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Anything at All: Tempe

(The following is the benediction I read prior to the reading on February 17, 2023, that featured Jim Thiebaud, Marbie Miller, Alex White, Christian Kerr, Yelyah Miller, Adam Burns / Jokamundo, Cole Nowicki, José Vadi, and Chandler Burton as Titus.)

Hello, everyone. If I could just get your attention for a minute…I’d like to begin with a real simple group exercise if that’s alright.

Imagine, please, a heart that is also a house. That’s it. Imagine a heart that is also a house.

Imagine a heart that is also a house that is also, sorry, one more step, a nation.

Imagine a house that is is also a nation that is also, of course, a heart.

Imagine this house is also a city, and also a house, and also a nation. Imagine the house is also a hovel, a tent, a castle, a nest. Imagine a heart is also a nation, a city, a borough, a town. 

Now, imagine the people inside of this house. Imagine their fingers and fears, their silverware and sorrows, imagine their people things. Imagine they live inside of this house doing their people things. They feel and bleed and murder and fuck, they give and need and take and bleed, and they wonder, at times, about this house that is also a city and also a heart.

They wonder if it’s okay to bleed as they do, or fuck as they like, or feel about murder the ways that they feel, and they’re definitely very good at feeling alone. They wonder of gods and the stories they’ve heard, they wonder if houses can even be hearts, or cities, or nations, or homes. 

They murder and die and wonder and bleed…and because there is blood, there is endless blood, they speak of the blood, and speak of the fucking, and tell to themselves what we might call stories, and tell to themselves what might call blessings. They write prayers to gods to tell them their stories, they pray to gods and beseech them to listen, they pray and tremble in their bones.

But the gods, my friends, have no interest in stories, because gods have no concept of time. The gods have no after, they have no before, so why would they care? Why would they even listen? It’s no wonder we feel so alone.  

Sorry, sorry. I’m sorry. Here: Imagine a heart that is also house, and remember the people things. Imagine a person who overhears a story and in it discovers a home. Imagine a heart that is the story that passes from speaker to crowd.

Can we imagine that the soul, the human soul, is itself a matter of time? Imagine the soul is not an idea, or even a matter of gods. Imagine the soul is a human thing, a story that passes like time. Imagine the soul that passes as story between you the people you're not. 

Imagine the soul is a thing that happens, each time that a story is told. Imagine the soul is what lingers of story what lingers beyond its own time. Imagine that death is not an ending, imagine a house is a home. 

Imagine the heart that is a city that is a house that is also this place, here. Imagine the blood that flows through this city imagine the people you're not. Inside the house that is also a nation, inside this place flooding with blood. You, I can see, my friend, are bleeding, and you, I can hear, my friend are screaming. Please trust, friend, that I am too. Around us flows blood unlike any we've known, and tonight this place is our home. 

My friend you are bloody, my friend I can see you, my friend you are also my home. Around us flows blood, and the gods are long gone, but in truth, there is no alone. Tonight we are here, and between us pass souls, and between us this blood is our own.

Time is religion. Stories, our scripture. So welcome, my friends, to church.

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toward a poetics of skateboarding

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

—Roger Angell

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Catching up with some of the interviews that came out in the wake of the book, for anyone inclined...

Agree, yeah. A state of mind that shapes perception of the world around us and works reflexively to inform our embodied navigation of space and time. So, a state of mind that relies on and is inseparable from a state of body. And this is why a phenomenological approach to selfhood, an intentional consciousness, is so useful to understanding skateboarding. To someone like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to exist is to be a body thrown into the world and asked to perceive, respond to, and inhabit that world. One is never finished with our work of existence, the activity of becoming. Hubert Dreyfus speaks of selfhood and coping skills, by which “my experience with things shows up in the look of the thing.” The more the self learns, the more nuanced and detailed that self’s perceptions and skills, which in turn make the world look richer with possibility for action. “My knowledge isn’t in me,” says Dreyfus, “my knowledge of the chair is in the increasing richness…of my encounter with the chair.” That, more or less, is the stuff of skateboarding. I’ll add that it’s wildly disorienting to see Gonz wearing DC shoes, like some kind of violation. I love it.

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Bronze 56k, The Reuben (2021) 

At a festival a few months back, I found myself talking to a filmmaker named Peter from New York or New Jersey, one of them. He was wearing a Bronze pullover, like a half-zip windbreaker, and I hedged for a bit then finally asked. He smiled. No—well, sort of, since he does do some work with Bronze, but he knew what I meant. He was not Bronze Peter Bronze Peter. And what relief I felt! What would I have said to Peter Sidlauskas? What can anyone say about his Bronze videos that his Bronze videos don’t already say about us?

Certainly I wouldn’t have tried to untangle the ragged threads of exclusion and stupor and pure colorful splendor they make me feel. Certainly I wouldn’t have raised a hand to gently cup his cheek and say, So, you are human after all! After all, what other filmmaker with such unmistakable style has so successfully denied their own authorship? His films seem to have been sculpted, meticulously, to feel as if they’ve amassed naturally, like organic discharge through the very colon of American culture. I mean that they feel inevitable, symptomatic, and cause for much joyful relief. 

They blur a bit for me, okay, I can admit, but in this fuzziness I catch myself imagining the impossible—that the Bronze series will go on forever, every year a new frenetic volume of east-leaning North-Americans, some wearing hats and all dressed for the occasion, boys and men (can girls skate for Bronze?) collecting New York clips to mix with road clips, it’s a big country full of spots and it’s always a hoot seeing New Yorkers out of place. Dick Rizzo, god bless you. Mark Humenick, excellent. Shanahan, always. But mainly, Peter, if you’re really out there, please keep these coming.

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Just a few hours left before this gem of an event goes live. So, skateTumblr, if you haven’t heard go check this out now. Chicago time 7pm.

Prof Kyle Beachy, Alexis Sablone, and Mark Gonzales at the Gray Center.

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Servold, Bachelard, and Three Unnamed Children

Perfection is the thirteen-second clip that comes about three minutes into a film you could easily forget was released in 2020, Emerica’s Green. The skater is Dakota Servold dressed in all black but for his belt. He does three tricks on a narrow and pretty obviously non-American sidewalk through one of those small shared outdoor spaces that European apartment buildings are so good at. It’s an Oz-like yellow pathway of small squares that rattle under Servold’s and the filmer’s wheels and there’s an incline, the path drops and flattens as it leads through the grass and toward a set of stairs. The lawn is a deep, verdant green with trees in planters on one side and shrubs lining the building on the other. Fallen yellow leaves dot the yard.

He lands a fakie three-sixty-flip and swerves twice along the narrow path’s grade before regaining control just as it levels out. Momentum carries him through the path’s crook and he sets up for a clean and high-speed half-cab flip. Then he pushes twice, moving now very fast indeed, and crouches, digs in his back foot, and pops a back lip down a handrail made of narrow piping. As the camera brakes at the stairway’s top, Servold lands on top of some kind of manhole, and the shot cuts just as he’s about to collide with the bike rack against another apartment building.

But look at the three German children running alongside the path! Two have long blonde hair, one is in a dress, and the third, a boy, leads the pack. There’s an ongoingness to their running at the clip’s start, and soon the one in the blue dress falls out of the shot, and then the second one, with the ponytail, and meanwhile the third boy is fastest, barely keeping up as Servold powers toward the rail, but he fades too, leaving only Servold, the stairs, the back lip.

The more that I watch this clip, the more it feels to me like a small miracle of framing and motion. Only once at the very outset does any of Servold’s body leave the frame—some of his right arm on the fakie-three—and yet we never feel a distance. We could touch him if we wanted, just by reaching, except somehow these children are in the frame too, the lawn and whatever game they believe they’re playing. It’s an open shot, and inviting, but close enough to see the wear on Servold’s right shoe. There is nothing that quite wears-in like an Emerica, after all, and in fact the entirety of Green functions as a kind of reminder to the shoe-buying world that it’s not over yet, or not quite, for skater-owned shoe companies.

“Every border,” wrote Ayesha Siddiqi, “implies the violence of its maintenance.” It is true that the upkeep of skateboarding’s borders has demanded the kind of exclusionary harm that we’ve learned to diagnose (and in some cases, treat) as gatekeeping. It is also meanwhile 100% true that there is something one feels while watching Green that one doesn’t while watching, say, a RedBull skate video, or many of the edits that come tumbling out of the big footwear tubes. Though it’s also become harder and harder to talk about this stuff, largely because the blurred and confounding status of skateboarding’s once fairly defined borders.

In a late chapter of The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard confronts the “profound metaphysics” of the outside / inside dialectic, the language of which is everywhere we look, each use of which “confers spatiality upon thought.” Over the years, as skaters have spoken in terms of “core” or “endemic culture,” we have abided by what Bachelard, quoting Jean Hyppolite, calls, “a first myth of outside and inside.” Can any of us belong to anything without defining that belonging by such a spatial metaphor? It is difficult. And it is a challenge faced by any community that is set off somehow from a broader population, any tribe or nation, any single self facing any single other. One wants belonging to have meaning, after all—meaning is the reward that belonging confides.

Our skate borders, by now, have been as gerrymandered as any in the US. The original “SB” in Nike SB was a message to skate retail outlets and their niche consumers—a gesture to distinguish between us and general athletes, a nod to both the specific needs of skaters and our specific commitment to style. It felt, back then, a little like respect. Over time, this respect was enough for Nike SB to leap from the confines of the skateshop into the broader marketplace. Along the way, “SB” morphed from request to claim, a credentialed bit of rhetoric in an argument that has, by now, achieved something like meaninglessness —what does it mean for Travis Scott and the Grateful Dead to have their names attached to an “SB” shoe? Truly: who fucking cares. In any case, “SB” means less to those of us who identify as “skaters,” surely, than whatever it means to those who don’t.

Did you read, earlier this year, Ariana Gil’s article, “The Best Don’t Get Caught: The Case of Supreme,” in Cultured Magazine? By now Supreme’s been sold again, the topic is exhausting, but Gil’s treatment of “one of the most mythical brands of all time” diagnoses with icy precision some hard truths about our little word. Gil turns to a framework proposed by new media scholar McKenzie Wark that treats branding as a third, complicating entry into the historic model of two dominant economic classes, capitalists and workers. A brand, so it goes, achieves its unified commodity value through the production of information vectors based on narrative and image data. Gil paints Supreme’s brand vector since its founding in 1994 as a balance of cool exclusion and delinquency, a pastiche that draws from homelessness, unemployment, and other unproductive activities, “from kicking wood to smoking dope to graffiti,” all of which become productive to Supreme’s own valuation. As a result, “what was once an ‘insiders’ club of self-identified ���outsiders’” became, quite suddenly in 2017, a billion-dollar company when half of it was purchased by The Carlyle Group, the largest private equity group in the world. 

Back to skateboarding, how about? Maybe, like me, you are equal parts intrigued and enraged by the current incarnation of Bill Strobeck. In 2015 I wrote that Ty Evans films skateboards, Greg Hunt films skate spots, and Strobeck films skateboarders, brutalizing the zoom function of a new generation of HD cameras to insist upon us a series of fingernails, blemishes, and other details of embodiment. By Candyland, that body interest reached a new level, and came at the cost of spots and tricks and also, regarding women and non-binary/genderqueer people on the street, basic human respect.

And so, a valuable exercise in forcing the question of just what exactly it is we're watching when we watch a skate video: body, board, spot, contextual noise that surrounds spot, and so on. Bill's gaze has a long history of being real good with skateboarders in motion but sometimes creepy and maybe sexist and definitely adolescent. And to my eyes, it’s never felt more like a prison than in Candyland. Which is a thing worth recalling—the myriad gazes so central to our consumption of skateboard media, the many thousand cameras in our pockets, are extensions of the tastes and values and aesthetics of whoever holds them. It is the obvious reason why a film of girls and women and nonbinary skaters shot by Shari White feels different—Shari’s camera does not leer—a point obvious but no less important for its obviousness.

Which all makes a clip like Dakota Servold’s three-trick line among socialized housing somewhere in Germany feel like a revelation. Green opens with a shot of Emerica shoes—a minor secret about Emericas at this point: the model does not matter; whatever the specifics of toe box and side paneling, they are all the same model and it is “the Emerica”—landing on the blacktop inside of a just-hopped Californian fence. And by virtue of necessary budget limitations and/or brand ethos, Green is a California video to the core, built of red curbs and palm trees and schoolyard blacktops. Having lost the twenty-year face of their brand, post-Reynolds Emerica exhibits no anxiety or insecurity, no desire to venture laterally or cater to anyone beyond their established demographic. And yet somehow, despite most of them being white dudes cut from the same motorcycling and flanneled and long-haired cloth, Green’s two song’s-worth of montage without name titles results in no confusion—you can mostly tell who they are! Jon Dickson continues his interpolation of a heftier, dockhand or mechanic version of Dylan Rieder, and it is both a powerful ode and powerful in itself, a reckless and gruff Dylan echo, stunning to behold.

And tucked amongst all of this denim and flannel and leather and hair, all the wearing and the tearing, we’ve got three German children running to keep up in the far right of a widescreen, high-definition frame. What a thing to be able to watch immediately on the heels of noticing Servold’s worn-out shoe. What a richness.

It brings me to that way of seeing we call “naturalism,” and turning once again to Annie Dillard, who wrote as well as anyone about the natural world. “I would like to know grasses and sedges—and care,” she tells us. Elsewhere, she has “just learned to see praying mantis egg cases. Suddenly I see them everywhere.” This is not a matter of theory or even comprehension, in fact what Dillard celebrates in her nature writing often has little to do with “meaning” at all. Dillard’s project is about metaphor as a tool to describe what is seen and what resists language. It is the enrichening of her lived experience that can only come of her learned competence. Of not just knowing but also caring, and from these two experiences becoming even more engaged. And so the cycle spins with each new level of engagement reverberating back into the body where knowledge and care live, an increasing richness of living.

People who have skateboarded long enough know that skateboarding, too, works this way. Seeing and caring work in tandem and echo. To care more about skateboard media is to change the way the body goes out and does it.

The filming of Emerica’s Green is not artful exactly but artfully proficient. In Tim Cisolino’s hands, the camera moves but does not jerk. The skaters and spots are framed deliberately. In Germany, following behind Dakota Servold, that means a wide-angle shot that holds space for the children to run alongside and play through the grass. It is a brief sequence, thirteen seconds out of a nineteen-minute film, that presents of speed and sound and several human bodies moving through the world. Of shoes that have been worn long enough to show wear. Under pressure as the last defense against Nike and Adidas and New Balance, Emerica’s choice was to turn to the viewer and encourage each of us to see what we could. Emerica know what we expect of them, and we know they know that we know, and so on. Were it any other relationship, we would call this intimacy. 

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Urban Pamphleteer #8: Skateboardings

This is a great project and I am happy to announce that it is freely available to read and download at the Urban Pamphleteer site. This occasional publication is a must for all urbanists and people interested in the various cultural aspects of urban life.

Back in 2018 after the first Pushing Boarders event, two of the organisers Sander Hölsgens and Thom Callan-Riley decided to follow up the event and publish a collection of musings on skateboarding. True to the spirit of Pushing Boarders this is a fusion of academics, skateboarders, artists, and activists and it is freely accessible. A great initiative from UCL.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to contribute and reflect on the direction of skateboarding scholarship. My piece strives to tie the very diverse range of topics in the issue together.

Basically I am stoked that this accessible collection of writing is out there and that people can plug into it. So do… follow the link here, donate if you can afford it, and enjoy.

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I hope you get cte, dumbass

Okay, but at least tell me why

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Stay Core, Stay Poor

(Opening remarks for the “Stay Core, Stay Poor” panel to conclude the 2019 Pushing Boarders conference in Malmö, Sweden. Delivered August 18, 2019. Panelists: Josh Friedberg, Kim Woozy, Paul Shier, Nick Sharrat, and Claire Alleaume.)

My name is Kyle Beachy. I'm a novelist and a professor of literature and creative writing, neither of which professions have anything to do with the skateboard industry.

But about seven or eight years ago I began writing articles about skateboarding because I had been doing it for a very long time and I was thinking about it basically all the time, due to a novel I was writing. At first I wrote about a few skaters who struck me as particularly important. I wrote about Nike's insidious and totally obvious strategy to work their way into a skateboarding market that had already rebuffed them twice.

And last year I wrote an article that began with some old though no less despicable comments from a white California skateboard legend that were unearthed in the wake of a late-career Thrasher cover and his ending part in a Converse video. But the comments weren't surprising, given American racial dynamics, and I wasn't interested in cancelling or harming the man himself.

Really I wrote about my profound disappointment in the way that the US skateboarding industry responded to these comments with just overwhelming silence. What the incident made clear was that the industry as it stood did not have the infrastructure in place to adequately address the racism, misogyny, and homophobia that have always lurked in the back corners of skateboarding, and often in plain sight.

…

When I was young, before I understood my self or my body, skateboarding taught me what it means to long, to yearn, to fantasize. Skateboarding opened me to longing even before it was complicated by adolescence and sexual desires. I longed for a place I had never been, and worshipped a handful of impossibly, world-historically cool young men that I would never meet.

And this longing changed but lingered into adulthood. I recall a period of a few weeks in 2002 or 2003 when I had a recurring dream of PJ Ladd. In these dreams he was just nearby, wearing an Es hoodie, baggy denim and his Accels. We weren't even skating. We were just kicking it. Like in basement or on a porch. And each morning I would wake to terrible sudden comprehension that it was just a dream, that PJ was not, actually, my homie.

This is what the skate industry did to me: it shaped my dreams, was the algorithm of my desires, and was just profoundly instrumental in the way I conceptualize my identity. It's given me fashion, music, jokes. And for me and a lot of other people who look like me, skating has been by far the most culturally interesting thing about us.

Ever since I achieved the slightest modicum of self-awareness, self-actualization, and, more recently, actively sought out various forms of therapies to assist me with mental and emotional health, I have always leaned upon skateboarding as a foundational text of my personal narrative.

…

I have an impossible goal right now: to have this panel serve as a kind of culmination to this week's wildly interesting and important conversations. And in a way, it will be, because has to be. And here's what I mean by that.

Much of this conference has been about the different ways that skateboarding creates or facilitates meaning. What skateboarding means for individuals like me, and many other individuals who are totally unlike me. What it means for cities, places, for history itself. Also this week we've heard people speak of strategies for leveraging the practice, the activity of skateboarding into other uses—education, activism, therapy—and we've discussed difficult realities about who gets to chronicle skateboarding and tell its stories. We've confronted the broader social truths of power disparities and many, assorted forms of imbalance and injustice. We've brushed against the sacred, we've applauded latecomers, and listened to the voices of people we might otherwise assume are simply grateful for Western help.

But just as all questions of contemporary suffering are ultimately questions of capitalism, all of these things we've discussed about skateboarding—its promise, its utility, its fundamental weirdness and unquantifiability—are, at core, dependent on the production, distribution, and marketing of skateboard products. And as we here go about our work to both understand and redefine the ways skateboarding matters, we absolutely must keep in mind the relationship between our ideas, our noble practices, and the economic realities of our beloved little toy.

And so, here we have a cross section of the contemporary skate industry. Who, like us, have witnessed the conversations this week. Who, like us, are skaters. Who, like us, love skateboarding. And who, perhaps more and perhaps less than us, play a role in writing skateboarding's ongoing narrative.

And now we get to have a conversation, which is as close as we get to the divine. I hope to move this conversation through four main parts.

We're going to start with questions about "core" and what, if anything, that word means today. Then we'll discuss SB's growth and exposure in new parts of the world, and touch on the question of gatekeeping. We'll address what this growth means to people who skateboard professionally and also casually, including questions about ethical treatments and practices. And then we'll discuss SB's future in a world teetering on the brink of apocalypse.

So, now. To utter those famous, perfect words: let's do this. 

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Toward a poetics of skateboarding. 

Reynald Drouhin

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I am fascinated by this write up of the Pushing Boarders conference in Jenkem. Firstly it seems like a peculiar case of breaking the fourth wall. Skateboarding happens, then academics study it, debate it, and then a skateboard magazine reports on academics analysing skateboarding. It seems all very niche, like skateboarding culture collapsing back into itself. As always the comments on the Jenkem article provide a good grounding to any ivory tower elitism a skateboard academic might have falsely garnered along the way.

I am also amused that I was included in one of the sketches. My wife didn’t recognise me, but I think Jon Horner did a great job of capturing these panels.

Amusingly the panel I was on looked at the challenge of writing about skateboarding. Ted Barrow introduced it by addressing the fact that many skateboarders don’t tend to want to read much. The Jenkem article kind of reaffirms this by stripping down the talks and highlighting some of the key features so it is super simple to digest. But this is not a criticism, they include links to all the talks in full. It is however a exercise in making these talks more accessible to people who would not be typically interested or aware of them.

This article contributes to the curious collaboration between skateboarding and academia. For a long time academics have recognised the challenge of researching and representing skateboarding, and in some ways this collaboration appears to be redefining both how people talk about skateboarding, and also how academic work itself is transformed by skateboarding. There is some very interesting work emerging here, particularly with the support emerging to get skateboarders into college. Whatever cynicism might exist about this article, reflection on the work of the CSEF might well challenge it.

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I am writing a poem (he thought) and, no, while I am not yet happy with it, I am certainly interested in it. Perhaps I am a lucky man.

Samuel Delaney, Dark Reflection (via themostfunthing)

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Issues of Class And Culture: An Interview with Aijaz Ahmad

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Chicago, Taylor near Washtenaw, June 1987. From the series “Chicago in the Reagan Era” by Jeff Wassmann