When did you start skating?
My brain doesn’t work so well for remembering dates and such. So I could totally have this stuff all wrong. I think I started skating when I was in the 6th or 7th grade. I was a hold-out with my white-on-white Redline freestyle BMX bike. All my friends ditched their bikes and were riding skateboards for a year or two before I decided to switch to 4 wheels. They were all figuring out how to ride these nailed together, slap-dash slant-ramp launch ramp things, and it just seemed so incredibly insane to be launching off these plywood contraptions in the driveway. Eventually the bike went bye-bye. Probably once all my friends started to take the train into Philly to street skate and look for empty pools. I couldn’t hang on an expedition like that, riding through those neighborhoods on a silly white BMX bike.
What was your first skateboard?
Busted up hand-me-downs from my buddy Fernando really. But my first new board was a Powell Peralta Ripper. They call it the “Old School Ripper” now. So funny. I bought it at the RC-Car and Hobby shop at the mall back in the day. There were no “skate shops.” It was a plywood rack to hold a dozen boards in the back of the hobby store, with trucks and wheels and stuff under glass, right next to the gas powered engine for that sweet RC airplane. I think I went there with all my buddies and my parents, but made my folks hang back until it was credit card time. Now that I’m an old-fart, I have perspective, and see what a complete brat I was being.
When did you stop or slow down significantly?
Well, to be clear, I skated for many years, but was never very good. I think my strength in the skateboarding realm existed more in the behind-the-camera aspects rather than in-front of the camera. After I graduated college, I got a soul crushing job and actually started skating more as a result. The job gave me access to a lot of high-end photography equipment so I started shooting more too. Then FDR started to blow up, and Dan-the-Man started his warehouse 13 funland out in East Falls and I got into it all more than I ever was before. I also lost all the college fat, and that helped. I had free time, a job that gave me a little money, and cameras to play with, no house, no family. . . nuthin’ but work and the bros.
Then “Operation Skateboard” happened–an insane under-cover DEA drug sting that messed a lot of people up and Dan’s warehouse changed hands for a spell. FDR started to get stupid crazy with all the building drama and factions and stuff. I don’t know when exactly it happened, but the skateboard just sat longer and longer in the trunk of my car. Probably 2002? 2003? Now I have a two and a half year old daughter, and I recently pulled the skateboard out of the basement to show her. I’m scoping out a sweet set-up at Toys R Us for her 3rd birthday.
What do you do for a living?
I’m currently a “Multimedia Producer” in the marketing & communication department at an Art & Design college. I basically shoot and edit all their web videos, handle some of their HTML Email stuff, and whatever tech & design stuff that needs doing. Thanks to my parents, I’ve always been a computer dork. Like sleep-over computer camp when I was 15 sort of computer-dork. I think designing with computers is something that was inescapable for me. Every design shop, advertising agency or marketing department I’ve ever been in I’ve always been a johnny-on-the-spot computer and design dork.
When you are not skating, how often do you think about skateboarding?
My YouTube and Facebook feeds are littered with skateboarding. I think about it, and watch it pretty much every single day. A ton of my old-fart friends are still out there doing it daily… well, at least weekly. Haha. Some of the stuff the pros are doing today are without a doubt, mind-blowing. So it’s hard not to be like, let me take a peek and see what those crazy mo-fo’s are doing today on YouTube. Then there’s the whole “skateboarding-is-like-hilariously-old-now-and-here-are-lots-of-interviews-and-shit-documenting-the-old-heads-and-crazy-shit-they-did” stuff to watch too. So it’s daily for sure.
How did skateboarding affect the direction of your life?
Well, skateboarding introduced me to so many different influences: hardcore shows, punk rock, straight edge, hip-hop, graphic design, Thrasher, Pushead, Vision Street Wear, zine culture, spray paint culture, the crazy streets of Philadelphia in the 80’s, Spike’s Skate Shop, abandoned 70’s skateparks, running from security guards, Andre the Giant and his Posse, snowboarding, FDR skatepark, private skate warehouses, private back yard concrete skateparks, and so on, and so on…
None of which was considered even CLOSE to being mainstream when we were experiencing it. Now-a-days, it’s exactly all the stuff that like EVERY SINGLE KID is doing. I’m not sure skateboarding could be any more mainstream? Back then, everything we were doing, we more or less tried to hide the details from our parents. Back then, jocks would chase skaters because they were “freaks.” One of my buddies went to the hospital because a bunch of jocks were chasing him, got a hold of his skateboard, and then hit him upside his melon with his own skateboard!? He lost memory of a couple days from that!
So all that stuff affected the direction of my life in a way that ingrained an openness and sympathy for the so-called freaks of the world. Alternative thinking about the world, and what’s considered beautiful, or accepted as normal/desirable. I think I always had an inkling for art, so that predisposed me towards thinking a little outside the box I suppose, but skateboarding really was the neutron bomb. The flash point.
It’s pretty funny though. I’m a pretty normal American Joe these days. Old, slow and fat.
What is the connection between skateboarding and creativity?
I can only speak for myself really, but I think of it kind of like the lenses of my camera. I can take my computer dork lens off, and put my 80’s skateboard dork lens on and see the scene differently. Now-a-days I have the husband, and the father lenses on more often than any other. But it’s good to know, I’ve got the skateboarding twerp from the 80’s, or the hardcore-show-going-I’ll-be-deaf-when-I’m-old-from-these-speakers lens I can always pull out and see the world a little differently through.
More about Dave Rizzio
Rizzio.net, 8Tracks Radio
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