Morning.
It’s become golden by now.
Nine o’clock. A skateboard pops out of a chimney. A dark-haired nineteen-year-old in a yellow t-shirt, khaki pants, and blue high-top sneakers pops out next. He grabs the board. He skates down the brown roof of a single story bungalow.
Roof. Air. Sidewalk.
Skating on.
More sidewalks. Curbs. The grass and dirt bordering sidewalks and curbs. Streets. Cars.
He leaps off the hood of a middle-aged surfer dude’s spray-painted convertible. The man did pull in front of the him after all.
Skating on.
He throws his board over a fence, then himself. Other skaters have commandeered a pool for a session of carves, grinds, lip tricks, and air. He pads up. Takes his turn. Shreds. Spills. Peels himself off the bottom of the bowl. He goes.
Skating past.
Houses, businesses, parking lots, construction sites, abandoned lots, graffiti, debris, more cars.
Just about getting nowhere by talking to two old men slurping from brown paper bags. Just about — until “Venice” slides off their fuming tongues. He’s off.
Skating on.
The huge boardwalk and public strand, Venice Beach, the threshold between the City of Angels and the Peaceful Sea.
Passing through.
The crowd. Their boomboxes playing hip-hop, the kind for breakdancing. A gap in the crowd, the stage for another skateboarder, who enchants with hyper-technical freestyle.
Skating on.
Past a wedding.
Noon.
Gold still in the open, sometimes white-gold above competitions in handmade canyons of plywood and concrete. Jade and emerald and shadow in a paved drainage ditch among brush, under great trees on asphalt thoroughfares.
Skating on.
Train cars. Overpasses. Paved embankments. Corporate architecture.
Skating past.
Mansions and freshly watered lawns. More cars.
Skating on.
Evening.
Gold still. It gilds plastic helmets, scuffed knee pads, seven- or eight-ply maple decks, skin gritty from dried sweat and California dust.
Skating on.
Night.
Sun slid from heaven, time for more child’s play.
Contorted faces. Tricycles. Prat falls. Sesame Street dolls. Skeleton body suits. Wild laughter. More skateboards.
Skating past.
A yellow shirt, khakis, blue high-tops — emerging and disappearing in darkness, under constellations stellar and electric.
I was working jobs so I could be a skateboarder. And I was thought of as a second-rate skateboarder and a clown and a blah blah blah. . . . And when you guys gave me the opportunity to be in that first video, it clicked.
— Lance Mountain, The Bones Brigade: An Autobiography
A forty-minute movie made it click. Volume One of The Bones Brigade Video Show. Filmed in 1983, released in ’84, bootlegged and studied intensely by skate rats for the rest of the Reagan administration.
Now you can watch the whole thing for free on YouTube.
It definitely gives off a UHF public access television vibe.
It’s cheesy — lots of the time intentionally, sometimes not.
First, there’s the theme song, “The Skateboard Blues.” For harmonica-heavy blues, the music itself isn’t bad. But it seems to be a poor match for a video in which Gen X skate punks are having fun skateboarding. I guess there’s some irony at work. But I suspect something else. Back to that in a minute.
Then there’s the opening. I wince even thinking about it. Stacy Peralta, former badass Z-Boy from Dogtown, sits watching the news in a comfortable chair in a dark-wood-paneled suburban den. The biggest hunk of cheese — the coup du fromage, if you will — is him half-assedly sending a pickaxe through a TV set and pulling a fully equipped Powell Peralta skateboard out of its carcass.
But, as I think I might’ve said before , Peralta had a knack for knowing what he was doing.
He knew how to sell something at a time when it looked like the product in question was all but obsolete.
Midwifed by bored surfers, more or less a toy going into the ’70s, passing through the occasional rebellious phase, the skateboard became something much more in the last few years of the disco decade: official competitions, sponsors, skate parks, t-shirts, deck companies, wheel companies, truck companies, professional skaters.
And then came the early ’80s. It was over. Skateparks got sledged. Sponsors moved on or disappeared. Poster children of vigorous, suntanned fun only five minutes ago, skaters became a menace to be shunned and harassed.
But there was Peralta, sensing an opportunity in the disaster.
It’s fair to say The Bones Brigade Video Show played a huge role in setting off the second wave — tsunami — of modern skateboarding. Although I hate to admit it, the damn thing might’ve saved skateboarding.
I’m not totally naive. Saving skateboarding for the sake of skateboarding wasn’t goal number one. Making money was.
Queue up the “Skateboard Blues” again. Not the punk rock or heavy metal or hip-hop or new wave that skaters actually skated to in the ’80s. The theme song was geared towards who would actually be forking over the lion’s share of money to Powell Peralta: suburban Boomer parents. As the blues had become by that time, so would the skateboard: safe, tame, mainstream, just shy of rock ’n’ roll.
The format Peralta chose and how he framed things were also geared to that audience. Not only did the video give off a UHF vibe; it also came across as a type of film becoming hugely popular at the time: the VHS or Betamax home movie. You could imagine it being shot by someone’s golf-shirt- and penny-loafer-wearing father. Oh, and let’s not forget that Peralta chose to start things off in a den and then on a roof of a middle-class house. Despite Peralta’s corny little pickaxe-through-the-TV bit — such a suburban dad’s idea of being rad — skateboarding was domesticated. Wholesome fun for wholesome families with wholesome wood-paneled dens.
Peralta nailed it. For the rest of the ’80s, he and George Powell practically stood in one of those plexiglass tubes with hundred-dollar bills swooshing around them. All they had to do was stick out their hands.
Okay, maybe I should cut Peralta some slack. He and Powell’s company was and still is just one diode — a tiny one — on the great motherboard of capitalism. Anyway, separating parents from their paychecks and kids from their lunch money is about as American as heart disease.
But even with all that, the video wouldn’t have worked as well as it did with the people who’d be doing the skating.
What made it click was a nineteen-year-old soon-to-be husband and father who had low self-esteem and who just wanted to skate.
Lance Mountain.
There wasn’t supposed to be a star of the show. But Mountain was, whether or not he and the other Bones Brigade members liked it.
The other guys — Steve Caballero, Mike McGill, Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen — were skating savants, perfectionists, maximalists, and natural-born athletes. They were wired for optimal performance, for winning competitions. They were demigods.
Not to say Mountain wasn’t good. He was one of the top-rated competitive skaters in the world before, during, and after modern skateboarding’s first collapse. Still, he was a different kind of skater who became one of a handful of skaters who represented a different kind of skating.
I don’t like mastering tricks. I don’t like practicing and having them down. As soon as I have them down, they feel wrong. They feel old. They feel really worthless. And there’s too much effort put in to win. . . . My general feeling is that skateboarding has nothing to do with competition or sport. It has to do with trying to stay as immature as you can for the rest of your life.
— Lance Mountain, The Bones Brigade: An Autobiography
Immature. Childish. Innocent. Naive. Infantile.
The negative connotations of those words are usually taken for granted these days.
So their root meanings — which are tied to unadulterated newness, freshness, birth, openness — aren’t of much value. They’re just not up-to-date or sophisticated enough. And unless they’re incubated and managed by the right institutions and companies, they’re too underdeveloped and untested for transmission or exchange.
That’s quite a contradiction that haunts the current social, economic, technical, scientific, cultural, political framework — a framework which prides itself on its novelty and adaptability, on being the apex of progress.
I doubt, then, I’d be going way out on a limb if I said we have a complicated relationship with childhood.
Thinking about the disputed territory of childhood drove me to re-read something I read years ago, Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood.
Bit of a disappointment, to be honest.
Part 1 is alright, even informative and interesting for reasons Postman might not have intended. Part 2 is by and large reactionary crap. I’m not sure whether I should be surprised by that or not. Insights in the first part are undercut by shallow polemics in the second.
He does make a good point in Part 1, even if it’s become something of a “No duh” since 1982. Childhood, as it’s generally thought of, is a product of socioeconomic and technological changes, such as the printing press. It emerged and developed from the Renaissance to right after the Second World War. Dividing people into economic classes — which often was determined by, or at least reflected in, literacy status — opened the door to divvying up people into age-specific subgroups according to factors other than biological age. That’s how modern childhood (adulthood, too) was born.
Postman, especially in Part 2, dances around a glaring problem. The ideal of childhood he aims to defend is a product of the “civilization” threatening it.
Going at this problem head-on would take the wind out of a pretty standard Western middle-class complaint: Civilization is degenerating, heading toward collapse and barbarism because we aren’t protecting the kids.
No doubt children, from their infancy to their teens, are treated poorly and exploited. In the US alone, just look at child poverty rates and how many children don’t receive basic medical care. Just look at how many are physically, sexually, and psychologically abused. Just look at how many are on antidepressants and harm themselves. Just look at how much the US’s multi-billion-dollar annual economy depends on stealing from young people’s nows and nows-to-come — thanks to such things as constantly increasing military expenditures and adventures, corporate tax policies, softening child labor laws, little to no concern for products’ health consequences, no promise of jobs with living wages in adulthood despite children’s service to the economy.
To pretend as if all this is a surprise in the current framework is . . . well . . . childish. But not in a good way.
With childish, as well as childhood and immature, I’d instead like to think along the lines Walter Benjamin does in “Experience and Poverty.” He comes up with “a new, positive concept of barbarism. For what does poverty of experience do for the barbarian? It forces him to start from scratch; to make a new start; to make a little go a long way; to begin with little and build up further, looking neither left nor right.”
I’m also thinking along similar lines with philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. I agree, more or less, with his argument that we human beings will hit a species-wide dead end if we don’t oblige ourselves to childhood, and to the concept of beginning that childhood implies.
This argument might sound, at first, like yet another version of the standard Western middle-class complaint.
But along with Lyotard, I’m coming at things from a different angle, with different reasons. Not “reactive, reactionary, or backward looking,” as he ventures in “The Grip.” It’s not about returning to a better time or about just surviving either. There’s something the current framework, which he calls “The System,” hasn’t accounted for. It’s “an element that all the data banks forget: the uncertain, slow resource, heavy with promise.” It’s an “immemorial infancy.” So there’s a different direction to head in because there’s a different kind of childhood in the mix. This alternative doesn’t “require the remembering and fixing in place of the infantile past,” but calls us to “bear witness” to what’s not been predetermined or co-opted yet: birth, beginning. It’s a call that can never be answered adequately; even so, it’s one that begs us to never give up answering.
But no matter how I come at childhood, I can’t sidestep the conflicted modern notion of it.
The social, economic, technical, scientific, cultural, political revolutions that brought the European medieval system to an end created functions, such as childhood, to satisfy their combined logic and needs. Over five centuries, the revolutions merged and matured, sometimes self-liquidated, to become The System.
Now, the logic and needs of The System continuously morph and complexify while also seeking maximum efficiency.
In line with that, the subdivision of human life called childhood subdivides further. Its function alters.
As if things weren’t complex enough, divisions between childhood and adulthood are shifting both upwards and downwards, becoming more pliant.
Compared to fifty or even thirty years ago, young people, as well as grownups, are needed for different purposes now. New kinds of consumers and workers for new products and new financing and new data, all for new capital and new development. The value of children today, just like every set or subset of human beings, is based on how they perform and spend their time in relation to the current operations of The System.
Neil Postman and gaggles of others haven’t been able to deal too directly with this situation because it would mean admitting that some of the things we inherited from the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and Modernity might not be quite what they’ve been cracked up to be. They haven’t exactly developed in a human-friendly manner despite — or because of — their humanism. It would also mean coming to grips with the fact that a few of our inheritances, such as the prevailing concept of childhood, have been liquidated or retooled by the Renaissance-to-Modern period’s own creation, The System.
The pursuit of greater complexity asks not for the perfecting of the Human, but its mutation or its defeat for the benefit of a better performing system.
— Jean-François Lyotard, “A Postmodern Fable”
Grab your board! Go out and be a child! (Some conditions apply.)
Skateboarding is fine as long as it performs well and spends time in ways that benefit The System. Innovation — new tricks, new skateparks, new board designs, new truck alloys, new wheel technology, new clothing styles, new niches and sub-niches — is great if it brings in new revenue and fresh ways of generating and accumulating it.
So where does that leave Lance Mountain?
On the one hand, by playing the role of a skateboarding Everyman and goofball in the ’80s, Mountain, as a paid representative of the Powell Peralta company, served The System dutifully. He — in his licensed Bones Brigade t-shirt, on his authentic Powell Peralta board — was practically a rolling sales pitch: Any schlub with mediocre-to-nil skills can kick around town in style after dropping two-hundred dollars at the nearest skate shop. Skate on, dudes! He, in other words, helped neutralize what made skating — and himself — alternative and then handed over to The System the bits it deemed useful.
On the other hand, he poked holes in The System — still does — by answering the call of the child.
And what else is left to resist with but the debt which each soul has contracted with the miserable and admirable indetermination from which it was born? . . . This debt to childhood is one which we never pay off. But it is enough not to forget it in order to resist [the inhuman system] and perhaps, not to be unjust.
— Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman
He’s rolling toward us.
The one in the yellow shirt.
Steel bearings whirring. Urethane wheels clacking over joints in the sidewalk, fault lines in the street. That’s his song.
He’s something like Pippa. He’s an innocent on the decaying streets of the latest great empire, amid masses racked by growing distress.
He’s something like Charlie Chaplin. A nothing. A no account who’s out of step with the crowd. A nobody on a pilgrimage to nowhere in particular, moving oddly across the ground.
He passes, doesn’t stop anywhere long. He does what he does, before knowing.
He won’t register as a someone to us.
We’ll just sense something happened.
It happened around when we heard a sound nearing and disappearing.
Wasn’t it like waves scraping a beach? Wasn’t it like a last train car?
It happened around when we caught a glimpse of a smudge of yellow.
A taxi? A bouquet of black-eyed Susans?
Something happened.
Something like a reprieve.
But more.