Medovoi uses the term “suburban counterimaginary” to describe the “beaches of the Pacific” in relation to the young, male surfers in 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) urban 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). 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. See Iain Borden’s Skateboarding, Space, and the City for a further discussion of this genealogy.

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