Paul O'Connor's Blog, page 10

"A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an..."

“A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint”

- Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Engagement, pg 27.

Some Superstitions Surrounding RobinsAs I am getting used to...

Some Superstitions Surrounding Robins

As I am getting used to being back in the UK, I feel my anthropological training constantly being tested. I feel like I have entered a field in which I am entirely conversant and accepted without question. Yet, each and every day I find myself trying to solve some sort of cultural puzzle. This is often compounded by the fact I am an intermediary for my wife and children who see their new surroundings as far more quaint than I do. In turn I start to be more curious and critical of all that I take for granted.

On a country walk I celebrated spotting a robin. After not seeing these birds for many years I delighted in being so close to one as it hopped its way through a hedge. Other members of my family were unsure of the significance of the bird and tolerated my glee. A few days later I picked up the book ‘In Search of Lost Gods’ by Ralph Whitlock on a charity bookshelf. It looks through British folklore superstition, sacred places, and festivals. I thought this would be a perfect way to temper and deepen my understanding of the peculiarities of things that I am revisiting. 

In the section on superstitions I was interested to read the following passage on robins. It might give some form of cultural explanation to the delight I took in the bird. The robin, is after all repeatedly Britain’s favourite bird.

Robin

The widely know rhyme:

The robin and the Wren

Are God’s cock and hen

Summarises the friendly esteem in which the robin is generally held. Its popularity was said to be due to a robin which tried to peck the nails from Christs’s hands as he hung on the cross, and its breast became redden by blood. robins were protected by such superstitions as the belief that anyone who stole a robin’s egg would have a crooked finger or be stunted in stature. On the other hand, it was also regarded as a bird of ill omen. For a robin to tap at a window or enter a house was considered unlucky, even a herald of death or disaster, though in Gloucestershire an exception is made during the month of November.

In pre-history it seems likely that because of its red breast the robin was regarded as a fire-bird. Some myths tell of its descent into the Underworld to fetch fire for Man. Consequently the bird was associated with fire worship rituals, and even in fairly recent times in Wales it was believed that anyone who killed a robin would have his house burnt down. The robin is also liked to a cult of the dead as is suggested by the fairy story of ‘The Babes in the Wood’ and also by the ballad of ‘The Death of Cock Robin.’

I replicate this short passage because it provide a number of tangents surrounding the high esteem by which robins are held. It is also worthy of note that the negative superstitions are those attached to any harm toward a robin. However, the notion that a robin entering your home is a hazard is most curious. Perhaps we can apply a bit of Mary Douglas here and imagine that this is a case of ‘matter out of place’. Birds should not be in the home, but it seems to revolve around the robin and the cult of death. In one account the idea of a robin entering the home was greeted with such caution on Dartmoor that some people would rip up Christmas cards with robins on them.

Yet, the popularity of the robin still attracts some interest with its association with death, and indeed offer some comfort. In Stephen Moss’s 2017 work on the life of British robins he cites a particularly modern example of a viral robin moment.

“The association of robins with death and burial places remains powerful to this day. In early 2017, a grieving mother, Marie Robinson, was videoing the grave of her young son Jack in Hampshire when she noticed a robin hopping around. Recalling that when Jack was alive he and his twin had always loved robins, she held her hand out – and to her astonishment the bird hopped right up, in full view of the camera.”

The BBC reports that Marie’s Facebook video quickly tallied up more than 10 million views. Moss takes this as a poignant example that of the emotional and spiritual comfort that people continue to find in these animals.

In short robins are a good omen, a comfort when encountered outside, a protector of the dead, and a reminder of mortality in the home. The passage from Whitlock’s book also reminds me of some distant memory from childhood of a robin on the window sill. Vaguely I recall my mother or grandmother remarking on this with caution. Moss’s book also details how ‘health and safety’ concerns have permitted some robins to be killed in public interest. Predictably this has been a cause of public outcry. Yet, the life of the robin is always relatively brief, normally lasting a year and their most potent threat is the equally adored domestic cat.

So in summary of these notes from the field. Brits love robins.

Skateboarding, Protest and the end of SubcultureMany years ago I...

Skateboarding, Protest and the end of Subculture

Many years ago I read an article on the mass appeal of The Simpsons. It celebrated the universalism of the message and how the family was able to appeal to everyone. To underline this point they provided the example of how Bart Simpson was used on bootleg T-Shirts and both supporting the war with Iraq and denouncing it. Bart was warmonger and pacifist. So whatever little niche you sit and watch The Simpsons in, someone else is laughing for quite different reasons. Fans don’t all share the same politics.

Seems apt to use Bart as the world’s most famous skateboarder, to highlight that this last year completely crushed the notion that skateboarding is a subculture. It was going to be for quite different reasons that skateboarding drew public attention, its debut on the Olympic stage, but instead Covid, BLM, and mini Trump-coup showed skateboarding in a quite different light.

Firstly the Covid-19 pandemic appeared to prompt everyone to go skate, to skate more, or to start skateboarding. Skateboarding viral moments blossomed throughout 2020 and none of them came from the media machines of the skateboard industry. 

Secondly all types of skateboarders took to the streets to protest police violence and injustice throughout the USA. The BLM movement saw skaters come out in force, and form their own protests. These events alone undid the stereotype of the apolitical aloof skateboarder.

Thirdly, at the start of the new year skateboarders were spotted as members of the Pro-Trump protests in Washington, waving flags and similarly their boards in the air. 

While typically protests have been a prime opportunity for skateboarders to get out and access parts of the city normally off bounds. It now seems that the priority to skate is fused with the desire to protest. The satirical ‘thenutdailynews’ aptly makes jest of this point.

Yet, this is beside the point. The key issue is that skateboarding can no longer be regarded as a cogent subculture of likeminded participants. While this has been evident to may for a long time, it is now plainly clear for all to see. Skateboarding is like The Simpsons. It is a universal and hopelessly open and accessible to all of the world’s freaks. 

Skate Videos: Rolling in a City Symphony - Subscript

Skate Videos: Rolling in a City Symphony - Subscript:

I got sent this enjoyable read from a skater and videographer in Malaysia. It is a great reminder that skateboarding is also an intellectual pursuit. As much as it is an escape, a physical release of everyday tensions, it is also a meditation. I am always super stoked when a skater has read one of my academic papers and they reach out and share their thoughts. No more ‘shut up and skate’ but ‘rest up and write’.

This piece has some nice musings about video, film, and skateboarding along with mental maps and pilgrimage. Nicely put together with some enjoyable links.

Shout out and thanks to Dominique

“It is not the reflexive project of the self as such which is subversive; rather, the ethos of...

“It is not the reflexive project of the self as such which is subversive; rather, the ethos of self-growth signals major social transitions in late modernity as a whole.”

Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, pg 209.

Raddon Hill - Same But DifferentVery occasionally I return to...

Raddon Hill - Same But Different

Very occasionally I return to this same spot at a different time of year. I take a photo guessing where I stood for the last one. When home I compare how the scene has changed. I guess I see it as a very slow ‘same but different’ project. The photos were taken in March 2011, July 2013, and December 2020.

Raddon Hill - Same But DifferentVery occasionally I return to...

Raddon Hill - Same But Different

Very occasionally I return to this same spot at a different time of year. I take a photo guessing where I stood for the last one. When home I compare how the scene has changed. I guess I see it as very slow ‘same but different’ project. The photos were taken in March 2011, July 2013, and December 2020.

"All our classical social science is flawed precisely because it is laden with assumptions of..."

“All our classical social science is flawed precisely because it is laden with assumptions of classical (mechanical) analysis, which then imperfectly structures theories and policies down the line. Quantum physics gives a more complete account of reality because it describes all the possibilities within a system, which collapses (decoheres) into a classical outcome at the moment of measurement. This does not mean classical science will be obsolete, but just secondary to the quantum approach.”

- The Quantum Turn in Social Science

Servold, Bachelard, and Three Unnamed Children

themostfunthing:

Perfection is the thirteen-second clip that comes about three minutes into a film you could easily forget was released in 2020, Emerica’s Green. The skater is Dakota Servold dressed in all black but for his belt. He does three tricks on a narrow and pretty obviously non-American sidewalk through one of those small shared outdoor spaces that European apartment buildings are so good at. It’s an Oz-like yellow pathway of small squares that rattle under Servold’s and the filmer’s wheels and there’s an incline, the path drops and flattens as it leads through the grass and toward a set of stairs. The lawn is a deep, verdant green with trees in planters on one side and shrubs lining the building on the other. Fallen yellow leaves dot the yard.

He lands a fakie three-sixty-flip and swerves twice along the narrow path’s grade before regaining control just as it levels out. Momentum carries him through the path’s crook and he sets up for a clean and high-speed half-cab flip. Then he pushes twice, moving now very fast indeed, and crouches, digs in his back foot, and pops a back lip down a handrail made of narrow piping. As the camera brakes at the stairway’s top, Servold lands on top of some kind of manhole, and the shot cuts just as he’s about to collide with the bike rack against another apartment building.

But look at the three German children running alongside the path! Two have long blonde hair, one is in a dress, and the third, a boy, leads the pack. There’s an ongoingness to their running at the clip’s start, and soon the one in the blue dress falls out of the shot, and then the second one, with the ponytail, and meanwhile the third boy is fastest, barely keeping up as Servold powers toward the rail, but he fades too, leaving only Servold, the stairs, the back lip.

The more that I watch this clip, the more it feels to me like a small miracle of framing and motion. Only once at the very outset does any of Servold’s body leave the frame—some of his right arm on the fakie-three—and yet we never feel a distance. We could touch him if we wanted, just by reaching, except somehow these children are in the frame too, the lawn and whatever game they believe they’re playing. It’s an open shot, and inviting, but close enough to see the wear on Servold’s right shoe. There is nothing that quite wears-in like an Emerica, after all, and in fact the entirety of Green functions as a kind of reminder to the shoe-buying world that it’s not over yet, or not quite, for skater-owned shoe companies.

“Every border,” wrote Ayesha Siddiqi, “implies the violence of its maintenance.” It is true that the upkeep of skateboarding’s borders has demanded the kind of exclusionary harm that we’ve learned to diagnose (and in some cases, treat) as gatekeeping. It is also meanwhile 100% true that there is something one feels while watching Green that one doesn’t while watching, say, a RedBull skate video, or many of the edits that come tumbling out of the big footwear tubes. Though it’s also become harder and harder to talk about this stuff, largely because the blurred and confounding status of skateboarding’s once fairly defined borders.

In a late chapter of The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard confronts the “profound metaphysics” of the outside / inside dialectic, the language of which is everywhere we look, each use of which “confers spatiality upon thought.” Over the years, as skaters have spoken in terms of “core” or “endemic culture,” we have abided by what Bachelard, quoting Jean Hyppolite, calls, “a first myth of outside and inside.” Can any of us belong to anything without defining that belonging by such a spatial metaphor? It is difficult. And it is a challenge faced by any community that is set off somehow from a broader population, any tribe or nation, any single self facing any single other. One wants belonging to have meaning, after all—meaning is the reward that belonging confides.

Our skate borders, by now, have been as gerrymandered as any in the US. The original “SB” in Nike SB was a message to skate retail outlets and their niche consumers—a gesture to distinguish between us and general athletes, a nod to both the specific needs of skaters and our specific commitment to style. It felt, back then, a little like respect. Over time, this respect was enough for Nike SB to leap from the confines of the skateshop into the broader marketplace. Along the way, “SB” morphed from request to claim, a credentialed bit of rhetoric in an argument that has, by now, achieved something like meaninglessness —what does it mean for Travis Scott and the Grateful Dead to have their names attached to an “SB” shoe? Truly: who fucking cares. In any case, “SB” means less to those of us who identify as “skaters,” surely, than whatever it means to those who don’t.

Did you read, earlier this year, Ariana Gil’s article, “The Best Don’t Get Caught: The Case of Supreme,” in Cultured Magazine? By now Supreme’s been sold again, the topic is exhausting, but Gil’s treatment of “one of the most mythical brands of all time” diagnoses with icy precision some hard truths about our little word. Gil turns to a framework proposed by new media scholar McKenzie Wark that treats branding as a third, complicating entry into the historic model of two dominant economic classes, capitalists and workers. A brand, so it goes, achieves its unified commodity value through the production of information vectors based on narrative and image data. Gil paints Supreme’s brand vector since its founding in 1994 as a balance of cool exclusion and delinquency, a pastiche that draws from homelessness, unemployment, and other unproductive activities, “from kicking wood to smoking dope to graffiti,” all of which become productive to Supreme’s own valuation. As a result, “what was once an ‘insiders’ club of self-identified ‘outsiders’” became, quite suddenly in 2017, a billion-dollar company when half of it was purchased by The Carlyle Group, the largest private equity group in the world. 

Back to skateboarding, how about? Maybe, like me, you are equal parts intrigued and enraged by the current incarnation of Bill Strobeck. In 2015 I wrote that Ty Evans films skateboards, Greg Hunt films skate spots, and Strobeck films skateboarders, brutalizing the zoom function of a new generation of HD cameras to insist upon us a series of fingernails, blemishes, and other details of embodiment. By Candyland, that body interest reached a new level, and came at the cost of spots and tricks and also, regarding women and non-binary/genderqueer people on the street, basic human respect.

And so, a valuable exercise in forcing the question of just what exactly it is we’re watching when we watch a skate video: body, board, spot, contextual noise that surrounds spot, and so on. Bill’s gaze has a long history of being real good with skateboarders in motion but sometimes creepy and maybe sexist and definitely adolescent. And to my eyes, it’s never felt more like a prison than in Candyland. Which is a thing worth recalling—the myriad gazes so central to our consumption of skateboard media, the many thousand cameras in our pockets, are extensions of the tastes and values and aesthetics of whoever holds them. It is the obvious reason why a film of girls and women and nonbinary skaters shot by Shari White feels different—Shari’s camera does not leer—a point obvious but no less important for its obviousness.

Which all makes a clip like Dakota Servold’s three-trick line among socialized housing somewhere in Germany feel like a revelation. Green opens with a shot of Emerica shoes—a minor secret about Emericas at this point: the model does not matter; whatever the specifics of toe box and side paneling, they are all the same model and it is “the Emerica”—landing on the blacktop inside of a just-hopped Californian fence. And by virtue of necessary budget limitations and/or brand ethos, Green is a California video to the core, built of red curbs and palm trees and schoolyard blacktops. Having lost the twenty-year face of their brand, post-Reynolds Emerica exhibits no anxiety or insecurity, no desire to venture laterally or cater to anyone beyond their established demographic. And yet somehow, despite most of them being white dudes cut from the same motorcycling and flanneled and long-haired cloth, Green’s two song’s-worth of montage without name titles results in no confusion—you can mostly tell who they are! Jon Dickson continues his interpolation of a heftier, dockhand or mechanic version of Dylan Rieder, and it is both a powerful ode and powerful in itself, a reckless and gruff Dylan echo, stunning to behold.

And tucked amongst all of this denim and flannel and leather and hair, all the wearing and the tearing, we’ve got three German children running to keep up in the far right of a widescreen, high-definition frame. What a thing to be able to watch immediately on the heels of noticing Servold’s worn-out shoe. What a richness.

It brings me to that way of seeing we call “naturalism,” and turning once again to Annie Dillard, who wrote as well as anyone about the natural world. “I would like to know grasses and sedges—and care,” she tells us. Elsewhere, she has “just learned to see praying mantis egg cases. Suddenly I see them everywhere.” This is not a matter of theory or even comprehension, in fact what Dillard celebrates in her nature writing often has little to do with “meaning” at all. Dillard’s project is about metaphor as a tool to describe what is seen and what resists language. It is the enrichening of her lived experience that can only come of her learned competence. Of not just knowing but also caring, and from these two experiences becoming even more engaged. And so the cycle spins with each new level of engagement reverberating back into the body where knowledge and care live, an increasing richness of living.

People who have skateboarded long enough know that skateboarding, too, works this way. Seeing and caring work in tandem and echo. To care more about skateboard media is to change the way the body goes out and does it.

The filming of Emerica’s Green is not artful exactly but artfully proficient. In Tim Cisolino’s hands, the camera moves but does not jerk. The skaters and spots are framed deliberately. In Germany, following behind Dakota Servold, that means a wide-angle shot that holds space for the children to run alongside and play through the grass. It is a brief sequence, thirteen seconds out of a nineteen-minute film, that presents of speed and sound and several human bodies moving through the world. Of shoes that have been worn long enough to show wear. Under pressure as the last defense against Nike and Adidas and New Balance, Emerica’s choice was to turn to the viewer and encourage each of us to see what we could. Emerica know what we expect of them, and we know they know that we know, and so on. Were it any other relationship, we would call this intimacy. 

A Christmas treat for you to read.

Universities say student cheating exploding in Covid era

Universities say student cheating exploding in Covid era