To a skater, the board is an extension of the body. And like a skateboard, an aging body can show life’s hard knocks.
“Skateboarding is truly rebellious and punk in its ethos,” said author José Vadi. “Nobody should care how old someone is just as much as someone shouldn’t care about their sexual orientation, gender, economic background. None of those things should be the determining factor of your ability to enjoy yourself on a skateboard.”
Vadi explores these ideas and more in his sophomore collection of essays, “Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens,” out on Tuesday, April 16.
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“Having an active relationship with skateboarding means having an active relationship with your body – but also the realization of your own mortality,” Vadi said in a recent phone interview from his Sacramento home. “That happens every time you try a trick, whether or not you’re gonna land or get injured, and as your body changes over time.”
As a skater, he has been keenly aware of his changing body with each passing decade. The book’s second essay documents a bad fall he had in 2019 and the excruciating pain that lingered on for weeks. His description of the experience, like much of the collection of essays, is written with sharp prose.
“As an older skater who is graying, you definitely feel self-conscious, not just because of your age but your ability at your age, or lack thereof,” he said.
Vadi grew up in Pomona and began skating in the mid-’90s, on the cusp of his teenage years. The book transitions between skating around Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley and Inland Empire and skating the streets of San Francisco and Berkeley. He also looks at how much has changed since he began.
“In the wake of all these new skate parks that have developed over the past 20 years, these kids are so good out of the gate. The baseline barometer of what is considered proficient in skateboarding today is what we would consider pro in the ’90s,” He said.
The book provides insight into what it’s like for kids skating out of suburbia to find themselves – or other like-minded skaters who are also exploring the freedom the board bestows.
“You’re so bound to a car, and skateboarding gives you a vehicle, metaphorically and literally, to re-explore your world,” he said. “Growing up in the suburbs, things can get very dull, very quick, and skateboarding allows you to reenergize and reimagine an environment.”
That reimagining can be literal, such as turning an empty industrial space into a landscape bursting with creative possibilities. “It’s turning a loading dock into a skatepark,” says Vadi.
The essays also illustrate the impact that skating had on popular culture, touching on MTV, skating publications such as Thrasher Magazine, and videotapes of riders that got passed around skating scenes and shops around the country.
Music also plays a large role in the book. Vadi writes about how skating incorporated punk, hip-hop, heavy metal, and other genres that helped redefine its culture. In one essay, he investigates the connections between jazz and skating, arguing that the musician and composer known as Sun Ra is a skater despite never stepping on a board.
“If I’m writing through skateboarder’s lens and am really going to try to own that perspective, it has to be inclusive of as much of those different strands as possible,” he said.
As much as the book is about skating, it also reminds readers of the beauty in the documentation of ourselves and the interests we acquire through our lived experiences.
“I feel like ‘Chipped’ is a redocumentation by way of articulation,” he said. “It reflects this larger need to document … and to articulate the many ways that this thing that we care about can impact someone.”
“The point is not to be better than anyone else, or to necessarily compete,” he said. “The point is to enjoy the act itself and in comradery with others.”
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