Howdy y’all!
Thanks for subscribing to the Only_Only Newsletter. Below are the first few paragraphs of my essay on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. It has been a long time coming and it feels good to finally share this writing and move onto the next topic.
I hope you enjoy it and if you do I’d love to hear from you!
This is a very condensed version for Substack. To read the full essay and see more skateboarding art please click the link below.
Skateboarding
Tony Hawk is too big a part of the Zeitgeist for me to ever remember not remembering. He has always been floating up there, a few feet from the pipe’s lip, spinning. A subcultural baby mobile. A flying love letter to all things rad and gnarly, cut open and filleted to be reread when needed. Tony Hawk is a god to a certain type of person born between 1985 and 2003. Honestly, he may be a god regardless of your birthdate. To a small boy in Texas, he is no different than any of the other American folk legends. He is Paul Bunyan in elbow pads and Davy Crocket in a ball cap. Giants of men who roamed the West dropping into valleys and jumping from peaks.
Before we continue this love letter to Tony Hawk and his merry band of Pro Skaters, we should get more acquainted with what this is and why we’re doing it. Theoretically, it’s an essay on the ripple effect Skateboarding culture and the Tony Hawk video games had on me as a sheltered suburban kid. It is an exploration of self and how we come to be the people we become. It is a reflection on art and language and culture and how by the time we notice their shape, it is often too late. This project started with me trying to teach myself how to draw by tracing an old photo of Eric Koston jumping a curb. After accidentally spending 60 hours in Procreate, I had a digital painting of some sort. I still didn’t really know how to draw, but I kinda liked this drawing. The amount of time I spent on it, seemed like it deserved to hang in a better gallery than my Instagram Story, so I started writing and drawing and thinking. I kept making skateboarding art and seeking little bytes of wisdom in the school of cool known as Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
I didn’t really know what I was looking for, but I found so much of my adult self in these decades old video games from my youth. There I am in 1999 bobbing along to the first punk and rap music I’ve ever heard. In 2001, drag-and-drop designing digital graffiti tags and skate tees. It’s 2003 and there I am again, dressing my arcade avatar in clothes my parents don’t know where to buy, listening to music my parents don’t know I’m learning the lyrics to, throwing Mardi Gras beads and spray painting churches, blowing up cop cars and learning to swear from Bam Margera. I found god and art and music and fashion and that feeble fuck you energy I have been holding so closely to all these years. I didn’t realize how much influence these games had on me. I don’t skateboard. I don’t work at Zumiez. I don’t really do anything radical or gnarly or sick. I thought this was just like any other video game from my childhood. I loved Halo 2 too, but I’m not reconstructing my understanding of self in the light of Master Chief’s shadow. Though don’t tempt me. I’m sure there is plenty of yin and yang to be found in Energy Swords and Plasma Grenades.
I still don’t really know what I’m making here. So I plan to just keep making it, in hopes I can make enough to make up for quality with quantity. This approach doesn’t always lead to enlightening work, but if you put enough of anything in one room it eventually starts looking like art. So welcome to that room I made full of all the things I like to make, made only about the things I like to think about. This is Only_Only, an online amateur art studio, a living memoir, a poetic deconstruction of self, and as always a bunch of unnecessary Woo.
To read the rest of this essay and see more skateboarding art please click the link below.
In Conclusion,
I’m still figuring out the best way to use Substack, so please let me know what you’d like to see on here and how often you’d like to receive these posts. It is difficult to include the full essays, but I’d like to start sharing behind-the-scenes of upcoming essays, as well as smaller writing that doesn’t have a forever home on the website.
As always thanks for reading! Its been a long time since I’ve shared my writing and honestly its a bit awkward for me. If you enjoyed this essay then I’d really appreciate for you to pass it along to someone else who might enjoy it too!