Here are three more books written by skateboarders that I’m reviewing because I’ve done this a bunch of times now so why should I stop. Plus it’s “the holidays” and while I surely don’t want to endorse spending a bunch of money, I can endorse buying books. Keep writing, keep reading, keep skating!
by Adam Abada
The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life by Kyle Beachy
One could say there are more “voices” in skating than writers. You’re familiar with the setup: T-ed begets Slap Pals begets #skatetwitter and on into the rumor mill and shop talk and the culture calcifies. Betrothed-to-advertiser magazines aside, not much of this has been recorded off the internet. A lot of people say things in skateboarding, and with the activity and its practitioners growing up and maturing a bit, it’s nice every now and then to get some of that stuff recorded. It’s also nice to actually get to understand these voices as complete people separate from skateboarding’s lore and heritage.
What’s great about the post-internet boom and destratification of skate media is the revelation that some of these individuals are indeed writers and not just nebulous voices. As a tenured creative writing professor and actual author of some of the most thoughtful voice-turned-writing on the skateboard internet, Kyle Beachy has completed that most writerly feat and published a book (not his first, mind you!). Furthermore, this one claims to be on the topic of skateboarding, or at least a life steeped in skateboarding.
Bringing all his years as a professor of narrative and a person who writes outside of his experience as a skateboarder, Beachy’s book amounts to a memoir weaving his relationships in and out of the skateboard experience. Born from the ashes of a would-be skate novel, The Most Fun Thing attempts to characterize the feeling and meaning of skateboarding and of being a skateboarder. Using some of his previously published works as signposts, Beachy draws us further into his own life, from friendship to marriage to museums to dog ownership. He also connects us to others, asking us to re-examine our relationship with some of skateboarding’s icons and iconoclasts. Beachy’s book seeks not only to teach about the endless possibilities of skateboarding, but also to examine the mind of a skater who clearly spends as much time questioning as skating. As each essay progresses, his conception of skateboarding deepens and refracts, bending back on Beachy’s own life, broadening the idea of what skateboarding can be without ever defining what it should be.
Get yours here.
The Next Wave, The History of Skateboarding; 1999-2020 (summer 2020 edition) by Daniel Fedkenheuer
A bit of background on how this book came to be: The author, Daniel Fedkenheuer, started skating in 2010 when he was 14 (which I think is a great time to have started skating) and has since published a book about skating. When he was in college, he cold-emailed a bunch of skate publications with the double-fisted goal of gaining some experience in the skate industry and publishing written work. When Concrete Wave, longboarding’s premiere magazine, got back to him, he stepped to the opportunity even though it wasn’t necessarily the “core” thing to do. They didn’t have a website, so after building that out Daniel started filling it with content, reaching out to some of his favorite skate companies for features. The editorial staff at Concrete Waveagreed to help him with his book but the magazine folded before that could come to fruition. In the end, though, he got his first job through a Concrete Wave advertiser and moved to California, moving on to work for Dwindle.
None of this is mentioned in The Next Wave, but it provides some cool context for this bite-size but comprehensive history of contemporary skating. It’s a good-feeling book, literally — a hearty but slight field guide with the type of spine that doesn’t seem to wrinkle — and shortly after opening it I realized I had never seen a book addressing this period of skate history. This, it seems, is exactly the point of making a book. Fueled by research from his years at Concrete Wave and subsequent industry connections, Fedkenheuer’s measured diction is enlivened by interviews and features, from Chad Bowers on the creation of Quasi Skateboards to Kevin Wilkins on the progression of skate magazines to Steve Rodriguez on the development of skate parks. The chronological organization of the book makes it a readable history and its meticulous index is highly searchable. As a cover-to-cover read, it concisely demonstrates how skateboarding got to where it is today. The extended omissions list at the end of the book’s lean 215 pages admits that it’s no end-all and be-all on the state of skateboarding. Instead, it opens the doors to the various ways skateboarding can progress.
By distilling the factual histories of skateboarding’s major cultural pillars, The Next Wave creates a sort of critical mass, driving home skateboarding’s global impact without ever having to explicitly tell you how important it is. The book’s elegant design imbues its subject with vitality even before you open the pages and are reminded of Tum Yeto’s longevity, the degeneration of big budget videos into single skater web parts, or the resurgence of Plan B.
Get yours here.
Inter State by José Vadi
As a California transplant, I constantly find myself searching for the routes and histories that created this place. There is a globally perceived sort of California cool — a nonchalant head-nod acceptance that people are here because they belong here, that the weather, the beach, the easygoing vibe are all set up for you to experience this place. Enter José Vadi, born and bred Southern Californian. His collection of essays, Inter State, uses sometimes poetic personal prose to dispel a heap of misnomers lurking beneath the gloss of California and reveal the endless searching and loss that this “California Cool” myth is based on.
Vadi understands that in order to know who you are, you need to retrace your own steps, and in order to retrace your own steps, you first need to understand the path of those that came before you. Inter State’s opening and centerpiece essay of the same name sets this stage. In it, the author road trips through California’s now nearly barren Central Valley, hoping to commune with the soul of his migrant grandfather who worked the land. It’s this landscape that is in the background of the subsequent essays, taking place in the more urban locales that exist because of his grandfather’s work in the Central Valley. Turning the pages further reveals a milieu of warm but erratic family settings, joints smoked while looking up at buildings, and the outskirts of an urban empire born of agricultural decay. Vadi leads us through this dried, crusty underside of California’s agricultural past, revealing how the only markers left of this ripe legacy are the one-note cash crops that remain.
Inter State’s prose is a bit unpredictable at times – jumping from poetic imagery to run-on consciousness streams – and feels like sorting through the author’s mind, but it is laced with pieces of Californian verisimilitude such as Vadi’s description of an Art Lebeau radio show dedication or the renovated bar at the San Gabriel Valley’s Ontario airport. Drawing from his own life does not seem to be a problem for Vadi, and it’s these details that make reading the book feel like I’m actually communing with a person and his history. Frankly, it is some of the most touching writing I have read from a skateboarder.
It’s also writing that hints at the kind of personality I’d like to grab a beer or four with. No doubt the evening he tees up for us at a San Francisco Tendernob bar in Getting to Suzy’s adds to this. While I may playfully be inclined to call this style booze-soaked or pot-addled, behind the faint veil of substances is clearly a sharp, discerning mind all too aware of the limits of such escapes, aware that the heat of California and the ghosts of the past constantly butt up against each other and our own personal histories. “…Every skateboarder, at some point, sessions with ghosts,” Vadi writes, but what comes a bit more into focus upon finishing this book, when we realize that the bar in Getting to Suzy’s was shuttered by landlord disputes during the pandemic, was that, especially in California, we’re all living with them as well.
Get yours here.
