Hey All, Happy Memorial Day and a big thanks to the military-affiliated among you who wrote in after last week’s Sunday Joint to comment on the unlikely but often very compatible ways in which service and surfing can together exist in a person’s life. I’ve always had a blind spot here. I watched Patton and Apocalypse Now and Stripes, Cliffs-Noted my way through All Quiet on the Western Front, and...
Hey All, Remember that thing you did in high school where you’d siphon a half-inch from every bottle in your parents’ liquor cabinet, add orange juice, mix, and look out, world, here comes the party posse? Did you have a name for that drink? In mid-’70s Manhattan Beach it was a Suicide. Here in Seattle, during the ’80s, according to my wife, it was called a Graveyard—and for day drinking during ...
Hey All, Midget Farrelly's The Surfing Life and Phil Edwards' You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago were published back-to-back in the summer of 1967, and are more or less the original surfer autobiographies. The genre didn't exist—then suddenly we had not one, but two very good first-person books by surfers who were not only supremely gifted in the water but also bright and articulate and opinio...
Hey All, The drink where you grab a little from every bottle in your parents' liquor cabinet and blast out into the night with your sticky 80-proof contraband feeling like Junior Johnson on a Carolina backroad outrunning a half-dozen G-Men? Like I said week before last, we called it a Suicide, my wife called it a Graveyard, and some of you out there called it Jungle Juice, or the Pearl Harbor, a ...
Hey All, Kevin Brennan is the jagged little diamond that at some point drops into every historian’s lotion-soft hands as he or she tills the fields of mid-1960s surfing. But unless you’re a pension-age Bondi local familiar with the Hep Pit and can tell Bluey Mayes from Red Ted, you likely know just three things about Brennan. First, he was called the Head, thanks to a large and well-rounded uppe...
Hey All, Correcting surf history misconceptions is great just for the neener-neener I-fixed-it pointy-headed rush, and I’ll be chasing that high till I’m soul-arching past the Pearly Gates on my way to an afternoon meetup with Tubesteak and Rell Sunn. But it also feels great because installing a new bit of history, apart from moving the ball a bit further downfield in terms of truth, more often t...
Hey All, It was the clothes, not the wave-riding, that caught everyone’s attention in Gidget. Or it was both. But mostly the clothes, I think, and the Gidget producers obviously had a lot of fun, without being mean about it, making fashion distinctions between Gidget’s parents (cardigan sweater and tie for Dad; long skirt and shellacked hair for Mom) and the surfers on the beach. Yes, the trunks ...
Hey All, I have pulled a few historiographical boners in my day, more than a few, but the results by and large have been humbling instead of mortifying. I wrote that former Top 16 pro Wes Laine was from West Virginia, for example, instead of Virginia Beach, which mistake-wise is a long way from signing off on a King James Bible run with “Thou shall commit adultery” jumping off the page like Magic...
Hey All, I finally watched the original 2012 Magic Mike, which has a too-soft ending but is otherwise a 90-minute sticky-fingered joyride of a film. The banter is excellent, loose and southern-dipped, but my favorite bit is an acting-within-acting scene where Channing Tatum, in cop mode, walks into a sorority party with flashlight at high port and brusquely tells a roomful of coeds who don’t yet ...
Hey All, I am three-quarters Jewish and 100% non-practicing. I act the Jew now and then by mentioning my brother played volleyball in the Maccabiah Games, and that Irv Zeiger, our family’s beloved showboating uncle, cofounded the Mulholland Tennis Club because Jews were barred from other Los Angeles-area clubs. But I never attended synagogue or fasted for Yom Kippur or celebrated Hannukah. No ba...