@TheLurper Okay, I dug up the Ocean quote I mentioned before, there are two, both from “Poetics of Security”. My beef with his characterization of skateboarding as apolitical does speak to the trope you mentioned of “not seeing color,” but I have too much to say on that subject to include it here. I definitely appreciate the parallel though, and yes, I see color in all its iniquity.
“Skateboarding […] is a young urban counterculture that admirably seeks to challenge power relations and less admirably seeks to escape from them.” p.3
Ocean Howell, Poetics of security
Typically a challenge is something that requires fortitude, maybe even courage, work, and sacrifice. An escape on the other hand offers pleasure at little personal cost or just the avoidance of something unpleasant. I agree with Ocean that skateboarding is a bit of both, but I take exception to the paternalistic characterization of escape as “less admirable”. To take it one step further, I see the overt challenge of social norms as the true element of escapism in skateboarding, and the sustained escape from those norms as the true challenge. Follow me as I dive into the Wreck like Adrienne Rich.
When you stop doing something you enjoy in favour of devoting yourself to what you are told are your “responsibilities”, it seems natural that the previous, enjoyable activity will come to appear as an escape. But this is true of anything, not just skateboarding. For example, my friend Bassam dreamed of being a doctor and fought his way into medical school, but then his uncles and mother pressured him into returning to Lahore to take over the family import-export business. Now he moans about the good old days, reminiscing on the late nights spent cramming for anatomy finals, as though those were the carefree salad days- and to him they were. What this example is supposed to suggest, is that escape is defined not so much by the nature of a given activity, but by the alignment of said activity with one’s interests and values.
In a nutshell, escape is measured by the sense of freedom it provides, and skateboarding by many accounts provides a sense of freedom. So why ever stop? For most skaters, it’s the inability to find acceptance or status that makes them hang it up. At a certain point they want to be treated like full-fledged members of society, like adults, like parents, like professionals, and that boilstheoceanhowell down to one thing: money.
Almost every pro spotlight interview in the old Transworlds’ said something like:
“my parents and the peeps at school
my skating didn’t get respect
until I did get paid and sent
around the world so
now they think it’s cool.”
Okay, but the vast majority of street skaters will never receive any kind of financial or social remuneration for their skating. In fact, the more time they spend street skating, the less likely their prospects of succeeding in the “real” world become. For every monetized skater with their own brand of coconut water, there are a million skaters who eventually “grow up” (ie. conform to normalized modes of value production such as making money and knowing about craft beer). Past a certain point, most quit or drift into the skatepark where they can maintain a certain respectability as consumer-citizens by posing no challenge to the status quo.
The longer you go as just an average street skater, the more stigmatized you become, as failing to live up to your social responsibilities. At 20, if you spend 8 hours a day out skating, when your parents friends ask “what do you do?” you can say you’re between things or some cockamamy nonsense, but at 40, the honest answer to that question in their eyes is probably “nothing.” Obviously it depends on the people, these are gross generalities I’m dealing in.
If you’re buying this so far, you may be asking why the greying, minimum-wage earning, middle-aged dood (hello fellow kids) with a late nineties trick selection that I’ve described is anything to be admired. I don’t know that they are, but I also don’t think they deserve to be singled out as less admirable than those who gave up on freedom in order to perpetually re-create the capitalist superstructure. And what else is it, when your life is predicated on earning a better wage, a better position, better benefits, bigger house, better school for your kids, etc. As individuals we can claim to have whatever noble values we want, but as countries, as citizens, our economic and political policies reflect an obsession with wealth accumulation above all else. And these systems are inherently competitive, breeding classism, ethnocentrism, and racism. The slave and non-union labour that allowed our countries to thrive and flourish aren’t an aberration in an otherwise just system, they’re yesterday’s grist in a capitalist pyramid scheme that we’re still every bit as committed to today.
I think it’s a good experience to feel like an outcast or a badass a little bit when you’re young, to understand that the cops aren’t there to serve and protect so much as to maintain social norms. But that’s a relatively easy experience to survive and move past. Shit, you could take that minimal outsider perspective and turn it into a master’s thesis if you were so inclined. But as I said before, the type of overt critique offered up by this type of activity is itself a form of escapism. Making art or any type of commodity out of an experience is a form of escapism: it’s an intellectualized, selective account that serves specific ends and can be bent at will. By contrast, the act of skateboarding remains unflinching and unromantic. When you haven’t done it in awhile it’s a little shocking how much it still hurts. I think it’s fair to say that for most people, to skate through life is idealistic, maybe unrealistic. But living your ideals and swimming out into your dreams till you can’t see the land anymore or find your way back, it isn’t easy and it isn’t less than admirable and it isn’t some tacit capitulation.
“Skateboarders are not interested in transformative politics, and the culture has little potential in that arena. Skateboarding hints at the possibility of a more spontaneous and ‘non-alienated’ experience of the city, but only obliquely.” p.21
Ocean Howell, Poetics of security
This was the other quote but I’m tired and it’s pretty similar anyway. I would have said something about politics as praxis vs. politics as theory.
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