thanks for this posting, I appreciate comment on skateboarding,
remembering when the world financial center plaza and chelsea pier
riverfront areas connected in lower manhattan, you could skate many miles
and all kinds of big obstacles to negotiate, and very smooth concrete the
whole way. AND most importantly no cops to bother you! While at Urbis
center in Manchester, a two patrol guys DROVE into the square to
apprehend 2 skateboarders. I didin't comprehend what was going on, seemed
utterly ridiculous. anyway, raves and definitely skaters would be
appreciated by debord, no doubt. could he have even imagined? the very
behemoth corporate/governmental impulses that generate these large,
smooth, surfaces and decorative elements, the very things hausmann
envisioned as streamlining and subjugating crowds, are radically
recontexualized when skated on. Skating is a manifesto, more convincing
and articulate than words. I just have some insite into an incredible
dream I had: I was skating very fast, and making big figure 8's that went
up the walls and even on the ceilings. What was incredible was the
feeling of freedom. But I didn't quite know why ,it was such euphoric
experience. This notion of articulating and redefining space- not to
mention speed and gravity- is meaningful. Where I teach in San Diego,
skating and surfing are huge but I find skaters and my students reticent
as far as contextualizing or analysing their activity along these lines.
For many of them, history is useless, or events are hierarchized in
indiscriminate ways. As instructor, this stance is simulatneously
disheartening and liberating. Maybe american kids are different this way?
Also, san diego is politically very conservative, lots of republicans,
big military presence. a strange place all around.
>
>>> The Situationists1 3a critique of urban geography2 is as relevant today
>>> as it
>>> was when written (1948?)
>
> Just for the record, the SI was founded in 1956/7, out of the Lettrists,
> which was out of COBRA. The 9th issue of 'Les Levres Nues' (1956) is the
> last Lettrist publication and announces some of the SI agenda with two
> essays from Debord: "Theory of the Dérive" and the lesser-known text, "Two
> Accounts of the Dérive." Perhaps of interest, I've written a little on how
> I
> see these two texts as divergent tendencies of the SI, perhaps tendencies
> that are being played out today, here:
> http://www.quadrantcrossing.org/blog/C277523597/E1540987349/index.html
>
>>> Another thing that becomes clear in my discussions with 19 yr old
>>> students,
>>> is that they really don1t give a shit about this sort of analysis, no
>>> more
>>> than I cared as a kid about what tv does to us as a society. how
>>> refreshing.
>
> My intuition (as well as research) is that the kids most recently
> interested
> in the palpable taste of location--as art, as movement, as place, as
> space,
> as time, as experiential, as concept, as practice, as theory--were the
> ravers. So there are still many people in their '20s who really give (or
> gave) a shit about all tangents of the locative. Perhaps some of us here
> came through this background. The tactics of Reclaim the Streets and
> global
> protest are admirable in this regard, but only insofar as they learnt from
> rave culture's early use of cellphones, voicemail, and checkpoints to
> reroute, deflect, disappear, as well as navigate new social space.
>
> Perhaps there is something in common here with skateboarding..
> https://www.b-bold.com/berg/us/book_page.asp?Title_ID=650
>
> - tV
>
>
> tobias c. van Veen -----------
> http://www.quadrantcrossing.org
> http://www.thisistheonlyart.com
> --- [log in to unmask]
> ---McGill Communications------
> ICQ: 18766209 | AIM: thesaibot
>
>
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