Malibu heavy Jonah Hill wows fans, last remaining critics, by twinning in powder blue “bare it all” suits with surf instructor girlfriend!

Has the surf life provided rocket fuel?

Malibu heavy, heir to Miki Dora’s throne, Jonah Hill has been on a rocket ship to superstardom in these the Covid days of our lives. Once a lovable boy famous for playing “non-threatening sidekicks,” Hill has transformed himself, or rather been transformed, into a beacon of body positivity, a leading man, a fashion icon, a voice to heard, a voice to be reckoned with.

Is it a coincidence that the meteoric rise in fame, fortune seems to be tied to his conquering of First Peak?

Well, esoteric questions, as such, are difficult to answer. What is undeniable is the heads Hill and his surf instructor girlfriend Sarah Brady turned, days ago, by showing up at the movie premier of Don’t Look Up twinning in powder blue Gucci suits.

Vogue described thusly:

Hill wore his suit without a shirt underneath, revealing his chest tattoo of a ship. The open jacket also revealed an aqua bead necklace reminiscent of an art teacher that offered an almost spiritual touch to the sleazy-chic ensemble. In Hill’s terminology, he looked, well, rad.

In lieu of a shirt, he finished off the suit with three floral pins on the lapel and metallic blue smoking slippers. His slicked-back bleached hair and full beard gave off a groovy rabbi vibe. To take the look to another level, Hill matched with his girlfriend Sarah Brady, who also wore a pale blue suit and the same slippers. The duo looked slick, low-key, and fun. On Instagram, Hill described the look, styled by Ezra Woods, as “glam space twins.”

@sarahhbrady (Instagram).
@sarahhbrady (Instagram).

Tatler called it “surfer dude fashion.”

Shaka emoji.

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Shark attack on surf cam!

Just in: Video of surfer being attacked and dragged under water by shark at Banyans on Hawaii’s Big Island, “Wham! Nails him right there! He’s down, now he’s going to pop up and swim to that guy!”

"Grabbed him by the arm and pulled him under and when it pulled him under it whipped  around and hit him in the face with its tail. Broke his nose and his jaw and knocked his teeth out."

Yesterday, word came in that a surfer had been hit by a Great White while surfing Banyans, one of the most popular breaks in the Kailua-Kona area.

Whites in Hawaii are pretty rare, but only eight days earlier a free-diver had filmed a fifteen-foot Great White swimming towards him off the coast of Hawaii’s Big Island so it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. 

Direct messages we saw from the surfer’s girlfriend indicate he identified the shark as a Great White and said it came at him with its mouth open and hit him so hard in the head it knocked out two of his teeth. The White dragged him under and, for whatever reason, let him go.

Other surfers in the area weren’t convinced it was a White,

“That Banyan’s shark incident is assumed to have been a black tip reef shark that had been seen acting aggressive over the last week,” one wrote to BeachGrit. “Grabbed him by the arm and pulled him under and when it pulled him under it whipped around and hit him in the face with its tail. Broke his nose and his jaw and knocked his teeth out. The fireman said he had a nasty cut on his arm and he’ll have a good scar but that’s about the extent of it… The kid said that it was a White shark but everyone who was around said no, and the firemen who responded said no. They also said that if you rewind the surf cam back you can see it happen.”

Ah, let’s rewind! Nice man, below, has provided commentary.

 

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Brophy and classic spray.

Iconic surf artist Drew Brophy on ventilator in ICU after being hit by COVID; family turns to crowdfunding to pay expected “six-figure medical bills”, “Drew is facing the biggest challenge of his life!”

San Clemente surfboard artist to the stars is real sick and it'd be nice to see him back in the water… 

Drew Brophy is ill and needs your long green. 

Yes, that Drew Brophy, the artist who painted the look of modern American surfing with his Posca pens and sideburns.

He’s got the Covid with all the trimmings, including ventilator.

Was Drew vaxxed? He can’t say.

Regardless, the cat needs some help. Being an independent contractor doesn’t come with goldenrod health insurance.

Lost Surfboards’ Instagram threw up a link to a sad letter on Gofundme.com from Drew’s brother.

You can read it here.

We know Drew’s art from the Lost boards of the nineties. His work is a straight-punch-to-the face.

Brophy started his career at ProGlass in Haleiwa after an overheard conversation between drunks at a hometown Myrtle Beach bar one night.

They needed a new airbrusher. Drew boarded a plane the next day and was gone.

Brophy found himself buried in board painting demand, doing jobs for multiple shapers. Plenty of pro boards fell under his brush too, painting pretty decks and rails for heavies Tom Curren, Tom Carroll, and others.

Between jobs, Brophy managed to spend ample time in the water, too — opportunities to zip into Pipeline barrels included. (Brophy is a serious big-wave bull fighter. Thumb through the April 1995 issue of SURFER, and you’ll see a beautiful photo of Drew wrapped tight in a perfect Puerto Escondido right.)

But he couldn’t pay the bills, existing on a slim diet of rice and his Hawaiian experience came to an end after a vicious hit to the face courtesy of Pipe reef.

Months of recovery followed, forcing Drew out of work and back to the mainland.

In 1996, he found a home sleeping in a friend’s garage and looking for work in the middle of San Clemente, basecamp for what was really goin’ on. Stewart picked up Brophy to paint longboards, paying about twenty dollars a board.

But the gentle airbrush fades required, leftover from the eighties, wasn’t quite his bag. Brophy had begun experimenting with paint pens from the Japanese company Uni-Posca and developed the raw, color-drenched, I-don’t-care-what-you-think style that would define his art.

Looking for a better gig, he walked into Matt Biolos’ shaping room to see that he was also a disciple of the pens.

Biolos says, “I was doing similar stuff as far back as ’87. Painting flaming waves, skulls, demons, monsters, mushrooms… rock and roll album covers etc., on Archy’s and Christian Fletcher’s boards. They were getting really big magazine exposure on my (rudimentary) paint jobs. It’s how I first built my name. We used this type of imagery on all our early tees, from ’93 on, as well. As my shaping took over, I no longer had the time to spend hand painting boards. Drew knew we had a history of it, but was not seeing it on my boards much anymore. He figured I would be open to him bringing it back. I was, he did, and he ran with it, far beyond anyone’s previous production surfboard numbers.

“His partnering up with us was really good timing. All the parts were moving well. It coincided with the popularity of our surf videos, like ‘What’s really Goin’ Wrong’ and ‘5’5″ x 19 1/4“‘. These videos brought our name into everyone’s living rooms. Surfers like Chris Ward and Cory Lopez were making a lot of impact on our boards. My shapes were now getting sought after. We had the Round Nose Fish and these two teen phenoms. Drew’s paintings gave the boards a point of difference, at retail, and everything sort of worked together.”

 

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A post shared by Drew Brophy Surf Artist (@drewbrophy)

After a quick test of his skill, he brought Drew on board to bring his color from tip to tail of Lost Surfboards. If Biolos’ genius with a planer wasn’t enough to hook a surfer on a Lost board, Drew’s art was the gravy.

“We were together a lot in the early days, for sure. People thought we were brothers,” Biolos says. “As the business grew, we moved the shaping rooms down the street and the painting moved to a warehouse, up El Camino Real, downtown San Clemente. We raised some hell at night as well. We traveled around the world, building the …Lost brand and our own brands. Peru, Brazil, Europe, Japan. We surfed and had a lot of fun.”

With Mayhem shapes filling racks in shops worldwide, Drew’s work became instantly recognizable, doubtlessly sending groms on every coast racing to the craft store in search of wide-tip Sharpies to ruin their boards with.

In each of his painted boards, heaving rows of monstrous waves march like soldiers taking a beach, screaming blood-orange suns stretch their angry rays across the sky, cartoonish skulls line the impact zones, laughing. Dripping and tripping down the rails, Drew’s images carried the surf-art genre in a direction that surely would have made Rick Griffin smile wide.

His current business, Son of the Sea, focuses on selling Brophy’s original art. But it also does something rare and gorgeous: Brophy gives away his painting secrets through video and demonstrations worldwide. While many artists might prefer to keep tricks close to the chest, he shares his techniques without a blink.

Brophy surfs mainly near his house at San Clemente Pier, Lowers or Salt Creek when it’s good, and even tries to get a couple days at up north at Mavericks and Ocean Beach each year.

But now he’s sick and it’d be nice to see him back in the water.

If you are so inclined, throw a buck his way.

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A taste for VAL.
A taste for VAL.

“Notoriously cannibalistic” sharp-fanged hermaphrodite lancetfish washes up on beach in San Diego; locals hope beyond hope that it will be enough to scare off holiday soft top horde!

VAL beware.

Last week, or maybe the one before, a “nightmare” washed up on southern California’s most well-known bigger wave nude beaches. The angler fish, which is found in very very deep waters, has wicked looking teeth, is covered with spikes and looks extremely scary.

Now yesterday, or maybe the one before, a notoriously cannibalistic, sharp fanged hermaphrodite lancetfish, which also resides in deep waters, has followed it to shore just south of Blacks.

The Scripps Institute of Oceanography tweeted, “Another deep-sea curiosity washed up at La Jolla Shores: a 4-foot #lancetfish, a species that inhabits the open ocean from the surface to about 6,000 feet deep.”

The species also eats its own, has sharp fangs and is a hermaphrodite.

If, and why, lancetfish are cannibals is a great mystery to scientists but according to San Diego’s local NBC affiliate:

It’s true, according to Dr. Elan Portner, a post-doctoral fellow at SIO’s Choy Lab. Portner and a team of scientists under UC San Diego assistant professor Dr. Anela Choy have been studying the stomach contents of lancetfish.

What they found was that lancetfish appear to enjoy the taste of their own species. It might be a maturity thing, though, similar to some humans and green vegetables. Choy’s team found lancetfish gravitate to their own once they reach about 3 feet long.

Why they wait is a mystery, as are many other aspects of the lancetfish’s life.

The one on San Diego’s sand was four feet long, certainly having tasted its own flesh. Locals hope the combination of terrors, angler and lancet, will be enough to scare off hordes of VALs certain to descend from adjacent communities after Santa leaves Ben Gravy soft tops under Christmas trees.

Fingers crossed etc.

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Kelly Slater, at right, in happier times with rock n roll's Marquis de Sade, Alice Cooper.

Greatest surfer ever Kelly Slater employs “rock n roll’s Marquis de Sade” who staged mock guillotine executions and used an axe to chop bloodied baby dolls onstage to sing birthday song for older brother’s fiftieth!

"There’s nothing wrong with any sexual perversion, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody, physically hurt anybody," says Alice Cooper.

A three-year-old video of shock-rocker Alice Cooper singing the world’s shortest birthday song to Kelly Slater’s older brother, Sean, has resurfaced. 

It’s a moment, as Sean, four years older than Kelly and also a shredder, points out is a moment worth re-sharing. 

“Happy birthday buddy,” says Cooper before singing, “This is your birthday song, it isn’t very long.”

Kelly who perhaps didn’t hear the lyric appears briefly confused before the joke sinks in.

 

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A post shared by Sean Slater (@captainseanslater)

“Not my birthday this was almost 3 years ago but I liked it,” writes Sean. “Nobody read the post so they think it’s my birthday. Mine is Jan 4.” 

Described by Rolling Stone as the Marquis de Sade of rock n roll, at his peak in the nineteen-seventies Cooper would chop up baby dolls onstage and stage his own execution via guillotine. 

“All death is sexual,” Cooper told Rolling Stone. “And when Alice does something onstage, he has to be punished for it. He always gets killed in the end. Just like the movies… I have sex with mannequins in ‘I Love the Dead.’ As long as sex doesn’t hurt anybody, what’s wrong with it? There’s nothing wrong with any sexual perversion, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody, physically hurt anybody, although on some levels some people like to be hurt sexually.”

In 1998, Cooper, still doing the suicide schtick, this time with a hangman’s noose, almost died when thick piano wire that was keeping him from actually being asphyxiated snapped.

“I pretty much blackd out,” he said. 

Watch! 

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