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Surfers, Fresh to Death
Author: Surfing Magazine
Warren Smith and Dion Agius: queerish hipster wannabes, and certainly not hardcore surfers. So speaketh the angry core. Photo: Nick Lavecchia
This one gets a bit arcane and wonky, so run while you can.
Ages ago, when I last had regular access to television, I saw CJ Hobgood’s Firsthand on FUEL. The show follows CJ on a visit to Globe’s Australian offices (Globe being CJ’s main sponsor), where he praises the brand and its skate roots by noting that “all skaters want to do is sniff out a fake” — i.e. since Globe passed the skate world’s smell test, Globe must be pretty legit.
Surfers really want to sniff out fakes too. They spend a lot of time going around, just sniffing. Hunting witches to burn, insufficiently legit witches, like someone made surfers the legit police.
Legitness is a funny thing. To surfers it connotes single-minded pursuit of plastic on water — single-minded to the extent that being “legit” causes social retardation, intellectual atrophy, poverty, skin cancer, and a host of other maladies none of which is quite as bad as being a poser, which is, like, the worst.
So it’s tough to be a merely casual surfer and not get castigated for it. One can, but one will be regarded warily as a fraction less than, as in a modern three-fifths compromise. Not quite a real surfer, not quite part of the tribe. A bit dodgy. And it’s assumed that anyone who surfs just casually is afflicted with a job, or a family, or other miserable retributions from a vengeful God. Otherwise they’d surf all the time and do nothing else, like a sensible person. It’s very all-or-nothing, with-us-or-against-us.
Chas Smith declared the core to be dead; I think the core, rather, is killing itself in the name of its own coreness. It’s a cultural Neanderthal slouching toward expiration. Engaging in a positional arms race — a race to the bottom, toward mono-dimensionality, whereby a surfer isn’t judged by the color of his skin (offer void in Hawaii and for Brazilians), nor the content of his character, but by the dogged fervor of his surf habit. By how closely he can bring it to resemble chemical dependency. By how little else he can think, care, or know about the world.
Look how surfers are vilified for having any outside skills or interests:
Rasta is just a hippie-flavored sales tool.
Alex Knost is just a queer Brooklyn doll.
Dion Agius must be angling for the Urban Outfitters catalog.
Timmy Curran needs to stop pretending he can sing.
Kelly Slater, pipe down about politics.
And nobody better touch a damn paintbrush.
It’s a pretty bleak and boring standard, but there’s hope in the youth. Hope that they see the folly in being core and that they do other interesting things, and become interesting people, and aren’t afraid to be broad and deep, because the core is shallow and evaporating under its own hot glare. The future belongs to those who also surf. —Stuart Cornuelle