Getting the Make: Making It
From this tripartite formation of skater, urban space, and visual technology emerge ritualized modes of movement for skaters and cameras, modes that are dense with repetition and failure, and which are used to get hold of a specific event. A mei-ku, or successfully completed or landed trick, stabilizes and grounds skaterly identity and its meanings when encoded within the spectral circulations of the moving image. (The word “Mei-ku” borrows the English word “make” for Japanese skater slang.) Arising from this dense set of contingencies are haunting questions about the authorizations, authorities, and authoring that occur between the skaters behind and in front of the cameras, and between the skaters and the ethnographic lens.
On a computer in the editing studio far away from my field site of Tokyo, I play back ethnographic footage on a small viewing window arranged among four other windows. I am using Final Cut Pro, digital video editing software. Seated in front of my screen-machine, I watch a key informant, 31 year-old Koji, sitting in front of his own computer screen and illuminated in its spectral glow. He is also watching footage play back inside the same visual architecture of Final Cut Pro. Koji’s versatility with recording and editing video has made him unexpectedly visible in my own ethnographic videography; he frequently shows up in front of my camera while behind his own. Koji has been critical to my research on skateboarders in Tokyo, not only because he co-owns and manages a skateboard company, but also because he films and produces nearly all of its video content. He records hours of footage of the fledgling company’s four professional and amateur riders. He was once a promising amateur snowboarder before he suffered injuries in Colorado. This change in his physical ability led him to experiment with videography, and he began producing short snowboard videos with his friends. He then moved to Tokyo and made a skateboard video entitled Catch Me (2005), followed by Barcelogy (2007), which features Japanese skaters in the emerging skate hotspot of Barcelona. After collaborating on Barcelogy with Itoshin and Junichi, two respected pros, Koji started a skate company with them in December 2007. In the company “office”—the living room of a rented suburban home in western Tokyo where the team lives collectively amid boxes of skateboard decks and t-shirts—Koji sits in front of his screen, intensely focused. He is staring at images he has seen countless times. He leans forward, his body intimate with the machine, watching the spectacle replay on the small window before him. Koji is showing me a YouTube video of Masataka, an amateur skateboarder from Okinawa who rides for Koji’s recently formed underground skate company, Lesque. Koji has uploaded the video only days before, and he is obsessed with checking the viewing statistics. He refreshes the page and hollers in delight because a few more hits have been registered in the past few minutes.
Koji shot and edited all the footage in Masataka’s video—thirty five separate clips comprising a total of two minutes and nineteen seconds. Now that the video is in global circulation, he sits like Marx’s watchman, attending to its progress. In checking the number of hits and reading viewers’ comments, Koji returns again and again to the digital artifact, the site/sight of so much of his labor. Though filming and editing are done, he exerts more effort, attempting to assess the effects of the video on its audience so he can calibrate his next project. He nods along to the soundtrack of Mobb Deep’s “Quiet Storm,” its dark, East Coast hip hop beats filling the spare office where we sit. The short video is the culmination of hundreds of hours of work spent coordinating logistics, traveling as far as Seoul and Taipei in search of new skate spots, collaboratively preparing a trick’s choreography with Masataka at every location, and filming every attempt and the final “make,” or successful landing, of the trick. Another series of labors followed: importing and logging hours of footage, editing, negotiating with Masataka and other team riders over the final choices of tricks and their sequence, color-correcting, adding secondary sound beds with music, and then rendering and finalizing the digital file that is then uploaded to YouTube. All this effort is expended in the hope that the combination of location, filming, editing, and music choice will display and enhance Masataka’s technical skill and style on a skateboard. The goal is a sensuous image -experience powerful enough to stimulate affective responses in viewers that will in turn alchemize the magic of branded financial sponsorships from U.S. companies for Masataka. While Masataka’s movement on his skateboard is the ostensible subject here, this brief narrative outlines the labor and moving parts necessary to put the filmic skate object —whose subject is ostensibly Masataka’s movement on his skateboard—in motion across time and space. The circulation via YouTube of a locally produced visual commodity saturated with signs of authenticity is crucial in articulating Lesque’s value to the global skateboard community and, more specifically, Masataka’s value to U.S. skate companies. The camera tracking Masataka’s deft movements is certainly about commodification. The performance captured is a form of exchange: the labor of the subject’s body before the camera is returned to the viewer as confirmation of an ideal, authentic self. To see Koji and Masataka’s relations to one another, to the camera, and to the global “screen” of YouTube only in terms of labor, however, is to overlook how movement constitutes the skaterly figure, both as a commodity and as an ethnographic object.
The literal movement of the skater and the camera in the skate video illustrates Deleuze’s notion of the “whole that changes.” At the same time, it exhibits the skaters’ need for a fixed subject available for close analysis and authentication within a global network of visual skateboard artifacts. Much like Rouch’s paradoxical claims of closeness and invisibility, or Deleuze’s inversion of the relation on screen between actor and motion, these skateboarders continually work at the play of skating to create the necessary video footage that would solidify their figures and present ideal selves immobilized against the backdrop of the city even as the real bodies roll and tumble in constant motion. The imagining and subsequent performance of the supposedly immediate skateboard trick is a spatial and temporal event that demands enormous physical and improvisational energy and generates repetitive failure, often resulting in physical injury as the skater attempts to manipulate the board in and over the architecture of the city street. The skater’s attempts at a trick are repetitive not because they are a circular habit, but because of the way flowing movements of different orientations and trajectories are organized in, activated by, and felt throughout the energetic body (Deleuze 1994, 78-81. What the skaters desire, however, is to land the trick and ride away, continuing the exploratory, ebullient relationship of board, body, and city through a series of complex motions. Each attempt, bounded as it is by an incompletion or interruption of the desired telos of the landing and continued flow, is itself comprised of the body’s arriving and passing through intense arcs of motion that are understood as “failure.” This unachieved telos is in fact part of the structure of the trick, a disordered potential fraught with the risk of bodily damage that in itself constitutes a corpus of practice undergirding the authenticity of the mei-ku captured by the patiently tracking camera.
“The trick” is a kind of destination, and the desire for continuous flow drives the skater to persist in experiments involving the body, skateboard, and physical space and to endure their concomitant risks. Iain Borden emphasizes the primacy of the trick, or “move” as he terms it, in the desires of skaters who “spend perhaps more time than any other sports practitioners actually failing to do what they attempt” (121). The camera extends a field of desire that relates the skater to the space of the trick. With the extension of this field, desire is relayed back to the camera from the skater in a kind of synergy. The skater wants to be more than they are in being captured by the camera, while the quotidian indexicality of the photograph is of interest only to the police and the anthropologist (Pinney 214). While physically so destabilized, the skater longs for the camera’s unblinking focus to cut short the repetition of failure with a decisive take—a hold on the momentary experience of the mei-ku manifested through the intimate but invisible power of the camera. The constant failures in front of the lens represent repetitious time spent turning back and forth and setting up for the next shot. But they also represent accumulation, as all those attempts accrue on digital tape or as bits on chips secreted within the dark chambers of the patient cameras.
The skateboarding film desires the mei-ku for its aura of authenticity derived both from the implicit risk to the skater’s body in motion and from the unique specificity of the location. The mobile and mutable forms of visual technology exert exuberant and unrelenting force on physical bodies and conceptions of being and practice. If practices such as skateboarding have been transformed to include the specular as much as the haptic and now infuse ordinary action with the potential for ritual and spectacle, how is research practice also similarly transformed? It is not enough to suggest, as George Marcus and Michael Fischer do, that anthropology is uniquely positioned “with its ethnographic insistence on in-depth knowledge of localities and their interactions with global processes” (xxi). Anthropologists themselves are uncertainly marked by and made coherent through the visual field exerted on them in the very terrain they call their field site (xxi). The method as a “whole that changes” requires us to abandon Mead’s precious panopticons of eternally recording cameras (even though this dream persists in surveillance fantasies). The field site itself, as a space of visual action, techniques, and documents, includes the anthropologist within its autopoietic process. Among the skaters, I find my own abstract vitality synchronizing with the machines around me.
On a computer in the editing studio far away from my field site of Tokyo, I play back ethnographic footage on a small viewing window arranged among four other windows. I am using Final Cut Pro, digital video editing software. Seated in front of my screen-machine, I watch a key informant, 31 year-old Koji, sitting in front of his own computer screen and illuminated in its spectral glow. He is also watching footage play back inside the same visual architecture of Final Cut Pro. Koji’s versatility with recording and editing video has made him unexpectedly visible in my own ethnographic videography; he frequently shows up in front of my camera while behind his own. Koji has been critical to my research on skateboarders in Tokyo, not only because he co-owns and manages a skateboard company, but also because he films and produces nearly all of its video content. He records hours of footage of the fledgling company’s four professional and amateur riders. He was once a promising amateur snowboarder before he suffered injuries in Colorado. This change in his physical ability led him to experiment with videography, and he began producing short snowboard videos with his friends. He then moved to Tokyo and made a skateboard video entitled Catch Me (2005), followed by Barcelogy (2007), which features Japanese skaters in the emerging skate hotspot of Barcelona. After collaborating on Barcelogy with Itoshin and Junichi, two respected pros, Koji started a skate company with them in December 2007. In the company “office”—the living room of a rented suburban home in western Tokyo where the team lives collectively amid boxes of skateboard decks and t-shirts—Koji sits in front of his screen, intensely focused. He is staring at images he has seen countless times. He leans forward, his body intimate with the machine, watching the spectacle replay on the small window before him. Koji is showing me a YouTube video of Masataka, an amateur skateboarder from Okinawa who rides for Koji’s recently formed underground skate company, Lesque. Koji has uploaded the video only days before, and he is obsessed with checking the viewing statistics. He refreshes the page and hollers in delight because a few more hits have been registered in the past few minutes.
Koji shot and edited all the footage in Masataka’s video—thirty five separate clips comprising a total of two minutes and nineteen seconds. Now that the video is in global circulation, he sits like Marx’s watchman, attending to its progress. In checking the number of hits and reading viewers’ comments, Koji returns again and again to the digital artifact, the site/sight of so much of his labor. Though filming and editing are done, he exerts more effort, attempting to assess the effects of the video on its audience so he can calibrate his next project. He nods along to the soundtrack of Mobb Deep’s “Quiet Storm,” its dark, East Coast hip hop beats filling the spare office where we sit. The short video is the culmination of hundreds of hours of work spent coordinating logistics, traveling as far as Seoul and Taipei in search of new skate spots, collaboratively preparing a trick’s choreography with Masataka at every location, and filming every attempt and the final “make,” or successful landing, of the trick. Another series of labors followed: importing and logging hours of footage, editing, negotiating with Masataka and other team riders over the final choices of tricks and their sequence, color-correcting, adding secondary sound beds with music, and then rendering and finalizing the digital file that is then uploaded to YouTube. All this effort is expended in the hope that the combination of location, filming, editing, and music choice will display and enhance Masataka’s technical skill and style on a skateboard. The goal is a sensuous image -experience powerful enough to stimulate affective responses in viewers that will in turn alchemize the magic of branded financial sponsorships from U.S. companies for Masataka. While Masataka’s movement on his skateboard is the ostensible subject here, this brief narrative outlines the labor and moving parts necessary to put the filmic skate object —whose subject is ostensibly Masataka’s movement on his skateboard—in motion across time and space. The circulation via YouTube of a locally produced visual commodity saturated with signs of authenticity is crucial in articulating Lesque’s value to the global skateboard community and, more specifically, Masataka’s value to U.S. skate companies. The camera tracking Masataka’s deft movements is certainly about commodification. The performance captured is a form of exchange: the labor of the subject’s body before the camera is returned to the viewer as confirmation of an ideal, authentic self. To see Koji and Masataka’s relations to one another, to the camera, and to the global “screen” of YouTube only in terms of labor, however, is to overlook how movement constitutes the skaterly figure, both as a commodity and as an ethnographic object.
The literal movement of the skater and the camera in the skate video illustrates Deleuze’s notion of the “whole that changes.” At the same time, it exhibits the skaters’ need for a fixed subject available for close analysis and authentication within a global network of visual skateboard artifacts. Much like Rouch’s paradoxical claims of closeness and invisibility, or Deleuze’s inversion of the relation on screen between actor and motion, these skateboarders continually work at the play of skating to create the necessary video footage that would solidify their figures and present ideal selves immobilized against the backdrop of the city even as the real bodies roll and tumble in constant motion. The imagining and subsequent performance of the supposedly immediate skateboard trick is a spatial and temporal event that demands enormous physical and improvisational energy and generates repetitive failure, often resulting in physical injury as the skater attempts to manipulate the board in and over the architecture of the city street. The skater’s attempts at a trick are repetitive not because they are a circular habit, but because of the way flowing movements of different orientations and trajectories are organized in, activated by, and felt throughout the energetic body (Deleuze 1994, 78-81. What the skaters desire, however, is to land the trick and ride away, continuing the exploratory, ebullient relationship of board, body, and city through a series of complex motions. Each attempt, bounded as it is by an incompletion or interruption of the desired telos of the landing and continued flow, is itself comprised of the body’s arriving and passing through intense arcs of motion that are understood as “failure.” This unachieved telos is in fact part of the structure of the trick, a disordered potential fraught with the risk of bodily damage that in itself constitutes a corpus of practice undergirding the authenticity of the mei-ku captured by the patiently tracking camera.
“The trick” is a kind of destination, and the desire for continuous flow drives the skater to persist in experiments involving the body, skateboard, and physical space and to endure their concomitant risks. Iain Borden emphasizes the primacy of the trick, or “move” as he terms it, in the desires of skaters who “spend perhaps more time than any other sports practitioners actually failing to do what they attempt” (121). The camera extends a field of desire that relates the skater to the space of the trick. With the extension of this field, desire is relayed back to the camera from the skater in a kind of synergy. The skater wants to be more than they are in being captured by the camera, while the quotidian indexicality of the photograph is of interest only to the police and the anthropologist (Pinney 214). While physically so destabilized, the skater longs for the camera’s unblinking focus to cut short the repetition of failure with a decisive take—a hold on the momentary experience of the mei-ku manifested through the intimate but invisible power of the camera. The constant failures in front of the lens represent repetitious time spent turning back and forth and setting up for the next shot. But they also represent accumulation, as all those attempts accrue on digital tape or as bits on chips secreted within the dark chambers of the patient cameras.
The skateboarding film desires the mei-ku for its aura of authenticity derived both from the implicit risk to the skater’s body in motion and from the unique specificity of the location. The mobile and mutable forms of visual technology exert exuberant and unrelenting force on physical bodies and conceptions of being and practice. If practices such as skateboarding have been transformed to include the specular as much as the haptic and now infuse ordinary action with the potential for ritual and spectacle, how is research practice also similarly transformed? It is not enough to suggest, as George Marcus and Michael Fischer do, that anthropology is uniquely positioned “with its ethnographic insistence on in-depth knowledge of localities and their interactions with global processes” (xxi). Anthropologists themselves are uncertainly marked by and made coherent through the visual field exerted on them in the very terrain they call their field site (xxi). The method as a “whole that changes” requires us to abandon Mead’s precious panopticons of eternally recording cameras (even though this dream persists in surveillance fantasies). The field site itself, as a space of visual action, techniques, and documents, includes the anthropologist within its autopoietic process. Among the skaters, I find my own abstract vitality synchronizing with the machines around me.
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