If you have been watching Epicly Later'd on Vice TV, as I have, you know that the professional skateboarders that Patrick O'Donnell interviews are often nearly brain-dead from drugs, alchohol, and mental illness.
But these otherwise mentally disabled vets of a binge lifestyle seem attracted to nearly killing themselves all the time attempting impossible "tricks" on urban architecture.
They are doing something called "taking it to the limit". And I mean this in its literal sense. They find the limits of what is possible in terms of human movement and they go there. This is different from the intricate steps of a ballerina or rambunctious basketball dunk. They have to ride, or jump, a path which had been hitherto untraveled. And this is different from Christopher Columbus. This "new world" is one that always existed, and in fact, had been created by humans.
When Allen Ginsberg said,
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,"
he was talking about Kerouac, Burroughs, himself, Neal Cassady, Kesey, Corso, etc. For better,
these "best minds" of our generation, these "crazy ones", are those who grew up in skate-parks.
They may not be able to string together a sentence, but their mission is that of the Beat: to trace
the liminal via a path of immanence.
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