Skate Bylines

Essay and introduction by Kyle Beachy

A version of this story was originally published as ‘The Dylan Period’ (2020) excerpted from the book The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches From A Skateboard Life (© 2021 by Kyle Beachy), reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing, all rights reserved

Photography by Anthony Acosta

Audio production by Farran Golding

It would be rather negligent to try discuss the decade of the 2010s without addressing Dylan Rieder. This essay is a sort of late one, it comes late in my book The Most Fun Thing and it is, in a way, a culmination of what the rest of the book is trying to do. Which is get directly at the question of “style”, what “style” is and how much, really, we as skateboard fans can know about these skaters we spend so many hours watching on our screens. I want to thank Greg Hunt who spoke to me about making dylan. (2010), and was incredibly generous with his time, and Anthony Acosta whose photographs I’m moved by. — KB

 I: Above and Beneath the Rest

When the most beautiful man ever to ride a skateboard died on October 12, 2016, the news was covered by Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, and People Magazine. Which might lead us to believe that he was a musician, athlete, or celebrity. He was not. He did sit shoulder-to-shoulder with Cara Delevingne on the hood of a New York taxi for a DKNY campaign, was at least a few times broadcast live on ESPN, and did move comfortably among models and actors through the nightlives of Los Angeles and New York City. His was a narrow face that slimmed into a tight and mischievous smile, with eyes that conjure images from nature, cheekbones like rolling hills. His body was skinny and long, with drinking-straw hips and a swimmer’s shoulders, the kind of frame onto which you could put any clothing and it would hang just perfectly right. He was twenty-eight.

So it was easy from time to time to forget that what Dylan Rieder was, above and beneath the rest, was a skateboarder. People who knew him will tell you: those haggard t-shirts he wore didn’t come pre-ripped. He was a skater’s skater’s skater, a rat to the core no matter how good he looked on screen. When he was on a mission, he’d be the one lying on the ground or bent in obvious pain and exhaustion, hour after hour as the camera batteries ran out and his colleagues had gone back to the hotel or out to the bar. Or, if they were rats too, sat there watching Dylan keep going and knowing that this was it, this was the behaviour that gave the word its glimmer.

I did not know him. He was, I gather, a private person, which is why the two years that he spent in treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia remains, for many skateboarders, a cloudy sequence even still. In July 2014 he was diagnosed and began chemotherapy in hopes of achieving a remission that would allow for a bone marrow transplant from his sister. A bout of encephalopathy complicated this plan, and he enrolled in a T cell clinical trial that would begin in January 2015. When the trial failed he was shifted to a portable med pump that he wore on his body, which also failed, 

leading doctors to move aggressively forward with the transplant. In April 2015 he achieved remission only to develop a liver disorder that kept him in the hospital until early July, after which he lived four months in remission before routine bloodwork in November alerted him that the cancer had returned. So, then, another T cell trial, but this time with his sister’s cells. This lasted from January through April 2016 and was successful. Having achieved remission again he was able finally to go home at the end of May. A little more than four months later he developed the infection that would quickly take his life in October, while still in remission.

This summary leaves out everything that matters, including the suffering, the fear, the unlikely smiles and deep cadre of friends who gathered bedside to surround Dylan and create the shield that would maintain his privacy from those who would imagine it was their right to know such details of where and when and how. In the end, there’s nothing to be learned from cancer, no lesson to Dylan’s or any other too-early death. Except how the person is loved.

The public account of Dylan Rieder begins in Westminster, CA, near Huntington Beach. A childhood of ample resources and easy access to skate parks accelerates around age twelve, when he began going on trips with the shoe and clothing brands Osiris and Quiksilver. He was a handrail chomper who turned to transition, and eventually joined the legendary board company Alien Workshop at eighteen and began filming for Mind Field, their long-awaited follow-up to the seminal Photosynthesis (2000). Under these new expectations, Dylan fell into pills and his Mind Field part showed it. So, he set to work on a follow-up video with cinematographer, friend, and neighbour Greg Hunt.

Because it is baffling, mankind has conceived of a number of models and metaphors for time. The everyday, conventional, secular concept of linear time that proceeds moment-by-moment, we call chronos. The generational notion of time as a series of periods or ages, we call aeon. Then there is a more sacred approach that separates time into periods of before and after—as in the liturgical calendar of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. This is time as kairos, and the film that Hunt and Dylan would release in 2010, just one year after Mind Field, is a seven-and-a-half minute masterpiece that would mark a before-after moment in skateboarding’s history. Done, now, was all the hyper-technical ledge wizardry of the late aughts. This would be the decade of renaissance, of simpler tricks executed elegantly. After dylan. was released, Dylan shot to the top of the skateboarding world and into the pages of Vogue. He refined his image and birthed a thousand imitators, created the smokiest and most artful skateboard clip of all time for his HUF shoe (the great and quick-of-foot Keith Hufnagel, did himself pass in 2020 of brain cancer, which, like Dylan, Hufnagel chose to keep private. Huf’s style was nothing, not a whit like Dylan’s—he had heavy arms, and his movements were compact and efficient in all ways but his push, which saw his left hand swing behind his body and open upward as if waiting for another hand to reach for it and take hold), and played no small part in the ascendance of two of street culture’s preeminent contemporary brands, Fucking Awesome and Supreme. And then leukaemia, death at twenty-eight, and now regular annual remembrances of his legacy. He is loved, now, by all.

There is, however, a very big piece that this version, and many versions, of Dylan’s story leaves out. Which is just how reviled and ridiculed Dylan was by large swaths of the skateboard community. Somewhere between 2006’s A Time to Shine and Mind Field, he’d gone from kid wonder to kid pretence. The hair, OK, we were used to hair. But the slim pants cuffed to the shins, the blousey shirts with huge necklines, the nail polish and jewels—Dylan was not what we believed a skateboarder should look like, and our opposition to his look was not gentle. We laughed at his photo shoots. We had great fun at the expense of his Gravis shoe with its barely there rumor of a sole and oxblood leather pinched into an elvish point.

How vain, I personally thought. Every move seemed to have been rehearsed before a mirror. How easy to imagine beautiful Dylan sleeping each night inside a custom-built, chambered, and reflective bed, rising each morning to a great hall of taxidermy and mirrors and secondhand animal skulls. There was nothing easier than to mock and ridicule his beauty and his obvious awareness of his beauty, which struck me and others as an insult to…well, by this point, it’s difficult to say. In 2010 skateboarders were all still mostly men and either heterosexual or closeted, so we made jokes about gender. We behaved like terrible, small-minded children because in large part we were exactly that. Until, that is, the short film whose title’s punctuation made for full sentence, with subject, predicate, and object all contained in that one word: dylan.

After that, we quieted down, backed away scuffing dirt with our hands in pockets. Soon enough the objections grew quieter and faded. Soon, in a reversal, the objections to Dylan seemed petty, vain, and clownish. And the importance of this shift, the lasting significance of Dylan Rieder, is not just that he changed minds, but the way he went about achieving this change with the selfsame tools that had shaped those minds in the first place.

Dylan was both product of and challenger to the collective norms and beliefs and practices that adhere skateboarding into a community. He embodied the traditions, attitudes, and a host of qualities that we might call the spirit of skateboarding. By embodying this spirit so fully, and so uniquely, he forced all of us to step back and reconsider almost everything we’d assumed about what was rad, what was important, and the very activity of our looking. Orson Welles had it that, “If the camera doesn’t like an actor, it just stares at him.” Cameras loved Dylan, but skateboarders loved him better. Eventually.

The camera is a tool to capture light, shapes, and distance—it does not see style. Language, historically, hasn’t done much better. E. B. White wrote that trying to find a satisfactory explanation of style was like “steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.” We might start by saying that, were Dylan a language, it was one written in cursive. He was long and looping, with legs that could as easily compress as explode, though both steps, the sink and the rise, seemed to happen inside of liquid. There was always something auspicious in his skating, something in that slender shadow of his that felt as if it was all premised on rumor. You knew him immediately: a handful of frames, a fraction of a second and it was him. He had a driving force that far exceeded his body’s mass, and a flick that hefted his board into rotations that felt, at times, to be his body’s own.

Every icon needs a signature—James Bond’s martini, Malcolm X’s eyeglasses, James Dean’s jacket—and nowhere was Dylan’s physical grace clearer than when he performed an impossible. The challenge of the impossible is what physicists call the intermediate axis theorem. If you, say, try to toss a tennis racket, book, or cell phone into the air in a way that it rotates flatly, end over end, it will be difficult. The object wants to flip as it rotates. Objects longer than they are wide or thick create different moments of inertia, which makes rotation along the intermediate axis unstable, and leads to this seeming desire to flip along another axis.

“Nobody’s, but nobody’s [impossible], was better than Dylan’s. There are five (or six) in dylan., and each is as cohesive and singular a motion as someone else’s snap of fingers or curve of lips”

Dylan’s signature impossible, like a lot of now-standard tricks, was pioneered by Rodney Mullen in the 1980s only after rotations along the other two axes—kickflips and shove-its—had already been “solved.” The only way to do the “impossible” rotation along the intermediate axis would be to, as Mullen describes it, “somewhat vertify” the 360 shove-it and use the back foot to guide the board and stop it from flipping over. The more vertical, the more proper, the more effective the impossible. Because the rotation takes so long, learning it takes commitment—people either have them or do not. What’s more, many skaters who have the trick in their arsenal cheat them by not fully vertifying the spin. So, while there’s a blurry line between a 360 shove and a cheated impossible, a proper impossible is both rare and unmistakable.

Nobody’s, but nobody’s, was better than Dylan’s. There are five (or six) in dylan., and each is as cohesive and singular a motion as someone else’s snap of fingers or curve of lips—he crouches and lifts and seems to heft the rotating board up and over the obstacle, or into a nose wheelie, or grind, or any number of variations. So, I was not surprised to learn that the most memorable impossible of his career, the one over the bench, the one that ridiculed gravity and is seared into the brain matter of all who have seen it, was one he did easily.

In July 2020, ten years later, Nike SB released a short clip of Norwegian skater Didrik Galasso, aka Deedz, during his first ever visit to New York City. Deedz and his guides move among familiar spots, go surfing in Rockaway, and then, late in the video, there’s a shot of Deedz in full tourist mode, his face radiant. “That’s the bench,” he says, and you would think he’s just rounded a corner in Rome and come upon the Vatican. Even as he says it his body moves a step or two forward, as if by magnets. “The golden bench,” he says, as the shot cuts to a standard issue seaport bench under FDR Drive, across which a body is sprawled, asleep.

Dylan did it twice, in fact. They were there for twenty minutes and he impossibled over the bench twice. Which explains how we’ve got two angles of the trick in dylan. First, from the front in slow motion, and later, in the credits, in full speed. I’ve pulled them up on the monitor to compare them side by side. The second finds him landing slightly more on his heels, just a bit less prone to swerving across the bike lane. But in both there’s a swing to his arms that I only notice now. His hands go from very low on crouch to very high as he leaps, then forward briefly as his torso pulls back and knees come up, then follow a looping, widening circle back, down, and then swinging forward and up they rise up again in front of his waist as he lands, olé. It is a wild thing to behold, these details, leaning into my monitor and watching so unnaturally. And the motions of the two are identical—and, well, identifying. As we expect from a signature.

It is telling that the fiercest and cruelest barbs of our opposition to Dylan pointed to his style. Whatever he had, whatever we saw, “style” implied a safe distance between him and substance. Here Susan Sontag proves useful. “Merely by employing the notion” of style, she wrote, “one is almost bound to invoke, albeit implicitly, an antithesis between style and something else.”

Skateboarding’s something else is a notion we have fetishized and leaned upon for any number of otherwise vague valuations. We can call it, boringly, “authenticity.” This year, 2021, will mark the thirtieth anniversary of one of skateboarding’s longest-running companies, REAL, capitalized as such (A company that has, however ironically, remained relatively innocent of the standard industry practice of dolling up and trotting out legacy every five years as a reminder). We have elsewhere discussed heritage and the way skateboarding values longevity, but for many skaters authenticity is synonymous with a kind of affectless core, or stripped essence. It calls to a Strunk and Whiteism, that advice to turn away from “mannerisms, tricks, adornments” and find style by “simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.”

The allure of this rather circular argument is the sheer variety of ways it can be weaponized. Anything you don’t like, for any reason whatsoever? Insincere. Fake. Done for the wrong reasons. I have, for example, caught myself more recently levying this charge against the fashionable Parisian crew, Les Blobys. When I first encountered them, I could not but think of that scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless when the scoundrel and performer Michel famously stands before a cinema poster, studying Humphrey Bogart. This fantasy, which ultimately brings doom to Michel, is Hollywood’s fantasy, one that Godard stood essentially against. To my eyes, the vanity of Les Blobys rang of deliberation and labor. They were Michel standing before the images of US skateboarding, modeling the movements into their own affectations.

To be clear: there would be no Les Blobys were there no Dylan, and the blowback he suffered was similar but even more barbed and personal. The opposition to Dylan began with beauty. The hair, the clothing, the jewels and too-pleasant smile. There was also the matter of his body, which was not only lithe and tailored but would assume shapes and forms misaligned with the skateboarding activity, unnatural and therefore criminal postures. I am speaking, mainly, of what some of us called “vampiring.” He had a way of bending his front, right elbow and raising his forearm up around his face like a vampire lifting its cape to shield his face from the sun.

See for example at about 2:40 of dylan. He executes an alley-oop wallride that seems to climb for too long, and when he finally comes down he lands crouched and vampired. Or, better, the following clip, a quick backside tailslide on an out-ledge that he kickflips off of and clears the protrusive bottom step easily. As he lands, his front, right arm hangs limp and natural across his body. Then, seeming to recall who is he, he lifts that arm up and into a vampire, crooking his right elbow as his left arm rises behind him. It’s the most excessive vampire of Dylan’s career’s output, a forced pose, like a gymnast raising their arms overhead for the judges.

In other words, the alarm of vampiring was a matter of conspicuous control. And it may have been that we were particularly sensitive to matters of control, given the historical conditions in 2010. There was Nike, remember, and more broadly the contraction of the industry in the wake of a global recession. Classic legacy brands were struggling and shuttering sub-brands and selling themselves to non-native buyers. Alien Workshop was bought by the snowboard and apparel company Burton, and Jake Burton is credited as dylan.’s executive producer. So, we were uneasy regarding the authentic and wary of change. Really, we were afraid. And Dylan suffered as much of this communal fear as anyone.

As Sontag put it, we found in Dylan “evidence of the artist’s intrusion upon his materials, which should be allowed to deliver themselves in a pure state.” Of course, in skateboarding as in literature there is no “pure state,” no way to do the thing without doing it somehow. Purity is a facet of nostalgia. Every skateboarding body has always been an intrusion, and its style an expression thereof, a force inseparable from the materials themselves.

But the one person who would know better than anyone disagrees. “That video part is all him,” said Greg Hunt, who is modest, I learned, and also generous and open to talking shop for two hours. But you should have heard how much he stressed this point: “Some filmers are crazy motivators and coaches. I was just there trying to capture it as best as I could, then put it together in a way that I felt represented him in the most honest way. But it all comes from him, because that’s what I wanted to see.”

Go watch dylan. Whether it’s the first time or the thirtieth, look at it again. A decade later and I cannot watch without recalling the experience of my first time, how fiercely I was prepared to reject and dismiss it. Its first section of three serves as a kind of showcase: a couple smith grinds, kickflip, and a nose blunt and a tall handrail into a few transition reminders followed by some high-speed lines. Nothing exceptional. Even as it begins to work against your resistance—it really is a high kickflip, a lengthy nose blunt, and boy he’s going pretty fast at that kind of massive rail…—the opening lulls you a bit.

When the title cards come they’re in Helvetica, ha ha, and proclaiming it a “short film,” and any eye-rolling at these might last until about halfway into the next clip, the film’s first slow motion of an alley oop frontside flip to the opening piano notes of Graham Nash’s “Better Days” (a sad song, it took me a long time to realize). Some portent here, even before the song has a chance to get moving. A second slow-motion clip confirms it—a floating impossible shot with gradual cinematic pan. This is an escalation. This, for the Dylan-opposed, presented a bit of a problem. Suddenly we’re moving full speed ahead and it’s difficult to hold on to whatever we thought just a couple minutes prior.

Even now, it is very difficult for me to watch what follows without making some kind of sound. On that first watch a decade ago, this effect would have had to include the real-time disintegration of that part of me, the reluctance and judgment from which I was shocked into a kind of stuporous disbelief. That any surprise remains ten years later is at least a small miracle. Sometimes that surprise arrives in the midst of a trick, like the early lipslide that just keeps going. Or the front tailslide that anyone watching closely knows is going to end with a kickflip dismount: you believe you’re prepared for what’s ahead but when it comes the kickflip is so meticulous with such lift from the slide and rise to meet his oxblood elf shoes—please go ahead and laugh, he dares you, haveyourself a nice chuckle—and there is such cool composure on the stomp that comprehension starts cracking. 

I remember thinking, this cannot continue at this pace. But it does. Everything is about twenty percent bigger or longer than you’d expect. He just straight up ollies off of a Montclair roof, which I do not think anyone saw coming. And like all great physical performances, this one involves moments of total control and the outer border of mayhem. His arms flail about during a two-trick line in a ditch, a kickflip, and a wallride back 180 out. He lands the impossible nose wheelie down the long hubba thing by the water and is wild and loose. And then the back tail up on the blue bars is clean, composed, his right arm bent at the elbow and raised before his face. Framed just so.

This bothness, the natural struggle for balance mixed with Dylan’s deliberate modeling of “Dylan” as form, brings us back to Greg Hunt. Recall that Hunt’s goal was to edit this short film “in a way that I felt really represented him in the most honest way.” And like other people who knew Dylan well, Hunt won’t say much about him personally. He opens up, though, when describing their work:

“The main thing was, I wanted it to breathe. Up until that time, the norm was to let people ride out of frame. But I really wanted to see Dylan riding up, riding away. I wanted to really see everything, like the board going under the bus, you know? When you watch Dylan skate, everything around him was so interesting too.”

Hunt calls himself an emotional editor driven by feeling over anything planned or analytic. He starts with music, moves things around to see where they fit in, emotionally. Then he builds outward from that.

But not only builds. Hunt’s role in dylan. is at once heavier and lighter than he’ll let on. Like consider the sequence that starts at 3:35 as the drums recede and the song settles into a break, with the slowed and very high frontside flip on a natural pyramid. Hunt gives us a brief, over-the-shoulder shot on the approach, seeing Dylan from behind and then cutting to the pyramid’s far side so we see him coming at us. Next is a single, low angle for an impossible 50-50 down a hubba, also slowed. Then Hunt returns to the multishot pattern for another frontside kickflip, but complicates it with a third step—first we’re behind on the approach, then in profile for the trick, both at full speed. The third angle is shot from directly ahead, slowed in motion and paired with the return of Nash’s drums and the (emotional) arrival of backing vocals. 

So, there is feeling here, but also disorientation. The next clip seems by all measures to begin in slow motion on Dylan’s approach and then ramp into full speed as he backside flips over a hefty LA handrail. Until you see his shirt blowing in the wind, it’s impossible to know how fast he’s going. These shifts between normal and slowed motion creates a sort of temporal lean, or imbalance. We stay full speed until the second angle of the impossible tail grab up out of the arroyo and over the fence, a slowed, second angle that reveals the drop’s full stature. Then another approach shot, another rail we see from behind Dylan followed by a partially slowed fakie flip over the rail and into the bank as the footage ramps back to natural speed on the roll away.

After five minutes, the film transitions to credits and B-roll and lifestyle clips that serve to round out the portrait of Hunt’s film. But by then, the effect of Hunt’s paired techniques—the sympathetic approach shots that give us something like Dylan’s view of the obstacle and the disorientation created by slowed motion—has already done the bulk of this work. Again, it’s both heavy and light on Hunt’s part. It’s the artificial used in the service of reality. But if you ask Hunt, he’ll stress that none of it feels conceptual to him.

He set about his work with two goals: to create an honest representation of Dylan himself, and to create a feeling.

More than anything, what I feel as I watch Hunt’s film is: present. Gravity has me, this chair contains me, these images and sounds from my monitor locate me on the big cosmic map. But that is not so strange, really. This is what knowing a person does. “Why are certain people so loved?” said Hunt. “The way they do what they do, and the way it makes people feel.” Sontag would have agreed. At one point in “On Style” she quotes Jean Cocteau, who goes further: “Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately with us the soul assumes the form of the body.” Unfortunately? Maybe. Soul, though—yes. I believe yes. In picking up this transmission from Dylan across the void I end up knowing myself just that much better. I am affected by dylan. because I am affected by Dylan.

There is also, however, the unlikely fact of Dylan’s Street League tenure to consider. To begin to know someone, to shed your prior resistance and come around to a more intimate relationship, and then to be surprised like this? Violation! As far as I can tell, Dylan competed in three years of the contests, and generally finished solidly down near the bottom of the rankings—twentieth, fourteenth, twenty-first, twelfth. But in June 2013, something clicked, and the footage of that weekend’s finals makes for one of two Dylan Rieder SLS clips that counteract any sense of personal violation.

“They all look stupid except for Dylan, who looks like Dylan in his plain white t-shirt with a blown-out neckline”

After ten events, it’s his first time making it to the finals, and speaking in terms of visuals, he’s clearly out of place. He is the only one without any brand identifiers on his person—Paul Rodriquez is wearing a Nike SB T-shirt and hat, Luan Oliveira a Nike T-shirt; Chris Cole in a DC shirt and Monster wristband, Nyjah [Huston] a DC shirt and Monster hat. Anyway, they all look stupid except for Dylan, who looks like Dylan in his plain white t-shirt with a blown-out neckline, less a deep v than garage door opened onto his chest, and it’s peppered by holes down by the beltline.

Of Nyjah, Felix the announcer says, “So solid, so confident. No expression on his face whatsoever.” Also in these finals is one Mikey Taylor, former Alien Workshop teammate of Dylan’s who since 2013 has retired and turned into a venture capitalist, anti-science motivational real-estate crank (and podcaster, in case that’s not implied by the rest). And the more you dislike Mikey Taylor, which I do a fair but not debilitating amount, the more enjoyment the following moments provide.

In 2013, Mikey Taylor’s physical presentation had turned, like much of skateboarding’s, unabashedly derivative of Dylan’s. His pants got suddenly shorter and his hair took on sheen and length. So, here we are before the control section of the contest, dropping into live action with a shot of them side by side, Mikey and Dylan up against the black wall of the course’s edge. It’s a bit like The Truman Show; the world seems to just suddenly end at this wall. Though he is not trying to, I don’t imagine, Dylan by just being Dylan manages to make Mikey look like the most awkward creature to ever stand on two feet.

And what is Mikey doing, standing there? Why, he’s using both hands to pull at and loosen the crewneck of his DC shirt! As if suddenly, by proximity to Dylan, Mikey feels the pinch of his NASCARed contracts, the firm limit of his attempts to mimic his way into another way of being. And then it turns out they’re on the jumbotron, so that is maybe a little awkward. You cannot look good on the jumbotron if you’re watching yourself on the jumbotron, so Mikey puts his hands on his hip, and sneaks a glance up to the jumbotron. Then he turns to Dylan and asks, “Is it me or you right now?” as if turning and asking might shift the camera’s focus to its rightful subject.

Dylan, meanwhile, is also looking at the jumbotron, but without any awkwardness. And here is what he does, seeing himself up there: he gives it the finger. Not for the cameraman, this finger, and not for Mikey. Not for us, who are watching it seven years later, five after he died. Mikey’s hands are on his hips and his shirt’s neckline is sagging weirdly, like wet paper. His grin goes very wide.

Dylan, collarbone exposed, watches and then drops his hand and smirks at what he’s done on live television. The announcers pretend it didn’t happen. Soon Mikey has left the contest with a groin pull. Dylan meanwhile takes two long pushes and smith grinds up and down the A-frame. He pushes along the top of the quarter-pipe, drops in, and tries to kickflip up the giantly long set of four stairs, something of which none of the contest technicians would even conceive. In fact, aside from Luan Oliveira, the rest of the contest seems by comparison to be taking place in the shallow end of the pool. Suddenly what they’re doing doesn’t look quite like skateboarding, even. It’s strategizing, calculating, executing. Dylan is skating the course like he might have discovered it accidentally while out for a drive.

The final section of this event is almost too much to bear. Suddenly everyone on stage is landing their tricks, Dylan included. He gaps to the bottom kink of the long rail, locking in to just beautiful smiths and lipslides. But everyone is elevating, it’s bananas and hard not to think that everyone’s else’s success has something to do with him, the threat of Dylan, a sense that Jesus, what is he, coming for this world, now, too? “Anyone’s game right now,” goes the announcer, and Dylan is there, implausibly, just off the lead.

A brief pause here for the work of Brian Glenney and Steve Mull, whose revelatory article, “Skateboarding and the Ecology of Urban Space,” argues for the pluralism of the activity. Skateboarding, they say, “vacillates between achievement and disruption of rule-bound competitive success,” challenging rules even as it participates in them. To support this claim the authors draw on the transcendental ecology of Thoreau and Emerson, pointing to skateboarding’s “wild” qualities, calling it “an activity that rewilds its environment.” Thoreau believed that the wild was less about outdoor activity per se as the attitude of one’s doing it: “merely walking can be a wild activity if one walks in a way that participates with the ecological order as opposed to, for instance, social or political orders.” I find these arguments convincing and recuperative. “Skateboarding,” they agree, “remains a mystery.”

Unlike with, say, Olympic diving or figure skating, in skateboarding contests, “innovative rule-breaking play is not only encouraged but anticipated.” This is true. But what Glenney and Mull don’t accommodate for is the activity of watching skateboarding, either as a skater-viewer or, more importantly, as a judge. I may revel at the fractional moment of Dylan’s final trick of this 2013 Kansas City Street League, as he comes down from the back smith off of the kinked rail and his wheels skid out and his arms flail and carries all of style-driven skateboarding upon his nearly exposed shoulders, but my values are not this event’s values. No matter how close he came, this was never a format Dylan was ever going to win. Even here, on Dylan’s best possible day when all was falling just perfectly into place, he was literally out of his league. Dylan knew as much, of course. “It’s kind of the same outcome every time,” he said to Chris Nieratko. “All those dudes train for that shit, they take Street League season off from real skating to, like, practice.”

Like a camera, the scoring algorithm does not, cannot account for style. Style is analog. Style is a matter of perception. By comparison, Nyjah is too good for perception. Too successful for style or facial expressions. By the time of the post contest interview with Nyjah, Dylan is already somewhere out back, probably smoking, amused.

“By the time of the post contest interview with Nyjah, Dylan is already somewhere out back, probably smoking, amused.”

The second Street League clip worth watching is much shorter. It was recorded by journalist and [at the time of writing] director of marketing for USA Skateboarding, Rob Brink, from the stands before the 2010 Arizona event. It’s practice, so nothing counts, nothing matters, and Dylan is rolling around the course with a cigarette in his hand. Eventually he decides to take a break and smoke it. To leave, he sort of casually hefts one of his impossibles over the barrier that separates the stands from the course. He misses it and starts to walk off when the small crowd of industry folks who sometimes hang about during practice urge him to try again. So, he goes back onto the course, cigarette still in hand, and this time he does it. The barrier is waist high, stupid high, and the sparse crowd completely loses their shit as he rolls away, glancing back to smirk just before disappearing.

VI: Style Was His Soul

“God,” goes the message of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, “Is Change.” Something improbable has occurred—the most maligned became the most beloved. The more unlikely, the less possible this change, the more godly. That he did not set out to change a community, or that the community is skateboarding, which is meaningless, these details do not matter.

What matters is that the change began with Dylan Rieder himself—the bothnesses, I mean, the contradictions that make a human human. The wild arms and the framed, deliberate landings. The bothness to deride Street League as less real while also participating in it—basking in the jumbotron’s glow while giving it the finger. The beautiful man in tailored, nonskate apparel made filthy by impact and abrasions and commitment to the activity he loved.

So from the bothness emerges the love, which cannot but be felt in dylan., knowing what’s required to film a full part in only a year. And the spirit, the gall, the absolute fuck-off pride it takes to commit to that path of ridicule, to cultivate and maintain a personal style so maligned that one cannot but see in Dylan the very spirit of the community that maligned him. Skateboarding as style, I mean. And style as spirit. Even as he embodied and performed a selfhood detached from and disinterested in skate’s status quo, Dylan affirmed the community of skateboarding and the cultural, physical, and spiritual values that stitch its borders.

“Hunt achieved that most impossible thing—gave us a way of knowing another person without ever meeting him. Suppose he successfully captured style, and suppose that style was, as Cocteau had it, his soul.”

Suppose it was not just improbable but impossible. What if, I mean to say, Greg Hunt succeeded? This is going to sound naïve, and I am okay with that. Suppose Hunt managed to make a movie that conveyed Dylan Rieder as he was. Suppose that, by knowing his friend so well, and going out shooting with him and editing that footage and presenting it as he did, Hunt achieved that most impossible thing—gave us a way of knowing another person without ever meeting him. Suppose he successfully captured style, and suppose that style was, as Cocteau had it, his soul.

Style, spirit, soul. Whatever the change he caused, it was not language that did it. Dylan Rieder was no rhetorician, was not inspired to speak a movement into existence. When he spoke on record about skate aesthetics he did so in the blunt terms of cool, looking good, and not caring that “little Billy can fucking big spin heelflip down twenty stairs.” His values were those that are familiar to much of skate culture: antiachievement, antiquantity, antirank. No, the revolution of Dylan was not linguistic. It was formal, visual, and spiritual.

Forgive me, but I am inclined to say that a miracle has occurred. The impossible made possible—to know the unknowable, and to do it by way of performance and form, on one side, and perception on the other. To see a self performed and know that self, and through it, know your own self more fully. But only among those of us who have been trained by the community to recognize the nuance of that performance. To perceive and give value, for instance, to a proper impossible as opposed to a cheated 360 shove.

Once more, we find ourselves leaning on a phenomenological approach to understand this miracle. The French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion speaks of real, lived events that transcend values, resist clear meanings one way or the other, and can only be experienced as “the impossible.” He means birth, death, but also love and god. Or, as Richard Kearney puts it, “God becomes the impossible possible, the possible beyond the impossible, the impossibility of impossibility.”

One needn’t believe in any specific God, or even god at all, in order for this to resonate. Faith can be very simple, says Simon Critchley. “As when I speak of faith in another person, the other person”—the meaning of transcendence can be “found in the human relation.” By being himself, and by conveying himself, Dylan Rieder changed skateboarding. By having been trained in the ways of skateboarding, that baffling set of values and contradictions, we were able to perceive Dylan as a self expressed. Between his body and ours something was conveyed. In participating in this conveyance, we became the change that Dylan caused. Skateboarding, then, the community, becomes the medium through which the soul passes: the shared values, the common language, and practices that allow a person’s performance to be seen in this strange, miraculous way.

It is all quite impossible. And quite the stretch, I know, to connect the miracles of faith to a beautiful skateboarder by a coincidence of language. I suppose this is my own small act of faith, a sacredness that I have long encircled, poked at, have essayed over these years but never confronted completely. The question has always been: What is it that we are doing when we’re skateboarding? The nature of my asking has long since eclipsed the board and wheels where it began and has spread to the activities of watching and communicating. The Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva calls her field of study, “post-Christian humanism.” To her, a humanist interpretation of god is “a thinking through the body” but without a space between thinking and the body—rather, a “thinking with the body.”

I mean to say that much of what we call contemporary theology and phenomenology—the studies of what it means to be human—overlap with the activity, perception, and discussion that we call “skateboarding.” We move, we express, we convey, we perceive, we process, we replicate, we tweak. We are and are seen and are known. We contradict, we baffle, we change, and are changed. There is only one true gift, and that is the gift that lays bare the many other gifts already in existence.

VII: Time Does Not Heal All Wounds

On March 3, 2020, Fucking Awesome released a two-minute clip of previously unseen footage that they called ‘Time Does Not Heal All Wounds’. Thrasher called it “a gift from beyond,” and that feels accurate. It is no small feat to manage a dead man’s memory; FA and HUF have been tasteful in their use of his image and name, donating proceeds of his product—each new pressing of his pro board sells out quickly—to the Dylan Rieder Foundation to benefit City of Hope Cancer Center. Given the towering differential between hours shot to capture the seconds that make it into a video, there are surely troves of Dylan Rieder footage sitting on a few select hard drives. But the people who have this footage are also they who knew him best, who formed that shell to preserve his privacy as he suffered his body’s decline. So far, people have kept his legacy sacred.

The video opens in the back seat of a car passing by some kind of police action. Like most of FA’s stuff, it has the air of the political without saying anything. The draw, of course, is “previously unseen,” and the big glory is Dylan’s kickflip from a sidewalk bump over a shopping cart, presumably shot the same day as the 360 flip we see in “cherry”. It’s a reminder of what was lost and what was achieved before that loss. And time, too. It’s time all the way down.

But the clip I go back to see is the five-second shot of Dylan walking away from the camera in slow motion. He’s in a tank top and passes a family of Orthodox Jews who are moving toward us widely, seven of them, three generations, the men with payots dangling and all of them in formal dress, only their hands and necks and faces exposed. The smallest child, a girl, rides in the carriage of the eldest son’s arms, and two more girls walk holding hands that link to their father’s. Dylan passes between this family and a Coca-Cola vending machine and then disappears behind them.

Of the seven, it’s the two youngest who turn to watch him go. The child in her brother’s arms has the best view. At the far side of their group, the second-youngest daughter cranes her neck, ponytail swinging, to see. He’s dressed differently. His body is a visible and striking sight. But it is not a spectacle, not something abject or terrible they cannot help but watch, no carnival of color or light. It is only a human body engaged in the commonest of motions. And theirs is the curiosity that comes prior to meaning or understanding. Who is that? What is he doing? Why? No answers. All they can see is how.

Kyle Beachy is skateboarder, educator and author who lives in New Mexico, USA. His two books The Slide and The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches From A Skateboard Life can be found, hopefully, wherever books are sold.

Anthony Acosta is leading skateboarding photographer who has, very likely, shot your favourite skateboarders for any magazine imaginable.

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