One night, a couple of months ago, I was madly clicking the converter looking for something that wasn't a repeat of a desgin or renovation show and I ended up on OLN which was running the documentary Dogtown & Z-Boys. I was immediately mesmerized. Watching footage of these guys surfing the pavement of Southern California playgrounds was spellbinding.
In the mid-sixties my friends and I used to ride skateboards. These were wooden planks with metal roller skate wheels on them. We couldn't do too much except for flying down hills trying not to get ourselves killed. I quit riding around 1970 when we moved to a new neighbourhood. In the mid-seventies I remembered hearing about some crazy kids that had started riding their skateboards in swimming pools and saw some skateboard competitions on ABC's Wide World of Sports. I never really thought too much about it.
I the 80's I noticed a proliferation of skateparks and was aware that some skilled kids were flying through the air but it was a concept foreign to me and my metal wheeled days. Tony Hawk became a phenomenon and I started snowboarding (nothing aerial though). I have my own skateboard again but I stay strictly grounded.
Watching Dogtown & Z-Boys was an education in the re-birth of skateboarding. It was a revelation to see the footage of the surfers that these guys were emulating on the asphalt. A few weeks later the doc was on CBC Newsworld and I watched it again. I was totally hooked and spent the next couple of weeks researching the likes of Tony Alva, Jay Adams and Stacy Peralta. If you visit www.angelfire.com you can reach some of the articles originally published at the time. These articles, written under various pseudonyms by Craig Stecyk, contributed, in large part to the legend of these guys.
For Christmas, my fiance bought me the DVD for Dogtown & Z-Boys as well as a book written by Stecyk with photographs by Glenn Friedman. The fascination continues. These skaters, writers and photographers were creating a new art form in our lifetime and these are the documents of that creation.
