Skateboarding’s been around long enough for lives to be lived within it, and now we’re starting to get looks back at what all those years meant.

Skateboarding’s like indie films or Nine Inch Nails fans: lots of flakes to wade through, but some truly interesting faces in there as well. Johnny Knoxville, of Jack Ass fame, started out shooting stunts for Big Brother Skateboarding magazine. Spike Jonze, director of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, began as a skate photographer and video director. A great number of truly rare and interesting personas have come from skateboarding. This harsh characterization of skateboarding as a pseudo-significant phenomenon is half-deserved but also unfair. There’s an outsider’s reputation to skateboarding, but, in an age where metal-studded belts are sold at Old Navy, do blatantly rebellious attitudes still mean anything? No, skateboarding is just a parent’s limited impression of cool and just a kid’s impression of breakaway independence. The average 14-year-old still prefers stadium-style sports like his dad, still dresses much like his dad, and looks at these skaters as Art Fags for being so showy with their “individuality”. In truth, though, very few kids skateboard with any seriousness. It seems to convey - to parents, anyway - the bewildering out-there-ness of contemporary youth: they’ll never, ever pick up their clothes, but, apparently, kids are so hip on this modern world that they can all hack into computer systems by eighth grade - things grownups just don’t “get,” like skateboarding itself. When you think of that typical teenage boy representation - the bored, cynical-but-good-hearted kid in the unbuttoned plaid shirt with hair long enough to imply creativity but still coming in neatly trimmed waves - more often than not he’s got a skateboard by his side. At least in its popular treatment, skateboarding’s been an adult’s impression of Young Cool for decades now.

The mutt how to skateboard and not kill