Anti-pleasure dissertation

Skateboarding is a Sport

When I was a kid, I always had an attitude of “Fuck every other local, skater-owned skateshop, because mine is the best.” And though I was lucky enough to have the best local skateshop there ever was, Metro, I’m beginning to realize where this attitude has gotten me.

There are no more local, skater-owned shops in my area. I can find a ride to Berkeley, about thirty-five minutes away, to get to 510, or I can hop on BART to get to SF in about 45 minutes to find one of the three or four local shops there, but those are all of the skater-owned options within an hour of me.

And I know, boohoo, I’m from California and need to go less than an hour away to get to a skateshop, instead of being in fucking North Dakota and having to go to the next state for skater-owned, or whatever. But that’s beside the point.

The thing is, it’s easy to think of skateboarding as existing in a parallel universe to the rest of the world; as a skateboarder, we see things so much differently. In an empty lot, we see a skatepark. In a loading dock, we see endless trick possibilities. Some people will see black marks on a wall and think vandalism; we will see those same marks and think, Fuck, I can wallride higher than that. Every red curb in the world is beautiful to a skateboarder.

In truth, though, the world we live in, the non-skateboarding one, is, in too many ways, inescapable. While my generation of skateboarders was busy saying “Fuck that shop, because it’s not mine,” the fucked up real world of capitalism and greed and bitterness and distrust has seeped through the pressure cracks of your deck.

Skateboarding is a sport. It is. And I don’t think it has to be, and I don’t think it’s always been, but it is now, because when New Balance gets involved, it’s a fucking sport. Worse, this sport is barely even really skateboarding—it’s a simulation of skateboarding. There’s this really obnoxious postmodern French philosopher named Jean Baudrillard (stick with me, here). He wrote this great essay called “The Procession of Simulacra,” about how the Western World had, in so many ways, made itself into a simulation of itself. He argues that this simulation we’ve been creating has made the original thing it was based on obsolete, and if the original is obsolete, is imperfect, what does that make the simulation? It’s fucked up. The Matrix was sort of based on this essay, but it got a lot of it wrong in ways that it would take a much smarter person than me to explain. So, anyway, in this essay, Baudrillard writes that “one enters into simulation, and thus into absolute manipulation – not into passivity, but into the indifferentiation of the active and the passive.” He’s saying that a simulated world, the one we’re living in, is so manipulative as to not let us recognize the difference between our acting to stop the simulation and our acting to continue it; our attempts to stop it, he says, are itself continuing it. This is one clear way to recognize whether or not we are in a simulation. This is how I can tell that skateboarding now is really only a simulation of skateboarding.

When we fight back against Nike and against New Balance, how do we do it? We write fucking think pieces, like this one. We talk shit about how stupid the shoes are. We make ourselves feel like we’re doing something by taking a stand, but what are we doing? Arto Saari is a really, insanely good skateboarder, a legend, one who really seems to be passionate about and to love skateboarding, and he rides for New Balance. What does he think? Is he actively embracing our new, corporate overlords as a way to take action against this way of thinking, that these companies are irrevocably changing skateboarding? It seems that he believes that, Hey, it’s not all that bad. He said it himself on Instagram, trying to calm people down about it. It seems that he believes that these companies aren’t changing skateboarding, that what they’re doing is inevitable and ultimately good for it, and it’s true that they’re making more kids skate, which is a very good thing, always. But his action seems to me to be passivity. He’s just embracing the inevitable, which might seem like taking action for an idea, but it’s just not. He’s going with the flow, really. He’s letting it happen, and convincing himself and everyone else that he’s taking action. In the skateboarding world, action and passivity for and against the Dew Tour and Nike and New Balance and Adidas and whatever are pretty indistinguishable, and ultimately so far pretty useless.

I have a problem with this. Skateboarding is something that has seriously made the world a whole lot better for me. It draws in the weirdos and the fuckups and the angry kids and the sad kids, and it chews them up, and the ones who stick with it it will keep chewing. And we’re tougher for it, and happier. And like I said, Nike and Mountain Dew and Monster and whatever the fuck else are going to be drawing in more and more kids, which is definitely a good thing. And skateboarding will have more kids to chew on, but the ones who aren’t the weirdos and the fuckups and the angry and the sad, it’ll just go ahead and spit them out. They won’t stick with it the same way. They’ll ride a longboard or a Penny board and call it skateboarding and be content for their whole lives, and good for fucking them. But that’s not good for the rest of us. The more kids who call that shit “skateboarding,” the more that shit will become skateboarding. The real problem with our new sport, our simulation of skateboarding, is that it’s becoming less and less about making lives better. Every skater-owned shop I’ve been to has been run by people who know that firsthand, who keep in mind that skateboarding is about making people better. Nike doesn’t give a shit about skateboarders, it doesn’t give a shit about lives. Neither does New Balance, or Adidas, or Monster fucking Energy. We live in a capitalist society, I get that. The bottom line is important to everyone—especially small business owners. But skateboarders and skateshop owners also keep to heart the importance of the people, the skateboarders—of us. Not only do Nike and New Balance and Converse not do that, they literally can’t. They are gigantic corporations, and we are numbers, and do you have any feelings toward any numbers? Not really.

So, I dunno. This is the state of skateboarding. It’s a sport. It’s finally been made a sport. There will always be people and organizations who aren’t part of that, that sports-hood, like Thrasher and Deluxe and John Cardiel and Mark Gonzales (who rides for Adidas), but this is how our world works: every aspect of it will become part of the simulation. It will happen.

The best I can think to do about it, then, is to stop buying into it. Any of it. As I type this, I am wearing Adidas skate shoes. I am a hypocrite. But I won’t buy Adidas again. I’ll buy Es or Emerica or Huf, and I’ll find my way to 510 in Berkeley to do it. We’ve known for a long time that you’re a fucking kook to shop at Zumiez, but I think you’re just as much a fucking kook for buying New Balance skate shoes.

And maybe this is obvious to established skateboarders. Probably it is. But I can tell you firsthand that for my generation, and the newer ones, it’s not. Not at all.

When I was a kid, it was always, “Fuck Milo and fuck 510, because they’re, you know, not my shop, I guess.” Every day I feel like shit for ever thinking that way. Because now I’m over here, overweight and bad at skating, thinking, “Fuck Nike and fuck New Balance, because they exist. Because of course they exist. And Fuck me and fuck my generation, because we did this. Skateboarding is a sport, and it’s our own damn fault.”

slow-riot:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf
So Eden sank to grief
Dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay