What a week. What a very special week. It all
started, for me, with the official release of Cocaine + Surfing on
Tuesday. I worried, briefly, that the news would be overshadowed by
Kim Jong Un and Donald J. Trump’s meeting in Singapore but soon
realized that nobody really cares about peace on the Korean
peninsula. I did a reading that night at the iconic Warwick’s and am now
sitting in the airport awaiting a flight to Florida for the premier
of Trouble: The Lisa Andersen Story at the Florida Surf Film Festival. If you
live anywhere near the Sunshine State I expect to see you
there.
More will be written on that later but in the meantime, did you
know that this is also National Women Learn to Surf Week? It’s
true! And let us turn to the Corpus Christi
Times for more:
Female surfers converged on Boogie-Bahn at Schlitterbahn
Riverpark and Resort in Corpus Christi on June 12 to celebrate
National Women Learn to Surf Week. World Pro Female BodyBoard
Champions Cathy and Morgan Seabert, a mother-daughter team, were on
board to instruct.
Cathy Seabert is a regular at Schlitterbahn, helping riders
tackle the inland surf attraction during the season. Currently, she
is ranked second in the world in her division of Pro Female
BodyBoarding.
Some 20 female surfers from beginner to expert and ages 8 to
70 slid into the endless inland surf created by a blast of 50,000
gallons of water on Boogie-Bahn. The water is only 3 inches deep on
the ride. Wipeouts land on a foam-covered surface, keeping everyone
safe from harm.
This entire time I thought the Schlitterbahn was in Munich and
was confused about which nation was celebrating Women Learn to Surf
Week but just re-read and realized the Schlitterbahn is a chain of
water parks in Texas. Anyhow, do you have time for a few quick
questions before I board?
How difficult is it to get a National _______________ Week?
Like, could we petition the U.S. Government for a National
BeachGrit Cut n Paste Week? What about a National Venice Adjacent
Gathering of Online Surf-ish Magazines That Have Located There in
Order to Thrive and Seem Abbott Kinney Kool?
Do any of you know the process?
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Opinion: Kolohe “screwed by judges.
Chronically underscored.”
By Derek Rielly
Judges "negligent," says the shaper Matt
Biolos.
As the rich and good looking Julian Wilson gallops
towards a world title in his thirtieth year, it might be
interesting to examine pivotal heats en route to this title and the
response thereof.
Five days ago, Julian won a semi-final heat at Uluwatu against
the similarly rich but not-quite-so good looking Kolohe Andino. The
result was not received well by all surf fans.
BeachGrit‘s Longtom had a swing (“Kolohe got
absolutely cooked by this phenomenon, the overcooking of Julian’s
scores. He was clearly the better surfer, on the better waves doing
the better surfing against Julian in semi one.”) and the
commentary accompanying the heat video on YouTube was similarly in
favour of the moustachioed American.
“Kolohe robbed!”
“Kolohe’s barrel wave was at least an8 something. Bad scoring,
bad characters at wsl.”
“Kolohe surfed better in this heat. Came down to Kohole’s barrel
compared to Julian’s barrel. Kolohe was deeper, it was a bigger set
wave, and he did more aggressive turns.”
“another rigged heat!!? wtf? how many rigged heats in a contest
can you have? wsl, when you’re like the whl and nobody remembers yo
or what you were,,, don’t complain because you’re becoming
irrelevant,,,, fast.”
“Result manipulation. Kalohe was clearly harmed. Your 7.70
should be 8.70. WSL without credibility.”
“Kolohe clearly won & jordy even more so in heat before… wsl is
disgusting.”
‘So sad to see how WSL is manipulating the score in favor of JW,
it is not a honest way to manager the sport!”
“First they favor him through vs jordy and now vs kolohe man as
an australian I feel sorry for julian the judges making everyones
energy negative towards him and its not his faut he was overscored.
Every decent surfer I know agrees julian was gifted in this
heat.”
“I don’t know who got robbed worse, Kolohe or Jordy. That dumb
girl Sophie must have a crush on Julian.”
Kolohe’s shaper Matt “Mayhem” Biolos was equally convinced his
surfer had been cut off at the knees, jumping onto the
FCS Instagram account and
calling the result a “blatant rip off.”
Shortly afterwards, BeachGrit’s Chas Smith took
pleasure in kneading Biolos’ clay into a story, which you can read here.
It was a short piece and the writer didn’t contact Biolos who
subsequently expressed his dissatisfaction in a DM.
“Stirring the pot. Damn, you guys used to call me to elaborate.
Not any more, huh?”
Earlier today, I called Biolos, who was about to drive to LA for
a flight to Fiji where he’ll be joining Strider Wasilewski on
Tavarua, to elaborate.
I say, “Blatant rip off. A sentiment hard to misinterpret.”
“Maybe those words weren’t right,” says Biolos. “I was grouchy
and jet-lagged. Blatant means the judges purposely did it and maybe
they were just negligent. Just a negligent mistake. They made an
honest mistake. And it wasn’t just me who thought it. I watched it
individually in the middle of the night and I was blown away.
Obviously there was a storm of social media and even legitimate
media you like you and Stab believed
Kolohe won. I mean, the criteria is speed power and flow. He was
going faster, with bigger more powerful turns and better flow.
Julian was kinda pivoting and hitting the lip but I don’t think he
was projecting nearly as much or linking his turns like Kolohe.
Nothing against Julian. He’s surfing very well and I worked closely
with him for a long time and I hope he wins a world title. I think
it’s his year. The judges obviously think so too.”
I express my belief that there’s something…tight… about
Julian, where his phenomenal, beautiful, natural skill isn’t
allowed a room to breathe.
“A little mechanical, yeah. Kolohe suffers the same fate. They
get knotted up. It’s a similar hiccup in their game. But I thought
Ulu’s was (Kolohe’s) to win. The draw was gong down and watching
him in that heat with Julian, I thought he’s going to win this
heat, he’s going to win the contest. Didn’t happen.”
I missed the semi live, and therefore missed the spike of
emotion, and found Julian a clear winner and that, despite claims
to the contrary, most heats are a points-per-manoeuvre deal.
“I was watching it live and Kolohe was doing harder turns, going
faster, his flow was a lot better and, bottom line, Kolohe’s 6.83
was the best wave of the heat. It sure as hell wasn’t a 6.83.”
“That’s how I felt. I’m not going too hide from it,”
says Biolos. “I’m not going to comment on your website and I’ll
never, ever, ever sign up to comment on anyone’s website. But fuck
it. I’m going to defend my guy. I think he got screwed. I think
he’s chronically underscored. Maybe he’s done a few things in his
career to welcome that.”
“You know as well as I do, things like that, and being very
successful financially, numerous things. But if you know him as a
man, as a person, he’s awesome. Kolohe asks me, does it bother me
when he punches a board? I’ve been watching baseball players break
their bats for a hundred years. It’s not as if Louisville Slugger
throws a temper tantrum every time Mark McGwire breaks a bat.
“I think that there’s a lot of scoring on the WSL where they
score the surfers not the competitors. They score Gabriel Medina
against what he can do, not in the actual heat he’s in. ”
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Film: Hollywood rates best ever surf
movies!
By Chas Smith
Get ready to hang ten, dudes!
Are you tired of Cocaine + Surfing talk? I’m
sorry. Really and truly. Any sort of promotion is annoying, I get
it, though essential but still annoying so let’s take a break for a
few days, ok? Let’s just talk about other things like movies. When
summer hits North America you can guarantee one, two or sometimes
three mainstream media groups will push out a list of surf movies
to watch complete with headlines like, “Don’t head to the beach
without watching these cool surf flicks!”
This year we are lucky that the film/television’s own Hollywood
Reporter took on the chore. Lucky because it is an inside peek at
what Hollywood itself values. They titled their own Hang Ten, Dude: 10 Memorable
Surfing Films. So what are they and how does the
Hollywood Reporter describe?
1) Big Wednesday: The coming-of-age drama starring Gary Busey,
William Katt and Jan-Michael Vincent centered around three young
men whose passion for surfing kept them connected through war,
death and other chapters of their lives. The film was based on the
real-life experiences of director John Milius and writer Dennis
Aaberg.
2) Blue Crush: Kate Bosworth starred in Blue Crush as Anne
Marie, a hard-core surfer girl living on her own with her younger
sister who braves the Banzai Pipeline of Hawaii to achieve her
dream of becoming a sponsored surf star. The iconic movie that
launched Bosworth’s career became an instant cult classic in the
early 2000s.
3) Chasing Maverick: The film stars Jonny Weston as a young man
aiming to surf one of the biggest waves, which is just miles from
his home in California. He turns to a surfing pro (Gerard Butler)
to teach him how to survive the treacherous waters.
4) Endless Summer: This 1966 documentary is considered by many
to be the most influential and iconic surf film of all time.
5) North Shore: Featuring no shortage of surfing action and some
of the most dangerous waves on Earth, North Shore is an
adrenaline-powered look into the high-performance sport of big wave
surfing.
6) Rip Tide: After an embarrassing viral video damages her
career, an American model (Debby Ryan) heads to Australia to live
with her former pro surfer aunt, who hasn’t been back in the water
since the death of her husband.
7) The Shallows: The surfer-against-shark premise might be
considered a warning not to surf in the ocean alone on an isolated
island.
8) Soul Surfer: In 2003, real-life and on-the-rise surf champ
Bethany Hamilton (AnnaSophia Robb) survived a tragic shark bite
injury, resulting in the loss of her left arm. Despite losing her
arm and 60 percent of her blood during the attack, she remained
undeterred from the water, getting back on her board once her
stitches healed.
9) Step into Liquid: In a documentary shot in waters all over
the globe, director Dana Brown takes on tall waves and surfers who
live to challenge them.
10) Surf’s Up: This family flick features the voices of Shia
LaBeouf, Jeff Bridges and Zooey Deschanel. The heart-warming
documentary-style story focuses on a young penguin named Cody, who
dreams becoming a surfing legend.
In the book Cocaine + Surfing I write:
Pop culture’s dance with surfing is always a funny thing. I
suppose if surfers had any sort of understandable depth, or any
depth full stop, then Hollywood would have pounced on them as
archetypes and figured out long ago how to capture the specifics
enough to make a surf blockbuster, but have you seen Hollywood’s
surf films? Have you seen Chasing Mavericks or Blue Crush or Point
Break (either of them) or North Shore or Big Wednesday or The
Perfect Wave or Soul Surfer or In God’s Hands? The best of them are laughably bad. The worst are a forgettable
cringe.
Hollywood can’t get the surfer even halfway right and I
think it’s a proximity issue. Many in Hollywood, many directors and
producers and actors, think they surf. Their glittering town
perched on the Pacific causes them to believe they know what it all
means because they walk out of Malibu homes, grab a goofy yellowed
seven-foot pintail and go sit in the puddle out front. But surfing
and belonging to surf are two entirely separate things. Belonging
to surf, in my definition, is to be part of the surf
industrial-complex. Those who either work for a surf brand in some
capacity as a photographer, writer, shaper, or who have at some
point in their lives. Those who have so oriented their lives around
surf that they watch World Surf League events while chatting about
professional surfer form on message boards. Those whose
productivity slowly drains away because they surf instead of
working. Those who have pterygiums.
And that is exactly what Hollywood is missing as it relates
to the surfer. Pterygiums.
“Although Cocaine + Surfing makes for a catchy title and
a smattering of salacious anecdotes, it’s a stupid idea for a
book,” writes Duane, before tightening the noose. “It’s an even
stupider idea for a book conceived in the way that Smith initially
(although not ultimately) conceived of it—as, to quote his
equally-catchy subtitle, ‘a sordid history of surfing’s greatest
love affair.”
What cruel torments lie ahead?
“Despite this horribly misguided premise—or, rather, because of
it—Cocaine + Surfing is a dazzling page-turner,
highly-recommended beach reading, and absolutely the funniest book
ever written about surfing.”
“Although Cocaine + Surfing makes for a catchy title and
a smattering of salacious anecdotes, it’s a stupid idea for a
book,” writes Duane, before tightening the noose. “It’s an even
stupider idea for a book…”
Oh, a volcano of praise! It continues.
“To hold those contradictions together in one’s mind, it helps
to recognize that Smith’s literary models do not include serious
works like my man Warshaw’s scholarly History of Surfing
or William Finnegan’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Barbarian Days; A
Surfing Life.
“Cocaine + Surfing belongs, rather, to the
honorable lemons-into-lemonade lineage that begins with Ross
McElwee’s cult-classic 1986 documentary film Sherman’s March: A
Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During
an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation, in which
McElwee tries to make a film about the civil war but ends up
interviewing all his ex-girlfriends instead, and Geoff Dyer’s
Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling
with D. H. Lawrence, an unforgettable book about not
writing a book about D. H. Lawrence.
“In the same spirit, Cocaine + Surfing is a book about
a self-loathing surf journalist getting the seemingly-brilliant
idea to write a book about cocaine and surfing, hitting the road
for research in various corners of the surf industry, discovering
that it’s actually a stupid idea, and wondering how his
once-promising life came to such a sad pass.”
“The surprising joy of this book, though—and it really is a
joy—has nothing whatever to do with cocaine. It lies entirely in
Smith’s brilliant skewering of surf culture, the surf industry, his
own complicity in both, and the frailty of the human ego.”
Also.
“The surprising joy of this book, though — and it really is a
joy — has nothing whatever to do with cocaine. It lies entirely in
Smith’s brilliant skewering of surf culture, the surf industry, his
own complicity in both, and the frailty of the human ego.”
“Smith also delights in deep inside-baseball stuff like his
repeated reference to the formerly-terrific Australian surf
magazine Stab as ‘the fake version of
BeachGrit’when everybody knows that his own
BeachGrit is in fact a fake version of the original
Stab.”
Today is the official release of Cocaine +
Surfing!
By Chas Smith
Thank you. Thank you all.
Books are strange creations. It’s difficult for
me to even remember sitting down and starting the one that
officially releases today. It was last spring, maybe, though I
can’t recall the weather, nor what I was wearing, nor my state of
mind. I do remember going to stay a weekend at The Charlie in West
Hollywood mid-way through to make real progress. It is how I write,
I suppose. Fumbling around, interviewing, researching, compiling,
finding a rhythm, then going away for two days and trying to write
an entire book.
I got way too drunk the night I checked in but forced myself up
at 4 am so if the whole thing feels like a giant hangover that’s
why.
It is probably not the best process but it is mine.
Anyhow, as of today it is out in the world in both Australia,
The United States,
iBooks,
Audible,
Kindle etc. I
hope you, of every group of potential readers, enjoy it. You are my
favorite.
I am doing a reading at Warwick’s in La Jolla tonight at 7:30 if
you are around. Before the reading I am going to thank all those
who suffered my questions, who suffered me, as I wrote. My wife,
above all. Derek Rielly, who I love. Matt Warshaw, Nick Carroll,
Brad Melekian, Scott Hulet, Ian Cairns, Pete Taras, Jimmy Wilson
and the rest of the dysfunctional surf industry.
I don’t know if people want to be thanked in a book titled
Cocaine + Surfing but without them there is nothing. And without
you I am bored and uninspired.
So thank you.
Thank you all/this is your fault.
Oh! And if you try and order on Amazon
it says 1 – 2 months delivery but it’s not true. They just sold out
their entire stock this morning but more is on the way as of
today.