When I was in high school, my teeneage mind was consumed by girls, comics and skateboarding (not always in that order, I admit), and I spent hours and hours devouring whatever magazines I could find that would tell me about California’s skate scene. It wasn’t just the skaters and the fashion that sucked me in, it was the art too. The graffiti in the background of the photos was often more interesting to me than the moves being shot, and the decks - oh the decks!

For the last few years, I’ve been wanting to just buy skate decks and hang them on my walls - art without the hassle of frames. Haven’t quite gotten around to it just yet, but I’m sure I’ll start my collection shortly. Vancouver’s “Globe And Mail” recently covered the phenomenon of skateboarding’s development as a countercultural pop art phenomenon in a recent article, touching on the Z-Boys of Dogtown, Keith Haring, Basquiat and more. I think I’ll try to get to the Orange County exhibit in the next week or two.

Back in the seventies, when a scruffy crew of latchkey skate punks, later known as the Z-Boys of Dogtown, was growing up in the derelict grottos of West Los Angeles, no one thought of them as extreme athletes who would one day inspire a slew of art exhibits, their own major motion picture and a pop-culture phenomenon. These kids were hard-partying losers, a scary bunch of social misfits from broken homes, who appeared to be wasting their days by smoking pot, doodling on their skate decks and breaking into empty swimming pools across drought-stricken Southern California.

They were beautiful losers, no doubt, with their tanned bodies and flowing bleached-blond hair, executing the graceful leaps, dangerous spins and death-defying stunts that pushed skateboarding into a vertical sport. But they were losers, nonetheless.

Flash-forward 30 years. The underground has gone mainstream. Civic-sponsored skate parks are popping up on every corner from Moose Jaw to Manhattan, while Z-Boy memorabilia can be found in Happy Meals and on prestigious gallery walls. On June 3, Sony Pictures Entertainment will be releasing Lords of Dogtown, Hollywood’s take on the 2001 cult-classic documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which won a slew of awards at the Sundance Film Festival and elsewhere. The film stars Emile Hirsch and Heath Ledger as the tough-talking teenager and beach-bum Svengali who invented the aggressive art of extreme skateboarding that turned an afternoon hobby into a business empire. It is being hyped with a touring Dogtown art show (which hit Whistler, B.C., and Vancouver last month) and a 34-city amateur skateboard competition, sponsored by Adidas, which rolls into both Toronto and Vancouver on Saturday.

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