Leading “surf influencer” challenges Mark
Zuckerberg to high-stakes cage fight following cancellation of
much-loved Instagram account, “Two Years Ago I was privileged
enough to teach @zuck how to surf…not gonna lie…the cat was one of
the worst I have ever coached!”
By Derek Rielly
"I'm a very lonely man but I will unleash the
war!"
A couple of months ago, the much-loved (two million-ish
followers) Instagram account @kookoftheday, was clipped after repeated
copyright breaches, following another adored account @beachgrit
down the virtual drainage pipe.
“Two Years Ago I was Privileged enough to Teach @zuck how to surf at
the World Famous Doheny…not gonna lie…the cat was one ☝️ of the
worst I have ever coached . He requested a @gathsports
Helmet after his first wipeout and a Band Aid for a small boo boo
he received on his elbow from a fin cut. My Favorite part of the
Lesson however was when I spoon fed him with a shovel on The Art of
the Towel Change. I hate to call him out on this but since @kookoftheday
has been gone and we have to use our backup account @kookofthedayog
the Gloves have come off. We could of had something Beautiful
@zuck . I
eagerly await your response about our MMA Fight. If I win @kookoftheday
goes back up. If I lose…my Family disowns me and I am mocked for
generations to come. We can do it at @rvca HQ or Kauai now
that my ban has been lifted for daring to poke fun at the Greatest
Singer/Surfer/Songwriter/Designer Power Couple of our Time @thebarn808#letsgozuckerberg#itwillbefun#playalong
#thepublicwillembraceyouifyoudothis”
He is younger, trained in the art of strangulation and striking
by a UFC debutante and some twenty years younger than the late
middle-aged Freeman who carries a distinctly bourgeois body.
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World Surf League CEO Erik Logan goes “full
Brazilian” ahead of Final’s Day with wildly flamboyant claim: “We
have not even had the biggest day in pro surfing yet and we’ve
already eclipsed some of the most amazing milestones we’ve seen in
the history of the sport!”
By Chas Smith
Set to inspirational music.
“We have not even had the biggest day in pro surfing
yet and we’ve already eclipsed some of the most amazing
milestones we’ve seen in the history of the sport. Already this has
been the most consumed live digital audience in the history of
professional surfing before this day has ever happened. We’re up
13.4%, precisely, we like precise numbers. We’re ahead of that
before the biggest day in professional surfing.
The momentum of the Championship Tour, the World Surf League and
professional surfing is real.”
Hurricane Kay to possibly destroy wave
quality during World Surf League Final’s Day, according to official
forecast partner, leaving surfers decapitated by “mid-season cut”
to wonder if karma is real!
By Chas Smith
Putting the K in Karma.
The World Surf League’s much-ballyhooed Final’s
Day is but hours away and, thus, Surfline, the official
forecast partner, has released its calculation.
Usually cocksure in predicting never-before-seen,
historically-significant, twenty-foot-plus swells with other ideal
conditions ahead of each tour stop, Surfline has gone noticeably
tepid in front of Trestles, declaring, “Hurricane Kay a major
wildcard for waves, wind and weather Thursday – Sunday,” adding
“uncertainty exists on exact details for wind speed and direction”
even though Thursday and Friday will see “7 foot sets.”
The prognosis only extends through September 12 with the waiting
period lasting all the way to the 16th and so all is not lost but
surfers decapitated by the controversial “mid-season cut,” rolled
out for the first time this year, must be wondering if “Kay”
actually stands for “Karma.”
The pop interpretation of the Hindu belief posits that future
beneficial effects are drawn from past beneficial actions but most
vindictive westerners really enjoy the darker side of nasty effects
drawn from nasty actions.
Walk an old lady across a street, win the lottery, sure, but
deprive professional surfers of their livelihood, cop a hurricane,
better.
What are your thoughts on eastern religious philosophy, in
general, and how it pertains to the World Surf League,
specifically?
Discuss at length.
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Intrepid reporter paddles into lineups and
carefully documents important conversations happening around her:
“Malibu is one of the most dangerous surf spots — it’s Peahi,
Pipeline and then Malibu.”
By Chas Smith
Fascinating.
For me, and my money, the best lineup is a
relatively quiet one. I do not paddle out to jibber jabber or small
talk. Sure, if some bit of conversation naturally blooms so be it,
but I attempt to keep it all within close proximity and not widely
share nonsense where it doesn’t otherwise belong.
I don’t generally get upset at others who chatter… unless they
are upper-middle aged gentlemen riding longer boards talking about
years’ ago trips to Mexico, college aged men riding soft-tops
talking about weekend plans, tech bros talking about anything.
Otherwise, I’m relatively ok.
Yesterday, a bit of “overheard in the lineup” that I enjoyed
came courtesy of lower-teenagers. One said, “I really want to get a
Lost Puddle Jumper.” Another said, “Those are made by Lib.” A third
added, “Mayhem is a style of surfboards from Lost, I think.”
“Like walking through a bar or concert,” she begins, “you can’t
help but overhear casual convos while surfing. The chatter can
range from trash-talking the last person who caught a wave to
uncovering relationship drama, like why someone’s clothes were
tossed on the lawn in trash bags.”
A sampling:
Surfer 1: “Taking off on a wave is like surfer
bowling out here. How do you not decapitate someone?”
Surfer 2: “You just gotta go — everyone usually
knows what they’re doing, but maybe there are some groms with
missing limbs.” (Lower Trestles, San Clemente)
Surfer 3: “I wanted that wave. You were in my
f—ing way. I get whatever the f— I want out here. Don’t get in my
f—ing way.”
Surfer 1: “You shouldn’t have f—ing pulled my
leash when I was taking off. You keep getting all the waves. It’s
my turn.”
Surfer 3: “You want to fight?! Go to the beach.
I’ll take you out any day, and I’ll pull your leash every time you
get in my way.” (Second Point, Malibu)
“Malibu is one of the most dangerous surf spots — it’s Peahi,
Pipeline and then Malibu.” (Second Point, Malibu)
“I don’t know why we keep getting skunked on these surf reports.
Everyone I know hates Surfline. It’s all about Wavecast.com — the
guy updates it three times a week, and it’s way more accurate than
Surfline, or should I say ‘Surflie.’”(Northside of Huntington Pier,
Huntington Beach)
Surfer 1: “Did you see?! I got so much air on
my last wave. I think it was bigger than yours.”
Surfer 2: “This isn’t a pissing contest,
bro.”
Surfer 1: “It is now. Sack up and keep up with
yo’ man bustin’ fat airs.” (Upper Trestles, San Clemente)
Etc.
But how do these bits compare to the conversations in your
lineup?
Add to the cultural study below.
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Historian reveals how surfing’s post-war
obsession with Nazi weaponry “which first rained holy terror on
London and Antwerp” led to one of the sport’s great design
breakthroughs!
By Matt Warshaw
"The V-2 rocket or penis obsession—boys and their
toys, am I right?"
Watching movies with my 13-year-old son is mostly down
to throwing a lot of Netflix-Hulu-HBO against the wall and seeing
what sticks, and while I have passed on to him a few
traits and characteristics that I wish I could delete,
I am grateful that, like me, he has a congenital indifference
to fantasy and superheroes, which means our movie-night hit
rate is pretty high.
We are currently on a roll, here in these last couple of weeks
of summer. Forrest Gump (better than I remembered), was followed
by Bridesmaids, then The Right Stuff—which is still a
thing of cinematic beauty, and Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager is
fourth-dimensional flyboy cool, although the movie at times launches itself pretty far
its own hyper-virile Mach-One ass.
Two great Right Stuff moments occur almost
back-to-back, in the same scene, which is set deep inside the
Pentagon. It is 1957. The Russians have just launched Sputnik 1
and, this being peak Cold War, American politicians
are now frantic to one-up the Soviets by putting a man in
space.
A pair of fast-talking young NASA recruiters (Harry Shearer
and Jeff Goldblum, both having a blast), with the aid of a film
projector, are pitching President Eisenhower and Senator Lyndon
Johnson on the type of men needed for space flight.
The projector rolls.
We see circus performers, high divers, race-car divers
(“they already have their own helmets”) and—surfers, yes, because
they would be naturals for the mission-concluding splashdown.
The second great bit in that scene is when Johnson looks across
the room and asks the top rocket engineer if it was former Nazi
scientists now working for the Soviets who had produced
Sputnik.
“Was it them?” Johnson asks. “Was it their German scientists
that got them up there first?”
That unnamed rocket guy is a proxy for Wernher von Braun, the famous
Nazi-turned-American-turned-Disney-pitchman who,
during World War II, while still a bad guy, designed the landmark
V-2 rocket—V for “vergeltungswaffen,” or “retaliation
weapon”—which first rained holy terror on London and Antwerp and
then sparked a global fascination for rocketry and space travel and
to this day is the sleek and pointed four-finned vehicle that comes
to mind when we think back to when space flight was sexy and
awe-inspiring instead of a budget-sucking black hole.
Germans, Americans, Russians—everybody put aside their
differences when it came to loving the V-2 and its
rocket-spawn.
“Racing 16,” as in 16 vertical feet of lumber and plywood, and
okay maybe you’d mess around with something that huge for paddling,
but for riding waves? You know what, never mind what I have to say,
just watch the last two waves on
this video and sort out for yourself if there was any
other reason apart from the fact that the board looks like a
maritime V-2 rocket that you’d ever want to paddle that thing into
a wave.
Except a lot of times you couldn’t paddle it into a wave.
Not by direct means, anyway.
Follow closely, because this is how the hot Aussie surfers
of the day would take off, while on a racing 16, if the wave jacked
up. This is so un-V-2. You’d paddle like mad until just before the
wave broke and the front of the board lifting off the face, at
which point, still prone, you’d scoot forward and whip the board
round 90 degrees so that the nose went parallel to the wave-crest
in one direction and the tail did the same in the other direction.
I know, it’s hard to picture. In other words, your body would be
like the fuselage while the board itself extended from your chest
and shoulders like airplane wings.
From this position, you would plunge down the face, let the wave
break, then swing the nose back around 90 degrees and stand up.
This was actually easier to do than to try and navigate the drop,
on a normal point-to-shore trajectory, without poking the nose.
I’m laughing here, but my God the skill it took to pull this
off, without fragging any nearby swimmers and bodysurfers, is
Chuck Yeager-level.
The Aussies were humble for about 15 minutes and then, look out
world, here comes Midget Farrelly, Nat Young, Wayne Lynch and the
rest, and basically, performance-surfing-wise, it was game over.
(The actual V-2 rocket itself, by the way, like the racing
16, often did not perform as well as it
looked.)
While trying to figure out what drives Renneker to take on
huge waves, Finnegan consults Edwin Salem, a mutual surfing friend,
and reports back: “Edwin’s theory is that Mark is driven to surf
big waves by the rage and futility that he feels when his patients
die. Mark says that’s ridiculous. Edwin’s other theory is Freudian.
(Edwin, remember, is from Argentina, where psychoanalysis is a
middle-class religion.) ‘Obviously, it’s erotic, he says. ‘That big
board’s his prick’.”
The V-2 rocket or penis obsession—boys and their toys, am I
right?
(You like this? Matt Warshaw delivers a surf essay every Sunday,
PST. All of ’em a pleasure to read. Maybe time to subscribe to
Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing, yeah? Three bucks
a month. Tell me that ain’t a deal.)