In twist straight out of neo-noir film
“Usual Suspects,” Jonah Hill’s ex Sarah Brady reveals she may, in
fact, be lightly narcissistic!
By Chas Smith
Audiences gasping for air.
The ride we’ve been on. Three weeks ago, Jonah
Hill’s ex-girlfriend Sarah Brady went for the beloved actor’s
throat. The onetime surf instructor took to Instagram and dumped
tens upon tens of private text messages between the
two. Brady accused Hill of being a misogynist and also a
narcissist, damning him days and days later with more and more text
message reveals alongside taking the brave mantle of PTSD
survivor.
The fusillade, it appears, is still continuing.
In a Instagram Story spree one hundred posts deep, tens of
thousands deep over the past three weeks, Brady again accuses Hill
of misogyny though this time adds the Usual Suspects-esque twist
that she, herself, might be a touch narcissistic.
“I believe I may have more narcissistic traits than the average
person especially if I’m hypomanic or manic. I’ve seen a lot of
doctors for my bipolar disorder and I’ve asked if I am a narcissist
and each one I’ve asked has said no so far. I’m sure I’ll ask again
soon after all this sharing.”
Audiences left gasping for air in the very same way they gasped
for air after it was revealed exonerated sex offender Kevin
Spacey’s Roger “Verbal” Kint was, in fact, Keyser Söze.
Boom.
But did you know, according the The Ultimate Book of Gangster
Movies, that Usual Suspects writer Christopher McQuarrie settled on
Söze, as the name of his main character, after finding it in a
Turkish-language dictionary? It comes from the idiom söze boğmak,
which means “to talk unnecessarily too much and cause confusion”
(literally: to drown in words).
Well look at that.
This story number 4986 was brought to you by “the brand” which
would like to remind you that there is nothing to see here.
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Sam George (insert) instructing surfers how to be
non-racist.
Olympic planners getting ready for the 2024
Games, exactly one year away, awoke dismayed this morning.
Excitement had been building in the French capital since 2017 when
the International Olympic Committee awarded Paris the honor of
hosting the XXXIII Olympiad. Government employees scurried around
dusting lamp posts, hiding rioters in dark corners and planning
which venues would host what. The iconic Stade de France will take
track and field events. Teahupo’o, all the way across the world in
Tahiti, the newly added surfing portion.
Which leads us to this morning’s consternation.
For this morning the world’s preeminent surf thinker, Sam
George, dropped a moral atomic bomb on the French organizers.
Teahupo’o, the name, or at the very least the pronunciation of
the name, is racist.
Thought to mean “Place of Broken Skulls,” and oft called “The
End of the Road,” Teahupo’o has long featured in the imaginations
of surfers. It’s wildly thick lip, various shades of green and
blue, folding over on the scary reef. Emerald mountains shooting
skyward in the foreground. Boats, pink and red and orange, bobbing
in the channel. It has long held surfing competitions, surfers,
surf industry, surf media flying across the Pacific to cover
events, each blathering overtly racist dribbles out of ignorant
mouths.
George, who begins the lengthy piece titled “When the Olympics Begin at
Teahupo’o, Shouldn’t Surfers Know How to Pronounce the Wave’s
Name?” for emotionally sensitive website The
Inertia by marching through history, declaring that the naming
of of parts of Canada by a viking was racist and also the naming of
Tasmania by a dutchman was racist before arriving at all the racist
surf spot names including, but not limited to, Pipeline, Sunset
Beach, Acid Drops etc.
The silver hair’d sixty-five-year-old, once married to Nia
Peeples, takes a brief detour to excoriate readers for their
mispronunciation of an Indonesian regency (it’s MENT-a-why, not
men-TAU-wee, for cryin’ out loud) before arriving at
Teahupo’o.
Shall we read, and learn, together?
And even though I know better, having grown up in Hawaii and
spent considerable time in Polynesia, I’ve been mispronouncing
Teahupo’o along with everybody else. Perhaps that’s why it seems to
me that this ramp-up to the Summer Olympics is a good time to
change that egregious habit. Soon the eyes of the world will be
turned to a tiny, incredibly picturesque village on the island of
Tahiti, perceived entirely in the context of international surfing.
A village whose residents have, for decades now, been incredibly
generous, sharing their remarkable natural resource with the hordes
of foreigners who descend on this little slice of paradise every
season to shoot their videos and hold their contests and establish
their reputations and earn their salaries…and yet still say the
place’s name wrong. Yeah, let’s fix that.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the proper pronunciation
is “Tear-hoo-poh-oh.”
Tear-hoo-poh-oh.
Do you have it?
Will you make a point of using correctly today?
This story number 4985 has been brought to you by the Linguistic Society of America which
would like to remind you that Sam George is not now, nor never has
been, a member.
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"Without giving too much away, too soon, I have been
forced to conclude that the man can not make good media. Like, at
all."
Long awaited Amazon TV series Surf Girls
Hawai’i ruined by “spectacularly untalented man”
By Jen See
Former WSL CEO Erik Logan's parting gift to the
surf world!
I broke Amazon, and Chas made me do it. All I
wanted to do was watch Surf Girls Hawai’i, a series recently
released on Amazon Prime. Chas tried to lend his account to me, but
he didn’t know the password. I am not judging. I forget passwords
with reckless abansdon. In fact, I managed to lock two accounts at
Amazon that I didn’t even know that I had. After much trial, I made it in. The
world is mine.
About two years ago now, the women’s media platform Togethxr
made a four-part film called Surf Girls Kaikaina. Owned by Alex
Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel, and Sue Bird, Togethxr has
created a killer platform for women’s sports. Surf Girls Kaikaina
painted a group portrait of teen surfer girls coming of age in
Hawai’i, and focused on Hokulani Topping, Vaihitimahana Inso,
Ēweleiʻula Wong, and Puamakamae DeSoto.
As the Surf Girls Kaikaina series progressed, it centered the
girls’ Hawaiian culture and their efforts to find themselves both
in and out of the water. Though contest surfing formed a piece of
the story — Moana Jones and Carissa Moore both appeared — it was
not foregrounded. Instead, director Monica Medellin centered the
young womens relationships with surfing, the ocean, and their
culture. The interviews, which took place in bedrooms and
skateparks had a raw authenticity. It felt real.
So, I was excited to see a new version of the film appear with
some fanfare and a release on a mainstream platform like Amazon
Prime. The new version, renamed Surf Girls Hawai’i bears only a
passing resemblance to its predecessor. Moana Jones receives top
billing. Ēweleiʻula Wong and Puamakamae DeSoto reappear, while
Brianne Cope and Maluhia Kinimaka join the cast. And while Medellin
returns as director, the series receives a new executive
producer.
I’m pretty sure you can see where this whole thing is headed.
You are smart people. Have you already guessed the identity of the
executive producer? Sure, you have. Of course, it’s Erik Logan,
with one last parting gift. Without giving too much away, too soon,
I have been forced to conclude that the man can not make good
media. Like, at all.
The shift in vision is clear from the start.
Surf Girls Hawai’i puts contest surfing at the center of the
story. The narrative arc becomes the effort to qualify for the
Championship Tour and the stresses of competing. There’s a sequence
devoted to training that predictably involves carrying rocks
underwater. It’s like Ultimate Surfer got stuffed on a plane and
flown to Hawai’i.
When the women involved have the opportunity to tell their
stories, Surf Girls is at its best. But the interviews have lost
their intimacy in favor of studio backdrops and professional makeup
jobs. We learn about where the girls come from and how they learned
to surf. The stories have a Hawaiian accent, sure, but the cultural
connections are largely lost in favor of a kind of stock hard luck,
long odds sports story-telling.
There’s nothing Hawaiian about the soundtrack either. With the
exception of a brief bit of Moana playing ukulele, the scoring is
mundane and unimaginative. The film now even sounds like Ultimate
Surfer. It beats you over the head, like omg, isn’t this
exciting?
Surf Girls Hawai’i plays like an extended advertisement for the
WSL, and that’s almost certainly what Logan set out to make. In her
original, Medellin trusted her material. She believed that this
coming of age story about girls surfing in Hawai’i had something to
tell us. There was less lip gloss and shine in Surf Girls Kaikaina,
but far more authentic story-telling.
Watching Medellin’s original, I became invested in the girls
involved, never mind their world rankings. And that’s the reality
that kept intruding into the new version. The women in this film
are young contest surfers who have a long — and maybe impossibly
long — way go to to make it on Tour. After all, this isn’t the
story of Sierra Kerr. Centering their heat surfing did the women in
the film a disservice that I lay entirely at Logan’s door.
It takes a long time to get good at surfing, and an even longer
time to get good at contest surfing. It requires a deep well of
financial resources and a so, so many hours in good waves. Contest
surfing is a painfully cruel business where only a small fraction
of even the most talented surfers succeed. The best in the world
are the best for a reason. No shade on anyone for not making it to
the top level right away, or even ever.
What’s frustrating about Surf Girls Hawai’i is that it grew from
a compelling concept. These women are plainly strong, engaging, and
passionate characters. Tell me the story of these women, growing up
in Hawai’i, finding their way in some of the world’s toughest
lineups. Tell me about their fears, frustrations, and joys. Tell me
about what it means to them to be Hawaiian and how their heritage
shapes their relationship with the ocean and the wider world.
That’s the story Logan steamrollered in his desperate effort to
sell contest surfing to the masses. And I think we all know by now,
that they aren’t going to buy what he’s selling. The story that
didn’t get told, that might have drawn people to follow these women
and their journey, that might have shown the world something
beautiful about women’s surfing and Hawai’i — I’m not sure he even
saw that story and its value. And that’s a shame.
I really wanted to love this film. I got super stoked when I saw
Togethxr promote it. I am a fan of what Togethxr is doing to
elevate women’s sports and I couldn’t wait to see them wave their
wand over women’s surfing. Medellin strikes me a talented
film-maker and skilled interviewer. I look forward to seeing what
she does next.
Too bad a spectacularly untalented man had to get in the
way.
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Premium subscription surf website reminds
world that it has precisely zero female readers in glowing review
of onetime surf brand Quiksilver film!
By Chas Smith
"While I don’t have a girlfriend myself, I can
confirm no such thing happened to those in attendance during the
watching of this film."
The oxygen has been sucked out of the surf
world, overnight, as two roommates engaged in a “provocative man
fight” during the currently underway U.S. Open of
Surfing. Once-proud Surfer Magazine’s AI bot declared the
event as “deep, profoundly sex sex.” Sam George, writing for
The Inertia, stated, “They obviously haven’t spent much
time surfing Steamer Lane.”
It’s hard when you put so much work into something, you feel
great and then you have a period so horrible it hospitalises you 3
days out from an event,” the two-time world champion wrote on
Instagram. “Competing after those 3 days of being mostly bedridden
and unable to eat was the harsh reality of navigating my period
while meeting requirements in my professional career. At times it’s
deflating physically and emotionally, feeling like you have no say
in it. Managing my period has been a journey. I’ve come along way
from my teen years, not even knowing it wasn’t normal to suffer
monthly excruciating pain that would lead to passing out, vomiting
and hours on the toilet. These days my period management looks like
a customised training program based around the 4 menstrual stages,
listening and planning carefully for what my body needs – even if
that means less time practicing in the water before comps,
prioritising sleep and recovery leading up to my period and being
aware this is the time I am at highest risk of injury. At this
stage in my life I am also heavily reliant on painkillers while I
menstruate. They aren’t ideal but my other option is to have
surgery to try find and fix the reason for these debilitating
periods. The surgery isn’t a guaranteed solution and I would have
to take time off from competing as well as rebuilding.”
Stab decided to reframe the important issue as one of
men battling back pain in the searing “Surfers vs.
Menopause.”
Now, in glowing review of onetime surf brand Quiksilver’s new
film, Stab, minus girl or even girlfriend, declares it
“passes the test.”
This passes the girlfriend test. Ironically, the ones least
invested in surf culture often make its best critics. Unlike you
they aren’t oogling over the planing hulls of Ryan Burch
pickleforks as they slice down a Mexican point – they’re one dull
clip away from hoping back on depop – While I don’t have a
girlfriend myself, I can confirm no such thing happened to those in
attendance during the watching of this film. It’s tight from start
to finish.
Quiksilver, days ago, officially cut making any product. No
shirts, no trunks, no nothing. The mountain and the wave will
merely be slapped on whatever product and voila, pure licensing.
More on that later.
Questions remain, though, about how much the writer was
pickleforking non-girlfriends in the audience with his eyes.
An accurate read?
Stab directly contributing to the the surf’s demise
aside, when was the last time you employed “the girlfriend
test?”
Did it work?
This story number 4984 has been brought to you by Reddit which would like to remind
you that it hosts the second largest incel community online.
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Exclusive new details emerge about
“provocative man fight” dominating conversation at U.S. Open of
Surfing in Huntington Beach!
By Chas Smith
Wild times in Surf City.
Earlier today, footage was released of a provocative man
fight at the U.S. Open of Surfing featuring one wearing no
shirt and one wearing a striped shirt plus shoes. The action begins with the
two speaking very closely before headbutts are given,
small umbrellas thrown, punches delivered. As the waves in
Huntington are, currently, 1 – 2 ft the man fight is assured to be
the biggest thing that happened this year, thus, dominating
conversation.
Once-proud Surfer Magazine’s AI bot declared the event as “deep,
profoundly sex sex.” Sam George, writing for The Inertia, stated,
“They obviously haven’t spent much time surfing Steamer Lane.”
Why were they tussling, though? Their chairs are clearly very
intimate when the whole business began. And what happened
afterward? Was there a wonderful make up or did the two remain
bitter?
Well, BeachGrit, the leading source of ultra hard surf
candy, just so happened to have a wonderful source witness the pas
de deux with own eyes and report.
“That fight you just posted, they were roommates and one guy
asked the other to move out. That’s what started it. Guy was
hospitalized.”
I was very curious as to which guy, the one who appeared to take
the lion’s share of abuse or the one who was not really moving at
the end.
It turns out the one who was not really moving at the end was
fetched by an ambulance and whisked into a medical facility where
he remains to this day.
