Z-Boys: The politics of style
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document in English
economics
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published 29/06/2008
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SummaryWhen land designer Abbot Kinney set out to create Venice, California, the European-style beach community of amusement piers son known as the “Coney Island of the West,” he had no way to foresee the eventual decay of Venice and neighboring Ocean Park and south Santa Monica. But when the piers began to close in the mid-1960s, Venice, like Brooklyn’s Coney Island, became a “place where pyromaniacs, junkies, artists, and surfers could excel in symbiotic disharmony.” Up to that point, surfing was life for the beach boys and California girls, and skateboarding was a popular after-surf activity. Early companies and organized competitions were successful until the skateboard industry crashed in 1965, and the final pier of the Venice Beach area closed two years later. Skateboarding became an activity of outcasts, and the area became known as Dogtown, “the last great seaside slum…It was dirty, it was filthy, it was paradise,’ says Skip Engblom, owner of the Zephyr Surf Shop, which became in 1972 a home on the corner of Bay and Main streets for the outsider surfer-turned-skater kids who had nowhere else to go. Engblom, with co-owners Jeff Ho and Craig Stecyk, became a mentor to the “Z-Boys,” encouraging their surfing and skating as a Captain Hook parent figure, “killing Peter Pan and turning the lost boys into pirates.”
Table of Contents
- Subcultures, like the Mods, and Punks, and the Z-Boys.
- 'Style was like the most important thing,' says Z-Boy Tony Alva.
- It was through this new skating style rather than their physical style that they most effectively communicated.
- Dick Hebdige notes the parallels of the communication of a significant difference as well as a group identity.
- In his study of how subcultures generate their own style, theorist John Clarke redrafts Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage.
- The Z-Boys' style as communication.
- This signified expression of the Z-Boys' value system.
- Z-Boys began to skate on the playgrounds attached to five different elementary schools of the Dogtown area.
- Z-Boys were indeed being political in vying for their own space.
- Craig Steyck's Dogtown articles began appearing in Skateboarder magazine in 1975.
- This entire analysis of the Z-Boys has so far neglected to tackle one major question.
- Guys tend to perform their gender by taking risks.
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