Dystopian Roller Skates

​In late 2011, not long after I had given a talk at the Esoteric Book Conference in Seattle on the topic of “The Library Angel & It’s Oracle,” my life took an unexpected turn. My step-daughter had joined the Junior Roller Derby Girls and on Wednesday nights we started taking her to practice up the road at one of the local roller rinks. Following the practice of the junior team, there was an open co-ed practice for the two adult teams, the Cincinnati Rollergirls for the women, and the Cincinnati Battering Rams for the men. I hadn’t ever expected to start training for roller derby, but for a few years that’s what we all did.

My wife and I had done yoga together on and off since after we first met. I had gotten into yoga after attending a kundalini yoga retreat led by Yogi Bhajan and his fellow Sikh’s in the desert of New Mexico the year I graduated from high school, but that is another story. There used to be a guy in town named “Joe Yoga” and he had a class he gave in the place he lived down in the Brighton neighborhood where a lot of artists had old lofts in warehouses and the like. After class he would crack up open a big magnum of red wine and light up the spliffs. At the time, that was my kind of work out and physical culture.

We went to another yoga class together at the neighborhood recreation center on and off for a little while, but it didn’t stick. Then it transformed into Pilates at an in-home studio run by a friend of ours. That was pretty much the extent of any kind of effort to stay in shape beyond going on long walks and hikes, which I’ve always loved. That was the way things stood until we fell into the subculture of roller derby.

I had enjoyed roller skating as a kid, but my real love had been skateboarding. My wife had really loved roller skating as well. Growing up on the West Side of the city, it was standard to spend at least some time hanging out at Western Rollerama, a venue that has now gone into extinction.

During the seventies and eighties the Rollerama even had an all-night skate, where parents could drop the kids off in the evening and pick them up in the wee hours of the morning. The only rule was you couldn’t go to sleep, or they would call your folks and make you go home. Talk about a cheap all babysitter so the parents could get some action. It is for experiences such as these, that Gen X is known as being feral.
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After a few times of taking the young one to practice, my spouse started getting interested in getting on the adult derby team herself, and the practice was a fun way to add to our exercise routine. I was a decent skater myself, but the majority of my skill came more from years skateboarding, which I started doing between the fifth and sixth grade. I had become an honest to earnest skater punk by junior high when my musical world exploded beyond the confines of mainstream metal and radio friendly alternative music. I still remember rocking out to The Descendants, The Ramones, Minor Threat and other punk bands as I was turned on to the music by older skaters and punks who had befriended me. I will always be grateful for the many mixtapes that were given to me in those days.

As a skateboarder, I developed many attitude problems. One of them was the way I looked down on rollerbladers. For one thing, rollerbladers were often permitted in parks and public places where skateboarding was prohibited. The other part was simple youthful arrogance and animosity. Rollerblading never had the same cache of outlaw cool as skateboarding had, so I never gave it a try. But roller derby players didn’t use rollerblades, so I was able to let go of some of my bias.
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There was one time, when I was dating a Baptist girl while in high school, where I allowed myself to skateboard with a rollerblader. She was practicing the time-honored method of “flirt to convert” and making out with me, but always leaving me hot and bothered and then wanting me to get saved. She was into rollerblading. On one outing we went to the park and she was on her blades and I was on my board. Later that night she cut it off with me after I took her to an industrial music tinged “rave” party in my friend’s basement where we were drinking cough syrup to have a cheap dissociative trip (some call robo the poor man’s PCP) dancing crazy to Nine Inch Nails as remixed by Coil, and the loud strains of "Psalm 69" by Ministry. As the night progressed, she thought I was possessed. By a demon. But that’s another story.

[This Coil & Danny Hyde remix of NIN fuckin’ slams]

All in all, for me, roller skating had been limited to outings for other people’s birthdays and elementary school field trips where it was given as a reward for those who had good behavior and grades. I still think it is weird that they had songs like “Push It” by Salt-N-Pepa blaring out over the speakers as the soundtrack for all of us fourth and fifth graders. I guess now it is some other highly sexualized pop song.​

Yet for all that I dissed rollerblading, roller skating had gained major street cred with me in the form of roller derby. Here was an amateur sport taken up mostly be punk rock girls, degenerate hipsters, and big butch lesbians who you wouldn’t want to mess with in a street fight. In other words, this was something I could get behind and celebrate. Plus, there is something about moving around on wheels I really did love and even though it wasn’t a skateboard, moving around the rink swiftly as I could was a lot of fun. I don’t think my quads were ever as strong as they were when we were doing those open practices.
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These practice sessions formed a kind of outer court for those who wanted to try out for the Rollergirls or Battering Rams. I was asked to try out, but there is something about team sports I can’t put myself behind too easily, even though I was less cynical about this than I was about football or soccer. I liked doing the drills, but I’m not a violent person, and I didn’t relish the “contact sport” aspect of the game. If there had been any kind of organized speed skating competitions, I might have gone for that, because that was always my favorite part: moving fast.

Cincinnati Rollergirls in Action

My wife tried out for the team, but she too is a really peaceful person. Not just a pacifist, but a vegetarian of several decades, and the past number of years, a committed vegan. Hitting people and knocking them down and bashing them around just didn’t come natural to either one of us. She was still disappointed by not making the team, but in the end, I was happy about her not getting on the team, at least in terms of her health. Any of the people we practiced with who did make the team at the tryouts always ended up with a broken leg or some other serious injury not long after they started playing real matches. Those breaks and injuries could happen at practice. It’s not for wussies.

We kind of drifted away from those practices when my step-daughter graduated from high school and was no longer on the junior team. I always feel like I am outsider in any kind of scene anyway, no matter how involved I am. Such is the fate of the fringe dweller. But I also am super fascinated by any kind of subculture, so it was really interesting to be a part of it for a little while, even if I kept my spot on the edge.
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We still enjoy going to see the Rollergirls play every now and again. Since I have my druthers about the military industrial sports complex (where bombers fly over sports stadiums, and military personnel make vast displays before a game) rollerderby is an alternative. It is an amateur enterprise, and the teams on the leagues that we go see are all part of non-profit organizations. No one is making a killing doing this stuff, and they aren’t celebrating killing in far off lands with their displays before the show. They just just beat the crap out of each other and injure each other for the fun of it and because they love to skate and slam into sweaty bodies. I can get behind that. I think I could be more of a fan of group sports if it was all a little more home spun.

A fascist rollerblading gang in Prayer of the Rollerboys (1991)

With all that in mind, I thought I’d write about some of my favorite movies that involve roller skating and dystopian futures.

In film and literature my wife and I have always preferred science fiction and fantasy. Finding good science fiction films has gotten harder and harder as time has gone by. Luckily some of the best films are not “good” by any kind of standard that would win them an Oscar. Most of my favorite films never have and never will win any kind of academy award. Most of them have been confined to the genre ghetto in the same way as my favorite books. Others, being budget films, have the fact that they were made on a budget going against them. Yet I’ve always prized physical effects and imagination in storytelling over flashiness and big stars. A lot can be done to tell a story on the screen and making do with what is available. CGI, now on stereoids with AI, doesn’t appeal to me visually in the same way handmade and old school editing tricks do.

We also like to scour thrift stores, second hand shops, antique stores and flea markets. The kind of place that has an antique store vibe with old wares, but a flea market mindset with cheaper prices and bit of junk is kind of our sweet spot. We managed to find two such places on our recent modest vacation, camping at Pennyrile State Park in Kentucky. Then we stayed in an airbnb cabin on Nolin Lake near Mammoth Cave as our basecamp while exploring the National Park for a few days. One was called the Village Vendor in Leitchfield, the other was the Elizabethtown Peddlers Mall. I recommend both. When I’m walking through these booths I tend to gravitate towards used books and VHS tapes.

It was while scouring the bins of VHS tapes in one booth that I stumbled across a movie from 1991 that I had never heard of before. This film was also a scifi flick and it featured rollerskating. Win-win! We will start our run down of dystopian scifi rollerskating films with this one and go backwards in time from there. These movies all fall into my favorite era of film as well the 1970s through the 1990s.
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PRAYER OF THE ROLLERBOYS (1991)

Patricia Arquette and Corey Haim in Prayer of the Rollerboys

I somehow missed this film until just a few weeks ago. I don’t know if it’s available on streaming. Maybe you can rent it from Prime or see it on YouTube. Or you can hunt around and find it randomly like I did. It stars Patricia Arquette and Corey Haim. I always liked Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. Both got pretty messed up by being young celebrities. Feldman still has his life, though. Stand By Me and The Lost Boys were some of my favorite films when I was in the fifth grade.

​I had pretty much started watching horror films in grade school. Not that my parents let me, per se, but being a feral Gen X kid, I did have a lot of unsupervised time with other kids on my street growing up and some of them had VCRs (we didn’t until I was in high school) and their parents had caches of horror films and other things we shouldn’t have been watching. No one stopped us from watching things like Hellraiser or Slaughter High or Halloween, because no one was paying attention to what we were watching or what we were doing. Maybe it made my mind warped, but I think I am better for the warping. Warpage adds character to the grain of the soul, right? The same way there is more grain in a old VHS tape with bad tracking.

​For whatever reason, maybe the writing, maybe the cheese factor, Prayer of the Rollerboys never made it big, though I suppose it has a bit of a cult following. I had never heard of it before however. The plot is a good one though, and it follows classic themes.

The United States is in the dumps following “The Great Crash,” not of 2008, but some other economic bubble collapse. Hey, that’s liable to happen any time with the current real estate market and speculation on AI. Go ahead and can call me a doomer or apologist of decline, I don’t mind. (The Decline of Western Civilization by Penelope Spheeris was another favorite film when I was a teen.)

The precise reason for this particular collapse was the greed of previous generations. Cue real estate comment I just made for replay. Everything went up for grabs by foreign markets and corporations. That doesn’t sound familiar from the past several decades of neoliberal economic policy, does it?

In this reality some people just get left behind. Some try to cope by numbing themselves with drugs, and there are new designer drugs allowing an escape. One of the people left behind is Griffin, played by Haim, a skilled rollerblader who lives a straight edge lifestyle. He and his little brother Miltie live in a tent on the grounds of a junk yard run by a friendly black man who has them under his wing. Beyond that, they are on their own. Their parents are dead, presumably from giving up and giving in to a life of drugs. “Heaven’s Mist” is the latest drug and it comes from overseas further destroying life in the states. (Fentanyl, anyone?)

Drugs need pushers and the people pushing “Heaven’s Mist” happen to be a gang called the Rollerboys. You guessed it, they are all bad ass rollerbladers, cruising around a devastated Los Angeles selling drugs. Meanwhile Griffin tries to do the right thing as a pizza delivery boy. He has to carry an automatic weapon while delivering pizzas, though, things have gotten so bad.

He is out on a run one night when he sees a kid in a burning house and saves him. Turns out the guy in the house is a Rollerboy, and for saving his life the leader of the Rollerboys owes Griffin a few favors. Turns out the leader of the gang just happens to be his best friend from childhood, Gary Lee, played by Christopher Collette, who had made horror history for his role in Sleepaway Camp. The gang seems more like a cult and Lee is always talking about something they are going to do in the near future, something called “The Day of the Rope.”

The little brother starts to hang around the Rollerboys, who have a strict policy of never using the drugs they deal themselves. But Miltie doesn’t follow the policy and after just a little while of dealing the Mist, he starts using. Griffin needs to find a way to pull him out before his little brothers mind is gone.

But there are also Rollergirls hanging out with the Rollerboys. One of them is Casey (Patricia Arquette) who we soon learn is working undercover for the police. The police also tag Griffin to work undercover to bring the Rollerboys and stop the “Day of the Rope.” It turns out this is a sinister final solution cooked up by Lee as a way to solve what he thinks are the problematic elements inside of what is left of American society.

It’s not my favorite movie starring Haim or Arquette. She doesn’t really get much of a chance to shine outside the role of ingenue. To see some of her real acting chops check out Richard Linklater’s Boyhood if you haven’t already. Yet I was glad to have watched this movie, because there is something about skating through derelict warehouses while having machine guns blast away and fighting against dystopian drug lords that warms my heart. The grain on the warped VHS tape mirrors the grain of my own soul.

I probably would have thought this movie was the shit when it came out. I would have been twelve.
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SOLARBABIES (1986)

Prayer of the Rollerboys wasn’t the first to marry dark futures with roller skating speed. Solarbabies had been there, done that in 1986. This one I had seen in my misspent youth. Sunday afternoons on our local Channel 64 was the place to park the dial on the tube if you had an interest in genre flicks as I did. That’s where I first saw John Carpenter’s Christine and They Live, and it’s where I first saw Luc Besson’s epic and memorable The Big Blue, which remains a grand film. It’s also where I first saw Solarbabies. When we were all getting into roller derby I brought it home from the library to watch again.

Like the other flick this film was a theatrical bomb, but has become something of a cult classic even though it doesn’t really add up plot wise. But hey, plots are for linear types. If you are truly into postmodernist fiction and thought, a plot doesn’t matter much anyway and something like Solarbabies can be enjoyed for the derivative camp that it is; and even derivative camp is a lot better than another fucking superhero movie. I’m just going to put my cards on the table and tell you I am not really a fan of those at all.

Solarbabies can also be connected to Lost Boys by way of Jami Gertz who plays the role of Terra. Her love interest is Jason, leader of a gang of orphans who play a sport that is kind of a cross between roller hockey and lacrosse. It’s kind of funny that such poor people would be playing anything related to lacrosse, which has always been a game for rich kids. However street hockey is for the broke, and the game probably leans more towards the broke anyway.

As usual with certain types of dystopias, a paramilitary group is trying to keep the lockdown on everyone in a post-apocalyptic world with major water shortages and desertification. They are called the Eco Protectorate. They need new recruits and look to the orphans for willing members, with the help of a little indoctrination along the way.
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Meanwhile a deaf boy named Daniel from the orphan gang has retreated to a cave as a hide out. There he discovers a mysterious sentient orb. The orb turns out to actually be an alien named Bodhi who restores Daniels hearing and can make it rain indoors, solving the water problem. It’s also friendly and cute. Yet the Eco Protectorate gets wind of it, and wants it for themselves and chase after Daniel, but another kid gets it and leaves the orphanage. The rest of the gang jump in to help Daniel retrieve the ball and they all end up fleeing into the desert where they join up with a band of outlaws known as the Eco Warriors. The leader of this group turns out to be Terra’s long-lost father. I guess that explains her daddy issues.

Somehow or other a plan is conceived to use their massive skating skills and raid the Eco Protectorate where there is a giant water storage facility. They do this and somehow the alien / magic ball reappears and the water is released back to the earth. The movie is sealed with a kiss between Terra and Jason and the kids go swimming in the newly restored ocean. Happy ending for an improbable film. But if you want some escapist nostalgia, I still recommend!
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ROLLERBALL (1975)

Blowing up trees. It's the corporate thing to do.

​Here is a litimus test for you. You know you are in a dystopia when people blow up trees for fun. That’s exactly what happens in the corporatocracy portrayed in this cinematic masterpiece. The movie followed the short story “Roller Ball Murder” by William Harrison that first appeared in Esquire in September 1973. He wrote the screenplay himself.

The film was set in the future of 2018. While we may not have live televised sports where murder is condoned and expected, Harrison got the corporatocracy part right. The set up is about a captain of the Houston Rollerball team and a corporate executive who wants to cut him a deal if he will retire early live on TV. This captain Jonathan E., played by James Caan, doesn’t want to make that deal. In point of fact, he is a bit ticked off at the corporations. Another executive had absconded with his wife Ella and there wasn’t much a lowly sportsman could do. Those fucking corporate bastards!

As the exec says, “Corporate society takes care of everything. And all it asks of anyone, all it’s ever asked of anyone ever, is not to interfere with management decisions.”

We’ve heard that before. James decides to do his own research. That’s as dangerous in the imagined future as it is now. He went to the library. They are data centers after all. What he found was that all the books then stored on supercomputers had been digitized and edited to suit the views and interests of the corporations. For some reason that didn’t sit right with him either.

Later James receives a visit from his former wife and they have a chat.

James: “I’ve been thinking, Ella. Thinking a lot -- and watching. It’s like people had a choice a long time ago between having all them nice things or freedom. Of course, they chose comfort.”

Ella: “But comfort is freedom. It always has been. The whole history of civilization is a struggle against poverty and need.”
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James: “No. No -- that’s not it. That’s never been it. Them privileges just buy us off.”

The whole plot point of her being bought by an executive reminds me of another classic scifi flick from the seventies, Soylent Green, where the managers of society get to live in fancy apartments with pieces of so-called “furniture,” i.e., what amounts to sex slaves.

Thankfully, I don’t really hang out with the superyacht rock crowd, but the sickening reality of human trafficking, and those who pay for such services, begs a lot of questions.

Eventually the main character is tipped off by an old coach and friend named Cletus tips him off that the Executive Committe at the Energy corporation, where the exec worked who wanted him to retire, is afraid of him. He better be on guard. He better look over his shoulder.

The sport starts being played with ever more ultra violence, ever more rough and looser with the rules. Houston is due to play Tokyo. There are no penalties in the match and no substitutions. The corporation wants Jonathan out. Excessive brutality brings exceptional ratings and several players end up dead, killed. One could say murdered.
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Then comes the final match. In between the beginning and the end there is a scene of gleeful executives blowing up trees. Same as it ever was.

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In other news, Peter Bastian has helpfully created some art work you are free to use in any way you may like. I have been using the “Dada not Data” phrase since I first started getting annoyed by AI. The “Turning Off Is Tuning In” came spontaneously in conversation with James Hart, but thought it was good enough to use. I am happy for people to use these phrases for whatever they want. Spread the message!
I have used these and one other image to create a Redbubble shop where you can buy these as stickers and on coffee mugs. I would manage printing and sending them off myself, but my time is already very tight, and I want to keep my fingers at the keyboard. Redbubble seemed like a decent way, and I might earn enough for a cup of coffee some time, because I do provide these articles and pieces for free, but put considerable effort into the work.

​Peter is behind the harsh noise project Bridal Creeper which you can find scattered around the internets. This is a split made with Absurd Reality.

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