This is my latest assemblage, which features some oldschool technology as the ground for a tweaked image of an oldschool skateboarder (the model for the image was actually a photo of Natus Kaupus doing a footplant on fence post). It's at the Hamilton Artist's Inc. members' show SWARM for the next month. I made it in a one night, and now wish that I had not included the grey floppy disk, which seems out of place each time I look at it. I also messed up the arm a little. Perhaps I'll reconfigure the piece when its back from the show.
Last Tuesday, I did a guest lecture about skateboarding for a course on youth culture at the Wilfred Laurier satellite campus in Brantford. My talk gave a brief history of skateboarding, and focused on the themes of counter cultures, incorporation, and the politics of space. I talked for about an hour, then the whole class of about thirty fourth-year university students, the instructor and I walked to the nearby Brantford skate park, to see what we could see.
I had prepared some questions ahead of time which were designed to get the students thinking about how public and social space is configured, what kinds of different uses it reflects, and how the construction of space itself might contribute to the fashioning of a particular sense of identity and community. Because it is fairly late in the year, I wasn't sure there would actually be any skaters at the park, so the questions were designed to encourage detective work on the part of the students, asking them to look for traces that park users might have left behind.
As luck would have it, it was an unusually warm day, and by the time we got to the park (a half hour before sundown) there were still about ten skaters there. It turned out to be a strange confrontation, with a group of thirty university kids (the majority of whom were women) with notebooks and backpacks, and one visibly aged skateboarder/professor-figure acting as the go-between for the students and the local skateboarders at the park.
I was singled out as the leader immediately upon reaching the park, and one of the skateboarders established his authority by calling out to me that my Remembrance Day poppy was on the wrong side of my sweater. I think it was this same skater who was skating around the park with a long plastic pole that he had found, occasionally launching it through the air and being generally menacing in a subtle pole-waiving kind of way. The entire encounter was haunted by an anthropological framework in which the seekers/producers of knowledge confronted their subject as Other, with myself positioned as a sort of mediator between these two worlds. At one point, the same vocal skater asked why "my followers" were just standing around. I didn't really know how to react to this situation, so I started skateboarding.
Every skatepark that I've been to has a different dynamic and character. The Branford Park is a beautiful facility built in a "skate plaza" model: it's designed to include all the best features of an urban downtown into one convenient location, the use of which by skaters doesn't involve doing damage to private property. A non-skater walking through this area when it was vacant might not even notive it was a skatepark, save for a few sloped obstacles and a mini-ramp type area set off to one side. It's built in the enclosure of what used to be an outdoor ampitheatre. The Grand River is just over the hill to one side, and a large casino flanks another of its sides. It is beside a fairly busy traffic artery, and from the gate of the park, off across the road and atop a steep slope, one can now see the remaining row of buidings of Brampton's main downtown street. This is because the flanking row of buildings, the backs of which used to face the park, have recently been torn down, much to the dismay of the historically-minded, as these structures were some of the last surviving pre-confederation storefronts in Canada. Built into the park area is a strangely sculpted lookout tower, which I'm guessing would make a great perch from which to make a skate video, if one had a good enough zoom on the camera.
Out of the different skate parks I've been to in Ontario, Brantford's has always struck me as slighter rougher than the others. I've often felt a slightly aggressive tone in the air there, and a couple summers ago, when I was a counselor for Hamilton's week-long "Skateboard Adventure Camp" our group's trip to the park was marked by threatening behavior from a couple of the locals toward some of the younger kids under our care. So, the pole-wielding skater's hailing me in a somewhat challenging way fit with the general pattern of my previous experience of the park, and I figured the only way through the situation was to do some skating and "prove" myself worthy of the respect of the other skaters there.
I did a couple oldschool tricks--no-complying up the stairs, and an airwalk or two--and the other skaters seemed to relax a little. I think, in fact, that the presence of an audience actually spurred them on, and they started doing some crazy tricks for the group of students who were watching. My 240-no-comply-to-tail is always a crowd pleaser, and I was lucky enough to execute one off on the first try. One young guy did an oldschool "boneless" over the angled bank in what I interpreted as a kind of tip-of-the-hat to my own oldschool stylings. Another kid asked me if I could do a kickflip, the universal measure separating the truly oldschool from the merely slightly oldschool (I didn't actually land my kickflip attempt, but I can do them). Darkness was quickly descending upon the park, and despite there being a metal lamppost, the lights themselves had not yet been installed atop of it. I asked one of the skaters about this and he told me that the city still hadn't installed the lights.
I repaired back to the now restless group of students and did a little more explanation, pointing out the scuff traces skateboarding leaves behind on concrete ledges. Now that it was getting dark, some BMX bikers had arrived and were doing tricks on the ledges and slopes of the park. BMXers and skaters often are at odds about the use of park facilities: the bikes are faster and quieter than skateboards, and so it is easy and painful to collide with one. The metal pegs that they used for "grinding" ledges also tend to chip the concrete, making it more difficult for skaters to use. But I'm guessing that the BMXers knew that the skaters could not skate well in the dark, and so arrived at that time to take advantage of the brief envelope before total darkness set in (also, perhaps it is easier to bike in the dark: a BMXer does not have to watch out for little pebbles and cracks as one does on a skatebaord).
I felt a little like I was providing narration for a Discovery channel expedition into the depths of some exotic environment concealed in the heart of downtown Brantford. But I hope the students had fun and took home some new questions or ideas about public space and its uses; it's hard to tell what effect one is having as a lecturer/skatepark guide.
Brampton itself was an insteresting spot to visit. I didn't stay much longer than five hours: just enough time to take a mental snapshot of the downtown of a city which, much like Hamilton, is struggling to redefine itself in the new post-industrial-oriented Western economy. I bought some discount vinyl at a record store that had opened a week earlier, and ate a delicious chicken shawarma at a shop that had just had its grand-opening that day. I finished my trip by having a beer at a sports bar, trying to read Deleuze's book about Kafka while listening to a golden oldie's station. But I got distracted by a Beetle's song ("A Day in the Life"), and recaps of the highlights of a football game on TV. I would have sat outside on the patio, because it wasn't all that cold out, but the waitress said they don't allow that in November.
Now that it is getting colder, and the days are getting shorter, it's harder to motivate myself to get out of the house. Even yesterday, though the sun was out and it was a beautiful autumn day, I almost didn't make it. At about four o'clock, the sun was coming in through my living room window, hitting the couch at just such an angle as to make it look like a particularly good spot for reading/napping. But I mastered my desire, put on a sweater, and headed out the door with my skateboard.
I can always tell when the winter is coming because all of my joints seem to age about fifty years: my knee, back, wrist, ankles (and these days, because of all the typing I've been doing for school, even my fingers) get achy and sore. This contributes to what I call the "house fly effect" which can be observed in common houseflies in the fall and spring, when they start to act "drowsy", buzzing against the window pane in the last vestiges of the summer sunlight. It is odd how humans, insects, trees and the plants in my garden all seem to be on the same circuit in this regards. Even my cat stays inside more, complaining when I accidentally lock him out of the bedroom, where he likes to curl up all the live-long day now that the weather has turned.
I feel that it is important to fight this slow slide into winter hibernation: the sleet and snow will come soon enough, making it that much harder to motivate oneself to venture forth. While the adversity of winter can have a bracing effect, inspiring one to rally greater courage to meet the season, it's the fleeting beauty of the transitional months that offer the most threat of slipping into complacence. But to allow the housefly effect to triumph is to miss all the things that make autumn great: the sharper, fresher air, the changing colours in the trees, the smell of wood fires from yards and chimneys, scraping one's feet through the piles of dried leaves by the curbside, and skateboarding at Beasley park, peeling off layer after layer of outerwear as one's body warms from the exertion.
I only spent about half an hour at the Bease yesterday, but Matt and another fellow whose name I forgot were there, ripping it up in the last of the summer sun. Matt is a powerhouse, able to blast crazy air out of the bowl, and this year particularly he has mastered many difficult tech tricks (like backside and frontside 180 heelflips, for example). Yesterday he was floating giant heelfilp variations over the hump, landing them seemingly effortlessly. His flips are so crisp that they seem to proceed in slow motion, and his feet meet up with the board at the nadir of its flight as if the rendezvous had been scheduled since the dawn of time in some kind of crazy and meticulous cosmic train schedule: "at precisely 4:31 BLT (Beasley Local Time) Matt's feet will connect with his board after it having completed a 360-degree flip-rotation, two-a-half feet off the slope of the hump, and he will ride that plank to the ground as if the line he just traced through the air had been prepared for him since the dawn of time". That's how it's written in the eternal Book of Raddishness, and that's how Matt delivered the goods yesterday as I sat around trying to convince my knee and ankles to cooperate.
Well, tomorrow I'm off to Brantford to deliver a guest-lecture about skateboarding at a course on Youth Culture. I've got slides and video clips and photos of the Bease renovation. Then the whole class will walk to Branford's downtown skate plaza to make some field observations, and the instructor and anyone else who is so inclined might even roll around a little, after we've signed a waiver of course.
Fridiay night, my friend invited me to the second-last event in the bi-annual 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, which has been running for the last ten days in Toronto. I was told that the name of the collective that organizes this show is constructed to suggest a crossword puzzle (7 across, 11 down), as well as encoding information about the festival’s origins (formed in 1997, I forget the detail about the 11). Apparently, there is significance to the asterisk as well, but this bit of the group’s mythology is revealed only to a select few—though I was informed that the inclusion of this character makes it difficult to use the group’s proper name on bank accounts and websites, neither of which recognize the symbol. The group’s name thus eludes certain conduits of incorporation, just as performance art itself has historically attempted to do by focusing on process over product, practice rather than goal, corporality, affect and community/audience-engagement in an effort to short-circuit (or at least comment upon) the commoditization of art in the modern world.
While a case can be made that the often inscrutable projects that fall under the umbrella of performance art still manage to effect an elitist cultural consumption that serves as a form of class distinction in Bourdieu’s sense, I read these kinds of performances more in line with de Certeau’s concept of tactics, or the surreptitious and temporal acts of resistance to meanings and ideologies that are inscribed into the mental and physical spaces we inhabit. Performance art's self-reflexive engagement with the spectator/participant often uses humour, performed metaphor, and sometimes shocking imagery and action to confront the viewer with a spectacle that challenges established meanings and expectations. Just as modern poetics theorizes the artist’s use of language as renewing our experience of a world deadened by habit, performance art appropriates the world of everyday objects as a kind of text with which to startle us into new perceptions and ideas. And just as there is a great deal of “bad” poetry produced, so too does performance art generate its share of poorly conceived happenings, leading to the stereotype of the inscrutable, self-indulgent artiste parodied in such films as The Big Lebowski by the Cohen brothers, or Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered.
At the same time, performance art’s attack on the commodity-form attempts to problematize the distinction between good and bad art, and thus recuperates failure as one of its recurring tropes. It is for this reason that I consider the above mentioned film by Tom Green to be an example of performance art rather than a spoof, while the Maude character from the Cohen brother’s film does serve as a kind of parody in the somber formalism and pretense that she illustrates. But the presentations I saw on Friday night were interesting and original, and even the hauntings by the spectre of high art were productive. The Toronto artist Henry Adam Svec opened the evening by appearing behind a podium and delivering an ironic and well-theorized reflection upon the nature of authenticity. Svec appeared wearing an unassuming blue Detroit Lions pull-over with a small sticker identifying him as a Festival Participant. His talk ran the gambit of post-modern theory in a pastiche of the academic conference paper that attempted to historically locate his topic while simultaneously performing the concept he claimed to articulate. This all in building up to a performance of a folk song with an acoustic guitar. Authenticity, argued Svec, was to be found not in the lyrics or music of the songs themselves, but in the quality of his own voice, the authentic dimensions of which exceeded the formal elements of the song to become its fleeting, original, content. And, just in case the audience were to mistake the song itself for the authenticity of which it was the carrier, Svec sang a second song about love and longing so that, by comparison, his listeners might be able to discern the quality in question. The whole delivery was saturated with irony that was only augmented by Svec’s expert rendition of the songs, both of which were by the same songwriters, making the attempt at comparison all the more futile.
The second piece was by Irma Optimist from Helsinki, Finland. Appearing in the space dressed entirely in black, Optimist proceeded to stretch a red ribbon across two of the gallery walls. She then produced a series of balls of scrunched-up paper, which, one-by one, she unceremoniously flattened out and hung from the ribbon with cloths pegs. In their scrunched form, the grapefruit-sized balls had been dipped in black paint or ink, so that when they were flattened, each had an irregular spot of black in its centre. After hanging a line of this strange laundry, Optimist cut out the black centre of each sheet, leaving a large hole at the centre the paper. She then roughly pulled each of the papers off the line and placed them around her neck via the head-shaped hole, taking care to re-assert her messy, shoulder length blond hair each time the pile of paper around her neck succeeded in confining her mop. When all of the papers were around her neck, she moved to the centre of the space an bent forward toward the audience so that all that could be seen of her head was her dangling hair framed by the large, crumpled sheets of paper. She remained in this position for several minutes while an electronic recording of what seemed to me to be the artist saying the word “poet” was repeated in such a way that the two syllables of the word shifted in and out of phase with each other, rendering an experience of the arbitrary nature of the signifier reduced to pure sound. I found this piece to be very powerful. The final image of the artist stockade by her own work, with the doubling of the artist’s work and body, seemed to me a wry comment on the processes of commoditization inherent in Western art practice.
The next piece by Francis O’Shaughnessy and Sara Létourneau, from Chicoutimi, Quebec, was interesting, but my appreciation of it was hindered by my being stuck in a back corner of the gallery, from which vantage it was difficult to see what was going on. The artists seemed to be commenting on domesticity, alienation, and the relation between the sexes, using only a few simple props such as red thread (with which they constructed the silhouette of a house on the gallery wall, and which Létourneau, at one point, wraps in multiple tight circles around her waist to create a sort of sash), ordinary kitchen bowls, some form of pellet-like food (which the artists had sewn into pouches in their clothing, and which they procured and chewed on, rabbit-like, at various points in the performance), scissors (with which they cut open their clothing to access the foodstuffs) and a garbage bag. My awkward location beside the exit door turned to my advantage toward the end of the piece, when the artists scattered what smelled like Borax over the floor of the gallery and proceeded to jump up and down, creating a cloud of particulate that irritated the lungs of many of the spectators and sent them prematurely fleeing the gallery, coughing and wheezing.
For the next piece, Michael Fernandes sat in a chair at the end of the gallery, his face partially obscured by a large microphone, and read from a book about fairies. His slow, monotone presentation of this book cast a sort of spell over the audience, and the somewhat trite, new-age text on the life, habits and relationship to humanity (and the other orders of being) of the wee-folk, took on profound meanings, almost becoming a kind of manifesto for performance arts itself. The fairies' distance from necessity, their inability to understand the cruelty and jealousy of human beings, their love of trees and animals, etc. all reverberated with the largely unacknowledged ideology of the performance art community itself. My favourite section was a description of the corporality of fairies as not circumscribed by an obvious skin or layer of fur, as is the case with humans and other animals. Instead, the book describes fairies as having levels of density that extend outward from a centre in such a way as it is impossible to discern a definitive break between the fairy and the rest of existence. As Fernandes’s lengthy reading went on, the audience sitting or standing on the concrete floor of the gallery became increasingly uncomfortable, and a mounting awareness of one’s own corporeality was brought into tension with the mesmerizing narrative of the transcendent life of the fairies, underscoring the difference between the two orders of being, and providing a physically-felt critique of fairy-life as a trope for the artistic lifestyle itself. Fernandez ended his recital abruptly mid page, like a tired librarian during a story hour that has gone over time, punctuating his reading with the deadpan comment that “The book goes on”, and “It’s not political”. I think this was my favourite piece of the evening.
The last piece, by Mexico’s Pancho Lopez was called “Anger”, and was prefaced by a curator’s introduction that Lopez almost didn’t make the festival due to difficulties getting a proper travel visa. Lopez's piece was accompanied by an upbeat Bossa Nova instrumental, and consisted of the artist emptying about fifteen bottles of champagne into a fishbowl on an obelisk. He did this while wearing an apron on which he glued the word VISA in black letters. Each time Lopez opened a bottle of champagne, the audience recoiled a little, worried that the plastic bottle stopper would be launched in their direction, but each time the cork flew harmlessly into the ceiling of the gallery where it sometimes ricocheted off the steel girders. When all the bottles had been emptied into the fish bowel, Lopez took a little sip from the top. He then peeled the letters off of his apron and floated them in the champagne. The piece was brought to a conclusion when the artist suddenly produced a baseball bat from behind the obelisk and smashed the fishbowl, spilling champagne and glass over the gallery floor (but not, as far as I could tell, over the spectators, who were required to sit behind a certain line). Out of all the pieces that evening, I found this one to be the most predictable and poorly conceived. An interesting effect was produced when Lopez stood behind the fishbowl, and the letters glued to his apron were magnified and distorted by the champagne inside, but even this was made too obvious by the artist’s highlighting of the effect. My friend commented that she would have liked if Lopez had dunked his head in the fish bowl before he smashed it. I agree, and think the artist remained too detached from this performance, as though he were not implicated in the anger he sought to illustrate. At the same time, there was a degree of playful irony and detachment about the way Lopez conducted this piece, the construction of which--with a mounting sense tension, as the champagne level neared the top of the fishbowl--underscored the humour of Lopez's delivery. The final smashing of the bowl provided a fitting, if decadent, end to the evening, and a fellow standing next to me pointed out that gallery owners always leave the messy pieces to the end of the show.
Throughout the evening, in the basement of the gallery Toronto artist Martine Viale was working on a time-based piece in which she placed blue dye in tiny plastic envelopes and then scattered them about a section of the basement floor. Apparently, she had been working on this over the course of two days. I found the basement room, with its low rafters, irregular concrete floor, and sections of historical stonework to be an interesting environment that Viale’s piece offered an opportunity to contemplate. My friend told me that the packets of blue dye were supposed to represent pieces of sky, a juxtaposition that worked well in the compressed space of the basement. I was lucky enough to wander downstairs just as the piece was coming to a close. Viale was standing in the centre of the room, a plastic container full of the last batch of “sky packets” held, for some time, above her head before she dropped them to scatter over the floor.
Yesterday summer made a surprise encore, and the weather turned so beautiful after a week or so of rain that I had to get out and skateboard even though I had about fifty pages of Walter Benjamin to read for the 8:30 class that I'm sitting in on on Fridays. But I asked myself what Walter would do, and decided to indulge in my own form of accelerated flannerie. I've already mentioned how much I love the oldschool re-issue Mark Gonzalez deck that the owner of the local skate shop gave me a great deal on last fall. It seems that nobody really wanted that particular deck and it had been sitting around on the bottom shelf for a while. I should start looking for a replacement as the tail is starting to splinter on the Gonz. But stepping on my deck, and rolling into the unexpected and splendid sunlight made me extremely happy, and I felt as if poetry itself were flowing through my blood vessels as I made my way downtown.
I should mention that for the first time in a while I've also managed to find a decent pair of skateboard shoes. I have wide, flat and large feet, and I find it difficult to get shoes that fit the way skateboard shoes need to so as not to feel that one is tripping over one's toes. It is actually extremely hazardous to your health to have too long toes on a pair of skate shoes. My last pair of clearance Adidas saw me through an entire year, but they were starting to become paper thin on a good part of the sole, not to mention the fact that they looked (and smelled) aweful. But they were SO comfortable and good to skate that I had the darndest time replacing them. Happily, a couple months ago my neighbour gave me the lowdown that the evil skateboard store West 49 was having a clearance sale on its remainder shoes, and this spelled good news for me. At the end of each summer, these stores end up with left over pairs of shoes that haven't sold, and they are usually in the larger sizes, which is perfect for 'ol flatfoot here.
It turns out Lakai makes a shoe type that fits my feet perfectly. I bought two different pairs for 30 bucks each. Given that skate shoes usually retail for between $80-110 (a price I refuse to pay, making the job of finding good shoes even harder), I feel that I did all right. The blue suede lowtops are the coolest shoes I've ever owned. The are also comfortable as stink. I'm worried about wearing through the toes (which don't have protective rubber or leather reinforcement like some other shoes), but so far they have held up. I was dismayed to find, about a month ago, that the soul had come unstuck along the entire instep of the left shoe. Apparently this has been happening alot with this particular model, and West 49 has been replacing them. But I had already become attached to this pair--I felt a kind of spiritual bond with them (how's that for commodity fetishism?)--and besides, I wasn't sure that they would replace shoes sold on clearance, even if I still had the receipt. So I glued the soul back together with Shoe Goo, and its still holding strong today.
Heading downtown along the newly laid sidewalk past the newly renovated library and farmer's market, I did a wall ride on the angled footings of the support struts for the second floor of Jackson Square that overhangs the sidewalk. I was just skating along and !BAM! rode that incline backside and dropped off the edge, back onto the flat. I'd always wanted to do that, but only with my wider oldschool deck did I have the gumption. Practicing on the Jersey Barriers at Bease helped some too. Heading east allong Wilson, there was a lane of roadway blocked off with large pylons, which were protecting piles of gravel that have been deposited for a future project. The lane gave me a wide area to skate without worrying too much about the cars sneaking up behind me. Normally I take the sidewalk towards Beasley park, but it was a nice change to take the road.
At the park, there were about four or five skaters and some younger kids. Not as many riders as I had expected on such a great, fall evening, but more showed up as things progressed. Now that the new obstacles have been installed, friendly neighbourhood sessions have been raging regularly at the Bease, and it is much like old times--better, actually, because there is more stuff to skate, and some of the excess skater kids have siphoned off to the new park on the mountain, leaving Bease to the downtown regulars. I like hitting up the Jersey Barrier backside, then doing a half figure-8 to take the tight transition of the tapered barrier frontside. You can also do a fronside wall-jam into a little "wallie" and launch into the air off the side of the thing. Other riders do crazy tricks off the lip of these new obstacles, but I keep to the basics. I really have no desire to fall off the top of one of those things. Perhaps if I had learned how to skate ramps when I was younger I would be less wary of lip tricks now, but I just don't know how to do them.
Other folks know how though. One fellow was trying a bluntslide to 360 shove out on the Jersey Barrier. I'm sure that if he hasn't landed it by this writing, he will soon. It's amazing to see skaters attempt these tricks like it's no big thing. I do the same stuff I've done for years, perhaps trying a new twist or application of an already-mastered move to a new obstacle, but I leave the big stuff to the guys who still have cartilage in their knees and spine. I'm good for about an hour (if I haven't been out for a week or so), and then I just run out of juice. But you can land a lot of tricks in an hour, and the ones I can do, I do well.
Bo showed up all stoked about getting a new job. He pulled some amazing tricks in the bowl, on the quarter, and out of the bowl. His 360 airs are so wild, and he almost landed a casper stall from the top of the bowl. Skating a park is different from drifting around town and taking in the sights. At the park on the mountain I often feel a sense of competition and one-upmanship. But skating at Beasley is a kind of club or loose affiliation, with guys doing crazy new tricks, kids just learning the basics, and old dinosaurs re-living their glory daze for what might be the last or second to last time. It's usually pretty relaxed and fun, and on any given day you can see some of the sickest skateboard tricks performed on ghetto retrofit terrain. Regarless of how many more trips my bones have left in them (each time I make it home safely, and wake up the next day feeling like I was in a car wreck, I swear it will be the last time), this summer has been a really fine gift, and I feel grateful for every wheelie down the sidewalk I still manage to navigate.
Even more fun than Supercrawl (Hamilton's art-music-culture event on James St. N.), Open Streets saw James Street closed to car traffic from Wilson all the way down to past Burlington St, from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon today. The event comprised of seven or eight blocks of neighbourhood-produced entertainment, socializing, sport, food, sales (both in stores and driveways), art and culture. I brought my skateboard, the use of which was encouraged by the greeter in the tent at Wilson St. It was so amazing to have all that urban space, normally simultaneously used and ignored by car traffic, made available for recreational, local and self-produced activities.
The Kiwanis Club's mobile skatepark was set up just past Strachan, and my array of oldschool trickery provoked one kid to ask just how old I was, and how long I'd been skating for. Then there was my friend's two kids, who were duly impressed as well that their dad's old fogey of a friend could actually bust so many moves on a skateboard. I only fell once, and that was because I was trying to show off to my girlfriend, who says "I'm such a kid", probably because of my need for attention. The middle of the road is amazingly smooth and pleasant to skateboard on...a nice change from the pitted, rugged curb-side that I nomally navigate on my way down James. And I didn't have to watch out for any car doors suddenly opening!
DJ Mathematica was spinning some awesome remixes at the corner of Burlington and James. I really like James St. N., and so seeing all the life and activity on the road itself was extremely uplifting.
It was as if all the life that one knows is flourishing on and around the street, all the human energy, talent, feeling and practices that one catches piecemeal glimpses of in the everyday navigation of a place, was given a venue to present itself all at once--a veritable flowering of the street and its people. The weather was perfectly cool and sunny. It was a fine afternoon in a summer that keeps offering unexpected surprises and delights, even now that the summer is officially over.
I find one of the best places to be alone is in downtown Toronto, where one can wander amidst the sea of humanity with relative anonymity. When I used to live in Toronto, there was a slightly higher chance of bumping into someone that I knew. But that was over ten years ago, and so now when I hit the T-dot, if I don't have a friend with me, the chances of running into a familiar face are slim.
So I was surprised when, upon rolling up to my favourite downtown skate spot--the large skate park near Bathurst and Dundas--I was greated with an enthusiastic "Hey, how's it going?!". I looked up to see my old skate pal Greg, a fellow who used to hang out at Beasley park but moved to Toronto a couple years ago. Greg is tall, and the last time I saw him, at the second day of the Beasley Skate Jam, his arm was in a sling due to a dislocated shoulder. But that was over a month ago, and his shoulder was more or less better--just so long as he didn't fall on it again.
I really like the large, flat expanse of ice-smooth concrete upon which I believe the city of Toronto pays to have a number of obstacles installed for the duration of the summer. There are two manny-pad/slider boxes, a couple slider bars, an angled box and a mini ramp (which I never skate). And that's about all there is, but it's more than enough for an afternoon of fun.
So Greg and I skated for a good two hours. I decided to bring my oldschool Mark Gonzalez deck, which was a good decision. All summer I've been skating my skinnier street deck, but I have big feet, and the Gonz is more to my liking. It doesn't flip out from under me, and I actually have no problem doing kickflips and the rest of my semi-oldschool repetoire with it. I'm also a little more confident with grinding obstacles, as the board has more weight and so sticks to the ledges better. The pointy nose is fun to skate too--one can do the no-comply shove-it much easier than with the kicktale shaped nose of modern boards.
Anyhow, Greg and I had a good time; skating with a friend is always so much more enjoyable and relaxing than going solo. I was happy that I managed to do a few wallrides on the vertical skirting around the ice-rink. It's been a while since I did one of these but I think that riding the vertical wall of the Jersey barriers at Beasley has got me in the right groove for the more difficult "transitionless" wall ride. Back in high school, learning how to do wall rides signified a major accomplishment: taking a skateboard from flat, onto a wall, and back again seemed like a feat of pure magic, and leaving wheel marks on walls that did not seem like they should have had them was akin to the thrill graffitti artists must feel when they hit up a wall.
[This reminds me of an odd episode from my youth. When I was about seventeen or so, my parents took us kids on a vacation to Aruba. I was pissed for most of the trip there, because I had wanted to go to California where all my sktateboarding heroes lived. In Aruba, we stayed at a hotel by the beach. I was kicked off from skating on the baordwalk, but because I was a hotel guest, they let me skate in the parking lot. I had just learned how to do wall rides, and so practiced on a wall out in the parking lot. I made quite a few wheel marks on the wall (skateboard wheels get dirty, and wallrides is one method to clean them). When I returned to the parking lot the next, day, my wheel marks had already been painted over with new whitewash. I think I must have put some new marks on the wall, only to have them painted over againt the next day. I was never prohibited from skating, or even vandalizing the parking lot wall in a minor way (Aruba's economy, at least at the time was based on tourists and an American military base), but I never got to leave a lasting mark on the island either. I did skate with some local kids, who showed me the downtown spots and a rickety half-pipe they had built. They were really great people and fun to skateboard with.]
Greg told me about his recent housing adventure in which he came very close to moving into an apartment that has bed bugs. Thanks to the Bed Bug Registry on the internet, tenants now have a bit more protection from sleazy landlords than they did in the past. Another kid who was at the Bease comp and threw his wrist out on the first day was skating at the park on Saturday. He's an amazing technical skater who can do any number of crazy flip tricks. Somehow, riding my older-style board makes me less concerned with proving myself by attempting the latest combo (which I could never land in any case). Instead, I've been working on getting my ollie grabs on flatground back. I used to love the backside "nosebone" (now called "melon") grab off flat, and could do them with a great deal of "tweak" back in the day. I've managed to do the mute and indy grabs on my Gonz, but the backside grab remains elusive. Maybe I can no longer jump that high, or compress my backbone enough to get it, but I'll keep on trying until the summer is through.
Tonight was a beautiful evening, so I headed down to the Bease. There was a small crew of regulars there, and some crazy sh**t being thrown down. Matt did some freaky antics in the bowl and off the quarter pipe (like heelflip to fakie and such). Scott was trying to get the delicate front-foot impossible out of the bowl. All manner of crazy grinds were being applied to the Jersey barrier. I was particularly thrilled at the way Matt just rode up the transition of the sloping barrier into a backside grind that he rode right off the end. I would try something like that, but I'm afraid of falling on my ass. I think the best line I did was a fakie airwalk down the runway followed by a fakie grind, 180 out on the newly-minted ledge. But I get a real kick out of carving the transitions on the Jersey barriers.
I've been so busy with home renovations, reading for school, swimming, gallivanting around, and, of course, skateboarding, that I haven't had time to update the blog in a while, but I have the sore knees and sprained wrist to prove that the last few weeks have been full of radical-ish thrashing activity (well, it's all relative, isn't it?).
So, having just wrapped up a ten day trip from Hamilton to Prince Edward Island and back, I managed to hit a couple of skateboard parks. Our intensive driving, party attending and furniture delivering schedule didn't leave much time for skating on the way to the east coast, but on the trip back, just around dusk, we stopped at the town of Grand Falls New Brunswick for some dinner, and to check out the fabled Big Chute. Water levels were low at the chute, but it was still an impressive gorge. And the photo we found in the lobby of the only restaurant with an open kitchen depicted a daredevil crossing the gorge on a highwire while a crew of lumberjacks looked on, themselves perched precariously but nonchalantly on the rocks above the falls. The photo was a strange testimony to an era before safety railings, lawsuits, and work-safety regulations would make such behaviour seem reckless and crazy (I mean the standing around on the rocks past which the water is sweeping by on its trip over the falls). But for lumberjacks who, as the song goes, go "burning down white water", traveling across the masses of floating logs which, according to the same song are where "the lumberjack learns to step lively" (I can't find this song on the internet, but it's a classic, and different from the famous Monty Python song), for these lumber industry workers of yesteryear, the dangers of water and rocks would probably be something they were comfortable enough with to not succumb to vertigo on the edge of the Grand Chute precipice.
At any rate, the pizza was delicious, and the parking lot we landed upon had a small skateboard park with three or four elements enclosed by a mesh fence. There were a few kids mulling about, one of whom offered to trade me his bike for my skateboard. It was hard to do any tricks after having sat in a car for six hours--my joints were stiff and my friend Matt the driver and I were both hungery, but I landed a couple of grinds on the metal box before heading off to dinner.
The second skate session happened when we got back to Montreal. I managed to locate the park I used to frequent when I lived there, down St. Laurent and past Jean Talon. Since I had last been there, which was at least five years ago, some new elements had been added, including a steel mini-ramp, a hump, quarter pipe, launch ramp, platform and slider bar. It was mostly a group of young kids hanging out, and I felt a little awkward, as usual, being ancient and all. But at the same time, my years of skate experience allowed me to completely dominate the park, as feeble as I have become in old age. I think I put on a good show, and I shared my Slushie with a couple kids, whom I couldn't entirely understand due to the language barrier.
The next session occured in Ottawa, at a nice park just a short hike from my parent's place. The problem with this park is its usually full of kids on bikes. Skating with bikers in a park is like swimming with sharks. They are fast and silent, so its hard to see or hear them coming, and most of the time the bikers themselves are plugged into their iPods, so they likely don't hear you coming either (despite the racket skateboards tend to make). The bikers at the Ottawa park were respectful, and waited their turn, but their presence prevented me from carving the canyon as I would have liked. I mostly limited myself to the flatground area, which had a platform identical to the one at the Montreal park (supplied by the same company, it would seem). Unlike Montreal, however, the Ottawa park was host to a tribe of young, amazing skaters, one of whom was doing crazy tricks on the platform. Unfortunately, my camera was entirely full of pictures from the trip at this point, so I have no photo evidence of these amazing feats of skill (backside smith grinds, backside tail to 360 shove out, etc).
To return to my original thesis for this post, radicalness is relative, and flawless performances of the same moves that led to my feelings of elevation at the Montreal park just made me feel antiquated next to the fast, dexterous kids ripping up the Ottawa park. But it's not a competition, right? I'm keeping the traditions alive just by showing up and refusing to let gravity and multiple wrist trauma keep me from rolling. I met a couple young guys from North Bay who had recently moved to Ottawa. Much like my hometown of Barrie was in the eighties, North Bay is bereft of skateboard facilities, so these two guys were not so proficient at navigating the transitions of the park. The three of us carved out a space in the transitions and tried to land some ariel tricks off the inclines, but to little effect. We then had a game of "SKATE" on the flat, and it was here that their North Bay skills came through. When you don't have ramps or parks to skate, you end up learning a lot of fancy flatground tricks, and we took turns trading my oldschool craziness for their newer heelflip and pressure flip variations. There was also a kid who arrived later who had the largest "Afro" hairdo I have ever seen. It was at least a meter across, like a giant, fuzzy halo around his head, and the kid himself was so lanky that it seemed as though a strong wind might lift him into the air like a balloon.
So, it was at the Ottawa park, on the second consecutive day of skating, that I fell a couple of times trying to do a simple railslide off of the platform. I landed, as I often do, on my wrists, which now hurt, along with my ankles, back, elbow and right knee. My left knee seems more or less ok, but I'm going to take it easy for a while to recuperate.
I missed the last day of the Beasley Park Skatebaord Jam, which got rained out three weeks ago and was postponed until yesterday. I would like to have attended, and all reports indicate it was an amazingly fun time, but I was still making my way back to Hamilton, and stopped in Toronto to have dinner and watch a bad movie with my girlfriend. Even if I had made it back in time to skate, I was so tired and sore yesterday that my performance in the Oldschool division would have been more embarrassing than usual, so things probably worked out for the best. But I haven't even made a post about the Skate Jam that I did attend, before it was rained out on the second day, two weeks ago. Photos and reportage to follow...
Last Wednesday, the Hamilton Skateboard Assembly met with the Director of Parks and Cemeteries, who came to our meeting and gave us valuable advice about the procedures we would need to follow to further our vision for the skater-directed renovation of Beasley Skateboard Park. We were also informed that city workers would be dropping off two jersey barriers at the park the next morning, and that contractors would be coming on Friday to make the adjustments we requested a couple months ago (filling in some cracks, and cutting one of the rounded ledges to make it grindable). Everyone was very excited to finally see some changes after months of waiting, emails to the city and expectation. Part of the impetus to make this happen came from the upcoming 18th annual Beasley Park Skateboard Jam, which will be held mid August (14th & 15th) at Beasley Park and then Turner Park on the mountain. This is the longest running amateur skateboarding event in Canada, and has been organized each year by Derek "Oldschool" LaPierre, the HSA's "Secretary of Skate".
Since the jersey barriers were arriving on Thursday morning, I volunteered to meet the city crew and show them where to place them new elements. It is very difficult to move a three-ton concrete obstacle once it is in place, so this responsibility made me feel a little anxious. But the HSA President, Scott Macdonald, went to Beasley with me after the meeting and showed me whereabouts to place the barriers. The problem was, the place we marked out turned out to be too close to the metal railing on the east edge of the park for the barrier to fit. Also, Scott had thought we were receiving two regular sized jersey barriers, but what we actually asked for was one regular one and one tapered barrier.
For these reasons, Thursday morning I had to make some executive decisions that would effect the skating life of the park for at least the rest of the summer. One issue to consider was the flow of the park: not interrupting the lines of usage that are already established in the space. Another issue is that skateboarding is not a symmetrical activity. Skaters either skate "regular" or "goofy", depending on whether their left or right foot is forward respectively. I wanted to place the barriers so that they could be utilized by both types of skateboarders as equally as possible.
On Thursday morning, I arrived at the park just as the city crew was unloading the first of the barriers. They used a large orange tractor to lift the barriers off a long flatbed truck. The truck had two barriers on it, but only one of them was for the park. The second barrier would arrive an hour or two later, on a separate trip. Of the two large barriers they had on the truck, they gave us the crappier one. It had several holes drilled in one side, and the bottom of the other side was all corroded near the middle. It looked like an older piece of street furniture that had already seen some service in the streets of Hamilton. Why they couldn't have given us the other barrier, which appeared to have nary a blemish, is beyond me--perhaps they thought that we were just going to wreck them anyways, which is partially true.
I had to decide which side should face out, and I chose the one with the holes, reasoning that we could always patch them up later. I decided to set the barrier a little to the left of where Scott had indicated, at an angle so that the slope of the bowl (which used to be a wading pool) would lead up to the angled wall of the barrier. The barrier also had a strange piece of metal fastened to the top of it--something that could easily cut open a skater's hand if they were to accidentally press against it while skating. Why they didn't remove this is a mystery. We also had to knock a wasp's nest out of the metal joint at one end of the barrier, but somehow all these imperfections were fitting to the DIY spirit of this undertaking: we, the skaters of Beasley would take care of this decrepit old road barrier and turn it into something people could enjoy.
The city crew had my cell number, so once the first barrier was in place, I went downtown to have some breakfast and to read the paper. A young woman who was working for the city as a park monitor was sitting on the swings with two little kids. She had taped paper snowflakes onto the trees and was going to pursue a snow-related theme for the day to conceptually combat the heat. I worked as a skateboard park monitor for the city a couple summers ago and it was a pretty good gig, but often we would only receive a handful of kids through the course of the day, so it could get a little boring.
I returned from breakfast just as the city crew was pulling into the park with the second of our barriers. Derek had called me from work and suggested placing the tapered barrier on the flat, "freestyle" area, which seemed a reasonable idea to me too. "I trust in your judgment" he said, but I still felt odd about making this decision all on my own. I had to decide which way the barrier's incline should face, and which angle to place it at so as to maximize the number of lines of approach it could accommodate. What really amazed me was the finesse with which the fellow from the city was able to maneuver the barrier into place using such a huge tractor as medium. By nudging, sliding and tapping the barrier, he managed to place it exactly where I had indicated. Even though I made a point on their first trip to ask whether the city guys could possibly pick a nice, clean and new tapered barrier for us on their return, the workers said they had no control over which ones the guys from the yard picked out for us. This is how things work in municipal power structures: wheels within wheels. But the tapered barrier we got was not so bad. It had one big crack across the low end, which does not look amendable by filler, but which might get worn down through use so as not to cause too many hangups.
I didn't have a chance to actually skate these new elements until Sunday night, and even then I had to sneak away just before sunset for a half hour or so. I missed the big inaugural sessions that no doubt raged on Friday and Saturday evening. The barriers hadn't been installed for more than a few hours on Thursday before a couple skaters, energized by the new prospects for fun, made a trip to Home Depot, bought some quick-dry cement, and built a transition into the large Jersey barrier. The position of this ramp allows one to hit the bowl and then blast into the Jersey barrier. When I arrived on Sunday, there was already a thick coat of wax and tell-tale grind marks on the two barriers. I had fun carving the new transition, and ollieing onto the tapered barrier, as well as onto the newly cut ledge. The Bease suddenly had become about 3000% more fun to skate! There was only one other fellow skating the park with me. We cautiously ignored each other for a while, but then we eventually got around to exchanging trick info. I showed him some old freestyle moves, dripping sweat like a soggy sponge, and he gave me advice on foot positioning for 360 flips, a staple modern trick that I have never been able to land. By placing my back foot on the very back edge of the tail, the board flips very efficiently, and I went from not being able to get a full 360 degree rotation, to flipping 180 degrees too far! The combination of my new board and old shoes also helped, and perhaps I'll be able to land this elusive trick by the end of the summer. What I found interesting is the "currency of exchange" that skating creates between two perfect strangers of different age, race and economic categories. Because of skateboarding were were capable of speaking a common language and creating a sort of temporary bond in the sometimes hostile heart of downtown, where strangers fear each other more often than not. I passed this fellow later on my way home and gave him the peace sign.
A couple weeks ago, I went in search of the secret skate spot that my neighbour's kid had told me about.
Not too far from my house is what looks to be an abandoned school. The concrete playground/parking lot behind the school is covered in cracks and weeds, and from the fence I could see that some makeshift obstacles had been constructed on a raised portion of the yard.
But the prominent "NO TRESSPASSING" sign kept me from jumping the fence; now that I'm respectably employed, I'm even more wary than I used to be about certain things.
So I headed off to the other side of the property to see if I could get a better view of what are called in skateboard park lingo, the "elements". It appears as though people had made a slider rail out of an old ladder, but I couldn't see the ramp that my neighbour had mentioned. There was, however, some pretty neat street art decoration the building.
Before I could complete my mission, however, a skateboarding friend of mine accosted me from his car, from the far side of the street. I've known M. for a while. He's a wicked painter and artist, and an excellent skateboarder. M.T. was in the car with him (there's no real reason to conceal people's names, but I try to anyways for the sake of privacy). These guys were on their way to a new skate spot and asked if I wanted to come. I was actually kind of depressed due to relationship-related issues which I can't even remember very well now, so I was happy to embark on a trip to a new skate spot with a couple of friends whom I hadn't seen for quite a while.
We drove to Dundas, to a beautiful municiapl park. The park has a bandshell with a decent sized ledge that drops off onto a sea of the smoothest grade of concrete. Beside the bandshell is another, lower ledge that is good for grinding, and has a slight curve to it. This was an ideal spot, and I had had no idea that it even existed. Another skater, S., was already there. It was early evening, and still light but cool as well; the perfect hour for skateboarding. I'm a little out of shape--actually, I'm just old--so the smooth, flat expanse was great for the flatground, freestyle tricks I like to do. You could manual forever at that place! The other three guys had more juice in them, and were doing awesome tricks on the ledges. M.T did some ollie to nose manuals on the bandshell platform, and S. did some wicked boardslide/hurricane grind combos on the curved ledge. M. landed some perfect frontside halfcab flips. S. had brought a large, impressive-looking camera, and M. was filming some of S.'s lines. S. has been skating for a while, and has a lot of tricks at his disposal--he always has some impressive and quirky variation to throw into the mix. I tried grinding the lower ledge a few times, but wasn't feeling too confident. I partially blame this on my deck, which was old and comfortable, but was quite ground down on the tail.
After skating for a good while, we decided to head back to town. S. took off in his '84 Porsche Carrera, while the rest of us packed into M,'s more utilitarian vehicle. He had a painting of a pair of Adidas sneakers in his back seat. It was well executed, and M.T. was buying it from him. We all went to the Vietnamese restaurant and hung out for a bit, and then M. dropped me off at home. I was going to meet back up with these guys at a local skater bar later that night, but I got tired and just did some reading before going to bed.
One thing I love about Hamilton is the proliferation of amazing street art. It seems that everywhere one goes, there is interesting art cropping up in the most unexpected of places. I try to photography these finds, but for every photo I take, there are likely two more that go unrecorded for one reason or other.
A couple Thursdays ago, the night of the greatly anticipated English/CSCT grad student prom, I was downtown on my way to get a haircut. Except, I never made it so far as the barber as I ran into a street artist in one of the unused storefronts.
I consider skateboarding to be a mobile form of streetart performance, and so I have a keen interest and sense of camaraderie with other street-oriented creative types who appropriate public space for unconventional uses. Take, for instance, the Streets are For People movement out of Toronto, or the interventions into the urban everyday undertaken by Improv Everywhere.
This fellow was an artist who I had seen on the street at various Art Crawls. He often, in fact, sets up shop in the alcove directly beneath what was my former living space, and I bought one his collages last winter.
But that afternoon, he had a spread of artworks and unusual books that he had collected, including several stacks of old comic books. One piece of art he showed me involved a binder with plastic sleeves filled with discarded stuff he had found beneath a bridge in the downtown core. He had assembled these items, which included a used syringe, and wrote a kind of narrative that went along with them. He also had several books that he had embellished with collages. These individual pages, he explained, would be cut out later, framed and made available individually for sale. But one book of such collages also had a section in the back hollowed out, like one of those makeshift "book safes". This hollow was just big enough for a cassette tape, which was missing, but which the artist explained actually had him explaining the various collages assembled in the book.
I talked to this fellow for a while, and he seemed happy to have some company on the street. After a while, a couple other guys came by. We were all flipping through the books and things. Caught up in the excitement I felt over this fellow's entire enterprise, I ended up spending my haircut money (in fact, most of my prom-night drinking money too), on comic books, buttons and a piece of street art that I gave to my date for the evening.
My idea was, instead of buying a corsage, we could wear vintage buttons.
I also rearranged a few of the elements to produce an embellishment of my own to the whole display.
I went to collect my date, and she seemed happy enough withe buttons, and the strange street art artefact I had procured (a pill bottle with graphic insert and a ceramic carrot inside). Why do these random assemblages make me happy? Well, we had a nice dinner of sushi, then got dressed up for the prom. At the prom itself, however, my date my date got a little mad at me for not paying enough attention to her. I guess I got distracted talking to people, and didn't realize that she wasn't having a good time. But what is a prom without a bit of drama? I walked my date to the bus, then returned to the prom and danced for a while with my classmates. This person and I are old friends, way beyond the point of dating or having romantic interest in each other, and yet something about prom night created strange expectations and reactions. However, she forgave me for ignoring her and we are still good friends.
