Hey All, Had the late Rick Rasmussen been 5' 5" and weak-chinned with a Stanley Tucci hairline, he'd be little more than a tragic surf-world footnote. But that very much was not the case. Rick charged out of Westhampton, NY, like a forgotten Marvel Universe character, like Long Island Thor, chiseled and grinning, charisma levels set to 11, blond hair waving off his teenaged shoulders as he won th...
Hey All, You can read about Dick Brewer and his incomparable divaness, or marvel at his gleaming Elves of Eregion Skil 100 planer, or call up yet again the famous image of the man in perfect Om-channeling full lotus. We do not lack in Brewer iconography. But there is no taking full measure of the man, no understanding the guru in toto, until you sit at Brewer's feet and hear the velvet-smooth bas...
Hey All, You'd need to be a lot deeper in the competitive surfing weeds than I am these days to have seen, live, the bungled hit job Erica Maximo of Portugal laid on Australian Willow Hardy during a four-surfer repercharge heat at the recent ISA World Junior Championships in El Salvador. The set-up is a little complicated, but basically time was running down and Hardy needed a low score to advanc...
Hey All, Arne Wong emailed after last week's highly animated (haha) Sunday Joint, to say that Glenn Shot is the original surfer-animator, meaning the first animator who actually surfed, not the first person to animate surfing, and that the foundational clip in the genre is Glen's 1969 head-spinner Eternal Sea—which, incredibly, is the least-druggy part of Natural Art, the trippiest surf film ever...
Hey All, Surfing and animation came together over 100 years ago, peaked in the 1970s, then mic dropped so hard in 2007 with Surf's Up that whatever comes next will be a postscript. This week's Joint is a starter pack of surf animation, arranged oldest to newest. All the titles here are now posted on EOS. I've added a few comments, below, but it's probably worth saying up top, and the point is so ...
Hey All, Longtime EOS connoisseur Thomas Altee, just after last week's Joint went out, sent me some amazing 1930s footage of Corona Del Mar, which I have downloaded and remixed into this two-minute swing-beat gasser designed to razz your berries and pop your peepers, and yes the drummer on that track is none other than the Big Sid Catlett himself, the heppest skin-tickler of the age. I did not f...
Hey All, Long-time Sunday Joint fanciers might recall me crowing a bit when I posted a complete year-by-year set of Makaha International results, then did the same a few months later with the Duke contest, and I'm about to ride that pony again here today with the Depression-era Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships. All the blustering means . . . I'm maybe a little insecure about said accompli...
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, Linda Davoli was the stealth surfer in our recent Boyer-Oberg Sunday Joint, and that tracks with the MO of her entire seven-year pro career, during which time you could find reputable surf-world figures who thought Davoli was not among the world's best female surfers but the best, full stop. Scroll to the last wave on this clip. Hang Ten Pro, 1977, First Point Malibu. My take is that Mar...
Hey All, Airbrushing is still a thing in surfing and always will be, until the Cybertrucks go rogue and bring down the grid at which point the compressors fall silent and we’re back to decorating our boards with charcoal and berry juice. But airbrushing is not a thing in 2024 the way it was in the 1970s and the sport is less colorful for this fact—and a bit less ridiculous, and I mean ridiculous ...