POSESSED TO SK8!

Well well – after I wrote a wee blog about Skater/Actor/Musician Mike Vallely he went and whacked it up on his official website and I even got a few words from the man himself. Since Mike is a huge inspiration to me this was extremely exciting. So I thought what better to write about today than skateboarding and how it relates to the punk rock ethic and setting your mind/life free!
When did I start skateboarding? Well, it was since just after I could walk probably. Almost everyone in the late 70s and early 80s had one of those horrible plastic “banana boards”.

Which unless you were totally good or weightless were impossible to ride with any degree of skill. We’d usually sit down on them and ride down a hill to the theme tune of the “Red Hand Gang“.
Then in the mid 80s came a skateboarding boost to the UK and it came in the form of Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly in Back To The Future skateboarding through the streets hanging on to the back of a truck. This coupled with the rising skateboard trend stateside in the form of Powell Peralta and their great skateboarding films featuring the “Bone’s Brigade”. Soon we were all skateboarding again using those wide 80s style boards (as modelled below by a pre-plastic Axl Rose) and this time putting some tricks into the style too. Well, those that we could do.

We rode for ages, to leave the house without your board was unheard of, it was part of our youth and in the mid 90s when we started re-discovering punk I started to skate again, this time with the smaller skateboards that are still in style today (probably because they work!)

Anyway, it’s 2010, I’m 34 and I still ride on my skateboard when I can. Living in Sweden that’s only a few months of the year and every year I have to learn all over again and to be honest I’m pretty shit but it is fun to do! And of course the skateboard view of things is a very punk rock view of things.
A lot of the early skate videos featured punk music. I discovered Black Flag, Firehose, Fugazi, Descendants and more via skate videos and a lot of the old hardcore punk founding fathers met via skateboarding (Ian Mackaye, Henry Rollins, SNFU etc).
What Ian Mackaye says about skateboarding really sums it all up for me:
“What I can say about skateboarding is that I really learned how to reassign properties to the world around me. This was not a conscious practice, but still it was occurring. Suddenly the weather means something completely different to you. Swimming pools take on a new potential reality. You’re not just taking a swim anymore. If you go into a parking lot and there’s a little bank on the side of it, you make a mental note of it. The surface of the streets, are they rough or smooth? There are any number of lines that you start to see. I think when skaters walk down the street, they’re looking at it with an entirely different grid in their minds. I think this practice enabled me to redefine the world around me—to take what was given and then readjust it to make it work. When I got into music, specifically punk rock, that sort of redefinition was central. I would look at a situation, the circumstances that had been presented, and think, “Okay, I’m just going to change all of this, or at least change the way I’m thinking about it.” I come at things from a different place, and I think that’s something I really developed through skating.

To this day I swim to the bottom of swimming pools just to check out the transition”

And of course Mike V also puts it beautifully:

“I grew up skateboarding in the 80s in a small town in Jersey, unlike today me and my friends didn’t have skateparks or designated areas to ride, we had the streets in front of our homes. In was in these streets and abandoned parking lots we first bruised our shins and bloodied our elbows, discovering the joy of skateboarding.

We truly made something out of nothing, that was the spirit of skateboarding, the possibilities were endless and in a dead end town skateboarding represented a runway to the stars and beyond.

Your life, your town, your entire existence is what you make it. If you think it sucks, that’s your mind set that it’s gonna suck but if you wanna make it awesome that’s in your power, that’s in your control.

It truly is the whole spirit of skateboarding, the whole “Do It Yourself” mentality, it takes an individual to start the process. That’s where the spirit is and I’d hate to see that spirit traded in for “who’s the best” or “who has the best clothes, who’s the best looking, who has the best style” that just doesn’t factor in, when I (we) started skateboarding none of that mattered it was just that we were together, doing something that we loved. No one was excluded.

We are all connected because we ride skateboards. Without the skateboards, you are here and he is there but with the skateboards we are all together.

What if we were all the same? It would be boring. You gotta have the one hyper guy and the one guy with the big mouth, every one’s personality makes it what it is but at the end of the day you gotta be respectful and cool to each other”