"All I know is that when one makes love, one changes a woman slightly and a woman changes you slightly."
(Editor’s note: Two years ago, The New Yorker ran a very good, and uncharacteristically raw, story by Jamie Brisick called, “Surfing in the Age of the Omnipresent Camera”, which described Mikey February’s surfing thus, “His hand jive, soul arches, and toreador-like flourishes play to the camera in a way that breaks the spell of the itinerant surfer in far-flung solitude. His style is as self-conscious as the duck-face selfie.”)
In this compendium of surfing clips and sweeping panoramas from Côte d’Ivoire, we find the South African surfer Mikey February, not as the pro surfer who once upon a time ran on the world tour, but surfer as a beautiful object, a beautiful thing, worthy of worship.
No one, I believe, can resist falling love with a such a face.
Also starring in the short film is Alex Knost, a surfer who has hacked his own pathway out of the cultural jungle. A little bit sixties, some seventies, all 2000s. A retro-futurist-modernist cupcake who loves surf!
“The longer you surf, the more waves you ride, the more surfers you meet and that helps to widen your perception and the amount of respect toward everything,” says Alex.
Completing the triumvirate is Lee-Ann Curren, the thirty-two-year-old daughter of the three-time world surfing champion Tom Roland Curren, unbeatable for most of his career and who popularised the modern fish surfboard.