You don’t have to love—or like, or even give shit one—about skating to enjoy watching Richie Jackson skate. You don’t need to know a lexicon of jargon to appreciate it, because most of what he does has no formal name, since it’s arisen from the immediate conditions and his feelings about them.
I guess I maybe dig Richie Jackson so much because he’s kept skateboarding—a thing that, since I was a kid, has been transformed into a sport and a career—as an expressive art form.
“I for sure had a vision, but how close to it I’ve gotten, I don’t know [because] I’ve dissolved it by making it a reality, and it’s different. [laughs] The original vision has ceased to be. I’ve replaced it with a bunch of pixels.”
Amen, brother. Amen.
More Richie Jackson. The bit where he goes down the escalator here is so perfectly Richie Jackson: a nameless trick, invented at that moment and for that place, that still has all the seeming of something that has always existed, for as long as boards have had skates, because it is just so damn right for its time and place.
If you wanna understand Richie Jackson a tiny bit more, this 2016 profile from Rolling Stone is nice (and has more video of Jackson skating!!!)