Today's Thought

Via P.Krou

Observations From A Surf Fabrication Volume 4

Validation! They cry. Validation! They scream. Instant Gratification is a thing of the (recent) past. Instant Validation is the thing of the moment. Validate my thing! They plead.
Dave says you only need to know 1200 words to be fluent in any language.
Casey is sure Terence McKenna is the source.
I heard about a website that allows women to publicly rate, anonymously, their old boyfriends. After being in Southern California for a couple weeks I figure I'll start a sister site that allows people to proclaim fatwa-like edicts against cars that've cut them off in traffic. Road rage writ digital! Go get that guy! They didn't use their blinker! He was a mama's boy! He didn't pay for dinner! He paid for dinner! These things could get confusing.
Soft Top Revolution is still in full effect. This morning 6.6 tide smashing upon the rocks didn't bother me one bit. The 45˚ air temp was more daunting.
Puppies are cute. They poop and pee a lot. My son is stoked.

Respect

Observations From A Surf Staycation Volume 3

Sublime, The Eagles, The Doors, Green Day, Grunge Rock and Oompah Mexican ballads. The radio play soundtrack of SoCal.

Head dips, shoulder dips, barrel rolls, blue & white striped Wavestorm. Greybeard papa paddling his kids into waves while they jump, mid-trim, into the face on boogie boards from his massive glider. Smiles, giggles, tropically see-through water. Red's beach break was all time this morning.

Observations On A Surf Holiday Volume 2

I look around and see nothing but water. Watery water and the men and women who prefer to slide on water utilizing a seemingly endless library of sliding vehicles. Single fins and fun boards, fishes and thrusters, pigs and squashes, big and small, light and heavy, young and old. I see no small population of styles, methods and habits. I watch like an eagle heron frog tourist, smelling purpose, discerning taste and scratching head. I have my own ticks. I like the parallel stance, or at the very least I go very narrow. My drop knee is more like a nod knee. My hands end up in small robotic contortions, fingers splayed and then cupped, a kind of OCD tai chi sparrow-parts-the-mane. I like to go fast, in a straight line, then cut back with the aforementioned nod, not too proud to take a belly or knee ride if I'm late and in no one's way, just for the fun of taking the ride. I like to crouch, grab rail, hoot and laugh. I probably make too much noise. All of this I say only to differentiate my superior brand of bad surfing from other, inferior brands of bad surfing. And I say superior because I've noticed a style that leaves people without smiles on their faces. This style consists of typically using a shorter board, squatting just so for maximum stability, and exerting as much force as possible to contort both body and board into the most muscular thwacking, spray inducing, gut wrenching turn possible. At all costs. No matter how slow they're going.  I witnessed a lot of this yesterday at Sunset Cliffs. Rabid, macho, and snail's pace. Paddling back out from one of my more goofy ones, I can just hear the epic grunts as these low, wide, and earnest shralpers make the most out of a mushy lip travelling at speeds akin to a bullet shot through molasses. And the crazy thing? Not a smile, not a laugh, not a shrug of the shoulders in self-mockery. For these forthright souls, surfing is not for the lazy, it is for those who work hard.

King Tide

Here at the Endless Bummer New York Surf No Surf Blog of Champions we leave no bit of reef unbleached, no puka shell unpredrilled, no bit of refuse unleft behind in hopes that a hermit crab would find a more aerodynamic, man-made home.  See, we believe in progress.  We believe in the power of fossil fuel inebriation. Plastics!  Carbon fibers! Lighter sneakers!  And of course it's all in the name of the Usually Day Late (shoulda been here yesterday) and Dollar Short (that beggar should have had a PayPal account.) In the spirit of turning a corner, any corner really (we're pretty desperate) we offer you today the burgeoning story of King Tide (erstwhile aka PacificLights.) Operating in the lazy shade of the now slightly defunct Greg's Surf & Art in Mission Beach (as our protagonist mentioned: only in California would you have a surf shop go out of business in favor of a marijuana dispensary) our man, Captain Kevin Curran makes the best of an economy that refuses to reuse, crafting wonderful and rugged looking hanging lamps out of the leftovers of big oil and gas tanks. I procured two myself, tickled at the thought that my environs might turn that much more rustico. 

A day late you ask? Well, it's a bit late for Hanukkah, and while Kwanzaa and Christmas have yet to pass, after our session at Sunset Cliffs yesterday, Kevin closed up shop for the year in favor of a visit to Steamboat Springs. A dollar short, your eyes narrow? Well, I'm always a dollar short.

Anyhow, you can order your gift array for Chinese New Year & Valentine's Day here.

Oh The Things They Say : The NY Times Covers The Wegener Blues Explosion

Clic le pic.

Yes

Sorft Torp Revorlertion

What's better than having fun? Nothing. Have fun.

Notes From Mastastico Volume 632

"I have seen and surfed next to weirdo steve white for going on 20 years now never realized he comes from such a prominent ny art family hanging with rothko and such this is a fucking fantastic interview and the weirdo really is a great guy and a hilarious surfer take not on the part about personality and surfing--totally hits the nail on the head great great great stuff..." - Lentini

Clic le pic.

Observations From A Surf Vacation Volume 1

There are always waves here. I will never ever let any West Coast surfer tell me it's gone flat. Frankly, the only complaint these turkeys could level would be something about how some spot is overcrowded or way too vibey (more or less two sides of the same coin.) Even to that, I just laugh and tell them to try surfing one of their "flat" days at one of the "lesser" spots.  Turkeys.

There are giant grocery store chains in Southern California that carry only "gluten free" bread. Well, that's not totally true.  They also have "sprouted wheat" and "organic grass fed" bread, but the point is this place is the birthplace of all wonderful health fads destined for perversion into terrible health fads. Remember "nonfat milk?"  Yeah, I guarantee you it got its start here.  Or at least was accepted en masse here.  And what has that done for us? Stripped out all the good shit milk has to offer and replaced it with empty sugar. If you drink non-fat milk or eat non-fat yogurt just know now: I judge your rationality. Gluten Free is quickly heading down the same road. Granted, while the idea to curtail the crap starch bread wheat tsunami that is drowning us is an important bit of digestive business, the tumble, headlong, into sugary fillers and red-herring replacements all in the name of an anti-gluten crusade produces nothing better, giving people a false sense of confidence. Nonfat makes you fat. Gluten free makes you... gluten.

There are these giant islands of plastic swirling in the ocean and the plankton are eating them and the fish are eating the plankton and the other fish are eating those fish and we (and our cats and dogs and cows) are eating the fish because fish is the "perfect protein." Plastic Protein Revolution. Seriously, I swear it's nonfat and gluten free.

Speaking of revolutions, the Soft Top Revolution is in full effect.  I am a true believer. Not the best in every situation, but the squishy slidey, unencumbered goodness is not to be missed. Except of course that it's more plastic. In the ocean. Where there's shit tons of plastic already. Wait a minute...

Editorial Board On The Go

EBNY Mobile Instapoop Experience. Follow the most prolific (read: manic) member of the EBNY team as he does boring, boring things with people you probably don't know.

Clic le pic.

Chicken Skin vs. Goose Bumps

I prefer pimples, but hey, that's me.

I Haven't Surfed In a While

In an online life, there are two things I try to avoid: Buzzfeed and Upworthy. And yet, and yet, I am constantly yanked into their netherworld of on the one hand inane, brain deadening trivialized evil bloat, and on the other hand crushing, self-righteous, syrupy, quasi-intellectually good vomit. The problem with Buzzfeed is obvious enough, the soporific effect of so much thought-beguiling input is a frighteningly common personal choice to take the mind off the ball. The problem with Upworthy being a bit more unexpected, as it's actually doing good things, saying good things, bringing important things to attention. It's simply that it does so in the same mind-numbing way that Buzzfeed does. It plunders the depths of the co-creation, user submission, we're-all-in-this-together attitude, pukes it out into a highly linkable format and draws us in to slowly nod our heads and cluck our tongues and tsk our tsks. All from the drowsy safety of our Aeron chair. Besides, there's always that question that pops up that asks you if you agree with something you obviously agree with. It's like having an ultra-liberal dinner guest who quotes NPR to you all evening, keeping you from talking about how awful Jose Mourinho is, how awful the surf has been, or how awful your knees feel with the idiot next to you. And the worst part is, that incessant guest is pulling your idiot friend into a conversation he or she doesn't even want to have. And they don't even know they don't want to have it because the whole thing is so appealingly righteous. Granted, I am keen on Bill Moyers, which is its own brand of self-righteousness, but I tend to eat that up. You gotta eat something up. Anyhow, here is my Today's Wonderful Upworthy moment, which while making me gag (in context), makes me bob my noggin vigorously in full blown "I told you so" agreement.

Heartwarming

From a land I used to call home, a beacon that may yet inspire a return.

Clic le pic.

EndlessBlatherNYdotcom

At some point you have to admit it.  Not to me, of course. I don't care whether you admit it or not, except for your sake. Nor to anyone else, but it would be better if you had, because that would mean you've actually admitted it to yourself and can now give it up. But there you go, I've already written my next sentence.  You should admit it to yourself, whatever it is.  In a funny way I think one can smell someone else's internal in-admittance. It's like a stench that lingers, ghostly about the backs of the ear, wafting unevenly as the person moves through the room, more pungent when they sat still. Perhaps there is visual manifestation as well. In this one the consigned slump of the shoulders, in that one the artificial lift. But admit you should and admit you will, whether you know it or not, which kinda defeats the purpose of the paragraph.

What gets me is this World Wide Web Social Blogosphere Black Hole of Vapid Returns is all set in stone, the stuff of the static image, the captured moment, the neat edit. I have a bit of an addiction to rooting around the tumblers and image archives and blogs and finding pretty images that convey some sense of domesticated adventure, of which there is a bottomless pit out there, collected and revomitted just the way I do, probably at roughly the same bits of the day, unless it happens to be a key component to employment, or the other way around perhaps. Oh yes that's lovely. I've certainly felt that way before. Oh wouldn't that be great. Jeez if we could only do that.  And I tend to hide these perversions, wrap them really, in shivering agues of creative perusal, accrual, denial.  In some way someone else's there becomes my there in my mind here and I hope to God I can bring their there here and how great would that be for my peace of mind when it happens but for now I'll let it sustain me through this humdrum air conditioned nightmare experience I am sure I've convinced myself I'm having when I'm failing but must surely be overcoming when I succeed. Let me tell ya what you're gonna wanna do.

On Sunday I get on a plane, hopefully to touch down again somewhere else, a place I convince myself to despise in order to despise it. The holidays beckon even if I haven't bothered with a  tree.  My knees are good enough for some 40 Year Old Sunday Morning Soccer, but will they be kind enough to surf?

The Usual Drift

"Give an art director an inch of beach and they'll make a demilitarized zone a mile circumference around your favorite break." Or something like that. I mean, I'm not sure what it is I said, but I'm as excited for this as I was for the first round I was so apparently blasé about. Which doesn't mean I'm not excited. I mean I am. Jeez, I'd better shut up now.

Out Now

Things Said and Done

There are so many things I'm not interested in. Even the things I seem to be interested in, or should be interested in, are often pretty far off my daily or even monthly radar.  The sort of disinterest that inspires aficionados, people who really care about some thing I'm involved in, to point in my direction where I shift uncomfortably in my seat at the table and say, "there's a fake." Everyone looks up, looks in my direction.  Some people shrug their shoulders, others shake their heads, someone pounds a fist, another hisses, while a third snorts in amusement.  But I'm not interested.  I'm not so interested in that either, but I can't say it doesn't play in my mind.  I think, "why can't I be more official?" And, "why aren't I more disciplined?" But I'm not. I'm not disciplined. I just want to have a good time.

Notes From Mastastico : Colby Printing Co.

It is some sort of non secret crush Lentini has on Stecyk, C.R. The 3rd, combined with a deep and abiding love for all things archivally tactile, that it made for no-surprise viewing when he sent this video through for his latest EBNY submission.

 In his words: "So great period and so sad period."

Happiness Is A Sense Of Humor

via Troast

Respect

Jonas Mekas Surfs Better Than You

Happening : Kidman, Gilmore, Thursday

Something To Look Forward To

Welcome To The EBNY Winter

Same Bat Channel, Same Struggles, Different Temperature. 

Still dreaming over here.

Respect

It was maybe 1988, maybe 1987. I was the proud rider of a Sims Pocket Knife 1440, duly emblazoned with a variety of me-defining stickers, the proudest of which were Fishbone, Sturtevant's and Ban Apartheid.  I'm not sure why that Sturtevant's one meant so much. Maybe I was thumbing my nose at the fact that I couldn't get the coveted Sessions sticker. I still remember that one day at the base of the lift, my teal green Gore-Tex jacket sensibly keeping out the snow my adolescent's rebelliously worn blue jeans could not, the slightly older punk ski bum lift operator, too cool for my school, sneered and panned my artwork: "Yeah man, ban apartheid, nyaaaaaah." It made me feel equally pea size and wildly angry then, and still fills me with some distant anger now. There is an absolutely stunning series of Anti-Apartheid posters on NYTimes.com right now.  Immensely worth the context.

What You Don't Know Will Kill My Kids

H.G. Wells threw out some zingers.  "Today's crisis is tomorrow's joke."  "Nothing leads to futility as literary ambitions without systemic knowledge." "Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo." "History is a race between catastrophe and education."

And then I think and look this up: 

The adjective systematic means (1) carried out using step-by-step procedures, or (2) of, characterized, or constituting a system. It typically describes carefully planned processes that unfold gradually. Systemic, which is narrower in definition, means systemwide or deeply engrained in the system. It usually describes habits or processes that are difficult to reverse because they are built into a system.

There is some gray area between the words. When there is doubt, it’s usually safer to go with systematic, which is older and more broadly defined.

So, there you go, feel free to substitute as necessary.  Last night I was listening to one of my favorite radio shows while on the way to the banya for a schvitz I was hoping would cure me of some impending illness I've been harboring.  Nothing like the subtle machinations of water and air teaming together to do the job. However you read that sentence it is something to think about.  The other day President Obama said something about the loss of opportunity as the great challenge of our century. It had something to do with class struggle, education and some hazy idea of the American directive. Maybe, I think.  But I don't think it's the great challenge.  No, our great challenge brings us back to that banya, H.G. Wells and that video post from the other day with that Patagonia guy; just getting ourselves to survive the century in the first place.

Give yourself a moment to listen to this.

The Advertising Board

Dunno what art director's fever dream this popped out of, but man, some sort of what.

Today's Thought

My friend Brandon sent this to me today. I reckon it's about right.

Completely Out of Context