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Sean Wilsey On Skateboarding, Using So Little, London Review of Books, 25, no. 12, 19 June 2003, pp. 18-21.
"Skateboarding's inspiration springs from adversity: surfers without waves; pools without water (1970s skating owes much to the California drought); kids without family. It's a particular product of American rootlessness . . . Skateboarding has always been a 'sport' for fuck-ups.
" . . .
"The best skaters of the late 1980s and early 1990s-Natas Kaupas, Tommy Guerrero, Mark Gonzales, Rodney Mullen- would do the Embarcadero just for fun, not for cameras. They were street skaters. They skated and talked to everyone, then flew back into the city in search of spots. Stylistically, Natas Kaupas (Satan Sapuak backwards, Sapuak, according to Thrasher means 'God' in some ancient language) was my favorite.
" . . .
" . . . Skateboarders are not role models.
"Skateboarding is observing things minutely. It is tuning the world out: cutting your hand and not noticing till hours later. Looking at the world like a skater means looking down. It means rarely raising your eyes above kerb level, constantly monitoring the smoothness of concrete and being alert to the presence of pebbles or grit, experiencing an instant elevation in your mood when you roll through a spot where you've successfully pulled a trick, and depression and superstition in a place where you've slammed-no matter the scumminess or beauty of the location in conventional terms. Skateboarding is bringing emotion to emotionless terrain-unloved parking lots, vacant corporate downtowns long after the office workers are home. . . .
"Skateboarding is unresearchable: anecdotal, singular, self-expressive. And that's the problem with The Answer is Never, (Century, 2002, 354pp.) Jocko Weyland's history of skateboarding (which began an an article in Thrasher), as well as the recent skateboarding documentary Dog Town and the Z-Boys. Both try to do it all. . . .
" . . .
"'Using so little.' It's the perfect indictment of everything that's wrong with, and the most succinct encapsulation of everything that's great about skateboarding. The beauty of using so little in a country that uses so much. Living for a plank and four wheels in a profligate culture. And the saddening fact that Thrasher has stopped moving against the wind. . . .
"Skateboarding has joined right in with commercial American culture-and there's something frighteningly involuntary about this numbing and succumbing . . . And now it doesn't know what to do.
". . .
"This is a strange time in the history of skateboarding and its homeland. It looks both more alive and more dead than ever before. Every ad and photo in all the skate magazines is eerily the same. In a 'sport' that's all about imagination-like a country all about freedom-nobody has any idea what to do. Skateboarding seeems both ashamed of itself and not nearly ashamed enough. And it doesn't get any more American than that.
" . . . "