Brantford Skate Park

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.

The House Fly Effect

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.

7a*11d Festival

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.