My Favorite Writing
One of my favorite pieces of writing is a profile of a 53-year-old skateboarding icon who recently passed away under mysterious circumstances.
As the profile suggests, he should have died years ago.
For almost as long as I've been alive, Jake Phelps has been the editor-in-chief of Thrasher, a San Francisco-based skateboarding magazine that prided itself on appealing to skateboarding's most hardcore adherents — the type unlikely to be celebrating the sport's arrival at the Olympics.
Skateboarding rarely merits coverage in most general interest magazines or newspapers, so my initial reaction to the profile was joy followed by suspicion.
Then I saw the byline: Willy Staley, an editor at the New York Times Magazine.
It wasn't his position or employer that impressed me.
It was the fact that he's a skateboarder from San Francisco; I felt comforted knowing the profile would be written from an insider's perspective, but with lyricism and integrity.
The profile is as much about Phelps and skateboarding as it is about contemporary San Francisco, a city that's changed dramatically in just a few years.
One passage succinctly transmit all of that: "In a way, Phelps is anachronistic two times over — both within his subculture, as a relic of an old order, and outside it, as an avatar of the city's grit that geeky newcomers are pushing to the side."
And there are other lines that read like poetry, but still do their job in revealing some essential, objective truth abut skateboarding (assuming such a thing exists): "Society reveres athletes for winning. Skateboarders are losers — they can't win — so instead they seek perfection of form, expansion of possibility. When they fetishize pain, it's only because it resides so close to excellence."
Source: Staley, W. (2016, March). Thrashed. California Sunday, 108-113.
As the profile suggests, he should have died years ago.
For almost as long as I've been alive, Jake Phelps has been the editor-in-chief of Thrasher, a San Francisco-based skateboarding magazine that prided itself on appealing to skateboarding's most hardcore adherents — the type unlikely to be celebrating the sport's arrival at the Olympics.
Skateboarding rarely merits coverage in most general interest magazines or newspapers, so my initial reaction to the profile was joy followed by suspicion.
Then I saw the byline: Willy Staley, an editor at the New York Times Magazine.
It wasn't his position or employer that impressed me.
It was the fact that he's a skateboarder from San Francisco; I felt comforted knowing the profile would be written from an insider's perspective, but with lyricism and integrity.
The profile is as much about Phelps and skateboarding as it is about contemporary San Francisco, a city that's changed dramatically in just a few years.
One passage succinctly transmit all of that: "In a way, Phelps is anachronistic two times over — both within his subculture, as a relic of an old order, and outside it, as an avatar of the city's grit that geeky newcomers are pushing to the side."
And there are other lines that read like poetry, but still do their job in revealing some essential, objective truth abut skateboarding (assuming such a thing exists): "Society reveres athletes for winning. Skateboarders are losers — they can't win — so instead they seek perfection of form, expansion of possibility. When they fetishize pain, it's only because it resides so close to excellence."
Source: Staley, W. (2016, March). Thrashed. California Sunday, 108-113.
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