Forbidden Trim will forever change the way surf
movies are viewed, maybe even made…
I’m not a fan of crowdfunding. Internet
begging is just so déclassé, and I’ll be damned before I
give some “entrepreneur” shithead a penny of my wife’s hard-earned
money.
Creative stuff is another matter entirely.
Nothing wrong with artistic types living off the patronage of
their more fortunate peers. I’ve been operating on that model for
years.
Forbidden Trim, a beautiful title evoking images of
70’s era lesbian prison dramas, is a 90-minute, low-budget film
shot on Super 8 film over the course of four years by San
Clemente’s George Trimm and starring Jared Mell and Alex Knost.
It just occurred to me that the title is a pun.
“A film about a commando’s mission to unveil a global crime
syndicate. Using surfers as cover, he travels deep into the
unknown.”
The trailer is deliciously absurd, which is how I like my surf
movies. Nothing worse than trying to force some sort of spiritual
significance on our selfish little ocean dance.
The filmmaker wants to raise thirty-gees to shoot the final
scene and to pay some of the post-production expenses. With 24 days
to go, they’ve got 49 backers for a total of $7197.
Chip in a twenty and you get a digital download when it’s
released (September 2015). A hundred and fifty will get you a
collab surf trunk with Birdwell Britches, the movie download, a
DVD, a soundtrack download. Another hundred and a Matuse wetsuit
jacket is yours.
Please help us expedite the completion of this movie by
contributing to our Kickstarter.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1044756525/forbidden-trim
THANK YOU FOR WATCHING
What do you call a good job nowadays? A doctor,
who earns his bread by foraging around in the putrid holes of
humanity? A lawyer, so well-paid, but tied to a job that is menial
and tedious?
For a cat like Eric Soderqvist, who set up shop as a 27-year-old
boat skipper and surf guide in the Mentawais back in 2004, the
concept of “good job” takes a sharp turn.
Eric, and his twin bro Jason, were scooped up by the surf
explorer and entrepreneur Martin Daly when The Crossing came by the
Turks and Caicos Islands where Eric lived. Eric ran the Indies
Trader II for a time. Now he’s working part-time on what used to be
called The Indies Trader IV but is now the Ratu Motu after it was
sold to Quiksilver founder Alan Green for around five mill.
Eric ain’t rich but he’s got a bitchin’ 48-foot catamaran called
Tank Girl. (Watch the movie below.)
He can fix any damn thing that breaks.
He can spin a laptop on his finger, walk on his hands across the
entire helipad of the Ratu Motu (12 metres up) and then front-flip
into the drink.
He can skipper a boat, whatever size you please around the
world, navigate by the stars, stitch a wound (just ask Matt Biolos
who was sliced from eyebrow to ear out there and got 19 stitches,
including a few internals) and resuscitate a guest who’s gone
overboard after several well-prepared cocktails.
And he can surf, man, can he surf.
On the deck of Tank Girl, as the sun peeled behind the
horizon, and as Eric showed me star constellations in the
equatorial sky using a green laser pointer, I asked Eric to brief
me about his fabulous job.
Why work as a skipper out here?
You get a sense of freedom, it’s the wild blue yonder
still. If I was working back in the western world, I’d be
running some silly white boat, have all these epaulettes and
kissing ass to all these people. One of the things, working on
a surf charter, I can tell you, ‘Go you soft cock! Fucking go!
Scratch! Bite Get into that thing! It’s It’s more salty out
here.
How about change, how about crowds, how about the
shifting goalposts in paradise?
Change comes everywhere, nowhere likes to see it change. It’s
getting busier and we lose one of our secret waves every year. It’s
good in a way, you see infrastructure, you see roads, so I’m not
against it. It’s good for the people.
Gimme some advice on how to get a gig out
here…
The first thing to do would be to get some sort of a captain’s
license. It’s pretty easy to do. You need some type of skill. A lot
of people want to come out and get barrelled, and I think that
those are the guys that never last out here. If you’re a lifeguard
or a medic or a captain or have some boating or engineering skills,
there are always places for those people.
Tell me about sewing up the guests…
I’ve seen a lot of shit, basically, I do a lot of the sutures,
even for a number of the boats. For my captain’s license I did a
three-week course called Medical Person in Charge. I sutured fake
arms, pretended to deliver babies. Spent a week riding around in an
ambulance. I actually learned to suture, in the real world, from
another skipper out here, Albert Taylor. A of the times we’ll have
doctors on boardand pick up bits and pieces from those guys.
What about the time you stitched Matt Biolos back
together?
Matt cut his head from the rail of his board from eyebrow to
ear, 19 stitches, a couple of internal ones. I’d just helped do a
really bad one on this boat. Fifty stitches, guy duck driving at
Pit stops and he literally, pushed into the reef, broke his nose,
half his skull was peeled off. Luckily, we had a doctor on board,
and I wrote notes down on what he was doing. Matt was a year or two
later. I had more confidence because of that bad one…
How would you describe your life? You work on the Ratu
Motu, but you’ve got your dreamy cat just moored hither and
yon whenever you want to split.
Yeah, if I don’t have a charter going I just get to play on my
boat. Go surfing… try and get girls out…
Do you use the miracle of Tinder to recruit
gals?
No Tinder, although I should be on it. Id say that, I’m getting
creepier and creepier in all honesty. This year is the first I
haven’t spent much time in Bali, lately, so my pool of girls is
getting smaller and smaller…
Cruel! Y’ever taking this boat back to the Bahamas to
run sunset tours?
If I even think of a sunset sail and drinking rum punch I throw
up in my mouth a little. The monotony of it!
Want to die of travel lust? Eric Soderqvist, his twin bro,
Jason, and two gal pals sail through the Raja Ampat islands in West
Papua on his 48-foot cat Tank Girl. It’ll make you wanna dance!
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Slater makes “way more” than $20 mill a
year!
By Rory Parker
WSL CEO Paul Speaker tells the Fox Biz Network
Kelly Slater ain't short of a shekel…
When my wife and I first moved to Hawaii roughly eight
years ago, we were so horrendously broke that we couldn’t
afford cable. Going set-less wasn’t meant to be a permanent thing,
I do enjoy television.
Beyond the empty mind escapism it provides it also helps keep me
balls deep in the zeitgeist. And I do run the risk of becoming
dangerously disconnected, living as I do in semi-hermitage on a
remote tropical island with almost no real connections to the rest
of the world. Seriously, the internecine conflicts with Kauai
County have far more influence on my life than whatever rich white
asshole buys his way into the executive branch.
Thanks to advancements in online piracy, and even though we can
now easily afford a big, dumb flat-screen and a premium
subscription, we got used to scraping all the shows we want to
watch off the web.
One thing I can’t get much of off the various private torrent
trackers of which I am a member is the top notch spectacle that is
Fox News.
It’s problematic. How am I to know how threatened I currently am
by racial minority uppity-ness? What rhetoric should I employ to
sabotage my own self interests? In what manner is my straight while
maleness under attack?
Lucky for me they post drips and drabs of content online, most
recently a hard-hitting interview with none other than the WSL’s
Paul Speaker.
Some highlights below:
Slater makes $20 million+ per year. This is a great
exchange between host Stuart Varney and Paul Speaker.
Varney: “I’m going to ask you a question that you may or may
not want to answer… can that superstar, whose name I’ve just
forgotten…
Speaker: Kelly Slater
Varney: Can he earn, say, 20 million dollars a
year?
Speaker: Has and will probably for a very, very long
time…
Varney: Really? Twenty million?
Speaker: Way more than that.
What else?
The most popular surfing spot in the world? Hawaii!
Surfing may or may not be bigger one day than the NFL.
The WSL has advertisers? I guess so, Fox News says so.
Twenty-two million people tuned into a WSL webcast in Brazil
alone.
Viewers are tuning in in order to watch people wipe out.
Five-thousand people flocked to Huntington
Beach, home to underaged drinking and What Youth‘s Travis
Ferre, in order to witness history. Brett Simpson and sixty-five of
his closest friends jammed themselves on a 42 ft 1,300 lb Nev
surfboard and rode straight into infamy. The most people ever to
surf a wave!
The total shattered the previous record set in Queensland,
Australia where a mere forty-seven people surfed a wave for ten
seconds. How did Nev feel about being a turncoat? “It’s all
about fun. Surfing is fun, here we are just emulating surfing on a
grand scale,” he told the Orange County Register. “This is the
heart of surfing, globally. Everyone known in professional surfing
has made their mark in Huntington Beach.” Sorry Queensland!
As the board was pulled out to sea by a PWC people were scared
and nervous but once whipped in everyone was thrilled! The
surfers bent their knees and nobody fell off as they shredded
for twelve seconds. Sorry Queensland!
At the end, Huntington Beach’s mayor said, in regards to the
board which will be housed permanently in the Surfing Museum, “This
is the new statue of stoke in surfing.” and maybe continued, “Come
to Huntington for the statue of stoke but stay for the underaged
drinking and Travis Ferre.”
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Candid: I was nearly eaten by Orcas!
By Beau Andrews
They kill dolphins and seals for kicks, don't
they?
I was nearly eaten by orcas a week ago. At
least that’s how the public perceived the situation.
Defying my deeply held scorn for dawnies, I found myself sitting
in the low light of dawn, immersed in frigid water, surfing a
backwashy right at a central city surf spot. It was already crowded
and I was cold, blowing waves and wondering why I even
bothered.
The beachfront was full of busy-body dog walkers and lycra-clad
middle-aged women pacing the sand, trying hard to achieve whatever
it is that is relevant to their dull, chardonnay (possibly pinot
noir, probably sauvignon blanc) sipping lives. I still sat cold and
disgruntled.
Then the beach erupted with screams of “Get out of the
water!” as six orcas came charging in to within 20 metres of
us.
I looked at the beach, “What’s the racket for I asked
myself?”
A guy turned to me and said “Did you see that?”
I didn’t, they were gone fairly quickly and I was too absorbed
in loathing the cold and back-wash. A photographer I knew looked
like he had seen a ghost as he sat there bobbing about amongst
us.
“Oh well,” I thought and surfed on. I’d shared the line-up with
orcas before.
Drawing upon my lack of self-respect and the respect of the
judgement of others, I’d had a similar situation as a grom when
blue sharks invested my local for a summer. My 14-year-old self and
11-year-old mate sat there stoked on the glassy two-footers as
two-metre blueys swam by.
The middle-aged people stood on the breakwater yelling at us to
get out. We smiled and waved politely. They continued to yell until
my friend lost his temper and yelled “Fuck-off, we know there’s
sharks!” He went on to do a great many punk things.
Stupid?
Possibly, but I had a father who told me that if I wanted to be
a surfer, I had to face the fact that I may be eaten by sharks.
Young and impressionable, I took it a little bit too far.
My masochistic sense of recklessness aside, I was relaxed about
the orcas. After all, they’re meant to be fussy and discerning
eaters. Some pods will only eat salmon, others, herring. Others
will kill a whale just to eat its liver. A sinewy 64 kg Beau
Andrews is probably not a good meal to an orca.
But what’s stopping them? They kill seals and dolphins for
kicks. Why not awkward rubber clad gimps with dick-headed opinions?
A pod of orcas could single-handedly make surfing unpopular again,
wreaking more havoc than any shark could. But they don’t.
Some would say that they’re too intelligent to do that. I say
bollocks. We kill for fun, even if we know it ain’t for food or any
real reason other than we can.
Then again, they may have a point. I’ve developed a theory that
orcas don’t attack surfers because we carry with us the great
stench of petro-chemicals. We’re literally clad in the stuff while
sitting on the stuff… repulsive.
It’s just a theory though, and a ridiculous one. However, if
true, the joke’s on them. They turn their noses up at us while they
gorge themselves on fish, accumulating dangerous levels of mercury
and DDT from our polluted seas.
So much for discerning.
Join me next week when I theorise how babies are made and
why.
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Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by
@theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros