Likely doubling an existing thread so point the way please and I'll delete this.
Looking for properly well written and thought out analyses ona and around skateboarding or boardsports in general. Short or long form. Gonna start off the collection with two of my faves:
Hanson O'Haver's essay that permanently changed my outlook on skateboarding (thanks Ryan Lay): https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/a-crime-and-a-pastime-ohaver
People have lamented his ignoring 70s/80s punk influences but I guess he had to limit his word count and was mainly interested in drawing a direct line from the very beginnings to the current state of skateboarding.
Kyle Beachy's essay on Jason Jesse:
https://www.freeskatemag.com/2018/06/05/primitive-progressivism-by-kyle-beachy/
I find the lack of class consciousness a little disturbing in a piece penned by a privileged academic on somebody who came from rock bottom, but can't have everything I guess. Also I'm not even sure about Beachy's and Jesse's upbringings, just assuming here.
Hanson O'Haver is a kook and a half. His piece is terrible and he has no clue what he is talking about.O’Haver’s claim that skateboarding is a libertarian activity misconstrues the activity and its participants. The author’s misreading appears to stem from a fundamental confusion between libertarianism and anarchism. The two viewpoints heavily overlap as they both center on strong individual rights and rebel against centralized authority. However, a key difference separating the two ideologies is libertarianism’s deep faith in private property and in the magic of the “free” market, and anarchism’s animus towards private property and belief in the magic of voluntary association or mutual aid.
This confusion of libertarianism and anarchism begins with the author’s first example. O’Haver states, “What business of yours is it if my friends and I want to grind on the painted curb behind the grocery store? Leave us alone. The curb became, for the skater, a fancifully deregulated zone imbued with limitless possibilities—and therefore a kind of freedom, so long as he could be left alone in his pursuits.” The skater has not turned the grocery store curb into some “deregulated zone,” – as this implies fighting the state—instead, the skaters have contested the notion of private property and redistributed a private asset for public use. Skaters are not analogous to “sovereign citizens” who are fighting government rule, but are closer to anarchist groups like the Black Banner, who aggressively attacked and appropriate property from the capitalists in pre-Soviet Russia.
Furthermore, the author seems to confuse conspiratorial solipsism with subcultural existentialism. The confusion here is at its peak when O’Haver ventures over to Peterson’s attempt to politicize the skaters’ risky practices. Peterson has not stumbled over skateboarding’s libertarian roots, the skaters are not kin with angry old men who complain about safety warnings on household items, instead they are like Norman Mailer’s hipsters of the post-war era. They are existentialists who challenge middle-class society by remaining in motion and define themselves through action. They have rejected suburbia, which they understand to be a stale and superficial world where the pursuit of money defines life and is the key measure of one’s success.
O’Haver falsely paints a picture of social world where hyper-individualistic skaters embrace a neo-Darwinian market based ideology. This is untrue. The subculture often promotes the idea of a system where individuals and skate-businesses must place the subculture above a profit motive. As Ocean Howell notes, skaters expect one another to “regularly make decisions that can only be thought of as foolish from a business perspective, decisions that are seriously irrational [and] deeply inefficient.” Moreover, the skaters have embraced the state through aggressively lobbying for public skate parks, which would be unlikely to survive within the free market. Skaters do not crave isolation. They are not bowling alone in Putnam’s late-modern nightmare. Skaters are (imperfectly) building community by skating together.
Topic: Quality critical writing on skateboarding (Read 584 times)