It's not the Quicksilver Pro but I hear it's just as popular over here

Travel is the Way to Go

Abandonment

Click the pic.

Today's Mastic Bureau Meanderings

I have been a suscriber of SURFER for over twenty years, I have always
considered the Steve Hawk era as editor my favorite. Steve left Surfer
during the dot com boom to work for all those forecasting companies,
and so it goes.  Anyway I started googling him on the train today
hoping to find some new writing, and I happened upon this gem:

“The day that Tony surfs better than I do is the day I shoot myself in
the head.”

Yes most dont know that Steve Hawk is Tony Hawk's older brother, the
brother 12 years his senior that bought him his first skateboard. That
skateboard is now in the Smithsonian

PS:Growing up skateboarding I was always on the bandwagon to rip on
the dorkyness of Tony Hawk, or the fact he was and still is one of the
only skateboarders that is a household name. The name guys probably
still yell out of car windows as your skating a curb in a parking lot.
Anyway as time went on and pro skateboarders dissapeared and
skateboarding friends stopped skateboarding, I realized something.
Yes Tony Hawk has boring style, but he's still ripping sooooooo hard in
his 40's And you know what? "Tony Hawk rules" he's funny, he
runs a great video channel on youtube that has great programming (Ride
Channel) and his son Riley Hawk has got damn good style. So now if I
am asked, I will proudly say "Yeah I like Tony Hawk he's a
skateboarder". 

PPS: back in the day it was all Hawk Vs. Hosoi, I would always side with the obvious Hosoi..he did huuuuge airs and had crazy style for days on end. Fast forward a bunch of years
and I now side with Hawk..Hosoi is born again and all preachy and he
dresses like a SoCal dad trying to be cool and fit in with the other
SoCal dads oh and also Tony Hawk's book was great and Hosoi's book was
crap (he left out I am sure 9 million great stories)

Blah Blah sorry for being way way to skatey and not surfy

-Mastastico

The Guardian Takes On Surfing

Happening : City Reliquary Luau

Wayne Lynch in NYC

On Ted Endo's Hipsters

The funny thing is, I live in the epicenter of what people refer to as "hipsterdom," Williamsburg, the capital of all things Brooklyn, and I don't know any hipsters personally.  I see lots of people on the street who I think look like what Ted Endo is calling a hipster, but I've had enough embarrassing moments of realizing "realness" after even a shallow scratching that I know better than to judge that book by that cover.  In fact, one friend, the one who looks quintessentially hipster, the one even another passing hipster would unselfconsciously call out to his hipster friends, "hey guys look at that fucking hipster douchebag," is actually someone who completely embodies all the things hipsters are supposedly not. This hipster shit is as tired as it is old.  Kooks and vals and hipsters and hippies and longhairs and mods and punks and anything else you care to name.  There are real conversations to be had about the abuses of corporate power, government spying, greed, corruption and any number of life threatening environmental concerns that generate their own special totems of decline, but I'm of the view that a quasi-definition of a perceived generational culture isn't one of them.

Click the pic to read the original article.

Black's Don't Surf : WNYC

A Giant Leap Into the Realm of Claimdom

Yeah, this is a sweet air. Awesome and totally epic. I could not have done it or do it or even know what it feels like to pull that off. This guy is truly at the forefront of creatively technical surfing that pushes into the less-explored physical realms. Yep. But it would have been ten thousand times more better if he hadn't claimed it. If he had kept going and taken a crunching chunk out of that next section. If he had shrugged it off like he does that everyday (which I think he might.) Even if it meant perhaps not getting the "score" by creating the possibility that he would have messed up the next maneuver. Yep, this sort of pop and stop surfing is meaningless to me. Then again, when was the last time I surfed?

Happening: Rockstock&Barrels and a Men's Wear Hoedown

Click the pic.

Keep Skateboarding A Crime

I had this same reaction a long time ago. And then Mastastico shows me the Juice sticker and I'm all damn, someone else has the right idea!

Happening Tonight : Hippy Denim Summer Peace Out!

Huck

I like Huck Magazine.  I don't like that many magazines, especially pop-surf-culture-hipsto magazines.  Prolly because I don't feel included. But I like Huck.  I like the sensibility there.  Here is an interesting article.

Click the pic.

The Mastic Bureau Gets Hot Over A Trophy Stick

Most guys that collect old boards dont ride them..that fully makes me
see red. Thats like owning a 1964 Corvette and never driving it
anywhere, not even to go pick up milk for the family.

If I had $1650 bucks to waste I'd waste it one this lovely stick.

http://longisland.craigslist.org/spo/3777757227.html
to the man selling this..you dont really need that money so give it to
me so I can scratch it and put dings all over it and surf the crap out
of it and never repair it. Seriously you dont need it, and we
certainly dont need some J off hanging it in his man cave

-Mastastico

Salt + Wax

Ed Cornell Gets a Day Off

Tai Chi, Surfing, and the Philosophy of Water by Arthur Rosenfeld

As a struggling tai chi practitioner and a struggling surfer, this piece, written by Arthur Rosenfeld, should have some sort of resonance.  And it does. But it goes just as far to remind me that the reality of surfing as an evermore popular pastime leaves me with selfish thoughts and wholehearted regrets. For me, right now, surfing and tai chi are as tied in to frustration as anything joyfully meditative. This also reminds me for some reason that we are actively destroying the very confines of this pastime.  Some day, the water will be so messed up, surfing will be unavailable.  Not sure why I'm all down in the mouth today.  But there it is.

Over the past few decades, the sport of surfing has ramified into different variants (body surfing, wind surfing, kite surfing, board surfing, etc.) and evolved from an activity seen by some as an emblem of a slacker lifestyle into a vibrant, competitive, global sport that expresses eco-friendly values, a high level of fitness, and a strong sense of community. A sport once notably associated with simplicity and even lack now represents an opportunity for corporate sponsors to penetrate a market of sophisticated, earth- and ocean-conscious people who have disposable income to spend on clothes and gear.

What many surfers are now beginning to realize is that there are historic mystical, metaphysical, and philosophical underpinning to the pastime. In the islands where the sport arose, these grew directly from a natural philosophy that had fueled the development of aboriginal island culture all the way back to its polytheistic roots. Worship of the ocean, its bounty and power as well as its beauty, was part and parcel of the joy of surfing during early island days.

In our current Western surf culture here in the U.S. and abroad, there is another simmering influence on the sport, one that Baby Boom surfers may recognize from the whiff of the 60s they may still hold in their nostrils but which new, younger athletes may not consciously know at all. This influence is the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism, and its younger, Japanese derivative, Zen.

Taoists believe there is an intelligent, guiding force, Tao, permeating the universe. Taoism is a natural philosophy more than a religion, and one that cultivates a keen awareness of the cycles and forces of nature, as well as its myriad and nuanced interrelationships. In Taoism, the forces of the world and those within us are an expression of the binary opposites called yin and yang. Cultivating a clear and empty mind and a body that moves like water are the goals of practice. Indeed, in a very real sense, Taoists worship water as the ultimate example of precisely the spontaneous, relaxed quality they want to see in themselves.

The ultimate Taoist practice is a martial art known as tai chi. While tai chi also draws on China's august martial history (kung fu) and its 5,000-year-old medical tradition, there may be no system of movement anywhere more intimately associated with a philosophy than tai chi is with Taoism. This link, a way of seeing the world and understanding both its most subtle powerful workings, make tai chi the perfect art for any and every surfer from the casual weekender to the dedicated, top-flight professional.

America's fastest growing exercise offers the surfer an unsurpassed mind/body link. Tai chi's emphasis on a meditative mindset, awareness of and connection to the physical environment, a keen sense of the role of energy at play in the world, development of the muscular core, flexibility, and longevity all dovetail precisely with the qualities a surfer wants in order to have a competitive edge and maximize his or her time in the water by getting more and better waves. Tai chi offers the surfer both a powerful preparatory practice to use before getting into the water and a perfect wind down that helps ameliorate the long-term, negative effects of surfing on the muscles and spine. Practicing tai chi means more energy, faster and more complete recovery, and, perhaps most importantly, a deeper and more enjoyable surfing experience.

It is a perfectly natural partnership, this link between the crown jewel of Chinese kung fu and the sport that is, in the end, the purest physical celebration of nature. The same spiral movements and deep, conscious relaxation that help everyday folks beat back the degenerative effects of aging by moving blood, lymph, and energy through the solid matrix of the body also help the surfer move through the water, contributing to the longevity of a surfer's career just as surely as it prolongs an active life for those of us on dry land. Tai chi, it turns out, is a simply effective program to take a surfer's skills to the next level. What a marvelous, beautiful, contemporary, functional, useful, and aesthetically pleasing use of a martial art that more people are finding to be the perfect exercise.

Found here.

Today's Thought

Yes, Why Not Yes.

Mastic Bureau Meanderings On T.Campbell

there is a reason thomas cambell gets talked about so much in the
surf/skate world

he is talented period, and if you think differently your wrong

he was doing it the hard way when doing it the hardway wasnt as cool
as it is now

glad to see he is stepping back into the skateworld, albeit very obscurly

anyway the music makes me want to rip my fucking hair, I kept waiting
for the tempo to change and the street skating to start getting killer
but then that wouldne be thomas now would it? Regardless tough it out
because 1:35 and 1:50 made it worth it.

yeah real film



- Mastastico 

Happening : Et•y•mol•gy

The Mastic Bureau

This is an email from a buddy of mine. All of these  words stemmed from watching a Brad Domke clip:

"Unfortunately, I suck ball sack at surfing.  I do all my snaps like two feet in front of the correct section, all my cutbacks too far out on the shoulder, never really take off deep enough to get a ton of barrels and then I probably close my eyes anyway when the lip comes down.  Every once in a while the stars line up just right for me and it brings me back.  

Oh, and sometimes I paddle really hard for the big set waves and the fruits and failures of battle get played out instantaneously."

-Mastastico

Super, Uper, Duper Cool.

via Jimbo Mattison

Scary stuff from a scary sounding person.

Today's (Old-But-Somehow-New) Thoughts

Early Summer Walk To Work Thoughts on a Recent Subject

Talent is an interesting subject.  Like so many other words in the dictionary, overused perhaps misunderstood certainly often misapplied, talent and its nature are an elusive concept.  Talent seems to be the intuitive, nearly instant grasp of what works.  That momentary facet a key one, differentiating what we might see as a good, practiced strategy against something more surprisingly slight; nuanced insto-tactico-decisions that separate failure from success.  And there is a second temporal component there: the consistency over time of a success to failure ratio. All the better when combined with something as equally intangible as gross creativity or feats of physical dexterity. The origin of talent is thus murky, usually depicted by the over-awed in fanatical, emotional terms. But when I really think about it, talent even flows closer to the artery of time. The real genius appears only in some magical confidence (perhaps ignorance or naiveté) to distrust any other possible possibility-in-the-moment. And this I think comes from a decision making muscle memory only generated by repetition, the end result falling similarly into a temporal context: talent offers the ability to compress the external, or far, perception of time, making things happen seemingly quicker and more efficiently by expanding the internal, or near, experience of time, creating personal space in which to allow complex decisions to happen in observable, discrete parts.  All of this just points to Einstein as the first peson to really describe the whole fiasco.

Click the pic. (Thanks Noah!)

The Mastastico Bureau Going Finless

Introducing the first post of a new EBNY Bureau. Lentini-vision will run rampant every now and again around here at unfixed intervals teetering on the edge of the viable inconsistency endemic to those rarified environs. A photo here, an editorial there, some You Tube finds, and maybe some Craigslist slobbering. I dunno what he's gonna do. And frankly, it may have to be edited to dodge the FCC. For now, we'll start off with some finless surfing Lentini has been crying about. Or as other people have called it for quite a while now, skimboarding.

Happening: Sundown Swap

Today's Thought

Mastastico

The Mastastico Bureau coming soon. Stay tuned.

Matt Fisher Is Still Pushing The Weird

Goodnight Nobody @ Weird Days (via Kris Chatterson)

A Previous EBNY Appearance

Uncoolest thing. Not ever. But scarily uncool.

Click le pic.

Coolest. Thing. Ever.

Like... ever.