Nate Tyler is as fantastic as he his
progressive. His surfing grows in beauty, year after year, in lock
step with his good looks. He just released the prettiest film of
the year (so far) and was featured on BeachGrit just last
week.
And while his interview with Mr. Rielly was insightful (here!), there was one gem left out and that is
the reason that he hates curry.
I must say, before we get to Nate, I have never met anyone
who hated curry. It is a staple from India to Thailand to Japan and
very sought after in New York City. I am, in fact, in New York City
right now and had a wonderful curry at a SoHo restaurant named
Uncle Boons. Nate Tyler was not with me. Why? Because he hates
curry. Why?
“The smell of curry reminds me of finger-painted boobs. My dad
is a hippie and when I was young we would regularly travel to
festivals and fairs in Oregon. There was everything that you’d
expect from hippie fairs. Music, arts and crafts, expressions of
free love and finger-painted boobs. Topless women would wander
around with saggy boobs and swirls of paint, rushing and whirling
toward unattractive nipples. And everyone was eating curry. I
loathed the sight of those finger-painted boobs and now I loathe
anything to do with curry.”
Oh. I would hate curry too.
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Smart: This surf leash could save your
life!
By Derek Rielly
Shark hits pal? Now you can staunch the bleeding
with special leg-rope…
A few days ago, a real polite man called Carson
Henderson (a former US marine who served in Afghanistan and Iraq
according to his bio) emailed with details of his company’s
leashes. Special, ’cause they also double as a tourniquet so when
your pal gets hit by a shark you can wrap his stump in your cord
and maybe save his life.
“Since there were two more shark attack yesterday it seems that
a story about my veteran owned business would be good for all
parties,” he wrote, referring to a hit in Florida and a hit in
South Carolina.
‘Cause it was Friday and Friday afternoons are reserved for
Campari and sodas, maybe gin if there’s cucumber in the house, and
not the continuing indignity of work, I didn’t reply.
The next day a bodyboarder was hit five hours drive north of
where I live.
“And now there’s this,” he wrote, including a link about the
attack on 38-year-old bodyboarder Dale Carr at Port Macquarie.
“This is why I am trying to get the word out about my surf leash
and other water sports tourniquets.”
What can I say? Here’s a little Q and A he has on the press
release he sent.
Why would I want a tourniquet in my
leash?
Having a tourniquet integrated in your leash enables you to
quickly mitigate extremity life threatening bleeding on yourself or
others.
Why using the leash cord is bad?
Has no mechanical advantage for tightening.
Cannot be secured in place.
The narrow cord can cause additional tissue and nerve
damage.
How quickly can a person bleed to
death?
A person can bleed to death in as little as 3
minutes.
How long can a tourniquet be worn?
A tourniquet can be worn for roughly 3 hours, with 2 hours
being the optimum time to not exceed.
What is the likelihood of complications from using a
tourniquet?
Tourniquets that have been properly applied and have been
worn within the range of 1-3 hours have a low risk of
complications.
If I use a tourniquet won’t I lose my arm or
leg?
Not necessarily, if you do lose a limb it is likely that you
would have lost the limb due to the trauma that caused the injury,
and not because you applied a tourniquet. What the tourniquet does
is ensure you won’t die from blood loss caused by the
trauma.
I’m not an accessories kinda gal and I’m also pretty sure if a
pal was hit I’d either faint or sprint for shore, so it’s not my
scene, but maybe you like? Fifty bucks does seem a small price to
pay.
Maybe if you live in Byron Bay, Reunion Island, South Africa,
Western Australia etc, you might wanna sling for one.
Was it really only a handful of years ago that we’d wait
a month for the latest surf news? A surf contest would go
down and it wouldn’t be until a journalist had written a story, the
photographer had developed all his shots, the story had been
submitted to a magazine and then edited, the photos had been
scanned into a digital format, the magazine had been designed,
printed and then distributed that we’d actually hear and see what
had happened.
What a mockery of… everything!
Now, the good surf websites will have a photo gallery of the
day’s action along with an analysis within a couple of hours. Shark
attack? Yeah, the inside story is up. Someone loses their sponsor
of 20 years? You’ll read about it in five different ways. There’s
plenty of dross out there, however, so let’s point you in the
direction of the sites that matter.
Most surprisingly edgy site: Matt Warshaw’s
Encylopedia of Surfing isn’t what you’d expect, at least
if you’re unfamiliar with Warshaw’s work. Sure, he’s a historian
now, and that’s the genre of this one-stop shop of everything to do
with surfing history, but the former editor of Surfer
and pro surfer is the sport’s most underrated writer. Combine an
ability to write with his enyclopediac knowledge of surfing
(hence his current gig) and a fearlessness of opinion unheard of in
modern surf writers and you have a site that
entertains…and…informs.
Most complete website: With its formidable
arsenal of surf cams and surf forecasting team, the foundation upon
which the site was built, Surfline is the one-stop shop. The
overwhelming taste of vanilla can be a little disheartening (Hello
dull!) as can its obvious sexual proclivities, but, if it
happened, it’s on surfline.
The overwhelming taste of vanilla can be a little disheartening
(Hello dull!) as can its obvious sexual proclivities, but, if
it happened, it’s on surfline.
Best photography: Despite its lack of any
breaking news, Surfing presents the bests online photo
features in the biz, a result of it having too many staff shooters,
and therefore having to disperse its myriad of brilliant imagery…
somewhere. The flipbook here (click!)
from this year’s Fiji event, is typical. Any other print
magazine in the world would kill for what are supposedly
Surfing’s outs.
Best original clips and most interesting
photos:What Youth is part-owned by the filmmaker
Kai Neville and counts the Indonesia-based photographer Nate
Lawrence. So what do you expect when they follow and film some hot
young thing for a week in their Fairly Normal series or,
as is evidenced in the main photo here, follow Craig Anderson to
Desert Point? You don’t wanna miss.
Best aggregator:Boardistan. From surf
to snow to skate, Boardistan trawls the net and press
releases from all the PR companies, provides a very readable
synopsis of the event, with links to the original source.
Best architecture:Surfermag.com. The
design of the site (and the magazine) is so simply perfect it’ll
move an aesthete to the happiest of tears. It ain’t breaking ground
in any other sense but… to look at… superb.
Most interesting insight into a surfer:
Marinelayerproductions is the website of Dane Reynolds, the 28 year
old from Ventura and, currently, Quiksilver’s most highly paid
surfer. What makes the site is it’s the musings and
photography of Dane and not the work of a media minder. Like
this, as he posted a collection of his outs from the movie
Cluster.
“i emailed a friend of mine a link to ‘SAMPLER’ the other day to
see what he thought and he texted me back that it was ‘pretty
cool.’ i said ‘that doesn’t sound very enthusiastic.’ and he wrote
back that it was ‘a little too b sidey for me.’ then the next day
he sent a long winded explanation saying he just expected more. i
wrote back ‘that text leaves me more confused than before, so your
saying you were just disappointed? i don’t really care i like it…
it’s b sides whatever i’m not gonna force people to watch it or pay
for it so if they’re disappointed then fuck em’
man… expectations, what a stoke killer. 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.
so here’s SAMPLER, which is a collection of surfing i’ve done
the past year that didn’t make it into ‘cluster.’ so yeah, it is ‘b
sidey’ but that is not a disclaimer, i’m proud of it. every moment
can’t be your best, the waves aren’t always perfect, the more you
expect the more your disappointed, do what you can with what you’ve
got, surfing’s an art, there’s no winner and no loser, no right or
wrong way to do it, there’s a big difference between saying ‘fuck
it’ and genuinely feeling it, and as much as i wish it did, writing
it on my boards doesn’t really make me feel it, and i have to say
that for the most part, while filming the past year, i was aware
that i was one of the oldest guys in the movie with a reputation to
defend, and that is not the right frame of mind to surf your best.
or feel your best, or be yourself… but seriously… fuck it, forget
what your sponsors expect, what viewers expect, expect nothing, do
your best, clear your mind, be present, turn off, tune out, drop
in.
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’”
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Laughs: Five Classic Hollywood Surf
Films!
By Rory Parker
Quirky, funny, even…subversive!
There’s not a whole lot going on in the surf world
today, but I’ve gotta do my daily deal, so I’m just gonna
toss a lay-up and write about surf movies. But I’m not going to go
on about Point Break or North Shore or
Zalman King’s tour de force, In God’s Hands. Those have
been covered, we’ve all seen them, and they have their redeeming
features.
Instead, here’s some other stuff.
Back to the Beach
This movie does it right, in the same way North Shore
did. It’s utterly ridiculous, fun to watch, and doesn’t attempt to
moralize. And so does a pretty good job of actually capturing the
essence of surfing. Plus, it features some of the best surf CGI
ever employed in film making, a kick-ass musical number, and Lori
Loughlin, who was an amazing piece of ass back in the eighties.
Surf School
So much effort goes into making a movie, it always blows my mind
when the result is a nonsensical abortion. But this movie has
Harland Williams, whom I think is hilarious, and features my
favorite trope of all time, when the ugly nerd girl turns out to be
hot and also the best surfer in the world. Plus, for some reason,
she dresses like a geisha the entire movie, which really works for
the secret weeaboo living inside me.
Another surf film featuring Clint Eastwood’s less talented son,
Dawn Patrol is a tale of racism and rape and revenge and guilt and
terrible acting and even worse writing. It’s one redeeming feature
is a lack of phony baloney Christian posturing.
Orange County
A pretty damn funny movie, Jack Black’s performance is
especially hilarious. But instead of going into that, I’d like to
talk about how this movie made for my brief brush with
Hollywood.
One day, while I was in college, I heard that they were holding
an open casting call a few blocks away from where I lived. They
wanted surfer types, I am one of those, and I really didn’t have
anything more important to do.
So I got drunk, very drunk, and showed up to toss my hat in the
ring.
Being in a room full of wannabe actors trying to look like
surfers is pretty funny. Un-ironic aloha shirts, strappy sandals,
and those terrible trunks with a mesh liner filled the room. We
were all handed lines and set to waiting in a weird little office
in Marina Del Rey.
I’d brought a couple tall boys with me so I whiled away the time
trying to suck them down before they got warm and fucking with the
guys around me who were trying to “learn their lines.” Serious
stuff for them, make or break dream time. Not so much for me.
My audition approach consisted of drunkenly screaming my lines
at the casting lady, making fun of the actor nerds in the other
room, then vomiting in a trash can on my way out of the building.
Some straight Daniel Day-Lewis type method actor shit. Always in
character. Always!
A few weeks later I actually got a call back. They asked for my
agent’s fax number, I gave them the one at the Italian restaurant
where I was employed as an especially surly waiter and I was on my
way to stardom!
But it wasn’t to be.
Apparently, smoking a huge joint in your car, strolling in
red-eyed and reeking of weed, then spending twenty minutes making
fun of the script, isn’t the best way to land an acting gig. Who
knew?
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History: How Charlie learned to surf
By Chas Smith
The Philippines and a glorious discovery.
Surf travels around the world on the backs of
wonderful ambassadors. A man, or woman, travels to a foreign shore
and walks on water and the local people shriek with delight and
emulate. Duke Kahanamoku, for example, or Bruce Brown. But the
man who brought surf to the Philippines is none other than Francis
Ford Coppola.
That’s right! The acclaimed film director from Detroit, Michigan
brought the Sport of Kings to a small fishing village named Baler
to film his epic Flight of the Valkyries soaked scene. You remember
it, don’t you? Robert Duvall, as Col. Kilgore, screaming at his men
to either fight or surf? Beautiful!
Well, those men who surfed left behind a board and a child named
Edwin Namoro grabbed it and bang! Surfing in the Philippines.
Read Edwin’s story here and watch that gorgeous
Col. below. What a man!