Off The Shelf: New Skate Books
Feb 24 2007 / Los Angeles, CA
If these last cold months mean you’re more likely to be flipping pages than doing kickflips, then you’re in luck: A handful of new skateboarding books including an arty and academic angle on architecture, a girl-power primer, and the strange history of Montreal’s most beloved skate spot ought to help keep your head in the game.
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'Reading Lines', by Steve Harries
This is a skateboard photography book that will turn any conception you may have of “skateboard photography” inside out: Reading Lines is full of portraits of skaters and urban landscapes, yet there isn’t a single image in the book in which an identifiable trick or action is being performed. In the only shots with any action at all, Harries uses super-slow shutter speeds to reduce the movement to blurs of light just passing through: he’s more interested in the spaces and how they are used by skateboarders than in the skateboarding itself. His endnotes are all about architecture: In Harries’ viewfinder, skateboarding is what brings these urban spaces to life.
British architecture critic Iain Borden made the same argument, using words, in 2001 with his academic text Skateboarding, Space and the City – Borden also provides a foreword to Reading Lines – but Harries’ images are both more straightforward and more convincing. As Borden puts it in his forward, Harries’ work is “remarkably subtle, avoiding the perhaps too-obvious dynamic, sports-style imagery so common to much skateboarding and street imagery. In Reading Lines, we find the architecture and spaces carefully juxtaposed against not action, but the possibility of action, that is against skaters thinking, contemplating and reflecting on their movements.”
By way of translation, Paul Sunman (founder of London’s legendary Slam City Skates shop) puts it into a skater’s perspective: “I look at everything with a view that connects it to a 54mm diameter urethane wheel,” writes Sunman. “Transitions, banks, curbs, ledges, handrails, blocks, steps, drops, gaps, paving slabs, surface finishes, grades of concrete and smoothness of asphalt. As a skater, you’re constantly noting these details…. One could argue that skateboarders have a better understanding of their urban environment than most town planners and are far more creative with its details.”
Definitely a new way of looking at and thinking about skateboarding, this strange but fascinating book belongs in the library of any skater, architect, or anglophile.
Visit Steve Harries site here >
'Skater Girl: A Girl’s Guide To Skateboarding', by Patty Segovia and Rebecca Heller
Cover Price: $12.95
Written for girls of all ages and definitely appropriate for an elementary or junior high school library, Skater Girl is a call to action, turning a basic intro-to-skateboarding text into a girl-power primer.
Co-author Patty Segovia is the authority on the subject: She founded the All Girl Skate Jam ten years ago and deserves much of the credit for getting women’s skateboarding into the public eye and into the X Games. Rebecca Heller, who also penned Surf Like a Girl, helps get the learn-to-ride tips and basic information down in user-friendly and easy reading style.
Cara-Beth Burnside – who else? – provides the foreword, a good sign that any young girl who gets her hands on this book is getting the real deal. As Burnside writes, “Anything that encourages girls to skate is a good thing.” Amen to that.
The intro chapters are about what you’d expect: A very basic overview of skateboarding for first-timers, geared towards girls but basically covering all the important stuff – including an acknowledgment from Burnside that nobody is ever really going to learn to skate from a book. “You need to teach yourself to skate, and this book can help you get started.”
Skater Girl has everything you might expect in skateboard book for beginners – some simple trick tips, a glossary, skatepark etiquette, basic safety information – but we love it’s “You go girl!” attitude and the author’s tips for keeping it real, steering clear of harassment from dudes who need to get a clue, and avoiding poseurdom. Also cool: a girl-power manifesto that includes a Skater Girl’s Oath and an entire chapter on health and empowerment that includes nutrition info, stretching tips and skater yoga, and first aid fixes to the inevitable injuries.
Where Skater Girl really picks up speed is in the final chapter, the most comprehensive history of women’s skateboarding we’ve ever seen. “Skateboarding: A Girl’s History” tracks skateboarding’s better half from pre-1950s roller skate pioneers all the way through to the debut of women’s skateboarding in the X Games and Lyn-Z Adams Hawkins’ landmark landing over the Megaramp gap. If the names Wendy Bearer, Pat McGee, Laura Thornhill, Ellen O’Neal, Desiree Von Essen, and Peggy Oki don’t mean anything to you, this book is worth buying for the last chapter alone.
Visit the All Girls Skate Jam site here >
'Pipe Fiends: A Visual Overdose Of Canada’s Most Infamous Skate Spot', by Barry Walsh and Marc Tison
Cover Price: $28
The story of The Big O is long, strange, and nearly perfect, like The Big O itself. And while many of the best spots in the skateboarding landscape have come and gone – or been brutally yanked out from under our feet – this story appears to have a happy ending.
More than 30 years ago, in preparation for the 1976 Montreal Olympics and in the process of saddling the city with tremendous financial debt for decades to come, French architect Roger Taillibert accidentally designed the skate spot now known as The Big O, “[One of] 10 Spots You Gotta Skate Before You Die,” according to Skateboarder Magazine. Originally designed as a tunnel for the Olympic torch runner to pass through on the way into the opening ceremonies, The Big O is a weird, oblong full-pipe that opens out into a tight but nearly perfect half-pipe.
Pipe Fiends goes deep into this history, dissecting the ambivalence Montreal residents feel towards the Olympic architecture they love to hate, and detailing the skaters’ battle to save it from demolition. Hundreds of pages of photos of Big O pipe action over the last thirty years make it clear why the spot is worth defending; shots of guys shoveling snow, skating in fur-lined winter parkas, and wielding hockey sticks serve as reminders that they do things a bit differently up there in Canada.
The real value of Pipe Fiends and the saga of The Big O is this: While the stories of Philadelphia’s LOVE Park, San Francisco’s Hubba Hideout, and other not-made-for-skateboarding-but-perfect-for-skateboarding spots have ended badly, the pipe fiends to the North seem to have saved their own little piece of skateboard heaven. When the Montreal Impact threatened to build its soccer stadium on the site, skaters mobilized – successfully – to defend it, arguing that The Big O’s Olympic origins and skateboard history qualified it for protected “heritage landmark” status. Press coverage of the skaters’ plight snowballed, and the tragedy was prevented.
Thrasher Magazine writer Wez Lundry sums up The Big O’s value in an essay in Pipe Fiends:
“Certain spots in skateboarding become iconic, and the Olympic Tunnel in Montreal is one of them. These icons become indelibly associated with the city in which they reside. Think of Derby, Burnside, FDR, the Turf, or Kona, and you immediately think of Santa Cruz, Portland, Philly, Milwaukee, and Jacksonville. Yet the Big O is of an entirely different breed, in a class more like the Nude Bowl (Palm Springs), the Glory Hole (Lake Berryessa), Mt. Baldy, or Buena Vista pool; that is, an organic spot in the sense that it wasn’t made for skateboarding but is part of the landscape that is adapted and adopted. Where others see disuse, danger, or neglect, skateboarders see potential and challenge. The places become etched in the mind, and are destinations hiding in the subconscious, waiting for the opportunity to present itself.”
Next time your favorite spot is in danger, feel free to use your neighbors to the North as the precedent-setting example.
