Henry And The End Of History

Good writing about skateboarding has been leaked onto the World Wide Web. Happy belated 25th birthday, WWW.

Boil The Ocean is a bit perturbed by Ronnie Creager's exit from Blind, introducing the concept of a 1990's Doomsday Clock. The choicest of cuts:

Guy Mariano’s comeback for the Lakai video set the clock back by a full ten minutes, the largest increment on record, igniting controversy among some pundits who claimed the trick selection in fact merited moving the minute hand closer to midnight and others who argued for setting it back by as much as an hour on general principal.

The clock has proven a magnet for criticism over the years, with some arguing that the 1990s are destined to live on forever in the hearts of those who truly believe, and others who maintain that the 1990s ended at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, an event knowed to some as ‘Y2K.’

Could Henry Sanchez' brief comeback tour be seen as a momentary "End of History," which could have propelled skateboarding into a perpetual state of 1990s-ness? We'll never know.

Elsewhere, Jenkem has a Kyle Beachy essay in which he ruminates about why we Pretend We Haven't Grown. It's on pain and suffering and how skateboarding is probably more akin to the universe than a god. At least that was my reading. A choice cut:

This is the secret treasure hidden inside of our pursuit of skateboarding. The activity is so terrible for us, and cares about us so little, that we can’t possibly do it without loving it. Which means that even the ugliest and biggest assholes in our midst are capable of love.

And whether we admit it or not, we seem to know this by now. Six decades in and skateboarders have learned a thing or two. We still bicker but we can’t pretend we haven’t grown. In 2014 we seem to be skewing closer and closer to that utopia of suum cuique pulchrum est: to each his own is beautiful.

There's a worthwhile tangent in there about the power of words and, based upon that tangent, the first (and only, as of this writing) comment on the essay is the hot skate take to end all, beautiful in its precision and predictability.
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Program note: I interviewed Robbie Brockel for Red Bull, right here.