Kooks gone wild.
When thinking of high society writing and surf, only one name comes to mind. William Finnegan. The New Yorker staple, and author of Pulitzer Prize winning Barbarian Days, took our generally illiterate pastime and turned it into fodder worthy of salon discussions in well-lit pied-à-terres, tea being served with heady discussion and insight on wave sliding.
You can imagine my shock, then, when clicking on to high-society’s favorite magazine this morning and reading a surf piece so poignant, so thoughtful, that my grumpy heart felt seen and not by William Fenster Finnegan but rather a San Franciscite Jay Caspian Kang.
Arguing Ourselves to Death began thusly:
About ten miles south of San Francisco, there’s a public beach called Linda Mar. As far as Northern California beaches go, Lindy isn’t particularly pleasant or pretty; the sand is gross, the water’s cold and slate gray on account of the persistent fog that hangs around the area. The spot is best known for an oceanfront Taco Bell, which is great in theory, but in practice is plagued by a perpetual sogginess and the hundreds of surfers who clog its parking lot every weekend.
I’ve been surfing at Linda Mar on and off for about fifteen years now. At first, it was because I was a beginner, and Lindy is one of the few places you can surf within a short drive of San Francisco without being sucked out to sea. Now I go because I am older and the waves at the better beaches are sometimes too big and scary. (I won’t name the other spots here; perhaps the most illuminating thing I can say about Lindy is that I can break surfer taboo and publish its name because it’s already the most packed spot in the area.)
Linda Mar was always crowded, but it’s become much worse recently, thanks to three separate innovations. The first is the wide-scale production of cheap soft-top surfboards, which are floaty enough to catch pretty much every mushy wave that rolls through. The second is the ubiquity of surf-camera Web sites that live-stream the waves and provide constantly updating, color-coded reports on the conditions. The third is the popularity of short-form surf content on social media, which, like so much of what you find on the Internet, highlights little fights or asks stupid rhetorical questions aimed at inciting as much conflict as possible.
All this has undeniably changed Linda Mar. Some shifts are obvious. When the color-coded report is green, for example, the crowds arrive. When it’s yellow, you might find fewer than twenty people in the water, even if the actual waves are no different from supposedly green conditions. Other changes are more subjective and harder to parse. Since the widespread distribution of WorldStarHipHop-style surf videos—which show surfers screaming at one another over snaked rides and tussling on the beach—I have noticed a discomforting edge in the water. Before, a typical kook at Linda Mar would cut you off, fall, and apologize while laughing at himself. Most of the time, he wouldn’t even know the surf etiquette he had violated, and, if you explained it to him, he’d listen.
Today, it’s as though the kooks are replaying, in their heads, the hundreds of social-media videos they’ve watched. They have a vague but often errant understanding of surf ethics, and it rarely translates into politeness. If they feel like you cut them off or snaked their wave, they will transform, however fleetingly and unconvincingly, into the saltiest local they’ve seen on Instagram.
And that’s as far as I read but good, no? Kooks transforming fleetingly and unconvincingly into the saltiest local they’ve seen on Instagram? Kang’s own proper placing of self into the hierarchy as adult learner who learned on mush that he continues to frequent because Ocean Beach is unchill? Hating both Wavestorm and Surfline?
Hammer time.
I image the rest of the piece went on to tie the culture wars into the same phenomena plaguing surfing. Namely, intellectual soft tops and color coding but I didn’t read it cuz duh. Plus I have to hop on a podcast with David Lee Scales unpacking whether men should shave before or after a shower etc and other important adjacency.
Finnegan, anyhow, served. Will be respond with a backside hack to Kang’s face?
More as the story develops.
