Wave Time
Skating Past — Pass 1
Some things we assume to be long gone manage to slip from behind an invisible curtain and wave to us. Not in a “Hello” kind of way, but in a “Come over here” kind of way.
We call them memories. But I’m not so sure.
A few months back, after scrolling through a streaming service menu for nearly an hour, I hit play on a documentary I’d been skirting past for nearly a decade.
I dove into The Bones Brigade: An Autobiography.
A sound. Like waves on the shore. Not so much like what you’d hear on the quartz-flour beaches of Pensacola and Gulf Shores. No. More like what you’d hear along the rougher crusts of the Pacific and Atlantic, where you can hear a grating roar.
That sound. It begins and ceases and then again begins.
Stacy Peralta — one of the early gods of modern skateboarding who turned recruiter, coach, marketing genius, and filmmaker — starts his movie without an image. Love him or hate him, he usually knows what he’s doing.
Dark screen, a minimum of credits fades in and out.
Polyurethane wheels, steal bearings, aluminum trucks, and a two-and-a-half-foot wood plank — they’re the vessel in an untethered swinging boat ride from lip to lip of an empty concrete swimming pool.
A grating roar.
Now away. Now near. Again away. Again near.
A handful of onlookers cheering.
“Aw, man!” a single voice says before cameras come to life and one of the second generation of skate gods, a now grizzle-bearded Steve Caballero, fills the screen and begins reminiscing.
Forty-one seconds.
Even the Sirens in the Aegean wouldn’t lure me away for the next hundred and ten minutes.
So there’s Cab and Lance Mountain and Mike McGill and Rodney Mullen and Tommy Guerrero. Oh yeah, Tony Hawk, too.
In the 1980s, if you were a skater, those were some of the names you had to spit out on demand without thinking twice, whether or not you were a fan of the Bones Brigade and their sponsor company Powell Peralta.
I wasn’t.
Don’t get me wrong. I considered (and still consider) Tommy and Lance to be tied for Second Place in my book of favorite skaters. Cab was in a realm all his own, mainly because of the amount of air he could put under him on a halfpipe. I also have to own up to being drawn — then and now — to Powell Peralta skate gear silkscreened with Future Primitive-themed graphics.
Thing is — by the time I got into skateboarding in ’85, Powell Peralta and Bones Brigade were like Coca Cola and Madonna. You couldn’t escape being bombarded by the ads, the t-shirts, the videos. Wall . . . to . . . wall.
I couldn’t afford a Powell Peralta setup anyway. A Bones Brigade deck with Bones wheels and all the fixings went for around fifty more dollars than my first board, a Kryptonics deck and wheels, which I bought at Bayside Bikes on Mobile Bay’s eastern shore. Fifty dollars might not sound like much, but a little over one-hundred fifty was all I had saved up coming out of eighth grade. I did buy a Powell Peralta skid plate, plus rails, which I guess made me only 95% loser.
That being said, Powell Peralta and its Bones Brigade’s legitimacy was actually a serious point of contention back then.
There was no way skateboarding, which emerged out of a California subculture and was then tied closely to hardcore punk and thrash metal, could have the Bones Brigade as its face. No fucking way, dude! Modern skateboarding couldn’t continue putting up with the bloated swarms of posers that Powell Peralta’s dream team attracted to skate shops and competitions. No doubt, man!
At least that’s how a lot of skaters felt, and not just hardcore Thrasher Magazine readers and Alva Skates acolytes.
By ’85, those gripes were academic, though. New Coke was out of the can. Black Flag and Metallica were safe in the suburbs despite themselves. There was no turning back, and the Bones Brigade was really nothing more than a profitable victim of their own unexpected success. They weren’t the only ones. Everyone was cashing in, including Thrasher and Tony Alva’s Anti-Bones Brigade.
Skateboarding had reached a crest. It was the beginning of the end of its second major era, which many still consider its golden age.
Sometime between ’87 and ’89, the vast ocean of skating retreated. It was like beach revelers dwindling after a totally rad party, moaning from hangovers, meandering off with the wind-blown notes of Bad Brains covering “Day Tripper” on the Chevrolet stage for National College Television’s spring break broadcast.
But I have to be honest.
Little to none of that was on my mind as I hung on every word, truck grind, and image in the Bones Brigade documentary — a bricolage of interviews and footage from Powell Peralta’s video library and pages from Thrasher and Transworld Skateboarding Magazine.
What was on my mind, and what appeared to be on the those of the now middle-aged Bones Brigade and other former pro skaters, was that we’d all been a part of something larger and cooler than anybody halfway serious about skating during the ’80s could come close to wrapping their head around.
A note of sadness.
Cab cries in the documentary. Lance cries. Rod cries and even punches himself in the side of the head. Tommy, known for his sarcasm and impish wit, is as earnest as a cancer ward counselor.
We ’80s skaters can’t let whatever it was go. Maybe we can somehow bring it back.
At the very least, we can stop the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, / Retreating to the / Breath of the night-wind.”
Truth is — we’re just the latest generation of old dudes pining for glory days. That doesn’t mean the ’80s weren’t a significant period for skating. They were. That doesn’t mean all us Gen Xers who took part in the scene shouldn’t remember our experiences. We should. It played a role — and still does — in shaping who we as individuals and a group became, who we are now. But there’s no freezing time or going back or reliving or reclaiming or whatever. Sorry.
If I consider the past epistemologically, then something from the past is simply past. Ontologically however the past is not always simply past, but exerts an influence on the present — not of course the entire past, but parts of it and not always the same parts.
— Georg Lukács, Conversations with Lukács
A few things to keep in mind about nostalgia, which has regrettably become synonymous with memory for a lot of people.
It lures you into thinking in terms of golden ages, good old days, better times, and all that — at the expense of memory.
Nostalgia short circuits the part of you that remembers — even feels — the depths and contours of events and impressions of the actual period in time called the past. You’ll gradually forget the odor of the sewage treatment plant and sun-cooked kudzu on that July midmorning in 1985, lose sight of the metallic blue tail of the skink watching you skate, gloss over your pockmarked neon-green wheels whirring over concrete in the silty storm canal. You’ll erase lying to your friends about how awesome a vert rider you had become after skating for only two months. And then you’ll photoshop staring down, horrified, into a plywood canyon from its PVC coping, acrophobia nailing you there almost forever, trucks wobbling after finally dropping in, never making it to the other side of the halfpipe. You’ll mute the ridicule and paper over the shaking heads of pity. The past must be homogenized and sanitized.
Nostalgia can, on the one hand, numb the part of you that remembers why you stopped skating or stopped wearing friendship bracelets or stopped listening to Big Country. There can be no thresholds, no transitions, no growth, no transformations, no completions that make way for newness, no continuity through change. Everything — every moment — must be a sealed fragment, disconnected from any sequence or vital relationship with what came before or after. Imagine all the growth rings of a tree separated and dipped in polyurethane — empty circles of plasticized cellulose floating in space.
On the other hand, nostalgia can, if you’re of a certain age, make you feel ashamed of having never stopped skating, never stopped wearing friendship bracelets, never stopped listening to Big Country. Grow up! Move on! Nostalgia can’t stand things that endure and flourish within time’s movement. It’s only interested in us yearning constantly for a present, if not multiple presents, we’re too late for.
Nostalgia encourages us to collect moments like postage stamps. But by doing that, we take them out of time, make them timeless. We also store them in one place, an empty present. It’s empty because we’ve pushed aside living our nows for obsessively accumulating all those thens. This makes some of us anxious. We sense something’s not right. Too bad we often react by doubling down on our manic obsession. Collect! Collect! Collect! Before the clock runs out!
Nostalgia also manufactures and markets the past. We can purchase ambiance and purported artifacts. What if what we’ve bought doesn’t quite jibe with historical events or with our own experiences and memories? Irrelevant. As long as it sells. And hey, if authenticity is what we demand, no problem. We’ll dutifully fork over more cash for it. Merchants on eBay and companies such as Powell Peralta and Vans rake in crazy money off vintage remnants and new re-issues.
In a word, nostalgia is a scam. A scam we run on ourselves. We become both dealer and mark in a game of three card monte. We become both lender and borrower in a Ponzi scheme.
Despite all appearances to the contrary, nostalgia doesn’t foster connections among our individual and collective experiences in the past, present, and future. It doesn’t enrich or propel our lives with memories. It alienates us from them.
It makes successful artist-athletes grieve, even though they were — still are — instrumental in turning the activity of riding a board on wheels into the basis of a remarkable event that continues to unfold and provide meaning to quite a few people.
Nostalgia, and bitter disillusionment with it, moved a talented Matthew Arnold to write magnificent lines that are also pathetic and dumb:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Oh, I’m more than a little familiar with the philosophical points Arnold makes in his landmark poem, “Dover Beach.” I’m not in the dark, either, when it comes to the historical situation he observed from his perch atop the pale cliffs of the nineteenth century.
With God dead, with revolutions turning on and churning under the supposedly emancipated, with the history of civilizations proving to be a long testament to barbarism, with all sure things fading or already dissolved, with the prospects of love and truth being precarious at best, with nature utterly indifferent to us, what’s left? What can we do?
Those weren’t bad points to bring up in the 1800s. Not bad ones to bring up now.
With all this awfulness going on, we have no other choice but to extend trust to the ones we hope are near and dear — although we intuit, if not know, that doing so is too little, too late.
Also worth hashing out.
But then we come to the gist of the poem.
Curse the treacherous sea! All is lost! We’re stranded! Who do we think we’re kidding?! We’re all so stupid! So alone! We can do nothing but die miserable deaths in a pointless, cruel world!
Um, no.
Water, or the sea, is the symbol for a thinking or behaviour that, from moment to moment, adapts and snuggles up to the transforming world and changing things. The world is not abysmal. It is merely manifold in its manifestations. It is not a being but a path that permanently changes course.
— Byung-Chul Han, Absence
The kind of conclusion the poem entertains is, paradoxically, a short-sighted and tin-eared prophecy that certain people would be more than happy to fulfill or exploit. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the current one, can bear witness.
Thankfully, “Dover Beach” itself — due in huge part to its craftsmanship and imagery — betrays its author, contradicts what it’s supposed to mean.
Check out the gaps among the stanzas: between an opening sonnet and a widowed sestet, between those six lines and an ottava rima gone rogue, between those eight lines and a not-so-Spenserian stanza that reads like a litany of the doomed.
Can’t let the spaces between the lines go neglected.
Or those rhymes and tempos that break with established standards — yet more openings.
Not to mention some of the many questions the woeful poet’s claims open themselves to.
Are the ones we love just debris we cling to in the void? Is love, as in the noun, no more than a sentiment or a thing to possess? Is integrity only a quaint virtue to hope for? Instead, aren’t loving and being true processes we have a hand in? For that matter, isn’t living? And doesn’t living require time, its passage reflected in the rhythms of our movement amid the elements?
All these gaps, these openings. They aren’t the abyss or void or whatever. They imply alternatives to Arnold’s testament.
With every intention of arguing how wretched we are, how at odds with nature we are, how we have no real impact on history, how incapable we are of knowing anything, how out of time we are, Arnold composed. He composed in and from the very world he was writing off. He, despite his impressive self-pity, created something beyond beautiful.
Matthew Arnold might’ve tried to pancake all of history into a bleak eternal present after he could no longer depend on a beautiful forever.
History, though, won’t be contained. Life won’t let it be.
Living.
This isn’t happening outside of time and space — off in some idyllic “Sea of Faith” or vapid Big Empty — but in them and by way of them.
The living stories of the world — once-presents, presents, presents-to-come — aren’t sucked into an abyss. Real seas everywhere deliver their cadences.
You can hear them on the world’s coasts, even deep inland on concrete.
. . . begin, and cease, and again begin . . .
Originally published on Substack: https://dexleap.substack.com/p/wave-time
