And this language was one of the things that first attracted me to skateboarding in the early to midnineties, when it was on the rise and going through an adolescence of its own, moving away from vert ramps and toward the street skating we recognize as the dominant form of the spart today. The language seemed a strange code, a jumbled signal I felt I heard louder than other kids because I thought cracking it would unlock the safe that held a better, more authentic version of myself, an identity I could live with. Before I started skating I’d dreamed of being a professional athlete. But throughout middle school I was cut, over and over, from the basketball, soccer, football, and tennis teams. I can still summon the tearful shame and existential terror of running my finger down the rosters posted on the brick wall outside the Tuckahoe Middle School gym, the sky gone to gloaming and Mom or Dad sitting in the car around the corner, and reading name after name of kids who were not me. It should go without saying that there were consequences to being so roundly rejected. At a time when confidence is a hard commodity to come by, when identity is a particularly fluid and vexing problem, not making these teams seemed to ratify all my self-doubt, to confirm my pervasive feelings of worthlessness. It was in skateboarding, then, that I found a whole new way to engage with the world, an identity to slip on like a suit of armor, one that would transform me, Mask-like, from the outside in. Most important, though, skating opened an avenue for me to imagine myself into the future. I was going to be a pro skateboarder.
As I improved, the language nourished this illusion that my identity could be mastered or resolved. The way I understood it, I was no more or less than the tricks I could do. They were like the axioms of a personal tractatus. To learn a new trick was to broaden your ability to express yourself and, therefore, increase the ease with which you moved through the world. And I obsessed over them, over learning new ones, worked on them for hours a day. If I couldn’t skate with friends, I practiced on the brick walkway in front of our house. If it was raining, I practiced in our carpeted basement, where I occasionally knocked the fiberglass panels of our drop ceiling out of joint as my hands rose above my head for balance. I know I once used an old tabletop as a ramp down there but, given the restricted space, cannot remember or fathom how that worked. To this day, hour-wise, I still don’t think I’ve done anything as much as I’ve skateboarded. And I don’t mean this to sound boastful, but Dad’s right. I was good, had talent. Probably tops in my school and among the best in the area of Richmond where I grew up. I didn’t do the biggest gaps or rails or stairs, but I could do more tricks than most kids and had “style.” In seventh and eighth grade, when someone found out you skated, their first question was typically, “What tricks can you do?” And I remember answering by naming every single one I had down, including the stance, so that many tricks became quartets, even octets (shove-it, fakie, switch, nollie shove-it, frontside, fakie frontside, switch frontside, nollie frontside shove-it, ad absurdum), feeling a sick and demented but overwhelming pride in this list, which acted like a force field as it filled the space between me and whoever had asked the question. And later, in high school, at my remembered best, I would take to the blacktop at Tuckahoe Elementary while a crew of kids thirty or forty deep sat by and watched me lay down a run, feeling in such moments like there were no limits to who I could be. Behold the man, bitches. Ecce fucking homo.
IX.
What I’m trying to do on the concrete, then, is rebuild my vocabulary, to get back the words of a language in which I was once fluent. For the first hour or so, I chip away at the basics, my 180s and shove-its. It’s not long before I find I can do a few fakie and nollie and switch. While I’m working on these, one of the younger kids rides up to me and asks whether he can eat his lunch now. It’s ten thirty in the morning. He’s maybe eight years old. When I tell him I’m not a counselor, but a camper, too, like him, he rides off haughtily. I move on and do some short noseslides on a modest ledge, but one I have to ollie into nonetheless. A measure of the old wonder comes back as memory pulls these tricks up from inside me with the ecstatic surge of remembering a word that was on the tip of my tongue. My feet know precisely where to go, what to do. The board conforms to my wishes for it. But how? In what basement or attic of my self had this fugitive knowledge hidden? Pride of a sort I haven’t experienced in years floods through me. I do backside 180s and switch frontside 180s in quick succession and I must look like a ballet dancer gone loopy on the pirouette but I’m too enthralled to think about what I might look like. Why had I ever stopped? Wouldn’t my life be more fulfilling had I stuck with it? Less confusing? The harder tricks will return, I’m sure. With a little time and work I’ll find everything I came to camp looking for. I imagine myself as some late-modern Odysseus, out to prove myself in order to be welcomed home.
Sometime before noon I get my kickflips back. The first of them flip under my feet like a dog rolling over. Clumsily, inexpertly. But soon I’m popping them off the ground and catching them in the air, landing on the bolts and riding along as though nothing happened. There are exceptions that prove the rule but I think this might be the truest measure of style in skateboarding, when a trick is performed so smoothly that when it’s landed it seems like nothing happened. Like a shooting star, it’s alive only in the minds of those people who witnessed it, who continue to witness it when they tell others about it later.
I break for lunch then and sit at a table with three younger campers and eat my sandwich. While I do, I pull out the Nietzsche and read, trying to track and parse Zarathustra’s speechifying over the chatter of the three kids and the park’s noise. It sounds like a construction site, what with the constant hammering of all the boards on the concrete and the clunk and sputter of missed tricks and the rock-tumbler churn of the grinds. More than anything else I ever listened to, any hardcore or emo or hip-hop, this is the music of my youth. After lunch I start going for tricks that are a little more technical. A few times I land on the board and it shoots out from under my feet and my stomach drops and fear flashes through me. Then I have to go running after it like I’ve seen fathers at the park hurry after their truant toddlers. After one such instance, my board rolls into the grass off the far edge of the park. I retrieve it and stand there a second, collecting myself.
I watch two of the better kids, Boston and Christian, launching from a concrete ramp. They’re clearing a gap with harder tricks than I’m trying, and with maybe three or four feet of air. The camp’s videographer keeps changing his angle, crouching low to ensure the tricks look as big as possible. We’ve been told that they’ll make an edit of this footage later and post it to the Windells site. There it will serve as both a keepsake, for campers to remember what they did during their time here, and as an advertisement, for potential campers to get a feel for what goes on at Windells. After the videographer gets into his crouch, Boston pushes off and gathers speed and heads up the ramp. At the top he does a hardflip—imagine the board doing a gainer—that travels between his scissored legs so perfectly it seems to happen in slow motion. As he floats through the air he looks like a deft puppeteer, his arms Karate Kidded above his head, the board flipping as though controlled by strings. It breaks my heart a little, witnessing this, but not because I envy his skill or youth or anything like that. It breaks my heart in a purer way, in the way certain sentences or poems or paintings can break my heart; it seems to satisfy a craving in me that I didn’t know existed before I saw it. It wounds and heals me at once. It is, simply, beautiful. His feet catch the board as it flattens out underneath him and he lands lightly even as his body gives a little with the impact and he rides off like nothing to see here.
“Fuck yeah,” the videographer says after Boston’s out of the frame. He runs over and gives him a high five and those of us who saw it knock our boards against the ground, clacking out “Sick!”s and “Tight!”s and “Dope!”s as though we were sending them by telegraph. Then the two of them huddle over the camera’s small screen. The videographer shields it from the sun i
n a way that looks like he’s maybe trying to warm his hand by its weak light. And as they watch the footage of the hardflip together, all the air whoopee cushions out of the moment for me.
I’m tempted to espouse an atavistic belief here and say that some portion of the hardflip’s beauty is diminished by it having been recorded. Captured on camera, it has already become just another hardflip. There’s no time for the trick to chafe against language, to spread around the park, or beyond, and achieve a certain mythic status, as tricks could and did when I was younger. You’d hear that so-and-so had kickflipped over the five-stair rail at Tuckahoe Elementary or finally stuck an ollie down the huge ten-set in back or 360-flipped the six-set at the Church and reports like this would live in your imagination with a potency that video evidence can’t touch. These tricks would become part of the lore of that spot, part of its history. “Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter,” Keats famously wrote, and likewise some of the best tricks I ever witnessed were ones I never saw. And this is how kids I grew up skating with continue to live on in my mind alongside the Gonz and Rodney Mullen and other skate legends, how the spots we skated still retain their charge, why they continue to show up in my dreams all these years later. Boston’s hardflip was good, in other words, but there on film it can’t ever become something maybe ever-so-slightly more.
It’s more complicated than that, though, what’s happening here.
Now that every smartphone has a built-in video camera, for which you can buy fisheye lenses, and now that practically every crew of skaters has at least one GoPro (those small, rugged handheld cameras), it seems like every trick gets recorded. And there’s no question that ready access to creating these clips and sharing them online has revolutionized the way skaters interact. Given how deeply time-bound an art form it is, skating has probably benefited from developments in digital technology as much as, if not more than, any other subculture, aside from maybe porn. The most popular sites, like TransWorld and Thrasher and the Berrics and Hellaclips, post fresh content a few times a day. Then of course there’s the labyrinth of YouTube and skaters’ Instagram accounts, which are all full of clips, mostly shot at their local skateparks. And while on the whole this technology is probably a good thing—one could even argue that skating couldn’t have progressed as quickly as it has without it—I’m still deeply ambivalent about it. I don’t believe it’s unimpeachably good. If a company has to post more and more clips to stay relevant and alive, I worry, isn’t the skating itself in danger of becoming just another form of advertising? “Content”? Maybe not. Maybe I’m being oversensitive and geezerish. Nostalgic.
This wouldn’t be a question or problem at all had skateboarding’s relationship to the market not always been riddled with tensions. There’s a long and knotty history here, one that goes back to the late seventies and early eighties, to Fausto Vitello and Stacy Peralta and Craig Stecyk, et al., and their somewhat contradictory goal of wanting to popularize skateboarding while also maintaining its antiestablishment and anarchic aura. They’re the guys who came up with the slogan “Skate and Destroy.” What this history boils down to is that the spart doesn’t cotton all that well to the notion of a bottom line. You’ll very rarely hear the owners of skateboarding companies talk openly or directly about the products they sell, for example. (After a couple frenzied periods of innovation, the products themselves, the durable goods, have become more or less standardized, and what innovation still goes on is often gimmicky. Soft goods like clothes and shoes, of course, follow the logic of fashion.) Instead, they’ll promote their team, the skaters they’ve “sponsored.”
I think this misdirection has everything to do with the fact that skating is founded on a rigorous notion of authenticity. Applied here, authenticity means something like putting your body on the line in order to reveal and enact beauty, to say something truthful in the language of skateboarding. It means prioritizing actual skating over all other cultural noise, perhaps most of all the noise that surrounds the skateboarding industry. (Think of the spart’s heightened sensitivity to posers, who pull on the accessories of its culture—that is, the products skateboarding companies sell—and act as though they were one of the tribe.) By dint of the transitive property, then, a company is only as authentic as the skaters who ride for them. And in focusing on their team, by celebrating the skating it has made possible, a company can deflect or mask its need to sell products—without doing any research on this, I’d bet that shoes and clothing and other soft goods sell more than any skate-specific hardware, and, furthermore, my guess would be that a good chunk of these sales, especially as skating continues to enjoy more and more acceptance by the culture at large, are to people who don’t skate, who admire the “skater” look and lifestyle, which is to say, posers. In this arrangement, the skaters themselves don’t have to feel like they’ve whored themselves out, because all they’re doing is skating, being real, living the dream. It’s like that little bit of cognitive dissonance that allows you to live with yourself.
This comes down to the fact that skateboarding, at bottom, is a symbolic form of protest, a way of saying no while making it sound like a resounding and joyous yes. “Skaters by their very nature are urban guerrillas,” Stecyk wrote. “They make everyday use of the useless artifacts of the technological burden, and employ the handiwork of the government/corporate structure in a thousand ways that the original architects could never dream of.” Here Stecyk is echoing the radical political philosophy that came out of the Lettrist and Situationist movements in France in the fifties and sixties, strands of which philosophy have Plinkoed through time to inspire, among other things, the punk movement. Behind the impressive thinking (and drinking) of folks like Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, the Situationists were looking for ways to live freer, more authentic everyday lives, ones that promoted creative intuition and passion and a sense of play, in the Nietzschean and capital-R Romantic sense of that word, and that were not so indebted to and controlled by capitalism and the mass media, what they called “the spectacle.”
That’s a drastically simplified précis, but here’s roughly what I think they mean: summer nights growing up, my friends and I would sometimes skate at a branch of a national bank in downtown Richmond. It had these perfect knee-high marble benches out front that you could thread together with runs. The air would be balmy and electric, alive with an ambient rebellious power. Turn your nose the right way and you might catch a whiff of significance as we threw down our tailslides and crooked grinds and 5-0s, a meaning whetted by danger, by the possibility of coming face-to-face with the human representatives of the power we were protesting, the “authorities,” building security or the actual cops.
In this way, skating can be said to complicate one’s relationship to the notions of property and ownership. It asks questions, probes. It’s the performance art equivalent of graffiti. If someone had a particularly good session at the financial institutions and schools and corporations we skated, we’d say, “You owned it.” Through vision and an execution of it, that spot was yours. I don’t think I’m being idealistic or too Pollyannaish when I say that, in its purest form, skateboarding isn’t only subcultural, it’s countercultural.
So call me a pessimist or an alarmist or a theory monger, but watching Boston watch his hardflip right after he lands it feeds all my suspicions that the spectacle has fully infiltrated skateboarding.
There’s another wrinkle here, because videos have played an important and integral role in skateboarding from the get-go. My friends and I treated one’s release like it was a dispatch from the front lines, like it contained vital news about our comrades in arms. There was an easy balance at work here, though, because of how long they took to produce and distribute. They were able to serve as a company’s chief marketing strategy and still exist as messages to be studied, communiqués. And we shared them like samizdat, which allowed us to nurture that special sense of belonging reserved for the excluded or exiled. They had a decidedly amateur
or DIY aura that lent them a flavor of authenticity, an aura that was, for the most part, lacking in the videos I was watching online. Most of these new videos existed in the hyperreality of high definition and had adopted the pace and glam of music videos. And to watch them you first had to sit through short commercials, which seemed to set a contextual tone for everything that followed. Furthermore, most of these videos had been shot in skateparks, places where local governments have sanctioned skateboarding. If you think about it, skateparks aren’t that different from reservations, a lame offering of appeasement. What’s for sure is that a skatepark can never be a spot. A spot, like a person or an idea, bears its history into the future—so we can talk about Tom Penny’s frontside flip at the Carlsbad Gap or Eric Koston’s backside noseblunt at Hubba Hideout and for some of us that calls to mind a collective cultural memory, a form of belonging in time, of placing oneself in history. Anything can happen at a skatepark, it doesn’t matter. Because skating a skatepark doesn’t require vision, at least not vision of a sort that means—everything there was built to be skated. It’s like fat-free treats or e-cigarettes or climbing a rock wall in some suburban gym: a form of the original stripped of what made it dangerous and indulgent and so worth doing in the first place. A recent contest I watched on TV featured an exact replica of Hubba Hideout, which when it was torn down in 2011 inspired an outpouring online of what can only be described as grief. Grief as real and as poignant as if a person had died. Same thing happened when they closed the Brooklyn banks and tore down the Carlsbad Gap. For a while some fellow nostalgist from Richmond ran a Facebook page for Tuckahoe Elementary School, whose blacktop had been annexed by auxiliary classrooms. The Hubba Hideout replica, then, was like a tombstone: it honored what was gone, sure, but it also confirmed it as dead.
With that all said, I’m ashamed to admit that after my short time out on the concrete, I’m also secretly hoping that I’ll get good enough this week to earn a few meager seconds of footage in the promotional video. Maybe do a little run, string three or four tricks together through a park’s terrain. I imagine watching a screen in the not-so-distant future, progeny in my lap, and saying, “Yes, young son and/or daughter Knapp, apple(s) of my eye, product(s) of my loins, that is Daddy. Daddy did do that. Isn’t it fucking dope?” I guess I also have to admit that I’ve been harboring an irrational Lamarckian hope here: not only do I want them to witness me doing these tricks, I want to pass them down. Though I know better, I don’t yet believe that I can’t. And if not the tricks themselves, then some measure of authenticity I take them to represent. As I stand there mooning over all this, disturbed by the damning narcissism this line of thought ends in, thinking I may be no different than Dad trying to triangulate his nostalgia and might actually be worse, Jamie rides up. He’s been taking it easy today, not skating too much, riding around helping some of the younger kids.
Up Up, Down Down Page 22