Skateboarder and Skate Park designing pioneer, Andy Kessler passes away at the young age of 48

In an earlier writing on my website skatetronics.com, I referred to the world of skateboarders as being similar to that of early hip hop because they have their own language their own culture and they live in a world inside of the world we all live in. Well Monday when skateboard pioneer Andy Kessler tragically passed away apparently from a heart attack due to an allergic reaction to a wasp sting, I learned he came from a community of young skateboarders and graffiti artists in New York called the Soul Artists. Very cool name. As anyone knows, graffiti artist and rappers are a major part of how hip-hop is identified and apparently skateboarders as well. Anyone who knows anything about ancient culture understands these cultures had their own languages their own tribal look and their own written forms of expression. Graffiti stands to be the hieroglyphics of the skateboarding and hip-hop cultures, which would be considered cousins if it were to be studied by anthropologist.

In the late seventies hip-hop was able to be financially exploited by corporate America and it seemed to have bolted out of the gate and clear ahead of skateboarding. Though they both appear to have developed around the same time, skateboarding is showing a strong resurgence just as hip-hop looks to be being euthanized by its vampirish corporate masters. Hip-hop will continue but with the trueness it began with which is a benefit skateboarding has been afforded by not being engulfed by corporate cultural disfigurement. One of the characters of this disfigurement is the element of age. Age in hip hop has been turned into a barrier which is ironic since hip-hop is really about information and knowledge of words which increases with age where as in skateboarding age has not been turned into a barrier though the culture is based on physical ability, something that can diminish with age. But now days corporate America appears to be toying with the idea of maximizing the profile of skateboarding similar to the way a cat toys with a mouse before the cats makes the mouse "famous", to use a phrase popularized in the "Young Gunns" movies when Emilio Estevez's character "Billy the Kid" would tell another gunslinger just before he shot him, "I'll make you famous".

But this is about Andy Kessler whose passing at the age of 48 is much too early and will be sorely missed by the culture he helped establish in a place bursting with culture, New York City. Andy’s dedication to something he loved to do is mirrored by millions of skateboarders all over the world. Its just Andy Kessler was doing it before it was considered cool. In a You Tube video by ‘mdorothy’ called "Grandmaster 108", Andy equates skateboarding to freedom, which is a line I used in describing the skater or rider culture on my website skatetronics.com. Andy also headed up the move towards creating a safe and so-called legal place for skateboarders to do their thing when he encouraged the building of skate parks in that concrete jungle New York City, many of which Andy Kessler designed.