Griffin Colapinto (left) and a Brazilian reborn doll.

WSL “sad” and “hurt” as hyper-realistic baby dolls pull focus from professional surfers in Brazil

By Chas Smith

3 weeks ago

Moral panic.

You may, or may not, know, but the World Surf League’s professional championship tour is currently in Brazil for the Rio Pro. Now, the Brazilian stop is not known for quality waves, a friendly time zone or generating interest outside Brazil and yet the WSL would never dare consider to scrub because Brazilian fans are that uniquely frothy. They pack the beach in droves, playing gold and green drums, puffing on gold and green horns, hooting, hollering, waving gold and green flags and making professional surfing appear, for the briefest of moments, as if it’s a real sport.

Or rather did pack the beach in droves.

Tuning in yesterday, the surf fan at home couldn’t help but be… underwhelmed. The Rio Pro kick-off seemed to be… lightly attended with a less-than-enthusiastic crowd. Most appeared to be staring into phones instead of the garbage waves on offer.

And now it has been revealed why.

Hyper-realistic baby dolls, known as “reborn dolls” have sparked moral panic in the country according to local media, sucking all the oxygen out of the room, leaving no time for interest in professional surfing. The life-like figurines have dominated the national conversation with the pro-reborn and anti-reborn communities clashing. Around 30 bills have been introduced for legislation, including “proposals to ban the dolls from receiving public healthcare or to prohibit collectors from using them to claim priority in queues for public services.”

The Guardian adds:

Videos of collectors bathing their dolls, tucking them into bed or pushing them in prams spread widely across social media – often accompanied by critical commentary or ridicule, such as a satirical rap song encouraging people to kick the dolls in the street.

The controversy reached a disturbing peak on 6 June, when a man slapped a four-month-old baby on the head, claiming he had mistaken the infant for one of the dolls. He is out on bail, and the baby is reportedly doing well.

And, again, it is all anyone in the land of order and progress is talking about. Not Griffin Colapinto, not Crosby Colapinto, not even Italo Ferreira and li’l Martin.

The reborn doll brouhaha shows no sign of dying down soon, certainly not during the Rio Pro waiting period, leaving the World Surf League sad and hurt.

Light a candle, please.

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Sly Stone, more surf than Brian Wilson.

Surf music has nothing to do with Brian Wilson and everything to do with Sly Stone

By Matt Warshaw

3 weeks ago

Sly Stone was transcendently hip and cool—in a way not wholly unlike surfing in its peak moments.

Sly Stone and Brian Wilson were born just a few weeks apart, and departed in similar one-two fashion, earlier this month, at age 82.

For boomer-age music lovers, it felt like a death in the family. The double blow in fact made the loss feel greater than the sum of the two parts—never mind the fact that both beat long odds to even reach seniority. Unless you’re Paul McCartney, it is just about impossible to burn as brightly as Stone and Wilson did without veering into some kind of implosive black-star coda. The New York Times would have had fill-in-the-blanks obits filed for both men, I’m guessing, as far back as the late 1970s.

Anyway, the algorithm sized me up right away, the online barrage began, and as of this afternoon, nearly two weeks after the fact, my feeds are still delivering Brian Wilson clips from across the decades—none of which I’ve lingered over; Wilson as a public figure is as flat and immaterial as his music is ravishing. The algorithm is not fully wrong. I am a South Bay Surfer after all, and my ascension to Valhalla, if the gods know their business, will be scored by side two of the Beach Boys’ Today LP.

But surf music, to me—meaning songs to which my formative surfing life was not just soundtracked but shaped, glazed and forged—has nothing to do with the Beach Boys or Brian Wilson and everything to do with Sly and the Family Stone. “I Want to Take You Higher” was on the radio and turntables everywhere in Venice in 1969 and ’70, just as I was going full immersion into the sport, and 50-plus-years later the song continues fissioning in my head, there when needed, a command not only to turn the knobs up but to try and do it all—surfing, skating, dancing, walking from one end of the room to another—with flair and style and joy. It must have been the same for Larry Bertlemann, multiplied by 100. Bertlemann was always going to find a place at the top of our sport, but there is no doubt in my mind that he became the exalted and electrified Pope of high-performance surfing in 1972 only because we’d been prepared for such a figure by Sly Stone.

It means a lot to me here in 2025, too, that the Family Stone was mixed-race and mixed-gender, and that the band, before Sly buried the project under a skip-loader-worth of PCP, was transcendently hip and cool—in a way not wholly unlike surfing in its peak moments.

Which gives us a nice redirect back to Brian Wilson, because the peak moment in the peak surf film of the 1970s—Gerry Lopez in Five Summer Stories, slouching out of a Pipeline tube while a monsoon of spit blows past his head and shoulders—is scored to “Feel Flows,” a Beach Boys album cut from Surf’s Up, their 1971 comeback LP. (The title track is also featured in Five Summer Stories, and I’ll say here that while I feel nothing but scorn for all the best-ever ranking of Beach Boys songs, I nonethelsss click on every list, and “Surf’s Up” is the consensus #1. No argument here—if anything ever had a chance at turning me religious it was this song, you could build a cathedral around it.)

One final thought.

Wilson and Sly Stone both, during their most productive and creative years, were always and without fail looking forward and above, and the message there I think is that us listeners should do the same. Nothing grounds me like hearing old favorite songs, especially if they come at me unexpectedly, from somebody else’s car speakers or in a movie soundtrack—the notes hit and lock in and I am flooded with gratitude. But the real thrill, just like when I was a kid, still comes from finding something new. There is an added bonus now, in fact, because I can often tease out a link between the old and new songs and, and when this happens I experience a kind of MDMA-like swoon of connectivity to people, genres, eras. Caroline Polachek’s “New Normal,” for example, is a knockout full-stop and no assistance required, but to my ear it also attaches itself like a strange spiky new molecule to “God Only Knows” and “If You Want Me to Stay.” Something to do with mid-verse tone shifts and the deleted chorus—Brian Wilson could explain it, I won’t even try.

(Editor’s note: Yeah, this is the fine work of ol Matty Warshaw, keeper of the surf culture flame over at the Encylopedia of Surfing. Warshaw delivers these sexy-as-anything, tough guy prose hit-outs every Sunday afternoon and if you want ’em, and if you want to access the keys to his entire archive, toss a few peanuts his way. Five bucks a month.)

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Live Chat Day One of Rio Pro!

By Chas Smith

3 weeks ago

Oops. Forgot about this thing.

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Brian Wilson hates surfing.

Huntington Beach honors singer who vigorously hated act of surfing with paddle-out!

By Chas Smith

3 weeks ago

"Brian Wilson, you are under arrest for failing to surf, neglecting to use a state beach for surfing purposes, and otherwise avoiding surfboards, surfing and surf."

Huntington Beach, California, colloquially known as “Surf City, USA,” is a silly town with a lot of heart. Famous for hosting surf contest-induced riots, its lightly trafficked MAGA-adorned libraries and banning rainbows, Orange County’s fourth largest burgh never fails to go full Kafka.

And, thus, perfectly sensible for Huntington Beach officials to honor the late Brian Wilson with a paddle-out. The Beach Boys’ mastermind died on June 11, this year, at the fine ripe age of 82. Derek Rielly penning the moving tribute, “The only surprise surrounding the death of ol Brian Wilson yesterday was that he was still alive.”

Well, even though Wilson grew up in Hawthorne, California and lived his last years in Beverly Hills, Huntington Beach decided on the paddle-out, Visit Huntington Beach tourism director Kelly Miller explaining, “I was having lunch with Dean Torrence (of Jan & Dean fame) … and he was very close to the Wilson family. One of our staff members, just before we went to lunch — we call him Cool Kevin, he’s a big surfer — and he said we should do something for Brian like a paddle out, so Dean and I were chatting some more, and we decided we should do this.”

The wheels turned quick and, yesterday, the paddle-out was conducted.

Now the funny bit, Wilson only ever went surfing once in his life. John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd played members of the California Highway Patrol, surf squad, in a Saturday Night Live sketch and cited the crooner for “failing to surf, neglecting to use a state beach for surfing purposes, and otherwise avoiding surfboards, surfing and surf.”

They then drug him to the beach and forced him to paddle.

According to sources, Wilson actually hated the whole experience and was angry that he agreed to it.

When I leave this mortal coil, I hope Huntington Beach celebrates me by hosting a country music line dancing festival.

I’ve never done it but imagine it’s awful.

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Tao Slater is the second bebe created by the world’s greatest surfer. His daughter Taylor Slater, a noted photographer, was born twenty nine years ago almost to the day back on June 6, 1996.

Kelly Slater delights surf fans with video of son Tao decorating his surfboard

By Derek Rielly

3 weeks ago

"Happy International Surf Day! Seems appropriate to get a new board for it!"

Kelly Slater, father of two, has sent surf fans into paroxysms of joy after he was filmed decorating his shooter with tiny hand and foot prints from his four-month-old son Tao.

Slater’s Chinese-American bikini mogul girlfriend Kalani Miller posted,

Happy International Surf Day! Seems appropriate to get a new board for it! (This was actually last week for Father’s Day!) We grew up in a house with endless arts and crafts, paints and goop, beads and sewing. It was fun to make a little mess for this Father’s Day present for Kelly. Thank you @jason_miller and @michellejunelee for helping with the paint and hiding the present, @travlee for setting it all up, @dan__mann @slaterdesigns @firewiresurfboards for the magical new dad board.

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A post shared by Kalani Miller (@kalanimiller)

Tao Slater is the second bebe created by the world’s greatest surfer. His daughter Taylor Slater, a noted photographer, was born twenty nine years ago almost to the day back on June 6, 1996.

Shortly after Tao was born, Slater leveraged his fatherhood into a debate about baby formula that had been roiling the US.

Operation Stork Speed was launched by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the jacked-to-hell seventy-year-old former junkie son of murdered attorney general Robert Kennedy and nephew of murdered president John Fitz Kennedy.

Slater wrote,

“Happy to see this initiative. We recently had a baby and if we weren’t able to breastfeed we were very concerned about HFCS and other questionable ingredients in essentially every baby formula. With the minefield of toxins we have in overall health today (and the physical addiction to sugar most people have and don’t realise), we should all be as informed as possible about every ingredient and potential health impact, short and long term.”

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Eat beach grit spam!