Zaturdays With Zitzer: Zen and the Art of Skateboarding
Posted on Friday, February 6, 2015 by Paul
TheRideChannel.com made headlines a couple months back with an article called “20 Things That Everyone Thinks About Skating But No One Says,” which I was tempted to write 20 articles trying to refute. Of all the controversial claims the writers put forth, this one seemed the most offensive: style is more important to East Coast skaters because they aren’t as good.
“That can’t be true!” I thought. Could it?
In RIDE’s defense, they listed exceptions like Gino and Keenan, (I’m thinking Westgate and Grant needed to be on the list too) but taking a step back in a forest-for-the-trees type of move, the question that came to my mind wasn’t so much about who’s good, who’s not and where they’re most likely to be from, but what does being good even mean?
If nothing else they were right about Keenan.
An almost insanely thorough inquiry into the topic, outside of skateboarding, can be found in the pages of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book by Robert Pirsig. In it, the story’s main character ends up getting electroshock brain therapy after a particularly bruising battle of wits, with himself, over the meaning of quality, or more simply, what’s good? The book is heavy duty, and it’s pretty impossible to sum up Pirsig’s conclusions here in a few sentences, but part of what he finds is that quality, whatever it is, results from a balance between rationality and romanticism. Rationality has its roots in logic and reason, while romanticism focuses on subjectivity and the individual.
To put it in skate terms, rationality is west coast skating, all flip tricks, hammers, and next level tech, while romanticism is east coast skating with its eye for the unique line tied together with a good looking push. So furthering the point and applying the book’s assertions to Ride’s claim, to me it seems more accurate to say that style is more important to East Coast skaters because they simply have a more romantic approach to skateboarding. But yeah I know, that’s super boring and not worth talking about, thus no likes, no shares, no point.
There are a million opinions about who and what is good in skateboarding. But since there’s no quantitative way of determining it (and no, contests where entirely subjective standards produce winners and losers don’t count) there’s no way to say for sure who’s right about it all. But if the author of the book is onto anything, with a balance between the rational and the romantic, or west and east, then the best skaters in the world should really come from the Midwest.
This should all come as welcome news for Randy.
- Paul Zitzer
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