The Answer Is Never: A Skateboarder's History of the World - Softcover

Weyland, Jocko

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802139450 ISBN 13: 9780802139450

Publisher: Grove Press, 2002

Synopsis

From the hard-ridden half-pipe of a suburban driveway to teens doing boardslides down stairway handrails in Rio de Janeiro, from the bright-light glare of ESPN's X-Games to the groundbreaking street-skating videos of Spike Jonze, skateboarding has taken the world by storm -- and if you can't deal with that, get out of the way. In The Answer Is Never, skating journalist Jocko Weyland tells the rambunctious story of a rebellious sport that began as a wintertime surfing substitute on the streets of Southern California beach towns more than forty years ago and has evolved over the decades to become a fixture of urban youth culture around the world. Merging the historical development of the sport with passages about his own skating adventures in such wide-ranging places as Hawaii, Germany, and Cameroon, Weyland gives a fully realized portrait of a subculture whose love of free-flowing creativity and a distinctive antiauthoritarian worldview has inspired major trends in fashion, music, art, and film. Along the way, Weyland interweaves the stories of skating pioneers like Gregg Weaver and the Dogtown Z-Boys and living legends like Steve Caballero and Tony Hawk. He also charts the course of innovations in deck, truck, and wheel design to show how the changing boards changed the sport itself, enabling new tricks as skaters moved from the freestyle techniques that dominated the early days to the extreme street-skating style of today. Vivid and vibrant, The Answer Is Never is a fascinating book as radical and unique as the sport it chronicles.

About this title

Review:

The first literary investigation and memoir of a cultural and sporting phenomenon.

About the Author:

Jocko Weyland's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Open City magazine and Metropolis, among others. His third gallery show of photography was mounted last summer at the Steffany Martz gallery

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0802139450
• ISBN 13: 9780802139450
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272