Dogtown and Z-Boys, The Birth Of Extreme

March 2003

Sony Pictures Classics, directed by Stacy Peralta, 2001

Review by Michael Christian

Rating: two stars out of three. Stars for sincere, personal storytelling; fascinating, original subject; good soundtrack. Although it may be appropriate to the subject matter, I didn't like some of the harsh, jumpy editing.

On Christmas day in 1973, a new technology changed my life if not for good, then at least for a good number of years. My mother gave me a skateboard with polyurethane wheels. I can picture the board right now, a Fibreflex with red Road Riders. The wheels made the difference and started a skating revolution.

The experience of most skaters of my generation spans the entire, brief, important history of skateboarding technology.

First, we took apart our sisters' old metal-wheeled roller skates and nailed their trucks to two-by-fours. Later we bought commercially fabricated versions of the same rickety machines. Boards with clay-composite wheels slightly improved on what we had jerry-rigged in our garages. These devices barely roll on smooth pavement and cement. They transmit harsh vibrations from the pavement, though your bones, to your teeth. If a wheel hits the slightest obstacle, such as a pebble, the board stops and your body hits the pavement. If the rider attempts any but the mildest turns, the board slides and the rider hits the pavement.

Polyurethane wheels changed everything. They liquefied the urban and suburban landscapes. It was heaven on wheels. And everyone who experienced the change from the old technology knew it. Instead of grinding, the wheels swished. The sensation of simply rolling was a joy. Traction went from nearly none to nearly perfect. Hard turns became possible. In fact, the skater could profitably assume a low stance and turn so hard that the body could lean close to the skating surface, and a slide could be controlled. With the combination of momentum and traction, you could defy gravity and skate on curved surfaces that reached vertical and beyond.

But no one knew of these possibilities when the new wheels came out. They had to be discovered and invented. Whatever people had done in the past with skateboards became mostly irrelevant. What might be done in the future was unknown.

And so for a period that began around 1972 and lasted for at least ten years, rapid innovation in skating styles and maneuvers earned great rewards. The currencies of those rewards were personal satisfaction and the adulation of one's skating peers. Skateboarders, in their skating lives, didn't care about the Little League or their parents or teachers or friends who didn't skate. The rewards from such groups could not hold a candle to the excitement of carving out new territory with a skateboard.

So what happened? An energetic, low-brow subculture was born. The skateboarding subculture had its own language, scarification rites, clothing, and hierarchy. And, for a few glorious years, at the top of the hierarchy were the Z-boys.

The Z-boys were a skate team spontaneously generated from the ooze around Santa Monica pier. They were like a cross between a street gang and a club of scruffy kids come down from the tree house. This bunch of misfit teens and pre-teens invented what we might now call extreme sports.

They were at the top, because they dramatically innovated while maintaining aesthetically pleasing styles. They explored the possibilities of polyurethane wheels with skating styles inspired by the surfing that they admired and participated in at the Santa Monica pier. They skated streets, school yards, paved banks, drainage ditches, and empty swimming pools. They competed with each other and encouraged one another. They formed a tribe. Stacy Peralta was one of them. His documentary, Dogtown, tells their story.

Peralta uses old photographs, video, and magazine articles to show what the Z-boys did. He interviews them and people who were close to them to show how they saw themselves and how they now assess what they did back in the 70's.

Dogtown is a documentary built around two simple organizational devices: chronology and portraiture of people, places, and things. Peralta gives us chronologies of surfing, skateboarding, Santa Monica, and the Zephyr skate team. He profiles several Z-boys (members of the historic Zephyr skate team). He paints a portrait of Dogtown (Venice Beach and south Santa Monica).

Peralta's techniques succeed. If you weren't there, you can get a very good idea of what it was like by watching this film. You feel the excitement of discovery and the thrill of outlaw skating in the empty pools of the suburbs during a drought. You watch the most unlikely young subjects rise in fame until they are treated like rock stars.

Especially moving are the struggles of the informants to express their conviction that they were part of a significant movement. Everyone interviewed tries but fails to say why the revolution in skateboarding that the Z-boys spearheaded was important. All of the surviving Z-boys (and the one Z-girl) feel strongly that they were involved in something momentous. But none of them can put his finger on it.

One of the former Z-boys said, "It was like a Mafia." Meaning that you had to earn membership, and they enforced their own rules. I think that another former Z-boy, Bob Biniak, came close when he said, "There were no goals. There were no aspirations." In fact, they had clear goals. Much of the film shows how the Z-boys pursued the goal of innovative skating. I think he meant that none of their goals were conventional or received. None of their aspirations could be measured in terms outside the subculture. They freed themselves from other people's goals. That sort of freedom only comes from profound wisdom, extreme youth, or bitter disenfranchisement. The Z-boys had two out of three.

They weren't (at first) trying to make money or get famous. They weren't looking for the approval of anyone but each other. Freedom from received goals and criteria for success deserves more attention.

One common measure of a liberal society that gets a lot of attention is equality of opportunity. Is opportunity determined by arbitrary factors such as birth, or by talent and hard work? A liberal society is a meritocratic society. A less common measure of a liberal society is diversity of opportunity. (When I say "diversity," I am speaking English here, not using a code word of the politically correct.) By how many different yardsticks can you measure success? In a rich, populous, liberal society, there are so many yardsticks that you can't count them.

Diversity of opportunity is a notion that first occurred to me in 1987 when I began working in downtown Los Angeles. The west side of the city was all about the entertainment industry. Downtown was about everything else. Downtown we didn't give a damn about entertainment industry. On the west side, they never thought about anything else. Looking around a little, I found that Los Angeles was full of all kinds of enclaves ignorant of one another or at least indifferent to one another. In my mind, I contrasted this with Boston where various groups hated each other and vied for supremacy, and where everyone knew who was on top of business and politics. In this sense, I think Angelinos have more freedom.

If diversity of opportunity is a kind of freedom, then at one extreme are traditional, tribal societies exemplified by villages I once visited in Africa. In those villages there is very little diversity of opportunity. Almost everyone must strive for the same things. No subcultures. No clubs. No hobbies. No room for private life.

In a place like Los Angeles, you can choose from among thousands of tribes or make your own. That's what the Z-boys did at a propitious moment – at a moment when new technology rewarded the rule-breakers. They created the clan of the polyurethane wheel. The existence of this clan and the technology that inspired it enhanced liberty all over the paved world by adding to diversity of opportunity. You can flunk out of school, fail at all team sports, earn the ire of mom and dad, yet still achieve greatness on a skateboard.

I'm not very fond of the hippie ethic, but there's a lot to be said for the value of doing your own thing. The greatest success stories are often about people doing their own thing. People get rich that way, sometimes without trying. They even get happy.

The Z-boys did their own thing in a big way. Dogtown nicely documents how it happened. The former Z-boys interviewed by Peralta and, I think, the director himself vainly strive to put their achievement into social and historical context. The strain and the failure are part of the film's charm; the men can't fathom what they did as young boys. The young boys wouldn't care.

Slovenian Bears In France

Bring On The Bears

April 2006

The Western Europeans killed almost all of their wolves and bears before they got religiously green. What’s left of their wildlife is pretty timid. In America, we have big, wild country AND a population of mostly greenish city slickers. That is the deadly combination that makes for animal attacks.

The protected critters get bold, and people in any leafy area less urban than Central Park sometimes get et.

When I lived in France in the early 1990s, I began collecting news stories of animal attacks in America. Some of my French friends loved to hear these stories, because it flattered their notions of America as a wild place.

Not to be outdone, the French have decided to release Slovenian bears in the Pyrenees. Two or three shepherds opposed and disrupted the first release. So the French government released the second bear (named “Franska,” or “Frenchy” in Slovenian) at a secret time and place. If all goes well, we will have stories from Europe of animal attacks within a few ursine generations. (It takes that long for animals to realize that we got religion and are no longer a threat to them.)

Time Travel To Hear Pliny On Public And Private Ownership

August 2006

In the summer of 1992 or 1993, while cycling in Western Europe, I had the opportunity to read what Caesar wrote almost two millennia ago about the same place. I learned how closely some characteristics of the ancient world resembled the modern world.

This summer, when I toured Italy, the writings of another Roman, Pliny, showed me how intimately I could identify with the ancients themselves, and with some of their ideas about government.

Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus was a first and second century Roman better known to us as Pliny the Younger. He’s the fellow who wrote a couple of famous letters describing the explosion of Vesuvius. Apparently intending to reveal himself to posterity, Pliny made a careful selection of his letters and published most of them before he died. He achieved his goal. Although he died nearly 2000 years ago, if you read his slim volume of correspondence, you will end up knowing him much better than you know most of your own acquaintances.

I’m no classicist, but during that trip I took in the early 1990s I learned to love reading the ancients and seeing their works in stone. I cycled with friends through Spain and France. We rode for more than two weeks with heavy saddle bags, going by easy stages similar in length to those of a Roman army on the march. More than once we rode over Roman roads and Roman bridges.

Descending from the Pyrenees into France, we stumbled across a Roman aqueduct and contemplated the genius of Roman engineering. There were no crowds of tourists. There were no signs, just a little dot on our Michelin map indicating some kind of archaeological site. Another dot represented the village where we spent the night. In the morning, we went looking for the site, expecting to find a small heap of stones. Instead we found a structure spanning a stream at a height of seventy-five feet, supported by eight round, unadorned arches of various heights but equal width.

It was a small aqueduct, as these things go, but it obviously would have required tremendous labor to build, the landscape being broken and steep. Momentarily I wondered why the Romans would go to such trouble to move water around when there was a stream, flowing in high summer, right beneath the structure. A bit of exploration made the answer obvious, even to modern city dwellers who thought of water mostly as something that comes out of a tap.

The stream itself, being below the banks where plants could grow, was useless; water does not flow uphill, and without irrigation, the banks of the canyon were a desert. Therefore, the Romans captured water from a small tributary, well upstream from the aqueduct. They channeled it in an imperceptibly sloping canal parallel to the canyon. The canyon slopes more steeply than the canal, so that, by the time the canal reaches the site of the aqueduct, it sits eight stories above the canyon floor.

At that point, the Romans had half of what they wanted: a source of water flowing well above the land that they wanted to irrigate on the near side of the canyon. The other half of what they wanted was the same thing on the far side of the canyon. That’s why they built the aqueduct.

I know all this with certainty, because the aqueduct is still working, still carrying water from far upstream to the apricot orchards that grow today on the terraced banks of the canyon. Exploring that scene made me want to know the Romans better. I admired their planning and investment and the beauty and durability of their works. That’s when I borrowed Caesar and read his book, The Conquest of Gaul, which describes his successful military campaign in what is mostly now France.

A few years before, I had lived in Africa. There, particularly in the villages near the Sahel, I saw what really ancient, traditional societies are like. They are terribly foreign to me and mostly disagreeable. They are, to use a highly colored word, “uncivilized,” at least by my cultural standards.

You may think that a little African village in the bush has no government. In fact, it is all government, all the time. It is a collective that dominates the lives of its members and permits no competing institutions. In a sub-Saharan community, the individual appears to count for nothing. The family, the village, and the tribe are all. There is no privacy and little room for private life. Also, there are no aqueducts and no roads or bridges built to last forever. There is no plumbing, and there are no Plinies.

I believe that the primitive motivations of family and tribe are the roots of tyranny.

This is a truth to which Rousseau was blind. His free and noble savage never existed. Man always had family and tribe to restrain him. Rousseau thought that man’s natural nobility was assaulted and debased by competition and strife among men in society. Competition and strife had to be severely restrained by law, enforced by government. By submitting completely to the authority of a democratic collective, the individual could gain protection from his fellow man. Rousseau believed that his ideal government was legitimate and beneficent, because it would emerge from collective consent (as opposed to divine rights, royal rights, or rights established by tradition). The government would do good. It would do the will of the people. It would constrain and educate the individual.

To me, this “social contract” is just a philosophized and aggrandized version of my African village. In it, the individual has no natural rights and “good government” replaces property rights and competition. Rousseau’s vision of government as the expression of a collective will is the perfect playground for the tyrannical urges of familial and tribal man. Power-hungry men want to be chiefs of tribes and fathers of nations. (In Africa, where the tribal affiliation of the current tyrant can determine one’s lot in society, the power-hungry men are sometimes both chiefs of tribes and fathers of nations.) Instead of the noble savage tamed in Rousseau’s controlled society, one sees the emergence of the ignoble savagery of familial and tribal man reproducing his primitive oppression on a bigger scale.

How fitting, I saw, that Rousseau’s ideas should have become part of the architecture of socialist thought.

But Rome transcended the family and the tribe. Rome did not respect all rights, but it protected many rights, including rights of property, at least in Pliny’s time. Rome two thousand years ago was more like America today than is today’s West Africa.

From a cold, objective point of view that struck me as modern, Caesar contrasted Roman civilization with that of the Celts. Caesar wrote about people, landscapes, politics, and strategies in terms I understood. He seemed a lot less foreign to me than the people I had known in Africa.

Roman civilization was organized on a grand scale. Roman institutions--cities, armies, political classes--were so big that they necessarily dissolved the tribal bonds that inhibited the Celts, and they left a lot of room for individuals to express themselves. The Roman Empire made the world a smaller place. At the full moon of empire, you could put your feet on a Roman road in southern Italy and walk to the western extremes of Europe; essentially, you could walk to the end of the earth, just as you can travel to the end of the earth from any point in America today.

So there I was in the early 1990s, part of an unmotorized army of three, crossing the old Roman Empire on Roman roads and Roman bridges, and reading a Roman general’s account of his conquest of those very lands. Reading Caesar under those circumstances was like traveling through time to observe its great events from a distance that was close, but safe.

Then, this year, Pliny brought me closer still to the Roman world. He took me right into a Roman citizen’s courthouse, parlor, bathroom, and bedroom. He took me into his private thoughts. In his letters, Pliny paints himself bit by bit, until you see the whole of him. He reminds you of people you know. You can easily imagine what it would be like to converse with him for hours on many topics.

He was an upper-class Roman, but he was from the provinces, not the city, and he improved his social standing dramatically, just as a self-made man might do in our own society. A complex society had a place for his particular talents. He worked hard and traded favors. He developed deep expertise in the fields of law and public administration. He was the cream that rose to the top of a society that had room for individual merit.

I know that Rome was no libertarian paradise. It was in many ways a police state; it was sometimes ruled by tyrants. It wallowed in racism, class distinctions, and slavery. But there’s no denying that it made room for many good men like Pliny to improve themselves relentlessly, to thrive, and to exercise freedom.

In my African village, Pliny would surely have been frustrated for life. His talent and competence would have received little reward. His love of letters could never have emerged. I wonder how many Plinies, and how many other great individuals, are suffering and going to waste in Africa and North Korea and Iran and Cuba today.

I was thinking that when I came to Pliny’s letter on public versus private ownership (book 7, letter 18).

Caninius Rufus asked his friend Pliny for advice on how to give his native town the legacy of an annual feast. In his answer, Pliny tells Rufus that he could endow the town with the necessary capital but notes that “there is a danger of its being dissipated.” Then he says that Rufus could give land to the town so that the income might pay for the annual feast, “but it would be neglected as public property always is.”

Finally Pliny comes up with a complicated scheme just to keep the necessary assets in private hands for as long as possible. The scheme is to convey the property to the city, which will then convey it back to the donor charged or burdened with an annual rent sufficient to pay for the annual feast. In other words, after the reconveyance, the town will have a claim on the first fruits of the property equal to a fixed annual rent, and dedicated to the charitable purpose specified by the donor.

Pliny concludes that only by his scheme, keeping the assets that benefit the town away from ownership by the town, can Rufus be certain that the town will actually profit: “The principal is secured for the town, the interest is certain, and the property will always find a tenant to cultivate it because its value greatly exceeds the rent charged.”

The recommendation is complicated, ingenious, and thoroughly motivated by Pliny’s well-grounded suspicion of government. And the notion that government will waste or misuse property seems to be uncontroversial; Pliny treats government waste as a given. Though he is a very thorough advocate (and a famous, experienced lawyer and orator), he provides no support for the assumption that government is a poor manager. He knows that nobody will dispute the assumption.

Of course, Pliny is advising Rufus to adopt an endowment structure that would reduce the value of his property, because the property would be burdened with a sub-market value lease in perpetuity. He recognizes the drawback. “I am well aware,” he says, “that I appear to have paid out more than the sum I have given, seeing that the fixed rent charge has reduced the market value of a fine property.” But he finds it necessary, and he sympathizes with Rufus’ aspiration to benefit the public: “One ought to make personal and temporary interests give place to public and permanent advantages, and consider the security of a benefaction more than one’s own gains.” The only way to do that is to keep the government from owning the property in question. Government would manage the endowment so poorly that Rufus would be better off underselling a leasehold interest than giving any principal or property directly to the local authorities.

Yet there is another important thought in this letter. It suggests a great virtue of Roman government. For all its failures, that government protected real property rights so well that Pliny and Rufus could have confidence in the maintenance of elaborate title and leasehold rights far beyond the grave. It would be folly to let the government manage your bequest, but the government did, at least, keep and enforce a good land registry.

All the collectivists and statists – the socialists, the communists, the fascists, the populists, the Democrats, and the Republicans – will tell you that good government means doing right. I think that good government means doing less.

Good government is the smallest government you can get away with. This is the essential insight that Rousseau never had. It was perceived by some of our founding fathers. But they were a bit less original than I thought. Thanks to Pliny, I now know that bad governments have been demonstrating this truth for at least two thousand years, and that Pliny knew it too.

A Chance Meeting

October 11, 2006

It took about 20 hours to get to Amsterdam via some god-awful charter. (Do they have those any more?) I was lost even before we landed.

My mission was to make my way by train to meet Coleman in Lausanne where he knew some young Swiss guys. I had no date, no timetables, no reservations, and no address or telephone number where I could reach Coleman. The year was 1982. I was 21 years old and traveling in Europe for the first time.

The Dutch spoke perfect English. That got me on a shuttle bus from the airport to the train station. A giant billboard displayed departures. The information changed rapidly with little panels noisily flapping down to reveal letters and numbers – an amazing system before digital displays.

In a daze, I saw a train heading for Paris and other destinations. I ran to the platform and, uncertain whether the moving train was the right one for me, jumped on it.

Thus began my life as a summer snail with a Eurail pass. That’s a bit redundant, because summer snails at that point in their evolution nearly all had Eurail passes. The snail is a student off for the summer and must spend at least a month in Europe. The Australian subspecies does it once in a lifetime for an entire year after graduating. The snail carries his house on his back. Oddly, even when he checks into a youth hostel, he walks around big cities with his backpack on.

After less than 30 minutes on the train from Amsterdam, out the window like a dream appeared perfectly tidy fields of flowers and alternating fields of grass with one or two milk cows grazing and windmills. To my eyes, it was an astounding postcard. Nobody else in the train even looked. I was discovering a new world – the Old World.

Someone told me the train went all the way to Lausanne. Even now that seems surprising to me, odd that a train would go from Amsterdam to Lausanne without at least a couple of changes. When I got to Lausanne after another day and night of travel, I realized how perfectly idiotic our plan was. Okay, Lausanne is not a huge city, but it’s not a small one either. How would I find Coleman?  He did not know my train.

Worn out and a little desperate after more than 24 hours of travel, I discovered that the Lausanne train station had showers in the underground passages between platforms. I paid for and took one thereby nearly missing an unlikely and lucky meeting. Colman was waiting for me at the empty station. In my joy, I didn’t even ask him why or how. He said he hoped I would be on that train and was about to give up.

--Michael