From: "fuller" <fuller-AT-bekkers.com.au>
Subject: Remapping the terrain of the everyday: An example.
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 00:52:47 +0800


G'day all,

I have just come home from viewing the documentary "Dogtown and the Z-Boys"
and it was *very* interesting (and fun). It traces the emergence and culture
of some influential skateboarders in the early to mid seventies. I was
struck by how the culture presented in the film was almost a perfect example
of the everyday revolutionary, where a handful of people were the catalysts
for the remapping of contended spaces.

A few of the lines from the film half-remembered:
"After 200 years of American industrial progress, these kids are partaking
in geurilla warfare to take back the concrete expanses..." (Very poor
paraphrasing, perhaps of more than a few lines:)
"Now, it would be like Nike paying some kid $10,000 to go around the place
spraying graffiti, it was just unheard of, people were paying us to do
this." (Hmm, ditto.)

To requote a passage that Eric has recently quoted from (and which I can see
a little of Badiou, or perhaps vice versa):
"To rethink is to question everything, inculding though, and question, and
the process. To question requires that something happen that reason has not
yet known. In thinking, one accepts the occurence for what it is: 'not yet'
determined. One does not prejudge it, and there is no security.
Peregrination in the desert. One cannot write without bearing witness to the
abyss of time in its coming."(Lyotard)
These people were skateboarding in the desert (that is at the literal end of
the heartbeat of all-apple-pie-America, Route 66).

And it made me rethink this bit from Heller:
"[Utopias] are not mere figments of human imagination. They draw their
strength from actuality; they exist, insofar as they exist, in the present.
Utopia is lived, practised, maintained by men and women as a form of life.
[The] utopian form of life is, for those who live it, the rose on the cross
of the present." (Heller)
The rose: The once-kids of the documentary came from a hard background and
found liberation in their skateboarding antics. Henry Rollins appears
talking about how the attitude of Dogtown and Z-boys was translated through
magazine articles so he could follow their lead and claim a similar place in
an environment so different and yet so similar.
The cross: Nearly all of them were fueled by their egos and the drive for
materialist gain. Maybe. Single minded in their 'locals-only' militancy
(literally!) it drove them to perform themselves and their everyday on a
mass-marketed, highly commodified stage on which they were "pirating" a
slice of the pie for themselves.

Towards the end they talk about the last time all the Z-boys were together,
skating out some rich kid's drained pool. It reminded me of this:
"'Home' is not simply house, roof, family. There are people who have houses
and families but no 'homes'. For this reason, familiarity is not in itself
equivalent to 'feeling at home' though familiarity is, of course, an
indispensable ingredient in any definition of 'home'. Over and above this,
we need the feeling of confidence: 'home' protects us. We also need the
intensity and density of human relationships - the 'warmth' of the home.
'Going home' should mean returning to that firm position which we know, to
which we are accustomed, where we feel safe, and where our emotional
relationships are at their most intense." (Heller)

I found it inspirational for my thesis, both stylistically and
theoretically. I recommend it to anyone who sees the everyday as the next
potentially emacipatory cultural battle ground (if there was ever any other
place) for western society, also if you are interested in well crafted (and
fun!!) slices of rewritten history. I could go on and on...but I am tired
and it is late.

Cya,
Glen.