Beyond Litmus Review: Cancer supersedes surfing!

If you are familiar with Andrew Kidman's work, the films, the books, the music, this is his best. The most accomplished. The most beautiful. The most moving.

Be you prime stud, or babe with the world at her feet, you’re going to get old and die, possibly of cancer.

That sounds about the most depressing statement ever but in Beyond Litmus, the reprise, twenty-five years on of Jon Frank and Andrew Kidman’s cult classic Litmus, that statement of fact becomes filmic and literary raw material of immense uplift and cheer.

Derek Hynd, the fulcrum of both films, calls the experience of dealing with throat cancer “total liberation”.

Litmus kickstarted the rebellion against Slater and the Momentum Generation.

It marked the signal failure of the pro surfing project up to and including the present day; that being the catastrophic lack of cross-over into the mainstream audience with Kelly as the front man.

Kelly is truly great, but he is ours.

He was never theirs. Theirs being Middle America.

Litmus dragged the fish out of it’s Sunset Cliffs/Pacific Beach lair and rebirthed it as a global phenomenon, thus driving the retro movement and hence becoming as significant as Morning of the Earth in steering Australian surfing culture (said with a straight face) and maybe more important than anything since Runman in giving confidence to the Californian underground which had heretofore been ignored by its own surf media.

Big calls, yes.

Beyond Litmus is more than getting the band back together for a sentimental romp through the old hits. Litmus was a case, according to Kidman, of “being lucky”.

“We were enthusiastic, but there was no skill in anything. It was punk rock”.

Twenty-five years later, the development of Kidman and Frank as filmmakers is obvious. Litmus was a slap in the face with a cold fish to the front lit, mainstream-Slater vision of surfing.

Beyond Litmus is altogether different.

An immersive, psychedelic trip of a movie, focussed as much on the “human-ness of becoming” and the nuances of history than the performance of riding a wave.

But that does feature, of course. Free-friction surfing isn’t everyone’s cup of chai, which is part of the reason Hynd embraced it so enthusiastically – as a mountain top where the herd would not or could not follow – but you’d need to have a perverse eye to not make the assessment that the lines he drew were a clear advancement on what he achieved with rudders.

Terry Fitzgerald, phlegmatic seventies surf star and scion of the Hot Buttered board-building empire and surf family said, “What’s he’s done there on the Edge”, referring to Hynd’s J-Bay free-friction surfing, “is the greatest”

I demur slightly.

I’ve seen Hynd do his thing in person. In the north-west desert of Australia, where as a fity-four-year-old and blind in one eye, he took on slabbing lefts sans fins.

We were there as part of a classical music art project – I had wangled on as an official forecaster. It sounds wank but was actually insanely good. One night Hynd had too much to drink and there was a disagreement, a pretty robust one between him and the director.

It got ugly.

Just talk, but still ugly. A lot of hurt feelings.

I know he won’t be particularly proud of that or even happy the anecdote is told but what I saw him do the day after with a savage hangover, in his fifties at a barely surfable slab, taking off wave after wave and setting an edge into oblivion, was the greatest display of surfing I’ve ever witnessed.

The centrepiece of Beyond Litmus is devoted to Derek Hynd’s experience of dealing with throat cancer. If ever there was a reason to quit, that would be it. Hynd says he felt no desire to get back in the water after chemotherapy, that a simple bowl of soup was about the highest pleasure imaginable.

Some of that desert surfing, shot by Jon Frank, makes the film.

Matt Warshaw made the observation in a recent newsletter that Australians, by and large, don’t quit surfing.

The centrepiece of Beyond Litmus is devoted to Derek Hynd’s experience of dealing with throat cancer. If ever there was a reason to quit, that would be it. Hynd says he felt no desire to get back in the water after chemotherapy, that a simple bowl of soup was about the highest pleasure imaginable.

Ravaged by cancer and its chemical and radioactive treatments he presents the very image of what the gas station attendant in Grapes of Wrath thought of the Joads when he saw them, “a hard looking outfit”.

You’re scared of cancer. We all are. I’m so terrified I wouldn’t even go to the Doctor to get mine cut out for over a year.

Hearing Hynd describe it as “raw and honest” and that it “superseded most life experiences”, including surfing was humbling and shocking. He describes it as an experience almost as pure and visceral as riding his dragster to the beach with dogs in tow in the dark hours before sunrise as a fifteen year old.

That seminal desire is turned into a lurid piece of psychedelic animation by Ben Jarvis. It’s the closest thing to a DMT trip without taking the trip. A wide awake dream scored by a haunting piece of post-rock soundscape.

Find that animation and see it. Even if you hate it it’s a trip worth taking. Believe me.

Tom Curren off tour and in his native habitat was a huge part of Litmus and his lengthy cameo in Beyond Litmus sings.

Were you sad when they wheeled Curren out for the legends heat with Occy at this years Bells? I felt very sad to see this shambles of a man being wheeled out for our entertainment. On his skimboard with his mumbling and his anxiety, there was something cruel about it. And his surfing looked terrible.

Made up like a clown, his expressions are so much better than words at bringing the inner Tom Curren to life.

Were you sad when they wheeled Curren out for the legends heat with Occy at this years Bells? I felt very sad to see this shambles of a man being wheeled out for our entertainment. On his skimboard with his mumbling and his anxiety, there was something cruel about it. And his surfing looked terrible.

In Beyond Litmus, Curren presents a rationale for the single fin and follows up with a fluid demonstration on a self-shaped singley. The lines we love are there. The deep cut off the bottom and the fluid swoop. The position forwards tube stance. It’s reassuring. Uplifting.

Weirdness is a funny thing and Curren wears it better than anybody but to see Curren surfing like Curren is alone worth the price of the ticket.

Hows your attention span?

Mine’s shot, for surf porn. Halfway through a three-minute POV Skeleton Bay tube-ride and I’m hitting pause. Fuk that noise, already seen it.

Yet, I’ve just spent six months getting through Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and the hour and twenty of Beyond Litmus flew by like a dream.

What I’m trying to say is, if you are familiar with Kidman’s work, the films, the books, the music, this is his best one. The most accomplished. The most beautiful. The most moving.

The biz model ain’t for everyone either.

You buy direct and you pay more.

But every cent goes into the right pockets, into the next project. I think this is a good thing to own.

To watch sober, sideways or hungover and wondering what the fuck to do with your life, with the time you have left.

If nothing else it exists as a document to remind us of the value of our own freedom.

(Beyond Litmus Derek Hynd a film/book project by Andrew Kidman and Jon Frank
100 page hardbound book (210 x 210) and DVD containing archival and never before seen footage, photographs and interviews with Derek Hynd, compiled and produced by Andrew Kidman and Jon Frank. Buy here.)