![]() ![]() On Swedish radio, Sidewalk’s Ben Powell and Skate Malmö’s Gustav Svanborg Edén declared skateboarding “inherently political”, which made me want to high-5 the pair of them. Skateboarding imbues the city and our leisure time with purposes beyond consuming or spectating. Skateboarders can do, and are doing, more to be part of the resistance: these are four things to start with. Although most big fights feel lost, despite what the entrail reading of recent UK election polling may suggest – now is exactly the time for little, local and everyday actions that can help push humanity’s stalled jalopy back onto the Enlightenment’s journey towards new and better. I hate Trump, May, Farage and their ilk more than the generation of failed ‘moderates’ (read neoliberal ideologues) they usurped, and am truly terrified for the future. Long Live Southbank helped change this, doing what Surfers Against Sewage did for surfing in the early 90s: taking responsibility for our environment with an infectious energy and globe-spanning visual language. We inhabit the city and the everyday with piss and vinegar, and yet, in the most urbanised century in humanity’s existence, still wait to have politics done to us – buffeted along by the story instead of framing the narrative. But skating is also all about practice over theory: playfulness and participation, which has the potential to be radical (in both senses of the word). Skateboarders are avid consumers and hoarders. We are detached spectators, ironically curating, rather than actively reshaping our lives. Baggy-as-hell, light-ass-denims are back, y’all. In contrast, today’s pop culture, politics and economics recycle the past in ever more rapid loops. Nagging memories of how things should have been are whispered by the ghosts of the 1960s, when man dreamed of space travel and the vast, imposing architecture that brought the modern to the everyday. ![]() This describes a state in which, with no impetus to create anything genuinely new, we are haunted by past visions of the future. I was too busy failing to broaden my flip repertoire through the early 2000s to pick up on the radical thinkers that clustered around Fisher, and am now reading their ideas on ‘hauntology’ with neophyte zeal. Euphoric outbursts of dissent are followed by depressive collapse.” Big acts of resistance fail because we cannot imagine any serious alternative to the current way of things. The sadly departed cultural critic Mark Fisher, known by his blog moniker K-punk, noted: “From the G20 protests, to the millions marching against the Iraq war, to the Arab Spring, to the short-lived student campaign against fees in the UK – the narrative of evental politics since the late 1990s has been reliably repetitious. Although hyper-capitalism has failed in its pledge that each new generation will be better off than their parents, its Randian high priests still sit at the very top of the hill. Optimists see hope in the millions galvanised to protest, choking up airports to make Islamophobic travel bans unenforceable, filling town squares to hear a man that looks a bit like Obi-Wan Kenobi speak of good, old-fashioned socialism. If we engage (and you should engage… please vote), it is more out of habit or forlorn hope than genuine belief that things can change for the better. If we see the world differently, with unique expectations of life, work and the city – is this potentiality ever realised? If it isn’t, we may as well be any other group of beer-chugging jocks.Īlmost half-way through 2017 and the world is still chain-barfing 2016’s dirty pint, exhausted by elections that serve only the politicians who call for them. We believe authority should leave us be, whether we are respectful or pig ignorant towards other users of public space. We collectively fail to distinguish between good and terrible skate art. ![]() Skateboarders have a notable tendency towards exceptionalism. Every sub-culture believes their people are better than the bozos on the outside. ![]()
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