Stoked to Ride
He had defeated the conspiracy of architecture, the tyranny by which the buildings that women and men had built had taken control of them, circumscribed their relations, confined their movements. These monolithic products of human hands had turned on their creators, and defeated them with common sense, quietly installed themselves as rulers. They were as insubordinate as Frankenstein’s monster, but they had waged a more subtle campaign, a war of position more effective by far. (p21)
King Rat, China Mieville
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age.
“Dedications” Adrienne Rich
Skateboarding has been a central part of my life since I was 13 years old when I went with my parents to Sears and bought a “Fingerprint” deck fitted with day-glo wheels on heavy, stiff steel axles. It was an ungainly board, cheaply made to stock the shelves of mainstream retailers hoping to capitalize on the resurgent popularity of skateboarding in the mid-80s. Since my parents had fronted me the money for the deck, I wasn’t allowed to ride it till I paid them back—a sort of coat closet lay-away system intended to instill a capacity to suppress desire until it could be unleashed with a debt paid in full. Unable to resist the call of the streets however, I would sneak the board out of the closet and practice pushing on it in the driveway any time my parents weren’t around, careful to wipe down the wheels, like a burglar removing fingerprints, before nervously putting it back. After making the last payment on my parents’ convenient installment plan, I was out pushing, turning, and carving every day on the nearest side-street. In the evenings I began to fill my sketchbooks with fanciful images of skaters jousting one another with bats and chains amid industrial desolation, suitably adorned in apocalyptic fashion replete with mohawks, eye-liner, and spiked shoulder-pads. Skateboarding provoked a fantastic imaginary while infusing a new haptic intensity throughout my body. The practice of skateboarding transformed my sense of self through risk and speed as I simultaneously transformed the ordinary streets of a New Jersey town into zones of excitement, pleasure and danger. I felt skateboarding literally changing the ground beneath me along with my relations to the social world. I discovered this otherworldly sensation described by the Venice Beach, California thrash band, Suicidal Tendencies, in their 1987 song, “Possessed to Skate”: Doesn't understand why you'd wanna walk, Ain't got time to sit and talk, Used to be just like you and me, Now he's an outcast of society, Beware! He's possessed to skate! This notion of possession is something I want to return to, but at the moment I want to point out the shift from the Beach Boys as soundtrack to the popularization of surfing in the 1960s to Suicidal Tendencies in the late 80s to musically accompany skateboarding, burgeoning at the very beaches surfing took hold 20 years prior.
At the end of my first summer with a skateboard, my family and I traveled to Florida to visit my grandmother. Driving to the supermarket with my grandmother one afternoon, I spotted a battered, garishly spray-painted old school bus listing at the far edge of the parking lot, a disconcerting feature amid the careful landscaping and groomed citizens of Cocoa Beach. The bus, I realized, was the local skate shop. Thrilled and frightened at the same time—the weird bus seemed too uncannily familiar from my apocalyptic skate drawings—I climbed the steps slowly to see the institutional interior of the school bus utterly transformed into a shrine to skateboarding that only gestured towards tentative commercial enterprise. Skateboard parts were arranged religiously on long, narrow wooden tables. Skateboard decks—7-ply maple wooden planks with strange and macabre graphics—rested against the windows. For the first time I saw that “real” skaters assembled their boards with specifically chosen parts rather than buying complete boards off the shelves at Sears. Skateboarding was revealed not only as a kinesthetic practice but a collection of technical and material knowledges that informed this type of customization. An older man, with a bandana tied wide and low across his forehead, dark sunglasses on and tattoos blacking his arms, leaned towards me from a lawn chair set up in the dim rear of the bus just in front of the emergency exit. “Hey, yo, you need something?” Hesitantly, I tried to forestall his possible suspicion about my awed, uncertain attitude by explaining I’d only been skating a little while and that I was just here visiting my grandmother. In short, I wasn’t a real skater and I’d ended up inside this apparition of skateboard occult by accident. “Cool. Did you bring your stick?” the man asked warmly and I stared back, completely confused. Seeing my incomprehension, the man nearly howled, “Your board, man, your board!”
“Yeah, yeah, I did!” I blurted out immediately, my voice tripping over itself, relieved and happy to suddenly be allowed, through a fragment of slang, into this skater’s world. “Well, you should grab a mag, something to do when it rains, you know?” He gestured towards several small stacks of magazines. I picked up one that proclaimed “SKATEboarding” repeatedly down its cover, supplemented by “Transworld” in smaller type. “Yeah, that’s a good one, man. That’ll get you stoked to ride.” I descended from the bus out onto the blistering asphalt of the parking lot, holding the August, 1987 issue of Transworld Skateboarding tightly. I felt like I’d finally made contact with an elusive tribe, a tribe with which I believed I shared some deep kinesthetic kinship.
Twenty-three years later, that copy of Transworld lays open next to me as I write, its pages worn, its cover carefully taped back together. The cover is mostly taken up by the title, creating a powerful graphic pattern, followed by a small text block detailing the contents. Among the five feature articles, one resonates with meaning I never imagined as I stood outside that battered bus in a Florida parking lot. “Japan.”
The article is primarily a photo essay about a 3-week snowboarding and skating trip taken by 3 Californian men to Japan at the invitation of the owner of a board shop in Shizuoka unabashedly named “California Image.” Full page photographs feature the Americans riding skateboards down parking garages, performing tricks on the concrete embankments of the docks of Yaizu while local “fisherman brahs” look on, and snowboarding with their Japanese friends. These images are supplemented and contextualized by smaller inset photographs. One depicts the smiling, blond Americans eating sushi with their chopsticks awkwardly presented to the camera. Another small, tightly-cropped photo, placed above a skater in mid-flight, simply shows the neon entrance sign for a “Hotel Daiwa” (ホテル大和) with its mix of katakana and kanji scripts illuminated in various fonts and colors and functions to actively amplify the difference of the skater’s body and movements against a foreign landscape literally marked by public signage.
The concluding paragraph describes contact with a Japan visibly foreign through the supporting photos, is yet strangely accessible to the American riders through a shared “lifestyle” with fellow Japanese boarders. However it is a “lifestyle” with a clear geographic locus—California—a fantastic site constituting a powerful mimetic imaginary for those “elsewhere” such that a Japanese skateboard/snowboard shop in 1987 would be named “California Image.” This imaginary also seems to impart an affect of innovation and originality to the American riders. The author of the text presents the Americans as “authentic” practitioners of skating/snowboarding and representatives of a particularly Californian (and therefore original) self-fashioning achieved through creative use of skateboards and (recently developed) snowboards. As such various Japanese media sought to create representations of this “new” form and practice of (American) youth culture embodied in the visiting California riders.
My own initial encounter at 13 with the “kinesthetic tribe” of skateboard practitioners demonstrates the durable continuity between Cold-War era American media portrayals of teen-age identity marked through surfing—a board-based activity depicted as individualistic, male, and non-conformist—and a lived reality of skateboard culture at the end of the Reagan years. My first discovery of skateboard commerce, media, and kinship was within the homosocial space of the repurposed school bus turned skateshop, as markedly masculine as any storied locker room. Yet the skateshop-bus was also alive with a kind of deviant potential to short-circuit normative, adult masculinity, signified by the very physical “capture” and alteration of the school bus—that vehicle of standardized education—into a Peter Pan sanctuary of the “suburban counterimaginary.” The older, tattooed owner provoked an immediate and radical revision of my understanding of skateboarding: a) it wasn’t something that could be authentically acquired at a mainstream store like Sears, b) it probably was going to cause a rupture in my blood-family if this was the sort of “elder” I was now related to through skateboarding’s “blood-sport,” c) further, it offered a distinct space of difference from my family and my classmates with its exclusive knowledge, argot, and ritual as marked in the tattoos. It also clearly marked out an accessible form of alternative masculinity vectored through a body practice coded as childish, marginal, and deviant, without even the (il)legitimacy of some sort of petty crime or mechanical insurgency in the way that street and motorcycle gangs were, ahem, endowed and allowed. The skaters/snowboarders pictured in the “Japan” article and the earlier depiction of surf rebels in Gidget represent mediated forms of a homosocial world that extends beyond a “counterimaginary” to a youth imaginary of becoming, haunting the circuits of global capital in the form of “lifestyle” practices. These practices are brought into valorized visibility through conventional state/corporate media (as in the numerous Hollywood films featuring skateboarders and surfers) but are also narrated from within the media scape of the boarders themselves, those who understand themselves sharing in a practice that conjures within the global spirit world of the youth imaginary and is materialized at the most immediate level of body and space. Understanding how this double spatial/material consciousness functions and produces affective and ideological changes among Japanese skaters is part of the task of this dissertation.
With attention to media, spatiality and mimesis, Sonny Miller, the author of the Transworld text, closes his brief essay by self-consciously affirming the centrality of California as an (counter)cultural imaginary haptically experienced through the intense body practices of skateboarding and snowboarding. Riders in Japan share in “lifestyle” actively reproduced to “reflect the California image.” Miller is clearly giving a shout-out to the shop that invited him and his friends over, but folding the meaning over once again to position himself as an authentic, situated figure capable of transmitting and representing a practice of California youth culture through global circuits.
King Rat, China Mieville
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age.
“Dedications” Adrienne Rich
Skateboarding has been a central part of my life since I was 13 years old when I went with my parents to Sears and bought a “Fingerprint” deck fitted with day-glo wheels on heavy, stiff steel axles. It was an ungainly board, cheaply made to stock the shelves of mainstream retailers hoping to capitalize on the resurgent popularity of skateboarding in the mid-80s. Since my parents had fronted me the money for the deck, I wasn’t allowed to ride it till I paid them back—a sort of coat closet lay-away system intended to instill a capacity to suppress desire until it could be unleashed with a debt paid in full. Unable to resist the call of the streets however, I would sneak the board out of the closet and practice pushing on it in the driveway any time my parents weren’t around, careful to wipe down the wheels, like a burglar removing fingerprints, before nervously putting it back. After making the last payment on my parents’ convenient installment plan, I was out pushing, turning, and carving every day on the nearest side-street. In the evenings I began to fill my sketchbooks with fanciful images of skaters jousting one another with bats and chains amid industrial desolation, suitably adorned in apocalyptic fashion replete with mohawks, eye-liner, and spiked shoulder-pads. Skateboarding provoked a fantastic imaginary while infusing a new haptic intensity throughout my body. The practice of skateboarding transformed my sense of self through risk and speed as I simultaneously transformed the ordinary streets of a New Jersey town into zones of excitement, pleasure and danger. I felt skateboarding literally changing the ground beneath me along with my relations to the social world. I discovered this otherworldly sensation described by the Venice Beach, California thrash band, Suicidal Tendencies, in their 1987 song, “Possessed to Skate”: Doesn't understand why you'd wanna walk, Ain't got time to sit and talk, Used to be just like you and me, Now he's an outcast of society, Beware! He's possessed to skate! This notion of possession is something I want to return to, but at the moment I want to point out the shift from the Beach Boys as soundtrack to the popularization of surfing in the 1960s to Suicidal Tendencies in the late 80s to musically accompany skateboarding, burgeoning at the very beaches surfing took hold 20 years prior.
At the end of my first summer with a skateboard, my family and I traveled to Florida to visit my grandmother. Driving to the supermarket with my grandmother one afternoon, I spotted a battered, garishly spray-painted old school bus listing at the far edge of the parking lot, a disconcerting feature amid the careful landscaping and groomed citizens of Cocoa Beach. The bus, I realized, was the local skate shop. Thrilled and frightened at the same time—the weird bus seemed too uncannily familiar from my apocalyptic skate drawings—I climbed the steps slowly to see the institutional interior of the school bus utterly transformed into a shrine to skateboarding that only gestured towards tentative commercial enterprise. Skateboard parts were arranged religiously on long, narrow wooden tables. Skateboard decks—7-ply maple wooden planks with strange and macabre graphics—rested against the windows. For the first time I saw that “real” skaters assembled their boards with specifically chosen parts rather than buying complete boards off the shelves at Sears. Skateboarding was revealed not only as a kinesthetic practice but a collection of technical and material knowledges that informed this type of customization. An older man, with a bandana tied wide and low across his forehead, dark sunglasses on and tattoos blacking his arms, leaned towards me from a lawn chair set up in the dim rear of the bus just in front of the emergency exit. “Hey, yo, you need something?” Hesitantly, I tried to forestall his possible suspicion about my awed, uncertain attitude by explaining I’d only been skating a little while and that I was just here visiting my grandmother. In short, I wasn’t a real skater and I’d ended up inside this apparition of skateboard occult by accident. “Cool. Did you bring your stick?” the man asked warmly and I stared back, completely confused. Seeing my incomprehension, the man nearly howled, “Your board, man, your board!”
“Yeah, yeah, I did!” I blurted out immediately, my voice tripping over itself, relieved and happy to suddenly be allowed, through a fragment of slang, into this skater’s world. “Well, you should grab a mag, something to do when it rains, you know?” He gestured towards several small stacks of magazines. I picked up one that proclaimed “SKATEboarding” repeatedly down its cover, supplemented by “Transworld” in smaller type. “Yeah, that’s a good one, man. That’ll get you stoked to ride.” I descended from the bus out onto the blistering asphalt of the parking lot, holding the August, 1987 issue of Transworld Skateboarding tightly. I felt like I’d finally made contact with an elusive tribe, a tribe with which I believed I shared some deep kinesthetic kinship.
Twenty-three years later, that copy of Transworld lays open next to me as I write, its pages worn, its cover carefully taped back together. The cover is mostly taken up by the title, creating a powerful graphic pattern, followed by a small text block detailing the contents. Among the five feature articles, one resonates with meaning I never imagined as I stood outside that battered bus in a Florida parking lot. “Japan.”
The article is primarily a photo essay about a 3-week snowboarding and skating trip taken by 3 Californian men to Japan at the invitation of the owner of a board shop in Shizuoka unabashedly named “California Image.” Full page photographs feature the Americans riding skateboards down parking garages, performing tricks on the concrete embankments of the docks of Yaizu while local “fisherman brahs” look on, and snowboarding with their Japanese friends. These images are supplemented and contextualized by smaller inset photographs. One depicts the smiling, blond Americans eating sushi with their chopsticks awkwardly presented to the camera. Another small, tightly-cropped photo, placed above a skater in mid-flight, simply shows the neon entrance sign for a “Hotel Daiwa” (ホテル大和) with its mix of katakana and kanji scripts illuminated in various fonts and colors and functions to actively amplify the difference of the skater’s body and movements against a foreign landscape literally marked by public signage.
The concluding paragraph describes contact with a Japan visibly foreign through the supporting photos, is yet strangely accessible to the American riders through a shared “lifestyle” with fellow Japanese boarders. However it is a “lifestyle” with a clear geographic locus—California—a fantastic site constituting a powerful mimetic imaginary for those “elsewhere” such that a Japanese skateboard/snowboard shop in 1987 would be named “California Image.” This imaginary also seems to impart an affect of innovation and originality to the American riders. The author of the text presents the Americans as “authentic” practitioners of skating/snowboarding and representatives of a particularly Californian (and therefore original) self-fashioning achieved through creative use of skateboards and (recently developed) snowboards. As such various Japanese media sought to create representations of this “new” form and practice of (American) youth culture embodied in the visiting California riders.
The time flew by quickly and before we knew it, we were counting down our departure. In our three week stay, we competed in a freestyle event (and done well), been photographed in action by almost every surf and ski magazine, were filmed for a four-and-a-half minute feature on the national news, and most of all shared our riding with many friendly snowboarders who by the end of our trip were good friends. The surf/skate/snow lifestyle is growing strong in Japan and reflects the California image.It is imperative to point out the uninterrupted masculinist hegemony of this “lifestyle” and the intensely homosocial connections and friendships it is capable of producing in mobile communities across the Pacific Rim to the extent that the focus on male body performance effortlessly removes any trace of female presence. The Japan encountered in this “lifestyle” adventure is completely depopulated of women—when ordinary onlookers do appear in the background of photographs, they themselves are part of a mobile working-class brotherhood of fishermen constituted out of global labor. The skateboarding/snowboarding culture that organizes energies and meanings while regulating its value to and for certain gendered bodies appears to have effectively implemented a fully segregated space of spectacular male physicality and trans-cultural flows. In fact the entire issue of the magazine does not show a single woman as spectator let alone atop a board. This exclusive homosocial cross-cultural community strikingly recalls and reinstantiates the male counter-cultural world of the surfer gang in the 1959 Hollywood film, Gidget. Against the considerable force of a “deadening maturity” in Cold War-era America, Leerom Medovoi describes the young male surfers in retreat from the normative, turning from “a dismal future as white-collared professional men and tract home husbands” to the beaches activated as “a free zone of male camaraderie divorced from materialist and domestic ‘goals’” (Medovoi 2005, 296).
Sonny Miller, Transworld Skateboarding, August 1987, p. 71.
My own initial encounter at 13 with the “kinesthetic tribe” of skateboard practitioners demonstrates the durable continuity between Cold-War era American media portrayals of teen-age identity marked through surfing—a board-based activity depicted as individualistic, male, and non-conformist—and a lived reality of skateboard culture at the end of the Reagan years. My first discovery of skateboard commerce, media, and kinship was within the homosocial space of the repurposed school bus turned skateshop, as markedly masculine as any storied locker room. Yet the skateshop-bus was also alive with a kind of deviant potential to short-circuit normative, adult masculinity, signified by the very physical “capture” and alteration of the school bus—that vehicle of standardized education—into a Peter Pan sanctuary of the “suburban counterimaginary.” The older, tattooed owner provoked an immediate and radical revision of my understanding of skateboarding: a) it wasn’t something that could be authentically acquired at a mainstream store like Sears, b) it probably was going to cause a rupture in my blood-family if this was the sort of “elder” I was now related to through skateboarding’s “blood-sport,” c) further, it offered a distinct space of difference from my family and my classmates with its exclusive knowledge, argot, and ritual as marked in the tattoos. It also clearly marked out an accessible form of alternative masculinity vectored through a body practice coded as childish, marginal, and deviant, without even the (il)legitimacy of some sort of petty crime or mechanical insurgency in the way that street and motorcycle gangs were, ahem, endowed and allowed. The skaters/snowboarders pictured in the “Japan” article and the earlier depiction of surf rebels in Gidget represent mediated forms of a homosocial world that extends beyond a “counterimaginary” to a youth imaginary of becoming, haunting the circuits of global capital in the form of “lifestyle” practices. These practices are brought into valorized visibility through conventional state/corporate media (as in the numerous Hollywood films featuring skateboarders and surfers) but are also narrated from within the media scape of the boarders themselves, those who understand themselves sharing in a practice that conjures within the global spirit world of the youth imaginary and is materialized at the most immediate level of body and space. Understanding how this double spatial/material consciousness functions and produces affective and ideological changes among Japanese skaters is part of the task of this dissertation.
With attention to media, spatiality and mimesis, Sonny Miller, the author of the Transworld text, closes his brief essay by self-consciously affirming the centrality of California as an (counter)cultural imaginary haptically experienced through the intense body practices of skateboarding and snowboarding. Riders in Japan share in “lifestyle” actively reproduced to “reflect the California image.” Miller is clearly giving a shout-out to the shop that invited him and his friends over, but folding the meaning over once again to position himself as an authentic, situated figure capable of transmitting and representing a practice of California youth culture through global circuits.
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