Revealed: Flowrider not to blame for “janky” tsunami surf scene in Escape from L.A. but rather damned skateboarders Tony Hawk and Chris Miller!

They wreck everything.

Skateboarding has been a little bastard since surfing pushed him out of the womb in those halcyon Southern California post-war years. Imagine how much better off we’d be without those four wheels and a deck of sin. Imagine how much happier.

We’d be able to name our grabs and airs for one. Instead of “method” and “melon” etc. we could use the more sensible “spinny” and “twirly.”

Also, Escape from L.A.’s tsunami surfing scene would be a cinematic high water mark, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Two days ago, we heard from computer graphics supervisor David Jones who was inspired by the newly invented Tom Lochetefeld Flowrider.

“I’d seen reference to a standing wave surf park in Texas. You see them on cruise ships now where you blast water up a wave shaped thing and you can surf by basically standing in the middle of the curve and the water’s rushing under you so it’s supporting the board. The first of these had just opened in Texas and got on the nightly news. I said, ‘Oh, it’s no problem, chaps. We’ll just go down to Texas, put green screens up behind the standing wave and shoot it there and then we can comp it in. It’ll be marvelous.’”

Well, as the story continues, “That’s what we did. The thing that I could’ve taken into account is back then it was very, very difficult to stand up and surf on those things. Professional surfers couldn’t do it. Only the guys that worked at the Texas place could do it. They looked janky. It did look janky.”

As revealed just last evening via secret email, however, the Flowrider was not to blame but rather the stunt doubles surfing the Flowrider.

Who were they?

Professional skateboarders Tony Hawk and Chris Miller.

Of course it looked janky. Skateboarders don’t understand fluid dynamics at all. They don’t understand much of anything else either, as it goes.

Hawk is currently teaching a “master class” on tricks etc.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CBs3r2hHaC0/

Not recommended.

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Dez lets out a long moan. "Ohhh, you have the most…" His voice splinters. "Beautiful little baby biceps."

Listen: “BeachGrit is an anti-val stronghold cheered on by a homoerotic cheerleading squad (and is) the most successful media outlet of any board sport!”

"BeachGrit has an insane amount of page views, visitors, zero advertising constraints, they say what they like, and they're now in a position to make masses of money!"

One of the more enjoyable aspects of creating a website without any sorta ideology beyond having a little fun and being able to lay on our lazy asses all day, is hearing other people talk about it.

In this podcast, which was prepared by English snowboarder and late blooming surfer, Matt Burr, we are gifted an opening monologue that describes BeachGrit as the biggest thing in board sports even if everyone who reads it wears bikini swimsuits and covers their bedroom walls in magazine ads of buff boys in frilly dresses; men who with effortless fluid motions can wink an eye, throw a kiss and toss their hair at the same time.

Matt believes that the “vast majority of interviews you see, read or hear tend to be anodyne, reductive, dull and often ill-informed” and, therefore, if you close your eyes during this interview with Charlie Smith, you can feel the empathic warmth Burr envelopes Charlie in.

“I’ve always been intrigued by Chas,” writes Matt in the podcast notes. “Firstly because I met him last year and found him to be utterly charming. Secondly, because in its way this persona as as much of a cliche as the very surf conformity he has spent his career railing against, and I’ve long suspected that nobody is more aware of that than Charlie himself. All of which begged a fairly obvious question as I sat down to interview him for this episode of the podcast: where does ‘Chas Smith’ end and Charlie Smith begin?”

The homo stuff is in the beginning.

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The face of privilege.
The face of privilege.

Long Read: “The sport that helped popularize the graphic T-shirt, birthed skateboarding and gave the world a name for loafing online is, like other American subcultures, confronting a scourge of racism that has thrived within its own ranks!”

Ouch!

A longer new piece on today’s NBC News explores surfing’s very racist past. I am sometimes surprised to read the opinions of professors of surf journalism, founders and directors of university centers for surf research and authors of political histories of surfing of whom I’ve never once heard.

Surfing is, to me, a small bubble where all the players are known or known adjacent but I suppose in this day of hard interior looks, that is simply my bubble perspective.

I don’t know, however, how a piece can be written without a chat to author of The History of Surfing and the Encyclopedia of Surfing Mr. Matt Warshaw.

In any case, journalist Dennis Romero writes, “The sport that helped popularize the graphic T-shirt, birthed skateboarding and gave the world a name for loafing online is, like other American subcultures, confronting a scourge of racism that has thrived within its own ranks.”

The Outrigger Club in Waikiki in 1911 culturally appropriating surfing and making it white, localism as a form of racial discrimination, The Endless Summer leaving out the word “apartheid”, Windansea kids traveling up to the 1965 Watts Riots for “entertainment”, Jeff Spicoli representing privilege and the racist sentiment associated with those who oppose the “Brazilian Storm” are all probed.

An accurate portrayal?

I don’t think so, especially not where it relates to localism as a form of racial discrimination. I’m certain there are racist locals but surf localism is much broader along with rage-filled surf tribalism and very rude surf shaming, as my transition to mid-lengther is teaching me.

Ouch!

I am also a white male so my opinion counts for zero but what is your opinion? What do you think?

Just kidding. Your opinion counts for zero too.

Read here!

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Beschen, main photo, orange Dez, top, and Cabo Chas, below.

Listen: “Least huggable pro of all” Shane Beschen reveals his and Derek Hynd’s failed world tour putsch, “gnarly racism to haoles” and the dirty secret/lonely rendezvous he shares with super shaper Jon Pyzel!

"Like Medina, he never put on an act for anyone."

Today’s guest on Dirty Water is the former world title contender turned super coach Shane Beschen.

He was one of the first surfers on tour to regularly bring airs into heats, he scored the highest total ever in a heat, thirty points via three tens on three waves, and he’s an in-demand coach with two shredder kids.

He abhors mediocrity in anything and his face has a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.

Two years ago, Beschen was described by the Encyclopedia of Surfing’s Matt Warshaw as “the least huggable pro of all” and said he “never put on act for our benefit. Kind of like Medina, but even less fucks given.”

On today’s podcast, Charlie in Cabo, Beschen in his beach shack at Rocky Point, me in Sydney, we talk about San Clemente when it was a wild little town run by Matt Archbold, Christian Fletcher and Martin Potter; seeing multi-generational change on the tour; the rebel tour he tried to launch with Derek Hynd and the fear it struck into little Taj Burrow’s heart; the “gnarly racism to haoles” in Hawaii, his secret east-side getaways with notorious North Shore heartthrob Jon Pyzel and the three stupid mistakes every damn intermediate surfer makes and how you can cure this hole in your heart.

Of course, no conversation with Shane Beschen would be complete without an examination of his famous US Open final with Kelly Slater in 1996.

Leave a review on Apple podcasts, good, bad, five stars or zero, just gotta be entertaining, send us the link and we’ll send you a tail-pad, anywhere in the world. Yeah, they’re that tough to move.

(Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher, TuneIn + Alexa, iHeartRadio, Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castro, Castbox, Podcast Addict, Podchaser, Deezer and Listen Notes.)

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Controversial: Berlin politicians plan to turn stadium “where Nazis once fetishised their belief in the supremacy of the Aryan body” into Olympic surf training facility!

“History is what happened in the past, and something we later-borns have to live with..."

Wild times etc. Weird times et. al. with World Surf League CEO Erik Logan actively stifling communication by capping employee phone calls to 45 minutes, maximum, sharks feasting on dolphins without their heretofore displayed reserve and Germans planning on winning surfing gold in the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games by building a surf training facility inside Berlin’s Olympiapark, a 1930s-era stadium “where Nazis one fetishised their belief in the supremacy of the Aryan body.”

Whoa!

As you are certainly aware, statues and monuments to past bad behaviors have become increasingly polarized. Confederate statues have been removed or fought over in the United States of America while English slave trader Robert Milligan’s statue was just ripped down and tossed in the Thames.

Germany has a larger issue as its past bad behaviors, like the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, lead to larger monuments, like the Olympiapark.

Hitler, himself, was involved in the design and construction of a great sport’s complex to be a centerpiece of propaganda during the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

While many symbols of Nazi rule have been removed or destroyed, including the bunker where Hitler killed himself, the Olympiapark has been a “protected structure” since 1966 but not without controversy.

Per The Guardian:

Peter Strieder, a former senator for urban development in the city, called for the removal of the monumental sculptures of athletes from the grounds, the renaming of buildings and streets that commemorate nationalist ideologues, and the lifting of the protected status of the Maifeld.

“The entire complex, all buildings, all their names, all sculptures, were borne out of the ideology of the Nazis,” wrote Strieder, a Social Democrat, in the weekly broadsheet Die Zeit.

Art historians have criticised the intervention. “History is what happened in the past, and something we later-borns have to live with,” responded the architect Hans Kollhoff in an article in the same newspaper. “You don’t get rid of it by removing monuments.”

Now, though, a new plan has been floated and titled Vision 2030. It imagines the grounds be opened as a “hotspot for Olympic and Paralympic Games” by building state of the art training facilities for runners, horse riders, swimmers, but especially the newest disciples like surfing and skateboarding.

Not included in Vision 2030 is what sort of artificial wave technology will be employed.

Do you have an opinion?

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