"A white dude getting credit for a thing that already exists…"

The world sure do love a bitchy critic. Personal favs, AA Gill and Rex Reed, the former doing over restaurants, the latter, film. 

Describing the shrimp-and-foie-gras dumplings at a very well regarded NY restaurant, Gill wrote, “What if we called them fishy liver-filled condoms? They were properly vile, with a savor that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital.” 

The New York Times’ Culture and Styles reporter and Menswear critic Guy Trebay, is cut from a similar if cheaper cloth. Anna Wintour’s face is “vulpine”; describing Lady Gaga’ style, she has barged “right past imitation to outright larceny.”

And so on. 

One man who didn’t feel Trebay’s claws in a recent review of his clothing label Stan (jackets $1500 etc) is the surfer and model Tristan Detwiler. 

In the story, Men’s Wear Is on a Quilt Trip, Trebay describes Detwiler as “a handsome surfer with apostle’s locks, a silver thumb ring and a palm tree tattoo on his hand” and Detwiler’s hand-made clothes, fashioned from old quilts, as something reminiscent of the great designers, Raf Simons, Ralph Lauren, Junya Watanabe etc.

A glowing endorsement while skewering other new designers.

“(Stan) was a standout in a day of disappointing designer efforts: stuff like the skirts, skorts and knit tunics from Chelsea Grays, garments so laborious tattered they looked like the aftermath of a moth banquet; or Carter Altman’s Carter Young men’s wear staples organized around some sadly hoary signifiers of a nostalgia-steeped New York; or Aaron Potts’s APotts collection of clothes so intentionally without reference to secondary sexual characteristics they made you itch for a Cardi B video; or ONYRMRK, a new Los Angeles label designed by Mark Kim and Rwang Pam, whose layered plaid puffer parkas (try it three times fast) underscored fashion’s growing westward drift.”

Detwiler self-describes as “an artist and storyteller. That’s what I believe in. Fashion is the easiest way to tell my story.”

Now, social media has hit back with accusations of sexism and white male privilege.

Writes @dietprada, two-and-a-half million followers,

In December, NYT reported that sewing was “back” because men were publicly participating, calling it a “long-neglected home art”, though home sewing’s popularity has on the rise for years, mostly led by women. Why does it take men, especially “handsome” ones with “apostle’s locks”, to validate it?
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Stan is hardly the first line to make clothing from discarded quilts. In fact, the overall look begs comparison to the female-founded label @bode, launched by Emily Adams Bode in 2016. Her early one-offs caught the industry’s attention for their unusual level of refinement so often lacking in upcycled clothes. She also presented a new level of cohesion and narrative, building a world with pieces picked from the flea markets and even linen closets of her own childhood. ⠀

Even the Times’ own readers took issue with the piece.

“Something feels amiss in this article, with the unnecessary disparaging comments on other young & new designers (many of named being a combination of woman & poc) in order to positively highlight another designer… who is noted in the article to not be doing anything of particular uniqueness… and who happens to be a white male of generic attractiveness… The writer mentions Emily Bode’s designs with admiration, but anything short of those praises would be insulting as Detwiler’s designs share more than a passing similarity to Bode’s who is also a new designer with a couple extra years under her belt. The doppelgänger effect between the two’s work is so striking it makes me wonder why this even article exists. Why praise him, and through what lens is the writer looking through that makes him do prepared to tear down those other designers to support this nonsense?”

The takeaway here is two-fold, I’d suggest:

One, being a ravishing surfer with a apostle locks gets you a long way in the fashion world and, two, is there not an endeavour, an art, that hasn’t been gang-raped, mercilessly violated, by white male privilege?

The existential question at the heart of Outdated Children.

An interesting development in the last year with the cancellation of the WSL CT tour has been the emergence of what I call Non-CT ripping to fill the vacuum created in the surfing media landscape.

This phenomenon, if we agree on that basic premise, makes Mick Waters’ film Outdated Children a more mandatory watch then it was a year ago when the film was released.

It’s an antidote to the WSL, not quite a throwback but a realistic counter-factual to the question: how might surfing have evolved or how might it be now if the WSL, nee ASP, nee IPS had never existed, or if it was to go the way of the Dodo.

It’s soul porn set primarily in the Southern Ocean and I certainly don’t intend any derogatory meaning in that.

How much of a life devoted to surfing is praiseworthy and how much is running away?

That’s the existential question at the heart of Outdated Children. I fall heavily on the side of the filmmaker who declares his position by placing at the beginning of the film a quote from Wayne Lynch who declares surfing a “wonderful way to grow old; a way to stay childlike without being childish”.

Partners of surfers may have a different view, of course.

To answer that central question, Waters presents a series of vignettes of surfers who have stayed the course and have (mostly) got an act on dry land. We won’t spoil the film by detailing them all; just discuss a few who exemplify the main theme.

Glen Casey brought the Patagonia franchise to Australia, helped save forest in the Otways and built himself a timber cabin in the woods. He’s also late fifties, raising a kid, two hip replacements in and shredding.

How old can you be and still get properly barrelled? Still throw proper buckets?

We probably won’t know the upper limit to that until Kelly kicks the bucket but late fifties, sixties is now looking grand if you can keep yourself near the beach.

Case kicks it hard on a 6’9” Maurice Cole Metro which shows if you can fuck pride before it fucks you and get on decent equipment there are many happy days ahead. I rang Case to confirm the board and he’d just got out of the water at the Point, riding a 7’10” mid-length twin, which I think we should not hold against him.

Beach clean-ups in remote south-west Tasmania, much non-CT shredding, tales of derring do at Shipsterns, a wonderful sequence of no name Sandy Ryan who hikes in to paddle surf all day.

It’s all gloriously hard core.

I was shocked to see in the film, living a Thoreau-ean dream on the edge of Tasmania, a guy who I used to share a hovel with on the Goldy and get on the end of many Orchy bottles with, they may have been dual paw paw stems in a beer bottle.

Addy Jones is making surfboards from entirely recycled materials, getting the job done in the vegie garden and nursing baby wombats back to health. I always knew him as a very loose cat but to see him walking the walk like that bought up many conflicting thoughts.

How the fuck is an environmental vandal like Kelly Slater being lauded while the real deal is there doing it in plain sight?

Kudos to Mick Waters for putting Addy’s story out there.

Many different varieties of whip ridden in the fillum. My personal fav was Heath Joske on a single fin shredding solid lefts and a single fin gun at a triple OH bommie off the southern Australian coastline.

In my favourite sequence of the movie, desert rat Geoff “Camel” Goulden rides a variety of high volume guns* at various slab reefs, outer bommies and north-west reefs. There will be mixed opinions on Camel, summed up perhaps by his cryptic statement in reference to surfing being the best and that “he had tried other stuff”.

Camel is the antipodean and less articulate Miki Dora of the times. His sequence, in my opinion, elevates the film to a must watch.

Outdated Children left a slightly odd taste in my mouth.

After watching these southern men, and women build houses, tend vegie gardens, wrangle White shark-infested slabs in the (successful) pursuit of pure fun, and something far more intense than that a tangled mix of emotions wrestled for dominance.

I felt like a loser, a jerk, a hillbilly, a wastrel, a dilettante.

A voice inside me said “you should be doing this. Cuddling baby wombats, planting olive trees and taking on that wild Southern Ocean”.

More than anything, it reminded me of the classic closing line in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Torso of an Archaic Apollo whereby the protagonist of the poem upon viewing the statue is exhorted “You must change your life”.

Mick Waters did.

Packed up the family, took ’em on the road around the Island continent, built himself a shack on Tassie. Divides his time between there and the North Coast. This film is the flourishing and the fruit of that labour and that decision. It wasn’t easy. Southern folk don’t always appreciate the moving picture.

Mick shot some of it hiding in a blanket in the back of a Landy.

Nothing is named, nothing is blown out, ratted on. It’s just the Southern Ocean, maybe the most VAL-unfriendly place on earth. At least as well known for its submarine size sharks as its backpacker serial killers.

A heaven worth protecting. Too hard-core for me, though.

Whats your vice(s)? Mine are strictly norm-core. Prawn and garlic pies from the servo, mid-strengths from Four Pines brewery. For less than two prawn and garlic pies, which I believe to be the greatest thing ever invented, I can rent Outdated Children.

Take your time with it. It rewards the rewatch in the same way watching Curren’s film did.

You must change your life.

You probably won’t though, so, like me watch the film and live vicariously through those who did.

Rent or buy Outdated Children via Vimeo here. 

*Mostly the Webster Desert Storm, review to come.

“If it were not for New South Wales, the WSL Championship Tour would not be happening globally."

The deputy premier of NSW has made the stunning and, in my opinion correct, claim that his government is responsible for saving the world tour. 

Speaking in Parliament, and after ripping into Lennox locals for knocking back the gov’s millions, Giovanni “John” Barilaro said, “The opportunity that came out of the rejection from Lennox Head was that we were able to steal two events. Attracting the best surfers in the world to New South Wales supports our locals and sports stars of the future. That is a fact. Santa Cruz and Hawaii were shut down. Bells Beach and Snapper Rocks are, of course, no longer happening.”

And the zinger, “If it were not for New South Wales, the WSL Championship Tour would not be happening globally.”

John Borilaro is a name that has become familiar to Australian surfers over the past month; while his opposite numbers in Victoria and Queensland fastened their nursing bras, Barilaro gave a reeling WSL the free-flowing NSW taxpayer’s teat. 

It ain’t such a bad idea, politically and on the ground.

Five mill per event, say, and you trump your idealogical rivals interstate and drive a bit of life into a pandemic-depressed economy. 

He’s a wildcat, ol Giovanni Barilaro.

Last September he brought his government, of which his conservative National Party is the bit-player in a coalition with the Liberal Party, to its knees over the protection of koalas. 

Libs wanted to pass legalisation to protect the furry bastards, meaning farmers and property owners would have to jump through a few loopholes before they bulldozed native trees etc. 

Barilaro said, essentially, fuck the bears.

The legislation, he said, would be a “nail in the coffin for farmers.”

“Imagine being so out of touch and arrogant you thought it was a good idea to spit the dummy because you wanted to be able to wipe out koalas,” said Greens MP Jenny Leong.

Libs didn’t want to lose government to the socialist ALP and therefore capitulated.

As we’ve posited before, the teats of state governments in Australia have long been a source of nourishing funds for pro surfing, although as Longtom pointed out after the Lennox Head fiasco, “It looks like cheap rent-seeking for a product that few want in their backyards and a story that has never really made sense except for a few rare birds who live at an altitude the rest of us will never attain.”

And, “Without a functioning business model to wean itself off State Tourism bodies the WSL is locked in a prison of its own making.” ­