Making Friends With The Neighbours

From The Dry Salvages   by T.S. Eliot (published in 1941) The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices. ---------------- I just read this at the beginning of the Afterword by Jeffrey S. Levinton in the 1989 edition of Rachel Carson's,  The Sea Around Us. It is a section of a much longer poem, that itself is part of a set, Four Quartets , that were largely written during World War II. The Dry Salvages was written during the air-raids in Britain, and it is very sad. I'm not vouching for the whole thing, but ...

Surfing is one of the great joys of my life.* Being outside, at the beach, riding waves, spending time alone or with friends, encountering all kinds of animals, being away from my computer and phone - it's a feeling of freedom and joy that I find in precious few other activities. The very thought of being in the water and riding waves makes me feel good. But while the joy of surfing is the biggest part of it, darkness, discrimination and exclusion are a large part of going surfing too. These cultural aspects - human wrought - are by far the worst of surfing; worse than the fear of sharks, of wipeouts, of fin cuts. The violence and anger, the sense of entitlement, the commitment to exclusivity that some surfers layer over the pleasures they find in riding waves is the worst of surfing. We've all seen, experienced or practised this to varying degrees, and we've all likely turned our heads at times as well, hoping it will go away, hoping the victim will go away. It's n...

I remember a time when I rolled my eyes at the idea of new surf films as they arrived on the scene. For so long, surf films told the same story over and over and over and over, and over and over and over. I stopped watching them. But that changed, and I had to start to eat my cynicism. Surf films got diverse. They got interesting. Part of this is the acceptance of new people as surfing's storytellers; letting surfing be more than men, more than sunshine, more than grunting descriptions of getting barrelled and feeling stoked, more than roadtrips, more than power turns, late drop ins and airs. New stories about surfing that suggested surfing was more than the worst of it. Well hello there, A Lunar Cycle . You might have heard about the latest offering in this new world of surf films, that was directed by Andrew Kaineder, and written by and featuring Irish surfer, Easkey Britton . If you haven't heard of Easkey, then you haven't been paying much attention to surfi...

It's a truth universally acknowledged that social media can be a real drag. Arguments, comparisons, bitchiness, nastiness, narcissism and more all play out across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, blogs and more. I've had my fair share of shitty social media interactions, but what I've found is that it doesn't have to be that way. Most of my experiences on social media has been really positive, and I've made some wonderful connections over the years with wonderful people. I've met so many folk through blogging and Instagram, and are people I care about and have various relationships with. Like me, Jamie, Toddy, Mick, Sarah and Felix are people you might have come across on your digital travels, and they are people I've come to care about and to , different degrees, to know. For me, these relationships are some of the best of social media. I love connecting with people and projects in various places around the world, and being able to watch their work develo...

I’ve been surfing again lately. Not as much as I’d like, but surfing. In fact, I managed to surf twice this week! Twice! Once down on the Gold Coast and on Sunday, up on the Sunshine Coast. To my shame, I still don’t know the coastlines of south east Queensland very well, so it’s always very hit and miss for me in terms of where I go and why. Since I surf so little at the moment, mostly I’m just happy to get in the water anyway. In the past, I use to avoid the Gold Coast, because it has a reputation for a localised, aggressive, male-dominated, shortboard culture. There have been many surf reports of violence there over the years, and the things I’ve often read in surf media and research spaces have deepened these assumptions. When it’s come up as an option, the idea of surfing there made me nervous in advance. But I’ve surfed there a bit over the years – at Currumbin and Burleigh and Rainbow and Snapper and Duranbah – and I’ve never had any experiences to back this up. I’m on a lo...

Following yesterday's NYC post about Ice Cream Headaches , I poached this from Toddy ! The contest was back in September 9th, but I've been doing some catch-up blog stalking this weekend: 2nd Annual Rockaway Beach Bodysurfing Contest from Noah Clothing on Vimeo . My favourite bits are people running in fins, and way the person in the blue hat gets a wave at about 1.10. I also like seeing the view from the water, back on to the developed world just beyond the sand. It's like the Gold Coast, but without the green hinterland. I also love to know what the view from the water is.

Given my experiences with Kurungabaa, I'm always keen to support an interesting project about surfing. Ice Cream Headaches, a book and photo project about surfing in New York, is the latest one that captured my attention. To be honest, being a city dweller myself, any project about city-related surfing grabs my attention, and New York surfing culture in particular, bucks the ideals of surfing in pristine nature, of surfing in warm, clear waters, of surfing as accessible. New York has a strong coastal culture and the beaches look amazing. While it sure looks like it has an enthusiastic surf crew, but actually surfing it does not look so easy. This project is focused on folk who live and surf in New York, telling surfing the city's stories through their experiences. The two chaps producing it have a crowd-funding page for the production of the book, offering a range of options from throwing in some cash to pre-purchasing books, t-shirts, art prints, and even surf lessons...

Since watching  Musica Surfica , I've thought a lot about intersections between classical music and the sea. I'm not going to bang on about that today, but I did want to share one of my most treasured oceanic musical discoveries, Become Ocean, by John Luther Adams. Instead of riffing on a sense of the sea from afar, of watching it, or being awed by it, this 45 minute composition takes you under the water, under the waves, onto the ocean floor. You float bout with the swell and fall of the sounds, carried along to the point where it's barely possible to notice it any more, where the weight of the water - of the music - disappears. I go back to this composition a lot, and highly recommend exploring his catalogue of work - songs of the wind, of birds, of light. The capacity to communicate space through words, colour or music fascinates me, and I've rarely heard a place - under the sea - so perfectly achieved as in this.

I'm always learning new things about the coast, the beach, the surf, the waves. Mostly though, it's with my feet planted firmly on the ground, or floating in or on the sea. I know the ways different waves form up and crash from the water. I know how the sand looks on the ocean floor bottom from sticking my face through the surface, diving down to touch it, or being scraped along when I wipe out. I know the rocks from headlands or from avoiding them at different tides, the shoreline from how sand sticks to my feet, from beach-combing, sun-baking, digging holes, building castles, I know the littoral zone from wading on long walks, paddling with children, passing through on my way to the surf. I know the effect of coastlines swell lines from sitting on headlands, walking up cliffs and watching from on high, but always with my feet planted firmly on the ground. Drones have shifted some of that, but most of the drone images I have seen have been of people surfing waves, not of coa...

These days, most of my writing about surfing appears in academic publications, which means all my work is hidden behind really expensive paywalls. Because the main role of academics is to contribute to public knowledge, that the public can't access our work is one of the terrible paradoxes and most unethical things about contemporary academia - we're bound by our industry to publish in academic spaces. It's why I feel a responsibility to write here and in other mainstream and accessible places as well. I've not been very good and keeping to that commitment, but writing more on this blog one of my goals for this year. In the mean time, a new book with lots of research about surfing, Sustainable Surfing (edited by Greg Borne and Jess Ponting), has offered full and free access to anyone for the next 60 days. I'm not sure you can print it out (people more clever than I can likely find ways around that), but if you're interested in reading some work on sustainabili...

Kids and parents play along the shoreline and the surf is busy: daughters and sons bobbing hopefully near their parents, awaiting instruction and/or parental pride; a Sunday Boardriders contest, the competitors gaudy in fluoro pink, green, yellow and blue rashees; young men positioned in the critical take-off spot, right next the rock shelf that generates this point break; older men on longer, thicker boards, knowing as much, or more, than the younger showponies, but betrayed by their bodies they wait further down the line, hungrily asserting themselves from the inside; those on the outside, avoiding the fray for all kinds of reasons: skills, age, vibe, preference, or some other knowledge about the break born from experience; and scattered throughout are women young and old, taking their time, staking their claims, with no distinctions between their skills and the others, the men – as far as I can observe they’re no worse or better at surfing. But I already knew that. On this warm, ...