Skate=Takes=Slates

Ed. Note: At anewyorkthing.com, you can see t-shirts that say such quotes as "Crack is Back...Again!" and feature pics of arms with legs. I would've posted these illustrations but they use flash to show off their designs, probably mostly so bloggers won't copypaste and make fun of them.

On to the story...

Where I went to high school, there was a kid named Dave. Dave had played soccer since he was five, he was handsome, and he had a sharp tongue that betrayed—through the veil of his horrendous academic performance—genuine, well-greased gears churning constantly and rapidly inside what should have been a drug-addled and useless head. Not entirely incidentally, Dave could skateboard.

Dave got laid by the waifs, anorexic hippie girls who smoked pot and came to the homecoming dance high as hell. He himself was into acid, mushrooms, and, of course, marijuana, which he and the wannabe rastas at my school would smoke during the lunch hour in an alcove between two of the buildings.

Dave liked me ok, and we even skated together a couple times. But I was too sensitive, angry, and into math to ever really hit it off with the guy. When I couldn’t land my kickflips, he’d say “Don’t turn your body,” then nail a perfect one down the seven steps leading to the pool building. He’d roll off silent and clean, walk back up the stairs, and light a cigarette. He’d give me a look that seemed to say, “You’ll never do what I just did now.”

During those years, my face and body fell short of the pretty portrait Dave cut, and I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think I ever believed I could get laid by the waifs or crack a knowing joke just because I could pop an ollie over a 20 oz. Coke bottle. I knew that, for some reason, skating was cool, and of course it wasn’t bad that I could at least say “Hey” to guys like Dave in the hallways, but I also knew that I had motivations for skating beyond the elusive and probably hopeless possibility of losing my virginity or garnering the respect of awesome athletes before I graduated from high school.

The simple explanation is that skateboarding is intensely physical. Each session yields extreme results: personal injury, the pure mental symmetry of landing a kickflip in the driveway, or board-smashing frustration at landing primo. For the college-bound, high school is essentially a half-decade of preparation, and, in the context of constant slogs through Charlotte Bronte or asymptotes, skateboarding offered immediacy: pleasure or pain.

Skating offered Dave another way to exert his dominance over the angry nerds, and it offered me one of my only ways to break up the monotony of the M-F test-prep-kit disaster that was my high-school existence.

This Times Magazine piece from Sunday posits a different set of motivations for the current hip set.

Apparently, getting pretty rich and somewhat famous has supplanted the effortlessness of the knowing look or the life-affirming agony of the broken toe. Having an anti-commercial lifestyle is now commercially viable. What’s more, anyone can cash in on any counterculture. All they need is a Comcast subscription and little start-up capital. And skateboarding figures big into their marketing strategy.

All this makes sense; possessed of blogs, pitchfork, thefader, New York City, hipsters, ripsters, our very rich society, packed to the gills with savvy, overeducated minorities of every possible description, is currently mass-producing countercultures that are just as hip and alluring as all the ones of the past, only now, everyone gets a piece of the action. Don’t like the Canadian indie bands? Fine, you can like the guy who sings about states. Don’t skate? Fine, get a funny haircut and design a t-shirt. With so many different products available for purchase, countercultural images have never been more accessible. And it’s never been easier to be a maven. And, possibly for that very reason, the whole catchall pop-indie hip-hop outdo-your-neighbors hip NYC-is-everywhere scene seems to be getting more hollow by the second.

Several things separate the high-school kids at the skatepark in Shaw by my house who wreck themselves trying to hit a pivot on the 8-foot quarterpipe from the Hundreds jokers who flunked the bar but still make cash by creating exclusive and somehow skateboard-like designs.

First, there is no cash in cool for the Shaw kids, who wear white tees and smoke Marlboros and spend the money they scrape together on tattoos and weed.

They will not be taking the bar exam; they don’t have opportunities to squander. So they’re doing their own thing, spending their time after school smoothing out their flicks, hoping to catch the perfect trey. They are bereft of the sense that there is anything else for them. Like all rebels from Bob Dylan the Hell’s Angels to the Zephyr team to Rocky to the Ramones to the 90s Zero team, they carry an aura of desperation. For musicians and skateboarders, each note and every trick is an ideel to be treasured and sought after more than money or fame. At least, that’s how the story goes.

Beyond that, though, there lies an even simpler distinction. Skaters actually skate, and skaters are skaters because of what they do, not because of what they buy or sell. They aren’t upset by the idea that their aesthetic sense might never lead to rock-star parties or pseudo-fame. They don’t feel entitled to those things because they don’t even want them in the first place; at least they don’t want them any more than they want to skate.

Meanwhile, one wonders if the would-be lawyers who sought meaning in designing t-shirts ever thought that, given the lifestyle horrors of corporate law, they might have been better suited doing something with actual meaning, instead of creating luxury goods for the upper and upper-middle classes. Given a chance to crack into the top echelons of a culture they view as mildly corrupt and grossly superficial, these kids take the easy way out and churn out some pictures to put on some stretches of cotton for the very conformist classes they despise for being fake and clueless.

Where is the allure of authenticity in something so completely devoid of meaning as t-shirts that do nothing other than signify upper-class taste? Why the preoccupation with the tangential elements?

Because the tangential elements are easier to imitate and sell. Maybe in the future, no one will even have to skate or play music. We'll just get rich making t-shirts that allude to legitimate activities as historical phenomena.

For the moment, at least, the joke’s still on these mauvaise-foi t-shirt weinerhogs. Because who buys their expensive, counterculture cache goods?

Corporate lawyers. Corporate lawyers who read Slate.

I promise to start the next one off with a positive jam.

Until then.