This is how you make the meaning, you take two things and try to define the space between them.
– Richard Siken
“Problematic”[N]: Frequently in plural. A thing that constitutes a problem or an area of difficulty, esp. in a particular field of study.
– Oxford English Dictionary
☆
Recto
This intro has been written, and rewritten, and rewritten again; I’m wont to say too much, and self-flagellate. But something they hammer into first-year Humanities students is the need for a clear thesis, an argument or observation that ties all your subsequent points together. A throughline. And I did tell Jenn these essays would be connected by some sort of personal narrative.
We could start with the fact that someone informed me I need to become a person. This hurt a lot, and I wish I could have responded with “what’s that supposed to mean,” but, unfortunately, it hurt because I knew exactly what they meant. It’d be easier to solve that problem if we could just skip to the part where I’m travelling to Iceland, or living in Montreal. Thing is, as of right now, the only thing that makes me feel like a person is writing, and I write in a world which often disdains anything beyond the realm of listicles or video essays. But sometimes an idea will strike you at a time where you just can’t help yourself, and you need to put it down in words.
Anyhow, I’m learning to skateboard.
I dress like I skate, I read the occasional interview in Thrasher, but until recently I’ve never gotten further than trying to ollie in the driveway. Earlier this year I had signed up for the University of Victoria’s skate club and forced myself to attend their first meet. Fun time, kind group of folks. But for the medium term this is the fuckin’ way of the samurai—me and my handful of buddies who skate and that’s it. We’re Spike Spiegel. We’re Clint Eastwood. We will learn to ollie up a curb by September. God, you know I’m a Leninist, I never ask you for much.
And for the longest time, I had wanted to write an essay on how Mark Suciu’s Verso changed my seventeen-year-old chud life. But it’s already been written about a lot. Like, a lot a lot a lot. I don’t intend to reiterate what’s already been said about a singular work—I’ve got another idea.
The In-Between
Like many others, when it comes to the Napoleonic era, I’m a scholar of hype moments and aura. I read too much and too often about Bonaparte’s failed invasion of the Russian Empire, for example. In his account of the retreat across the Berezina river, Philippe Paul de Ségur delivers an unsettling picture of the main force’s physical state: “a mob of tattered ghosts draped in women’s cloaks, odd pieces of carpet, or greatcoats burned full of holes, their feet wrapped in all sorts of rags…those skeletons of soldiers went by, their gaunt, grey faces covered with disfiguring beards, without weapons, shameless, marching out of step, with lowered heads, eyes on the ground, in absolute silence, like a gang of convicts.”1
To me, the most salient aspect of this description is the #genderofitall. Not only does Ségur emphasize the “women’s cloaks,” but the focus he places on soldiers’ bodily disfigurement is uniquely masculinized. As Klaus Theweleit writes in the second volume of Male Bodies,
The arena of war is first and foremost [man’s] own body; a body poised to penetrate other bodies and mangle them in its embrace. The man depicted as the active center of warfare is an irresistible charmer hunting for sensations. His actions take place amid dying masses of humanity, between imperialist powers warring over colonial sources of raw materials or world market domination; but he remains an absolutely private individual. Though he claims repeatedly to represent the “whole,” the “nation,” he best fulfills that function as an isolated, self-interested individual, a man searching for the flow of desire.2
What fascinates me about skateboarding, and skate videos in particular, is that although there’s seldom any violence inflicted by the individual (male) skater upon others, this atomized relationship wherein the body becomes a warzone is almost unavoidable. The inevitability of injury, as Iain Borden argues, represents the “great contradiction within skateboarding, whose masculinity can be at once loud and contemplative, violent and considerate, intolerant and respectful.”3 This contradiction defined the race for Thrasher’s 2019 Skater of The Year award, where stoic, quiet, bookish Mark Suciu was an honourable mention in a competition that saw Milton Martinez—”the madman from Mar del Plata”—take the title. There couldn’t be a bigger stylistic divide between the former’s Verso and the latter’s ¡DEMOLICIÓN!, but you can draw some interesting parallels nonetheless.
Let’s start with the latter. ¡DEMOLICIÓN! represents Martinez’s return to the game. Having broken his leg attempting to gap the Hollywood Car Wash in for Volcom in 2016, Milton undertook a period of full mental and physical recovery. This was the closest he’d get to a tactical retreat, though. In Michael Burnett’s words, “asking Milton why he likes to go fast is like asking a pitbull why they like to bite toddlers.” Martinez loves the speed, the aggression. He’s one with the crash. And it’s hard to take any other information away from ¡DEMOLICIÓN! Not only do we see Martinez return to the car wash and land that infamous kickflip, but the whole video is ridden with maneuvers that could only be pulled off by someone out of their fucking mind. As a fellow madman, I admire the thrill-seeking, though I’d never attempt these things myself.
Take, for example, the sequence at 1:22 where he bombs the Pierresvives building in Montpellier. Who the fuck does that. The soundtrack is breakneck—LatAm rock, grunge, alt-rock. The music meets the moment at every turn, though one gets the impression that—minus the title track—each song was chosen on a whim. But what matters most are the actions this soundtrack helps to communicate. These are the thrills Martinez couldn’t stay away from, the ones that make him a person.
Verso, by contrast, is not a part concerned with thrill-seeking. To summarize the basic formal coordinates already discussed at length elsewhere, Suciu’s collaboration with filmmaker Justin Albert is structured around visual parallels, recto and verso. A trick moving in one direction is mirrored by another maneuver going the opposite. At 6:01, for example, the shot of Suciu’s bluntslide panning right is immediately followed by a nosegrind moving left. The effect is hypnotic, and the novelty doesn’t really wear off. I’ve watched this shit on repeat hundreds of times.
Suciu’s vision extends beyond the skating itself. The song choices have a wonderful intentionality, with skater favourite Beirut marking the work’s intro and denouement. But the details which strike me as most interesting, the ones that keep me coming back again and again, are the images Suciu uses to fill that space between both sides of the page: Shots of city streets, cafes, books, birds in flight. If we take skateboarding to be a purely visual form of language, a type of writing, these sequences represent the ineluctable space between two words or utterances, what Derrida would have called espacement—an endless chain of signifiers.
Suciu underwent a tactical withdrawal before creating Verso. Having made a name for himself as a skating wunderkind in the early 2010s, a burst appendix and the desire to pursue academics inspired Mark to step back, a decision he explained in greater detail to Thrasher’s Lui Elliot:
I didn’t want to skate anymore. I was bummed at the idea that my body would still want to skate. People talk about how you can never quit skating, how you could never fulfill that urge you’ve satisfied so many times, to roll down the street. It’s very true but I didn’t like that, at the time… I wanted to be totally in control of the things I was doing. What I wanted to do was to live a very deliberate life and I came to the conclusion that skateboarding wasn’t the most interesting thing that I could do. It wasn’t the most inspiring and it wouldn’t push me onto the next part of my life. I had these dreams of becoming a certain person and I tried to arrive at that point through skating. I probably had those dreams due to skateboarding, but they didn’t have anything to do with actual skating.
Suciu’s retreat wasn’t really a retreat at all; he was filling space between both sides of the page. I’m repeating an argument you’ve heard a million times before when I say this, but really, we’re all sales representatives now. Our self-commodification often metastasizes into atomized, cheap representations of personal identity, and these performances are limiting. We spend so much time trying to define ourselves in relation to just a handful of identity categories, to narrativize our lives according to the narrowest set of interests which we can then include in a neat, end-of-month post.
So when shit hits the fan, becoming someone else, or, rather, becoming a new version outside the sales floor, is the most dignified option available. When I watch Suciu talk to JENKEM about literature and philosophy whilst also skating around, I pine for this dynamic in my own life. I want to fill up that space I just haven’t been using, but I don’t want to abandon the things I love because they’ve been deemed pretentious by reels-fiends either. I don’t really know where this argument is going now.
The point is, only once you’ve defined the area between two things can you finally arrive at the other side.
Verso
I’m at Topaz skatepark. It’s windy as hell, and apparently everybody wanted to bring their entire family at 4:30 pm on a Sunday. At twenty-two, I’m trying my hardest not to care that those teenagers are laughing at my fear of dropping in. I’ve been standing at the edge of this ramp and staring at my shoelaces for like five minutes when a kid who can’t be older than seven wheels up to me on a Lightning McQueen-branded scooter.
“Are you new at this?”
He’s sweet. This is sweet.
“Haha yeah dude, I’m pretty new. Just getting used to it, y’know?”
“I think you should try scootering. It’s easier for people like you and me.”
He scoots away. I’m so fucking stunned that I hardly register his younger sister pulling up on a smaller, pinker scooter.
“Hi! Is this your first day skateboarding?”
I watch as their hot skater-dad nails a kickflip. He shoots me one of the kindest smiles I’ve ever seen and says my trucks are way too loose.
