All good things must come to an end, and sadly in this first week of 2009, the Club Old Man Ramp Compound (or “The COMpound” as it was called) has come to its final, flaming days. After four years of harsh South Alabama sun and sporadic barbecue sessions, proprietor Greg Siegfried put the torch to the beast’s big belly. Continue reading “The End of the Club Old Man Ramp Compound”
New Zine: labcabinalabama
With all of this digital stuff, sometimes it feels good to go back to the analog world. I find making a real, honest-to-paper-pulp zine every once in a while keeps things in perspective. As many of you know, I spent the summer of 2008 in my old haunts in southeast Alabama. Well, I made a zine to commemorate the last few months of skateboarding, correspondence, and heat. Continue reading “New Zine: labcabinalabama”
Radio Silence: The Salad Days of American Hardcore
In the early eighties, American hardcore brought extra speed and confrontation to the DIY punk-rock game. Radio Silence: A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music (MTV Press) documents a big chunk of the beginnings of this genre and its culture. Authors Nathan Nedorostek and Anthony Pappalardo opened up their archives of letters, original artwork, records, tapes, fliers, t-shirts, zines, and photographs — all the the sacred ephemera of the movement. Continue reading “Radio Silence: The Salad Days of American Hardcore”
Go Skateboarding Day!
June 21st is Go Skateboarding Day, so after a month off of my board due to a bum foot, I went skateboarding. It rained all kinds of fierce as it is wont to do in the evenings in the summer in southeast Alabama, but I skated anyway. Continue reading “Go Skateboarding Day!”
A New Notebook: Three More Giant Influences
I made a “Master Cluster” notebook. Check it out.
Continue reading “A New Notebook: Three More Giant Influences”
An Inconvenient Youth, Part Two
Remember when music was good — when bands stood for something and the music they created was from the heart? Remember when music was real?
I remember a college professor trying to tell me that Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine was “fake, plastic music” while Jimi Hendricks’ Are You Experienced? was “real.” I recently heard the same argument about the fakeness of My Chemical Romance, with NIN as the “real” example.
Since writing last entry, I attended a skateboarding session where there were several skaters much older than I am. One said skater couldn’t seem to get his head in the present. All he talked about was “how things used to be” — the tricks, the ramps, the attitude, the music — everything. Needless to say, this grew tiresome very quickly, and I was glad when the younger crew finally showed up to session.
Some cultural artifacts get “grandfathered” in before our critical filters develop — shows that you remember loving that would probably annoy you now. Others however are chosen by your newly discerning pre-teen mind. Be it Bad Brains, The Wipers, The Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, Fugazi, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, or My Chemical Romance, everyone has that “punk rock moment” where he or she realizes that the shit on the radio or the shit that their dad likes is wack. This does not make the stuff that you used to like better than the stuff your daughter likes. This does not make Nine Inch Nails “better” than My Chemical Romance (there are plenty of other reasons for that).
As Doug Stanhope would put it, Nine Inch Nails is good to you because being young is good. Everything was better then, but not because it was 1991 (or 1968), for example. It’s because you were young then. The same can be said for the Jimi Hendricks example and my college professor above. Sorry, everyone, “Three’s Company” was not necessarily better than “The King of Queens.”
Part of this is cognitive. Our brains’ ability to create and store new memories simply slows down — to a near-stop, therefore making our most cherished memories those of a bygone era, those of our youth. And when we remember those times, we reify them, making them stronger (Freud called the process “Nachtraglichkeit” meaning “retroactivity”).
So, the aging skateboarder lamenting the olden days when skateboarding was more about gnar than fashion (Ed. note: it’s always been about both) might be suffering from cognitive deceleration, but most likely he’s just being nostalgic boor. Farbeit from me to quote Bob Dylan, but he once said, “nostalgia is death.”
My college professor (who’d probably be proud of me for quoting Dylan, even if I’m using it against him) was just being nostalgic as well. Nostalgia is not inherently bad, but when it comes from a sad place (as in our lamenting skateboarder above), then it indicates a dissatisfaction with the present. This, I believe, is when it becomes death.
We should all always be working toward making these the good ol’ days. The day I’m looking back, lamenting the now, is the day I want to cease.
Sources:
Johnson, S. Mind Wide Open. Schribner: New York, 2004.
Watson, J. D. Avoid Boring People. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2007.
Watson, J. D. “On Enduring Memories” SEED Magazine, April/May, 2006. p. 45.
Thanks to Reggie for sending me the Ruben Bolling comic.
UNCONSUB by Mark Lewman
My friend Mark Lewman sent me this video clip a few years ago. It’s sort of a video zine called “UNCONSUB” that he made with a digital camera. At the time, one couldn’t share such things as freely as we do now (he sent it to me on a CDR via the regular mail), but now that we have the bandwidth, I thought I’d share it. Continue reading “UNCONSUB by Mark Lewman”
Recurring Themes, Part Six: Sleeper Artifacts
“The essence of culture is found in all its artifacts.”
— Pete Robinson in Donald Antrim’s Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World
During one of our mid-session chats at the skatepark recently, my friend Greg mentioned that a lot of the older guys he skated with at various parks, guys who’d skated back in the late 70s and early 80s, started skateboarding again after seeing the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary. I don’t know why, but this struck me as an odd phenomenon. I guess because it was a halo effect I hadn’t thought about.
Similarly, in Doug Pray’s 2001 movie Scratch, in interviews with a lot of today’s prominent turntablists, one of the questions was, “What made you want to be a DJ?” A large majority of the interviewees named Herbie Hancock’s 1983 hit “Rockit” as the defining impetus for their becoming DJs. This also struck me as odd since the main thing that stuck with me about that song was the video’s disturbing robotic mannequins (see below). “Rockit” is also a total anomaly in the Herbie Hancock canon, but it brought scratching to the mainstream with its infectious hook, based on the frenetic but rhythmic scratches of GrandMixer DST alongside Hancock’s catchy keyboards and mechanized vocals. Unbeknownst to me, it also had a major role in setting off what would become the turntablism movement — the DJ as musician.
I read a similar series of interviews with professional BMX riders a few years ago, and the same question was posed to the day’s top pros. Again, a large majority cited one cultural artifact as their starting point. This time, it was the 1986 Hal Needham movie Rad. Given my age, and the fact that I was already deep into BMX when Rad came out (I clearly remember going to see it the night it opened in my town in Alabama), I never thought that it would affect the sport the way it obviously did.
Along the same lines, Duane Pitre claimed Back to the Future (1985) was the reason he started skateboarding, and I’m guessing he’s not the only one.
These few examples demonstrate clearly to me that culture is about our relationships to cultural artifacts, and not necessarily their intended purposes. It’s about the effects of artifacts, and not the artifacts themselves. It’s about the ripple, not the rock.
I always cite James Gleick‘s Chaos as a turning point in my adult life. Reading that book turned me back into a reader and set me on my way to graduate school.
What cultural artifacts changed your path or had a deep impact on you?
Here is the aforementioned video for Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” (runtime: 3:25):
Security Cam Footage
Quick clip of me skateboarding in the Nemo Design studio. Continue reading “Security Cam Footage”
Avoiding Affordances: Unusability Engineering
With all of the semi-recent focus on usability, I’ve noticed a growing countermovement that doesn’t get near as much attention: unusability. I’m talking here about deliberately designing something so that it’s not usable, not the much-maligned negligence of design that renders things unusable.
For example, there are several bus bench designs that allow sitting while waiting for the arrival of mass transit, yet prevent the bench from being used as a bed. Most of these designs involve armrests or ridges in the seat to prevent one from lying prone across the bench, but my favorite is the backless, round-top bench: The seat is shaped like half of a cylinder and allows one to sit (albeit not a luxuriously comfortable place to park yourself). Without your feet on the ground though, you’re not likely to stay on top. Therefore, there’s no napping on this bench. In one of his books on L.A. (City of Quartz, Vintage, 1990), Mike Davis calls them “bum-proof benches.”
The manipulation of the perceived affordances of objects and surfaces is another great example. Donald Norman discusses a few of these in his book Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles (Addison-Wesley, 1992). Chairs and tables offer surfaces that are affordances for the support of weight. That is, a table affords support. If you have a glass counter on which you don’t want anything placed, it should be slanted. If it’s flat, it gives the perception of affording weight placed on top (and often ends up cracked).
The handrails around hotel balconies are typically rounded or beveled in such a way as to prevent the setting down of a beverage. This is to keep one from setting a beer bottle on the rail then drunkenly or excitedly knocking it off onto passers-by, cars, or just the ground below. This is not a design flaw. It is an engineered unusability.
In the past ten years or so architects and urban landscapers have made or retrofitted handrails and ledges to make them unusable for skateboarding. Large knobs welded onto metal handrails or blocks bolted to ledges keep skateboarders from using these surfaces as props or obstacles for their maneuvers. Again, these are not mistakes, but designed — if even often clumsily or not exactly aesthetically — for preventing a certain use.
There are many other examples, but it just struck me that the flipside of usability (in its deliberate form) doesn’t get much attention. Be on the lookout for things designed to prevent their use.