The “Real Non-Fiction” of Magic Skate Spots

It should come as no surprise to anyone that I grew up obsessed with skate spots, primarily Embarcadero. I was born in Northern California, and fortunate enough to spend every summer and most winters in Bolinas and San Francisco. I spent a few weeks in the summer of 1992, after having studied Mike Carroll’s “Questionable” video, skating and lurking around Embarcadero, enduring the intimidation, real and imagined, ridicule, and technical trick progression that is now the stuff of legend. When I got back to Austin, my crew of friends imagined that we were skate-gangsters just like our heroes in San Francisco: we spent more time on the street, skated more brick and tile-surfaced spots than we should have, and did our best to emulate the EMB crew, with whom I probably had the closest, most up-to-date contact. Whether or not our lives were anything like those that we glimpsed in videos of Embarcadero is, well, questionable.

It's safe to say that, through the example of those videos shot at that place, we all inherited and internalized class-based, racialized, and gendered pathologies both good and bad. By emulating people who didn’t look like us in videos that largely elided women, we began to think differently about how we related to the world, using those videos and those skaters as a template. But then we all grew up, and the thought of emulating Mike Carroll, our hero at 15, seemed a lot less cool by the time I turned 17. 

Further, skateboarding itself evolved, and soon my own sights shifted from wannabe EMB to looking for the pink granite surfaces that recalled what I saw of DC’s Pulaski. One weekend, I found a set of high pink granite planters in front of a windowless state building near the capital. The planter ledges reminded me of Freedom Plaza, where people like Pep Martinez, Andy Stone, and Reese Forbes did tech tricks on what seemed like impossibly high stone ledges. This mini plaza was obviously nothing like DC but became so to me through my own desire. I imagined myself skating Pulaski, increasingly alone, as none of my other friends in Austin really liked that spot. 

By the time I turned 20, I had largely outgrown that attachment to one skate spot, and one approach to skateboarding. I was not alone. The type of skateboarding that had incubated through centripetal force in the plazas of the early 90’s was in a diasporic moment, and the focus shifted from canonical West Coast spots to exotic East Coast and European locales, and the middle part of the decade featured a lot of street skating down regular streets. This arguably began with Stereo’s A Visual Sound, continued through 40’s Amigos, and reached some kind of apotheosis between Dan Wolfe’s Eastern Exposure 3 (1996) and Real Skateboards’s 1997 Non-Fiction, where Keith Hufnagel, Quim Cardona, Mark Gonzales and others skate increasingly non-descript spots. Something about that video challenged the primacy of spot-centric videos of the past. Seeing Mark Gonzales weightlessly glide down the Sunset Strip, weaving in and out of traffic and flying off of curb cuts is about as close to “real magic” as I can imagine. 

Returning to the title of the talk, “Real” is both a brand and a commitment to empirical reality, no? Real I get, but what do we mean when we talk about magic in skate spots? Does it have to do with tricks? Is it somehow alchemical? Could it be social, as if the fact that people who share  a passion for something that is both fun and rigorous can lead to lasting bonds and a greater sense of kinship? Are we calling that magic now? Before I go any further with whatever potential for magic that skateboarding may have, let’s try to historicize what we might mean by magic itself. 

Marc Johnson, more poignantly relevant than ever, offered one answer in his famous Cliff Kauffman story:

The craziest thing about skateboarding is you can say ‘what if?’ You can say ‘What if I can do this? I think I can probably do this,’ and you can do it. You can take something that was pure thought and make it reality, because that’s just the way it is.

Johnson describes something extraordinary,  not magic. To imagine a thing and then to bring that thing into existence through repeated effort, doggedness, and sometimes dumb luck can feel miraculous, sure, and yet I am not convinced that this is magic but something closer to discipline, imagination, and will.

Then again, magical thinking and tricks have been central to skateboarding. We perform tricks, and the lay audience often cannot understand how those tricks are done. If we’re fortunate, we mask our process through the grace of our performance. But every magician knows that the trick itself is part practice, part con: the impossible effect is produced through repetition, rehearsal, and technique. What appears supernatural on stage is usually the product of punishing labor performed elsewhere. The beautiful sausage of our nose-pick is made with bloody knuckles and shredded shins. 

To paraphrase Dolly Parton’s “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap” zinger, ours might be “you gotta try really hard to not look like a try-hard!” But even this isn’t “real magic”; it’s just explaining how hard things sometimes look easy.

This might be as good a time as ever to examine historical moments when magic, fetishism, and aura might converge in a way that is relevant to skate-spots. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Walter Benjamin all grappled with same problem under a different name. For Lévi-Strauss, magic was a symbolic system through which we organized reality, while for Benjamin, the language became that of aura: the strange quality that allows an object or place to feel charged with significance beyond its physical presence. With Karl Marx, fetishism describes the way social relationships become disguised within objects. For Freud, the fetish is a repository for displaced desire, like how I fetishized Pulaski at my sad, lonely, sunbaked pink planters in Texas. Each thinker tried to explain why humans imbue certain objects, places, symbols, and practices with powers exorbitant of their material reality.

Of this cherry-picked genealogy, “aura” and “fetish” might be the most germane to our discussion of magic in skateboarding. Take Benjamin's aura. I have never been entirely persuaded by his famous definition of aura as "the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be." The phrase is evocative, certainly, but also frustratingly vague. When applied to skateboarding, aura often becomes a way of describing the feeling that famous spots possess some special quality. Love Park. South Bank. Pulaski. Brooklyn Banks. EMB. But does EMB possess some kind of magic beyond what we make of it?

IDK.

What makes a skate spot meaningful is rarely the spot itself, but is the accumulation of use, which results in the stories we tell. The photographs, videos, community of rivals and chosen family,  the countless hours spent waiting, failing, trying again, and simply lurking. This significance doesn’t emanate from the granite or concrete of the spot, but it is created almost by consensus by all of us.

This is why I have always been uncomfortable with claims that my work fetishizes skate spots. Perhaps I used to, but not now.

The word fetish carries a long and complicated history, with its origins in Portuguese and Dutch European colonists to describe supposedly magical objects encountered elsewhere, it later became a central concept for the widgets of Marx and the naughty bits of Freud. In every version, however, fetishism involves attributing powers to an object that obscures the human relationships behind it.

That is precisely the opposite of what I want to do with This Old Ledge:  within the limited range of things I can talk about, my goal is not to reify the spots or lionize the locals, but to demystify them. When I investigate the history of a plaza, identify its architect, trace its design influences, document its construction, or explain why skateboarders gathered there, I am not attempting to transform the place into a sacred relic, nor big-up Mies van der Rohe. I am attempting to return it to its capacious social history. We all know that some dumb, inert ledge doesn’t possess magical powers even if it grinds well. The point is that skateboarders found a use for it. It’s the grinder, not the grinded. Skateboarders do not uncover magical places. We create meaningful places through use, and meaning changes momentarily.

When I examine a Late Modernist plaza, a failed civic space, or a forgotten piece of street furniture, if I’m feelin’ high-falutin’, I’d like to think I’m more in line with Benjamin’s Arcades Project: not because I am searching for hidden magic but because I am just interested in how people use places and how those uses change over time. Both projects emerge from the same impulse, fostered in my PhD program in art history: to understand the flimsy present through the exorbitant material stockpiles of the past. 

The patina left by our skateboards on a curb is not the magic part of it, attractive as it may be. Nor does the magic reside in architecture, or in some mystical aura surrounding famous locations. If there is magic in skateboarding, it exists in the social world skateboarders create together;  it is sustained in the transformation of ordinary space through collective imagination, and remains in the ability of a group of people to establish their own values, their own shifting hierarchies, and their own systems of significance within spaces never intended for those purposes. The friendships, communities, and shared experiences that emerge wherever skateboarders gather, and especially where we roam, testify to this.

Perhaps this is why attempts to theorize skateboarding through magic often leave me unsatisfied. Skateboarding emerged after the Enlightenment, after industrialization, after Modernity, after many of the intellectual traditions that reified the concepts of aura, fetishism, and magic in their classical forms. Skateboarding is a postmodern activity practiced amid the ruins of those older systems of meaning, our realest connection to magic without the magical thinking.

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