American DeConstructionism

 Time to change it up a bit.  Employment as a musician in the cruise industry is a widely varied phenomenon.  The cruise industry had become one of the last remnants of full time employment for musicians.  I was thankful for such an opportunity to be able to hone my craft while earning a living wage.  The cruise ship industry is unique.  You may never know its flavor until you try it.  I have discovered after settling back on dry land, it is much more difficult to survive on terra firma (and you are not supposed to use foreign terms in expository writing)  than on a floating hotel.  Why?  The answer is that hygiene is crucial to the success of the cruise industry.  In such a contained environment any illness could be devastating to revenue, because the "guests" are the focus.  Possibly at one time customers or citizens were important in America.  Customer service was a tangible tenant of the retail industry.  Amazon and eBay have struck a major blows to in person customer service.  They have substituted a computer network.  This network must be programmed and manned by human beings, but it is not the same.  In person service is upon what the cruise industry is based.  Make the guests happy and the revenue will flow.  In many ways working in the cruise industry is easier than life on land.  The cruise industry offers nothing for retirement.  There is no monthly pension upon which to live if you retire.  Consequently the exchange rate for foreign currencies makes it lucrative for non Americans to work on American ships.  Everyone gets paid in American dollars, but foreign workers reap the benefit of the exchange rate in their own countries.  This is not true for Americans.  What you see is what you get.  There is no monetary surprise when you return home with your cash.  Immediately life becomes more difficult.  The biggest difference between the cruise industry and land is the automobile.  As I worked on ships I adopted a new form of transportation, one which was more environmentally friendly, more portable, and more fun.  It was called a skateboard and not the new school type.  Because my skating heyday was in the late 70's and early 80's, my quiver of sticks necessarily reflects that skate dynamic of that time.  It was best expressed by either The Bones Brigade or even more accurately by the Z Boys.  What are these Z Boys?  Skating again has lost public consciousness at least for now.  When the Coronovirus is tamed skating again will regain its importance in American popular culture.  When we are not worried about our lives, perhaps we can begin to think about more pleasurable activities whether they earn money or not.  The skate aesthetic of my time was called Surf/Skate, because skateboarders first were surfers.  When the waves did not present themselves, these surfers took it to the streets.  Because they all ready had mastered a very delicate and skillful balancing act, skateboarding fell into place.  They surfed on their skateboards and consequently searched for terrain that emulated the moving waves of the ocean.  Today the skating aesthetic has changed, and the "ollie" is the center of attention.  The entire style of skating today is based upon this maneuver, a movement which elevates the skateboard off of the ground in a jump.  The low surf stance of vintage purveyors is not necessary, although still it looks stylish.  When I ventured to our newly built skatepark, it felt foreign to me.  I do not know this style of skateboarding.  What I do know is slalom, freestyle, and carving.  Both slalom and carving are necessary in most aspects of skating.  Looking at the terrain of our local park, this is not obvious.  It is not obvious, because parks built today encompass an amalgam of skating styles.  There is a freestyle area.  There are rails to grind.  There are banks to fakie.  One thing often they don't provide is a serpentine or mogul run.  Moguls themselves are from snow skiing, but as with all board sports there is a common denominator.  Snowboarding of itself has developed away from the Surf/Skate aesthetic, because the way you control the board is by leaning on its rails, either front or back.  In surfing or how the Z Boys developed their approach to skateboarding, you must pivot from your hips like doing the dance the Twist.  Your feet are closer together, and you achieve a sharper turning radius enabling you to carve a narrow pool or banked wall.  As I watched New Zealand skateboarders carve their massive pool in Wellington, this was not apparent to me.  Your trucks much be loose, and while in the midst of a near vertical carve you must turn the board with your ankles and toes.  Therefore slalom is crucial to success, slalom being able to navigate very closely placed cones on a downhill course zig zag styled.  The Surf/Skate aesthetic lends itself well to slalom, and this is why Stacy Peralta easily won these competitions.  What does any of this have to do with anything?  It means that to be successful in a particular park, you must have a style in mind.  My style necessarily will not incorporate the "ollie," because I choose not to use it.  The ollie developed from ramp riding in Florida.  Alan Gelfand discovered that at the top of a steep wooden bank, if he pushed hard enough on the tail of his board it would propel him into the air.  Pop!  It is a rather ingenious thing, the ollie.  It was so influential that the entire modern aesthetic of skateboarding is based upon it.  Conversely it is possible to skate equally as skillfully without the ollie.  Ironically neither the Z Boys or the Bones Brigade used it.  Could anyone say these two competitive professional teams are less skilled than skaters today?  They just did it differently, "Not like stick men," in the words of T.A., Tony Alva.  A "low" stance was appropriate for them, because if you wanted to make it through the tube of a wave, you had to bend your knees and squat on your surfboard without loosing control.  Your feet moved closer together, and because water was your only resistance you almost had a 360 degree range of motion pivoting on the rear fin.  Skateboard companies have emerged that embrace this style offering specialty trucks that pivot.  Skateboard technology reached its peak during the 1980's, and the boards were more than just a ambidextrous Popsicle stick with wheels.  There was a specific nose and tail of the board.  Skating fakie is a crucial component to ramp riding, but it eliminates a appealing visual element for the spectator.  When I approach skating at our new park, I must skate a style that is familiar to me.  It must come from an aesthetic with which I am familiar.  For me that is Surf/Skate.  With this in mind how I approach the myriad of transitions will be facilitated.  You must own them.  There can be no doubt in your mind how you will approach, traverse, and exit these angles of concrete.  Most of the technique for doing so is in your ankles utilizing a "seesaw" movement.  After I connected my own skateboarding experience with this new park, it began to feel less daunting, and I less of a nerd.  Embrace what you know.  For years I have been interested in skate culture, and this interest culminated in a skateboard collection I alone curated.  I also created it.  Some of my boards remain in their original states, but many were assembled from components I researched.  I watched vintage skateboard videos on Youtube and DVD, took screen shots of the equipment, sourced these items on eBay, and assembled the completed boards to document historic advancements in the evolution of skateboard equipment.  Like the field of American popular music, there is a wealth of enlightenment, history, and information in this study.  My collection represents popular cultural values of America through through the second half of the twentieth century through skating.  This, like many unique American cultural trends (or Americana), has lost relevance.  With this in mind and deep in the midst of a deadly world wide pandemic, the void in American culture has been exposed.  One only has to try to watch a television Christmas special to understand traditional forms of education have failed for the arts.  The arts may be alive in the school systems, but they are not as a tool of solidarity for America like they once were.  America's neglect of education now has surfaced, not from just using it as a babysitter for our children, but for preparing our children for life.  There were times in America when art was a reflection of life.  These times were when America was operating authentically realizing her own ideals as a democratic, free, but sovereign nation.  This was America as her best setting examples for the rest of the world.  Things have changed, and with poor leadership, corruption, and contempt America has become plagued by parasites.  Foreign interested are doing everything in their power to destroy America's freedoms.  The most substantial evidence of this is our loss of culture.  Fervently I believe Universal Music Group did not buy Bob Dillon's music catalog to promote it.  They like others bought it to suppress it.  Time/Life or Time Warner systematically has bought the rights to most American popular music, and consequently we never hear it.  What's the point?  Yes, they can attempt to sell it in collections of CD's of which I have bought many.  My fear was this music, the history of America, would disappear forever.  It has.  Never has it been more stark that after an artist dies in America, they disappear into the abyss.  The greatest money earners in American popular music history, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles rarely ever are heard anymore.   The same fate now has been applied to the artistry of America's greatest folk poet.  If you had heard a Bob Dillon song before now, you are lucky.  It will be a stretch if you ever hear one again.  This now is the deconstructionist theory of America, where the building blocks of culture and humanity no longer are deemed relevant.  Is this a good idea?  All you have is what you remember.