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...
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, Do you throw the shaka? If so, do you mean it? The first question is easy, yes or no. The second question is maybe a little harder. In this Age of Perpetual Satire, we would need a full statistical analysis with a side order of boolean function in order to estimate the percentage of ironically-thrown shakas. “A shit-ton” is the best I can do this afternoon. The shaka, of course, long ago...
Hey All, Pointing out the smallness of 1970s world tour surfing won’t raise any untrimmed eyebrows over at the Society of American Historians. Smallness is a cornerstone of the WCT origin story. To demonstrate growth, the tour will invariably harken back upon its kitchen-table origins, the tiny but hardcore cluster of spectators at the early events, the blue-collar paychecks. (Eddie Aikau, 1975’s...
Hey All, Localism was already a thing in 1972—you might even say it was the thing, in terms of the sport jumping all over a new trend—but for most of us it was still a rumor, a bit of sidewalk graffiti, a lustily shouted “GO HOME, KOOK!” after a drop-in by a non-local surfer. Of course, we’d been tribal for 20-plus years by that point. “Locals Only” blew up not just for its perfect four-syllable ...
Hey All, Deep in the weeds here at Encyclopedia of Surfing HQ, spit-shining every page before gently, carefully moving it to the new platform. We’re still a few weeks out, and I’m adding an extra few days at least to account for all the time where I’m side-tracked looking at posts I haven’t seen for years, some of which go back to 2013. A few things have stuck out. Mostly, and I’ve come back to t...