渋谷の妄想症

there are invisible holes in the city's interweaving fabric of perpetual motion and static structures. passageways and corridors and ticket gates give way suddenly onto open space where no single direction exerts a dominant pull--bodies rush and flow and pause, waiting to be joined to continue journeys back into the dense landscape of urban dreamscape. there is a kind of paranoia here, or a delusion, but perhaps more appropriately a kind of haunting. things are present, but made partial, incomplete, a binary relation fractured by something missing.

before me, as I wait too, an inaudible narrator appears, seeming at first to also be waiting, but I realize he is speaking to us all, but without being heard--his voice is absent, and there is only his gesture. His hands mark out some occult terrain, or illustrate some instructions. he occupies a space that is empty, suddenly. people who inadvertently pause nearby readjust themselves beyond some invisible perimeter, or simply hurry through. they have a legible purpose: to meet someone here (a group of three girls bow to one another and move off-screen), to meet someone elsewhere (a woman runs from right to left), to receive or transmit information to someone who is not present (a man holds a cell phone to his ear). around us all is white noise, the massive screens benignly illuminating the Shibuya intersection with their looped sequences of light and sound--even this non-sense is legitimated with commercial purpose. capitalism talks to us of fetish objects made real through labor and money.

the man speaks to no one that can be seen by the camera, by me, this entranced observer. my own purpose is suspended as i strain to see what it is not there, hear what i cannot. i realize i am filming this to discover some explanation, to understand what possesses this man even as he possesses this self-created zone of impossibility. his is an uncanny counterpoint to tokyo's impossible consumer architectures that flow and hum with a fantastic energy we inhabit with our bodies and imaginations. this zone before my camera is an interruption. it exists, yet those of us around the man refuse to make it real by including it in the space of the ordinary. this "ordinary" is also fantastic, one which allows us to mask over what is not present. the ordinary is a tentative membrane that has meaning because it fuses together with other things we believe exist and have knotted together with skeins of meaning. we hold this weird manifestation apart, each of us calculating the distance necessary to prevent our own inclusion in this haunted space that bespeaks dislocation, disassembly of meaning, absence and abnormality.

it is a space of doubled impossibility: invisible visibility. to rephrase Avery Gordon, we each utter: "i see [you/you] are not there." this scene is ghostly, but the man is so alive and in being so he exhumes the absence all around him (and our own absences too--who are we not with? who cannot hear us? who can we not speak to?). he is alive with his own language--the motion of his lips in silent speech, the accompanying choreography of his hands, the slow turning from side to side as if seeking to broadcast or acknowledge the fullness of his audience, or perhaps single out a specific recipient. but where is this absent other? the man is a talkative representative of what is missing. none of us want to become the counterpart to his speech: representative of that missing figure, the receiver, the listener, the patiently unseen, that ghostly, impossibly other being that is so apparently present.

i am unsettled as he turns and his eyes meet mine. but it is only the briefest contact. new detours emerge. people devise new lines of motion in response to this uncanny place that has occurred where before the space was understood and comprehensible, full of coherent communications. the city is upended momentarily, its territoriality dislocated by the immateriality of ghosts. beyond what i can see and my own sense of visibility--my own frail empirical truths--all is incomplete. all is ghostly. all these people will disappear. no-one can hear. i am not seeing you. you are here.

with transitions removed

the small half-pipe at the Nogawa skate spot is in the process of being disassembled, leaving the skeleton stripped of its plywood skin. the panels were leaning against the frame last night when I went skating and were transformed from scrap into a surface of pleasure and risk. frontside/backside wall-rides, Tokyo.

Nothing is a fetish for the truth.

Ian pulled some truly punk rock ingenuity from those years of bunking down with crusties and sketchy West Coast kids for so many years. Or maybe that was upstate NY comin’ out of him in the clutch. Either way, he figured out how to inject a parched inkjet cartridge with a syringe full of screen-printing ink so he could coax out both of our invites for the Nike SB “Nothing But the Truth” video premiere. Even though I didn’t witness this feat of Yankee can-do spirit, his simple retelling of it was the most interesting event of the evening.

Amid love hotels and gauche clubs, most notably the ubiquitously dull “Club Asia,” the theater is a stark futurist slab of concrete façade, a venue inclined towards the reprint of Chomsky’s fabled “Manufacturing Consent”—the last film I saw there—than commercial skateboard hype. Apart from the extravagance of Nike’s promotions crew renting out a theater in Shibuya, there wasn’t as much flash and pop as I expected. Nothing like Shanghai’s premiere that included ramps, several of the SB team, and a bouquet of blandly and scantily attired girl-hires. Maybe the budget had already been blown on the video itself, and the remaining green would go further cashed out in RMB than yen and would get deeper into a dreamy “emerging market.” That’s casino capitalism doubled down: marketing and venture commerce meet faddish extreme sports that have bloody consequences for bad judgment.

The subdued crowd of style-fiends in expensive denim and fitted T’s with requisite 59 caps and unscratched boards clutched close, seemed nonplussed by the coolness of the space itself, and this indifference hung thick in the auditorium itself. Two kids sat quietly beside me, rocking a pair of expensively-swooshed windbreakers cut and patterned from an unmistakable 1980’s steroid-muscle beach aesthetic. They murmured “hot” or “amazing” or “scary” as key moments of physical jeopardy and triumph played themselves across the screen. Skaters rocked-and-rolled and gave proof of their street credentials with tricky flips done switch over (requisite) gaps, or big flips over handrails to waiting embankments. The filming depended on pre-lit environments and careful choreography while the edits were fast and clean. It left the skaters sanitized and ironically unremarkable in their consummate displays of rare skill. As Nike SB has labored to infuse their brand insurgency with legitimacy, their calculated image-crafting seems to have cost them the ability to let calculation and control remain as split-second miracles of the skaters themselves. Apart from a few sequences shot on scarred concrete highway barriers made barely rideable with crude transitions and Chet Childress’ scenes, the skating itself was reducible to a series of predictable set-pieces which belie the risks and intensity of finding spots and dialing them in. The Nike magic of soaring conventional athletes is a puppet that lives in the theater of mainstream sports but on the streets that magic struggles to conjure itself within the truth of skating’s failure and improvisation. Out there on the street objects disappear and suddenly reappear with totally new purposes under the fiery slash grinds of skaters. Even the most adroit skaters crash and bleed with far more frequency than they stick tricks in spotlighted glory. “Nothing but the Truth” occupies an increasingly crowded corner of the truth-universe, one stuffed with the wall-projection-trophies of manufactured truths about brand and sport synergies and the wacky personalities that make both come alive. What is finally on display is not magic, but a kind of taxidermy of risk. Effortlessly precise riders like Paul Rodriguez or hardcore skaters like Childress are made into coherent shills-in-motion to animate the imagination of a global brand.

With skating broken down into tightly framed depictions of triumphalism, edited free of the context of slams and false starts and bad timing, what remains is only a thin veneer of raw proficiency presented in series, like a checklist, or a sneaker collector’s catalog. In order to give “flavor” to the team, to make them more than flawless but rote street performers, the film introduces the conceit of movies-within-the-movie. The Belgian director duo, working under the nom de plume Lionel Goldstein, rehearse their low-tech narrative conventions again in which the normative portrayals of sport are undermined with clever exaggerations of mythical underdog stories told in a raw documentary-style.
Here Goldstein presents the skaters documenting themselves as eccentric iconoclasts. This attempt at a kind of ironic nonchalance befits a moment when major brands are found casually yet determinedly slumming in the erstwhile ghettoes of art and sport. With seeming ease corporate money can now successfully make allies of old-school innovators as Nike SB recently did with Lance Mountain and transgress those old color lines between jock and the outsiders. Goldstein’s technique is perfectly suited to portray this Nike-funded filmic distillation of pure body practice—skateboarding—coming from that wellspring of authenticity, “the streets.” The resulting concoction is a tepid depiction of truth’s ironic mutability—nothing is true here and that indeterminacy makes Nike and its team as legitimately bound up in the intense conflicts over meaning and representation under capitalism as anyone else.

As if to underscore this surreal drama of brand-enhancement and street credibility, the film is scattered with little skits of the skaters being interviewed by lumpy old men in suits posing as Hollywood B-rank producers seated at cheap fake-wood desks. They want to help the skaters tell their “stories”—whatever improvised piece of theater the team riders can concoct using moldy warehouses full of props and the help of a make-up department and a procurer of silicone augmented models. Cut with bits of 16mm film, shot on a near-abandoned movie lot in the desert, these scenes are eerie and aimlessly experimental in their “truth”-telling. They attempt to restore to the skating a kind of insane intelligence that is so absent in the clean footage that comprises the bulk of the film. This device isn’t simply a weak plot vehicle to carry the repetitive money-shots of (skating) flesh in action. They are totally disconnected from the skating geographically, thematically, and stylistically while loosely serving as introductions for various riders.

The film is most compelling and weirdly unnerving around these scenes flashing us with the film’s post-modern best: the self-conscious pretend acting of the skaters playing themselves in their fantasies—the ridiculously self-scripted vignettes—within the larger fantasy of being filmed for Nike’s self-promotional and legitimizing video. For us watching, the layered fantasies seemed to present too much incoherence to respond to, and the audience was quiet, occupied with popcorn and the beer—tangible realness made better by being free. A trite slam section ended the film, repetitive outtakes belittled as a freakish distraction to the long credits.

Conscious of watching this quintessentially Californian rebel-sport enacted on a screen in Tokyo, I was struck by how tightly circumscribed around Americans the movie remained. The film hardly presented Nike SB as a global team despite it having sponsored riders around the world. This is in sharp contrast to Nike’s broader significance transnationally, from its production sites littered along the poorer and non-unionized edges of the world’s economy to shoe lines such as Nike’s famed “Glocality” series created by diverse designers representing their particular nationalities. More specifically, while Nike SB has employed Japanese designers such as Takashi and Yuji Sato, therefore extending the creative/cultural linkages across the globe and proving that stylistic metabolism across space and nationality is rewarding and necessary, there was no similar acknowledgment of the vitality of skateboarding’s imagination beyond America. A strikingly narrow range of riders skated over far-flung terrain, super-flattened into a nameless mélange of global, (mis)appropriated architecture. The emphasis on Nike SB’s team cadre certainly links its brand to a few recognizable skaters who are geographically positioned to benefit from skateboarding’s media and industry epicenter and its simultaneous authenticating, originary location--California. Across the Pacific Rim, on the streets of Tokyo, however, this rehearsal of skateboarding’s “true” sites and riders hardly affected the skaters I ride with regularly. Out in the western sprawl along the Chuo train line, skaters generally were unimpressed with Nike SB’s efforts to situate itself as part of their world and the film too was unremarkable to them. Particularly because it made no effort to link its narrative or riders to those who share the wider cultural and physical spaces that skateboarding thrives within.

As the movie finished there was finally weak, uncertain applause and the audience dispersed into the lurid unreality of Shibuya’s pleasure zones. It seemed like we had become part of intertwining fictions, caught up as spectators and participants in fantasy all at once. Despite this, skating’s spontaneous energy couldn't be completely contained by the film and Ian and I longed to go lay out some long slappy grinds and recreate some truth for ourselves.

motion experiments