No Resistance

Former rec center slab/future Front Plaza.

The latest Front Plaza update is underwhelming because they've yet to start construction on the Front Plaza. High hopes from more than a month ago have been dashed by the weight of the machinery needed to make such a plaza and the forever mushy ground on which they'd need to tread [rainiest year ever, they say (including snow, so precipitation), it's been wet]. For now, the original Front Park stands, though it's already being divvied up:

@mmunzenrider dibs the flatbar!

— Davis Torgerson (@DavisTorgerson) June 19, 2014

Stolen still, via the article mentioned below.

VOICE 1: What’s that thing he’s on?
VOICE 2: It’s a board with wheels.
LORRAINE BAINES: He’s an absolute dream.
—Robert Zemeckis

There will be thinking and reading when it comes to Kyle Beachy's Toward a Poetics of Skateboarding; whether by reading or memory of the film discussed within, I pushed up hills and rode down, around the neighborhood just after.

An intelligent, almost too intelligent, outsider's view of skateboarding: http://t.co/6r2hivzUDp

— The Boardr (@TheBoardr) June 19, 2014

As mentioned before and contra above, Beachy is a skater and a novelist and college prof (probably an absolute dream) who has edged skateboard writing, further than most, away from talking about boners and towards something more. I'd be exaggerating if I claimed to have gotten everything first try, but Beachy frames skateboarding in a way that both those within and without can appreciate, then delineating that strange aspect, how it always is what it is, regardless of intent, time or setting.

We know on first glance that skateboarding, in its dominant form of street activity, stands apart from ball and net athletics. It seems uninterested, too, in velocity and stopwatch performances. But the first challenge to the rubric of sport begins even lower, at a semiotic level. You and I could, if we wanted, go and shoot lazy jumpshots on a netless schoolyard hoop, or go to the driving range and smack buckets of balls into the green void. We can take our gloves to the park and throw grounders and pop flies and apply tags to invisible runners. But for any of these to qualify as “basketball,” “golf,” or “baseball,” we would require the structure of competition and order of rules.

Dive into reading, then, of Cuatros Sueños Pequeños, a short film by Thomas Campbell that ought to be watched and appreciated. I'll do the work no more justice than it does on its own, Lorriane Baines knew.

SVM from the Plat Archives.

Good friend and co-founder of this website, Sam McGuire, told the Internet he was gay this week in an interview on Jenkem, and even managed to garner some shine from the Huff Po.

Keeping tabs on the reaction, both as an interested observer and a concerned friend, I can report it's been overwhelmingly positive and supportive; Sam is up, give or take 1000 followers on the Instagram since Monday, so there's that (a stat I monitored, accidentally).

I'm happy for and proud of Sam.

Happy weekend.