Leerom Medovoi uses the term “suburban counterimaginary” to describe the “beaches of the Pacific” in relation to the young, male surfers in the 1960's teen film, Gidget, and their desire for a space wherein to self-fashion a resistant alternative to the Fordist teleology of post-war American adulthood, an adulthood signified in the stultifying tract housing of the burgeoning suburbs (Medovoi 2005, 296). I apply the term here to skate culture and its reassignment of a zone of youthful independence from the “beaches of the Pacific” to North American streets. I recognize Medovoi’s use of the term is loosely applied to spatial sites represented in popular media. My reassignment recognizes the immediate line of descent from surfing to skateboarding as linked body practices with shared (or mutated!) counter-cultural aura. This aura is evident in Noel Black’s 1965 film, Skaterdater, the first cinematic depiction of a skateboard lifestyle that features a gang of young, male skaters who ultimately lose their leader when he “grows up” by falling in love with a girl. The rebel image of skateboarders as (often younger) (sub)urban variants of surfers continued in later filmic representations including Thrashin’ (1986) (“Hot. Reckless. Totally Insane.”), Gleaming the Cube (1989), and Destroying America (2000) (featuring Eric Estrada! His cop car gets blown up!). This surfing heritage is clearly evidenced by early skateboarders/surfers actively attempting to mimic the movements of surfing. Peter Dixon makes this link explicitly in his 1965 The Complete Book of Surfing, “Skateboards have captured the imagination of thousands of pre-surfers and inlanders who want to experience the thrill of surfing” (Dixon 1965,155). Dixon’s summation of skateboarding’s haptic appeal was echoed in the 1964 Jan and Dean song, “Sidewalk Surfin’.” Iain Borden devotes considerable attention to this kinship, focusing on architecture, “microcartography,” and body-imaging. Surfing pre-figured not only a desire for verticality and smooth arcs but techniques of the body, “includ[ing] touching the bank surface as if the surf-skater were trailing the hand in watery spray” (Borden 2001, 32). With the growing popularity of skateboarding in the 70s, skateparks were constructed with terrain intended to provide an approximate sensation of riding waves—a relation mimetically acknowledged in the names of parks such as “Concrete Wave,” “Pipeline,” and “Paved Wave.” A distinction, or rather, departure, must be made, however, between ocean surfing and the concrete imitators and thus the borrowing of the ideological and embodied spaces of the counterimaginary. “Through surf-related moves, skaters recombined body, board, and terrain, simultaneously copying one activity (surfing) while initiating a second (skateboarding)…This was an attempt to produce from second nature [modernist space] those things which became scarce in capitalism: first nature, air water, land, light” (ibid, 33). See Chapter 3 in Borden’s Skateboarding, Space, and the City for a further discussion of this genealogy.

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