Gimme: Shark attack inspired shoes!

9 years ago

The Bloodbath is here and it has never been so amazing!

Sneaker culture is something I stand very very far away from yet admire. The passion, lust, dogged pursuit. The always limited edition that turns a usually nerdy kid from Tokyo or Omaha into a vicious hunter, a Sherlock Holmes.

I don’t know what makes a great sneaker great. I don’t know what turns the crank of the sneaker head but I know what they feel. I once had a pair of Nike Air Pressures. They made me feel like Marty McFly in Back to the Future II and I loved everything about them and I would do almost anything to find a pair today.

While you’re looking for my Nike Air Pressures, though, (I’m a size 10!) check this out. Sneaker Freaker, a destination website out of Australia, has maybe done the greatest collaboration of all time. They paired with Germany-based Puma to bring not one, not two, but three sharky shoes!

The first, released in 2008, was called “The Great White” (natch) and dropped to universal acclaim. A version of Puma’s Blaze of Glory runner, they looked like a great white shark swimming on the feets. 30 pairs were even made with shark skin and sold out in seconds.

The second, called “Sharkbait,” is a turquoise terror with “hints of treasure-chest gold, mako grey midsoles and infinite black accents, it’s the perfect endgame for this predatory project.”

And the last just launched. It is called “Bloodbath” and is all red, like blood, and wow. To quote the website, “The shoe, drawing inspiration from the New Jersey shark attacks of 1916 (also the inspiration for the film Jaws), boasts a creamy crimson red leather-and-mesh upper with black accents, white and mint outsole, a gum bottom and metallic gold Puma branding.”

It is as delicious as it is insensitive. Just think of all the recent shark attack victims, more every day, seeing a shoe that glorifies blood in the water! They’d be so mad! But Sneaker Freaker proves, once again, that great design trumps all.

Go to Footwear News and read more!

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What separates a rad magazine from the flock? How about a slice of inspiration mixed with a rare hit of daring? An American surf mag with a kid (in this case little Christian Fletcher) inhaling a beer on the cover? Oh What Youth!

Rebuke: Surf magazines are pointless!

By Rory Parker

9 years ago

Murdered trees, stale news, obscene print bills, waste, waste, waste…

Why I Still Cling to Surf Mags… Jesus christ. This is what happens when you let a commenter start writing shit. We’re a website, not a magazine. Digital, not analog. The future, not the past. Toe the party line, motherfucker.

I get where ol’ Negs is coming from, though. I, too, was a young boy enamored with the printed word, rushing down at the beginning of each month to the weird magazine store that kept a full selection of glossies in every genre as an excuse for the existence of the large curtained area that took up the majority of the floor space. So many pornos.

I popped into a similar shop in downtown Honolulu a while back, near the Fort Street bus stop, where all the hobos and dispossessed mentally ill hang out.

It’s 2015, modern notions of decency meant the proprietor barely provided a pretense for his smut peddling. A handful of National Geographics, a few assorted celeb rags, arranged haphazardly in the front. A steady stream of perverts making their way to the back.

Who jacks off to a printed page these days?

I remember once, way back when I still lived in LA and the internet was barely a thing, my wife, then girlfriend, accompanied me to the newsstand. Which I guess is what they’re called, though it was a proper store.

“Wow,” she said, “This place is popular.”

Six or eight single men were browsing the shelves.

“Do that many people really buy magazines?”

“Kinda.”

I paid for my haul, a lovely selection of skate ‘zines, weird art mags, awesome independently owned adventure journals.

“Watch this.”

We left through the front door and watched the mad rush to the porn section the moment the only woman present was gone.

The point is, magazines were pointless, even when they had a point. Stale news, obscene print bills, waste waste waste. Murdered trees smeared with ink, delivered to your door once a month. Rarely anything good in them. And even then, never worth saving. My colossal pile of cherished issues hit the dumpster years ago. Nothing of value was lost.

I don’t even think I have more than a handful of books in my house. Digital is divine. You can read them in the dark, fit thousands on little magic device, and, if you know what you’re doing, they’re all free!

No one gets to control the narrative anymore. Everyone gets a voice.

Admittedly, most of those voices spew from the mouths of morons who have nothing of value to say, but that’s hardly a new development. People haven’t gotten stupider since the 90’s. Poorer, definitely, but not dumber.

Yeah, I miss a few, and yeah, I definitely miss the money (not that it was much, but it was more), and I’m a little sad I never got to play the big man magazine mover and shaker I always dreamed of being.

But, shit, I put my effort into building a better buggy whip. The times are changing, better get with ’em or get left behind.

So I moved on. All my subs are lapsed. In the end they’ll all be dead. With the exception of a few niche titles.

The Surfer’s Journal will probably hang around for a long time, as well as… well, that’s all I got.

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Just in: Shark Attack on NSW North Coast!

By Derek Rielly

9 years ago

It's the winter of the shark! Another attack, this time at Black Beach Head, near Forster…

Just off the wire: a man in his sixties, David Quinleven, was belted by a shark an hour ago at Black Head Beach, Hallidays Point, near Forster on the NSW mid-North Coast. The man was knocked off his surf-ski close to shore and his leg “bitten to the bone”.

A helicopter flew him to John Hunter hospital in the nearby city of Newcastle (Hello Craig Ando! Hello Ryan Callinan!).

Two surfers have died and two’ve been severely injured in the region in the last year.

It struck me as ironic that the attack came on the same day the writer Fred Pawle had a piece in Australia’s only national newspaper calling for some kind of management of shark numbers. And by sharks, ol Mr White-y, mostly.

(Read it here.)

Considering the timing, and because nothing is quite as satisfying as an immediate I-told-you-so, I asked Fred to write a piece on why the protection of sharks is no more than a piece of moral grandstanding.

This is what he came back with:

The arguments in defence of sharks were always cliches: It’s their home. They’re majestic creatures. They’re apex preadators. And, paradoxically, more sharks are killed by people than vice versa.

It was only a matter of time – sadly hastened by futile, tragic attacks on people – before those arguments lost their persuasiveness.

Now even career researchers can’t back them up. I’ve tried to interview two of Australia’s leading researchers several times during the past two months, to no avail. They’ve both appeared on the ABC, of course, because that taxpayer-funded sheltered workshop is a swamp of green algae that welcomes like-minded envirologues with the warm embrace of quicksand. But front up to some awkward questions regarding the human toll of their “research”? Sorry, not available.

Thankfully, if my reading of things is correct, normal people are less gullible.

The first time I wrote about sharks was for The Australian, in 2000, after two fatalities in South Australia (Cactus and Elliston) in consecutive days. I humbly argued then that our respect for great whites was as much cultural as it was scientific, and, tongue-in-cheek, pointed out that surfers understandably loathed the stoopid things. The letters to the editor from outraged green critics lasted for three days. Bless

I hope the parasites who study these things, pat them on the head, and set them free to continue their carnage on surfers are experiencing the opposite response.

I’ve revisited the issue with a lot more knowledge and fervour, not to mention urgency, this time, and am happy to report that the resistance from readers has been almost non-existent. The mood is changing because there is no freaking point in letting prehistoric monsters roam freely where we play.

I hope the parasites who study these things, pat them on the head, and set them free to continue their carnage on surfers are experiencing the opposite response.

There isn’t a single human activity that doesn’t somehow affect our environment. For some reason, it’s recently become common for paranoid, depressive people to think this is a bad thing, and condemns us to imminent planetary doom. Such people should develop a meth habit or join a transsexual burlesque troupe. Maybe then they’d realise how boring they’ve become.

Meanwhile, we should all be campaigning for great whites to be put back on the menu. I’ve heard the young ones are damn tasty.

(Fred Pawle is The Australian’s surfing writer.)

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Remember?

Opinion: Why I Still Cling to Surf Mags!

By Negatron

9 years ago

Even as the titles are murdered one by one, I nurse their bleeding corpses…

Print is dead is the clarion call from…everywhere.

(BeachGrit says so, too… click!)

If you’re reading this now you are more than likely part of the problem. Hand in the air, I’m guilty, too.

Transworld Surf, gone. Waves, gone. Who’s next?

When I was a grommet, my pay was on a Thursday and in cash. I would bolt straight to the mall to buy some music but, more importantly, to check the shelves of the local newsagents hoping to see the latest issue of one of the half-dozen surf-mags I would regularly buy. Inhaling every word and flicking though the photos of my heroes and the waves they surfed over and over until another new magazine replaced the last.

But then I grew up and the magazines didn’t.

Twenty years on and now living in a small coastal town, I’m completely out of the loop of the printed world. The town has one bitter newsagent that hates surfers and only stocks couple of random titles (Well, hates us local surfers… We voted against a WQS coming to our fair shores thus denying him and the rest of the town-folk millions in surf-tourist dollars they thought would follow the event).

So I have decided to buck the current click-bait trend and subscribe to not one but two surf magazines. Two!

What kinda mindset drives a man to pay something that comes for free?

It goes like this: when websites disappear so does the content held within. In 20, I’m not going to pull out my old laptop from 2015 from the boxes in the rafters of my garage and browse though the hallowed historic online pages of BeachGrit like I do with my collection of old surf mags.

But if you’re going to pay for a magazine, which one(s) should you buy?

If I was a real journalist and not a lazy plumber, I’d spend spend days researching the current surf magazines titles available, the pro’s and cons of each respective mag’s editorial staff, cover-costs, the merits of monthly vs bi-monthly, the quality of each mag’s staff photographers.

Screw… that! How long is that going to take, a week?

So I’m passing it onto you our dear reader to help a brother out…

Whats out there? What would you choose?

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Mavs? Teahupo'o? Pipeline? Nope! South Florida, if you can believe.

Exciting: A surf contest you can win!

By Chas Smith

9 years ago

Can you ride waves up to 6 ft big? Get ready for fame!

You are never going to be a World Surf League champion. You are never going to win a WQS event or even a Junior. You were not built with stellar DNA and that is ok. Neither was I. But guess what? We could BOTH of us possibly win the Salt Life Food Shack Florida Big Wave Challenge!

Surfing Magazine’s famed Jimmicane filled me in on this little gem being run out of Florida where the biggest wave ridden during a three month period, in state, gets you 5k and laid and that’s right. You and I standing shoulder to shoulder with Makua Rothman and Greg Long as balls-to-the-walls hellmen. You and I winking at Keala Kennelly and her death defying Teahupo’o drops.

“That Chopes was heavy, eh KK?” We could say.

“Yes.” She might respond.

“Well, I know how it feels, babe. I stroked in to a six foot bomb off New Smyrna a couple days ago. Sand bottom. Gnarly. My bro almost couldn’t duck dive it but it’s cool, he made it out the back. The thing was almost over my head…”

And how impressed would she be?

Very impressed.

The rules are simple. Ride and photo/video your Florida bomb between July 15 and Nov 1. Get laid.

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Eat beach grit spam!