On Wheels: The Art of Skateboarding

James Guida December 07

Skateboarding is as much a staple of our cities and suburbs as any skyscraper or parking lot, and it’s image, despite attempts to cordon it off into regulated parks and centres, is still one of adolescent insouciance, rebellion and risk. In the latest issue of Meanjin, James Guida takes a look back the sport’s early incarnations in Australia and overseas, and remembers what it was like to be physically free, chasing after that one trick that could give way to a moment of perfect control and unison. The full essay is now up on our editions page. You can read a brief extract below.

Lately I’ve been watching skateboarding clips on YouTube. It’s an idle, enjoyable activity that means reflecting on the roughly ten-year period when skating was the whole of my life. Skating’s a young and unusually aesthetic sport, and video has played an enormous role in shaping its culture and progress. For all I know, an addiction to these old films—ten and twenty years constituting age here—is burgeoning again thanks to technology. How easy it is now to find Animal Chin, that figure of myth from the Powell video, and then get lost among all the semi-forgotten footage of his descendants. Those few seconds from the Blind video when Jason Lee hits the Eiffel Tower banks? They’re available again, and now you can watch what they left out—Lee casually skating the famous spot, and then the city more generally, with Mark Gonzales and Danny Way. It’s 1990, and the Parisian pedestrians the skaters swerve around are typically discreet about their brush with greatness, some even affecting to pretend that the riders are some delinquent kids with a camcorder.

As a kid, watching skate videos decidedly meant looking forward. In the mid to late eighties there were two shops (one primarily surf, the other BMX) that stocked a little skate stuff in my hometown of Canberra. The first three Powell and Peralta videos arrived there, as they must have everywhere kids skated, as events of religious importance. There was only one copy of each tape, and we would hire them again and again, our admiration turning to new points with every viewing, and use them as inspiration for our own skating. Gradually there were more skate companies; with cameras more accessible, videos became easier for all to make, and started to come out with greater frequency. In 1991 my brother and I were lucky enough to get our hands on Blind’s Video Days within the first week of its release in Australia; a group of good skaters we were friendly with heard we had it out on hire, and showed up unannounced at our house, though they hadn’t since the days when we had a jump ramp and people still loved those. We huddled around the screen, spines tingling at the intro. Without backing music, fourteen-year-old Guy Mariano came on, doing the handful of tricks that opened his part, a sequence still precisely remembered, probably, by any devoted street skater from those years. Watching the little crew-cut prodigy, our anticipation was mingled with fear. The god of skate videos decrees that the film must finish on the highest note of difficulty possible: if this was how the Blind one began, how might it end? We were not sure such a close would be believable.

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