A Crime and a Pastime | The paranoid style of American skateboarding

Peering straight into the underbelly of the skateboard industry, this piece in The Baffler Mag is an interesting one. Curbs as freedom, skateboarding as a crime and not a sport, and more. It’s all in there.

 

Sample:

However absurd it may sound, skateboarding’s first years were clearly bound up with America’s burgeoning paranoiac libertarianism. It may have been that the blithe surfiness of early skateboarding masked its suspicion of outsiders—of anyone, that is, who doesn’t skate—as well as its predilection for clique formation against a sometimes (though not always) invisible regulatory bogeyman. Take, for example, John Severson’s editorial from the first issue of The Quarterly Skateboarder, which jumbles cheeriness with frontier psychology and an oddly preemptive suspicion of “opponents”:

“Today’s skateboarders are founders in this sport—they’re pioneers—they are the first. There is no history in Skateboarding—its being made now—by you. The sport is being molded and we believe that doing the right thing now will lead to a bright future for the sport. Already there are storm clouds on the horizon with opponents of the sport talking about ban and restriction.”

 

 

Click to THE BAFFLER for A Crime and a Pastime

 

 

 

 

Hanson O’Haver, on the world of professional skateboarding: “For those who fail to make a name for themselves in this illusory world of merit, careers can be vanishingly short. Injury inevitably couples with age; footage gets harder to come by; sponsors disappear. As the checks dwindle, skaters are forced, as the saying goes, to find a real job.” Art by @chowsaiman. Link in the bio.

A post shared by The Baffler (@thebafflermag) on Jul 9, 2018 at 10:29am PDT

 

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