Buying In - (Page 28) 28 rob walker subject of the 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, formed a group that competed as a kind of team on behalf of a local skate and surf shop called Zephyr. The reverence accorded the members of this group today may be suggested by the alternative newspaper L.A. Weekly’s judgment that the Zephyr skaters “defined the language, made the idols, built the myths, established the canon, bled and bruised the sacraments, and in the end forged the aesthetic that skateboarding, and by extension modern youth culture, adheres to still.” The details are not particularly important here—and inevitably there are alternative accounts arguing that the whole Zephyr thing is overrated—but the poetry of this particular creation myth is unbeatable: Literally beyond the end of the American frontier, in the ruins of a failed amusement park that jutted several hundred feet into the ocean, in an era when the whole American idea seemed vulnerable, something brand new was invented. “One of the reasons we’re attracted to these guys, I think, is because they lived authentically,” commented Catherine Hardwicke, director of Lords of Dogtown, a widerelease 2005 Hollywood film about this group. “They rode their skateboards, and their jeans were fucked up because they could only afford one pair. They weren’t sitting there watching TV, they were doing shit they loved, you know, and they cared about it and felt it vibrantly. . . . You can’t help but be attracted to them because they lived by their instincts.” All of which is a major reason why young guys on skateboards have been so thoroughly absorbed into the iconography of marketing and in recent years have been used to sell everything from cell phone service to soft drinks. These days, talented young skaters send “sponsor me” videos to equipment makers, hoping to get “on flow” (meaning that they get
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