No! Not Gabriel Medina in his bathroom again! Something good!
There is something about cold not good waves that turns me on, visually. Maybe because I grew up in cold not good waves and know the struggle, intimately. Maybe because cold not good is often striking and picturesque. Maybe because… I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a personal kink.
Whatever the case, I very much like this short film starring Zakary Grey by Howard Groves is just the thing. A little funny acting, a little fun voice over, a lot cold not good waves.
The best!
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Watch the king of vaudeville take his Voodoo Child act through Indonesia.
Ride a surfboard model approved by the king of shuck and jive!
Ain’t it weird that, until today, Mason Ho didn’t have a pro model board, a situation that would never happen in the personality-driven sports of skate and snowboarding.
I doubt there’s a surfer under thirty who isn’t transfixed by Mason Ho’s vaudeville shucks and jives, contortions, magic tricks and highly diverse turns. Who wouldn’t want to ride what he’s riding?
Today it was very loudly announced in the surf ghetto of San Clemente that…dada!… you can now buy a Mason Ho model. It’s called Voodoo Child (naturally), has an eighties beak-y nose (of course), a real flat rocker through the nose for that oowee-let’s-get-going speed but curved as all hell through the exhaust and a double concave in the deck to give it the foot-well feeling of a collapsing deck. Think: a hot-rod dressed up in retro chic.
Is the World Surf League suggesting that dreams lead to death?
I watched two minutes and fifteen seconds of Sunset Beach today and happened to catch the newest Samsung x World Surf League spot that featured a snail and a Bangladeshi boy. Have you seen? The boy wants to surf while his friends play cricket and his dad doesn’t believe in his surf dream and the snail wants to achieve greatness and Carissa Moore and Gabriel Medina and greatness.
Very many metaphors are folded into the message which becomes increasingly convoluted but still possibly understandable. Follow your dreams into the unknown maybe. The Bangladeshi surfs and learns to claim. John John Florence. The snail reaches the sea.
There she/he (did you know snails are hermaphrodites?) is at the end on a rock watching a surfer paddle.
Except did you know the main enemy of snails? What leads to certain death?
SALT!
The first splash of saline water to land on that poor snail would shrivel it up and kill.
A very cruel punishment don’t you think.
So what do you think Samsung x WSL is trying to say? Dream and die?
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This is the sixteen-year-old surfer Finn McGill in waves described as "up to twenty feet." | Photo: WSL
Waves soar to unimaginable heights at Sunset Beach!
Wave height is a helluva thing to call. One man’s four foot is another man’s six. Three in England is flat in Hawaii. And ten-foot Cloudbreak on Surfline is a world away from the four-foot the weary traveller finds when his boat drops anchor in the channel.
Remember the Eddie in February? Was it twenty-five or forty feet?
So you don’t want to to be too hard on a press release that calls six-to-eight Sunset Beach “20 feet” but ain’t it a little gassy to write:
The best heat of the Vans World Cup thus far took place today in Round Two and saw the finest 20-and-under surfers tame wave face heights of up to 20 feet at Sunset Beach.
Let’s agree that the waves were good, yeah, very good. Tahiti’s O’Neill Massin described it thus: “The conditions are very good. Couple barrels, offshore wind, some good size, perfect!” And tomoz is looking like another day of groomed eight-foot north-west lines. And round three is when the studs line up for a swing: Slater (a Triple Crown lunge), John John, Gabriel Medina.
But…twenty feet?
Watch the little clip below of the twenty-foot heat. How big you going to call?
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The gorgeous, the funny Norwell9 aka David Cwikowski writes: "Just like the country song says, 'My camera broke down, care broke down, computer down...' After trying to nurse this season, tonight the axel on my old car snapped. That and with my camera down and costly repairs I am forced to make the decision to shut down the volunteer work that I have been doing in the Ventura area for the past three-and-half years. I will organize all current footage, make the remainder instas, and then make a final Insta Movie #2. And be gone.'
Ventura’s Norwell9 aka David Cwikowski is on the short list of heads whose stuff I’ll check based solely on his name. I don’t need to be told it’s good, just assume it will be and go from there.
I don’t really do instagram though, so I appreciate when he drops the long form vids comprised of all his short form stuff. They almost remind me of Voluptuous. Huge cast, decent music. Perfect to run in the background while your mind is on other stuff. Like drinking or reading or drinking and crying while reading.
At forty five minutes it’s fairly long. Maybe too long for a single serving. Cue it up and watch in drips and drabs. Or, as I’ve mentioned, crack a bottle of booze, suck it down ’til you get sad, then give it a gaze to break the sadness up.
Or just watch it sober and reflect on how much time the guy spends standing on the beach watching other people have fun. Filmers are weird. Just a weird as photogs. Semi-creepy voyeurs hiding from the world behind a lens. God bless ’em for the work they do, but it is a tad odd, yeah?
Cue it up and watch in drips and drabs. Or, as I’ve mentioned, crack a bottle of booze, suck it down ’til you get sad, then give it a gaze to break the sadness up.
Unfortunately, it looks like this will be the last we hear from dear Norwell9 for the foreseeable future.
Just like the country song says, “My camera broke down, care broke down, computer down…” After trying to nurse this season, tonight the axel on my old car snapped. That and with my camera down and costly repairs I am forced to make the decision to shut down the volunteer work that I have been doing in the Ventura area for the past 31/2 years. I will organize all current footage, make the remainder instas, and then make a final Insta Movie #2. Then celebrate all that we have accomplished with one final party and be gone.
Ain’t life cruel?
Here’s hoping he gets his shit redialed and comes storming back onto the scene post-haste.
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Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by @theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros
