Grown men bat their eyelashes and swoon while looking at the Gonz

In a lucky twist of fate I somehow found my way into Poprally’s sold out Spike Jonze Skate Video Night at MoMA last night. The evening was nothing short of the type of wet dream registering somewhere around a 9.2 on the Richter Scale that when woken from requires not a good washing of the sheets but an inconspicuous trash dumpster. It was cold and rainy, exactly “the type of night skaters like to watch skate videos on” according to Patrick O’Dell, who picked the videos/clips of the night.

First was the 80’s. Pretty much dominated by Powell, the videos were: Bones Brigade Video Show, Animal Chin, Future Primitive etc. Lance Mountain, The Gonz and Spike Jonze then took the stage and talked about skateboarding in the 80’s with O’Dell firing off the questions. Spike and Mark got in more than a few fights in their younger years, culminating with Mark throwing a camera out the window of a car somewhere around the Video Days time. Lance reminisced about simpler times, when making a video consisted of waking up with an urge to skate, skating, and having the whole part finished by supper time. Then, talking about one of what must have been the first attempts at actually putting anything resembling effort into skateboarding, Lance remembered Stacey tring to get Cab to ollie off a kicker at three in the morning for some reason. Cab said “Hell no it’s three o’clock in the fucking AM” or something along those lines and was simultaneously fired and quit over a nighttime filming mission.

For my buck, the 90’s were the real gems of the night: Video Days, Goldfish, Mouse, Eastern Exposure, Fucktards (I can say without a doubt I never thought I would see Fucktards at MoMA),Welcome to Hell etc. The panel turned into a sort of clusterfuck for the 90’s and 00’ decades without enough room for everyone at the table. The lineup was Lance, Gonz, Spike, Ed Templeton, Ty Evans, Greg Hunt, Tobin Yelland, Phelps and O’Dell. Lance said he saw Video Days about two weeks after it came out at Powell and he started to cry. Ha! He said the video was “the changing of the guards” and he cried because he didn’t think he would be a part of this skateboarding revolution. Gonz tried to explain the name and said it came about because videos were still fairly new, and this video was bringing everyone into the “video days,” when Phelps (who was ejaculating corrections to O’Dell’s skateboard history throughout the night) reminded Gonz that the video actually took its name from a Woody Allen movie called Radio Days.

It was in the 90’s that videos began to get more organized. No one was really sure, but the general consensus was that Video Days was the first video to have individual parts for each skater (I should probably fact check that, but I’m presenting the night as it happened here). Ed remembered doing one of his first Impossibles down a four stair right in the faces of some freestyle guys doing their thing on a basketball court nearby. It was a special time: People were beginning to actually give a shit about style and trick selection in videos. Gone were the days of filming a part in one day (they were up to a couple of months now), and thanks to these videos skateboarding was presented to a whole new audience. People in obscure parts of the country who may never have picked up a skateboard were exposed to this thing and able to appreciate and participate in this relatively new art form.

Spike’s Girl videos from the 90’s like Goldfish, Mouse, Las Nueve Vidas De Paco were basically the artistic and athletic culmination of the last decade wrapped into a few spools of Betamax. This was addressed in a round about way during the audience Q and A session by a young man whose accent pegged him as someone who has lived somewhere with a queen. He asked if the mainstream popularization of skateboarding by people like Sheckler and Spike (he lumped Spike in with Ryan which seemed like a sin to not a few people besides myself) wasn’t hurting future generations of skaters who grow up not wanting to just be “a skater” or “a filmer” but wanting to be a Ryan Sheckler or a Spike Jonze, and getting all the fame, power (for better or worse) and bitches that comes with it. Mark took particular interest in this question, running down the aisle with his mic to get the kid to ask again so everyone could hear.

Ed took a stab and posited that just as there are two different types of skaters, such as Cardiel and Sheckler for instance, there are two different types of people. The first type are actual skaters, those who are aware of skateboarding as so much more than just entertainment or a sport. Then there is the second group, these are the ones who will be interested in Sheckler and whatever the hell it is he has to say or do. This second group doesn’t really matter though, because just as Sheckler has made the switch from skater to reality TV to The Rock’s co-star in a movie about the Tooth Fairy, that’s where his new audience will be, and those people never cared about skateboarding in the first place; they cared about celebrities and shitty television. Sheckler just happened to dive into that world head first, thereby passing through group II’s field of vision, catching their eye like a shiny new marble and nestling on in there.

I believe the basic message here is there will always be skateboarding and there will always be shitty TV and even shittier celebrities. And while the two worlds may occasionally collide it is important to remember that group II flits around on the wings of whatever is fashionable with the majority of the country, and as soon as skateboarding hits a rough patch, they’ll forget it and Sheckler ever existed.

Phelps summed Sheckler up best, saying “He’s an amazing skateboarder but a terrible human being.” That was pretty much the end of the night, with Phelps bringing down the curtain saying something about Sheckler’s mom at Tampa 96’ that “you guys aren’t ready to hear about.”