Part two of the “The Polyurethane Cottage Industry” concludes my middle school-search for skateboard glory and picks up the trail of skate design in hip-hop and the gastronomical arts. I have almost written myself into buying another board. Read Part One.

OLLIE UP

Calling skateboarding’s rise to prominence meteoric would not be accurate. Though infiltration of skate culture into mainstream media may seem like osmosis, it has taken nearly 40 years for skateboarding to get a substantial monetary foothold.

The companies who approached the kids skating drought-ridden swimming pools in Orange County in the 70s were tasked with making a dangerous and (at the time) counter-cultural sport, attractive to a broad enough audience to make money.

Skateboarding did not fit the traditional sports business model of finding talented, somewhat gregarious athletes to promote a product and popularize a sport to the masses, largely because the skaters would not heel to the people with the money. The inherent rebellion coupled with the official stance that skateboarding was little more than vandalism made marketing the sport nearly impossible.

Since the sport was born out of a predominately dystopian view of the world, it was naive to think that skaters would buy products from or trust anyone but their own. Skateboarding has always depended on authenticity.

The first skate team–Zephyr Competition–was a family. The Z-Boys came from disjointed families on the wrong side of the tracks, but skating united them together. This familial aspect, coupled with skateboarding’s re-branding as a lifestyle in the 90s has made it a viable and sustainable commodity in the sports marketplace.

SKATEBOARD-P

The logic behind the design of skateboarding is almost antithetical. Current skate art has almost nothing to do with speed, tricks, or ramps.

Skate clothing is more apt to resemble a Shepard Fairey painting than Adidas’ “Impossible is Nothing” campaign. Skateboarding has always been only halfway about the sport. The other half is the often didactic artistry , which is responsible for skateboarding’s appeal to a vast array of visual artists.

The skate shoe company DC Shoes recently pulled a ménage à trois with skating, music, and the gastronomical arts by designing a shoe co-branded with The Spotted Pig restaurant in NYC’s West Village, of which Jay-Z is an investor.

Marc Ecko’s purchase of Zoo York Industries, one of the largest and oldest of modern skate collectives, was a huge merger of fashion, skateboarding and design. Under the Ecko umbrella Zoo York has expanded from skate into BMX, snowboarding, and motocross, making the work of even more artists and athletes accessible to the creative compendium of sport.

Hip-Hop has all but adopted skateboarding. In “Can I Have it Like That,” Neptunes producer and rapper Pharrell Williams rhymes:

“But please, run along, cause ladies, is feelin’ wrong
And I got some right for ‘em right after this song,
Cause my name is Skate-Board-P.”

Hip-Hop and skateboarding are a perfect match, since they both embrace the culture of DIY, the lone soldier, literally attacking the infrastructure of the world with board or beats. See Pharell put skaters to good use in one of his latest videos.

THE LEGION OF SKATE: FOR WE ARE MANY

At school the following Monday, when I showed up proudly with my new Alien Workshop shirt, Buck did indeed seek me out, practically from across campus. He walked right up to me, and I thought, this is it, yup, I have finally arrived.

“You skate?” said Buck.

“No,” I said.

He gave me a nice solid shove, “Fucking poser,” and was gone.

I was mostly devastated, but my disappointment had much to do with confusion. I could not believe that I had been mistaken, that skateboarding was actually about the skating.

The failure, I felt, was not my own, rather Buck’s. He only understood half the ethos of skateboarding.

The aura of cool, I thought, came not from the sweat sessions in drainage ditches, but from owning artisan skate products.

Like Buck, I was only half right. Many people do skate for the love of the sport, and a few of these people are unbelievably talented. You need only watch ten minutes of Rodney Mullen’s stunts to understand why skateboarding should be an olympic sport.

I was never any good. Worried about my sex appeal, it’s hard to admit, even now, but I accept it.

But I also understand that my reticence at jumping off a ten-foot high loading dock did not have to preclude me from the sport.

Skateboarding has flourished precisely because it penetrates our culture through a veritable aqueduct of media. You can get in on skateboarding at so many different points. Photographers, videographers, and artists, all arriving with a unique skill-set, have helped build skateboarding from the pool up to street level.

THE WARM HEARTH

As big as it has become, however, skating, at its core, is still a family. The Neptunes and Mark Ecko aside, skateboarding would not exist without the most essential unit, the warm hearth, the local skateshop.

I remember mine. A guy named Trent set up shop in the old Cowtown Boots storefront on Central Ave. when I was in eighth grade. He kept the original sign and Cowtown Skateboards was born. The shop soon became the official after-school hangout. Instead of going home we went to Cowtown, sat on the big couch and had our minds blown by skate videos like Mouse and Welcome to Hell.

I hung out at Cowtown because I loved skateboarding. I loved the endless variations on tricks and designs. I loved watching the pros. But really, I think I loved how skateboarding taught me to look at the world in a different way, as if it were designed just for me. I noticed architecture, spacing, ledges, rails, gradients, that I had never seen before. Even after I left skating I retained the open-eyed, explorative impression of the world that skateboarding helped engender.

The next time you see a group of skaters in the Financial District clustered around a ubiquitous, chipped, waxed ledge or an ordinary set of stairs and rail, consider that those objects blended into the urban landscape before skaters “discovered” them. And once you notice the design of the world you can never go back. Thank skateboarding for that. A new-world view with your first deck.

Read Part One here.