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Writing from a Skateboarder's Lens
by José Vadi
A memoir-in-essays about how skateboarding re-defines space, curates culture, confronts mortality, and affords new perspectives on and off the board.
Chipping a board—where small pieces of deck and tape break off around the nose and tail—is a natural part of skateboarding. Novice or pro, you'll see folks riding chipped boards as symbols of their stubborn dedication toward a deck, a toy, and aging bodies that will also reach their inevitable end.
In Chipped, José Vadi personalizes and expands upon this symbol. Written after finishing his debut collection Inter State: Essays From California, Vadi used these essays to explore his own empathy in aging, and to elaborate on the impact skateboarding has had on culture, power, and art. From tracing a critical mass skater takeover of San Francisco's streets, to an analysis of visceral '90s skate videos and soundtracks, to the solace found skating a parking lot during a global pandemic, Vadi expands our understanding of the ways skateboarding can alter one's life.
Vadi acts as a "ethnographer on a skateboard," writing, living, and animating an object, likening the board and skate ephemera to the fear of being discarded, wanting to be seen as useful, functional, living. These essays analyze the legacy of seminal texts like Thrasher Magazine, influential programming giants like MTV, and skateboard artists like Ed Templeton. They imagine jazz composer Sun Ra as a skateboarder to explore sonic connections between skateboarding and jazz, obsessively follow bands, chronicle tours, and discover the creative bermuda triangle Southern California suburbs have to offer. Chipped is an intimate, genre-pushing meditation on skateboarding and the reasons we continue to get up after every fall life throws our way.
"Pensive ... The rhapsodic prose shines, and Vadi's passion will hold the attention even of readers who know little about the sport. It's a ride well worth taking." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The essays are poetic, compassionate, and vulnerable, drawing rewardingly original connections among a host of seemingly disparate topics ... Vadi clearly takes great pleasure in the vocabulary and syntax of skateboarding; at times, this pleasure feels contagious, even for non-skaters ... [A] largely illuminating collection about skateboarding, race, and relationships." —Kirkus Reviews
"Skateboarders young and old-school will see themselves in Vadi's journey captured in this collection of essays by an optimistic, fresh, and insightful voice." —Booklist
"To José Vadi, one of our great poets of the overlooked and ignored, it's not just a skateboard. It's a medium for dreaming, for chasing down histories of public space and private rebellion, for measuring ourselves against the wide-open visions of youth. Chipped is a treasure." —Hua Hsu, author of National Book Critic Circle award-winning Stay True
"Continue the line that runs from Sun Ra to contemporary skateboarding and you'll arrive at the brilliant, searching essays of José Vadi. Chipped is a masterpiece of both the form and his subject." —Kyle Beachy, author of The Most Fun Thing
This information about Chipped was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
José Vadi is the author of Chipped and Inter State: Essays from California. An award-winning essayist, poet, playwright and film producer, his work has been featured by the Paris Review, The Atlantic, the PBS NewsHour, Free Skate Magazine, Alta Journal of California, and the Yale Review. He lives and writes in Sacramento, California.
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