Three reasons why Brazilians own the tour…
(Editor’s note: Travel with a Brazilian troupe and you’ll be privy to the secret of their success. Every wave, every sunset, every afro-beat is celebrated as if they were starving men chewing a crust of bread. For the past week, I’d travelled with Filipe Toledo and his filmers Bruno Baroni and Erick Proost through Mexico and was continually saturated in their awesomeness. In the water, Filipe broke into applause at the tomato sunsets. After dark, MC Delano got ’em all dancing. This morning when I landed back home, I woke to an email from the writer Giancarlo Guardascione who must’ve read my mind. Why does Brazil own surf? Three reasons.)
1. We (you) Will Never Know Paris (Brazil)…
Henry Miller wrote Tropic of Cancer (originally called Crazy Cock! ’cause he, was, like, having sex with everything in The City of Lights). He was living in Paris when his girlfriend came to visit him. She told him, “Show me the Paris you write about.” His answer? “It was impossible. It is a Paris that has to be lived. That has to be experienced each day in a thousand different forms of torture. A Paris that grows in side you like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it. ”
It’s easy to scoff and roll our eyes at two-dollar surfboard sob stories and starving families in favelas when your quiver runs from a fish to a step-up and hits craigslist after two pressure dings. We will never know, to quote one Brazilian Pro, “The sound of my father crying because he could not buy me a soccer ball.” And, contrary to western belief, a favela does not constitute a third-floor walk-up with only two flat-screen TV’s, a paltry 200-channel selection and wall unit ACs that you have to get up off the couch to turn on. Ever ask a war veteran to describe his time in battle, a mother what it’s like to birth/raise a child or a Kardashian to explain long division? Like explaining life in Brazil to someone who doesn’t live it. Incomprehensible.
2. Dance (airs)
Show your typical white guy a dance floor with a thumping techno track in the background and watch him wilt like Trump at a Cinco de Mayo party, desperately praying that the fist-pump corner is alive and pumping. Just mentioning Samba, Carimbo or Capoeira is enough to make a stiff pale man from the north shiver in nervousness. Does this confidence and sexual self-awareness translate to surfing? Look at Filipe shoot the stars. Sexy as hell.
3. Celebration! (Claims)
Ever been to Carnival? Colors that could blind a rainbow goblin, outfits that’d make Ron Jeremy blush and a horny beat that’ll coerce a Nordic grandma in a walker to swing her hips. We have parades with bagpipes that induce walking comas and ticker tape like candy from a broken piñata to distract us from the sad truth that we’ll never gyrate our midriffs. Consequently, every claim and fist pump is a whip-crack at the desperation and poverty wolves snapping their teeth at every Brazilian pro’s heels. One point of Brazilian culture is a powerful sense of camaraderie built around the fact of just being Brazilian. In America, we build fences around our property lines and make sure our neighbors are at least three football fields away from our front door.
Americans’ IQ about other cultures could be rounded to the nearest single digit number, as long as it doesn’t go above ten. And that’s fine with Brazilians as they have plenty of tens coming their way…
Tommy Curren is the best surfer ever – period
Elegant dance flow and rhythm down the line with perfect reading skills.
Better than monkey like acrobat airs. IMHO sorry
As
There’s most likely indigenous tribes in Brazil that think most “Brazilians” are European white devils.
Yeah they’re all from the favela but somehow manage $1,500 tickets to Hawaii and cover board bag fees, dinner at Lei Lei’s, accommodations, cars, etc.
And guess what?
WE’VE ALL HEARD OUR DADS CRY.
that last line line is good one , eventually, at some point we all gotta cry
extremely offensive title (blame the copy editor?)
not necessarily wrong except that most of the brazilians on the world tour are white and middle class.
and in brazil, “middle class” means you have servants in your house and you never have to sweep the floor or make your own bed, let alone mow the lawn or help your dad do boring chores around the house. so don’t get it twisted! caio ibelli is not from the favela.
Yeah, we live in a state of affairs when punk has become mainstream and Strider lives in Malibu. Bizarre. There’s something to be said for funk, for sure. It’s been co-opted by corporations.
More generally, I would argue that PC culture has strangled art for whitey at least–there’s so many eggshells to avoid stepping on, that the artists only walk on predictable paths. Do anything interesting, and you’ve committed an -ist or an -ism, such that the only safe path is self-critique (guilt). I wonder, in the last 20 years, how many great novels, songs, and paintings died the mind of the artist before the pen, guitar, or brush was picked up?
Mind you, it doesn’t need to die, and it can be reinvigorated very easily.
Fair enough, but I totally disagree with you. American culture is extremely robust and innovative, and I don’t have to go back 100 years to make the point. Consider literature: Thomas Pynchon,
Jonathan Franzen; music: Dylan, Ramones, Hendrix, Coltrane; hell, even surfing, especially surfing. Toledo wouldn’t exist without Fletcher.
Obviously, I’ve constrained myself to American culture, because this is where the conversation is going, but the point could be expanded to Western culture in general.
Moreover, this article is confused. He criticizes Americans, which is really a stand in for whitey, then says Americans have no clue about other cultures, without intended irony. But of course Australians, South African, and whiteys of other nationalities are on the
tour as well.
Plus, it sounds like he wants to bang my Norwegian grandma.
Profound ignorance. When the relative contribution of cultures is measured by giving a bum a high five, I weep for the future.
A Brazilian in Peru, who kept paddling right back to the peak, told me “closest to the peak has priority; that’s how it is everywhere, even Hawai’i.” I tried to explain rotation to him but, as many of us know, many Brazilian surfers are fucking dumb and don’t understand sharing or rotation. “But they’re poor, and it dangerous there.” That dumbass in Peru wasn’t poor and neither are these dingos that come to the north shore.
Again, some spoiled rednecks talking about Brazil… We live in a huge and very unequal country. We have terrible governments, poverty, ignorance all around and violence in a way you can’t imagine. And we are 200 million. So not of us are the same. Not every brazilian is a sneaky prick in the water, like one idiot said down here. The way you all try to understand and categorize one whole country is close to ridiculous.
Oh but generalisation is super fun!
I couldn’t help but notice the hypocrisy lying in your own statement. I’ll use your words. “Spoiled rednecks” in the opening sentence. Final sentence-” The way you all try to understand and categorize one whole country is close to ridiculous “.
All of you who are writing here are spoiled. I am not categorizing a country, a race, an ethnicity … I am delimiting the receivers. The word is not hypocrisy, is ignorance.
Well, shit. If only I’d been born in Brazil!
Brownsplainin’
“Yeah, so when a Brazilian snakes you, it’s because they have more soul. That and because white supremacy.”
Filipe does fucking kill it in the small stuff
*First published about five years ago on Stab.
The bullshit call underlying your whole story seems to say that “every” brazo surfer comes from some under privileged upbringing – and that is always fallen back on!!!
“Aw cut us some slack we come from the favelas blah blah”
Every prick Brazo I have ever come across surfing in Oz or the Pacific or Indian does not come from a favela – they are the rich “privileged” ones who can travel!!!
When you stop whinging about being some form scrappers who deserve cudos because you have “all” done it tough, then maybe the rest of the world will cut you some slack.
Well, after Mike C’s “Medina’s not the world’s best” fiasco, i was really thinking our Beach Grit would turn into a new The Inertia.
Wish you’d turn into roadkill
No Beach Grit will ever be ‘our’ Beach Grit Jimmy
So to summarize:
1) All us whitey’s grew up with a silver spoon and never experienced poverty growing up.
2) Air’s somehow represent dance more than flow on a wave.
3) We all live in suburbia with fences and acreage and don’t know what it’s like the celebrate being ‘merican.
And then you polish the turd off with a generalization about how American’s aren’t cultured.
Great journalism.
Yeah, actually that seems pretty accurate.
Gosh, I feel so inadequate next to the Brazilian studs. If only I had gotten hepatitis from drinking from the tap, I’d be so much better off.
Hey, hey, Brazilian culture has given so much more to the world. True, we have Mark Twain, Snoop Dog, Herman Melville, Gilbert and Sullivan. But that can’t hold a candle to a waxed pussy.