![Carte Blanche [Skateboarding]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e8/66/e866238d-c304-4142-8930-e488e4890869/content/images/2026/08/Carte-Blanche---Skateboar-4.png)
(Part 1) Every era, someone pointed a camera at a skateboarder, cut the footage into a shape, and smuggled the result into homes, contest halls, and shop TVs. The filmer and the director were usually the same person, so the image and the argument came from the same hands. In
Please forgive me. I was naive. I thought I was going to build a home for a couple of opinion-oriented stories, between curb-wax scented mind-fart and hopeless buoys in the ocean before El Niño. Alas, an app and my brain decided otherwise. Admittedly, there is a long
I. THE BOOK I really love your book. I think it's very original in the way you made it. Tell me about the process. Were you sitting on thousands and thousands of photographs and suddenly thought, Okay, I need to make a book now? DAVE SWIFT: I'
Japanese skateboarding is often described in a simple shorthand: an American culture imported and reproduced. Pretty much like in every other country around the globe. There is some truth in the first part. Skateboarding arrived in Japan carrying familiar source material: California imagery, American brands, skate videos and magazines, punk
Why participation stats can’t explain skateboarding’s identity crisis (An unrequited follow-up to Sebastian Perez Higueras’ keynote on skateboarding’s paradox) Sebastian Perez Higueras recently did a commendable job mapping the mechanics of the skateboard market since COVID. It’s no small feat organizing the data. The keynote
My previous piece cracked open a question I couldn’t shake: What does “culture” really mean in skateboarding? The word often points to music, clothes, and art — expressions I see as satellites. But the foundation runs deeper. It lives in the independence, the mindset, the negative space, the transmission, and
Skateboarding has gained “respectability” over the past years. But what has been left in the scales might be far more valuable and irreplaceable. The once-close-knit community now faces a world where meaning and originality are ignored. I. Scene: Visibility ≠ Health At a skatepark, different stories unfold. A young
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Paris, 1819. Mechanic Charles-Louis Petitbled patents an early roller skate and, in our alternative history, accidentally starts a global youth culture. Not long after, Petitbled’s grandson attaches the wheels to a larger board, believing it will reduce the risk of falling. It does not. By the 1880s, skating
Skate shoes used to announce themselves. Suede. Vulcanized rubber. Reinforced ollie panels. The architecture was legible, the purpose built in. Then came the transgressions. Almost aggressively invisible, the Wino slipped in. No armour, little bulk, barely a concession to the violence awaiting it. On the right feet, however, none of
Tony Hawk asks Ema Kawakami how long it took him to learn a 900. “One day.” Hawk laughs. It is the laugh of someone briefly confronted with a version of reality that makes no sense. Hawk spent years pursuing the 900. He had been trying versions of it since the