Hey All, Surf media in the '60s and '70s was like a middle school dance, with boys on one side of the crepe-paper-bedazzled gym, girls on the other. Except the boys got 98% of the dance floor, and the yearbook photographers were all boys, along with the principal, the band, the yearbook staff—in fact, gals, would you mind running out to pick us up some more refreshments? I can't think of any othe...
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 apparentl...
Hey All, I'm in Baywood Park this weekend, at a memorial get-together for Daniel Blau, my uncle, the person who got me started surfing and is therefore the flapping butterfly wings that gets us to EOS, the Sunday Joint, the whole thing. Dan was a happy accident. He was born 15 years after my mom, who for the rest of her life maintained a lightly held resentment because he was basically the favor...
Hey All, Thanks to everybody who reached out after last week's famille c’est une grande table Sunday Joint on the de Rosnay brothers. Apart from Joel and Arnaud, of course, I didn't get much into the specifics of this storied and accomplished clan, but I should have at least pointed out that for 15 or so years now the family headliner has been Joel's firstborn, Tatiana de Rosnay, a novelist and s...
Hey All, The "greatness" quote, above, is from the towering, and toweringly insufferable, Cinquième République founder Charles de Gaulle, and maybe you're thinking, Just what you'd expect—nobody appreciates the French like the French. Or maybe you're more like, It's not bragging if you can back it up. I lean toward the second option. If you value culture in all it's manifest wonder—not counting c...
Hey All, Montreal, we can all agree, is as French as a city gets without having a Gitanes-studded bank on the River Seine. So if Teahupoo had been on the map 50 years ago, and surfing was already an Olympic Sport, we can further agree that our "surfing shortboard" Olympic venue for the très fleur-de-lis '76 Montreal Games would have been End of the Road, just as it is for Paris '24. In which ca...
Hey All, Probably the first thing I did on my first day at SURFER, January 1985, the new junior associate editor, was plug in my pea-green IBM Selectric II, power up, hit the "return" key a few times and whisper, "Tick-tock, Jarratt—here I come." Six months later I got a Leading Edge word processor, a year after that I traded up to a Mac SE, and that was it, Team Apple all the way, and never a pr...
Hey All, The self-justifying nonsense we’ve said and done over the years to make surfing grander than it is, am I right? All the energy we’ve spent pulling our beautiful blue sport this way and that, stretching and tugging till we can rub it against the hem of religion or the Olympics or live-laugh-love style personal affirmation. I’m not entirely against this. (Mostly I am. Blame atheism and Ste...
Hey All, Tom Curren and I spoke by phone in early 1996, five years after his third and final world title. He’d been traveling hither and yon that whole time, as headliner for the Rip Curl Search campaign. Perfect waves, no more chasing scores and rating points. Everybody assumed Curren was now finally living his purest surfing life—myself included. Does traveling better fit your idea of what a p...
Hey All, Richard Nixon was never far removed from the surfing conversation, in one way or another, during his presidency. Mostly because if you were of fighting age, as the vast majority of surfers were in the 1960s and ’70s, Nixon was viewed as the person responsible for the draft and America’s grinding and ongoing involvement in the Vietnam War. Unless you were 4-F, or in college, or already pl...