178 ThrasherHey, Mark, what’s up?
Nothing much. Just went to get an espresso.
Easy for you, you’re in the Lower East
Side, right?
I live at the border of the LES, Two Bridges
and Chinatown. I live in between Labor and
the skatepark. I skate LES a lot. Blubba is fun
to skate flatground at. Skating through that
area by yourself is just as fun as skating a park
with people. I’m in such a good zone—the
coolest restaurants, a dope movie theatre and
the skateshop. I know the guy that runs the
Dimes cafe and have a barber, Nick Belmonte,
that works at Blind Barber. It would be so hard
for me to move and find another area like this
place. If I did move, I would like to stay in
Manhattan.
We lost you for a couple of years.
What happened?
I went to school. I didn’t want to skate
anymore. I was bummed at the idea that
my body would still want to skate. People
talk about how you can never quit skating,
how you could never fulfill that urge you’ve
satisfied so many times, to roll down the
street. It’s very true but I didn’t like that, at
the time.
Why do you think that bothered you so
much?
I wanted to be totally in control of the things
I was doing. What I wanted to do was to
live a very deliberate life and I came to the
conclusion that skateboarding wasn’t the most
interesting thing that I could do. It wasn’t theake no mistake, Mark Suciu loves skateboarding. Coming in hot when he
first hit the scene, he released tons of incredible video parts which seemed
more like he was filming with friends than working on a project. However,
even with taking all the right steps a hopeful, young skater could take, skateboarding
became uninspiring to him. He decided education might be the path to becoming
the person he aspired to be and slowly separated himself from skating. Luckily for
us, school showed Mark that his view of skateboarding had been narrow and there
was still plenty of ground left to cover. He’s now ready to take this thing on from an
academic’s angle with a freshly-opened mind. We’re glad you’re back, Mr. Suciu!most inspiring and it wouldn’t push me onto
the next part of my life. I had these dreams of
becoming a certain person and I tried to arrive
at that point through skating. I probably had
those dreams due to skateboarding, but they
didn’t have anything to do with actual skating.
When I traveled the world and turned pro, I
saw how it really was—my dreams turned into
a reality. The bubble had been popped and it
wasn’t the route I had to take to become the
person I had envisioned. I looked around and
tried to find another way of doing that, which
ended up being school. That ended up being
super exciting and very inspiring. It wasn’t
exactly school, it was what I was studying.
The idea of literature and one’s spoken word,
the raw element of one’s own consciousness
on the page. It has to do with what I was just
talking about—living a deliberate life, trying
to create something that is entirely your own
product. To theorize a creative production that
is not completely objective, including taking
account you as a person and your body as an
object, it’s a complex thing. Your body moving
in space while carrying out the things your
mind tells it to do is much more difficult to
understand than writing your idea of art into
a long tapestry, however that may be. I think IFront blunt bank to bank—totally
in control of the things he’s doingPrevious spread: Fulfilling the urge
with a backside 180 nosegrind.
Try learning that in collegeSHAFER