🔑 Words by Adam Abada
Spring is as great a time as any for reading. While reading can mean a lot of things, consider using time in the newly crisp air and blossoming scenery to read some of these books authored by skaters from the past year or so.
Pray for Pigeons by Bob “Shaggy” Crawford
Most of Shaggy’s writing comes in an old yet familiar format: as letters from his job in the mailroom at Hearst Corporations in midtown Manhattan. For any skater who cut their teeth on the downtown streets of New York City, a run-in and chat with Shaggy is a staple right-of-passage. His letters, like conversations with him, are usually off-the-cuff thoughts and read as honest representations of what Shaggy is thinking and the world as he sees and feels it in that moment.
His first self-proclaimed book, Pray for Pigeons, comes in just shy of 80 pages and fits neatly into most pockets or handbags. Like pamphlets of colonial times, Shaggy’s thin volume focuses on very specific life philosophies: mostly, that the world’s lost its edge and has gone soft; and that nothing can re-sharpen that edge better than sitting on a curb with your board, some brown-bagged beers, and a homie or two. His street-level stories depict day-to-day happenings of an upbringing in working class America that focus heavily on his life experiences in the Greater North Jersey/New York Sopranos Area™. Chapter titles include Newark, Belleville, Triangle Park, and Hozzy (hospital). It is apparent that a copy-editor is not under Shaggy’s employ, which fits into his whole D.I.Y. existence. He has some devastatingly good chapter openers, like “When I was 7 years old, a building burnt down to ashes,” and “From my town, it takes ten minutes to skate to Newark.”
Pray for Pigeons reads a bit like Shaggy’s writing in the 90s, but for some reason, there’s also cell phones. There’s also revealing, tender moments like helping some heatless neighbors during a cold snap. Through it all, he finds kinship with pigeons as street survivors, scroungers, travelers, and a profound reverence for life’s characters and small moments.
✅ If you want a copy… you’re probably going to have to flag Shaggy down next time you see him skating down the street. But Normal Bob is saying, “If you want a copy for yourself, mail $15 cash (he specifically told me CASH) to: Bob Crawford 300 West 57th Street NY, NY 10019. INCLUDE A RETURN ADDRESS!”
Laser Quit Smoke Massage by Cole Nowicki
When it comes to word output, Cole Nowicki is another Shaggy-level author. Not even a year since publishing Right, Down, + Center, and in addition to his weekly newsletter Simple Magic, he released his second book: Laser Quit Smoking Massage. Nowicki depicts small town Western Canadian life in a way that can stand-in for small town anywhere-life. Over 144 pages, this tidy collection of twenty-five stylistically different essays is observed keenly from a patient perspective and translated with wry but tender satire. Nowicki has a penchant for taking everyday life things – bereavement flowers, big box hardware stores – and using them to reveal their multi-layered connections to our daily life. Indeed, some of the best writing here centers around objects that draw us into much larger themes, like the stack of twenty-dollar bills that leads us through a hilarious drinking tale with some of the best drunks-on-paper I’ve read in a while (The Pile.)
There are many important laser references (“Things You Can Now Shoot Lasers At,” “Smooth Black Marble,” the title essay), but that’s not all. Nowicki outlines the links between pop culture and memory (Ray Liotta), examines what happens when technology isn’t used for profit (“The Last Wholesome Corner of the Internet”) and writes some striking poetry about loss in the form of a list (“How to Forget.”) He examines the nature of grieving digitally (“Send Flowers”) and is as at home spinning hugely entertaining and existential yarns about a domestic mystery (“Who Pissed On My Balcony?”) as with blending local reporting with art criticism (“The Big Dog in the Sky is Dirty.”) There’s something for everyone here, my personal favorite being “The Darklord of Vancouver Karaoke” (exactly what it sounds like), and after just an essay or two, I found myself led into life’s intricacies of despair and beauty.
Chipped By José Vadi
Not to buck the trend, Chipped is the second book by the versatile writer, José Vadi. His excellent first collection of essays, Inter State, about California’s agricultural and industrial roots, centered on topics from his life as they relate to his home state. His new book picks up on a similar premise: a lyrical, probing examination of questions about things in Vadi’s skateboarding past and present.
He translates the feelings of skateboarding into sometimes broadstroke and sometimes pinpoint specific depictions of his explanations for how they might hold importance, like his heartfelt examination of Jamie Thomas’ Welcome to Hell part as an art masterpiece and what that could mean, or calling out the New York Times’ photo of two trench-coat clad unity riders doing twin slappy nosegrinds as an instant classic skate photo.
With a deceptively easy-going style, Vadi guides us seamlessly through rhythmic pedestrain stories from his life like an afternoon break at Geo Kayes bar in Oakland or an adventure with a close friend referred to as C. They blend philosophical musings with factual occurrences to a pulsing soundtrack of Sun Ra, Weedeater, and Gang Starr. Vadi is good at using touchstones from both mainstream and subcultures to underscore how chronological context becomes history. Individual anecdotes reference each other as different chapters circle around and become more than the individual essays working together to form a lyrical whole of awe and acceptance for skateboarding and all it touches — with enough self-awareness to understand that the world it all exists in isn’t perfect.