Hey All, There’s a lot of surf fiction out there, short and long, and damned if I can recall a single passage that gets anywhere close to a bullseye in terms of actual wave-riding. Tim Winton’s Breath, maybe—the early chapters, before the book wobbles into a big-wave-life-or-death-psycho-sexual-triangle. But as a rule, you will sooner lasso a cat with a piece of string than you will capture the r...
Hey All, On Friday night, just before 10:00 PM, with a half-finger of warm bourbon still in the tumbler, I finished the photo revamp on the EOS “Zinc Oxide” page—the last image to drop in place was the freckled Surf’s Up gremmie you see in the grid above—and people, that was it, the longest, hardest, most satisfying stretch of work of my life done at last, the images for the entire A–Z area of EO...
Hey All, Coming at you this afternoon from deep into the "W" pages and half-giddy at the prospect of wrapping up this massive EOS photo-remodel by mid-week—so giddy in fact that I have halted work in order to fire up this Joint and spend a few bleary-eyed minutes with you talking about surfing’s powerful Weber element, and by “Weber,” I mean “Weber” and “Webber” both, so let’s get into it. Greg ...
Hey All, At some point, as I tiptoe further into early adulthood, I will make a real effort to stop organizing my thoughts in the form of High Fidelity-style lists. Today is not that day. Today I announce that Joey Cabell is floating near the pointy end of my Top 10 All-Time Coolest Surfers, and if you don’t share this opinion, then Robert Mitchum likely isn’t on your Top 10 All-Time Coolest Act...
Hey All, I don’t know if Australian Surfing Hall of Fame photographer-kneeboarder-whirling dervish Peter Crawford really was a genius, as his aging but enthusiastic supporters claim, but he for sure had a formidable talent for head-fuckery. Which was annoying as hell to anyone on the receiving end of a Crawford verbal barrage of jabs, japes, cackles, and non-sequiturs. I met Peter in Hawaii in De...
Hey All, I am coming out of Sunday Joint hibernation today but wish I wasn’t. Maui is still burning, and cinder-blackened scenes coming out of there, Lahaina especially, are heartbreaking, overwhelming, tragic. Nearly 100 people are reported dead from the fires as of this moment, and the toll will almost certainly go higher, which means this little corner of earthly paradise—an area that most peo...
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 after the last note and ride that Om-pop bliss as far as it will take me. I’m not thinking here so much about ...
Hey All, Wave-wise, Santa Monica is not even in the conversation as a great surfing town. You can scrape together a decent surf life here, but only by commuting up and down the coast. I learned to surf in Santa Monica at age nine, and by ten I’d already learned to call Bay Street “Bay Slop.” Zero local pride, wave-wise, except maybe for the Cove, but that’s another story. Nobody lives in Santa M...
Hey All, A recent Sunday Joint shot of Fabian (click here, scroll down) in those flawless two-tone trunks but paddling with all the grace and control of a Carly Rae Jepsen first pitch, prompted Randy Rarick to go deep into the memory hole. Long known as “Mr. Clean,” Rarick is incapable of offhand meanness—but he is getting saltier as he ages, and I hope the trend continues. Here is the email Rand...
Hey All, The EOS team is 75% fraidy-cat when it comes to scary movies. Jaws, for some reason, didn’t set me back the way it did for a lot of other impressionable mid-’70s surfers. But Carrie destroyed my interest in horror as completely as Sissy Spacek destroyed prom night, and I don’t think I’ve made it through a scary movie since, not that I’ve made much of an effort—20 minutes of Get Out was e...