SHMASH

New York is a bandwagon. People from New York who work intimately with the New York scene will swear that New York is way more than that. It's the terminal from which the bandwagon departs, the hub of the wheel, the center of the wagon universe, blah blah blah. But that's a bunch of baloney. People here feed off the other people here and those other people feed off people from somewhere else. It's one big avalanche snowball with an unidentifiable source. No mountain, no hill, no great big Manhattanite's mitted hand initially packing the snow or shooting the canon or whatever else the metaphor-simile thing obligates. The thing New York's got, what it really has, are people who are passionate about culture. That's the secret. That's the bit that gets confused as genuine primal-force trail-blazing. But the culture doesn't come from here, necessarily, see? More often it comes from someplace else, and someone here, passion afire, lit by the combustable precession that really is New York's forté, gussies it up, repackages it and sends it back out there. This is not a bad thing. This is not a disingenuous thing. There is no lie, no subterfuge, it isn't some sort of grand guignol of debauched fakery. It's the real thing, embraced by real people with real passion. And if it sticks around long enough it just gets soaked in and becomes what New York is. And this is all a long winded, run-on, perhaps incomprehensible way of saying that surfing didn't start here. It was adopted. But unlike the recent adoption that most assume, it's been around for a long, long while with a passionate lineage that matches any passionate lineage anywhere. SMASH is the direct offspring of that branch of the family tree. These guys who are passionate about surfing and are bloody north-east coasting surfers through and through. And now they finally have a new website that you should look at as much as you can in the near future. Respect.