Breaking: “Secret project in the works.
Highly cinematic, involves the ocean and #1 female surfer in the
world!”
By Chas Smith
Can you guess?
Yesterday the great Hollywood film producer
Brian Grazer (Parenthood, Backdraft, 8 Mile etc.) posted a very
cryptic message on Instagram. “Secret project in the works… it’s
highly cinematic and involves the ocean and the #1 female surfer in
the world!” Sitting on Mr. Grazer’s right was the statuesque Keala
Kennelly and what do you think this secret project could be? What
are your best guesses?
I had lunch with Brian Grazer once. He is a voracious collector
of stories, tales, anecdotes. Inquisitive would be the best way to
describe, I think. Curious. He had, anyhow, read about my best
friend and my Middle Eastern adventures. We met in his office. He
was kind. We ate something forgettable and he peppered us with
questions. At the end, he walked us out and we said goodbye. Before
reaching the door, though, we heard our names shouted. We turned
around and there was Brian holding a very rococo pair of G-Unit
jeans.
“Are these cool?” He asked.
“No.” We answered in unison.
I am excited for whatever he is working on with Ms Kennelly and
wish them nothing but the best. I very much enjoy pop culture’s
dance with surfing and wrote about it in the eponymous Cocaine +
Surfing (buy
here). Would you like to read?
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, also called “surfer’s eye.” What WebMD
describes as “a growth of pink, fleshy tissue on the conjunctiva,
the clear tissue that lines your eyelids and covers your eyeball.
It usually forms on the side closest to your nose and grows toward
the pupil area.”
Quite basically, pterygiums are scales. Scales that begin
growing over the eye because surfers sit out in the water long
enough thinking about where to put their hands and so God, in his
transcendence, knows that they will go blind and puts scales over
their eyes to protect them from the sun’s fiery wrath as it bounces
off the water. They don’t generally cause blindness, but they cause
blurriness of vision.
Surfers have scales covering their eyes. I have never met a
director or producer with scales covering his and I have only met
one actor who might be close to having them—Jimmy Caan’s boy,
Scott. But almost every real surfer, every professional surfer or
surf brand manager or executive vice-president to the bros has
either full-blown pterygium or the beginnings of pterygium, or
bones covering the inside of his ears, also known as “surfer’s
ear.” He has chosen surfing over clear eyesight or over hearing.
Sometimes over both. Scott Caan went one better, too. He chose to
star in the remake of Hawaii Five-0, just so he could
surf.
Can you imagine starring in the remake of Hawaii Five-0? For
seven seasons?
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The most poignant revelation in Momentum
Generation, or maybe Kelly revealed it in the Q and A was the fact
that his Dad never showed up to watch a single CT contest he was
in. Can you imagine what a kick in the guts that would be? Dad
never showed up to witness who he was, his greatness, his whole
being.
Momentum Generation review: “Softens
criticism that Kelly Slater is a narcissist who can’t let go of the
spotlight!”
By Longtom
Our reviewer approaches HBO surf documentary with
trepidation. Expects schmaltz on epic scale.
Everyone thought he would go on forever. And
even now, with the retirement called and “one last lap” started
(disastrously) we still can’t quite accept Kelly Slater might one
day be gone.
Momentum Generation, a movie-length documentary, as you
probably know, takes a retrospective look at the First Act of
Kelly’s career, and puts the supporting cast of New Schoolers into
context with him during that phase.
It’s a story of friendship and death. It does illuminate the
last lap, softens judgement by critics who see the current Legacy
phase of Kelly’s career as a textbook case of a narcissist who
can’t let go of the spotlight.
I approached it with some trepidation. Expecting cheese and
schmaltz on an epic scale.
The film was being played at the Byron Community centre and the
organiser had asked me to attend; he wanted me to prepare some
questions for a post-film Q and A.
But, what if it was epically lame and all I could offer up were
platitudes or the kind of questions I’d love to ask him man on man
but that would turn off a loved up audience here to pay homage to
the GOAT?
That dilemma about how to review continues, sharpened in the
context of current events like the suicide attempt of Sunny Garcia.
Presenting a truthful account versus the potential hurt caused by
unkind and insensitive comments.
Kelly’s got a lot, far more than I’ll ever have: world titles,
loot, fame, celebrity etc. But I’ve got what he hasn’t and may
never have. Kids who know that Dad, even if the Point is pumping,
will show up to the cross-country race. A dad who might need a
couple of brown sangas to get through the school play but he’ll be
there.
Every time.
They know I’ll back them up, even if, especially if, they are in
the wrong.
The most poignant revelation in Momentum Generation, or
maybe Kelly revealed it in the Q and A was the fact that his Dad
never showed up to watch a single CT contest he was in.
Can you imagine what a kick in the guts that would be?
Dad never showed up to witness who he was, his greatness, his
whole being.
That theme runs strong through the opening scenes of
Momentum Generation. Absent Dads, overbearing, aggressive,
asshole Dads.
“They’ll fuck you up – your Mum and Dad,” claimed English poet
Phil Larkin. It describes the damaged Lost Boys who coalesced
around the genius of Slater perfectly.
There are some jarring notes in the opening scenes.
The film makes a major point about surfing still being a
renegade, anti-social activity. Kelly claims he didn’t even know
pro surfing was a thing.
The Momentum Generation inherited all the benefits of a
fully developed surf-industrial complex built by an earlier
generation. A major premise of the film, that the Momentum
Generation brought surf into the mainstream, is built on a
very shaky foundation.
While the non-surfing world still swallows the myth of surfing
being a radical activity outside the bounds of normal society, even
today, it’s a trope worth selling, the truth is far more
prosaic.
Tom Carroll had already signed a million-dollar contract with
Quiksilver in 1988, while the Momentum crew were tweens.
Kelly was groomed and courted by big money before his teenage
years. He was carefully cultivated as “the one”, an updated and
improved Tom Curren that could be sold to Middle America.
The Momentum Generation inherited all the benefits of a
fully developed surf-industrial complex built by an earlier
generation. A major premise of the film, that the Momentum
Generation brought surf into the mainstream, is built on a
very shaky foundation.
The film is on much firmer footing when it explores its other
main themes: friendship, vulnerability and the pressures that
competition puts on people in close contact.
Leaving out an earlier incarnation of communal living where the
Momentum crew had gathered at the Hill House behind
Laniakea under the tutelage of Brock Little and Todd Chesser the
film spends much of its narrative capital exploring the
relationships that developed at Benji Weatherly’s Pipeline
crib.
Todd Chesser,
Cheese, remains the alpha male and spiritual leader of
the group. A Dionysian father figure with a mad passion for big
waves.
Cheese takes the flawed, molten characters of Slater, Dorian,
Benji, Kalani Robb, Ross Williams, Machado et al and steels them in
the furnace of the North Shore into a force that took over the
world.
World titles follow, the world is dominated etc. You know the
story.
Chesser was a pivotal figure not just for surf stars. He called
me into the biggest wave of my life, at Haleiwa. I’d slept on the
beach, in a cheap suit, after a party and woke up in a sleeping bag
underwater getting rolled down the beach into the shorebreak.
Then Todd Chesser goes and dies. Drowned on a massive day at
Outside Alligators. And the close knit world of the Momentum
Generation falls apart.
The emotional impact of Chesser’s death still reverberates
today. Kelly took the stage for the Q and A in an Oatmeal-Heather Odyssey
Reversible Crew ($US68) in tears. Through sobs, he
recounted how hard it still was for him to watch the film and
reflect on the passing of Chesser.
Chesser was a pivotal figure not just for surf stars.
He called me into the biggest wave of my life, at Haleiwa. I’d
slept on the beach, in a cheap suit, after a party and woke up in a
sleeping bag underwater getting rolled down the beach into the
shorebreak. A massive swell had hit in the night.
I paddled out sometime mid-morning, in a state of high anxiety,
on an 8’2” Rawson. The Toilet bowl was like a scene from a Poe
short story. Gothic apocalypse. Cheese was out there , toying with
it. That sideways arrogant grin making it seem like surfing big
waves was about as risky as buying a carton of milk.
At some point, the apex of a huge peak came to me and trying
desperately to elude it Cheese looked me straight in the eye and
screamed “Go!” He had an internal force within him that made
obedience mandatory. So I did. Like all the Momentum crew
did when he turned them from scared young kids into Pipeline
maestros.
Chesser wasn’t the only father figure Kelly wept over during the
Q and A. He broke down when discussing the influence of Jack
Johnson’s Dad, Pete Johnson. The crowd was gushing, people weeping
openly.
The film had made a fair fist of painting Kelly as an
over-competitive dickhead but this display of male vulnerability
was melting the hardest hearts. Kelly’s last lap will be as much
about these public unburdenings of emotion as it will be about
surfing.
Kelly and his crew ran a straight edge campaign and avoided the
excesses of a Tour where dark spaces lured other damaged youth into
toxic drug culture. The ghost of Shane Herring haunted the film.
The arc of redemption from rags to riches is an American tale but
the Australian experience was as much a mirror image with a darker
outcome. Lost boys who did not find healing in their tribe.
Certain things are dissected forensically. The famous 1995
Pipeline High Five, for example.
A view is presented that Kelly somehow orchestrated it to throw
Machado for the rest of the heat. Kelly claims it as an organic
display of joy. Having witnessed it from the beach, ripped to the
tits on LSD, I side with Kelly.
The whole heat was so surreal, so perfect; it would be inhuman
not to try and wrest a high point and commit it to posterity. Which
is what happened. Kelly the preternatural showman created more of
these unforgettable high points than any pro surfer in history.
Other things are left out.
The film is scrubbed clean of sex, drugs, Australians. That
surgical insularity aims the film squarely at a mainstream American
audience but leaves more questions than answers for global
viewers.
Kelly and his crew ran a straight-edge campaign and avoided the
excesses of a Tour where dark spaces lured other damaged youth into
toxic drug culture. The ghost of Shane Herring haunted the film.
The arc of redemption from rags to riches is an American tale but
the Australian experience was as much a mirror image with a darker
outcome.
Lost boys who did not find healing in their tribe.
I couldn’t help but try and calculate the influence of the
Momentum Generation while watching Bells. Kelly’s
quarter-final with Ryan Callinan was being watched live by a global
audience of around six thousand, maybe a few thousand on the beach
watching live.
The era officially ended in 1998, less than a decade after it
began, with Kelly’s sixth world title and subsequent retirement.
The high-water mark of American pro surfing rolled back from there
and twenty-one years later, the American coastal market has not
been able to sustain a single CT event.
Only Kelly’s own creation remains. For now, at least.
As far as pure influence on the surfing culture, both Andrew
Kidman’s and Jon Frank’s 1995 rebuttal to shopping mall punk and
ADHD editing, Litmus, as well as Tom Curren’s post-tour
wanderings in the Search movies seem more enduring.
The blowback was stronger than the movement. Only Kelly’s
Pipeline surfing from that era seems destined to ring through
eternity.
To be fair, and accurate, each member of the Momentum
Generation did step up and achieve something close to their
full potential. Ross now coaches the heir to Kelly’s throne, John
John Florence.
Dorian became the greatest big wave rider of his and any
era.
Machado has continued to invent and reinvent a marketable
persona and stay stoked.
Taylor Steele was the last man standing to sell a squillion
DVD’s and so on.
Kelly’s Third Act, taking control of the waves, may yet prove to
be the defining move into the mainstream that twenty-seven years of
pro surfing mastery could never provide.
Friends heal and make whole, that is the message of the
Momentum Generation, but in the final analysis a
father-sized hole in his psyche can never be filled.
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From the Surfers-rule-jocks-drool Dept:
Malibu High School drops 11-man football, keeps surfing!
By Chas Smith
My, how times have changed!
Once upon a time surfers were outcasts,
deadbeats, ne’rdowells, trouble-niks and their sworn natural
enemies were jocks. Big, strapping, buzz-cut’d, part of the system,
man. For years and years these two groups fought a asymmetric war.
Not asymmetric like modern surfboards, no. Asymmetric in that jocks
had muscles and strength so that the surfers, skinny and addled,
could not go mano-a-mano with any hope of success. The surfer would
rather attempt to make the jock feel lame.
My how times have changed.
For now it is the mighty jock who has been shunned by society.
The once-proud football player maligned. His game criticized as
“retard-making.” His way of life erased and the once lowly surfer
raised up and seated upon the throne of “things parents want their
kids to do.”
Let us now read about the sad fate of 11-man, or real, football
at Malibu High
School.
It’s clear that surfing — not football — has become the more
attractive sports option to Malibu students. The school has a
surfing team that’s more than twice the size of the football
team.
“We’re on the coast, so it only makes sense,” (one time
Malibu High football coach) Lawson said. “The whole demographics of
football and all the concussion concerns have changed things. Going
eight-man football is better than dropping football.”
High school participation in 11-man football declined for
the second consecutive year nationwide in 2017, according to the
annual survey by the National Federation of State High School
Assns. The decline was 21,465 out of more than one million
participants. Football is still the No. 1 participatory sport by a
wide margin, but signs of trouble can’t be ignored.
Practice rules have changed to include less hitting, which
might reduce concussions. But there’s a lot more to be done. There
are so many sports options to have fun. Football can’t rely on the
past. Coaches must innovate and lead.
And these are the days of our lives.
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Occ, Kelly, Vaughan, Jed etc. | Photo:
@kellyslater
Listen: Vaughan Dead vs Kelly Slater vs Jed
Smith!
By Derek Rielly
Ain't that Swell hits apogee at dirty ol Victorian
bowling club…
During the recent Bells surfing carnival, the podcast
Ain’t That Swell put on a live show at the Torquay Bowling
Club, a sports joint for old people on the waterfront
there in that lizardy surf town.
Over two-and-a-half hours, Vaughan Dead (Goons of Doom frontman,
bro of Ronnie, writer, surf identity etc) and Jed Smith (likes weed
and getting jerked off on massage tables) made a very good
interview with Kelly Slater, who licked his lips and opened his
mouth wide to catch Vaughan and Jed’s consecrated whiskey
rainfall.
Kelly explains why he jumped on Adriano’s world title with the
pool reveal (“I wanted to put it out before Pipe even happened!”)
and various other things and Vaughan talks of making out with Layne
Beachley at the Rip Curl Media Night some years ago.
Some of the stories will make you weep, some whimper.
Substantial.
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I was apoplectic Medina didn’t win at Bells, but I
realised that in the grand scheme it will not matter. Ultimately I
believe that he will not only win the world title this year, but he
might have it wrapped up by France. (Even allowing for the
inevitable juiced scores of the Golden Child). | Photo:
WSL
JP Currie: “Gabriel Medina is the most
naturally gifted, progressive and powerful surfer in the
world”
By JP Currie
Scottish surf gambler falls under spell of man he
once hated…
At some point during the Bells event I had an
epiphany. I was violently affected by Gabriel Medina.
Suddenly, I recognised that he is the most complete surfer in
the world. He is the most naturally gifted, the most progressive
and the most powerful. He is not just a double world champion, but
the future winner of many, many more titles. He is the GOAT in
waiting.
And what a transition. What a character arc. Where once he was
the Night King; now he looks like the rightful heir to all of the
Seven Kingdoms.
He’s come a long way from the moment we shared in Portugal.
Minutes after a buzzer beater defeat in the final by Julian, Gabby
and I were alone, behind the event scaffolding.
We locked eyes: his filled with tears; mine with joy.
I wanted to see him cry then. I wanted to see the bubbling
little Brazilian baby crying his dark eyes out at the unfairness of
it all. But we’ve changed, both of us.
Today, I would snivel and snotter with and for him.
Sometimes, exceptionally talented people are hard to like,
especially if they are young. But you can hardly blame them for
brimming with the self-confidence that supreme talent affords.
It must be difficult.
Given even a national level of athletic talent as a teenager I
would have been an unbearable cunt. I can’t imagine how you rein
things in if you’re world-class. Top talents are often polarising,
Kobe, Tiger, Floyd Mayweather, Neymar, Michael Schumacher, Lebron,
Shaun White.
For all the adulation, there are millions who yearn to see them
implode. We all love a fallen idol.
Lots of surf fans hate Medina, primarily because of his
nationality. Or because he’s the one surfer in the world better
than golden boy John Florence on any given day.
But, racist or American or not, you should consider the
objective facts.
When Medina joined the Tour in 2011 as a seventeen year old
(during the experimental and short tenured mid-season rotation) he
blew the doors off.
There’s a reliable, early way to determine superstars in the NBA
– they don’t start slowly. The good guys are nearly always good
right away. Same with surfing. Think Kelly, think Parko and Mick
both winning events as teenage wildcards. Think Gabriel
Medina. There is no weakness in his game, none.
He won two of his first four events outright and made the
quarters at Pipe.
His aerial surfing changed the game. He was banging out perfect
20s on the WQS and carried that form onto the CT. Judges hadn’t a
clue how to score him.
No-one was doing airs like Medina.
There’s a reliable, early way to determine superstars in the NBA
– they don’t start slowly. The good guys are nearly always good
right away. Same with surfing. Think Kelly, think Parko and Mick
both winning events as teenage wildcards.
Think Gabriel Medina.
There is no weakness in his game, none.
He can win on any day, at any wave, in any conditions. He is
tactically savvy. (For pure, cinematic brilliance, sending Jordy
over the falls at Pipe last year was a tactical masterstroke that
will never be bettered.)
He cares about winning. He loves competing. He has the optimum
level of cunt in him. And he’s an absolute beast. A physical
specimen who could rag doll the best of us.
You might poke at his style, but you would be naive. Style
scores nothing, if anything it might cost you a point or more.
Medina surfs at the absolute apex of the given performance
criteria. Why would he do anything else? I’ve heard Parko refer to
him as “the most talented human I’ve ever seen stand on a
surfboard.”
And remember the goatpool? Remember what happened when everyone
was given the perfect canvas to showcase their skills? All of a
sudden the gulf between Medina and everyone else looked even
greater.
At Pipeline last year he was masterful. I’m no pro surfing
historian, but I can’t believe many performances have ever been so
dominant, even in the eyes of the layman.
Recently, Ronnie Blakey said that he thought Medina might have
been studying the form of some of the great Bells performers of all
time. He reckoned Medina might have got better. That’s a terrifying
prospect. If true we could see a period of competitive dominance
like the Slater era.
I was apoplectic Medina didn’t win at Bells, but I realised that
in the grand scheme it will not matter. Ultimately I believe that
he will not only win the world title this year, but he might have
it wrapped up by France. (Even allowing for the inevitable juiced
scores of the Golden Child).
My mortgage is on it.
Longtom put it best in his Chelsea grin of a rebuttal to Sam
George: what Medina did at Bells is yet to be understood.
Gabriel Medina is playing chess when everyone else is playing
checkers.