by Paul O’Connor

My big passion is nudging people to see skateboarding a little bit more mytho-poetically. Sure, riding on a board is fun and playful. It doesn’t have to be more. My answer is that this is precisely why it ‘is’ more. The fact that the object and intent of skateboarding is so ambiguous (transport, thrill, tricks, cool?) makes it a rich repository for conjuring meaning in an increasingly rigid, algorithm constrained world. It can be fluid, it can be chaos. One particular skateboarding act ‘the grind’ is especially chaotic. Dragging your metal axles over concrete purely for the sensation, the noise, and the vibration. It serves no real practical purpose other than the experience, riding on two objects that should not really give traction and possess the literal gnarl to stop your board in its tracks and throw you unceremoniously to the ground.

I keep a close eye on types of sacred skateboarding. Riffing of the famous anthropological notion of cargo cults, I’ve used the term curb cults to refer to the self-consciously absurd devotion to urban objects for grinds and slides. These becomes parody religions in part, but while the joke is self-aware the truth is that they speak to the undeniable fact that fun is serious business. The Spanish ‘Grind to Grind’ collective have got their own little skate fetish going on. While BA. KU. (Barrier Kult) have the Jersey Barrier to love and cherish in ski mask anonymity, Grind to Grind devote themselves to trucks. Their DIY park has coping made of trucks, and they also melt down old trucks and craft them into rails. Why not make your slides grind too?

In their latest video offering they have crafted a giant concrete truck replete with an axle made out of the many old trucks. Here we delve into the simulacra of the truck. It is at once a representation of a real truck, crafted out of… trucks. Its core material is concrete and is thus the primary material of which trucks grind. This concrete being grey is therefore both an overt feature of our discussion and an ambiguous entity, a grey space. It manifests as object, substance, context.

The skateboarding is not merely skateboarding. It is ritualised. A salutation to the act of skateboarding (always) and the object we profess our love to. Act, object, and in this case representation of the facilitator. The fact that Grind to Grind have an altar at their DIY, where trucks and broken boards are burnt is an exemplar. So while curb cults adore the concrete, Grind to Grind go further and imbed the truck in the concrete like the ultimate grind that makes union with its target.