Wrung dry by depression, the wonderful Sterling Spencer heads to secret island…

In this trailer for an upcoming film by the surfer-comic Sterling Spencer called Join the Dance, and which may or may not be completed this year, we find a curious introspection.

This isn’t a grab-bag of comic moments such as the Spurned Child that offended Jeremy Flores so much he choked out Sterling.

Or the order-a-pizza-while-tubing gag.

Sterling, see, suffers depression and this movie, which centres around Sterling meditating on an island, is gonna be shortish on jokes.

In an interview with Surfer magazine’s Todd Prodanovitch, whom I fell in the deepest platonic like with during our mutual Surf Ranch session last November, Sterling explains his motivation.

“I was really depressed when I had my son, and that totally freaked me out. I was thinking, “This should be the best thing that’s ever happened to me, why do I feel so depressed?” I’d tried everything, but nothing really helped that much until I started meditating. I had this clear moment when I realized that I wasn’t my mind, I wasn’t the person talking–I was just watching this person talking. So then who is this person watching, you know? My perspective really changed. I went to this little island–a little secret spot with waves–and I just camped out, searching within myself. I was having my Rob Machado “Drifter” moment. [Laughs.] But on the island, there was this guy who shoots photos of birds, since they fly through there as they migrate to Mexico. We kind of knew each other before, but we became good friends. He was filming me surfing when he wasn’t shooting these birds, so he kind of organically caught me finding my connection with the present moment and with real life.”

And

“My whole life I was always trying to win a heat or get the clip, which is an ego-based fulfillment. I realized that’s why I wasn’t being fulfilled by surfing like I was when I was a kid. When you’re a kid, you’re very present and you’re surfing just to surf–you are completely open to that experience. Whatever the ocean throws at you, you’re excited to experience it, and I think I lost that when I became a pro surfer. When I let all of that go, surfing was suddenly, like, “Whoa, what is this?” I’ve felt this shift in my surfing where it’s become the ultimate meditation for me. Meditation is just the bridge toward peace within ourselves–a bridge toward the now.”

It’s a lovely interview. Read the rest here. 

You like big, clean, Indian Ocean tubes? Oh this is just right for you!

In this three-minute short, built around the Gold Coast surfer Sheldon Simkus, roughly one third of the feature is footage of the twenty one year old shooting ten-foot tubes in Indonesia.

It’s these sessions, or session, that make it worth at least a cursory viewing, perhaps while preparing breakfast or while your immediate supervisor isn’t cruising the cubicles, looking for evidence of loafing.

When he’s not working on his surfing, Sheldon stays fit, and baby-faced young, through hard work and nothing else. He doesn’t eat nut burgers or drink spinach juice and refuses to take vitamin pills. He has so much energy the neighbourhood kids ring the doorbell constantly, wanting to know “Can Sheldon come out and play?”

Hit play, see if it takes your fancy.