Hey All, It was the clothes, not the wave-riding, that caught everyone’s attention in Gidget. Or it was both. But mostly the clothes, I think, and the Gidget producers obviously had a lot of fun, without being mean about it, making fashion distinctions between Gidget’s parents (cardigan sweater and tie for Dad; long skirt and shellacked hair for […]

Hey All, I have pulled a few historiographical boners in my day, more than a few, but the results by and large have been humbling instead of mortifying. I wrote that former Top 16 pro Wes Laine was from West Virginia, for example, instead of Virginia Beach, which mistake-wise is a long way from signing off […]

Hey All, I finally watched the original 2012 Magic Mike, which has a too-soft ending but is otherwise a 90-minute sticky-fingered joyride of a film. The banter is excellent, loose and southern-dipped, but my favorite bit is an acting-within-acting scene where Channing Tatum, in cop mode, walks into a sorority party with flashlight at high port and brusquely […]

Hey All, I am three-quarters Jewish and 100% non-practicing. I act the Jew now and then by mentioning my brother played volleyball in the Maccabiah Games, and that Irv Zeiger, our family’s beloved showboating uncle, cofounded the Mulholland Tennis Club because Jews were barred from other Los Angeles-area clubs. But I never attended synagogue or […]

Hey All, Pro surfing’s #1 feel-good moment of 1985 was Tom Curren winning his first world title—never mind that the achievement led to a pig’s breakfast of a tribute section in Amazing Surf Stories where the silken visuals of Tom’s wave-riding are laid without mercy or care atop a two-bit Casio-made anthem titled “Top Cat,” with Curren […]

Hey All, I was an okay skier for a few years there, back when André the Giant was throwing heels into the front row and cooling down après-wrestle with a hundred beers and playing rhyming games with Mandy Patinkin in the third-best comedy ever made, but I was not good enough or stoked enough to ski […]

Hey All, A few additions to last week’s Sunday Joint on Pat Curren, who died two weeks ago today. From Joe Curren’s Instagram: “We said goodbye to my dad on Sunday, January 22nd, in North County San Diego. His family, including all of his kids, and most of his grandkids were at his side when he passed. […]

Hey All, Big-wave surfer and boardmaker Pat Curren died last Sunday at age 90. Here it is a week later, no decent obit has yet surfaced, and I’ve got six phone calls out trying to find out the simplest of facts, like where he died, Idaho or Utah or California or somewhere else, but no […]

Hey All, I’m halfway through Demon Copperhead, which has me walking around the neighborhood in a contemplative reverie trying to imagine the sheer depth of Barbara Kingsolver’s magic writing bag to be able to take a story this relentlessly grim—poor kid growing up in 1990s Appalachia with its royal flush of pathologies including drugs, abuse, prison, neglect; there […]

Hey All, I won’t bet my AARP card on it but I think Florida’s own gonzo-hunk surfer-writer Bruce Valluzzi was the person who gave Backdoor its name, at the end of a 1968 article for Petersen’s Surfing magazine: When the mortals awoke the next morning, they found a right breaking where the mighty Banzai Pipeline had […]

Hey All, I’m a long way removed from the action, and reports are still coming in, but my Sunday Joint hot take is that California’s big-wave beatdown last week was All-Time Top Three for size and destruction, right there in the mix with 1969 and 1983. The Santa Cruz footage from three days ago has […]

Hey All, Nat Young’s SURFER Magazine report on the 1969 Australian National Titles, a five-round marathon held that year in Western Australia, mostly at Margaret River, skips completely over the women’s event and doesn’t even bother to post the final results. (For the record: Josette Lagardere won, followed by Nola Shepherd. We’ll skip the men’s.) This […]

Hey All, We’re going Jointless this Sunday, tomorrow, Christmas Day, but I just wanted to shoot a little something out before signing off for the week. The EOS Fundraiser has just crested $60K, and I expect some showboating latecomers out there will be dropping something into the kitty between now and the New Year, and […]

Hey All, The 2022 Encyclopedia of Surfing Fundraiser is still ON, as I have shaken many but not all of the trees. It’s been a good week—we’re nudging 50K in donations and new subscriptions. But these next few days will make a big difference for EOS in 2023. Surf history archives do not build themselves, and […]

A letter from Matt Warshaw, Executive Director of Encyclopedia of Surfing. Hello surfers and all lovers of surf culture. The 2022 Encyclopedia of Surfing fundraiser is ON (December 12–21), and if that alone is enough to trigger the philanthropic reflex, click here to donate and here to subscribe or buy a gift sub. Big plans […]

Hey All, It’s gonna be run-and-gun from now till the end of 2022 here on your favorite nonprofit website weekly newsletter. Holidays, inlaws, fundraisers, snow days, White Lotus—all coming at me like Level Three rocks on Asteroids with no hyperspace button, which means I’ll be Jointing at you with one hand while baking Christmas cookies […]

Hey All, Never mind the header, today you get it Fast and Cheap. I just returned from a week in LA and the Joint’s turkey-scented deadline breath is hot upon my neck, so I will try and nudge this thing somewhere close to the outskirts of Good—but no promises. For example: I am looking at […]

Hey All, I moved to San Francisco in 1991 and for two or three years the City flew hither and yon, Tinkerbell-like, across my dull SoCal beach-bro senses. Everything I experienced in SF during this period was at the very least new and different and often borderline magical. I’m not a Grateful Dead fan, but whatever […]

Hey All, Photographer Art Brewer and pointbreak stylist Kemp Aaberg both died this week; Brewer on Wednesday, at age 71, from complications following a liver transplant; Aaberg last weekend, at 82, from Parkinson’s. Brewer was, and still is—and probably always will be, given that the profession itself is such a different and arguably reduced medium […]

Hey All, A great ending cannot save a bad song, or even add much value to a decent one. But if you can pull off something special at the end of an already-good track, the effect is pure uplift, almost gravity-suspending—there are songs whose endings are so good that I’ll pull the earbuds and ride […]

Hey All, Greg MacGillivray was 14 in 1960, the son of a Corona Beach lifeguard, small and pretty (his older sister was Miss Newport Beach) and absolutely relentless at whatever he put his mind to: paper route, math class, Boy Scouts—or, by 8th grade, making a surf movie. Nobody saw Greg coming. He looked like a kid dressed […]

Hey All, Surfing is no longer hip, but lack of hipness doesn’t matter. This is the apple-sized conclusion, placed 100 yards downfield, that my arrow of logic was going to smartly pierce at the end of this Joint. But nay. Every time I draw the bowstring my hand wavers. The word “hip” is so wrung out, […]

Hey All, The day came and went without me noticing, but as of last month the Sunday Joint is now five years old. “I’m going to try and send one of these out each week,” I wrote on September 3, 2017, back when we were all wearing $500 crop-top designer T-shirts and soothing our frayed nerves […]

Hey All, Jen See of Santa Barbara, BeachGrit’s least-trolling and sole PhD-holding writer, said last week she was “pretty sure the curve of a woman’s hip off the end of a longboard, that dance, that swing, is the most beautiful thing in surfing.” Jen was inspired after seeing Lauren Hill’s new documentary film The Physics of […]

Hey All, Whatever the funniest thing in surfing is at the moment always seems, in my experience anyway, to be the funniest thing ever, and right now that thing is a huge plushly-bearded goofyfooter from New Zealand named Luke Cederman. Luke posts often on his various Raglan Surf Report platforms, and I encourage you to visit […]