12 minute read
Fucking Awesome
Fucking Awesome All Roads Lead to Home
Just like that, my conversation with Jason Dill—one of my favorite professional skateboarders—painfully, awkwardly, stopped.
A lump swelled in my throat. We’d been talking for 20 minutes, and although I’d covered only three of my questions, everything was going great. Until I questioned his soccer abilities. We’d been meandering: about how I grew up in the Manhattan neighborhood he used to frequent, a fight that happened in front of Fucking Awesome’s new Hollywood store, being freshly minted on adidas’ skateboarding roster. When I asked whether he had collaborated on the adidas Samba for its significance in punk culture, he jokingly quipped that there’s nothing punk in the world—except cutting your penis off. Revealing a bit of his dark humor was a friendly gesture, right? I shouldn’t have cared, but shamelessly did. Dill liked me, and my inner 14 year old was validated. “Is punk alive? I didn’t even know what it was in the first place,” he continued. He told me he just liked the Samba’s silhouette and soccer in general. Then we segued into the shoe’s commercial, and Dill revealed that he had kicked a beautifully bent chipper into the far corner of a goalpost.
“Oh, that’s you!” I said, surprised. Which was a mistake.
After some backtracking on my part, I learned that Jason Dill really does play soccer. And loves ballet. And Phillip Glass. It’s naive to judge him from appearances in GRIND editorials and Supreme lookbooks, wearing that unamused gaze as if blowing smoke in your face through the page. Or from one of his many classic video parts for companies like Alien Workshop, where even the most impossibly gracious maneuver rarely merits a smile. Don’t let any of that fool you. After a conversation with Dill, it seems more likely that his on-screen demeanor is simply part of the show. “At the end of the day, I’m an entertainer,” he tells me. “So, as an entertainer, I can be seen in the way that I want to be seen.” Basically, somewhere in his 28 years in front of the camera, he’s reconciled with the idea of having an audience. And like any good entertainer, he’s a rather charming conversationalist—genuine, disarmingly open, willingly empathetic. And yet, you always get the sense that he’s keeping some magic to himself. After all, without the magic there is no show.
Dill has a lot of rabbits in his hat, like the successful skate brand Fucking Awesome (FA), which opened its first flagship store about a month before our conversation. After flirting with the idea of a shop in Tokyo first, the company (chiefly Dill) decided to set up on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. The strip is a thoroughfare of garish Hollywood nostalgia for sale: there’s the Hollywood Wax Museum, where Elvis stands immortalized in statue, practically dripping Vaseline on hotter days; there’s Musso & Frank Grill, a Roaring Twenties-era bistro swathed in brown leather and brass, slinging the best martinis in town—as stars and mobsters would attest.
Yet the Fucking Awesome outpost, ostensibly a stamp of nouveau millennial culture, fits right in. A neat, white, gallery-style layout belies the curated chaos lurking within its walls. Dill designs pretty much everything: the board graphics, apparel, knick-knacks like pins or stickers— and collages are something of a preferred medium, which makes sense because the guy’s got a lot going on upstairs. Boards depict the Virgin Mary holding a stillborn (I think?) baby, while a giant wall juxtaposes Jaws, elements of gothic folklore and Diana Ross. Paintings, also Dill’s medium, are romantically horrific and everywhere in the store. “Not to be clichéd,” he says, “but life can be really beautiful, or it can be really”—tense pause—“disgusting.” His worldview is laid bare within the store; perhaps it’s one giant collage in itself. “You have to keep yourself occupied with the interesting, think-y parts. The smart parts.” And so when you enter the store, you’re walking into just that: the result of Dill channeling his creative energy into whatever canvas can absorb it. And the best—perhaps most satisfying—thing about it is, it totally works.
Go to school. Pick a career. Stick to it. Retire. Die. If your parents hassle you enough, growing up can be coldly, systematically calculated. But if you grow up outside of the nuclear family structure, which Dill did, concepts like “school,” “family,” and “routine” become arbitrary. “My dad went to jail when I was young,” he tells me. “I was raised by my mother and my brother Chris.”
He was introduced to skateboarding when he was eight years old. Neighborhood friends in Huntington Beach, where he grew up, gifted him a board composed of spare parts. He got his first sponsor around the age of 12 in 1991: A1 Meats, a wheel company. By 15, he was sponsored by skate legend Natas Kaupas through a company called 101—which also backed a young Gino Iannucci and Eric Koston. Which means that by 15, Dill was already traveling independently, with little more authority than a semi-retired twenty-something barely old enough to drink. “[Natas] was very good to me and he taught me a lot,” he recounts, respectfully. “I learned so much from riding for companies and paying attention over adults’ shoulders.” Which is like getting a Montessori education, but in street culture—totally free.
It’s the kind of free thinking that goes really well, completely wrong, or Dill’s way. Skateboarders at that age tend to create extended, self-governing fraternities, like Lord of the Flies, with cheap beer and porn. So in the absence of a defined role model, surrounding friends have a more profound effect because they shape your values. Travelling up to San Francisco during the 101 days, Dill quickly made friends with Peter Bici and Chris Keefe, who introduced him to Keith Hufnagel—the founder of HUF— as well as a then-burgeoning New York brand named Supreme. “I walked into the Lafayette Street store when I was 17,” he remembers. “What was nice about New York
is that no matter who the person was, or what age, skater or not—people were like ‘Oh, you don’t know about this? Let me show you.’” He traveled between California and New York for the next two years, sampling life in the city: a raucous, unhinged bubble of culture just begging to be popped.
In 1998, when he was around 19, Dill joined the Alien Workshop, meeting founders Chris Carter and Mike Hill. “It definitely felt like they brought us on—[Fucking Awesome partner] Anthony Van Engelen and myself— to be the [new blood] on an already well-established team.” He may have been young, but Dill was already a big deal. He’d travelled the world and was an in-demand, industryrevered talent. So, shortly after, he moved to New York City full time. While he admits he was “a very Californian boy,” Dill enthusiastically tells me that he did half of his growing up in early-aughts NYC. And man, what a time. By 2000, the city was three years deep into Rudy Giuliani’s second term, the hard-nosed mayor hellbent on cleaning up the streets by militarizing police. A then-new band called The Strokes was writing a song, “New York City Cops,” trolling that very thing. Bars like Niagara were packed with post-BFA kids sweating warm Pabst and angst, snapping each precious moment to dump on a blog the next day. The Knicks wore glass slippers to the NBA Finals and the Yankees couldn’t lose. Dill was coming into his own. “I think we were so into blacking out and going as
far as we could get,” he recounts of his time in New York. “We were mimicking what people told us about the ’80s
and ’90s.” He hung with the infamous IRAK graffiti crew, whose ranks included the late artist Dash Snow. “Do you have a favorite memory from being in New York?” I asked him, expecting to hear about a legendary rave, or maybe a slapstick moment with an art-scene somebody.
Professional skateboarders need to skate to keep their jobs. So in 2000, some of Dill’s greatest work appeared in Alien Workshop’s third full-length video Photosynthesis—aptly titled, particularly considering this period of his life. The skating speaks for itself, but the introduction features a notable exchange between Carter and Dill. It has the defensive, frenetic tension of a stepdad catching you coming home high. In this case, Carter was urging Dill to regiment his life in New York. “Carter was a bit of a father figure for me for about 15 years,” he remembers. While his path wasn’t always pretty, Alien Workshop supported Dill, because that’s what family does. It allowed him to absorb a tradition of “great skateboarding, skateboarding ads, art direction, personality, everything.” So in those whirlwind years, in between smoking PCP and tagging walls, Dill also learned how to operate a brand. “Having something that successful for 20 years is hard to do. They did a great job. I’m really grateful for what we did with them.” In his own way, Dill learned to respect a previously elusive concept: consistency. Just what Carter was talking about all those years ago.
Jason Dill has applied his learnings from Alien Workshop to Fucking Awesome, and that includes things not to do— like forcing pieces that don’t fit. A brand’s most valuable
promotional asset is its team: a roster of representatives who fit the creative ethos. Fans that identify with a rider will, instinctively, support the company. Like, how do you think Under Armour sold so many basketball shoes? Except, Dill’s not really thinking about “marketing”— skating is too precious, too familial and it attracts too many outsized personalities to be diluted by, well, someone non-skaters think is cool. And touring the world with someone with a flat personality just isn’t fun. “One of my gripes—or complaints, I should say—with being on Alien Workshop was when they would just throw someone on the team. It didn’t matter if it was an amateur—like, you don’t do that.” As such, Fucking Awesome’s skate team operates on a simpler concept: chemistry. I was surprised to discover that the team, comprised of young riders like Sean Pablo, Sage Elsesser, and Tyshawn Jones, is selfgoverning. “The kids decide [who gets on]. It’s up to them. They have to feel good about where everything is and how we exist.” Pablo, Elsesser, Jones, and the rest of the team are, on paper, different personalities. But when I ask about the connective thread between the kids—as in, what makes them all fit under Fucking Awesome—Dill’s answer is endearing: “A general sense of goodness. To rise above. No matter what they’re doing.”
It’s important to remember that “the kids,” baby-faced in what seem like yesterday’s Supreme ads, are now suddenly capable, decision-making young adults. They can choose skating or pursue something else entirely. Having known some riders since they were nine years old, Dill has watched their evolution firsthand. But that also lends itself nicely to Fucking Awesome’s art direction, especially in terms of the decks themselves. The graphics are often deeply personal: sometimes they are the visual extensions of personalities, and sometimes they’re the collaged interpretation of an inside joke. Put together, they could create a timeline of each rider’s personal growth. But it’s this specificity that only a big-brother figure like Dill could create, because the group, including himself, grew up together. “They’re so busy now, it’s epic. They’re always on the move, being seen. I think that’s the best—I can’t keep up with them.” That is, until the team hits the streets, where Dill, now in his early 40s, is right there with them. “I tell you what, I’m very glad to still be out there skating [with them], just throwing the couple punches I still can these days.”
Despite frequently being cited as one of the most influential, stylish skateboarders ever to grace the stuntwood, Dill says he’s “always in fear of not looking good on a skateboard. I’m not afraid to admit it. That’s one of my insecurities. Don’t want to look stiff, you know?” That’s a fair concern at his age. “Man, I’m younger still, and I get insecure,” I countered, anxiously wondering whether, at 28, I’m skating enough.
