Hey All, The eagle has not landed. The eagle has swooped in, majestically—I have seen the eagle up close. Then it turns and flies away, and this has in fact happened four or five times now, but today is worse, today feels as if the eagle has dropped a parting gift on the back of my head. EOS 2.0 is not up. October 1st was the deadline. But we’re not ready, and as much as I want to say we are ver...
Hey All, Count me among those who canceled, without any hand-wringing, the never-jailed but ninth-ring-creep filmmaker Woody Allen. This scene alone should have done it, decades ago—watch and cringe. Yet a half-dozen Woody Allen lines are still hung on the walls, dusty but accessible, in the comedy museum of my mind, like the bit in Annie Hall where Allen, reconnecting with his ex while still bei...
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...