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Despite everything, New York is finally shaking off the winter chill and stretching its creaky bones. The mayor is closing miles and miles of roads to cars, allowing pedestrians, cyclists and skateboarders a bit more space. The trees are in full leaf, and my better half recently spent a few hours planting radishes, beans, and basil in the backyard (here’s hoping they thrive). The beer gardens and outdoor concerts and movies are definitely missed, but it’s clear that people are going to find a way to get some fresh air, coronavirus be damned. Upstate, things are finally beginning to reopen, and New Jersey is hatching plans to open the beaches, albeit with constraints.
The worry, of course, is that this flourishing of outdoor activity and reopenings will be the recreational equivalent of a dead cat bounce — an anomalous improvement in asset prices during a bear market, followed another decline — rather than a real turnaround. I’m not going to prognosticate about this, as there are simply too many variables, although it seems fairly obvious that too swift of a reopening without appropriate precautions will lead to a resurgence in infections. The reality is that short-termism is never a good economic policy, although America tends to embrace it, and it is particularly perilous right now. This is a time for baby steps out the front door, as Bob Wiley says, not for taking a leap of faith.
Perhaps the best metaphor for the economy right now is surfing. If you’ve ever surfed before, you know that there are a lot of waves that aren’t really worth the trouble. They might look like they’re going to do something when they come rolling in, but they turn into ankle busters and break too small, or they well and then never break at all. I make no claims to being a particularly good surfer — I’m not — but it doesn’t take long to figure out that rather than chasing these cheap thrills, it’s better to wait them out until a real wave arrives. In practice, this means spending some time chilling on the board and not worrying about it. That’s where we’re at. Too quick of a rush to re-open the economy, and we’ll get dumped. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get on the board; we just have to be patient and wait for the right moment.
Today’s Film: Minding the Gap (2018)
Rockford, Illinois is a speck of a town without a lot of prospects for young people. Like many communities in the midwest, it was hit especially hard by the Great Recession and the decline of American manufacturing. Yet Rockford was home for skateboarder and director Bing Liu, and when he started videotaping his friends in action during high school, his ambitions were limited to just that, creating cool skateboarding videos. But Liu kept shooting, and his horizons expanded, while many of his friends were frozen in place by circumstance, race, drug use, economics and social pressures. The result is a tremendous documentary feature, Minding the Gap.
What resulted from Liu’s many years of videotaping the Rockford skateboarding scene — and eventually turning the camera on himself and his own family — is one of the most touching and deeply intelligent documentaries about America in years. While it was Liu’s first film, it garnered an Oscar nomination and has the ruminative and introspective feel of a work from much older artist. Initially, Minding the Gap presents itself as a sweet story about a group of high school boys who love skateboarding and get into trouble every so often. Yet as Liu finds more opportunities through college and then filmmaking, and his friends fail to find those same opportunities, the roadblocks to advancement in contemporary America are revealed.
Rather than dwell on this potentially depressing subject matter, though, Liu seeks to understand not only how he fits in in Rockford, but also why he and his friends were so attracted to skateboarding. That activity, it turns out, was not just a distraction, but a savior, a passion and in some ways a curse. The magic of Minding the Gap lies in Liu’s ability to connect the friends’ lives as skateboarders to a larger narrative about manhood in the midwest. He celebrates skateboarding, and small town skaters who never experience any glory, even as he talks honestly about their challenges. For Liu’s subjects “skateboarding was more of a family than my family,” and it becomes a life or death matter.
Numerous writers and filmmakers have sought to explore the American condition, the decline of factory towns, and the struggles of working class people, but their attempts are typically ponderous and either turn into dull and technocratic analysis or agitprop. Liu deftly avoids these pitfalls. Partly, this is because of a conscious decision to keep skateboarding front and center, even in the majority of the formal interviews he conducts, but it is also the result of his youthful beginnings. This film exists because Liu loved three things as a teenager: video cameras, skateboarding and his friends. He still loves those things, and it shows.
Minding the Gap is streaming on Hulu.
A special note for my readers: I want to hear from you, particularly if you work in a creative industry. I’m always looking for guest reviews or Q&As, so if you’re working on something cool and want to tell the world about it or you just feel like sharing your opinion, let me know.
Reading List:
For those in search of some escapism, I’d like to recommend a trilogy of novels from science fiction author Ann Leckie. These books, which collectively make up the Imperial Radch trilogy, are an unusual and gripping space opera about an intergalactic imperial power with rot growing at its core. Leckie won Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for the books. In order, they are Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy.
And over at McSweeney’s I enjoyed reading “Sure, the Velociraptors Are Still On the Loose, But That’s No Reason Not to Reopen Jurassic Park.”
Benjamin Reeves is an award-winning screenwriter, journalist and media consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. Follow him on Twitter @bpreeves or write to him at breeves.writer@gmail.com.