World famous DJ and influencer Diplo nearly decapitated at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch: “I got rocked!”

Rare company.

Oh the unseen dangers lurking amongst the tule fog and cow stink of central California’s Lemoore. There is: 1) Stiffer than normal whiskey sodas poured at the Tachi Palace Casino Resort by gruff bartenders. 2) Methamphetamine. 3) Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch which boasts “The World’s Best and Longest Barrel for Human Beings Under Three Feet Tall.”

I know first hand.

When Derek Rielly and I traveled there, a handful of years ago, to participate in “media day” at the aforementioned Surf Ranch we shared a comfortable room at the Tachi Palace and drank a handful of whiskey sodas each. I somehow escaped the head-splitting, stomach-turning hangover but Derek Rielly did not, waking up the morning we were scheduled to hunch into the aforementioned barrel very green in the face.

He somehow worked through his discomfort and put on quite a show for Chris Cotê, Vaughn Dead, Nick Carroll and others.

I did not and as poet laureate Ben Marcus enjoys immortalizing, bounced off the cement bottom and loosened my arm from its socket.

It was not the first time. My arm had been loosened from its socket a good 30-ish times prior but still very frustrating and as I shuffled to the pool’s edge, reinserting it, I was very frustrated though semi-placated myself with re-inserting it in front of the lifeguard while sneering about medical attention. Like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon.

Well, I am now joined by world famous DJ and influencer Diplo who just became nearly decapitated by the Oompa-Loompa.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFU-pBtH9N5/

Ouch but I feel Diplo’s pain. That 30-ish time was enough for me to get my arm surgically sewn in and while it was a horrible experience my arm no longer falls out of place. I would recommend the same to Diplo, re. his head, and will hope that poet laureate Ben Marcus also eulogizes him.

Very cool.

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@sensitiveseashellcollector
@sensitiveseashellcollector

Desperately Seeking: “(40) Male, legendary pro surfer with dreamy eyes, handsome face, chiseled physique. Adults swoon at the sight of him and children aspire to be him!”

Let's assume Kelly Slater is unavailable.

Very famous television producer Darren Starr (Sex and the City, Beverly Hills 90201, Melrose Place) has a new project currently airing that may require you. The show is called Younger and mainly set in New York City, chronicling the personal and professional life of Liza Miller, a divorced 40-year-old woman with a teenage daughter and a failed marriage that collapsed due to her former husband’s gambling addiction. After 26-year-old tattoo artist Josh mistakenly thinks that he and Liza are about the same age, she concocts a plan to pass herself off as a 20-something to re-enter the ageist industry of publishing, later becoming the assistant of Empirical Press marketing head Diana Trout and befriending Kelsey Peters, a co-worker.

Obviously very fabulous and coming up on its seventh season, which is where you come in. Episode 703 is desperately seeking “(40) Male, legendary pro surfer, he has become his own brand with a sustainable clothing line, reality television show, as well as a sizable and meaningful charitable foundation. With dreamy eyes, handsome face and chiseled physique adults swoon at the sight of him and children aspire to be him. At a pitch meeting for a book he wants to write he locks eyes with Liz and the chemistry is palpable.”

Now, of course Starr and team are desperately seeking Kelly Slater as, minus the sizable and meaningful charitable foundation, he ticks all the boxes but we must assume he is too busy to play himself (the generous version) on television.

Who knows Kelly Slater better than us though?

Exactly right.

You’re 40, or could play 40, and male, aren’t you? Have enough insight into the mind of the greatest professional surfer of all time and are considered dreamy, handsome, chiseled or at least could be.

No?

KVF?

Wiggs?

Lemoore Goat Rodeo, Hippy, SSD, Bex, VONR, Otto, Channel?

Come on. One of you has this.

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Lou Harris, gettin' it done.

How to live, drive and survive in Rockaway Beach, NY!

Meet a wildcat who gives free surf and ocean safety lessons to any kid who swings by the beach…

Make a  wrong turn at any NYC corner and you can quickly go from sunny side of the street to sudden disembowelment in the flash of a homeless pan.

The City will flip you that way.

A stroll down Fifth Avenue can lead to secret bends where light-fingered larcenists will free you from the weight of your wallet. Within each borough, inside its own little section, down isolated blocks, there are enough lines of demarcation to make a Rubiks’s Cube dizzy.

And the Rockaway Beach (yeah, Ramones Rockaway Beach) section of Queens County is no different.

The Rockaway peninsula technically runs from 9th street in the east to 126th street in the west. (The surf really cuts off around 35th street, blocked by Long Beach Barrier Island.)

The west end (Belle Harbor, Neponsit) are what your local housewife fingering a 12:01 afternoon Chardonnay would call “affluent.” Multi million-dollar homes. No subway access. No public boardwalk. Parking permits for residents required. Lifeguard stands every 150 feet. They say this section is protected by the old guard, Irish fireman and cops who’s lineage in the force can be traced to the “Gangs of New York” time in the five boroughs.

As you roll further east (Far Rockaway) you approach the Mason/Dixon line of 74th street.

Within this area you will find the Edgemere and Hammell projects. And, as ODB of The Wu would say, they ain’t nothing to fuck with. A point proved during a surf check by two surfers around 62nd street. While walking back to the car the two surfers are greeted by two Dodge Chargers parked in a “V” blocking the street.

The president of the Welcoming Committee of Hammell sincerely asks “DA FUCK YOU DOIN HERE!”

Surfers walk to the car silent and drive towards the road-block. A curb hop and zig-zag navigation through street signs and local solders yields an escape, but not before a bottle is hurled and cracks the cars back window.

Welcome to the Old Rockaways, east end.

It is in this section of the Rockaways where the drownings occur.

Mostly teenage children of Latin and African American decent from the east side of the Rockaways. The side where there are four lifeguard stands for seventy blocks of beach. There were seven drownings this summer alone. A national study released by USA Swimming says six out of ten black and Latino kids can’t swim. Most of these kids have no knowledge of the ocean and its currents and have never heard of a riptide.

Ask anyone who’s read a book and they will tell you this dates back to the segregated pool days.

Enter Lou Harris.

He is the founding member of Black Surfing Association Rockaway, a division of the Black Surfing Association, that operates in Queens.

Lou gives free surfing and ocean safety lessons to any kid who stops by.

“I don’t care if you’re black, white, Asian or Muslim,” he says. “If there’s five of you, and you’re hanging out on the corner with no job, you’re going to get into trouble.”

Of course, it’s a non profit.

Check out their Instagram here.

And, if you wanna help cut a path to a kids enjoyment of the ocean, hit the GoFundMe here:

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"Mysterious strawberry blonde" Sarah Foote

“Mysterious strawberry blonde” accused of stalking Mick Fanning sentenced to jail

Busts off tracking device installed after Fanning episode… 

Earlier in the year, you’ll remember, a woman was charged with the unlawful stalking of three-time world champ Mick Fanning, breaking into his Hamptons-themed three-storey house with intent and two counts of stealing.

Sarah Foote, a thirty-nine-year-old from Ballina, same age as Mick as it happens, is accused of following Fanning between January 29 and February 4, the break-in of Mick’s pretty beachfront joint in Bilinga allegedly happening on Feb 2.

Foote is accused of sending “rambling hand-written letters with accusations of pedophilia, declarations of love for Fanning and thoughts of wanting to kill him.”

While that case has to be resolved the woman faced court earlier this month charged with breaching her bail and wilful damage of police property, busting off the tracking device she was ordered to wear after being charged with stalking Fanning. 

Ms Foote, who has been engaging in a cute chat exchange with a pal of a pal on Facebook, sub judice prevents me from revealing those details, was sentenced to three months behind bars but released immediately on parole and ordered to pay eight hundred bucks in compensation for the electronic tracking device. 

Four days ago, a sixty-six-year-old man, previously banned from coming within even half-a-click of seven-time world champ Stephanie Gilmore, was charged after allegedly approaching Gilmore at the Tweed Coast Pro on Sunday.

In 2012, a homeless schizophrenic junkie, Julius Fox, was sentenced to four years in jail after bashing Gilmore with an iron bar, breaking her wrist, outside her Tweed Heads apartment in 2010.

It ain’t all palm trees and water so warm you feel like you’re sloshing around in mammy’s womb up there in northern NSW and the Gold Coast.

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Accomplishment: Excerpt from surf journalist Chas Smith’s new book “Reports from Hell” makes it onto virtual pages of highly exclusive Men’s Journal!

“When you’re a jet you’re a jet all the way!”

I have tried not to pound my latest book through our BeachGrit, excessively, as self-promotion is ugly to see and stomach-turning to do but sometimes but sometimes pride overwhelms and especially where the Men’s Journal is involved.

Men don’t get journals anymore and the august publication, floating virtually alone in a modern sexless world, feels like a glorious last bastion. The only place I dreamed of appearing outside of Out.

Here is an excerpt from the Men’s Journal excerpt because I can’t help but glowing.

We treat al-Mukullah over the next ten days the way sloppy Germans, Danes, and Poles treat Mallorca, ambling around in the heat of the day between shops that sell ice-cream and internet cafés, driving out to the wave for a surf, driving back for a massive chicken lunch, driving out to the wave for an evening surf, driving back for a dinner of fried fish balls and banana mush next to the mosque.

Major Ghamdan mostly stayed in his room as far as I could tell and seemed resigned to whatever would happen, throwing up his hands and letting God decide our fate, really and truly getting into the “inshahallah” spirit the way all good Muslims and Calvinists do.

Irate younger men would approach semi-regularly, especially after evening prayers, eyes burning, and tell us that George Bush is a dog. Yemen was severely punished by George Sr. for holding the position that Arab nations should not intervene in the business between Iraq and Kuwait during the first Gulf War and even more severely punished by Kuwait and her neighbors as thousands of working Yemenis were expelled without warning.

George Jr. had just taken Baghdad in the second Gulf War not two months ago as the Global War on Terror found a new theater and was saber rattling through the rest of the region, demanding that nations were either for us or against us, and if they were against us—well, things would not go well.

Depending on our collective mood we would either argue back that the Bush family was a proud American legacy or agree and either way the conversations would end with warm proclamations of friendship and hand-holding beneath the starry skies of Mukullah, a striking town that grows better with experience.

The way the light bathes it in the day, the way heat radiates off every surface at night. The mix of Indian, British, Persian, Indonesian, and East African influences. Architecture, food, and dress harkening to the days when it was a center of the trading world. Osama bin Laden’s family chose their region well, and my desire to live in the Hadramawt grew unchecked.

Most nights belonged to music videos or accidentally CNN’s international version. The Horse did indeed have televisions and not one but two music video channels from Saudi Arabia and from Lebanon, which worked brilliantly when one switched to Live from Mecca programming unless they both switched to it at the same time. It blew my expectations out of the water, and even though Josh would semi-regularly reference how epic the hotel by the mosque was and how it was also closer to fried fish balls, we all feasted on Stone Temple Pilots, Ricky Martin, Alicia Keys, Incubus, Uncle Cracker, Nelly Furtado, and Enrique Iglesias with equal relish—especially the Enrique Iglesias video featuring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Mickey Rourke in an epic ballad that brought me near tears every time it played, particularly when Enrique Iglesias looked deep into Jennifer Love Hewitt’s eyes and said, “I can be your hero, baby. I can kiss away the pain.”

One evening, as we traipsed back to our hotel from fried fish balls, a group of young men followed us into a small, empty corridor and unsheathed their jambiyas, flashing the curved steel and yelling that we were Americans. Josh lowered his shoulder and ran at them like a corn-fed University of Michigan fullback. They tossed them into a nearby bush and took off sprinting, and the whole scene felt wonderful, harkening back to a simpler, less litigious time when back-alley street fights between rival hoods were commonplace.

“When you’re a jet you’re a jet all the way!” I shouted as they rounded the corner, Josh hot on their wedge-sandaled heels.

Another evening as we sauntered back we saw a massive crowd out front the shopfront where we bought our morning coffees. A sea of turbaned heads sitting cross-legged on a piece of Astroturf rolled out for the occasion. As we got nearer we saw they were all watching a tiny rabbit-earred television, and as we got nearer still saw the television was showing a pro surf contest from Hawaii the year earlier.

I couldn’t believe it. Here in al-Mukallah—a thousand miles from the nearest semblance of surf culture and ten thousand miles from Oahu’s North Shore—a few hundred men were silently basking in the Pastime of Kings. I elbowed one wearing a particularly neat turban-skirt combination, pointed at the television, and told him that’s what we did, what those men were doing on the television, riding tables on the ocean exactly like them. His eyes widened and I almost invited him to watch us live the next day but thankfully caught myself, realizing that while we indeed rode tables on the ocean exactly like the men on television, our surfing looked very different. So different, in fact, that it might have been confused as a separate water game altogether. One not so graceful or exciting. Still, the entire scene was so gorgeously surreal it made me positively giddy for days afterward.

And then, one hot morning, it is time to move on.

What did we find?

Here you go replete with photos!

What a time to be alive and self-promoting.

Take that, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West!

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