There is nothing I love more than rumor. They
so titillate. They so cause emotional furnaces to burn in chests.
And my love has made me a connoisseur. I know the ones that smell
right and the ones that smell wrong and unfortunately our distant
lands bureau has just learned that John John Florence may, in
fact, have sustained an ankle injury and it does not smell
wrong.
What will this do to our shining Hawaiian knight? Will it be
severe, forcing him to miss the rest of the season, blown over by a
great Brazilian storm? Will it be nagging, forcing him to
overcompensate and causing greater injury? Will it make him strong
and resourceful like Michael Jordan with the flu?
Nobody knows. It is a rumor. But you can be sure that BeachGrit
will fill in details as soon as we know. Just like we always do.
Goodnight and good luck.
That gorgeous French Bulldog is back and wilder
than ever! She is busy, don’t be mistaken. Today I saw her on
Instagram zooming a pink Mercedes load of Stance socks off to
higher-end department stores. But she is not to busy for you. She
knows you live in Tel Aviv and need to know what kind of dog
is best for bomb scares. She knows Orcas have a hard time in
activity. She knows Iggy Iz.
You should, if you have not, dip right in because she is the
smartest French Bulldog in the world and daughter of Courtney J.
and Dane R.
Today the great Marine Layer
Productions, supposedly shuttered since last
winter, rose from the dead with a super fun, wonky, wild
11-minute mini-film titled “Sampler.”
While it isn’t the “best” surfing we’ve seen from the World’s
Best Surfer Circa 2012, it is great fun! And shouldn’t it be?
According to Dane, he emailed it to a friend. That friend said
it was “pretty cool.” Which bummed poor Dane out. Can’t the
poor new Papa get a break! I mean, did you fucking see Cluster?
What do you want from him.
“man… expectations, what a stoke killer.” Dane posted on Marine
Layer. “Every time you do something, the expectation is that
whatever you do next has to be better. do you understand how
unsustainable that is? the pressure caused by this principle has
stressed me out, burned me out, i eventually cracked, hid out,
dropped out, turned away… but then it get’s to a point where you’re
just like ‘fuck it.’ that’s when i’ve done my best surfing. when
there is a complete absence of consideration for what people
expect.”
Do you hear his conviction? Do you feel it in your cold, cold
blood, you fuckers? Behold the Second Coming! A Dane with shoulders
light as air.
“so here’s SAMPLER, which is a collection of surfing i’ve done
the past year that didn’t make it into ‘cluster.’ Dane continues.
“So yeah, it is ‘b sidey’ but that is not a disclaimer, i’m proud
of it… fuck it, forget what your sponsors expect, what viewers
expect, expect nothing…”
The film opens with home footage of a prepubescent Dane pushing
around on a skateboard, throwing himself off a launch ramp, not a
care in the world. Might that be what you’ve been trying to find,
Dane? That feeling you felt all those years ago, just a toothy kid
pushing a chipped skateboard hard and fast, your head full of
dreams and possibility
Dane’s post ends: “or as ethan fowler says it ‘do what you want,
do it well, or, if you don’t want to do it well, don’t do it well,
just do it how you do it, and that shit shines through a thousand
times brighter’”
If this is the attitude we can expect to see at Fiji, what a
spectacle it could be!
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What's Need Essentials? It's a lil company fuelled by a
desire to make premium suits but make 'em real cheap. And here we
see its principal Ryan Scanlon, the former senior VP of Global
Products for Quiksilver, modelling his 200 buck 4/3 chest-zip
steamer.
Australian surfer cuts out middle-man and gets you
straight into premium rubber for peanuts…
Yamba-based surfer Ryan Scanlon, the former Senior Vice
President of Global Products for Quiksilver, doesn’t wanna
take over the world. He isn’t building his biz Need
Essentials up with an eye to slamming it on the counter for a
few mill down the line. He isn’t aggressively chasing market share
or running hither and yon trying to find investors. Says he’ll even
point his profits in a philanthropic direction if, when, the biz
lights up.
Ryan’s play is simple. He makes premium wetsuits at around half
the price or less of the major brands, with one important caveat,
but more on that later. It’s a shuffle of the usual way we buy
stuff.
“We are not a brand! So we don’t act like a normal brand,” he
says. “We don’t advertise, we don’t brand our products, we don’t do
swing-tags and packaging, we don’t wholesale and we don’t pay
people to endorse our products. What we do focus on is premium
product at a price point and we rely on customer satisfaction and
word of mouth to promote our products. By doing this we believe we
are helping the surfer that has a day job and a stack of bills to
worry about and doesn’t need to fork out $500 for a premium suit to
stay warm.”
Ryan started designing for Quiksilver back in the
mid-nineties after punching out his design degree. He’s 38 now, but
“was always juggling work and travel. I would take 18 months off
every few years and just go surfing all over the world until I had
to go back to work. My passion, like most surfers, is finding waves
and traveling and in my own life that tends to come before material
possessions. I try to live a pretty simple life (he lives on a
yacht) and Need is a reflection of that. I wanted to create
something that I wish existed but didn’t. A supply chain where
you didn’t have to pay for all the excess. You just pay for what
you… yeah… Need.”
Hence the name.
“We make only what we believe you need to be warm, flexible and
light. We don’t have all the extra components like, printing,
textures, useless components, unproven technologies and fashion or
fads. So what we are able to offer is a high-end suit below the
cost of thelow-end branded wetsuits.”
This means you’ll buy a 4/3 chest-zip steamer for $A200. What’s
that in US dollars? One fifty or thereabouts. Cheap. And your suit
comes from the same factory in Taiwan (Sheico Group. Read their amazing story here)
where Rip Curl, Quiksilver, Billabong and pretty everyone else gets
’em done. (You thought Japan? So wrong!)
There’s a slight sting in the story, and this is the caveat. No
warranty.
“We don’t offer a warranty because we are so aggressively
priced,” says Ryan. “A two-mm back-zip premium jacket is $60.
That’s less than a branded hooded fleece top which doesn’t carry a
warranty. So Need approaches premium wetsuits the same way you
would approach clothing.”
And the game plan for Need Essentials, who’d sold their entire
inventory of stock last time I looked? Wetsuits only or is there
more on the griddle?
“At this point the primary focus is catching up to demand on the
wetsuits and keeping people warm and happy. There is a lot more
stock on the way and an extended summer line that also features one
technical board short. Need will always keep away from fashion and
fads and only plans to focus on surfers genuine needs… I’m not
trying to make an empire with this project, I don’t need that in my
life, my life is extremely simple. If Need can provide a few jobs
for other surfers in Australia and also provide core surfers with
their basic needs and help save them a buck then I think that’s our
spot.”
The cardinal rule of perpetrating an excellent
hoax? Don't get caught.
It probably found its way onto whatever social media
feed you favor in the past week, “This Pro Surfer’s
Selfless Act Got Him Disqualified,” attached to some maudlin
schmaltz about how a surfer took a crippled guy out during a
heat.
It’s a stupid notion even if you take it at face value. Who
cares if he got disqualified? Even if he wasn’t, it’s not like
you’re gonna win a heat with some dude clinging to your back like a
limp legged limpet. Why not just wait half an hour and take the guy
out then? It seems like a good way to waste your contest entry fee
and maybe drown a guy in full view of a ton of people, but that’s
about it.
Well, GrindTV, Yahoo’s XTREME! Sports media outlet par
excellence, is reporting that it was all just feel good
bullshit. Argentine surfing campeon, Martin Passeri,
staged the affair, shooting the surfing footage outside
competition, then editing in some voice over and footage of the
contest area.
Turns out the guy isn’t an idiot after all. Passeri realized
that, first, surfing with another person on your back is hard as
all hell and, second, he’d probably be DQ’ed.
Now, I love a good hoax. Playing with people’s understanding of
reality, manipulating their emotions and getting them to laugh or
cry of feel an all encompassing rage, that’s awesome. Because, you
know, man, what is real, anyway?
But the cardinal rule of perpetrating an excellent hoax is
“Don’t get caught,” and Passeri blew it big time in that regard.
Now he’s gonna be treated as some nefarious charlatan by the online
community, when he could have made a video that’s pretty much the
exact same thing, just not put in the contest part. Because, again,
that was just stupid, even if, especially if, it’s true.
