Did you ever believe that you’d live to see the
day when the two biggest surf companies in the world, Billabong and
Quiksilver, united into one? Well congratulations! You did!
The parent of the Quiksilver surfwear brand has agreed to
acquire rival Billabong International Ltd., combining two of the
largest active sports brands as the industry is undergoing a major
shakeout.
The combination would create a global player with ubiquitous
brands, about $2 billion in annual sales and 630 stores in 28
countries. But both Quiksilver and Billabong have struggled in
recent years with declining sales and corporate
restructurings.
Restructurings?
Hang ten?
This is maybe the least interesting news of the week (John
Florence Sr. losing more
integrity wins) seeing as the same finance corporation
owns both’s debt but you made it to the day when Kelly Slater and
Andy Irons rode for the same company.
How does it feel?
Are you thrilled?
Does this restore your faith in humanity?
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Daddy John: “You’re blinded by tits!”
By Chas Smith
John John Florence's father comes swinging in!
The internet is a singularly fantastic thing
and mostly because it doesn’t forget. Every little thought, idea,
photo, story deposited into its fertile loam stays there forever.
Like the ex-girlfriend you thought you could delete from Facebook.
Like Derek Rielly’s John John’s dad just wrote a
tell-all book from three years ago. Would you like
your all-to-human memory jogged?
Ain’t nothing worse than a middle-aged man who throws away
the last vestiges of his dignity. Some men’ll fly the coop from
their families to chase long-evaporated dreams; others’ll fool
’emselves into thinking that 20-year-old high-ass-and-pussy combo
ain’t just chasing ’em for their money.
And John Florence, the 45-year-old estranged father of John
John, Nathan and Ivan, has sunk to a remarkable nadir with a
69-page self-published Kindle-only book currently for sale on
Amazon.
The book is the work of a man who’ll happily tell you he got
too many blows to the head as a kid and who was so rad he was
always doing something to “give me that warm fuzzy feeling of fear
and/or ‘Now you fucked up.’”
It’s a book that attempts to be part adventure (swinging
through Europe on expired credit cards), part street-lit (dealing
coke and weed) and part redemption (I just gotta stay away from the
booze!).
F.E.A.R (Yeah, that’s the name) fails because the writer
can’t shuck off the ego that inflates the story.
Derek then goes on and posts excerpts from the book before
suggesting you purchase Mom John’s memoir instead.
Three years ago is so so so ancient and you likely were unaware
of BeachGrit. One person, Radical_Dude_33 commented
“Cringe.” And that was it. That was all.
Until last week.
During that magical time between Christmas and New Year’s John
John Florence’s father, John Florence, apparently found the story
and decided to comment too.
Soak in that illusion bro… you aren’t very bright are you….
that or oblivious to the truth… perhaps your blinded by the
tits?….lol
It’s really him, seeing as his only other post is to advertise
the book elsewhere and do you think he is right? Is Derek’s
critical review born out of being blinded by Mom John’s tits? Or is
John’s comment the last last vestiges of his dignity?
Elder John? You are clearly there. Can you tell me about your
dignity?
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How to: Become a Fabulous Degenerate!
By Chas Smith
You already have one bad habit (surfing). Why not
develop another?
Many people fall into bad habits and practice
them absentmindedly with neither passion nor flair. They smoke, for
example, and are sitting in a restaurant feeling vaguely satisfied
but vaguely uneasy and so they get up from the table and step
outside and light a cigarette.
No great pleasure comes to them, only a slight uptick in overall
well-being because they did not choose this habit. This habit chose
them. Maybe they were young children and their parents smoked and
they emulated. Maybe they were in school and saw posters of James
Dean and emulated. Maybe they were post-college and in da club and
watched boom-chick-boom-chick-boom-chick smoke and emulated.
Whichever the case, they all begin with emulation and end with
chemical dependence. They do once, twice, three times and then Lady
Nicotine reaches her yellow stained fingers into the ventral
tegmentum and the result is as reptilian as it is bland.
Passion and flair require choice.
They require the practioner to think about what bad habit he or
she would like to develop and then set about actively changing
their very brain chemistry by do do doing that thing over and
over.
My cousin was once an honorable man. He served in the military.
He went to medical school and became a nurse. And then he started
gambling. One thing led to another led to another led to him
stealing chips from a table, to feed his bad habit, and going to
jail. When he got out he started robbing banks to feed his bad
habit and robbed 27 banks before getting caught.
And the best kind of bad habit? A gambling habit.
My cousin was once an honorable man. He served in the military.
He went to medical school and became a nurse. And then he started
gambling. One thing led to another led to another led to him
stealing chips from a table, to feed his bad habit, and going to
jail. When he got out he started robbing banks to feed his bad
habit and robbed 27 banks before getting caught. When he got out
again he promptly disappeared. I think he may be in Kathmandu but
cannot be sure. In any case, living on the lam in Kathmandu as an
ex-bank robber is very much better than being a nurse. Here’s how
to develop your own habit:
Go to fabulous Las Vegas: If you learned
anything from the previous column, how to live in the desert, you
know that Las Vegas is the best part of the desert and this is
because gambling. Gambling built luxurious hotels with fine
thread-counted sheets. Gambling brings James Beard award winning
chefs du cuisine and even Michelin starred ones to chic
restaurants. Gambling. And so find your game. Play the roulette.
Play black jack. Play craps. But end in the poker room. Poker is
the only game to really get addicted to. It is too difficult to win
or lose massive amounts of money at once in the other games. Also
poker feels like a skill whereas roulette, black jack and craps all
feel like luck. It is really all luck but who cares. Poker. But
also thread count and James Beard.
Go back to Las Vegas but less fabulous: Cancel
all trips that don’t involve Las Vegas or maybe Reno or Atlantic
City. Spend more time in the smoky back rooms and less time in the
thread count or with James Beard. Find the casinos that specialize
in that game. They will not be the glitzy ones. They will be the
obscure ones, away from the strip, and you will be shoulder to
shoulder with pockmark face’d white men wearing trucker hats and
double chins and picking $5 t-bone steaks from between their
crooked teeth with small twigs. The external pleasures of beauty,
comfort, fun are beginning to fade. The bad habit is beginning to
form.
Don’t go back to Las Vegas or anywhere else:
Find your local Indian casino, the one nearest your home, and
settle down. The back rooms will be even smokier and the company
less pleasant. You will now be shoulder to shoulder with wide
Chinese men featuring dead faces and slacks from Hong Kong. Their
breath will be so bad that if health workers could enter (they
can’t because the casino is considered sovereign because it is
Indian) the building would be condemned. The whole situation will
be, in fact, so repugnant that lesser souls would vomit simply by
entering where you spend six to seven hours each night
ecstatically. Your eyes, burning red, see only one thing. Royal
flush.
Go to jail: Except you usually do not see
“royal flush” you see various shades of “bust” and your money
dwindles and you devise a plan to get more money so you can
continue to play. The bad habit is now fully set and wonderful. At
first you gamble to get more money so you can gamble but then that
somehow doesn’t work and so you steal a car. You, however, are not
a car thief, you are a gambler, and so the police quickly find you
and lock you up. After getting out you have even less money and so
you gamble but then steal diamonds because they are smaller than
cars and easier to conceal but, again, you are not a jewel thief,
you are a gambler and so the police find you once again and once
again lock you up.
Go to Kathmandu: Because there must be
fantastic poker in Kathmandu or because you are trying to shake
your bad habit in a place that has no poker and only slacks from
Hong Kong. In any case, you are car thief jewel thief degenerate
living near the roof of the world and isn’t that better than what
you are right now?
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How to: Surf Like An Animal!
By Derek Rielly
Juice up your turns!
It’s the most visceral of surfing experiences.
You feel it as much as you see it or hear it. Those
rail-buried-to-the-nose cutback and hacks that hypnotise, and even
scare just a little, as you paddle over a wave.
Airs are thrilling and easy to like, easy to understand. There’s
a speed and there’s a push and a pull and maybe a huck.
But a cutback with fire, a hack that seeks to readjust the
molecular formation of a moving piece of ocean?
Well, that’s something for the purists.
Here’s how you can get some…
1. Get the right board
Surfboard design is game of adding and subtracting. If you want
extreme power, you’re going to have to lose some of that pop in the
tail and the ability to squeeze into the most radical of curves.
There’s only a few surfers in the world who’ve got a power-air
game, John John, Jordy Smith and Dane Reynolds, if you want to
know, but I’m presuming you aren’t in that same league. Talk to a
shaper. Tell him you want to explode out of your turns. You’ll need
more rail length, more thickness, a straighter rocker.
2. You need to be close to the pocket
I once asked a famous surfer, known for his iconic cutbacks,
what the secret to his photogenic success was. He leant over,
smiled, and said, “You have to be deep, deep in the pocket”.
Well, sure.
“But can you do that?” he asked.
I went out that afternoon, turned up the face of the wave but
instead of hitting the lip, I straightened the front leg and flew
into the best cutback of my life.
Who knew there was room for a cutback in such tight a spot? I’d
never felt a turn so perfect and so vicious. And then it flew back
and pierced my cheek, just missing my eyes.
3. Straighten your front leg
Kolohe’s dad, Dino, once a top pro himself, told me the secret
to those beautiful frontside wraps that pleases top-level judges so
much is to “straighten the front leg.” Try it. Sounds easy.
It ain’t.
4. Aggression
It takes a certain mindset to jam an entire rail into the face
of a wave, and in the most critical part of that wave. Airs are a
skateboard-esque dance of weighting and unweighting. Power requires
violence.
5. Put on weight
Skinny kids aren’t going to shower the lineup with spray. If you
want drama in your turns, put on weight, fat, muscle, it doesn’t
matter. It’s a physics thing. Kolohe is one surfer whose spray arcs
have doubled in the last five years.
Of course, ain’t no one like Dane.
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Warshaw: “Poorest fuckers in surf most
generous!”
By Derek Rielly
Raises $60k to keep surf history archive
online!
On New Year’s Day, the surf historian Matt
Warshaw made a
welcome announcement.
“Out with a bang! BeachGrit just dropped 6K into the
EOS fundraiser, and I’m shutting it down at $60,000. Spraying corks
tonight!”
Three weeks ago, of course, it was a different story. The online
history of surfing hung by a thread after Warshaw threatened to to
pull his entire archive (The Encyclopedia of Surfing ,
History of Surfing,
Above the Roar) unless thirty
thousand dollars was donated immediately.
And now? Warshaw is waltzing around with sixty gee.
Let’s rap.
BeachGrit: Prior to launching the fundraiser were you
shitting yourself? Were you like the lonely boy who throws a party
catered with fine wines and meats and wonders if anyone will
come?
Warshaw: It changed hour to hour. In the morning I’d be sure it
was going to work, I’d save the site, all would be fine. But any
little thing would trip me up. An anonymous comment on a thread
somewhere, “Nobody subscribes to websites!” and I’d be fucked for
the day.
Did you make a binding promise to your wife that if the
money didn’t come in you’d really seek alternative
employment?
I made that promise in 2011, with a 2012 deadline. Time was up.
And yes, I was gonna go back to print. New versions of the books,
magazine writing. I would have steered clear of the web, just out
of bitterness.
If print publishing didn’t pan out, was there a plan C?
What other talents do you have?
Early retirement. PTA dad.
And you romped it in! Can you describe the shape of your
face when you told your wife that you made the required thirty k,
that you doubled it? Did you resist an I-told-you-so smirk? Or
no?
Two days into the drive I had $12,000 in donations. Jodi came
home and I said “Look! Twelve thousand! We’re gonna make it!” Went
downstairs, had a glass of wine, sat down to dinner, and while
we’re eating I get a call from the EOS dev guy. Not the dev guy,
but the head of the actual company that I hired last year. This
swinging dick blue-chip company in Venice, charging me $110 an hour
to code —everybody told me to hire the best dev guy possible, you
end up saving money, and I did. So I answer the call, and the head
of the company says, “Matt, I’ve got some really bad news,” and all
I could think of was that my coder must have died, because what
else could it be? “I’m so sorry, but your donation page has been
set on ‘Test Mode’ the last two days.” Which meant that none of the
12K had processed. Back to zero. That was the closest I came to
actually crying during this whole thing.
So what did you do?
Got in touch with all the people who’d donated, explained what
happened, kinda played it for a laugh, and got the money back. Not
all, but almost all. It took a few days, though.
And the dev company?
Fired. But only after the money was in the bag, and I had
another guy lined up.
Did anyone in the surf industry apart from the surf
media toss a few bones? The clothing brands? Any of the big board
guys? The WSL?
Shaun Tomson donated. Tom Carroll donated. Randy Rarick donated
big — he’s always been a great supporter of EOS. Sam McIntosh,
Felipe Pomar, Sam George, Steve Hawk, Zach Weisberg, Brendon
Thomas, Marcus Sanders, Phil Jarratt, Scott Hulet, Sean Doherty,
they all gave. Amazing, the poorest fuckers in surf, the media
people, were the most generous. Nothing from the brands. Zero.
Nothing from the brands themselves, or maybe just two or three
donations from people who work for the brands. That’s okay. It’s
easy to say in hindsight, but EOS I think works better when it’s
independent. The site doesn’t belong to the surf industry, in any
way, shape or form. No donations, no ads, no brand presence at all.
It looks and feels better that way, I think.
What’s the final tally? Sixty gees? How will this be
distributed? Are you a put-in-the-bank drip-feed sorta guy or
oowee-baby-gonna-be-a-helluva-Friday-night party
pants?
Just over $60,000. Thirty to me for this year’s salary, 10 for
site maintenance, and who knows how much into some bigger
improvements. I just bought www.eos.surf, and all three sites are
going to be collapsed into that domain. And a whole new paywall
will go up before summer, where subscribers can name their own
price to get on the site. Whatever’s left stays in the bank so I
don’t panic this time next year.
And do you have to do it all over again next
year?
Probably, yeah, but not another life-or-death thing. More like
an NPR annual fundraiser. Tote bags and coffee mugs and shit for
new donors. It’ll be a pleasure after what I just went through.
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Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by
@theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros