Skateboarding-The Centaur Rides

Inspired by Dr Rodney ‘Gonna Shake the Dust Out of Academia’ Jones

Skateboarding in the modern sense emerged with the punk revolution from around 1975–1977, which in astrological terms falls under the jurisdiction of Chiron—the planetoid discovered in 1977—which connects mind and body, human and planet, nature and technology, past and future.

Skateboarding, as Dr Rodney ‘Wake Up to the Wild Stuff’ Jones explains, operates on multiple time frames as each trick learnt carries the history of all skateboarders, all those who have done the trick before, the hours of practice and failure, into the transcendental moment when it falls into space and the skater escapes the linear time frame.

Skaters utilize the video camera to real effect to catch their urban surfing—reconfiguring the environment as a malleable integrated substance as they do so— often showing split frame and slow motion capture of their definitive moments.
The skaters themselves suggest that the moment a trick comes off, they do indeed feel that they have escaped the linear mindscape as they move into ‘the holy of holies’ of all athletes, ‘the Zone’.

Prophessor Rodney ‘Slicing the Edge of Linguistics’ Jones talks of “resequencing the city” and the skaters’ navigational relationship with the circadian rhythms of the city.

“Wait a doggone minute there Mister! Isn’t it just a bunch of misfits trying to be special, rebelling and getting off on cool?”

Well, sure, that is happening too, but within the usual motivations of the young, an art form is being sewn into the fabric of the urban consciousness.

In those private stolen moments in the underworld —undetected by the authorities, yet in the heart of towns and cities—the magic happens.

The filming and documentation, the sharing on the Internet with their peers and the self-branding creates a bridge to the surface world.

The Astrological Mirror of the Skateboarder
Chiron is the maverick, ejected from the Kuiper belt—that band of 100,000-plus small planetoid objects, where Pluto still rules as Lord of the Underworld.

Chiron’s orbit intersects that of Saturn and Uranus. He cuts inside Saturn’s realm of ordered society, integrating the subterranean with the consensual. Chiron is the centaur; the horse/man mutant not quite belonging anywhere, yet like the shaman he comes into society with tricks, humour, healing and art, and is an embodiment of the love of the existential mystery.

Chiron is the key that unlocks doors to refresh the connection to the essential boundless state of life.


The Upload into the Terra-sphere
In my developmental model, Turquoise Chiron Enchantment rules the integration of the Earth’s environment that includes all of its history and human product as one being, a being that is a timeship moving in the multidimensional cosmic ocean.

This integration is not just about integrating psychological and sociological progress, but also ingests the disenfranchised, the hip hoppers, trash poets, trip cats, the scratchers, the funkster-munks, renegade techies and fringe boffins, maybe even the mystic crows, and all those who have got put aside in the linear forward momentum of the dominant paradigm.

Of course, each seedling of novelty grows and then gets swallowed by mass culture— eventually—but in doing so, culture surrenders some of its constraints … a little at a time.

A new shamanistic consciousness is emerging up from the streets, from the pirates and those who live off the grid (whether part time or otherwise), or in the slums without the safety and therefore sterility of consensuality …

I wonder what is bubbling up now.

What is next?

Junk technology, fashion RIPs, print jockeys, retro-futurists, skunk monkeys, meme cutters, currency jackals, cyber cram networkers…

I don’t know for sure, but I do know stuff is happening—behind the curtain and beyond the radar and under the lid … new fusions and reinventions to rock the world and recalibrate reality.



To really get into the spirit and sheer joy of the skateboarding emergence, I recommend you watch my all-time favourite documentary, The Z Boys of Dogtown, with interviews and actual video footage from the 70s of the pioneering surf rats who channelled the archetype of modern skateboarding through mixing punk attitude, ocean surf and skating. In doing so, the Z Boys helped bring in a new consciousness, a fusion of the body with the concrete jungle, uploaded into the planet’s noospheric template.

Dogtown and zboys:birth of vertical, a two minute introduction



Hong Kong Skateboarding, a 5 minute Documentary




Dogtown and Z boys promo




The fabulous lecture by...........

(1/4) 'Creativity in Dynamical Systems: The Case of Urban Skateboarders, Dr. Rodney Jones