Surf mags turn on surf mags! It's elegant, graceful
and entertaining!
A few days ago, Bez Buckley revived the ancient art
of gags between surf mags with a brightly executed
sledgehammer attack on The Inertia, and of which we’ve had
terrific fun with.
Here, and here too.
Cuckolding, which Bez called his brilliant hack, is an activity
I’m familiar with. One older surf writer, who was otherwise very
kind to me, cuckolded me twice.
The first cuck I caught with my own eyes. The girl, whom I was
courting, was found mounted atop the bathroom sink of the women’s
toilet at a Jan Juc bar, breasts loosed from blouse with one being
enthusiastically fed into his mouth. The second cuck was revealed
via a dramatic post-fact description from the girl and included the
words ‘unutterable ecstasy’. The writer failed on his third cuck
and I was so thrilled I married the woman.
The ancient, and surprisingly arousing art of cuckoldry aside,
Bez’s gag reminded me of other great inter surf mag gags.
Wait.
Actually it didn’t.
It reminded the BeachGrit reader Preston of other great
surf mag gags and the owner of the comment suggested placing a call
to the surf historian Matt Warshaw.
Which I did.
Warshaw reminded me of two fabulous moments, reprinted below
from the Encyclopedia of
Surfing, which you can subscribe to for a few
shekels a month or if you complain loudly enough, for whatever
pennies you can muster.
#1. First-place prank, surf industry division.
Surfing mag was tanking in 1969. Missed pub
dates, advertisers jumping ship, newly bought by a company
headquartered in Sparta, Illinois. The mag was published out
of New York—30 years before that was cool. SURFER meanwhile had
just hired intellectual stoner-poet-jokerman Drew Kampion as
editor. Drew, today, is an energetic ruralist up here in
Washington state, a lover of Whitman and God and environmental
causes. But he used to have a mean streak, and was competitive as
hell, and Surfing was a gently lofted softball for Drew to
clobber into the next time zone.
He got out an oversized padded envelope. Inside the envelope,
neat and tidy, he put a plastic-protected sheath
of reject Ron Stoner transparencies, shot at Hammond’s two
years earlier. On top of the photos he added a single-page
prose-poem titled “The Inner Tubes of Hammond’s Reef.” One passage
read:
Sleepy village / Silent sea / Silver tubes and solitude /
Waiting for the soul in me / Will my board and I travel
thee?
A little further along:
My good Karma was really working today / Karma waves / Karma
days / Karma brain in purple haze / I’ll always cherish these
days.
One more:
A wave approaches beckoning to all my skill / I, a surfer,
an artist of the sea, am drawn to its hollow bosom / Breast of the
sea / That comes to me / Whose fingers are like snow / Takes me
into her womb / Revealing secrets I must know!
On top of the slides and the text, Kampion placed a cover
letter, introducing himself as writer and photographer Dru
Anderson, along with an author photo.
Surfing bit. Hook, link, sinker. The article ran in the
July issue, five pages, without so much as a comma change. On the
contributor’s section at the front of the mag, Dru Anderson
was introduced as a writer who “gets away from traditional form.”
The author photo shows a young man, smiling broadly, with
tousled brown hair. Handsome devil. It’s SURFER founder John
Severson. They didn’t know what it was, but the surf overlords of
Sparta felt a hot breath of laughter on their necks.
#2 A week after I left the SURFER house during my last
visit to the North Shore, this would have been in the mid-‘90s, the
guys woke up to find a nice pink box of donuts on the front porch.
A young photog kissing up? Something like that. Nobody asked
questions, and a half-hour later the box was empty. On the front
porch the next morning there was a photo
of Surfing mag’s North Shore crew, lined up in a row,
bent over, donuts wedged in their butt cracks, with the pink box
laying open in the foreground. “Hope you enjoyed the donuts!” or
something like that, written on the photo. Steve Hawk told me the
story, and I was delighted. Hawk was too, even though he ate a
donut. Solid prank, and Steve’s a guy who gives credit where its
due. But for him it also it was like, Yeah, I ate a glazed
donut that was in Skip Snead’s ass—and it was totally delicious.
But you, Skip, had to go in and wash sticky glazed
sugar out of your crack. Winning by losing.
Or the other way around. Or both.
(Subscribe to the EOS
here!)
