20 Minutes of Decontextualized Skateboarding Clips

Kottke shared a 20-minute supercut of skate clips, which seemed very up my alley!

I’ve had a bit of a skate fixation recently thanks to imp, Skate Story, and Dave Alvarado putting me on to the impeccable Mitchie Brusco/Andy Anderson bromance. I’ve now watched probably a dozen hours of skate parts and in-depth trick tutorials/deconstruction, despite not owning a board since I was like 7.

What instantly struck me about the montage Kottke shared was how flat it all became within the first five clips. It’s all climax all the time, back-to-back-to-back, with no context. Who are these people? What is their style? How long have they been skating? Do they consider themselves skaters? (Some of them seemed more like acrobats on a skateboard, which is still cool but is kind of a different thing?)

You lose all of that when you see nameless best-hit after nameless best-hit.

Reap & sow

Something that clicked for me with (the demo of, still need to play the actual game) Skate Story was the physicality inherent to skating, and deeply rooted in its aesthetics and culture. The mortality of it. There’s a reason you’re a demon made of glass—the human body is fragile and painful, and skating entails hurling it against wood and steel and concrete over and over again until either you shatter, or your limits do. And then exulting

I see a lot in common between skating and speedrunning (neither of which I actually participate in lol) that for me embody a key essence and beauty of human nature: grinding away at a goal that is as insurmountable as it is utterly frivolous. Just because you can.

Someone beating LEGO Star Wars in 2:30:00 has no greater bearing on the world. Someone doing 2.5 spins on a plank of wood off of a specialized ramp does not intrinsically make a line go up or even feed someone. But they both took dozens—maybe hundreds!—of hours of effort and mastery to achieve, and knowing all the nuances and expertise that went into their execution makes them all the more fascinating and exhilarating. And knowing that the expertise needed for each feat came from communities of dedicated sicko nerds learning and helping each other until someone finally cracked the accomplishment is all the best parts of human learning, agency, silliness, ingenuity, and pro-sociality.

But when you just play the hits back-to-back, you lose that story, and you undersell the immense magnitude of skill and dedication (and community!). You skip over the part where each of those skaters in the clips took hundreds of hours to even learn how to ollie, let alone tre-flip El Toro. Skating and speedrunning in particular are usually instances not of just generic skills, but dozens of attempts to nail a specific accomplishment—a particular run, or a particular trick in just one location.

A huge part of the exhilaration is know that life isn’t Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and you can’t just casually bust out a sick combo line unless you are an absolute prodigy. Which means even the uglier, less-slick, imperfect stuff is impressive and skillful. Heck this is why “switch” skating is worth imaginary bonus points—it’s usually less graceful, but is impressive precisely because it’s less-practiced.

I think one of my favorite roles of criticism (yeah, I’m counting skate part deconstructions as criticism) is when it elucidates why something that seems superficially easy is in fact extraordinarily complex and skillful. Life feels so much richer for me when I can understand how every frame is a panting—or maybe a bus stop—and look in awe at the mighty works wrought by all these people everywhere.