Notes, Tidbits & the Blog of Confusion
NOTES AND TIDBITS:
For anyone who read my day 89 post, Surfline has some pictures of that day. Pretty wild stuff. here and here
I didn't see any of Newport Beach (although there were photographers standing on the beach), but there's one of RJ's. here
I don't know how long they leave their photos up for, or if I can post them here, but I won't for now.
PULP FICTION
As the blog grows, I think a few words of explanation are apropos, just in case someone happens upon this and wonders what the heck is happening.
I started surfing every day in mid June, and have been keeping logs on my personal computers since early July. A few weeks ago, I got the idea that if I could clean up the journal logs and supplement them with a little bit of research, I could get a book out of this whole thing.
I found the blogspot completely by accident, following a link one day, and decided that this was as good a place as any to start assembling the book.
So, the entries that are getting posted are in no particular order. Some of them are me looking back at my old notes and writing based on the early days. Some of them are recent, daily notes that are developed enough to be posted.
Think of it like a Quentin Tarentino film - the timeline is all screwed up, but you can get the idea.
Mind you, I don't know the first thing about publishing and have no idea how that whole aspect is going to work out. So, it's very possible that someday I'll just print this whole thing out, pass it out to a few people and that'll be the end of it. But, like a good little capitalist, my wife sees dollar signs in the whole effort. She figures that if we can get this thing into bookstores, or surf shop, sunder some kind of cover, that ten or fifteen copies will immediately fly off the shelves making us multi-billionaires so that we can retire and take up the new hobby of watching 12 hours of television every day.
So it goes.
Until then, I know that I really like to write and I'm having a heck of a time doing these entries. So, I'd do more.
A word on the concept.......
When I decided that this might be a book, I did what seemed the easiest thing at the time: I stole the idea for a format and started running with it.
The format is this: A surfer's personal experiences are presented along side a parallel historical or sociological narrative about surfing in general, surfing history, Suring culture, etc.
I'm stealing this format from a book called "Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast", by Daniel Duane.
Duane surfed for a year in Santa Cruz, and wrote a beautiful and lyrical book about that year parallel with some really great surfing history. Duane's focus, historically, was presentations of surfing in literature and early Polynesian and Californian surf cultures.
My focus promises to be at least a little bit different. Last year, while babysitting my newborn daughter, I saw a commercial for the "Endless Summer" which was broadcasting on a cable television station. I had never seen the film, but had always heard it discussed. So, I watched it.
"Endless Summer" is not the greatest surfing movie ever made, it's simply the most enduring. It is still sold in all the surf shops, and is the most universally recognizable portrait of surfing that we have, even to this day. It has permanently attached a face, an attitude, and a culture to surfing in the minds of surfers and non surfers alike. It's really quite a phenomenon.
But, "Endless Summer" was nearly 40 years ago.
Robert August was a surfer from Orange County who surfed in Huntington Beach, but the Huntington Beach that he knew is not the Huntington beach that I surfed at. His experience of surfing and my experience of surfing are two different worlds.
The pages of published surfing literature are significantly weighted to coverage of the period leading up to 1966. What I've wondered is... what's happened to surfing since then? What has changed in surfing, and in the culture that surfing lives in to make my surfing experience so different from the boys of 1966?
So, that's what I'm writing about.
That's why I did the whole piece on Edison Field, Ron Jon's and Crystal Cathedral. In 1966, all that was being developed out of farm land. Now, any plant you find for miles is sprinkler fed urban landscaping. This is a different place, and I think that surfing's history cannot be thought of as independent of that.
More Later
-Travis
copyright 2004 Travis R. English
For anyone who read my day 89 post, Surfline has some pictures of that day. Pretty wild stuff. here and here
I didn't see any of Newport Beach (although there were photographers standing on the beach), but there's one of RJ's. here
I don't know how long they leave their photos up for, or if I can post them here, but I won't for now.
PULP FICTION
As the blog grows, I think a few words of explanation are apropos, just in case someone happens upon this and wonders what the heck is happening.
I started surfing every day in mid June, and have been keeping logs on my personal computers since early July. A few weeks ago, I got the idea that if I could clean up the journal logs and supplement them with a little bit of research, I could get a book out of this whole thing.
I found the blogspot completely by accident, following a link one day, and decided that this was as good a place as any to start assembling the book.
So, the entries that are getting posted are in no particular order. Some of them are me looking back at my old notes and writing based on the early days. Some of them are recent, daily notes that are developed enough to be posted.
Think of it like a Quentin Tarentino film - the timeline is all screwed up, but you can get the idea.
Mind you, I don't know the first thing about publishing and have no idea how that whole aspect is going to work out. So, it's very possible that someday I'll just print this whole thing out, pass it out to a few people and that'll be the end of it. But, like a good little capitalist, my wife sees dollar signs in the whole effort. She figures that if we can get this thing into bookstores, or surf shop, sunder some kind of cover, that ten or fifteen copies will immediately fly off the shelves making us multi-billionaires so that we can retire and take up the new hobby of watching 12 hours of television every day.
So it goes.
Until then, I know that I really like to write and I'm having a heck of a time doing these entries. So, I'd do more.
A word on the concept.......
When I decided that this might be a book, I did what seemed the easiest thing at the time: I stole the idea for a format and started running with it.
The format is this: A surfer's personal experiences are presented along side a parallel historical or sociological narrative about surfing in general, surfing history, Suring culture, etc.
I'm stealing this format from a book called "Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast", by Daniel Duane.
Duane surfed for a year in Santa Cruz, and wrote a beautiful and lyrical book about that year parallel with some really great surfing history. Duane's focus, historically, was presentations of surfing in literature and early Polynesian and Californian surf cultures.
My focus promises to be at least a little bit different. Last year, while babysitting my newborn daughter, I saw a commercial for the "Endless Summer" which was broadcasting on a cable television station. I had never seen the film, but had always heard it discussed. So, I watched it.
"Endless Summer" is not the greatest surfing movie ever made, it's simply the most enduring. It is still sold in all the surf shops, and is the most universally recognizable portrait of surfing that we have, even to this day. It has permanently attached a face, an attitude, and a culture to surfing in the minds of surfers and non surfers alike. It's really quite a phenomenon.
But, "Endless Summer" was nearly 40 years ago.
Robert August was a surfer from Orange County who surfed in Huntington Beach, but the Huntington Beach that he knew is not the Huntington beach that I surfed at. His experience of surfing and my experience of surfing are two different worlds.
The pages of published surfing literature are significantly weighted to coverage of the period leading up to 1966. What I've wondered is... what's happened to surfing since then? What has changed in surfing, and in the culture that surfing lives in to make my surfing experience so different from the boys of 1966?
So, that's what I'm writing about.
That's why I did the whole piece on Edison Field, Ron Jon's and Crystal Cathedral. In 1966, all that was being developed out of farm land. Now, any plant you find for miles is sprinkler fed urban landscaping. This is a different place, and I think that surfing's history cannot be thought of as independent of that.
More Later
-Travis
copyright 2004 Travis R. English
posted by travinator @ 10:58 AM
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