Skatepark killed the skate scene

I am a user of social networking site Facebook. Today on Facebook, one of my friends passed on a post from one of her friends:


There's a council meeting 7am next Tuesday
at Leichhardt Town Hall (Norton St, Leichhardt) to get gather support
for a skatepark in Balmain. Should also be a good opportunity to get
some initial design ideas across. If anyone is free, the more support
the better!


This post came following an extended conversation I had had last night with one of my oldest friends and long time skateboard pals about the effects that building skateparks has had on skateboarding culture and on youth culture in general. While I think the writer of the Facebook post meant to say 7pm and to use either the word get or gather and not both, I was excited that such a comment had come following what had seemed like quite a personal conversation.

The conversation last night began with a drive past some teenage skate haunts, leading into some stories of other spots, until we arrived at the fortress like nature of schools, places that almost always provide the teenage skater some useful terrain. We reminisced about times spent arguing with security guards and being continually kicked out of skate spots but agreed that it was great fun and very much a part of the thrill of skateboarding.

Conversation turned to the building of a huge skatepark in our suburb. About five years after we left high school our council came together and made plans to build this park. By that time we had been skating in the area for years and knew many of the other skaters. We were all excited about it and my friend along with others who had achieved some kind of ‘olde skool’ respect were actively involved with the design and planning of the skatepark.

At the time it seemed like a dream had come true. For years skateboarding had been a renegade pastime, a dangerous, risk-taker’s, trespasser’s pursuit. Now the council was spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars building us a tailor made spot, designed by us? Fucken gnarly! Up until that point our town had always had a decent skate scene. The boom of the 1980s had convinced an earlier council to build a very inadequate, but often frequented, ‘Mexican Hat’ style bowl around 1989. Of course this bowl was not built by experienced labourers and was not designed by skaters. The huge new park, opened in 2000, was a drastic improvement in design and execution, as well as a milestone in the ability of local skaters and the council and legal bodies to communicate effectively, to plan and negotiate and achieve a result that everyone was totally fully stoked on.

Fast forward, or maybe skip to 2010 and there is no skate scene in our town anymore. None, says may friend. Maybe a lone rider on a beaten up Santa Cruz from the 80s riding barefoot to get the milk. Maybe one kid standing tentatively at the side of the skatepark, while scooters and BMX riders take full advantage of what was designed and created by skateboarders for skateboarders. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not bitter that scooters are using a skatepark, I’m glad its being used at all, because it’s certainly not being used by skaters.

What happened to all the skateboarders? Did tricks become so difficult that there is little chance of ever rising above the level of amateur without doing oneself many serious injuries? Is it that there are almost no new tricks left to be invented? My friend suggested something more challenging. That the skatepark had killed skating. No longer did teenagers have to climb fences, or explore drains, or quickly take a run at a flight of stairs before the security guard came chasing after them, instead, all they had to do was to go to the skatepark for all the thrills and spills of skateboarding, without the thrills and spills of being a teenage larrikin at the same time.

We talked this out for a while and agreed that an essential part of our experience was that we were often getting into trouble, or were in places we weren’t allowed to be, often in places that no other person would even want to spend their leisure time in. There was an element of adolescent mischief, of defying authority, of exploring new places that was as much a part of the experience as was personal development and enjoyment of the sport. The idea of finding a new but secret spot was what drove us to continually search out vacant buildings, carparks, schools and other urban spaces.

At that time, the mid 1990s, the skateboard ‘culture’ was in its second puberty. In its first puberty, in the mid 1980s, skateboarding had become hugely popular in the United States and had infiltrated nearly every home with a TV set in some form like Stacey Peralta in Charlie’s Angels or The Bones Brigade in Police Academy. After this boom, skateboarding styles changed from ramp to street skating and the culture also changed. The sport experienced a slump in popularity, followed by a steady regrowth that seemed to peak in the mid 90s. It was this period, this second puberty, which saw ‘skater’ culture become defined as a distinct subculture, with an identity quite different to the skater of the 80s and unique from the other ravers, b-boys and punks who overlapped in fashion sometimes. Being a part of that culture as it evolved, seeing the demise of Powell Peralta and Vision and the birth of World Industries and Girl, seeing an entire new fashion evolve out of the death of another: Skateboarding had died and boomed again but for us there was nowhere legal to skate except for the old bowl, which was awful at its worst and extremely limited at its best.

In 2010, with skateboarding being regularly seen in ugly forms like the X Games it is much more visible, much more corporate and feels like another Sunday afternoon sports program for dads. It is presented in similar competitive formats to other sports with huge amounts of sponsorship, branding and endorsements, all watering down the individuality of the sport and at the same time watering down any teenage rebellious appeal. The X Games looks safe and controlled, organised and boring. As adolescents, skateboarding provided us the thrill of doing something prohibited and dangerous but also made us feel part of something new, or at least a new part of the evolution of a subculture steadily defining itself through history, industry, technique, equipment, technology, fashion, media and popularity.

Without the associated dangers that unlawful street skating provides, the skatepark functions only as a training ground to learn tricks. Tricks that usually become more impressive when performed in raw or less perfect street situations. While the obstacles in skateparks can be more or less difficult, larger or smaller, rougher or smoother, or identical replicas of street spots, they are in one way inadequate in the satisfaction they can provide. Like the legalised graffiti mural, immediately impotent because of its deliberation and its sanction, the teenage graffiti artist will never be satisfied with only legal walls. What excited myself and my old mate Frogger to ride skateboards was more than just learning tricks or riding a piece of concrete or a flight of stairs, it was an entire adolescent mythology.

So maybe the skatepark killed the skater. Or at least killed the skate scene. Making skateboarding too accessible, made it completely unappealing. Removing the danger, removed the fun. Sponsored by Boost Mobile? Rad, dude. I don’t think I will be attending the meeting at Leichhardt Town Hall next Tuesday, I think skaters have quite enough parks at the moment. Rarely, do I see anyone skating them anymore. Is it a shame? I don’t think so. Hopefully just the beginnings of a new movement, call it a third puberty.

Athens 2065

Can you dribble a grenade to save your life?

Dead Prez

Riyadh 2050

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

Aldous Huxley

NOW, this page is determined.

Sometime around autumn, 1996, in the early stages of my second year at art school, I grappled with the significance of the image. What constitutes an image? How can text function as an image, or a painting, or a work of art. This text comes from my sketch book, pictured left.


NOW, this page is determined. Its path is chosen. It is contaminated. “They say, ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away.’ Why not just tell him to fuck off?” That was just a passing thought and in obvious fact unrelated to the fate of this piece of paper, however, simply because of its existence it has helped shape the outcome of this piece of paper as a work of art. However, this is not to say that this text is an artwork, merely it is a study in existence. Though such a text may seem artistically inclined the text itself is not artistic in intent. To the contrary the text is a medium to exercise the visual effect of text itself. Therefore what you are reading is a pile of crap. But a test to see if you will read, or how much you will read of a text with the visual effect of this. The test is both conceptual and individual to the reader.
As an artwork the visual effect left by an activity such as erasing a word and changing it, as done several times previously in this text, has an effect on the outcome of this piece of paper. Each mark effects its outcome, and in turn effects the impact of this piece of paper on a person viewing it or reading it. This is the crucial point: the page in front of you can be viewed or read. Indeed the two acts seem similar, however to read this text is to take in the words which have been written on the page, while to view it is to see it as a visual image as a whole – that being a page full of words. In most instances the two acts become one, or one follows the other. In the same way the ‘intent’ of the artwork and the ‘intent’ of the text become one, because one depends on the other to exist. And now, if not by luck, this art work is resolved because the subject of the text is exhausted and has also reached the end of the page.

app OD

Apple’s monopoly on personal devices shows no sign of relenting, with the iPad released earlier this year. What does this device do exactly? Is it a phone, a laptop, neither or both? Well I personally have little idea, having yet to actually see one in the flesh. I’m not going to review the device (what do you mean, no USB inputs?), but I would like to talk about Apple for a bit.

Fifteen years ago, it would have been laughable to suggest that Apple would have the market share it enjoys in 2010. Twenty-five years ago it might have been more believable. While its desktop and laptop sales have risen dramatically, it is the market domination of iTunes, iPods, the iPhone and possibly now the iPad, that have launched this once small, specialised, education focused computer company into a juggernaut, saturating the western market with its products.

This web log is being created on a MacBook Pro, whilst music is listened to from iTunes via an iPod. And while I have resisted the urge to purchase the iPhone yet, there is little doubt that when my current phone expires it will be replaced with one. While I love their products, what bugs me is the total, all over acceptance of this brand into our lives. Should we all just give in and get ourselves tattooed? Is this the beginning of a new world order, a single system or language that our daily lives are so plugged into that if we disconnect from our Apple we are unable to function?

The only dissonance seems to be coming from the technically minded, the folks who like to build and drive their machines in their own direction to interesting destinations, rather than the majority of the consumer market who are happy buying a Toyota Prius that can only go as fast as 60km/h and will only drive on streets covered in Apple’s iMap.
“The iPad, much like the iPhone, is completely locked down. The user has no control over what she installs on the hardware, short of accepting exactly what Apple has approved for it.” Lifehacker

“Apple has taken operating system control to a new extreme: Not only does the company insist on approving each and every iPhone and iPad app, it now wants to control exactly how those apps are written.” Gawker

Should we fear this kind of market control? In other industries the resounding yes to this question is deafening. Imagine the only restaurant was McDonalds and the only things you could buy at supermarkets were McDonalds products that could only be used in strictly defined McDonalds ways. Think a step further and it begins to sound like, “What if we only had one bank for everyone, that didn’t require cash or cards because everyone had a microchip under their skin that holds all of their account information?” Even better would be, “What if we had one government for the whole world that controlled the one bank that had all of our money?” Pretty soon things would start to feel like an extremist socialist dictatorship.

The market most inclined to recognize the danger in the kind of control Apple seems to seek have been seduced by the beauty of the Apple. This group were the sceptics of the 1990s who saw Apple as a specialised but unaffordable design tool that they would love to have if it could do all the things their PC could do at the same price. The ones who despised Bill Gates and bought the doomed first generation of bubblegum iMacs when they hit the shelves (exclusively in Apple stores). This generation, now with kids and mortgages, are happy to blindly accept the brilliance of Apple. After all, they are so intuitive!

The generation they call Generation Y seem less inclined to care about these sorts of issues. They haven’t quite been seduced by the beauty of the Apple, for them it has always been the most obvious, the most dominant, and (in some cases) the only brand. “What’s an MP3 player? I just have an iPod.”

Tim Marshall seems to recognize the irony:
Apple seem to be moving more into this way of thinking which is odd when Microsoft after years of doing this have now realised it’s stupid to do so and have relented! Could be an interesting few years to see how things play out with Apple….

Agreed Tim. Lets hope some healthy competition surfaces to keep Apple on their toes. And lets also hope that Apple is not too big for the consumer watchdogs to shut down what might be called an unfair market share.

The first breath into a despicably large bag full of other limp and tepid exhalations. Choosing this medium, this outlet, this forum at this time is questionable at best. In a nauseating room full of cacophonic, non-objective rants APPARENT OVERDOSE will probably be little different to its peers. No doubt it will suffer the same self indulgence, self importance and self absorption suffered by other web based media.

Recently I heard there was a new blog created every second. Well here’s another one. There are enough different ideas to warrant several concise web logs, however at this embryonic stage such organization, clarity and sensibility seems counter intuitive and counter productive. So expect some messy mixing of genre, style, process and production.