There are many people out there that know what they're doing and if I go out there and
screw up, you know, they're going to think that I don't know nothing, so I have to be
perfect.
I think life would be hard because you're going to have to be working, trying to find
a good job, trying to, you know, during the meantime you're going to have to get a good
job, what you're doing, how you're doing, going to school and, you know, trying to get
money to go to college and make a score.
People are pushing you around, telling you, trying to put you down, you know, things that
they try to make you unconfident of yourself.
I really feel that children need encouragement.
They need to be told, yeah, you can do it.
It's going to be hard.
It's going to be difficult.
There will be times when you wish you weren't there, but you can do it and when you need
some support, I'll be there to help you.
Well, it doesn't work that way because many of the parents are experiencing the same kind
of fear that keeps them in the box and so they'll stay with what's familiar.
Change is a very difficult thing to undergo.
It's very painful sometimes and especially when it's the youngster breaking away from
the home, from the neighborhood, from the family, from the ethnic group, from the socioeconomic
group.
I mean, that's a pretty major change and it's frightening.
So sometimes it's easier just to stay home and leave things the way they are.
If you could have anything in life to help you, what do you need?
Money.
The support of my family and money.
A job.
People support family.
What does that do for you?
I hope you will not quit school.
The support of my family to get me through college.
If education is not important to the parent, then it's not going to be important to the
kid.
And if the parent doesn't support the child's endeavors, educational endeavors, forget it.
What did Sylvia say was one of the things that she needed aside from money to get her
through college, family support.
And I wish the parents would have been able to hear that coming from a child.
I tell them all the time, they need your support, that you have to support them.
But the children know that that family support, if you don't have that support, it's like
riding off into the wild west alone with no help.
You know, who would be so foolish as to do that?
It's just simpler to stay home and fail.
Education helps me get out in the world and be prepared for what I would have to face.
Education will help you get better jobs.
It will help you live better.
And you're going to have to go out in the world alone, and education will help you get
a job and be somebody in the world.
We all have times in our lives, we all have pains, we all have sorrows.
The school can provide a positive alternative to the message that the kid gets at home.
Assuming that the message is negative, or at the very least neutral, we can say, you
can do it.
We can open the door, open the window, let them see what's available.
We can provide role models.
If we succeed, we can share that success with the children, and we can say, look guys, I'm
just like you.
Or, this teacher is just like you, or whatever, and if I can do it, you can too.
A one, a two, a one, two, three, and on top of the chalkboard, all covered with blood,
I shot her with glory.
Yes!
I shot her with pride.
That's me, folks!
How could I miss her?
She was 40 feet wide.
I went to her funeral.
I barfed on her grave.
Some people threw flowers.
I'll miss her.
But I threw a grenade.
Five seconds later, one, two, three, four, five, I threw fire.
I heard a big boom.
I heard that my teacher went straight to the moon.
The next day in the newspaper, I heard that she wasn't quite dead.
So I took a bazooka, and I blew up her head.
Here we have another one.
This is a short one.
Today, both of these are dedicated to the teacher, Miss Owens.
A one, a two, a one, two, three, go.
Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.
Throw your teacher off the boat as the tumor screams.
Three, go away.
Okay.
You find a place to skate really hard.
The difference here is the general landscape.
Probably the garbage quantity is higher.
You know, dodging cabs and traffic, and irate drivers, you know, this kind of thing.
The way that we have indigenous terrain in New York that's incredible to skate on, there's nothing like skating in the city.
Yeah.
So first of all, Harold is a great skater.
He learns tricks really fast.
He can ollie so high.
It's really incredible.
And he's a total clown character.
He loves to act out and ham it up in the store and keeps the kids mesmerized.
He loves being the center of attention.
But he's always straddling this line between like, okay, do I want to succumb and be a hoodlum like all the homeboys I go to school with, but I want to be, you know, for some reason,
he seems very true to skating and the kids around the store, you know, it's like very non-hoodlum-y.
And so I don't know, it really could be his ticket out of the projects when he ends skating.
And then again, people like Lewis, he's got such an affinity for using the camera, you never know what's going to happen with him either.
Lewis is a really stylish, technical skater.
He's really beautiful to watch.
He's also like incredibly mature and sort of private before his age.
And, you know, like we turned the whole store over to this guy and he's like only 16 or 17.
And he handles it with total control.
He's only a junior, but he should be a senior, so he has one more year of school.
He's a year behind. He dropped out for a year to learn how to skate.
He literally skated every day for hours, like watched videos, dissected tricks, and skated, skated, skated.
Well, skating, I see, in my mind, or like initially, to me it was like a conceptual art project.
There had to be some kind of skate energy in the city where there's a group of people concerned about developing the sport here and helping it grow and everything.
You know, that really fit the bill for me and Tom.
But also, you know, for us, we totally identified with skating on every level that it represented in the country.
And we really completely want to do this, not to mention just love skating itself.
It's the whole way it made this whole culture into itself.
It's really fascinating and really punk and we're completely into it.
So this is what we're going to do, man.
We're going to sell skateboards in New York.
It's all about reification, you know, just identifying with this stuff so hard, you know, and thinking that school is all about really, they're going to be able to do it.
They have really specific, out there, usually dark and nude kind of imagery.
It's not like, you know, a football jersey with numbering stripes, man.
They have style, you know.
That's a look out of Manhattan. It's the best in the very terrain available, basically.
I mean, because everything's right there in a smallish kind of contained area, which is very unique for New York.
That's why so many people go there. That's why PSA could hold contests there.
But what it is basically is landscape architecture because it's all ended up being, you know,
the consciously derived landscape architecture or something, you know, landscape architecture gone straight.
One, two, three, kick it.
You are now about to witness.
You are now about to witness.
It's like a real remarkable phenomenon that you can have kids doing this thing that is essentially a sport.
It translates into so much else.
And do it for eight or ten hours a day and live it.
You know, just the skating thing itself is incredible because in a way it's like dance, you know, and it's so zen and it's so, you know,
it's a difficult thing that takes a real combination of being like very aggressive and yet very delicate at the same time.
All the authorities in the field are like, you know, under 20.
And that's why there's nothing any adult can tell these guys that they're going to learn from.
They are teaching us.
That's really funny.
All these kids, they have such fear about getting older and they're so happy being 14 or 15.
Boy, that is such a distinction then from like when I was a kid.
Let me tell you, well, all we wanted to do was get older.
We couldn't do anything at our age.
We felt these guys have this whole world that is defined on every level by what they do.
And the only fear of getting older is that you're going to lose what you have now.
You know, it's pretty amazing.