stopovers in New York that date back to the Broadway end of the Wall Street Gap still being skateable, and a some other antics that would later surface once the DC video was released. The whole thing is dominantly set to early-2000s era New York rap, back when the Neptunes were still actually making good music. Features parts of Kalis, Getz and Wenning. Worth a watch, especially considering that death-inducing wind that could be heard outside of our windows at this current moment in time.

See you guys at Sway in a few hours!