beautiful losers

when my youth was on fire (and my back in one piece) I used to skate. I went on skating for years in my legendary neighbourhood called "Mirafiori Nord" in the surprisingly quite pretty suburban area that crowns the Mirafiori Fiat factory. the grain of the asphalt was rough and hard to ride, there were no structures at all and we used to grind and slide pretty much anything with an edge. he board and the trucks were just not sliding without approaching the obstacle with a wild anger.
occasionally we were getting duplicates of VHS tapes from the unites states and we were gathering in someone's sittingroom to look at these pros. it was magical. we used to hear about these tapes for weeks before actually seeing them and it really was a "happening". I never agreed with my mates about who was the coolest guy in most of the videos, it was mostly a guy called Ed templeton. I was mad for him, to me he was using skate to communicate about himself. he wasn't particularly gracious or technical (compared to the others) but he really really really wanted to make the trick he was doing and he was ejoying it to the fullest. he really really wanted to skate and he was never showing off. tight trousers (far more than an outsider in the early nineties), sixties shoes and skating on pretty much anything with an edge.

I was pleased to find out that already at the time he was part of a fantastically REAL art scene that has been beautifully described in the documentary "beautiful losers" (2008). I extremely recommend it. to put it as IMDB.com does: "The greatest cultural accomplishments in history have never been the result of the brainstorms of marketing men, corporate focus groups, or any homogenized methods; they have always happened organically. More often than not, these manifestations have been the result of a few like-minded people coming together to create something new and original for no other purpose than a common love of doing it. In the 1990s, a loose-knit group of American artists and creators, many just out of their teens, began their careers in just such a way."