This Week in Not Surfing

1. On Fatherhood:
I take my son surfing early in the morning. While I put on my wetsuit he runs off to the dune beneath the lifeguard chair. I paddle around in two foot mush for a bit, trying to make myself feel like I'm doing something important, diligent. He digs holes in, and roles down, the sandy slope. I watch him butt flop and it knocks the air out of him. Later he waves to me and I paddle in. We swim together for ten minutes or so, and he declines a trip on the board. Raising a kid to surf, I'm sure, is easy in some places. I'm sure it's easy with some kids. But not this kid. He has a mild distrust of the water. Maybe of me in the water. We'll see if and when the thing takes hold.

2. On Being an Older Surfer:
I am at a crossroads in life. I'm now over forty years old and I've worked hard enough for long enough and have been lucky enough to be where I'm at. I'm far mellower than I was even three years ago. I'm working on getting mellower still. But my patience is starting to run thin. I lose my temper with decisions I consider dogmatism based on aesthetics instead of a pragmatism based on joy. I find morality a tiring concept to unpack. I am becoming more aware of my frailties and my shortcomings. I often find myself thinking I've reached the judicious level of my incompetence. But certain prerogatives of my youth hold on. I have a fascination with being outstandingly mediocre as a surfer. I've been at it so long that I am starting to consider myself the Serena Williams or Tim Duncan of outstandingly mediocre surfers. I mean, really, really, doggedly mediocre. There was a time that I'd only ride longboards. And then I'd only ride longboards that came from the trash or that someone gave me or would cost less than a hundred dollars. As those sorts of finds became less likely thanks to the explosion of surf popularity (find me a useful hundred dollar longboard now) I started widening the possible quiver to crappy old 70s single fins or 90s fun shapes. The more unwieldy, the more patently cruddy the shape, the yellower the sun damage, the more bulbous the delam... these were under my feet. And only under my feet every now and then. Because I undertook a strict regimen of not surfing. Of putting career and creative life and urban partying ahead of paddling out. The odd masochistic shock of shame and and internal recrimination somehow became a habit forming burst of anti-dopamine. Initially ignorant of my discipline, I covertly coveted the missed opportunities. I think. Actually it's all a bit of a blur, life. But the only way I can justify or qualify all the time I've spent getting steadily worse at surfing is to give it a kind of workmanlike mythos. Even now, I've spent the last three years sorting out how to look like a twerp on a soft top. I've started riding soft tops as twin fins, with no fins, in bigger waves, on perfect days. It's that old habit of shooting myself in the foot, of giving myself the finger. But I'm older now, maybe less inclined to follow my own rules. I hope.

3. On The Shit That's Been Happening for a Long Time
While I may have failed my education, my education has not failed me. And I know that the only hope is a change in the system. It isn't about the police culture, though that's part of it. It's not about gun control, though that's part of it too. It's about a systemic readjustment of priorities based on critical thinking and shared definitions. It's about managing a capitalist system that offers what capitalist systems ultimately should: continued equal opportunity. It's about racism and classism and old men and fear and willful stupidity and holding onto ignorance as a central tenet of life.

4. On Relationship
Two close cousins from the same bad habit family tree: The Doomed Loner and the Perpetual Martyr.

Country for Old Men

A Fine Onofre Morning 12/26/2007
Music: Jolie Holland

This Week In Not Surfing

1. Commercial airline travel always begins with the same things. Second guessing the luggage weight. An anxiety filled car ride. Splurging at an unimaginatively stocked airport chain bookstore. Fear of the automatic flushing toilets. Awkward queuing. The middle and end experiences of commercial airline travel vary more widely but will surely entail uncomfortably spiking body heat. 

2. Francis, the pink and blonde shop boy, explains for glasses to fit properly they ought to reveal the wearer’s brows mostly unobstructed. This is dependent on the proper width of the bridge and the forgiving length of the temple. Here I can think of an implicit joke.   

3. Have I spoken of my distaste for the flagrant practice of showcasing mid-coifed clientele in large storefront windows of hair salons? Like specimens in some sort of wacky performance art meets ghoulish science experiment gone embarrassingly inchoate? It’s true, the sight of someone having their wet hair yanked this way and that, exposing their state of undoneness for all to witness fills me with disgust. Brazen co-optive marketing at the expense of dignity. 

4. Six days after Gerry receives a text apparently mistaking him for another Gerry where he is propositioned to drive to 'Jersey because the texter has "heard it's pumping," I arrive at his doorstep in Clerkenwell. Gerry shows me this mis-targeted text and I conjecture that it may indeed be meant for another Gerry I know who happens to live in the same building in Brooklyn where this Gerry, standing here in front of me, also has a routinely vacant apartment. That other Gerry also lives part time in the building, the other part on Kauai. And he surfs. This Gerry here lives the other part of his time in London and does not. I wonder if the mistaken texter has entered this Gerry's name into his phone mixing the two up based on a shared address. This would explain a lot.

5. Jeremy says free will is the location on our tongue where we taste time. 

6. There are moments that occur to me. The moment I want more yogurt than granola in my bowl. The moment the weather changes and my ankle hurts less than it did. These are little mile markers of advancing age. 

7. I go to the Basquiat show at the Barbican. I see an old friend in two polaroids encased in glass. I stand in line behind two French women bent on listening to the full 22 minutes of outtakes from a Warhol/Basquiat T.V. show. They can feel my looming over them, impatient. I wonder if I look like Trump looming over Clinton in that one debate. I'm not sure I can help how I may look and feel.

8. But I feel like a real New Yorker at a Basquiat show in London.

9. The American in his black t-shirt, black cardigan, stiff jeans and well-worn Stan Smiths has been on his feet for twenty minutes, pacing as he talks on a cell-phone conference call in the powder blue Australian cafe. At the end he says "brilliant" then "lovely" then "cheers" then hangs up and goes straight to the bathroom, leaving his aging golden retriever waiting beneath his table. In the bathroom there is a hidden mirror in a slim cupboard opposite the toilet. I suppose this is in case you'd like to observe yourself going to the bathroom.

10. Antonio texts to see if I'd like to surf together this week.

11. We run into our friend on the sidewalk who is going to the introductory night for a later sex party night. She says she's going to accompany a friend who actually is looking to be accepted to the sex night, but feels insecure going alone. Try-outs for an impending orgy, in other words. Two nights later I ask her about the experience. She says it was certainly odd and she left early but with a certain esteem for the people who could feel so brazen and fulfilled in their desires.

12. People in London walk terribly on sidewalks. All over the place. Higgledy-piggledy.

13. When I hear an English accent I think of violence and intelligence and dry, sometimes annoyingly effete humor.

14. While in London I have two surfing dreams, neither of which contain surfing. In one I am on a playground filled with all sorts of metal monkey bars jutting out in opportune angles. I swing around them all, hopping weightlessly from set to set, spinning and twisting. In the other, my eleven year old son and I are in a grocery store on a cruise ship dancing in a kind of intuitive Bob Fosse way through the aisles, clapping our hands and snapping our fingers.

15. On the flight to London, my seat-back screen breaks, leaving me with no choice but to watch the latest installment of "Planet of the Apes."

16. I meet a Danish-French photographer at a cafe on Portobello Road. We find we have many mutual friends and a copacetic misunderstanding of the mysteries of being 20th Century men in a 21st Century world. I mention surfing to illustrate video communication.

17. While walking in Notting Hill some friends from Brooklyn text and ask me for advice about surfing on Kauai. I refer them to that other Gerry. In four conversations I have with introduced strangers in London surfing comes up as a short-lived topic.

18. I have a seat next to a window on my flight back to New York. I've been on flights where the attendants have asked everyone to close the plastic pull-down shades. This never fails to upset me but I can see why they ask. Keeping the glare off video screens. Allowing people the choice to sleep. But I love the light without exception. I love, at least, the open windows without exception.

19. There are many evenings when my wife asks me to keep the window near my side of the bed open. This can be slightly annoying as it will cause uneven breezes to flit across my face all night.

20. One thing I’d like the one-minute-younger me to remember to say to the one-minute-older me: stop trying so hard to be heard. I wish that one-minute-older me would stick around long enough to remind the one-minute-from-now me of that wisdom.

21. This past week at different moments, both in his apartment, Gerry twice spontaneously adopts a sort of cockeyed old-timey persona and states in a drawl, "You've got two ears and one mouth! Use them proportionately."

Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,

Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

The Sundown Surf Challenge Recap : My Story. My Whole Story.

When I was in fifth grade I tried out for baseball for the first time.  I was so good they put me on the fourth grade team.  Once when I was a freshman in high school I was geting beaten so bad during a wrestling match all I could do from my totally submissed position was smile and give a thumb's up to my coach.  My sophomore year I got cut in the first round of tryouts for the basketball team.  My junior year I got third in long jump at the All City J.V. track meet.  I quit the next day in a haze of pot smoke.  Oh, and I once played "The Love Theme" from Flashdance at a piano recital.  I think I was twelve.  So when Tyler Breuer slotted me into the men's logboard division of the Sundown Surf Challenge, I jumped at the chance to finally fail with grace.  I figured I'm old enough to be able to compete without caring about competition, without fearing the humility of it all.

I've never actually been to a surf competition.  I didn't grow up a grom scratching around the weekend meets and I didn't know what to expect, but I was hopeful, you know, hopeful for a little camaraderie, some laughs, a chance to surf alone on some waves and maybe pique my son's interest.  It was actually all those things.  I got to surf all morning while the kid's division were going on.  The boy got to watch some surfing and play some foamy paddle ball.  We ate fish n' chips.  I got to surf some more while everyone went on lunch break and I got a few laughs with Ty out in the water.  The one thing I didn't expect was how long a surf meet is.  They start out with the junior juniors, work their way to the mid-level juniors, head to the senior juniors and then circle around again.  By the time I realized they wouldn't get to the men's comp until later in the afternoon, I'd already surfed three or four times and made my son late for his long-awaited play date with Louise.  Yeah, Louise.  You know.  Louise.  So it was that my dream of teaching my son how to lose with dignity was squashed by my own shortsightedness.  We had to pack up and run off a good two hours before my date with destiny.  I was so bummed, the only solace coming with the sight of my son's sparkling smile as he ran off to play with his friend.

I'm not sure how I would have fared in the heat.  I think I had a fair chance of at least putting up a respectable showing, and as Coach Jamie later digitally patted me on the back he spoke some true words: "The best thing about not competing is that we always woulda won. That's why I quit many years back.  Now I'm world champ."  

True that, true that.  But next year I'm planning better.

This Week In Not Surfing

I land in Los Angeles and head straight inland to Korea Town. For the next four days I will not see the ocean. I will not even call my local surfy friends as I usually do, looking for a little paddle out friendship. One of my co-workers will offer me one of her boyfriend’s boards for a morning quickie in Venice Beach but I will not have the time. I will instead settle for dawn shuffles up the street to the Korean baths to spend the otherwise surfable hours sweating and naked amongst geriatric Korean men, feeling conspicuously hairy.

Poolside, at the hotel, I will see children playing with their parents. In particular one elderly toddler laying atop his mother, playing at her face gently with his little pudgy hands, squeezing her cheek and thumbing her bottom lip. This will remind me of those pesky lion cubs pawing at their regal father before he swats them away in National Geographic films. I will miss my children at this point. 

I will think about the ways to place an apple box. Among them Los Angeles, dead flat, Chicago, on the side, and New York, on end. People from Chicago might try to convince me otherwise.

Amid the stucco and the peeling paint and the derelict signage and the barbed wires around the mechanic shops and the stubborn flora and the dirty feet of homeless men and the gas stations and the curious placement of phenomenal restaurants there will be gems of streetside art, architecture and history, peaking out, snuggled happily between the repetition of stop lights, hidden with self-conscious regard among the parking spots.

I will finish my job and on the fifth day I will head south to visit my in-laws, including my 97 year old grandmother-in-law with whom I will stay up late one night, drinking gin and trading stories.

I will meet a friend at the big mall in La Jolla where he is buying a blue suit reminiscent of Cary Grant’s in “North By Northwest.” I will recall Cary Grant's penchant for wearing light blue socks. My brother was fond of pointing out that he ascended and descended staircases as if they were an escalator, a conversational anchor I would dishonesty adopt as my own observation. The blue sock thing is all mine though.

We will surf Sunset Cliffs where the wind pressing against the north coast is cut by orientation and kelp beds and where the big shelf of reef will be a tactile pleasure while ambling out.

Bird Shit Rock. I’ll notice my friend has gotten very adept at surfing, having put in the time in real pursuit of the craft since the last time we surfed together. He is a biologist and a sailor and a free diver, having at some point collected bugs off the local floor and having been nabbed for it in a classic mix-up. He will tell me stories about recently dismembering rabbits on a bow-hunting trip. Not tall, and handsomely barrel chested, he is conspicuously attentive in giving driving directions from the passenger seat, a tic that would be an eye-rolling offense if proffered by any less a traffic tactician.

Miraculously, we will surf an in-between boil all to ourselves, my softtop lacking both wax and leash and my winter atrophy having reached a personal zenith of epidemic proportion, my legs a gentle mush of fleeting ingrown hairs and stubbornly swollen joints. But I will manage a few rides and even a full two footed, pin-legged body leaning turn on my last wave, a miracle itself.

Wrapping our wetsuits in towels, I will tell my friend about being included in a coffee table book about New York surfers. He will erupt in a snorting laugh, “How’d you pull that off?”
“I dunno, I guess they needed someone in there who doesn’t surf.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. That’s your brand. It works. Mine are my pecs.”
“Stay on brand.”
“Gotta stay on brand.”

At dinner the chiropractor will confide in me that Kelly’s wave pool can crank a few feet more and look like a different wave. A proper, critical wave. But they’re still working out the kinks so it’s not on offer yet. It would all seem pretty boring to me, except the idea that one could surf in the middle of flat desert, miles from the ocean, a startling mental displacement almost too rich to pass up; a cognitive dissonant holiday scoring barrels nestled between meth labs and Indian casinos.

I will jump on a big trampoline on the ridge above Cardiff, facing the dusty hills in the east that haven’t been colonized by identically ugly houses. I will scare the bejesus out of my nephew by playacting an overly aggressive silverback. By the time I drive away he will be sad to see me go.

I will get bumped to first class on the flight back to New York and instantly regret ordering the quiche instead of the oatmeal as soon as I receive it. The sausage will have cheese unappealingly baked into the middle.

My particular synesthesia, the one of mentally contorting any common instance of sudden, off-beat repetitive clanging sounds (a car back-firing, metal utensils landing on a hard floor, the banging of a distant hammer) into an internal, opening drum gambit of D'yer Mak'er, will occur on three separate occasions over the seven days of travel.

Newfoundland

Here the tides flow,
And here they ebb;
Not with that dull, unsinewed tread of waters
Held under bonds to move
Around unpeopled shores
Moon-driven through a timeless circuit
Of invasion and retreat;
But with a lusty stroke of life
Pounding at stubborn gates,
That they might run
Within the sluices of men’s hearts,
Leap under throb of pulse and nerve,
And teach the sea’s strong voice
To learn the harmonies of new floods,
The peal of cataract,
And the soft wash of currents
Against resilient banks,
Or the broken rhythms from old chords
Along dark passages
That once were pathways of authentic fires.

Red is the sea-kelp on the beach,
Red as the heart’s blood,
Nor is there power in tide or sun
To bleach its stain.
It lies there piled thick
Above the gulch-line.
It is rooted in the joints of rocks,
It is tangled around a spar,
It covers a broken rudder,
It is red as the heart’s blood,
And salt as tears.

Here the winds blow,
And here they die,
Not with that wild, exotic rage
That vainly sweeps untrodden shores,
But with familiar breath
Holding a partnership with life,
Resonant with the hopes of spring,
Pungent with the airs of harvest.
They call with the silver fifes of the sea,
They breathe with the lungs of men,
They are one with the tides of the sea,
They are one with the tides of the heart,
They blow with the rising octaves of dawn,
They die with the largo of dusk,
Their hands are full to the overflow,
In their right is the bread of life,
In their left are the waters of death.

Scattered on boom
And rudder and weed
Are tangles of shells;
Some with backs of crusted bronze,
And faces of porcelain blue,
Some crushed by the beach stones
To chips of jade;
And some are spiral-cleft
Spreading their tracery on the sand
In the rich veining of an agate’s heart;
And others remain unscarred,
To babble of the passing of the winds.

Here the crags
Meet with winds and tides
Not with that blind interchange
Of blow for blow
That spills the thunder of insentient seas;
But with the mind that reads assault
In crouch and leap and the quick stealth,
Stiffening the muscles of the waves.
Here they flank the harbours,
Keeping watch
On thresholds, altars and the fires of home,
Or, like mastiffs,
Over-zealous,
Guard too well.
Tide and wind and crag,
Sea-weed and sea-shell
And broken rudder
And the story is told
Of human veins and pulses,
Of eternal pathways of fire,
Of dreams that survive the night,
Of doors held ajar in storms.

 E.J. Pratt

This Week In Not Surfing

I am absolutely convinced that in a few years they'll tell us that, in fact, smoking tobacco every now and again is really actually very quite good for a majority of the population. Something magical it does for lymphatic circulation and dandruff.

I am also certain that somehow, some way, this unprecedented and hazardous obsession with being fit past forty will be a cornerstone of the "hey remember when" genre of giggles in future conversations. Someone is going to realize, I hope, that being a slightly dumpy - less prone to taking death defying chances - simply happy to enjoy an aging camaraderie - sort of elderly bon vivant is really the way to go. We'll even enjoy a catchy pop song that will forever change our attitudes. It's all about that pace, 'bout that pace, mo' feeble.

It is the time of year when you are dragged far from the beach if you are person like me. The kids want to pick apples. No, pumpkins! Aren't the leaves beautiful this time of year? Oh, how Fall is my favorite season! That crisp air! Bah, humbug. Not only did I not surf this week, but everyone I know did and sent me photos proving it. Well all you lucky jerks, I ate some great pizza, drank some great wine, had some good conversations and jumped on a trampoline.

Fascination. Fascist Nation. Fascination. Fascist Nation.  Hmmmm. Never thought of it like that.

There is this place down the street, Mr. Piña, that will give you a free juice from their juice bar if you buy more that twenty dollars of groceries. That gets dangerously addicting. Twenty dollar kale/lime/pineapple juices and a cupboard stocked with potato chips.

And finally, this surf film has knocked that old cruddy Chanel surf film off my Ten Best Surf Films Of The Last Ten Days list:



(The only question, really, is if all these bassy girls are looking for rather more trebly men.)

This Week In Not Surfing

1. On the plane to California I watch Atomic Blonde three times over other passenger's shoulders. I watch Beatriz at Dinner then The Hero on my own itsy-bitsy screen. All three films make me wonder what it means to live every day as if it is your last, to appreciate every moment the way they say you ought to, our popular religion in which everyone is chatecised but where no one receives communion. 

2. At one point I let myself believe that when we die we don’t really die but our positive vibe soul pixie dirt carries on to join other soul pixie dirt of a certain cosmic simpatico, forming a kind of enthusiastic pixie clod, packing in with other pixie mounds to coalesce into some sort of terrestrial rebirth. The better you do, the more ethical positivity you can achieve in this life, the way cooler your subsequent reformation will be in the next. Not you, so to speak, but the remnants of you partying along with other way cool, thoughtful remnants making the universe a better place.

3. When we get to Grannie & Papa’s house I find my old Patagonia wetsuit hanging where I left it in the closet, a relief as I once left my favorite black belt (my only black belt) in this same closet only to find it irrevocably borrowed upon my return. 

4. Nina had warned me the waves would die just past Christmas. I figured she was speaking in a California surf vernacular, “flat” on the West Coast having an entirely different meaning to “flat” on the East Coast. But she’s wrong in a different way. It’s flat even before Christmas. 

5. I now reckon every successive evolution in our belief is just a bridge to the next. Bridges upon bridges next to bridges as far as the eye can see, spanning a chasm between the places birth & death. People get stuck in the middle, so taken with the view they’re sure they’ve reached terra firma. Or they've just decided to stay suspended in place. Which is understandable. Sensible even.

6. On the flight to California there are three different films on three different seat back screens simultaneously featuring men in cowboy hats. Out of 43 possible Halloweens I can only remember dressing up as a ghost (the Charlie Brown kind), a lion (with a plastic mask, the kind with a rubber band), a pirate (like Johnny Depp) and a cowboy (lots of times.) (Most times.)

7. At the end of The Hero there is a poignant scene (spoiler alert) where one character (a beautiful woman) reads an Edna St.Vincent Millay poem to another character (a cowboy actor.) My three year old interrupts this ultimate, meaningful scene four times, twice kicking the headphone jack out of the port. When I do finally finish the scene, I cry. Because I’m watching a movie on an airplane. And she's reading a poem to a cowboy.

8. California has never been my home. I lived here a while, a tourist the whole of it.

9. Fatherhood is a bit like tourism. I suppose I don’t have to explain that. 

10. Being married is like being a tourist. But that probably needs explaining. 

11. There is no tourism to surfing. Just suffering. 

12. On my mobile phone I have a link to a webpage titled 10 Cultural Values of the Lakota, or something like that. Most of them have something to do with being quiet. My relationship with that sort of quiet has been a spotty one my whole life.

13. I pull out one of the softtops from beneath the house and paddle from Grannie & Papa’s to Tamarack and surf for an hour off the north jetty in something knee highish. One of the regulars hoots me into waves, talking loudly and telling everyone to paddle harder, then laughing ecstatically. I paddle back to the house not long after he shows up. 

14. We drive to LA in my wife’s late grandfather’s Lincoln Towncar. I walk into a hip restaurant and all the waiters are wearing mustaches. I am also wearing a mustache. I told my wife last year I think I may never not have a mustache again. The upper lip protection somehow translates into lazy confidence. 

15. Graham’s dad shaved off his mustache one summer during high school, becoming so much nicer, more jolly, more jovial. Seemingly overnight. An almost instant loss of authority.

16. In Venice Beach I dip into the water just after sunrise, watching a 3 foot tiger-striped ray glide past my feet as I shuffle out. There are a handful of novice surfers hanging around the pier going straight on nothing shorey. I think for the first time that I understand the draw of owning a cat.  

17. I observe the strikingly Gallic features of my handsomely hangdog friends at their new music venue/bar/restaurant on the other side of Echo Park. The place feels triumphant, victorious and hollow in a youthful way. The product of grit and can-do. It’s beside a dry river bed under the shadow of brown scrubby mountains. I imagine those mountains have sage brush rolling atop them.

18. At the hip restaurant I sit across from three twenty-somethings with three matching meshback caps: Marmot Mountain, Patagonia, REI. They sport thin hair on their lip and cheeks. The baristo has his own attenuated twenty-something mustache and a full sleeve tattoo of some swirly waves. His dusty lip fuzz is feathery and perched. I regard it with vicarious satisfaction, proud of its precarious confidence. The manager walks by. His mustache is very blond. Too-blond mustaches don’t always capture the feeling. I indulge in using my thumb to press the cauliflower rice onto my fork. Like a cowboy.

19. I paddle from Granny & Papa’s almost all the way to the Oceanside pier before I find a little sandbar in front of a seawall just past the Teutonic housing development. The paddle is windless and I glide smoothly over the clear water that feels like I’m looking through a green beer bottle. Surfing isn’t suffering when there is no wind and the water feels like an empty beer bottle. That comes later, on the flight home.

20. I celebrate New Years with a woman who looks out over the sea every morning when she wakes up and every night before she goes to bed. And has done so for around sixty years. I also celebrate with the guy who almost got run over during that surfing motorcycle stunt at Cloudbreak. 

21.  When I get home my son’s godmother is there, dog and house sitting. I’ve left my family in California to return to work. My son’s Godmother makes dinner of polenta and pan friend meat with sage on it. During the meal she tells me about parking her car in a very dodgie neighborhood in Queens but not at all feeling threatened as everyone she passed was too busy looking down at their phones. She convinces me to catch the late night screening of the famous Irish method actor’s final film. Getting to the theater a little early, I drift to a bookstore and read the titles off some of the books heaped on the little islands. “Men Explain Things to Me” by Rebecca Solsnit. “How To Ruin Everything” by George Watsky. “Why Buddhism is True” by Robert Wright. Each title like a small dagger in the heart. 

22. Walking back to the cinema I get a text from my sister-in-law with pictures of my elder son surfing under the moonlight, being goaded into waves by his uncle, the same uncle who pushed the reigning Adaptive Surf champion in the AS-5 category (surfers who ride in a non-standing position and need assistance to paddle into waves) to victory in last month’s title event. When the champ touched down in his native Australia they blew massive firehoses over his plane and put him on the front page of the newspaper. They do this for surf champs in Australia. 

23. My son doesn’t get water cannons for surfing by moonlight. But I do when I hear he’s been quoted exclaiming, “this is the best night of my life!”

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.

New York is for Surfers (The +s & -s of a Stab Article)

Stab Magazine is doing some sort of "best cities to live and surf in" deal and New York came up #8. I am not sure how much time Charlie Smith spends living in the city, but since he is a writer and may make his own writerly hours, perhaps he has a different take on the rigors of surfing here than the normal nine to five guy.   Or even  an eight to eight guy like me.  Either way, here is the scoresheet:


"The women are not the best. That is what Los Angeles is for."  I do not know what universe this guy is from.  Seriously.  I wouldn't usually talk about this sort of thing, but, come on.  We've got the United Nations.  Literally the United Nations.   There is no better place for women (and men) of a certain caliber and variety.  Come on.  
-40 points


"Do not stay cheap. Do not stay with friends. Do not stay cheap." God bless you for saying so. 
+20 points


"Walk, don’t ride or even subway. In walking, you will discover the textural nuances of Manhattan."  New York is for the peripatetic.  That is one of the very first things that occurs to everyone when they start living here.  One day you're in Central Park, walking around, getting the feel, in the blink of an eye you're eating a burger and drinking a beer at the Corner Bistro.  And you didn't step foot in a cab or train.  It's crazy.  Happens all the time.  
+5 points


"Do not listen to the hip New York crowd. They will crow on and on about Momofuku or the newest this and the newest that. Their tastes have become spoiled by excess. They no longer know what actually tastes good." This is so right on it is almost worth a thousand points.  Except it is ruined by the bizarre advice to eat at Pastis before other places.  You can do a lot better than that. 
0 points


"Do not set foot in Brooklyn."  Classic.  I'd tell you the same. Lord knows I rarely set foot in Manhattan anymore except to go to a session, see a museum show or um... what was that third thing?  Fact is, parts of Brooklyn, the famous parts where the hip people live, are now more expensive than lots of Manhattan.  Even Downtown.  Besides, there is nothing to really see in Brooklyn.  The see stuff is in Manhattan.  The only reason you'd want to make the trek to Brooklyn is to have a rooftop barbecue with some old friends.  And even that can be a drag, depending on the friends.
+10 points


"Don’t look shell-shocked. Look slightly jaded."  Shit, I look shell shocked all the time and I've lived here for over a decade.
-5 points


 "I don’t know how people have time for work with so much culture and fun around." Me neither. It sucks, truly.  
+5 points


"The models in Soho may even talk with you."  Here lies the problem.  All the models that would talk to you live in Brooklyn.  
-5 points


"Cold in the winter, humid hot in the summer, perfect in the spring and fall. New Yorkers love it when seasons change and they are right. It is loveable. Enjoy the nuances of each. Dress appropriately for each. Dress appropriate always." I have no idea what this even means.  But it's sorta true.  I guess.  
+2.5 points


Grand total: + 12.5
Ok, so I did the math on a piece of paper and it may still be wrong. And ok, I have no idea what +12.5 means.  But it's not a minus so... um... the birds are hotter here.  Photo by Matt Clark.

Don't You Influence Me

The Influencer, a relatively recent titular attribution breathing and dying in the social media realm, inhabits a space sandwiched between Brand Ambassador and Wonton Opportunist.

It used to be that brands, the Mad Men, could invent the Respected Voice. Or at least gobble up an emerging character bending their visage to a strategic will, selling back their Frankenstein-With-A-Wink to captive audiences. But in this digital age of a million extruded niche voices splintering into incalculable cliques of untraceable taste, the corporate marketing wonks lost the magic equation with which to deliver the perfect pitch. They lost the golden ticket of authenticity brought to you by Joe Namath. Shit, man, his knees really were that messed up.

Chiseling out a whole new genre of spokesperson from the fickle shale of our attentions, voila the Influencer: a souped up 21st Century sleight of hand co-opting the age old rank of Respected Voice. Preceded by an unfortunate industrial stench of a cynical manipulation of authentic esteem, it has the vibe of backward masking, of subliminal messaging, of hidden agenda-ing. It has the word "sell out" plastered right next to the exotic city stickers on that proverbial leather valise.

There is the well documented knack surfers have in filling necessary gaps keeping themselves happily in the purchase of paddle time. It's the stuff of our sport's myth and legend. The ability to pull the fleece over some carpet bagger's eyes, buying just enough of the day in the water thanks to the gullible slob's forkful of cash has it's own stink of rad punk rockness. I think Dora, of course. And of every one of those Malibu surf scions who rigged the Hollywood stuntman system in their favor. I think of apocryphal tales of Waikiki cunning.

And perhaps this is why it is such an affront. I've certainly not worked out that scheme and I'm always pulling for those clever bastards who have. Is this a lost sensibility in surf culture? Is it all so nauseatingly shallow? So meanderingly main stream? Of course it is.

But the Surfline article beknighting Mikey DeTemple an Influencer is that disappointing.
Because Mikey DeTemple is a good guy making his way in the world while surfing.
And he, or any other working surfer for that matter, doesn't deserve the stab in the back.


Editors Note: Yeah, this is all semantics, and thinly plastered at that. But that's the currency of the realm. And yes, I pay my own bills and satisfy my own creative desires via the advertising industry, often making films about people called "Influencers." There's just something sacrosanct to me about surfing. Or at least there is still some plainly naive part of me that really, really wants "surfing" to still play by its own rules.

Editor's Other Note: And yes, I may have just accepted EBNY's first product placement/review gig. Anything for some free sunglasses. Just don't call me Influencer, apparently.

Editor's Second Other Note: Maybe they'll pull that offer now. Maybe I need to rethink my public opinions. I mean, I really need new sunglasses.

This Week In Not Surfing

The wages of sin is death. And I've been swimming. That line repeated throughout my youth in the most inconspicuous ways. Romans 6:23. The grammar never quite sat snug in my ear, which is probably why it's sat so long. And I've been swimming. I haven't touched the wet side of a surfboard in a couple months, an effect conjuring both horror and hope. If I can torture myself this long every time, I reckon I can do just about anything. Like Hannah Gadsby, during culture's most recent beatification, "white men are the canary in the coal mine, if they aren't doing well, what chance do the rest of us have?"

Interestingly, on the occasion (if we can just eek to it) of some great reckoning of white male perpetration, the observed academic takeaway will be incredibly interesting; the desired effect of a paradigm shifting wide-spread cultural accreditation and acceptance of shame being truly the solitary instance of that particular emotion being so fulsomely adopted by the sexual predator rather than his victim.

Amidst the petulance, both real and imagined, no doubt there will be humans with answers of all sorts.

And there is the old double cliché that New Yorkers are rude married to its equal, the retort that New Yorkers are honest. The conventional wisdom being that New Yorkers will punch you in the conversational face while Angelinos will stab you in the relational back and Midwesterners will offer you another slice of pie, or sausage or whatever makes you feel most awkwardly welcome. It is true that the threat of confrontation is a palpable constant the moment you step into the Five Boroughs. It is often a defensively aggressive habit that has traditionally approached and departed with refreshing alacrity. And being perceived as the the soul of the New York character, a kind of brand commodity sold via countless movie characters to the world. Subsequently misconstrued as actionable anger, the endemic crankiness is traditionally a far more bite-less bark. But the lore is being shilled back to us now, with an extra bit of unnecessary cause & effect borne of a Wild West misconstrual that demands instant comeuppance. This foreign attribution a perfidy to the meaningful ineffectuality of the original.

And I'll admit that when someone prefaces their authoritative statement with "...it's what I like to call," or "...as I like to say," my hackles go instantly to their most erect. If you insist on me being more than I am, I'll insist on being given an instruction manual written in my own language.

And here on Long Island:

A chain of nine teenagers stand in line along the shorepound, arms linked as in a game of Red Rover. Their screams of glee at the inevitable wallop like the joy of a tickled toddler. 

The wetsuits hang about the two boys like wet sheets on a clothesline. Their boards, one a yellowing potato chip, the other an aging buoy single fin. They ride them prone, tipsy. But they feel like surfers. Like real surfers.

When the sea is happy, its most happy, it turns a color of silvery green and plays with itself. I'm fortunate to have seen humans in the approximate state.

"The beach is just something you cross to get to the surf." I used to repeat this until it subsumed a whole portion of available synapses like a Transcendental Meditation mantra. It is no longer a relevant totem.

I love the beach.

On The Big Worry

The arrival of a major surf contest in New York raises eyebrows.  For those who didn't realize there is "surf around here" the notion that the sun kissed wild men of the South Pacific might want to dip in our sullied waters has the whiff of the absurd.  For those whom surfing in the New York Metropolitan Area is part and parcel to their urban lifestyle, the thought of the disruption and commodification of their cherished pastime rouses paranoia and fear.  For everyone else (the ones who follow the New York Times' love affair with Rockaway for instance) the whole thing perhaps fits into the faddish patterns already taken hold.  In truth, there is nothing new happening here.  It is the age old arguments of lifestyle vs. sport, business vs. bliss; the ritual gnashing of teeth whenever a surf contest lands anywhere other than J Bay, North Shore, Fiji or Bells; a recipe for repeat surfy indignation.   Ricardo Salcedo makes some interesting points here regarding the O'Neil Coldwater Classic.  I put a couple cents down in the comments area there.
What is interesting about Thad's article in the Times is his concern for the naturally occurring low key, non-vibey atmosphere in the NY surf scene. Thanks to a small, relatively tight knit community, there is a basic sort of begrudging camaraderie at work.  The stated worry is that somehow a burgeoning commercialism will tip some delicate balance, sending the planet out of orbit.  It's not hard to imagine the scenario where surf crazed ignorant hoards descend upon the beaches to wreak havoc on a delicately balanced social eco-system.  What's hard for me to imagine is that they would stick around long enough to cause any more irreparable, lasting harm that is not already in motion, something that's been in motion for me, anyhow, since my parents bought me my very first T&C Surf t-shirt. Obviously, I am tainted.  I've helped the thing.  But I can't help but think the whole show will blow in, blow out and leave little side affect. New York's surf scene is already growing faster than it had, the tensions already mounting in accordance.   The contest won't do much other than give us something to watch, wonder and shake our collective head about.  Something we're already doing. 

This Week In Not Surfing

1. The Uber driver wears a silver set of boxing gloves around his neck. When a paunchy and balding sixty-something driving an SUV honks maniacally, nearly running the stop sign and smashing into our Prius, gesticulating wildly, our driver quietly chuckles to himself. Someone from the back seat lightly posits “I think we could take him,” and the Uber driver raises his eyebrows and says he’s pretty sure it wouldn’t be a problem. “Golden Gloves,” he flicks the dangling silver pendant. “My dad started me too early. I was fighting in the ring by the time I was eleven. By 16 I'd beaten everyone. There was no one left. I'm all about pressure points now. You can beat anyone with a pressure point. The cops don’t like it.” I reference a southern Kung Fu style, “ooh, Mantis style? That's illegal. Who taught you? I carry around a taser now. I had a guy make me a taser glove once. The cops got it. I got caught and the cop just took it, didn't even arrest me, wanted it for himself. They’ve got a device they put under the hood that will open every door and latch in your car, electric or mechanical. No joke.” No one jokes.

2. In an effort to keep my life under control I start deleting my Instagram app from my smartphone and downloading it again every time I want to post a picture. This keeps me from mindlessly flicking my thumb at any given spare moment; standing in line, in the kitchen, driving my car. It also spares me the full brunt force anger-envy that wallops me every time I see a shot of a Long Island beach break working in any fashion.

3. I travel to 45 minutes north of Austin, Texas to make a film about a dog. As most things concerning dogs, I learn a lot. 

4. Forgive me father for I have not surfed in weeks. I have not even seen the water, the waves, the sand, the horizon line. The problem is, your highness, that there is a problem with guilt. It’s not that one should not feel guilty, guilt can be an incredibly useful motivator, mentor, best friend. It’s that people seem to feel guilty at all the wrong times.

5. I am often asked how I like my eggs. It is a standard question. At 5:45 in the morning I walk into a fancy restaurant in an airport and ask to be seated at a table with four seats in front of a T.V. showing a rerun of a women’s international soccer game and even though the restaurant is empty, the hostess states she will only seat me at a table for two far away from the T.V. I leave without telling her how I want my eggs. The fact is I almost never know how I want my eggs until the last minute. It can take a slightly embarrassing amount of time to decide, and at the last minute, the waiter tapping his toe, this can be awkward.

6. I stop surfing altogether and am now simply a father in a city. And surfing, the normal kind of surfing, the kind of surfing I still see in magazines, is not part of my normal life. I like being a father though. I like my kids.

7. I would like people to stop using the word ‘just’ around me. Cut that crap out. “Can you just…” “It’s just that…” “Why can’t you just…” “I just feel…” It’s ridiculous. If you can’t figure out why I feel this way, well then you’re just dense.

8. I turn 42 years old and fail to re-elect a slim sliver version of status quo laced with stubborn hope. The actual result feels like a new, scary reality, a dawning of a new, scary era, but in reality it is the dusk of an old scary era. Had I elected the other one, the one I had wanted to elect, it would have simply prolonged a charade. I face a reality. There is the garden variety misogyny, racism, tribalism and strains of ignorance communally tended to in varied states of ignorance and delusion. But I am now firmly in the opposition and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be opposing.

9. People are asking where we went wrong. Some people say it started with the loss of Glass-Steagell or with Bush V. Gore or with the failure of school desegregation. Some people think it is faulty polling, identity politics or disconnected rhetoric. I personally see a significant correlation with the disappearance of video rental shops.

10. Leonard Cohen died this past week. A long time ago he introduced part of me to the rest of me. For that I am grateful.

11. On the plane to California I watch Ferien “... a prospective district attorney takes her father’s advice to get some rest and relaxation and heads to an island - where she makes friends with a series of strange inhabitants (German with English subtitles.)

12. I try, when able, when not traveling with my children, to wear a suit when I fly. I have a few suits. A very expensive one, which is also the most non-traditional, making it the hardest to find a moment to wear. A cheap ready made black one that I had tailored to fit my oddly shaped body and is worn with a very narrow tie and a white shirt with a collar that is just slightly too large. A medium-dark blue cotton one that I bought at a fancy store in downtown LA and I imagine makes me look slim. And a light blue summery suit that I have worn only once, to Antonio's wedding. On this flight I wear the third suit with a light blue, very thin cotton oxford that opens between the buttons in an embarrassing way that exposes my belly button. But I feel like people treat me well because I am in a suit. Everyone except the people who naturally distrust people who wear suits.

13. I visit Jef and Joce, my French friends who are reopening the mythical, legendary, iconic Brooklyn bar Zebulon in the Los Angeles neighborhood called Frog Town. These two men make me smile, they make me happy, but mostly they make me squirmy. Their massive authenticity and pride, the very apotheosis of manliness sometimes a shade too overwhelming for me. I nod and titter and try to understand everything they say through their shruggingly manly French accents. When all is going badly and I think I may fail, I dream that perhaps after it all I will just move to L.A. and bartend at Zebulon and not surf there either.

14. I visit my mother who has voted for Trump. She had not voted for two presidential elections and then decides to vote for Trump. I ask her incredulously, I say, "you could have voted for McCain, for Romney, for Obama... why did you come out of political retirement to vote ... for Trump?" She coughs a little cough and waves her hands with fingers pleading, "you don't understand, how could you understand? You're not my age! I had to live through Bill Clinton and that, that cigar! I had to bring up my children, trying to explain to them about that Lewinsky girl! I cannot have another Clinton in office." I nod and understand better. Ok, so that left a mark on you, having to explain to your kids about that sort of thing. It really scarred you. A full 24 hours later, sitting in a hotel room bathtub I realize that I, her youngest son, was already a year married and working as a television cameraman in San Francisco when the Lewinsky scandal broke.

15. I text my friend Jamie to see if he'll be in the vicinity while I'm in California. But he'll be in New Smyrna, Florida. I text back, "you know what they say about New Smyrna." "What?" he replies. "A real upgrade!"