Noa Deane slob
Since surfing has bitten skating’s style since the early air days of the 80’s, let’s peer through it’s lens and examine 2015/16’s en vogue move: the tweaked slob straight air. From Dane Reynolds to Noa Deane and every ‘aerialist’ in between, this move has been making the rounds ensuring useable clips. Through the lens of a skater, they are hideous. | Photo: Morgan Maassen

Opinion: “Ditch the Stinkbug Slob Airs!”

Samuel Einstein

By

Through the lens of a skater, they are hideous.

(Editor’s note: This story, by the Lisbon-based writer Sam Einstein, interests me because it demonstrates the perennial war between surfers who can skate, and those who don’t. Sam skates. Sam surfs. And while the tweaked slob straight airs of Noa Deane and Dane Reynolds render me breathless, Sam thinks they’re hideous. He reasons his case below.)

 

Airs. One day they are cool, the next they’re not. One contest everyone’s jealously sandbagging Brazilians for doing too many airs while getting a Pottz-sized hard on for (insert lighter skinned surfer)’s rail game.

The next, everyone praises Slater for aerially emasculating Jack Freestone.

“Too many reverses.”

“Not enough power surfing.”

“We need more progression.”

There was always something rather homoerotic about passionately preferring a big, strong man’s powerful, yet beautiful, aggressive, yet stylish, spray-sending rail game. I don’t know where I was going with that.

But airs and style do mix. Growing up skating vert, doing airs was the whole point. Rotations were easily distinguishable (Slater’s air was a 720 dammit) and there were clear style no-nos in regards to grabs. Things are not so simple in surfing, to the bewilderment of any other board sport patron.

Since surfing has bitten skating’s style since the early air days of the 80’s, let’s peer through its lens and examine 2015/16’s en vogue move: the tweaked slob straight air. From Dane Reynolds to Noa Deane and every ‘aerialist’ in between, this move has been making the rounds ensuring useable clips. Through the lens of a skater, they are hideous.

While I am relishing the fact that no-grab straight airs are kinda cool again (it’s all I got), the fact that between the legs stinkbug grabs are the shit in surfing is beyond me.

Call to action: grab over your front knee!

While I am undoubtedly coming across as a keyboard warrior, I am writing this as a Public Service Announcement. A proper, tuck-knee slob grab (or tuck-knee front side grab for that matter) will not only look infinitely better, but will separate you from the stinkbuggy herd.

Be the stylish slob you were born to be!

Kelly Slater APolitical
And here we see the work of Florida mixed-media artist Bruce Reynolds.

Watch: Vice Does Kelly Slater’s art show

Derek Rielly

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Illuminating four-minute short on Kelly Slater's recent artshow, Apolitical Process.

Yeah, sure, we’ve been milking the hell out of Kelly Slater’s art show in Venice last week. But what do you do? Where I found the event, viewed from far, as smooth and as licked as bathroom porcelain, BeachGrit‘s writer for the night, the noted broadcaster David Lee Scales found it irrational and unpersuasive.

The New York-based, born-in-Canada magazine, Vice, just published a four-minute short on the event, one that, to me, gives the best window into the show. We see the anti-Sea World painted boards of Kevin Ancell (the sharp-eyed reader will note Vice gets Ancell’s name wrong – accuracy, or balance for that matter, aren’t Vice strong points), the surreal and mutated sculptures of Florida’s Bruce Reynolds and Todd Glaser’s monochrome photography.

If you, like most, recoil at the likelihood of a Trump presidency, you’ll love Bruce Reynolds’ eloquent The Great Wall of Trump.

“This is a cautionary tale… I sometimes feel that our leadership is selected, not elected,” says Reynolds.

Watch here.

Turtle Bay Oahu
Gorgeous Turtle Bay on the North Shore.

Two teens dead in Turtle Bay shooting

Rory Parker

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One more incident proving that we shouldn't be allowed guns.

There’s not much real violence in Hawaii. Plenty fights, but usually nothing too serious. Just some guys scrapping over something dumb. Pretty easy to find some fisticuffs outside a bar post-midnight, but that’s the deal pretty much everywhere. Young men get drunk, don’t get laid, get in a fight.

Almost no gun violence. Because there aren’t many guns. Too hard, too expensive, to get your hands on them. And I’m cool with that. I dig guns, in theory. But in reality I think the average person is too stupid to handle the responsibility of owning a hunk of metal that slings chunks of lead at a million miles hour.  I’m definitely too stupid.

A study in 2014 showed that Hawaii has the lowest rate of gun deaths in the United States. Lowest household gun ownership numbers as well. )  Which makes me happy, makes me feel safer.

Yeah, there are always lunatic criminal types, but they mainly go after each other. Like the violence on Kauai. Tons of violent crimes in Kapaa, just down the road from my house. But it’s just chronics bashing each other over chronic drama. Garbage humans hurting other garbage humans over the garbage bullshit they think is important. Pretty much victimless crimes.

So it’s crazy to hear that two people, a seventeen year old girl and nineteen year old boy, were shot in the Turtle Bay parking lot last night. 

It’s apparently some sort of suicide. Or murder suicide, more likely.

Damn tragic, as always. One more incident proving that we shouldn’t be allowed guns. No matter how awesome they are, how fun they are, how well they can supposedly “protect” us.

I wish we lived in a world where we all could own guns. But we don’t.

Revealed: Nate Tyler hates boobs!

Chas Smith

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Finger painted ones!

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.

But Nate Tyler 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.

A dour looking young Kelly accepts defeat.
A dour looking young Kelly accepts defeat.

Victory: Hamilton wings Slater!

Chas Smith

By

There is a new most popular kid in town!

Who is the most popular surfer in the world as measured through the fine, though imperfect, lens of social media?

Wrong!

Kelly is certainly very popular and the most popular man but the most popular person, as revealed by Transworld Business, is Kauai’s Bethany Hamilton!

Let’s look at the stats!

Beth has 4.3 million followers across platforms with an average engagement of around 17,000 fans per post.

Kelly wins Instagram (how could you not follow him? He’s a brilliant artist!) but Beth wastes him across Pintrest, Facebook, Twitter and GoGoInflight with her fans liking, commenting, not swearing… engaging so very often!

And does this surprise you? Surfing is, after all, still fairly to very misogynistic. Maybe it is changing? Maybe it is becoming more open, more even? Let’s hope!

While we’re at it, who do you follow on the socials?

Or do you not give two shits?

Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by @theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros
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