Hey All, A great ending cannot save a bad song, or even add much value to a decent one. But if you can pull off something special at the end of an already-good track, the effect is pure uplift, almost gravity-suspending—there are songs whose endings are so good that I’ll pull the earbuds and ride that Om-pop bliss as far as it will take me. I’m not thinking here so much about the big showy “A Day...
Hey All, Greg MacGillivray was 14 in 1960, the son of a Corona Beach lifeguard, small and pretty (his older sister was Miss Newport Beach) and absolutely relentless at whatever he put his mind to: paper route, math class, Boy Scouts—or, by 8th grade, making a surf movie. Nobody saw Greg coming. He looked like a kid dressed up for Halloween as a surf movie-maker. He was almost invisible. MacGilli...
Hey All, Surfing is no longer hip, but lack of hipness doesn’t matter. This is the apple-sized conclusion, placed 100 yards downfield, that my arrow of logic was going to smartly pierce at the end of this Joint. But nay. Every time I draw the bowstring my hand wavers. The word “hip” is so wrung out, for starters. What about “cool,” then? Is cool okay? Isn’t cool the same as hip? They are not the ...
Hey All, The day came and went without me noticing, but as of last month the Sunday Joint is now five years old. "I’m going to try and send one of these out each week," I wrote on September 3, 2017, back when we were all wearing $500 crop-top designer T-shirts and soothing our frayed nerves with fidget spinners, "mostly just to catch everybody up on what posted [on EOS] over the previous seven da...
Hey All, Jen See of Santa Barbara, BeachGrit's least-trolling and sole PhD-holding writer, said last week she was "pretty sure the curve of a woman’s hip off the end of a longboard, that dance, that swing, is the most beautiful thing in surfing." Jen was inspired after seeing Lauren Hill's new documentary film The Physics of Noseriding, which looks slow-mo and groovy in the trailer but apparently...
Hey All, Whatever the funniest thing in surfing is at the moment always seems, in my experience anyway, to be the funniest thing ever, and right now that thing is a huge plushly-bearded goofyfooter from New Zealand named Luke Cederman. Luke posts often on his various Raglan Surf Report platforms, and I encourage you to visit and sample freely, but you might start here with "Surf Nerd" and "Surf D...
Hey All, Except for Jesus and Elvis, every famous person's life eventually gets reduced down and poured into the smallest possible container, and while Florida-based surf photographer Tom Dugan worked miracles at Sebastian Inlet, he will not be mistaken for the Redeemer—redheads never are—and thus I believe Dugan's contribution will in time rest on just two images. Which is more than most of us w...
Hey All, Damien Hardman is my second favorite Iceman, ahead of Val Kilmer but miles behind George Gervin, and apologies to anyone here who is not an NBA nostalgist but I cannot say Gervin's name without proselytizing on his behalf, starting with the fact that he was the smoothest, most stylish and fluid player of his or any other generation, the Tom Curren of NBA shooting guards, right down to th...
WSL Finals Day 2022 is a wrap, and we won't dwell too long, but I watched the entire damn event and need to get a couple of things off my chest. First, I'm okay with the ten-surfer one-day title shootout format. Yes, it means that the best performer over the course of the year—the surfer who, in the old aggregate-points format would have been the champ—might get kicked down to runner-up. Carissa M...
Hey All, I’ve been racing around this past week on trains, planes, and automobiles, swept away in an end-of-summer crescendo before my son returns to school, and by the weekend I was left completely Jointless. The Joint below, in a slightly different version, originally posted at the end of 2019. * * * I can go years without thinking about Roddy Doyle, then here comes something like The Curfew,...