As panic sets in to a world under siege by invisible bug, one surfer stands tall…

I doubt, by now, if I have to press upon you the bona fides of surf historian Matt Warshaw, a former surfer who is currently confined at home in Seattle, Washington.

A peerless writer, researcher, thinker, owner of The Encyclopedia of Surfing, the very thread, no, the single thread, that holds surf culture together in the face of the WSL’s VAL onslaught.

On matters concerning the sport’s atrophying culture, there is no one else to turn to.

If you’ve yet to drink from his fountain, dip into,

“WHEN THE LAST ANALOG VERSION OF A SURF MOVIE OR MAGAZINE DISAPPEARS, THAT’S IT, GAME OVER, KISS IT GOODBYE!”

“I FIND IT PURIFYING THAT MEDINA GOES ABOUT HIS WORK WITH SO FEW FUCKS GIVEN!”

“WE’VE TRADED MAGIC FOR PERFECTION!”

In today’s weekly EOS mail-out, where his subscribers are treated to one thousand seamless words on whatever topics Warshaw has been into that week and in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic, he writes,

In exchange for you guys cutting me some slack, I make this offer: if anybody out there in EOS-land takes enough of a hit during the impending economic plunge that your subscription becomes a burden, let me know and I’ll pick up the cost until things get better.

I will continue to pull frivolity from our viral pandemic, in keeping with a whistle-past-the-graveyard response that, surprise surprise, is already the default setting for surfers and memers alike. On the other hand, there is no whistling away the fact that COVID-19 has literally hit home in Seattle. Schools closed here last week, meaning that in addition to being CEO of the world’s leading nonprofit surf history and cultural preservation website, I’m now a full-time stay-at-home Dad. Expect more typos and misplaced, commas, in other words.

In exchange for you guys cutting me some slack, I make this offer: if anybody out there in EOS-land takes enough of a hit during the impending economic plunge that your subscription becomes a burden, let me know and I’ll pick up the cost until things get better.

Social distancing means we are all going to have more time alone with our computers and phones. Between refreshing CNN Live Updates and watching our stock portfolios contract like a hot panful of Shrinky Dinks, we might as well kill time together on EOS. So hit me up. You guys rallied and kept EOS going when we were on the brink. I’m glad to carry anyone who needs it from now till vaccine day.

And to go out on a high note, remember that surfing, in these tense and unsettled times, is practically a life-saving act. Barring some kind of open-mouth collision with another surfer, riding waves is the safest thing this side of trail running through the Falklands. In other words, we just became half as selfish and twice as righteous.

No one quite like Matt Warshaw is there?

Put him in a shimmering white silk micro dress and a blue-black wig that hangs to his shoulders and jam his size ten feet into white square-toed pump with rhinestone buckle and I’d marry the bastard.

Subscribe to the Encycopedia of Surfing here. 

"A kind of saintly, adorable ET whose sole purpose is to remind us only about tolerance and our prejudices…"

Transformed is a documentary series from WSL Studios, currently into its second season, that tells “stories of surf ambassadors whose lives were transformed through surfing, and who are now transforming their communities through the power of surfing.”

The first series “sparked an emotional response from surf fans and resonated with a broader audience,” said the WSL’s CEO Erik Logan.

It’s a good spin.

The YouTube numbers were terrible, between four thousand and six thousand views an episode, a handful of comments.

The second series, between three thousand and thirteen thousand.

On a medium where Jamie O’Brien gets two-and-a-half million views for riding softboards down a sewer drain’s steep incline, the numbers are catastrophic.

Why the lack of engagement?

These are pretty, well-made films with every emotional button pushed: brave women fighting patriarchies, a legless Colombian, cruel Taliban overlords in Afghanistan and a focus on People of Colour.

Of series two’s four eps, the first three feature,

India’s First Female Surfer,

How Women In Surfing Are Changing the World, with Senegal’s Khadjou Sambe

And, A Surfer From South Central,

All gorgeous stories, break out the tissues etc.

I watch ‘em all over and over, big fan, especially chubby LA guy gets out of gangsta lifestyle  via surfing, a real weepy.

Yesterday, this IG post appeared.

Edgy. 

I hadn’t noticed, too busy sniffling and jazz-handing, although it did make me wonder,

Is the sentiment of Transformed the same as the media’s canonisation of the Gay Man as Magical Elf, a theory held by superstar eighties author Bret Easton Ellis.  

“The sweet and smiley and sexually unthreatening elf with liberal values and a positive attitude is supposed to transform everyone into noble gay-loving protectors… a kind of saintly, adorable ET whose sole purpose is to remind us only about tolerance and our prejudices,” he writes.

Ergo,

Is the WSL festishising people of colour and is it this patronising approach masquerading as progressive values that has its potential audience staying away in droves?

Or not?

Booze, food, fuel, running low.

Ramifications from the world’s response to coronavirus are far reaching. Yet to be fully understood.

Border closures. Enforced quarantines. Essential social services in many countries suspended. Macro decisions that hit on a micro level.

The biggest social upheaval since World War II plays out in myriad ways.

As I write, twelve surfers from Newcastle, Australia, are in limbo off the coast of Sumba, east of Bali. Stranded by a political decision that sees them unable to disembark from their boat nor allowed to return home.

While they were out chasing waves in a mobile reception dead zone, local government authorities decreed no foreigners could set foot on land in any of their ports for fear of spreading the mildly lethal virus further.

Upon their return, they found the world had shut up shop.

No back to life, no back to reality.

At one stage, the dozen were down to the final meal and running dangerously low on basic supplies. The skipper they’d use the last of their fuel to travel to nearby Flores, but there was no guarantee they could land there either.

Many have already missed connecting flights home (and will now face a two-week quarantine for their troubles when they do finally make it).

“We’ve had one boat come out to speak to us to basically tell us we can’t come to land,” one of the surfers, Brydon Roper, told 9News.“This is a ten-day surf charter so the guys that run this boat stocked it for ten days only of food and water.”

Dire times east of the Wallace line.

Yet surf travel companies in my Facebook feed are still advertising business as usual in the Ments, up the other end of the archipelago. Freedom of passage assured, lack of crowds guaranteed. Social distancing to be enforced on the trip, allegedly. But any person that’s ever stepped foot on one of those testosterone-soaked love boats knows how that will play out

Cheap deals for you, mister.

Special price for today only. Shred the apocalypse.

But the situation is evolving as quickly as the virus spreads.

The only knowns are the unknowns and a real-world, geopolitical unravelling that would rival any right-wing-left-wing conspiracy fantasy.

So what would you do for love in the time of coronavirus?

Risk a dirt-cheap trip and uncrowded perfection for the chance of quarantine, forced berthing, or worse?

It’s a yeah, nah, for me.

Obvious question: who did it better?

In 2010, the filmmaker Kai Neville was shooting for what would become his, and the epoch’s, defining masterwork, Lost Atlas. 

That golden period. All collaborative artists have ’em.

It’s only years later, upon reflection, that we can trawl through their work and call it.

Kai Neville, the now thirty-seven-year-old filmmaker and sunglass company co-owner had grabbed the performance surf film space after his debut Modern Collective.

But for Kai, it was his second film, Lost Atlas, that built his reputation into a profitable exercise.

A decade later it’s still his masterwork. It came at a time when he had John John Florence, Jordy Smith, Dusty Payne and Dane Reynolds in his pocket.

And, in the middle of 2010, Kai joined your ol pal DR and the Stab gang to shoot Oakley teamriders Julian Wilson, Kolohe Andino, Adam Melling and Evan Geiselman in a Canary Islands wavepool, with lighting and stills by master technician Richard Freeman. 

The clip, which starts twenty-eight minutes into Lost Atlas, is most surreal, an ethereal interlude in a most prosaic film.

Recently, the German motorcar company Audi, employed the surfers Stephanie Gilmore, Coco Ho and Leah Dawson to, and one must suppose here, recreate the Lost Atlas sequence, and which you can watch below.

The obvious question is who did it better?

Do bear in mind that Kai shot and edited his sequence solo, and using a seven-hundred dollar Canon 7D camera, while the Audi team hired the noted Australian filmmaker and artist Daniel Askill (Chanel, with Kristen Stewart, Dior, with Jude Law, BMW, Air France) and a cast of many.

(Watch the behind-the-scenes clip of Audi film here.)