August Newsletter: Lords of Dogtown, Dylan’s Infidels and Trails Worth Hiking

 
 

Photos: Classiq Journal

 
 

“This was a magical time in the ’70s
when this burst of creativity came from these kids
who were from the wrong side of the tracks.”

Catherine Hardwicke, director of Lords of Dogtown

 

 

Viewing

Lords of Dogtown, 2005
Catherine Hardwicke

“This was a magical time in the ’70s when this burst of creativity came from these kids who were from the wrong side of the tracks,” director Catherine Hardwicke said. “They had shitty, unstable home lives. They weren’t good in school and couldn’t afford an expensive sport. But anyone could buy a skateboard super cheap. And with Skip Engblom as their father figure, it felt like the family they didn’t have. […] Each character is finding his powers and creativity. It’s an expression of pure bliss and freedom. Stacy, Tony and Jay were always trying to one-up each other, pushing the sport. Their music was integrated into the style of skating because, for these rebellious, frustrated kids, the pounding of that music helped them. The skaters found poetry from a drought and empty pools.”

This is the ‘70s skateboard counterculture of the mean streets of west Los Angeles, the Dogtown area, brought to life with raw energy, youthful grit and incredible visual sensibility. You are living it, riding it, immersed in an endless California vibe. It is the true story of the legendary Zephir skateboarders (Z-Boys) who redefined skate culture in the 1970s. Stacy (John Robinson), Jay (Emile Hirsche) and Tony (Victor Rasuk), under the guidance of their team leader, Skip Engblom (Heath Ledger) – Zephir comes from the surf shop Skip owns. These wonderfully cast actors (and I really want to insist on Heath, his dedication to a role was hypnotic all-absorbing, and it was maybe his greatest gift and greatest misfortune) are the rebels who defined an era. Lords of Dogtown is also one of the most beautifully shot films in Los Angeles, back-lit by the sun and defined by a rock attitude that I feel every generation should experience.

 

Summer with Monika, 1953
Ingmar Bergman

It still surprises today with its freshness and sensuality. “What were we dreaming of when Summer with Monika was first shown in Paris?,” Godard wrote. “Ingmar Bergman was already doing what we are still accusing French directors of not doing. Summer with Monika was already Et Dieu…créa la femme, but done to perfection. And that last shot of Nights of Cabiria, when Giulietta Masina stares fixedly into the camera: have we forgotten that this, too, appeared in the last reel but one of Summer with Monika? Have we forgotten that we have already experienced – but with a thousand times more force and poetry – that sudden conspiracy between actor and spectator which so aroused André Bazin’s enthusiasm, when Harriet Andersson, laughing eyes clouded with confusion and riveted at the camera, calls on us to witness her disgust in choosing hell instead of heaven?”

 

High Noon, 1952
Fred Zinnemann

Lee Van Cleef. He doesn’t utter a single word and delivers the best performance. It almost makes you forget the wooden acting of Gary Cooper and the far fetched idea of the lonely frightened hero. Howard Hawks was right: “I made Rio Bravo because I didn’t like High Noon. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help.”

 

 

Reading

The smell of watermelon, the sound of cow bells on mountain trails, the taste of sea water on your face, the sound of tennis balls on dirt elicit my strongest memories of childhood summers. And Agatha Christie’s books. At least one of the above punctuated every summer day. I am reading Christie’s books for the first time since then. My fascination has remained intact and much more than back then, I realise this writer’s great understanding of human nature and how much ahead of her time she was, or just the opposite, how much of her time she was.

 

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is a book every child should read, and everyone should re-read to never lose the kid in them.

 

On my list: Dogtown – The Legend of the Z-Boys – it’s the photos in here (by C. R. Stecyk III and Glen E. Friedman) that the film Lords of Dogtown used as inspiration.

 

Listening

The soundtrack: Lords of Dogtown

 

The podcast: Trails Worth Hiking. It tells the stories behind the world’s most interesting backpacking and trekking routes, and inspire you to hike them. One of the most beautiful of these o routes is Via Transilvanica and this is the episode dedicated to it.

 

The album: Infidels, Bob Dylan

 

Making

I first interviewed Anna Westerlund in 2015 and she still is one of the artists that stands out for me. This summer I finally made it to her shop, Together, in the Portuguese capital. On one of the walls are written these words: “When buying from an artist/maker you’re buying more than an object. You are buying hundreds of hirs of failures and experimentation and moments of pure joy. Our greatest tools are our hearts and hands so when we take time to make something with our hands we connect with ourselves and others. An object made with love, dedication and passion makes you feel happier and more fulfilled as that object will survive in time. Thank you.” It is a shop that instinctively reflects Anna’s aesthetics and values, creating a sense of place and tells the story of her craft with elegance and emotion and good vibes. And here’s Anna’s take on her city: “Lisbon is perfect because it has a great vibe, you have perfect food, good sightseeings and busy cultural life, but it is also near to the beach. So it gives you the best of two different worlds. That is not so easy to find, and it has a light that is unique!”

 

Exploring

The Surf Film Festival Anglet, running from 26-29 August. Founded 20 years ago in the sun-kissed town of Anglet, the festival, which celebrates the artistic merit of films about the world of surfing and enables a wider audience to discover them, sees silver screens installed on the beach and offers free entry. The film posters for this year’s line-up are a wonderful, immersive world in themselves.

 

 

On an end note

Few things can make a city more appealing and more alive than its news kiosks and magazine shops. There is hardly anything that gives me greater joy on a city walk, whether at home or on a trip, than stopping by a newsstand in the street mingling with the locals and travellers alike, or entering a shop with beautiful lined-up shelves, stacked with magazines and newspapers. All the magazines I read in print, I have come across this very way and not online. People who like to read things on paper are more connected, with the others and with the world around, and more present in their own lives. Hello, Kristof (selling coffee as well as cool independent magazines, such as Waves & Woods and Sirene) and Under the Cover are two new favourites, both in Lisbon, but I have to say that the one I have a soft spot on is the van-turned-news kiosk at LX Factory. It was summer, outside was raining, the shop assistant was sick inside, which made this culture-fill stop, for the magazine obsessive in me, frenetic and fun.

 

The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Wachstumsversuche, with Sarah Schill. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.

 

Heath Ledger in “Lords of Dogtown”, 2005. Columbia Pictures, Art Linson Productions, Indelible Pictures

 
 

“One of the strange things about living in the world
it is that only now and then one is quite sure
one is going to live forever and ever and ever.
One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender
solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws
one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky
slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening…”

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

 
 

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