I realize that putting “Day One” in the title of this column makes it sound like I’m going to wake up at 6am every day and write another one, sagaciously summing up all I’ve learned over the course of everyone’s favorite academic conference on skateboarding. Tomorrow, with any luck, I’ll be too hungover to. But today I wanted to put something down, if only because yesterday reminded me precisely why this Pushing Boarders thing is so special.
Words by Tobias Coughlin-Bogue
The speakers were good, of course. I was especially interested in the opening remarks, which featured John Rattray and Madeleine Uggla introducing the event’s broad theme of mental health. “I’d like us all be able to talk about mental health issues the same way we can talk about a broken wrist,” Rattray said, after sharing the experience of losing his sister to suicide.
“It’s time to normalize speaking up about our emotions,” added Uggla, who lost her late boyfriend to the same scourge. “We all have them, it’s the most normal thing. We are all naked under those clothes, believe it or not.”
I worry a bit that none of that very good advice will stop people from hiding their pain until it literally kills them, because toughing it out about mental health is such a major pillar of the patriarchy, which is such a major pillar of capitalism, and we’ve all been conditioned to buck up and keep working until we die by forces that have more control over our lives than even skateboarding, but that’s kind of besides the point.
The point is that Pushing Boarders is special because it doesn’t just present a panel, pat itself on the back, and call it a day. It creates a myriad of extracurricular activities around those panels, so that the topics are scattered into a hundred impromptu discussion groups, where they’re refracted by hundreds of minds and thousands of beers into something much, much greater than whatever words were said on stage that day. Perhaps I’m just telling myself this, because I have to present in a frighteningly small amount of time, but all you’re up there to do is get the discussion going. The many brilliant skateboarders in the audience do the rest.
Speaking of that panel I’m about to present, I had been feeling, until yesterday, a bit more pessimism about social change in skateboarding than I’d care to admit. That skateboarding could still use some social change is very clear, but the way there isn’t always. I’ve been beginning to feel like there really isn’t one, which, to reveal my own mental health crisis, means I’ve gone and uprooted my whole life for nothing. I’m moving to Amsterdam to work on SKATEISM, but does skateboarding even want SKATEISM? Yes, but a lot more of skateboarding wants Nyjah and the Olympics and the latest Thrasher dirtboarding edit, it seems. A lot of it wants to snicker in unmixed company about how “women will never be as good as men, dude.” A lot of it fucking sucks and refuses to stop sucking. And here we are, sitting in Bryggeriet patting ourselves on the backs about how much better we are than all of that. Does any of that care? How can you change something as big and diffuse as skate culture? You can’t, of course, with one conference or one magazine. But you can do it incrementally. You can very slowly, very sneakily change what it means to be cool within skateboarding.
There are unwritten rules that govern our culture. Indeed, our friend Ian Browning writes an entire series on them for Village Psychic (and it’s very worth a read). They are as nebulous as you’d expect, of course, but they are unbreakable. And, fittingly for something so nebulous, they are taught more by osmosis than any didactic method. As a kid, you overhear an opinion from someone you respect, and suddenly you don’t want a Monster Energy logo anywhere near you. Pushing Boarders is that little overheard tidbit times a million.
What I’m saying here, which is based on what my friend Edvard from Latvia said to me as we refracted the day’s panels through our beer bottles, is that places like this are where we get to rewrite the rules about what “core” is. We are not the high arbiters of skate culture, by any means, but we are a lot of skateboarders, and the only way to change a diffuse culture is to diffuse ideas. The ideas we mull over here in Malmö will be brought back to our homes all over the world. They will be shared with the people we skate with and the kids who look up to us. Perhaps most importantly, they will be part of what we represent ourselves as to the outside world, which is still very interested in skateboarders.
People like Ed and his Estonian friend Juergen, who have come from places where homophobia still runs deep, are going to redefine what’s cool there. Not for everyone in the Baltics, of course, but for at least a few of the people they come into contact with through skating. Being a skater there will be a little bit more synonymous with being progressive. Everyone who listened to Rattray and Uggla open up about their deeply personal experiences with mental health and suicide is going to be affected, in some small way. Having well-respected skateboarders get up on a stage and talk about how talking to your friends about their mental health is cool means that, yes, being open about your emotions is now officially core. Looked at in that light, some of the pessimism I’ve been feeling melts away. Skateboarding can, perhaps, save the world. Not for everyone, but for enough of us to matter.
I used to think that the exclusionary nature of our core was bad, but I’m beginning to think the opposite. We’ve just been excluding people based on the wrong things. Benihanas are, of course, still a valid reason to vibe someone out, but so is all of this:
