In issue 13 of ONE magazine Dominic Sagona lays down some real hate on David Sizemore. His top answer to ‘skaters that make me want to quit’ is ‘David Sizemore’, and his third answer to ‘Places to never get stuck’ is ‘David Sizemore’s house’. What occasioned this hate? Did Sizemore deuce in Sagona’s trunk or is simply an esthetic difference? Sizemore seems to be on the bottom of most people’s ‘best style’ lists while Dominic is at the top. But not liking someone else’s style is not uncommon, everyone criticizes everyone in blading. Your best friend criticizes you! But we keep it quiet, behind closed doors, and everyone goes on thinking no one hates them! Why? The issue in blading was expressed best by my friend Cossimo, when I was about to decapitate Erik Stokley, he said—drunken and mumbling at the Valo 3 premier—“We are all in the same boat”. Not only are we all in the same boat, the boat is very small and we need most everyone to row or we are going nowhere. Furthermore, if you knock one person—lay down some real hate—you are most likely going to offend and even hurt someone that you love… you might knock your own friend off the boat as a consequence of pushing an enemy. So we should all be peaceful hippies, right? Float along on our river to nowhere singing to Phish, treating everyone that you hate and love exactly the same, repressing any negative feelings, smoking the good purp and falling to sleep no later than 1030 pm.

The problem is: this hippie vision is an illusion and always has been. Difference between people, cultures, esthetic tastes, and ethics exist necessarily—difference is more fundamental than similarity, similarity is a generalization. If you were ever wondering: Am I unique, or am I ‘just another sheep’, the answer is YES you are unique, you can’t help but be unique, though you may or may not be interesting, beautiful, powerful, or skillful. Simply by living, we are in relation to spaces of love and hate. For when you are living you are doing one thing or another and each thing you do has a multiplicity of opponents to its existence. For example, insofar as we shred the streets we are opposed to the police, we interact with them in a space of hate. Whether the cop is nice or a complete asshole does not change the fact that we interact in a space of hate. Even if the cop lets you continue, he does so at the risk of being reprimanded precisely because he is not filling his role in the space of hate. The same thing goes for rollerblading. Perhaps Sagona—valuing a certain blading and life esthetic—could not help but be opposed to Sizemore who appears to us as the grommet with overgrown skills, amazing only the crowds who don’t know a God damn thing about blading and its historical progression.

But there is a more fundamental dynamic in our culture that is symbolized by this conflict between the grom of the year and the lizard king of style. This dynamic exists between the value of skill and ability versus the value of style on the other. The old question of whether rollerblading is a sport or an art cuts precisely along this dynamic. In terms of the broad culture, this problem still hasn’t been resolved. The style-kings argue that blading is not about competition and thus it is irrelevant who can land the biggest drop or who can ‘spin the most to win’—that blading is about feelings, that blading is an expression of yourself, that blading is art (perhaps Colin Kelso is the most flamboyant in this view), that bladers definitely shouldn’t wear helmets. On the other side there are those who see this interest in style as an obsession over a gimmick. They ‘see through’ the waving arms, staggered feet, extra long fakie rolls and confident gestures and assess purely the technical difficulty, they are the scientists of our culture who cut through the skin and peer inside and assess whether the heart really is pumping blood efficiently, whether there is a terminal cancer underneath the smile. The estheticians puff up their feathers, in response, and say that the scientists are missing the point of everything, the wholeness, the beauty, the motion, etc. etc… In my opinion, this dynamic cannot and should not be resolved. I don’t want us to finally decide what we are—an art or a sport. What we are doing cannot be reduced to an Art or a Sport it has elements of both, and yet stands on its own spurning on creativity through the conflict. There will never be a victor, though there will be times where one side is valued over another to swing back from a gross imbalance. For example, how for a minute there ‘spin to win’ was actually the defining factor on who won the competition, which was rebelled against by many pros in favor of valuing the flowing lines of talented skaters such as Stockwell and Guerrero. Within the actual act of blading, style and ability are intermixed and one, but when they are intellectually separated—after the fact—we take sides to more or lesser degrees and the discourse ensues. And so Dominic swaggers and spits on David, and so David wins the competition.

And so, in conclusion, what is the Wolfman’s howl on the Dominic and David situation. Should Dominic have kept his mouth shut, was it immature to take the point of endless message board conversations into the public, into print? It was immature, and it is petty and I feel sorry for David—I mean, fuck if Sagona said that shit about me I would feel like a real piece of shit (Though perhaps the gauntlet of criticism will only strengthen David). However, it is also about fucking time that someone rocked this little piece of shit boat we have been floating on for too long. The winds haven’t been blowing, most people have already left, the rest of us are sitting on this boat, the purp is all used up, we are all sick as hell of Phish, the images on the TV keep repeating: the time of free love must come to an end. When hate starts becoming explicit, price tags are put on love, and what we say begins to mean something—and where we go begins to matter.

Oh, and Eat a dick.

Lost forever in Shred Forest,
Wolfman Yee

(Editors Note: Don’t be a hoe, support the industry and subscribe to One Magazine at: http://onemag.bigcartel.com/ )

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 11:39 am and is filed under Blade Ripping, So So Shocking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.