Is this the first shot in a coming race war? Will the
tables turn, black artists now stealing from white?
Blood Feud: Beyonce vs Blake Kueny!
By Rory Parker
Was Beyoncé, uh, inspired by Blake Kueny's View
From a Blue Moon?
Hard to believe it’s been eight months since
the trailer for View from a Blue Moon dropped.
Superb piece of film, gorgeous surf porn. Maybe the best ever.
Even if VFABM wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, you
can’t argue that it wasn’t gorgeous. Perfectly shot, superbly
edited. A work of art. The type of thing people copy.
People like… Beyonce Knowles. Or, more likely, whoever it is
that HBO hired to cut together a promo for her new
project, Lemonade.
This is hardly the first time the Knowles machine has been
accused of intellectual theft. A quick google turns up some pretty
damning evidence.
And who could forget that monument to cultural appropriation,
Drunk in Love?
Is this the first shot in a coming race war? Will the tables
turn, black artists now stealing from white?
Is it coincidence, homage, or outright theft?
Does a surf filmer have the financial wherewithal to sue a music
industry powerhouse?
Is this the beginning of a cultural shift that will see millions
of black Americans flood coastal ‘burgs in pursuit of a righteous
slide?
Only time will tell.
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Is the Weisner penis clamp and PicoBong vibrating ass
plug Filipe's secret weapon? Might that account for his terrific
success there? | Photo: WSL/Cestari
Parker: Your Oi Rio Pro Survival Kit!
By Rory Parker
Includes Weisner penis clamp and a PicoBong
vibrating butt plug!
We’re slightly less than a month out from Rio!
Can you smell the excitement? Is that what excitement smells like?
Sewage and poverty and rampant corruption? If only you could bottle
it…
I love Brazilians. They get a bad rap. They might be loud,
obnoxious, have terrible etiquette in the lineup, but no more so
than your typical Californian. Maybe less. I’ve never heard one
moaning about “racism” in Hawaii, bumps them up a few notches in my
book.
The Oi Rio Pro will probably suck, which is too bad. Brazil
deserves a world-class event. They love their sports, love to surf,
are churning out contest talent at a breakneck pace.
An emerging market, kinda. Not sure how much money can be sucked
out of a country that seems to suffer an economic collapse every
ten minutes. But I guess it depends how you look at things. Trickle
down nonsense helping everyone? Probably not. Economic disparity
enriching a few at the cost of the majority? Okay, yeah, I can see
that.
We know the water’s poison, we also know the WSL plays ball. ‘QS
events failing to pay off competitors in a timely manner is
shocking. Rule book requires the WSL receive the bread in advance.
Nothing wrong with sweetheart deals in support of a struggling
venue. Wave the sanctioning costs, subsidize entrance fees, that’d
be great. Not cool to place the burden on athletes’ backs.
Especially when the amount involved is a pittance.
But Brazil is Brazil. Bunch of rich assholes chase money while
fucking everyone else. Sounds familiar.
Will the rumored competitor boycott happen? I doubt it.
Will someone get sick? Probably.
Will they be able to prove it was related to water quality?
I’d ask my lawyer, but I already know the answer. Fifteen
minutes of hemming and hawing wrapped up with an, “It’s up to the
courts to decide.”
With the difficulty inherent in pursuing a legal judgment
against a US corporation operating on foreign soil, it’s up to the
competitors to protect themselves. They could band together, stage
a revolt, refuse to surf. But that’s unlikely to happen. Getting a
bunch of independent contractor competitors to cooperate with each
other is difficult. Especially since surfing was effectively union
busted a couple years back.
Instead, better to look to personal protection. Since you can’t
surf in a bio-hazard suit something needs to be assembled
piecemeal.
Which is why I am introducing the BeachGrit approved Oi
Rio Pro competitor kit. We’re not being paid to endorse any of the
following product. Really. You can trust BeachGrit. We’d
never stoop so low as to shill for a product we didn’t believe
in.
Like, say, a leash with magnets in the cuff produced by a
company with whom we’ve partnered to produce cinch-top “waterman”
backpacks.
If you’re gonna stay healthy, you better seal up those head
holes!
But don’t forget, your only openings aren’t the ones up top! If
you want to protect yourself from all the creepy crawlies looking
to worm their way into your insides you’ve gotta seal yourself up
tighter than the North Korean border.
PicoBong Vibrating
Buttplug. Probably want to leave the batteries
out during your heat, but you can do what you want. I’m not the
boss of you.
Though I will recommend that the ladies each pick up a pair.
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Bill Finnegan at G-Land in the seventies. The waves
"looked incredible – long, long, long, fast, empty lefts, six
feet on the smaller days, eight-feet plus when the swell
pulsed… " | Photo: William Finnegan/Barbarian Days: a Surfing
Life.
Just in: Surf Writer Wins Pulitzer
Prize!
By Derek Rielly
William Finnegan wins most prestigious prize in
journalism for his book Barbarian Days…
One year ago, the New Yorker staffer
William Finnegan loosed his two-decades-in-the-making surf memoir
Barbarian Days.
At the time, I expected a genteel read, a not particularly
rigorous examination of a part-time surfer, a big-city fucker who
dared to assume that he could reveal the mysteries of the game.
Instead, I was thrown under the bus of a two-day obsessive read.
As I wrote at the time, I’d only penetrated three chapters into the
book when we suddenly camping on Maui waiting for Honolua Bay to
break and, shortly after, camping on the empty beach at Tavarua for
a week and surfing a new discovery called Restaurants.
Soon, Grajagan in 1979, Africa and, later, among the big-wave
surfers of Ocean Beach, San Francisco, and, then, spending long
vacations on Madeira, waiting for Jardim Do Mar’s heavy deep-water
right to break.
Photos scattered through the pages showed the author to have
visible obliques, was long-haired and tanned. Finnegan was, is, a…
stud?
I wasn’t the only one in thrall to Finnegan.
The Wall Street Journal called it “gorgeously
written and intensely felt… dare I say that we all need Mr
Finnegan… as a role model for a life, thrillingly, lived.”
The LA Times said, “It’s also about a writer’s life
and, even more generally, a quester’s life, more carefully observed
and precisely rendered than any I’ve read in a long time.”
And, announced only thirty minutes ago at Columbia University,
Barbarian Days has won the Pulitzer Prize for
biography. The prize committee praised it as, “A finely
crafted memoir of a youthful obsession that has propelled the
author through a distinguished writing career.”
The Pulitzer Prize, of course, is America’s most prestigious
award in journalism. It also includes ten thousand dollars in prize
money to each category winner.
Last year, when I asked Finnegan if he thought surfing was
elevating or just another pointless pursuit he wrote, “It’s
supremely useless, I think, and not at all ennobling. Which is not
to say that a great many people, starting with you and me, don’t
get a great deal out of it – even a reason to live. It just
does nothing, obviously, for anybody else. It’s the ultimate
selfish pursuit. You could argue that it teaches its devotees a few
things about self-reliance and the grandeur of Nature – maybe even
a little humility – and I guess I wouldn’t argue with that.
But in the end surfing, in my opinion, does little or nothing to
build or improve character. As we all know, a lot of assholes surf,
and some of them surf well.”
On the plus side, “a lot of my best friends surf, and it can be
a great deep thing to share with people you really like,” he wrote.
“Non-surfers are certainly never going to understand it.”
Read about Barbarian Days, here.
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Adventure: Back to the Middle East!
By Chas Smith
"Anyhow, life would be pretty dreary if we always
acted reasonably; it does one good to be a little mad at
times."
Thirteen years ago I set off for a three month
run through Yemen with three other stout souls. Nobody had ever
surfed the mainland, as far as any of us knew, and adventure
beckoned. The way the coast bent it had to have waves but more
importantly was exotic, dangerous, untamed.
I reached out to Sam George at Surfer magazine and
told them our idea. First ever in Yemen. They were in and for a few
thousand dollars up front. I reached out to totally disgraced surf
brand Ocean Pacific and told them we were doing a story about being
the first ever in Yemen for Surfer magazine. They were in
for a few thousand dollars. The other friend started emailing
randoms in Yemen and accidentally connected with the ex-Prime
Minister’s son. He told us we would have anything we needed for
this exploration from Land Cruisers to bodyguards to visas.
And we did it. We spent three months traveling from Sana’a to
Aden where we got chased by terrorists through the streets then up
into the hills near ‘Ataq where Al-Qaeda might have come to try and
get us only to be beaten back by a company of battle-hardened
Yemeni troops then Mukallah where we surfed an amazing right hander
and weren’t allowed to stay in the old city because it was deemed
unsafe. Too many beards. Too much religious fervor. Then Sayhut,
Qishn, Nishtun where a firefight happened between townspeople and
pirates, Al Ghayda where the rusty hull of a beached ship leaked
oil into the waves, Hawf, where the Arabian peninsula becomes a
rain forest before heading out to the island of Soqotra, a place
where the trees bleed and the wind sings.
Thirteen years ago is a long time. My path meandered from Middle
Eastern adventure into surf and I thought I would maybe never
return to Arabic lands. It has gotten weirder over there. Ugly. And
so I buried those travels to Yemen and Lebanon and Syria, Oman,
Egypt, UAE, etc. into the footnotes of my life.
Except for some reason I need it again. For some reason that I
feel deeply yet can’t quite explain I need to taste that very
particular sun, to breathe that specific air and exactly
as fate would have it, the same crew from thirteen years ago
have somehow gotten their hands on a sailboat in civil war torn
Aden. We will sail it through the Bab al Mandab, past Yemen,
Eritrea, Sudan and up to Egypt. Past pirates, wars and
sensibility.
What’s the point? Again, I don’t know but it is something.
Something for my beloved wife and gorgeous daughter but I can’t put
my finger on exactly what. Or not yet. The great French adventurer
Henri de Monfreid wrote, “Anyhow, life would be pretty dreary if we
always acted reasonably; it does one good to be a little mad at
times.”
See you all in two weeks.
P.S. If anything should happen please book WSL CEO Paul Speaker
for the eulogy.
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Movie: Ozzie Wright, Otis Carey in
Israel!
By Derek Rielly
Let yourself be swallowed by a magical middle
eastern adventure!
Earlier this year, the Australian surfers Ozzie Wright
and Otis Carey were invited to compete in the Seat Netanya
Pro, Israel’s first WSL event. This excited the two surfers very
much as neither had been to this magical middle eastern democracy
before. The trip presented one small-ish problem, however.
Neither surfer did contests.
Nothing personal, of course. Both surfers appreciate the skills
and focus needed to excel at the highest levels of surfing
competition, but, well, why put yourself under that kind of
pressure when you can paint, sing and surf (Oz) or paint, model and
surf (Otis)?
In any event, the pair dutifully joined the WSL, mowing through
all the banalities of contest administration forms and erasing
nearly one thousand dollars each on their credit cards in the
process.
The level of surfing in the contest was higher than any of us
thought (I’d even considered a cameo until I saw Pedro Henrique tag
a two-footer a dozen times to the beach), surfers arriving from
Portugal, Tahiti and beyond. Still, Ozzie looked like the happiest
man on earth as he soared through two heats while Otis, whose
talent and youth is stark, made a succession of heats and was only
stopped in the quarter finals.
But the trip to Israel was never going to just be about a
contest.
Ozzie is treated as a god in this part of the world and wherever
he went, crowds of curious onlookers gathered around him.
“He’s more influential than Kelly Slater,” three different
surfers, at three different beaches, told me.
The shaper and pro surfer Didu Biton, who owns the company Seadny
surfboards, and who operates from a shaping bay
behind a beachfront mosque, built Oz a surfboard (Buddha model)
that proved a phenomenon in the wind swells.
The noted Israeli filmmaker responsible for the movie, here,
Yakir Avrahami, explained that Ozzie was the
first surfer to demonstrate how surfing could be more than
contests, that it could lead to a fulfilling life, creatively.
It’s why Yakir, fresh from three years in the army, took to
directing.
It’s why his graphic designer pal who cornered Ozzie at one of
the dazzling bars in Tel Aviv brought a laptop – to show Oz the
deep influence he’d had on his work.
At a party presented by the mayor of Netanya, the beach town
north of Tel Aviv where the contest was being held, a surfer of no
more than eighteen years stopped Oz and told him that
156 Tricks was the best movie
of all time and his girlfriend called Oz the “best
aerialist in the world.”
This movie, Love and Peace from the Middle East, will
require a small leap of faith and I do beg your patience. It isn’t
Under a Blue Moon, it isn’t Cluster. The waves
are small and onshore. The action, therefore, limited.
It was made by a commercial director determined to give surfers,
worldwide, an angle on his country that isn’t coloured by the
sensationalist reporting of, say, CNN or The
Guardian.
It is nine-and-a-half minutes long, longer than most surf shorts
you’ll watch, although this does include Oz’s own two-minute
credits, cut to the song he wrote in Israel, King of the Jews.
