velvet oracle
The first thing you see is a cartoon dog. It sprints, collapses, and falls asleep, and then the name of the company fades up over it. Tired. The reel that follows runs a little under twelve minutes, features thirty-five mostly middle-aged men, and was put out in 2014 by a brand whose entire market is skaters over thirty. Nobody in it is going to make it. That is the joke, and it is also the argument.
I came to The Tired Video through a paper. In 2019 four sociologists, led by Indigo Willing at Griffith University, published a study of it in the journal Sociology, sitting through all one hundred and twenty-eight of its scenes and sorting what they found into four behaviours: modification, dedication, humour, homage. The reading is careful and mostly right. On the question of the humour, it stops half a step short of what the video is doing.
Here is what I mean. The paper treats the self-mockery as compensation, a way of getting ahead of the failure before anyone else can name it. That is real, and you can see it in the video. But watch what the joke is aimed at. One skater does a few tricks on a curb, lies down flat in the street, and announces he thinks he is having a heart attack. He is not tired from anything. The tricks were low and small. The bit only works because the whole apparatus of the skate video, the sweat and the slow build to the big trick, is being held up and mocked from the inside.
The clearest version of this is the gutter curb. The video is full of tricks done on curbs set at ankle height, an inch or two off the ground, shot with the same care an ordinary skate clip reserves for a twelve-stair. You are meant to notice the scale. A young skater films a handrail to prove something. These men film a curb because the proving is finished, and what is left is the doing, and the doing turns out to be enough.
A body that has aged is a body that has kept a record
The default skater in a magazine or a video is lean, young, often shirtless, shot from below so the trick looks larger than the person. The men in The Tired Video are heavier, going grey, shirts on. The study notes that not one of them skates bare-chested, and the detail carries more than it looks.
There is a concept the sociologists borrow for this, temporal capital, from Paul O’Connor. The years you have put in become a kind of status, legible to anyone who knows the culture. What makes skateboarding hospitable to this, more than most sports, is that it never issues a retirement.
Skateboarding doesn’t make you a skateboarder. Not being able to stop skateboarding makes you a skateboarder.
— Lance Mountain, Cutting the Stone, 2013
You could push back on all of this. Skateboarding is a progression sport. The whole pleasure of it, the argument goes, is the next trick, and a video that reframes decline as freedom is just making a virtue of necessity. I think this is the strongest objection, and I think it is incomplete, and the video answers it better than I can. It does not pretend the decline away. It films the falls, the arms windmilling, the trick left half done.
The video is not innocent, and the paper is right to say so. For all its generosity about who belongs, The Tired Video and both of its sequels are men, only men. A film that opens the door this far, then cannot picture an ageing woman on a board, has left its most obvious question unasked.
Still. What it offers is a permission that reaches past skating. You are allowed to keep doing the thing after you have stopped being impressive at it. You are allowed to film the curb.
Willing I, Bennett A, Piispa M and Green B (2019). ‘Skateboarding and the “Tired Generation”: Ageing in Youth Cultures and Lifestyle Sports.’ Sociology 53(3): 503-518. Runtime, scene count and the ‘temporal capital’ framing are as reported in that study.