Rights are assumed in the surf now, not earned. An insoluble problem when the numbers exceed the supply of waves.
What a week here*, what a month! Surfing in the dock on two fronts.
The hottest new species of VALs shish-kebabed by a respectable bourgeois publication, the mighty Vanity Fair and then it’s inner entrails cut out and examined in the sunshine (in forensic detail) by the magnificent Magistrate Karen Stafford in the Ballina Courthouse.
Appropriate time to ask, as Sally Fitz would say, “Where you at?”
Surfing in the age of the Tub has become almost a byword for techno-utopianism for a new species of masters and mistresses of the Universe. The soft fascism of market-mediated narcissism peddled by the Murfers, as they are now tagged, rolls on with momentum undiminished by the Vanity Fair hit piece.
In fact, the photographer became insta-pals with the Murfers, the network extended, greater reach into American markets etc. These are the new, modern day Darwinians.
The Murfers have inverted the usual Darwinian rules of modern, crowded surfing and life.
Ruthlessness does not happen in the water or in the glossy shots but in the background as a red in tooth and claw version of self-branding total commercialisation.
To look into their hot soft eyes is to believe in a version of innocent theme park narcissism.
Darwin showed us that humans are like other animals. We compete for mates, for resources.
In the surf we compete for waves. Implicitly or explicitly.
Our animal inheritance is a consequence of the evolutionary success of what English local John Gray calls “an exceptionally rapacious primate”.
To believe otherwise, despite 50 years of a surf media ever ready to pander to self-mythologising grinning-hippie capitalists, is to deny reality.
I saw that reality relentlessly and surgically flayed and exposed in a court last week.
More on that in a moment.
Like all animals our existence and access to “our playground” is conditional, subject to all kinds of local and regional vagaries and territorialism, even sometimes to the threat or reality of violence. If Kala Alexander shows me his knuckles and tells me to beat it kook at the Pipeline, or Tahiti, or even Indonesia it’s likely I will submit. Even under the protective umbrella of the rule of law I may submit to the law of the Wolfpak.
The genie of technology can not be put back in the bottle. The bitter irony is the Murfers cause more harm with their soft fascism than the direct output of violence in the name of self-interest, but also tolerated by the community in the name of order. These are slimy, slippery eels to grapple with.
The VAL fantasy is access to a playground of uninhibited freedom accessible to all.
But this is a lie.
Like all animals our existence and access to “our playground” is conditional, subject to all kinds of local and regional vagaries and territorialism, even sometimes to the threat or reality of violence. If Kala Alexander shows me his knuckles and tells me to beat it kook at the Pipeline, or Tahiti, or even Indonesia it’s likely I will submit. Even under the protective umbrella of the rule of law I may submit to the law of the Wolfpak.
The rule of law which protects the VAL is the ultimate human construct. The ultimate freedom they fantasise about is only accessible in an even more mechanised playground, and it comes at a very high price.
These strangely fruitful internal contradictions constitute the new surfing myth and the true work of the surf writer in our new woke age.
Jodie Cooper, of course, is very far from a kook or a VAL. The violence perpetrated against her is of a kind that is much more repellent, even amid the chaos of the most crowded day of the winter. Even considering the breakdown of order during a tourist invasion which threw the vibe for the season from its normal strict but sunny disposition (the most noted local enforcer told me: “I’m a fucking mirror, they bring smiles and good manners that’s what they get back. If they’re cunts they get a smack”) into a dull, sullen resentment.
Something had to crack.
The perpetrator had few, if any, allies. Trussed up in an ill-fitting suit and clutching a mat, his last stand as some kind of local enforcer was now in the hands of two barristers and a solicitor.
The one, with a massive lionine visage and physique shaped by expensive wine and cheese.
The judge put the aggression of localism in the dock and found it wanting, not strictly on its own terms, but because it violated Cooper’s rights as an experienced surfer to her “perfect wave” .Rights are assumed in the surf now, not earned. An insoluble problem when the numbers exceed the supply of waves. Still, violence has decreased. Old hardheads mellow out or become legit family guys. The culture has become more feminised, more passive and older.
His sidekick: a version of Robert Duvall from Apocalypse Now who had been cryovaced for 30 years and then microwaved a little too long to thaw him out.
The judge did not share my appreciation of the comic effect of the barristers talking about a mat’s inability to cut back. She put the aggression of localism in the dock and found it wanting, not strictly on its own terms, but because it violated Cooper’s rights as an experienced surfer to her “perfect wave”.
Rights are assumed in the surf now, not earned. An insoluble problem when the numbers exceed the supply of waves.
Still, violence has decreased in the surfing world.
Old hardheads mellow out or become legit family guys.
The culture has become more feminised, more passive and older.
You’ve pretty much got to travel to the Third World, or Victoria, to be threatened these days. The Carcass case looks more like the last of an endangered species being put against the wall than any kind of brave new “Straw Dogs”** world.
Violence is more sublimated now into a soft fascism: my life is superior to yours, you can’t afford it etc.
Blocking and ghosting takes the place of the open fist but the Darwinian reality remains. The human animal will stay the same: a highlyinventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive.
More, much, much more to come.
*Boring Bay/Lennox Head/Ballina.
**Sam Peckinpah Film with Dustin Hoffman.
