Hey All, There are different paths to riches, and while I am a traditionalist in that I’d love to trod the path that ends with two or three more zeros in the family IRA, I am wealthy in other ways. I am up-triggered, constantly, for example, when reminded of the cultural bounty that dropped like rosebuds and free Sex Wax into my tanned hairless arms during the earliest years of my surfing life....
Hey All, Los Angeles-born surf filmmaker Hal Jepsen was the Taylor Steele of his era, or the other way around. The right guy in the right place at the right time. Jepsen’s Cosmic Children(1970) equals Steele’s Momentum(1992), is what I’m trying to say—both movies are raw and artless and as bleeding-edge as you could get in a pre-internet age in terms of showing us what was happening almost as it ...
rfHey All, The print version of Stab magazine, which was published out of Australia from 2004 to something near 2014 (that’s where my collection stops, anyway) was a distant cousin of a short-lived early ’90s magazine called Beach Culture, in that the graphic design jangled and jarred and did everything but reach up and grab you by the throat. Stab was also a bit like Playboy, softcore and lad m...
Hey All, Halfway through last week’s Joint on Eddie Aikau, I noted that his Waimea Bay memorial service, despite being announced beforehand and held on a Saturday, drew less than 1,000 people, which seems like an impossibly low turnout but the photos don’t lie. EOS contributor John Callahan emailed back the next morning: A memorial service held today for Eddie Aikau, if he were to pass in the sa...
Hey All, EOS will always jump at the chance to go around the world, and this week is no exception. A British surf-mag collector reached out to Julio Adler of Brazil and turned him onto a forgotten gem of a movie by Japan’s Kiyoshi Fujimoto, which closes with a tribute to Hawaii’s own Eddie Aikau, and that film, thanks to Julio, has landed in the inbox of yours truly—feeling Canadian, given what I...
Hey All, What giant snobs we were, all of us California-born surfers, for a few decades there but especially the 1960s. Hawaii was above us, of course. Australia mattered, once Farrelly and Young literally beat us at our own game. But in the continental US, as far as we were concerned, the sun rose on one side of Pacific Coast Highway and set on the other, and if for some reason we happened to lo...
Hey All, How did I get to Burleigh Heads, Queensland, Australia, floating like a buoy at the top of the point on a dying swell, trying to conjure a chest-high set wave along with three other second-tier pros before an indifferent few hundred spectators at the 1981 Stubbies Pro Trials? Practice, practice, practice! to steal an antique punchline. More specifically, I got to Burleigh by selling my c...
Hey All, I asked my dad recently if he was disappointed or puzzled or otherwise confounded by the insane amount of time I spent surfing. He thought about it. I watched him think about it. He’d gone along with my new interest way back when, no problem, backed it even, got me a SURFER subscription for Christmas, paid for or did matching funds on my first half-dozen boards, drove me two or three tim...
Hey All, The days of high-low hip-swinging culture-vulture Sunday Joints—you know what I’m talking about, Mike Doyle riding tandem with Diana Ross or the one where we parkour from Vishna to Bells Beach to David Cassidy—are about to return. Further down the page here, in fact, I’ve loaded up a little preview of what’s in store next year. But for the moment we are still in fundraising mode. If an...
A Letter from Matt Warshaw, Executive Director of Encyclopedia of Surfing Surfers, surf culture aficionados, fellow travelers—the 2023 EOS fundraiser is ON and if you want to skip to the business end of this message, click here to donate. Last week we pushed the big red launch button on EOS 2.0, and bringing that new and massively upgraded version of the site to life pretty much sucked all our t...