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Recession Rebels
42 Revolutionising female surfing, one massive set wave at a time.
68 New York artists, defying the times.
Silversun Pickups
Surf Revolution
50 Songs to ride by.
76 Special report from Cuba’s shores. By Sarah Bentley.
City Politics
50 States
52 Taking back the streets.
84 Faces of the new America.
O’Neill Big Mountain Pro Yeah Yeah Yeahs 86 Blitzing it.
The Cribbar
Sneaker Doodle
60 Tales from a big-wave spot.
90 Stylish sketches, for your feet.
San Onofre
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62 Power plant dreams. By Sam Bleakley.
94 Dodging bullets behind the scenes.
Mathieu CrÉpel
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66 Snowboarding enters the celebrity age.
96 Agile canines caught mid-air.
josh cole
56 Diary from the edge.
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TERJE HAAKONSEN BOBBY MARTINEZ MAT REBEAUD KAJ ZACKRISSON DAVID BENEDEK NICOLAS MÜLLER JEREMY JONES RICHARD PERMIN ROBBIE MADDISON FREDERIK KALBERMATTEN PHIL MEIER MIRJAM JÄGER BUSTY WOLTER JOONAS KARHUMAA XAVIER DE LE RUE GERALDINE FASNACHT CHRISTIAN „HITSCH“ HALLER CODY TOWNSEND SVERRE LILIEQUIST JAN SCHERRER LAURA BOHLEBER MARC WILLERS ROB DE WILDE THOMAS DIET SEB MICHAUD LANCE COURY NADJA PURTSCHERT A SWATCH OUTLAWS PRODUCTION 2009 · DISTRIBUTED BY SWATCH & SWATCH PRO TEAM · CMYK-COLOR
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Coral Reefs Soy Panday Mark Mathews
Thomas Campbell The High Line
Pilpeled
The Gaslight Anthem
Stacy Peralta JEff Soto Groove Armada Albums Films Books A Woeful TalE jean feil
Holland Surf
Peter Bauer
16 HUCK
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Words King Adz, Sarah Bentley, Sam Bleakley, Jon Coen, Colin Delaney, Gemma Freeman, Niall O’Keeffe, Stacy Peralta, Melanie Schönthier, Alex Wade, Faith-Ann Young, Olly Zanetti
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Images Caroline Allison, Peter Baker, Juliana Beasley, Joey Den Beer, Mark Brautigam, Jesse Chehak, Josh Cole, Kevin Crawford, Ben Ey, Christian Gaul, Maury Gortemiller, Shawn Gust, Naomi Harris, Craig Havens, Ben Huff, Yellena James, Steven Katzman, Peter Kearns, Sarah Lyon, Michael Macrodt, Chris Martin, Peter Mathis, Aaron Packard, Tony Plant, Heather Protz, Babak Salari, Derrick Sandini, Shorty, Jeff Soto, Tom Spader, Chad States, Carmen Troesser, Brian Uyeda, Faith-Ann Young, Irena Zablotska
Marketing & Distribution Ed Andrews
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The evolutionary process continues. Synth-pop. Neon. New wave wannabes. If these terms are foreign to you, you probably weren’t born yet. The 80‘s were all about the Cold War, video games and music television. And don‘t forget the Frogskins, a sunglass that
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Marlon Lipke in Oakley Jupiter™
In the last few decades, men and women have destroyed over 35 million acres of coral reef, and if the destruction continues at current rates, 70 per cent of the world’s coral will be killed within our lifetime. Tourism, coastal development and destructive fishing methods are just some of the ways in which mankind is chipping away at these subaquatic Edens. But coral reefs are more than just pretty gardens under the sea. They are home to thousands of plant and animal species that would otherwise be extinct, and are a nursery ground for many types of commercial fish, several of which you probably eat for dinner. Amazingly, they are both a link to our past – samples taken from corals can tell us a lot about our earth’s history – and provide hope for the future, with coral species already being used in the development of HIV and cancer drugs. Without coral reefs there would be no Pipeline to surf in Hawaii, and no Teahupoo in Tahiti. If we lose coral reefs, thousands of unique marine species will go with them, leaving behind a stony, lifeless reminder of what we once had. But, thanks to projects like the Rip Curl Coral Guard programme, it doesn’t have to be this way
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Is Soy Panday living proof that skateboarding is an art? Text Jay Riggio Photography michael macrodt
For as long as I can remember, skateboarding has been periodically referred
Soy had always drawn pictures, scribbling endlessly across the pages
to as an art form. Though I refuse to acknowledge skating as anything close
of his school notebooks. When he turned nineteen, he wanted to attend
to a sport, I’m still not sure it’s an actual art – despite its obvious creative
art school, but because of his obsession with skating, he never found the
attributes. But if I were to wholeheartedly accept the ‘art’ label fastened to
time to create a pre-entry portfolio. “I took the easy way out by studying
skating, it would without a doubt have something to do with the on-board
economics,” recalls Soy. During his following six years of education, he
talent of thirty-two-year-old French pro skater Soy Panday.
abandoned his drawing regime almost completely. “I didn’t draw much. A
To those who have never seen Soy ride a skateboard, his style, flow, board
couple drawings here and there while in class to make my friends laugh,
control and all-round creativity reflect something rarely seen in skateboarding:
but that’s about it,” he remembers. “Whenever I wasn’t in school, I was
genuine originality. But it could just be another case of life imitating art,
skating and had time for nothing else.”
seeing as Soy’s artwork is just as easy on the eye as his skating.
It was only about three years ago that Soy rediscovered how important
Soy was born in Orleans, France, to an Indian father and French
drawing was to him and has since adhered to a rigid schedule of creation,
mother. It was there that along with his older brother, Arjun, Soy started
devoting as much time to sketching as possible. With his plate piled high,
BMXing. But as the BMX scene slowly died out, Soy’s interests took a quick
Soy’s working on a series of T-shirt collaborations, a graphic for Landscape
turn. “I can clearly remember the vision that first made me want to start
skateboards and a group exhibition curated by his pal, Marke Newton.
skating,” remembers Soy. “It was this guy cruising in the middle of traffic as
“There is definitely something about drawing, the ability of the artists I look
I was stuck in the back of my parents’ car.”
up to – how they reproduce what they see with such accuracy and style,
He began skating in Orleans with nothing but his own driveway to
and completely understand light – that fascinates me,” explains Panday.
skate upon. But it wasn’t until his family moved to Belfort, in the east of
Though the ‘skate as art’ debate remains, what is fairly certain is
France, that his eye for endless possibilities fully developed. “That’s when
that Soy Panday’s skating is as fluid and free as his drawings. Whether
I understood the whole city could be a playground,” says Panday. “Now I
a conclusion can be drawn from that particular notion, well, that’s pretty
was that guy cruising in the middle of traffic.”
much up to you.
24 HUCK
S ABOUT WHO CARE E SUITS?
KL NON-WRIN
K TO BE QUIC IC, YOU HAVE SSIONS AVES ARE EP OP-IT-ALL SE DR WHEN THE W E S TH OT : SP TS EN ST SURF PROTEST PRES EUROPE始S BE U S EVENTS AT AT PROTEST.E SPONTANEOU XT AND EMAIL ALERTS R TE T THERE! SIGN UP FO SEE YOU OU
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26 HUCK
Sydney surfer Mark Mathews steps away from the beachside badlands conquer monster waves. to Text Ben Ey PHOTOGRAPHY SHORTY & BEN EY Three years ago, after a heavy wipeout at Shipstern Bluff off Tasmania’s isolated south-east coast, Mark Mathews – standout member of notorious Sydney surf gang, the Bra Boys – was in trouble. He’d been nursing an inflatable crocodile through the bowels of the big-wave reef in tribute to conservationist Steve Irwin when a blow to the head knocked him unconscious, forcing a medical evacuation. “I knew I’d done something bad to my neck,” says the big-wave charger. “I could feel tingles in my feet. I could still move but the boys held me still on the boat just to make sure. The rescue helicopter was off saving someone else so it was about eight hours before I actually got to hospital. I didn’t move for that whole time.” It wasn’t the first close call for Mathews. Nicknamed ‘Chalk’ by friends in the notoriously rough beachside Sydney suburb of Maroubra where he grew up, the twenty-six-year-old has a long history of surf-related setbacks including dislocated shoulders and broken ankles. Having recovered from his 2006 neck injury, hip surgery put him out of the water for four months last year, effectively squandering his World Qualifying Series (WQS) seeding and dashing his hopes of qualifying for the top-tier World Championship Tour (WCT) this year. Now he’s back in Tasmania for the O’Neill Coldwater Classic, but already injury is threatening to overshadow his 2009 campaign. “I was feeling really good but I just got a tendon tear in the other hip,”
27
he says from the garage of the weather-beaten shack housing the O’Neill team.
Mathews has shared in both the fame and infamy. The ill-fated pairing of
“I was feeling really fit – the best I’ve ever felt – but I’ve had a month out of the
his twenty-first birthday celebrations and a police force Christmas party at
water and I’m just starting to surf again now… it’s pretty disappointing.”
the Coogee-Randwick RSL Club in 2002 resulted in a minor riot, but the
Surrounded by a tangle of well-worn fishing nets and freshly stickered
record-breaking documentary has appealed to audiences worldwide.
surfboards, and sporting an earthy-toned jacket and beanie, he comes
“There is trouble everywhere in Sydney,” says Mathews, “heaps of
across well-spoken, articulate and calculated; decidedly innocuous for a
drugs, heaps of everything. I guess a gang forged around surfing and a
celebrated member of the Bra Boys, and surprisingly sane for someone so
brotherhood – something positive – is pretty unique, and the whole story
at home in huge surf. So why risk injury and a promising competitive career
behind that is a good one that everyone can relate to. Everyone loves
to chase big waves?
having family and having that sort of brotherhood – doing anything for
“I was shit-scared of big waves when I was really young,” says Mathews.
your mates. That’s a pretty good experience and something everyone
“I even had instances when I was twelve or thirteen where I got stuck out
would like to have in their lives. You just take out what you can from that,
the back and was too scared to come in and my mum would come out on
and it changes you into who you are. I just try and take the positives out of
her board and rescue me. I wasn’t born with it. Growing up in Maroubra,
where I grew up and leave behind all the negatives.”
we’d just push each other in the water. At first it was all about saving face.
Without a major sponsor in 2008, a three-year deal with O’Neill last
You’d never pull back in front of your mates… but once you ride the waves,
October has opened up a world of possibilities. “I’d saved up enough to get
that feeling is just unbelievable. You’ll never turn back after you get that.
me through last year without a sponsor, but right now I’d probably be at
Now it’s just all about chasing that feeling. There are guys who do it for the
home working if I didn’t get that deal,” he says. “I’d love to be on the WCT
exposure, but you can tell the guys with a real passion. As far as big-wave
but I also love chasing big waves and surfing remote locations. It’s almost
surfers go, they’re all unique characters, but we’re all driven by that feeling
impossible to do both. If you want to qualify you have to do nothing else
you get from surfing a big wave. We’ve all definitely got that in common.”
but focus on that. I don’t know if I could ever put that sort of attention into
Chasing monster surf has sent him around the globe in the company of
it and give up chasing big waves – I don’t know if I’d enjoy being on the
some of the world’s best big-wave chargers, including fellow Bra Boys Koby
world tour more than what I’m doing now. So I’m just going to see what
Abberton and Richie Vaculik. The three have just returned from Western
happens. I’m going to do the rest of the Coldwater Classic series and am
Australia, where Mathews last year rode a 45-foot wave at Cow Bombie
looking forward to surfing in Canada. I’ve never been there so it should be
that saw him collect the $20,000 winner’s cheque at the Oakley Surfing
pretty exciting.”
Life Big Wave Awards. This time round, his trip was less successful.
And as for big waves – just how many does Mathews have left in him?
“It was terrible actually,” he admits. “Probably the worst preparation
“I’ve been psyched to surf Cortes Bank or somewhere like that. I’m always
you could have for a comp. I shouldn’t have gone down there. It looked like
chasing slabs but I’d love to just ride one of those mountain sort of waves.
it was going to be good and I knew I had the contest… but I didn’t want to
I do a lot of CHEK training [the holistic regime favoured by many elite
miss out.”
surfers] to manage the injuries I’ve got over the years. The ‘standard’ time
That camaraderie is perhaps one of the primary factors behind the box office success of the movie Bra Boys: Blood Is Thicker Than Water,
to retire is usually around thirty but I reckon if I keep going with this training I can still surf big waves when I’m forty – or even fifty!’
which thrust the trials, tribulations and triumphs of the south Sydney gang into the public spotlight in 2007. As one of its most celebrated members,
28 HUCK
www.oneill.com
THOMAS CAMPBELL’S NEW FILM, THE PRESENT, CLOSES THE GAP BETWEEN CELLULOID AND THE SURFING EXPERIENCE. TEXT MICHAEL FORDHAM There is a music to Thomas Campbell’s films. It’s not just that music is the
There are so many highlights in the film it’s difficult to pin down even a
binding element, the thread that weaves the scenes together. The work
handful, but my personal favourites are sixty-year-old Santa Cruz shaper
is layered, cut upon cut, image upon image, so that the texture combines
Michel Junod’s straight-legged, soulful flow and Dave Rastovich streaking
with the sounds to make something else – something that harmonises
across a shimmering, cobalt-blue wall the size of a house. Alex Knost
and shimmers and resonates. And the thing is, the films can still make you
attempting to groove with Senegalese street dancers and Rob Machado’s
laugh out loud.
seventies anchorman hairdo are genuinely comical cutaways from the
The Present is Thomas’ third full-length film. The Seedling and Sprout
straight-ahead beauty of the tapestry.
were incredibly influential pieces of work that were infused with a
The texture includes Tom Curren’s archival mind-blower of a first
colourfully alternative aesthetic, carrying through a recognisable thread
wave at J-Bay and Joel Tudor dropping knowledge of the history of surf-
from his visual art.
riding influence. Even leader of the thruster-rocking airborne division
“I’m coming from the same place as you,” he tells me as he knocks
Dane Reynolds is cut in, as well as what must be the best Alaia riding
together a little greeting card by applying his signature scrawl upon
ever captured on film from Dan Malloy and Dave Rastovich. Australian
coloured pieces of paper, wispy threads and Polaroid transfers. “I worked
surfer Chelsea Hedges is represented in a series of awe-inspiring barrels,
on magazines for years, and when you’re thinking of what works in that
bringing to the forefront the fact that there is no gender bar to radical
context it’s all about balance. You edit things together in layers and you
and creative wave riding in Thomas Campbell’s world.
hope that you come out with something that people appreciate.” With Thomas’ visual art encoded in the filmic surf experience, you’d think there might be a distance between the simple act of wave-riding
The Present may very well be the closest to the elemental feeling of surfing you’ll ever get on film. Campbell, however, is humble about it: “You just have to do things how you feel them and hope that people understand.”
and the movie itself. But, amazingly, the trilogy of films has brought the viewer closer to the uniquely beautiful experience of riding a wave than
The Present will be touring the UK this summer.
many other filmmakers who have attempted to do the job.
www.trimyourlifeaway.com
30 HUCK
traile
r
Design by Field Operations and Diller Scofildo & Renfro. Courtesy of the City of New York.
New York City gets a park in the sky. Text Olly Zanetti In a city like New York, space is a closely guarded commodity. And now,
commuter transit of Chicago, the new High Line ran through the middle of
just like the apartment buildings clamouring skyward, the parks are being
city blocks, rather than down the avenues themselves. This meant streets
raised too. Thanks to NYC locals Joshua David and Robert Hammond,
weren’t plunged into the permanent shadow of a train line, and access
an elevated railway called the High Line which, unused since 1980, winds
to industrial buildings was made easier, with some trains modified to run
through West Side Manhattan, has been saved from the wrecker’s ball and
right through them. But by the 1960s trains had slipped from favour, and
converted into green space. The first section, a half mile stretch between
were replaced by trucks. The last train, laden with frozen turkeys, drove
Gansevoort Street and 20th Street, will open this June.
the High Line in 1980. And the intricate structure of steel and concrete
“We were both just so surprised that nobody was trying to preserve it, that the City would consider tearing down this old piece of industrial
– a monument to modernist design and harsh urban industrialism – was closed and left to rust.
infrastructure without a thought about what opportunities it offered,” says
Since then, demolition has been on the cards on more than a few
Robert, who met Joshua at a community meeting on the structure’s future.
occasions. But each time it’s had a lucky escape. When Friends of the
Though they had only seen the structure from ground level, the pair fell in
High Line started campaigning for its rehabilitation, transformation into a
love with it and, shortly after that meeting, decided to start Friends of the
park seemed the obvious choice. “It’s beautiful in itself – this juxtaposition
High Line, a group dedicated to its preservation.
between the natural and the manmade – and it offered such a unique
The High Line’s story is one intimately tied with that of the city. In the
perspective on the neighbourhood,” explains Robert. “Here we were 30
early 1900s, the stretch of Tenth Avenue running through Manhattan’s
feet up in the air, crossing over streets and avenues, and rooftops and
Meatpacking District was so dangerous it earned the moniker Death
backyards, and seeing a familiar neighbourhood from a whole new point of
Avenue. It wasn’t mafia killings that gave it its name, but trains – deathly
view. We had never experienced anything like it.”
trains, often five-blocks in length – which travelled the streets at ground
A competition was launched to redesign the High Line into a green space.
level, carrying goods to and from the dockside. In a futile attempt at public
The winning design emphasises the High Line’s industrial heritage, with plants
safety, each train was led down the avenue by a man on horseback, called
growing alongside the reclaimed railway tracks. Ten years since Friends of the
West Side Cowboys, who cleared the way.
High Line was formed, was it all worth it? Absolutely. “How often do you get
It wasn’t public safety that got Death Avenue shot of the trains. As
to reclaim a whole mile-and-a-half of Manhattan for the public?” says Robert.
city traffic increased, downtown streets gridlocked by trains proved bad
“The High Line represents this great connection between past, present and
for business. So, in 1929, the city committed $150 million ($2 billion in
future, and a connection between three very unique neighbourhoods. And
today’s money) to the construction of the High Line. Unlike the elevated
here in New York, we always need more public spaces.”
32 HUCK
Street artist Pilpeled puts Israel on the map. Text King Adz Artwork Pilpeled “My heroes are Shlomo the King, Elvis, Einstein, my father, Bob Dylan and
look closely enough, is like hand-drawn vectors. There is a vein of pure art
Batman.” So says Pilpeled, the twenty-four-year-old street artist from Tel
running deep through everything he puts out, and he has created his own
Aviv whose work is as eclectic as his inspiration.
world in which his characters live.
I’ve been down with Pilpeled for a while now. After spotting his work
But there’s way more to Pilpeled than just mad skills and talent. Dubbed
online, and touching base via the wonders of the world wide web, I now
‘The Rabbi’ by friends, Pilpeled is deeply religious and runs his own Torah
commandeer his giant black leather couch whenever I’m in TLV – a rare
every Thursday night. This totally sets him apart from anyone I’ve been
honour indeed as he keeps himself to himself.
down with in my whole career. “I have a huge list of things I’d like to do in
“To create my art I wait for everyone to go to sleep,” he says, “then I crawl silently to my computer, plug in the headphones, roll one, and what happens next – I can never tell.”
my life, outside of graphics and painting, before I really start to enjoy life,” he says. For now though, Pilpeled is still soaking up success, one achievement at
Coming out of Tel Aviv, Pilpeled has a totally different set of influences
a time. He just created his first cover for Time Out (“we stayed up all night
and peers. The place is one of the most laidback I’ve visited and – despite
for the first copies to be delivered from the printers, and it was a pretty
the negative spin the media insist on drenching each bullshit report with
special moment when they finally arrived”). And the next day he was one of
– the talent that emerges onto the world stage comes fresh-as-fuck and
the talents in the second Tel Aviv Pecha Kucha Night, a Japanese concept
seriously correct. Pilpeled is a shining example of this.
that gives artists and designers an opportunity to present their body of
But here’s the thing: the kid is totally self-taught. “I have no formal
work. Pecha Kucha is a night all about creativity: each invited artist shows
training,” he says. “My whole life I’ve always drawn and painted. I liked
twenty images for twenty seconds apiece. Those are the rules. The fact that
school. I liked the corridors but never liked class – never learnt anything in
Pilpeled was allowed to fill his six-minute-and-forty-second slot with a video
school except drawing. For the last few years I’ve been doing a lot of work
rather than present in person (and still killed it) speaks of his importance in
for some of the biggest events here in Israel. I found this to be the best type
Tel Aviv – a place where, it seems, he’s more than happy to stay.
of schooling.” From fine art to Tees (he has his own killer range) to CD covers and MTV
“In five years I wanna be here, in the same place I’m right now – in Israel,” he says. “I guess in five years I’ll still be working my ass off.”
idents, his work is forever mutating into something bigger, better, faster, stronger. The aesthetic is undiluted city-shit but the application, if you
34 HUCK 34 HUCK
www.pilpeled.com
?
TROIKAEDITIONS.co.uk
the gaslIght anthem salute sPrIngsteen wIth theIr fresh new brand of heartland rock. text Jon coen PhotograPhy tom sPader
So here it is. The Gaslight Anthem, forever linked to Bruce Springsteen by their New Jersey roots and blue-collar themes, are about to play Asbury Park’s famed Stone Pony – the house The Boss built – for the first time. Just two years prior, with a single track published on an obscure compilation and a few circuits of the New Brunswick basement scene under their belts, they released Sink or Swim, a folk-fused punk record with a timeless element. Now there are 1,200 people packed into the iconic
so that’s what we tried to do this time around.” Of course The Gaslight’s delivery has a youthful rock urgency, but their voice is that of an old soul, telling small-town stories ripe with decadesold Americana – like hitchhiking, drive-ins, heartbreaking Marias, high-top sneakers, sailor tattoos, and that old ’55 that you drove through the roof. “There’s something about that time period that’s nostalgic for all of us,” offers Horowitz, a vital cog in the local scene since he was fourteen.
Jersey shore rock club for two consecutive nights. The walls are sweating.
It could be the fact that their strongest influences have been timeless
The members of The Gaslight Anthem – Brian Fallon, Alex Levine, Benny
songwriters like Tom Petty, Mike Ness, Otis Reading and The Clash. But
Horowitz, and Alex Rosamilia – were literally banging nails, delivering
there’s something else about The Gaslight Anthem that whiffs of nostalgia
pizza, and DJ’ing for free booze when their second album, The ’59 Sound,
– certain threads of authenticity and work ethic – that forever ties them
was released in the summer of ’08. Since then, the four-piece have been
to other Jersey predecessors such as The Bouncing Souls, Lifetime, even
relentless warriors of the road, receiving love everywhere from the indie
hardcore stalwarts like Vision.
music press to Letterman, Texas to Tasmania.
“Those bands all came out of the New Brunswick scene,” says Horowitz
Each article makes the token Springsteen reference. On the surface,
about the historically DIY music scene of this college town some forty
their gritty punk house backgrounds seem a stark contrast to The Boss’
miles outside of NYC, “a lot of us came out of that scene. It doesn’t matter
arena rock, but it doesn’t take much scratching to see the umbilical link to
if you go on to be a businessman or play in a band, you still take that work
New Jersey’s patron saint of the working class.
ethic with you in life.”
“It’s an easy question to ask,” says guitarist Alex Rosamilia. “It’s like
Having seen the world through the window of a tour van, Horowitz
asking if we like tattoos or playing music. But we can be compared to him
has a new perspective on home. “It’s a place where if you don’t have
forever and I’ll be fine with that.”
a handle on who you are, a hundred people are going to tell you that
“I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t a little tired of it,” admits drummer Benny Horowitz. “I didn’t start listening to Bruce until I joined this band.
you’re a piece of shit,” he laughs. “New Jersey is not a home of subtlety or modesty.”
But it’s not like we’re constantly being compared to some shitty artist. He’s
Now, having come full circle, the boys are set to share a bill with Bruce
lived his life and career in a really good way. I think even ethically and
on the third day of Hard Rock Calling 2009 in Hyde Park, London, on June
humanly we’re pretty connected to him.”
28. “I’m stoked to play with Springsteen,” admits Rosamilia, with a wiry
Frontman Fallon, who grew up in the same town as Springsteen, clings tightest to the cord. “When I was a little kid listening to Springsteen I
grin. “But I don’t think I’m going to feel the impact until there are so many thousands of people staring at me and waiting to play.”
remember thinking, ‘These aren’t songs, these are gigantic rides you went on’ – and I thought if I could even attempt to do that, it would be excellent,
The ’59 Sound by The Gaslight Anthem is out now on Side One Dummy Dummy.
listen 36 HUCK 36 HUCK
37
Brian Fallon.
Noseriding, Scheveningen style.
If a swell hits Holland, they’re ready to pounce. Text Colin Delaney Photography JOEY DEN BEER
“On average we get three to four days of rideable surf per week,” says
like eating stale bread and then being served a fresh loaf,” he says. “When
thirty-year-old Dutchman Hans van den Broek.
guys go away for a month they come back a different surfer.”
The Hague’s surf beach, Scheveningen, looks like a lake. Picture
Today, Hans and about 350 others have taken the Protest NK Surf Tour
perfect for spring tourists walking the promenade, beach bars line the
to Moliets, France, for its second round. Those left behind fill the void
sand, carousels carry children and bungy jumpers plunge off the long pier
of another waveless weekend by popping into Henk’s for a coffee and a
for cheap thrills. At the south end, large fishing trawlers are given clear
chat. But how does one stay motivated when, for want of a better word,
passage through the hard grey concrete groynes, while on the horizon
conditions totally suck? “It could be worse, you could be a German surfer
endless ocean liners await access to Rotterdam’s harbour. It’s the industrial
with no coastline,” says Henk, flashing a cheeky grin. “Besides, as a surfer
North Sea, alright. And this is where sandbanks and surfers collect.
you always want to surf.”
With no swell to play with, Hans and I sip coffee in surf shop-cum-café
He points to a picture hanging on the surf shop wall, as if to reassure me
Sublime, run by his friend, Henk Selier. Hans has surfed Scheveningen
they really do get waves. It’s a nice little cover-up taken at De Zuid, Holland’s
since he was twelve, commuting from inland Holland before moving here
best break. A perfect, glassy A-frame with a rock wall in the background, it
permanently when he came of age. He rides longboards, mainly – the
could be D’Bah on the Gold Coast. The biggest he’s seen there is smooth,
heavier the better for ploughing through common Dutch slop.
two-metre faces – but that only happens about ten times a year.
As director of the Holland Surfing Association, Hans is dedicated to the
Hans had told me earlier that, after a swimmer died recently at De Zuid,
development of surfing in the Netherlands. When he’s not pushing the local
the locals had to protest to save it from being banned as a surf spot. They
government for better lifesaver training, he’s passing on his passion through the
paddled from De Zuid all the way to City Hall, via river and canal systems,
surf school that he owns. But when there’s no swell, he hobbies away, rejuvenating
then marched into the foyer dripping wet with surfboards underarm. It
old Vespa scooters. Just like the groms clattering about on skateboards outside,
worked. “The national news covered our story,” said Hans. “It was great,
every Dutch surfer, it seems, needs another hobby during the long flat spells.
surfers in Holland are still so unique.”
The following weekend, my third visit to Scheveningen, and things
Back in Amsterdam, without a wave to my name, I log onto the webcam
again are mellow. With nothing else to do, I stop by Sublime for another
at Scheveningen and to my surprise see a score of riders chasing just
coffee, this time with Henk. Having surfed for five years, Henk admits that
surfable chop – chop this snobby Byron-bred surfer wouldn’t get out of
being a committed Dutch surfer means travelling – a lot. Just two months
bed for, but surfable nonetheless.
after a friend introduced him to surfing, Henk was on a plane to Bali. “It’s
38 HUCK
I bet they ride the shit out of those ten annual days of glassy A-frames.
Thinking back, with German snowboarding pioneer Peter Bauer. Text Melanie Schönthier Photography Peter Mathis
Peter Bauer’s first snowboard was a bent one-way road sign. That was
Terje was riding with hard boots? No, he had soft boots but special three-
in 1984. Three years later Jake Burton offers the German a contract –
strap Burton bindings and an alpine board. Me and the other older riders
Peter signs it and gets two snowboards and a racing suit. He stays with
were always dragging him to training and felt responsible for him.
Burton for sixteen years, dominates the first ever world championships and carves his name into the history books. Today, the forty-two-year-old
What does a day in the office look like today? Anian and I take care of
lives in an old farmhouse in the Munich countryside. He owns the ski and
everything – product development, graphics, sales, everything. In winter,
snowboard company Amplid, starts his working day by hopping onto a
my day starts on the mountain. I go riding with Anian until eleven, then we
skidoo and has next year’s Amplid snowboards propped up and ready to
start working and go on until we’re done. Depending on the season, that
go. So, Peter, has life always been this good? HUCK heads to Germany
can be 6pm or midnight.
to find out. What makes Amplid different? All our skis and boards are “proudly produced A few years ago you founded Amplid together with freeskier Anian Thrainer.
in the Alps”. We get our wood from Switzerland and Slovenia from
Weren’t snowboarders and skiers sworn enemies back in the day?
companies that have to plant a tree for every one cut down.
Absolutely. We hated skiers because they hated us. It was a form of apartheid. We weren’t allowed to use their lifts as they accused us of
The mountains are not your only passion. You’re also a big surfer, and in his
ruining the lift track, which was nonsense of course. For us skiing was
autobiography, Surf Is Where You Find It, Gerry Lopez writes that he still has an
something for adults and not cool at all.
issue with you... No, actually we are even. We had the same sponsor, Chiemsee, and in the mid-nineties they wanted to do a movie called Four Aces. Gerry
What changed your mind? Skiing and snowboarding is no longer a
and big-wave surfer Darrick Doerner were supposed to teach Jean Nerva
generational issue. The fifteen-year-old kids in the park don’t care what you
[French snowboarding pioneer] and me how to surf in Hawaii and then go
ride as long as you are like them and crazy about rails, kickers or powder.
snowboarding with us in the Alps. We flew to Hawaii in December and learnt surfing in Pipeline, the gnarliest spot ever! It scared the shit out of us and
When you were a pro you were also crazy about gates... Yes, but I was also
we wanted revenge. Six weeks later we got our chance: Gerry and Darrick
riding halfpipe. Back then nobody specialised in disciplines, everybody
visited us in Courmayeur and on the very first day we sent them down an
would ride everything. Terje [Haakonsen] or Craig Kelly were doing really
icy, steep chute at the Mont Blanc. Both were good snowboarders but for a
well in slalom!
Hawaiian, 5,000-meter high mountains must be really freaking scary!
40 HUCK
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4eg\fgel \f `beX g[Ta gT_Xag `beX g[Ta gXV[a\dhX! 9\aW bhg `beX Tg eX_Xag_XffXaXeZl!Vb` TaW ]b\a G[X BeWXe!
42 HUCK
She HAS revolutionised female surfing one massive set wave at a time. But teenage looks and man-sized cojones aside, is there more to Brazil’s Maya Gabeira than meets the eye? Interview Giuliano Cedroni Photography Christian Gaul
43
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism (…) The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences…” Letter written by Chris McCandless, (Into The Wild, Jon Krakauer, 1997).
aya Gabeira is shuffling up the deep white sands of Barra da Tijuca, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She’s taking a break from a tow-in training session that has gone on for a few hours now. She walks up to the jet ski, turns around and stops on the photographer’s request. Wet hair dripping over her face, Maya glances at the camera and smiles. She looks calm and tired; happy and… strong, way strong. The youngest daughter of Fernando Gabeira, a famous Brazilian politician, Maya doesn’t fit the stereotype of the young Latin American of privileged extract. She doesn’t care about expensive clothes, she doesn’t mind being in the sun all day long, and she hardly ever goes out at night. All Maya cares about is riding waves – stupidly big waves, as a matter of fact. In April this year, Maya won the prestigious Billabong XXL Global Big Wave award on the Girls Overall Performance category for the third consecutive time. It’s a bit like winning the World Cup for big-wave surfing three times over – the kind of stuff reserved for the more seasoned of the species. Winners are often in their thirties. And yet, at twenty-two years of age, she’s done it again. “Instead of buying shampoo I’d use the money I had to buy wax for my board,” remembers Maya. When she was seventeen she left Rio never to return. Her destination: Hawaii, Australia, Indonesia, California, Mexico, Costa Rica, South Africa, Panama, Tahiti. Since taking off, she’s never spent more than four months in the same country, always moving, chasing waves, living a seemingly impossible Endless Summer cliché. “For a long time I had nothing, just a small backpack,” says Maya, who two years ago was still waiting tables to pay for her travels. As I chat to Maya I can’t help but notice that she’s full of light. Maybe it’s her long blonde hair flowing over her Coppertone skin; maybe it’s her fifteen-year-old looks. Who knows… Her father says it comes from her respect for freedom and the lifestyle that comes with it. And he’s got the biography to back it up. Fernando Gabeira was the brain behind the spectacular kidnapping of Charles Elbrick, American ambassador to Brazil during the turbulent sixties. The plan was simple: as a response to the American-backed dictatorship that was arresting and killing all his fellow activists, the young journalist came up with the idea of kidnapping big brother’s man in the country. It worked. The government freed some prisoners in exchange for the ambassador, and Mr. Gabeira, instead of being jailed, was thrown into a nineyear exile. The inside story became his first book, later made into an Oscar-nominated feature film called Four Days in September.
44 HUCK
His second book is no less controversial. A Maconha (The Marijuana) is a technical text about the history of cannabis and its many uses in the modern world. No wonder Gabeira is the most ‘pop’ of all politicians in this country. Last year he ran for Rio de Janeiro mayor, losing in the run-off election to his right-wing opponent. Maya was there, by her father, in many of his speeches, supporting what she calls her ‘role model’. Apparently dad is also the idol of many young people around the country, his popularity epitomised by his making the cover of the Brazilian version of Rolling Stone magazine last year. Political pedigree aside, Maya has no interest in congressional activities, legislative bills and the like. In fact, she admits that she’s never even voted. Instead of changing the laws of the land, she’s changing the face of surfing, proving that a girl can also conquer the sea in a state of fury – a place most men won’t dare to go. That in itself is one hell of a democratic statement, right? Long before she found surfing, Maya used to be a ballet dancer. She took lessons every day since she was eight. Then one day a boyfriend took her to the beach with a surfboard in tow. The boyfriend lasted only two months; surfing never left. During my three-hour conversation with Maya, one of the things that surprised me the most was her relationship with… relationships. Maya’s last steady boyfriend was that surfing teacher, back in Rio, when she was fifteen. Since then, her priority has been surfing, and only surfing - at the expense of everything else. “I’ve never loved,” she says with no tears in her eyes. I must admit that at the end of my interview I still struggled to define Maya. Her character, you see, is too subtle for the likes of myself to pigeonhole after a mere three-hour chat. She didn’t break up with her relatives to live a wild lonesome adventure, nor did she reject the west in search of the wisdoms of the east. Instead, she got a job, paid her way to surf the world’s best breaks and now attends the surf industry circus, poses for pictures, gets sponsorship money to ride waves with the right logo in the right place. In other words, Maya is no martyr. But in the world of ordinary people doing ordinary things, Maya is a powerful outsider. And outsiders matter and have an impact on people. They prove that despite what the media tell us, there are far more interesting and exploratory ways to spend your time in this strange place called Earth: surfing monster waves around the globe, getting paid to do what you love the most, and doing all of that without having to be… a man. How amazing if she manages to change the world just a little bit without having to become a martyr first. Now that would be revolutionary, right?
You’ve just won the XXL for the third consecutive time. What crazy stuff did you have to do this time around in order to win? The waves that counted the most for my victory were in Outer Reef, Oahu [Hawaii]. It was something around 15 to 18 feet, and I was doing tow-in with Carlos Burle [Brazilian big-wave rider]... But in order to win the award again, I first surfed Teahupoo [Tahiti], Alaska, Puerto Escondido [Mexico], Waimea Bay, Jaws and Outer Reef in Oahu... This whole year’s work resulted in the third XXL award.
I read you went on a course to learn to stay underwater for longer… Useful stuff in your line of work, I suppose? Yes, but I can’t hold it for too long, only 1 minute and 40 seconds…
Describe your perfect day? Waimea over 25 feet with my 10’4”. I pray for it to get like that but it’s been two years since it hasn’t been that big…
Are you afraid of dying? No… I’m afraid of getting hurt badly.
You feel more comfortable paddling in than towing in, is that right? Yep. I’ve just started doing tow-in and it tears me apart, it’s very stressful. After that session in Teahupoo I got sick, it’s too much for my body… But in a few years I’ll be okay.
You know, the more you surf these monster waves chances are… I know, but that’s ’cause I still wipe out and you can’t wipe out on these kind of waves. The guys don’t fall as much. Well, when it happens I’ll worry and do a lot of physiotherapy, right?
Describe that famous wave in Teahupoo, please. That was the biggest day in years in Tahiti and everyone was there, I mean everyone: all photographers, the pros, the legends, the sponsors, fifteen jet skis, helicopters, a mess… I had fallen on the two waves I’d tried before and hit the reef really hard. So I was hurt, scared and insecure when Burle [Carlos Burle, Maya’s guru and friend] came to me and said, “Come on, we’ll get one now!” I said I was fucking scared and he said, “Everyone’s scared, I’m scared too but we’ll get one now!”
Do you think your parents know how much risk you take out there? No one knows, really… Only the surfers know. How to explain a closing set in Waimea to a person who doesn’t surf? A photo or a video won’t do it justice.
Sorry to interrupt, but how do you guys talk over there if he’s riding the jet ski? Well, we actually scream but it feels like we’re talking… Anyway, he rode to the outside and this big mess of a wave rose up, and I remember the other guys leaving it to us… ’Cause you got the best surfers in each jet ski and that wasn’t really our wave, you see? But Burle charged hard on that one and they just got out of the way and screamed, “Go Maya!” [Maya’s eyes start to wet as she tells the story.]
What time do you wake up on a regular working day? In Hawaii, during the season, which lasts seven months, I wake up at 4:30am every day.
Were you wearing a helmet? No… So he pulled me in and when I let go the rope I remember seeing this great Tahitian surfer paddling out with his eyes wide open and screaming at me… Then I said to myself, “I got to go forward, I’ve got to speed up!” [Maya has tears in her eyes now.] Then I made it, I surfed the thing… All that sound over me, all that strength until I fell thanks to the big smoke behind me, but it was already in the end and Burle came to rescue me and said, “Fuck, man! That was big! Fuck!”
What kind of a girl were you at school, the shy type or a bit crazy? Man, I was more the rebel type. I was very shy when I was a young kid, very attached to my mum… until a certain point when I turned against her. You know, teens… [laughs]
What’s the worst wipe out you’ve ever had? I had some nasty ones in Waimea, but Teahupoo is the worst. That famous one on YouTube was bad… [laughs] My last one there, I smashed my body on the reef, I also threw up underwater. That night I woke up crying with big swollen feet… I can tell you it wasn’t funny.
That doesn’t sound bad… But it is. I believe the secret is to be physically prepared and not to panic. Have you ever panicked? I’ve wasted energy, yes, but I’ve never thought I was going to die. Never.
Have you? Not yet.
Does the high you get on a huge wave match the risk you take? I guess it matches the challenges I set myself, ’cause you see, it’s hard to be there… It’s hard to even believe that you can be there. You’ve got to train hard to believe it.
Do you need an alarm clock? No alarm clock. I just open my eyes, get up and go check the waves on the Internet: when is the best tide, where will the biggest waves be, etc. Then I check my e-mails, I meditate and practice some yoga. Then I hit the water.
Terrible phase... How old were you when your parents got divorced? Twelve. Any need for therapy? As a matter of fact, yes, I did go when I was little. I still visit her when I come to Brazil… She rocks, my therapist, I love her. Did it help? I guess what helped me the most was surfing, that’s what put my life back on track…
45
It was around this time that you took lessons at Arpoador, right? [Arpoador is a famous beach in Rio where poor and rich kids share the line up.] Yep, with Thyola and all the guys. He used to give me a hard time for having to kneel before standing up… It took me a month to stand up properly [laughs]. I surfed there the other day and it was a blast to meet all the guys…
guess I’m not open to relationships… or maybe I haven’t found the right person yet.
How old were you when you moved in with your father? I was thirteen, and my father used to spend the week in Brasília so I would be home alone from Tuesdays to Fridays…
Have you ever had your heart broken? Yes, when I was fifteen… Does that count?
Have you ever loved? No. Do you… miss that? Maybe.
It’s not that long ago, Maya… Well, I remember suffering a lot. No grandma or aunties? Nope. There was a maid that would come, clean and go...
Is sex important in your life? It’s good, but not important.
So you would live alone, at thirteen, in a city like Rio? I guess…
Has it ever been? No.
Weren’t you afraid? Wasn’t your mother worried? I wasn’t, but my mum wouldn’t talk to me nor to my dad because of that… It was a tough time.
Helio Gracie, the patriarch from the famous Jiu Jitsu Gracie family, says that to abdicate from having sex gives you extra strength. Do you feel the same? Don’t know, could be... But in my case I wouldn’t worry, after all, I’m only twenty-two and I hope to have enough energy for all the things I want to do [laughs].
Weren’t you lonely? Not really. I feel lonelier nowadays, with all the travelling I do. You see, the path to get here was very lonely, always on the move, no stability, no attachment to anyone… But if I was to stick with someone, whether a best friend or something, then I just wouldn’t be where I’m at, right? I guess not… I lived on my own, and everyone that chooses to follow your own journey has to be somehow lonelier, it’s natural… But that’s my life. Do you have friends the same age as you, Maya? My best friend is forty, and my two others are twenty-eight. My last roommate was fifty-five… I love old people. Don’t you ever go out with kids your age to party or something? No, I don’t like partying. I don’t go out, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink… Not even a glass of wine on a winter’s night? Once every four months or so, maybe. I go out for dinner, I like the movies, but what I like, what I really like is… to sleep [laughs]. You see, I believe the night is made for sleeping, so that’s what I do most. Alone? Alone. Just checking… What about boyfriends? I knew that was coming… My longest relationship lasted two months and I was fifteen. Does that answer it? Yep. Any particular reason for being such a lonely fox? In the last six years I haven’t spent more than four months in the same country, so that makes things complicated. I don’t know, I
46 HUCK
Indeed. You definitely don’t sound like such a young woman, and growing up faster than normal usually causes some kind of suffering… In my case I think it has to do with solitude. There is some suffering, sure, but mostly solitude. Many people surf but only a few try to make a living out of it. When did you realise you could be a pro surfer? Until last year I didn’t know I could make it. You see, my self-esteem isn’t the best one, man… But when I saw Waimea breaking for the first time I was sure that’s what I wanted to do with my life. I said to myself, “If I can do that I’ll definitely be happy.” And when did you surf Waimea for the first time? February 6, 2006, my second season in Hawaii. You keep track of the dates? I remember all the dates for the big waves I rode… On that day in February it was huge, 20-25 feet, and I got in and surfed one wave. I remember thinking, “Today is about surviving, just don’t die, Maya, don’t die…” [laughs] I bet your mother liked that… I guess… The following day the fear of dying was replaced by the desire to get more and more waves, and now, if I go out on a big day I just won’t come in until I drop behind the peak in one of the set waves… Otherwise you’ll see me in a shitty mood. Is that what gives you a bad mood nowadays? Yes, having a lousy performance… What puts you in a good mood? Surfing a massive set wave.
47
Do you think you became addicted to set waves? Sure did. Don’t know what my life would be now without it. It’ll be tough for a guy to match this kind of thrill… Told ya’... [laughs] What do you think about your father’s books? Never read them. What about the film, did you watch it? Yes, and I loved it! I cried like hell… How is it to have a father as a congressman? I’m his fan. I really believe in his work, even though politics is a very bad scene to be in, right? Who did you vote for on the last election? I’ve never voted, man. Always travelling… You are a free surfer, travelling around searching for big waves… Never considered doing the World Tour? No, it’s not my thing… My thing is big-wave surfing, that’s where I’m happy. Do you have any idols? My father is one, Kelly [Slater] is another, Laird Hamilton… …men only, like the sport you’re in, right? Well, I love the boys, love to be around them, to travel with them. And during the night where they do stupid stuff I’m never around, I’m in bed, so maybe that’s why I love them. Did you ever get yourself in any real trouble while travelling on your own? I had my head sliced open in Sumatra when I hit my board really hard, that was in the middle of a big storm so we couldn’t leave the island. They gave me morphine and six stitches, and I started to convulse… Scary shit, man. Do you consider yourself a strong person? I believe I’m strong not ’cause I surf huge waves but because since I was a kid I’ve been putting myself into critical situations. I was pretty dumb, actually, but somehow I always managed to get out in one piece. Do you think you know your limits? Sometimes when I’m tow-in surfing I think, “Okay, got three good ones and didn’t get hurt, time to stop”. ’Cause sometimes we fly from Hawaii to California chasing a big swell, so you haven’t slept and suddenly you are thrown in a 30-foot wave, the water’s freezing... That’s dangerous, man… And do you know when to stop? Not really… The guys are always, “One more, just one more!” It’s hard to know when to stop.
48 HUCK
How many serious injuries have you had over the years? I’ve broken my nose about ten times. Some ugly cuts and bruises too, but nothing that would take me out of the water for more than ten days! Do you have life insurance, Maya? No. Only health insurance. Have you ever had to throw in the towel and say, “Fuck, now I’ll have to call dad”? Never. It wouldn’t be fair to do all these things and then call him to get me out… He says that when I don’t call him for too long that means I’m in trouble. How long after you had your head cut open in Sumatra did you make the call? I didn’t call for over a month. I was very sick for ten days, some kind of reaction to morphine… Are you allergic to morphine?I don’t know… Well, you should… [Maya laughs, the interviewer doesn’t.] Do you regret somehow being so tough on yourself? I mean, most girls your age in Rio are on the beach getting a tan or hooking up with boys… I never think I’m tough enough on myself! [laughs] I suck, I know, but I feel I need to do more and more… Are you stubborn? Yes. If someday your daughter travels away and gets hurt, how would you feel if she didn’t call you? That would be awful… but I don’t know if I’ll have kids. Wanna talk about it? Not much to talk, but for now my parents won’t have grandchildren from me… [laughs] Marriage someday? I want to find someone but I’ll always live my own life, and it’s a peculiar life, so he’ll have to deal with that. Don’t know, hopefully I’ll find someone who can stand me… [laughs] Do you follow any religion? Buddhism, ’cause I practice a lot of yoga. Do you pray? I meditate. Do you believe in God? Yes and no. God is everywhere, I’m God, you’re God, this chair’s God. Is God also there when you’re underwater, rolling around like you’re in a washing machine and being sliced open by the reef? Especially there… [laughs]
S ABOUT WHO CARE KLE SUITS?
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K TO BE QUIC , YOU HAVE ES ARE EPIC SSIONS AV SE W LL E -A TH -IT N OP WHE S ENTS: THE DR ST SURF SPOT PROTEST PRES EUROPE始S BE U S EVENTS AT AT PROTEST.E SPONTANEOU XT AND EMAIL ALERTS R TE T THERE! SIGN UP FO SEE YOU OU
-ALL THE DROP-IT Y SESSIONS B
Rider: Yannick de Jager www.protest.eu
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SILVERSUN PICKUPS ARE BRINGING HEART BACK TO HEAVY ROCK. TEXT GEMMA FREEMAN 50 HUCK
A guitar throbs a warm electrified tone. Two leaves come into focus, lit by sunlight and, like a sign of the apocalypse for any ski resort, scenes of spring fill the screen. Then, as an androgynous voice croons the words ‘I can’t tell it’s winter’, snowfall suddenly sparkles in shot, followed by branches bowed under inches of snow and a panorama of powder fields. As the intro for Absinthe Films’ Optimistic? wraps, and Silversun Pickups’ ‘Rusted Wheel’ builds to its climax, one thing’s certain: screw climate change, winter is on. I couldn’t be in a more contrasting environment when I hear this song live: mid a sold-out and sweaty London Barfly gig. The crowd have created a hot, oppressive fug that fuels the Los Angeles quartet’s Gothic, grunge revivalist rock. But as frontman Brian Aubert’s distinct vocals cut through the heat, I’m instantly transported from city smog to mountain bliss as scenes from the snowboarding films the band has been featured on come flooding back. Formed in 2000, the East Los Angeles quartet became friends while playing in other bands in the Silverlake scene and named themselves after a local booze shop. For years Silversun Pickups bubbled under the radar, picking up fans by word of mouth, and gaining exposure from countless action sport flicks. The first song the band wrote
From left to right: Joe Lester, Christopher Guanlao, Nikki Monninger, Brian Aubert.
featured on a Big Brother skate video. Debut album Carnavas saw them featured on surf films such as Bobby Martinez’s Mix Tape and Trilogy, plus snowboarding’s DC Mountain Lab 1.5. But where Carnavas is stripped-down, quirky space rock, new album Swoon is a mature epic. With comparisons to The Smashing Pumpkins – but more like My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth or the Secret Machines – the LP is filled with layered guitar distortion, punk-driven drums and haunting synthesisers. So how did these black-clad, pale musos wind up involved with sideways cinema? They’re skaters themselves. “Whenever our label gets song requests from those filmmakers, we’re like, ‘Yeah! Of course!’” explains keyboardist Joe Lester. “We get comments about it all the time, like, ‘I heard you guys on this film...’ We were snowboarding in Park City actually, and were in this rental shop when one of our songs came on a video that was playing in there…” “I think it’s weird to be honest,” adds Aubert. “You have a distance with your music, and so, when I hear my little voice coming out of one of those films I’m like, ‘They think that’s a real song!’ [laughs] It’s peculiar. Sandwiched in with these other songs, it feels strange to hear us there. It’s pretty wild...” It’s the day after the Barfly gig, and Silversun
are lounging in a meeting room at their record company’s Kensington offices. Un-rockstar-like, their analytical approach has them disappointed by the show due to technical problems – but stoked on London’s reaction. It was awesome, even if a wall of six-foot guys obscured my view. “Yeah, a lot of people said, ‘That was the best show I never saw,’” agrees Aubert. Impaired visibility or not, the gig rocked and was a great showcase for their new album. Speaking of which, why did they decide to call it Swoon? “We like one-word, esoteric titles,” Aubert explains. “The first day of writing, we wrote ‘Swoon’ on a board and it became an inspiration point. It sounded like this weird dance – romantic sounding but also grim. For me, the word swoon is sad, like unfulfilled love. I never think of someone who swoons over something they have – it’s always something they don’t and, to the point of definition, causes them to collapse through loss of blood flow to the brain. So I thought, perfect! That title got more important as the sessions progressed, in terms of how we were all feeling. We cursed ourselves in a way...” The album’s theme is a nervous breakdown – a reflection on life post the two-year tour for their debut record. “We were away learning to be a band for two years, then came home and had to readjust,
fix a lot of things that, because we were gone, hadn’t been paid attention to for a while,” says Aubert. “Relationships with family, friends who had become alien. People think you come home to this parade where everyone’s cheering, but actually it’s more, ‘Where have you been? Life’s moved on...’ It’s also about putting pressure on yourself. You’re trying to make more music but it’s hard to grow because you’re not sure how. You have to make yourself uncomfortable all the time.” For their album cover, the band handpicked three paintings to be interpreted by San Francisco artist Darren Waterston. The final choice was a painting Waterson called St. Claire, which Aubert says was an instant match for their abstruse sound: “The way that Darren understood our sound and the title, it made a perfect match. We’d described that painting before. I was always talking about red and dark pinks swirling around, then it just turned up. So, halfway through [song-writing] we hung scans of the painting in the studio, which helped us focus. “People see different things,” continues Aubert. “For some it looks pretty and romantic, but others see blood and violence. I agree with all of it, you know...” Swoon by Silversun Pickups is out now on Dangerbird.
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Who really controls our cities? HUCK meets the revolutionaries who, instead of bowing to Big Brother, are staging a coup to reclaim public space. Text
Olly
Zanetti
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illustration
Chris
Martin
Anthropologist Marc Augé disparagingly calls them ‘non-places’. They’re our cities’ soulless, featureless voids – supermarkets, airports and shopping malls – which have little in the way of interest or distinguishing features. These non-places are increasingly becoming the arenas of modern life. Often regarded as public areas, they’re usually privately owned – an apparently superficial distinction, but one with serious consequences. Enter a shopping mall and you’re no longer your own. Cameras peer over your shoulder at every turn, and signs bark orders from all directions. No skating, no hoodies, no politics. Just spending. And the line between public and private is becoming increasingly blurred. Step across into one of the identikit corporate piazzas where cappuccino culture replaces civic life, and perhaps the only difference you’ll notice will be the colour of the paving slabs. In a world where money conquers all, how much say do we really have about how our cities look? The days, it seems, when cities were chaotic and exciting, dynamic places of freedom, democracy and self-expression, are confined to the past. Actually, the story’s not that simple. Whether subtle or overt, urban architecture has long been synonymous with power and social control. In a more religious age, the height of the church spire visible over surrounding buildings acted as constant reminder of God, and indeed the local priesthood’s all-seeing gaze. This served as a means of coercion which kept people’s behaviour in check. In France, a country known for its uprisings, Emperor Napoleon III was taking no chances. When, in the late 1800s, he commissioned civil engineer Georges-Eugène Haussmann to oversee the renovations of central Paris, pleasing aesthetics and an improved infrastructure weren’t the only aims. Having gained his position by coup d’état, Napoleon approved the design for the city’s broad boulevards because they would facilitate the movement of troops to quash any future unrest. Ironically, however, revolution deposed Napoleon III before Haussmann’s work was finished. And today, while a full-on uprising isn’t on the horizon in most of the world’s cities, bands of creative individuals are joining forces, eager to challenge the authoritarian orthodoxy of contemporary urbanism in ways ranging from the playful to the anarchic. The Space Hijackers are one such group. Now in their tenth year, the Hijackers describe themselves as anarchitects whose aim is to “oppose the hierarchy that is put upon us by architects, planners and owners of space”. Referencing the Situationalists, the avant-garde French movement which in turn drew on Marxist politics and surrealist actions, the Hijackers undertake interventions in urban spaces, encouraging people to think again about their surroundings. On September 19 last year, those taking the Thames foot tunnel in London were surprised to find a party taking place. Tired of sanitised pop culture, the group wanted to show it was possible to have a dance without lining the pockets of corporate bar and club owners. And why that date and location? “It was international talk like a pirate day,” laughs one of the Hijackers in explanation, “and the tunnels are below the water line.”
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Though the Hijackers’ activities are often lighthearted, they’ve got the weight of some well thought through politics behind them. Buy Nothing Day, the last Saturday in November, is the annual celebration of anti-consumerism. Stateside, it marks the start of the winter sales when consumer spending is at its highest. With consumer culture dominating much of our urban space, in 2007 the group took on London’s West End. Posing as shop assistants, and wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the statement, “Everything in store is half price today,” the Hijackers offered a piece of creative disruption. That year, the biannual international arms fair at a cavernous exhibition centre in East London also had some unexpected guests. Having scraped together the money to buy a second-hand tank, they went along to the fair with the intention of selling it to the highest bidder. “If this so happens to be an angry teenager in a balaclava, then so be it,” they said in a sardonic echo of the lines spouted by real arms dealers. “It’s just a business transaction. We don’t see how destruction caused with our tank can possibly be our responsibility.”
Surveillance cameras represent a desire for security which teeters on obsession, and an illogical assumption of mutual distrust. The Space Hijackers aren’t the only people to organise surprise interventions in urban space. With the rise of social networking, flashmobbing – where hundreds of people descend on one place to take part in a spontaneous group activity – has become increasingly common. With the mobsters equipped with iPods and headphones, Liverpool Street Station in London has been home to several silent discos which were arguably the inspiration for a certain mobile phone advert that aired in the UK. And, on the last Friday of every month, the road’s usual pecking order is turned on its head with the Critical Mass cycle ride. Known as the Commute Clot when it began in San Francisco in
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the early 1990s, Critical Mass is now worldwide. The rides are attended by hundreds of cyclists who ride together around the city, taking, for a few hours at least, control of the road space away from cars. A dubious honour, the UK is renowned for its huge number of CCTV cameras. According to Liberty, Britain is monitored by over 4.5 million CCTV cameras, making us one of the most watched nations in the world. There is one CCTV camera for every fourteen people in the UK. Installed under the vague guise of public safety, almost every move we make in our urban areas is within sight of the surveillance camera’s lens. But the evidence that a camera’s presence actually reduces crime is sketchy, and their quality is usually so poor that their pictures are rarely admissible in court. The argument that if you’ve done nothing wrong then you’ve got nothing to hide doesn’t hold water with a lot of people. You’d think a democratic society would allow its citizens to occupy public space without their being constantly under surveillance, especially by a state whose very legitimacy is oftentimes under question. Sadly, though, that’s not the case. Stateside, the New York City-based group the Surveillance Camera Players have decided to play the security forces at their own game. Rather than allowing them the uninterrupted ability to record everyday life, they’ve decided to give the camera operators something to watch. Shortening them massively, and adapting them for a soundless context (it is unlawful in America to fit surveillance cameras with microphones), the group performs plays to the lenses. As their movement became better known, they planned their activities to engage with passers-by. “Ultimately we’re not going to convince the camera operator to smash their equipment and join us,” explained co-founder Bill Brown in an interview with Surveillance and Society magazine, “but we’re trying to work directly on the populous to inform and agitate them.” UK-based photographer Andre Penteado is no fan of CCTV cameras, but not because he’s concerned about being watched by The Man, rather because he’s interested in what they say about our own society. Having grown up in Brazil, the first thing he noticed about living in Britain was how safe it is. Surveillance cameras represent, he believes, a desire for security which teeters on obsession, and an illogical assumption of mutual distrust. He decided, then, to photograph all the cameras he spotted as he walked from his house to locations in the city, marking the cameras on a map. Though the authorities seem to find no problem training their cameras on him, turning his camera’s lens back at them was not appreciated. Though he intended to do ten walks, he stopped after just two, intimidated
by the level of police interest in his activities. Transient activities are all right for some, but for others, it’s not just the right to occupy urban space they seek, it’s the right to modify the very fabric of the city. If Critical Mass rides apparently justify a heavy police presence, then it’s no surprise that the authorities take a dim view of anything more permanent. Banksy has made a career playing on graffiti’s illicit nature. Street artist Ben Wilson works on a far smaller scale: painting tiny murals on the blobs of discarded chewing gum which coat our pavements, he’s had his fair share of negative attention. Though hardly a villainous mastermind, he’s been arrested on several occasions for criminal damage, and even ordered to provide the authorities with a DNA sample. Dealings with the police have been, for the most part, something guerrilla gardener Richard Reynolds has managed to avoid. Tired of the drab, unkempt gardens around his block, he crept out in the middle of the night, hands in gardening gloves, to do something about it. A “frustrated gardener” living in a high-rise flat, this arrangement worked well for him. Blogging his activities, he sparked the interest of a Radio 4 journalist and realised the potential the movement held. Still gardening the same beds, his blog has ballooned into an international message board where gardeners across the world meet and plot to makeover unloved public spaces. “Whilst it’s easy to label what we’re doing as some kind of benevolent act, like helping a granny across the road,” Richard notes, “we’re actually seizing public land for our own good – imposing our vision on that space without consultation with anybody.” Skaters in Portland, Oregon, have also sought a corner of the city to make their own. The Burnside skate park, built entirely by volunteers on vacant land under a freeway, has become the city’s most renowned skate spot. Having gained at least tacit acceptance by the city, the spot, also known for being the location for Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, has set the pace for community skate park building. So whose cities do we really live in? Are they dominated by the powers of overzealous governments and transnational capitalism, or are they the sites of social and political freedom? The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. For every local council busybody or draconian new law with the potential to invade our privacy, comes a movement to answer it back. Maybe we’ve only got ourselves to fear. It’s our attitudes, or at least our passivity, which allows our right to the city to be taken away. They can be our cities, but only if we embrace our role in shaping them the way we want
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Beyond the man-made boundaries of the park and pipe, one snowboarding contest prefers to roam free. Welcome to the O’Neill Big Mountain Pro, where Mother Nature rules supreme. Text
Gemma
Freeman
“This is the reason I ski – right here,” grins bigmountain skier Cody Townsend. Covered in a dusting of the lightest snow, the six-foot Californian jumps aboard today’s method of transportation: a tractor-driven cart winding deep through the forest of St. Jakob im Defereggental. It’s an Austrian Alpine tradition – locals have lunch at the summit then toboggan down – but today a different kind of tourist has nabbed a lift. Under the shadow of statuesque pine trees, a select crew of the world’s finest freeride snowboarders and skiers are dropping pillows, slashing stashes and zipping between branches – before grabbing the next cart and doing it all over again. Welcome to the Swatch O’Neill Big Mountain Pro 2009. Influenced by the backcountry-freestyle movement, which hit the mainstream in 2008 with Travis Rice’s film That’s It, That’s All, the Big Mountain Pro follows a mobile format, bringing together an elite crew who congregate in the Alps in search of the best conditions on which to prove who’s the most fearless, and stylish, freerider of all. This year’s line-up is impressive: Austrian snowboarders Eric Themel and Mitch Toelderer; backcountry legend Jeremy Jones; French firebrand Xavier De Le Rue; Norwegian Isenseven crew member Fredrik Evensen; and Mayrhofen veteran Thomas ‘Beckna’ Eberharter. On two planks, Californian Cody Townsend may be a favourite to win, but will be challenged by France’s Thomas Diet and Arnaud Rougier, with Loris Falquet, Richard Permin and youngster Jeremie Heitz also competing.
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Illustration
With buckets of fresh powder and avalanche warnings aplenty, this year’s event is set to be the most dangerous, and spectacular, to date. Day 1 There’s no time for hangovers. At 7am our entire crew – riders, photographers, writers and organisers – board the tour bus where we’ll spend most of the week. The first location is Wirth, a small face overlooking the village of St. Christoph in the St. Anton region. It doesn’t look that gnarly, but the lack of gradient and length is deceiving. Covered with cliffs, including an iced waterfall, stomping a clean run is a challenge. Except for Jones who, always creative, weaves a ridiculously narrow line between chutes that would leave mortals dead. So how do you choose a line? Toelderer explains: “We get told the day before, but we have no chance to see the faces. So when we’re up there that’s our first time seeing it. Mostly I stick to what strikes me first. You don’t want to ride for the judges, you want to choose something you like and ride for yourself.” After some exploratory runs I head to location two in the neighbouring resort of Sonnekopf: a steep face littered with drops and covered in powder, like a deadly canvas aching for lines. Deflowering the virgin snow are two perfectly shaped kickers, a twist for 2009 that’s not entirely welcome. “You ride, ride, ride and you can only see the kicker from far away,” explains Themel. “Usually you see the landing, walk around it, do a run in – you know how much speed to get, what angle to take. But here you’re already super
Irena
Zablotska
stressed, then you have to hit a kicker and you don’t know anything about the landing...” From the opposing piste, I watch the world’s finest commit high-speed pow turns, then transfer suddenly to a packed-down, icy run-in resulting in edge catches and stacks, except for De Le Rue and Beckna who land 360 and 720 spins. The skiers are unperturbed – Diet drops a colossal cliff, throws one backflip, then a double, finishing with a second drop. Again Jones goes original, ditching man-made features for big drops. Day 2 It’s pitch black. Dawn is a crack on the horizon. I wait for our mobile home, shivering under the mountain’s shadows, bleary eyed. Today’s spot: the Brandjoch, a stunning descent right above Innsbruck. But this is no city-softy stop. There are warnings that sun has deteriorated the snow quality, and avalanche risk is high. After the ascent to Nord Park, I session the park while my courageous compadres start the three-hour hike up the ridge. But not everyone’s keen: Beckna pulls out and Themel voices unease. As organiser Florant drops in to test the descent, a communal sigh of relief is held in limbo as huge, light powder sprays follow him – but, as he reaches the lower half, an avalanche erupts, flowing down the couloir to base. He emerges safe, but nature has another surprise: thirty wild mountain goats run across the hill. Stunned, I feel like I’m inside a movie. A few minutes later, the riders are at the summit
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and ready to descend. As they drop after one another like talented lemmings, a helicopter follows each like a gargantuan fly, filming footage. Evensen stands out, buttering off the face and throwing a big backside 360 into a bowl. O’Neill rider and newly qualified doctor Toelderer has looked at this gigantic face for years, and benefits from local knowledge and extensive hiking experience. “It’s my home mountain,” he explains. “I showed the organisers a picture of the face, and how they could see the contrast of the mountains and the city, as I really wanted to bring people here. Even if the conditions weren’t perfect, to hike up with all these guys and see the view was incredible.”
keeps away clouds and protects the untouched snow. I lean back and go fast, over fluffy pillows, drops and between thick tree stems, to rejoin the cat track before dropping off to head through the snow again. Then, saturated with snow and smiling, I do it all again. “This doesn’t feel like a competition for me,” states Toelderer. “It’s more a full day out in the mountains and that’s what I like.” At dinner I sit next to Jones who extols the virtues of ditching helis for hiking, explains why snowboarders are lazy, and shows off his collection of tree photographs. He’s had his best day so far: “This place is like Transylvania meets palm trees. My favourite thing to do is surf powder and faces, like we did today at St. Jakob. I’ve never had it so good.
Day 3 The hunt for freshies is on. St. Anton may have blue skies but it’s on to the less glitzy East Tyrol, where it’s rumoured to be puking. Sat near the back of the bus, my route through the South Central region is lined by jagged peaks, as death metal soundtracks riders sleeping, chatting or, in the case of Jones, staring longingly out the window, documenting with a point and shoot. After three hours I’m plunged into the darkness of the Felbertauern tunnel. From wide-open spaces into the claustrophobic veins of the valley, my retinas ache under the artificial light. Suddenly the portal spews me into the white otherworld of the East Tyrol. Cheers erupt – our hopes are realised. It’s dumping in my Narnia-like new home. Our destination is the near snowed-in village of St. Jakob im Defereggental, on the border of Salzburg, East Tyrol and Carinthia. It’s pure rustic charm, all wood chalets and cross-country ski tracks. I check in, scrounge for Internet (we’ve been in a 1990s time warp), sleep and dream of powder.
DAy 5 I’m back in civilisation at the small resort of St. Leonard, which has been blanketed overnight. Punters stay on piste as I follow the crew – up early despite hangovers – to the powder fields under the lift, ripe for slashing, floating and snaking through the loosely dispersed trees. I’m in mellow heaven, and do laps all day. On a couple of runs, Evensen acts as a personal guide through the forest, looking for features to launch off and flying through pillows. Later, I watch Themel rip a steep covered face up close. Competition? I’d almost forgotten.
Day 4 I could never have imagined today. After being ‘advised’ to wear avalanche beepers, my qualms quickly evolve into fun when, while waiting at the designated meeting point, an increasingly loud rumble reveals itself as a tractor towing a cart packed with people. I clamber in and squeeze between bodies and piles of equipment. Dodging branches and children on tobbogans, I’m trundled up the track to a restaurant housed in a wooden shack, from an age when skiing was for the fearless and fit. The valley is doused in white. But the tall evergreens that surround me create a warmth that
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Day 6 While I’m still in bed dreaming, guides Claude Alain Gailland and Pierre Muller are hiking from the village to the summit of St. Leonard at 4am to check today’s location – the Grosse Lepples Korl, 2,877m high above the resort. Avalanches are high risk due to snowfall – hence the pre-dawn safety check. It’s also colder, at minus 17, with 40km winds harassing contestants on their hour-long hike up. Sat next to two cameramen I have full view of the face. It’s fierce and nerves are high – Evensen’s already bailed: “Looking at all the avalanches that went down on the opposite faces, it’s too risky for me today. I don’t have enough experience yet.” But the remaining riders can’t hold back. Eric Themel drops in to air off a few features then descends with care, fearful the whole side could engulf him. Jones straight-lines through the rocks, then surfs the light powder below. Despite having already survived an avalanche, De Le Rue is fearless – landing a double cliff drop, then hurtling down before the snow pack splits. “We woke to cold, blue skies and finally got to
see what was around us,” reflects Jones. “The riding was out of this world. I like to take photos of the mountains around me but I was hesitant today. The dangers were high, but when we hiked up the guides showed us the perfect spot.” After an early start, and a real ‘big mountain’ day in St. Leonard, I’m whisked off again for a last contest day at Heiligenblut. Day 7 The promise of a face ‘like Alaska’ wasn’t meant to be. Our party’s fully prepared but, with the mountain masked in thick fog, the weather isn’t. I brave the conditions anyhow, exploring secret stashes during short bouts of sunlight. A couple of hours later I’m wet, cold and tired, so download for lunch, before departing to Saalbach Hinterglemm, for the final judging and closing party. It’s a smooth journey, with a party atmosphere – until our Parisian bus driver negotiates a hairpin on the icy road towards the hotel and gets stuck in slush, right next to a sheer drop. Our thirty-strong crew can’t push him out, so elect to abandon the bus for the judging session in Saalbach’s glitziest hotel. The footage from the week has been edited into riders’ sections, to be judged by the riders themselves. “This year, picking lines was a lot easier with less people, but I saw little of the riding, so seeing the videos will be cool,” comments Jones. “Rider judges are the best way to judge – it’s more worthy.” Evensen agrees: “Competition-wise it’s similar to freestyle contests – you have a start number and then go down the mountain or through the park. But here you all judge each other, rather than having a set of judges. So that’s better – more a nice week with friends than fighting for points.” The standard is impressive, but it’s clear who stands out. Santa Cruz’s Townsend wins the Best Skier award, while, after his gutsy performance all week, De Le Rue wins Best Rider and Best Overall Rider – followed by Jones and Toelderer. Exhausted from the week, I join the collective to banquet on Bavarian barbecue, indulge in free booze, be entertained by a dodgy stripper and witness 80 per cent of the guys ripping each other’s T-shirts off. There’s no personal security guards, rock star egos or pro pretension here: when the backcountry’s your playground and the mountain holds your fate, we’re all equal – and free www.bigmountainpro.com
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Patient photographer Tony Plant is waiting for that perfect wave. Text Alex Wade + Photography Tony Plant
“He waits. That’s what he does.” So goes the voiceover at the beginning of Guinness’ celebrated 1999 advertisement, Surfer. For several long seconds the camera focuses on a dark, muscular surfer as he eyes something in the distance, then the man, with three other surfers, paddles out into outsize Waimea. They duly surf a bomb whose crest dissolves into a group of wild, white horses in an ad once voted the greatest of all time by a television poll. Waiting is also what photographer Tony Plant does, only his territory is Newquay, Cornwall. The Cornish town is the home of The Cribbar, a wave often imbued with mystical qualities by a mainstream media eager to witness big-wave surfing in England. In recent months, attention has switched to the west coast of Ireland, but The Cribbar remains a legitimate, fabled and downright scary big-wave spot. Plant – a tall, intense and powerfully built man – has devoted his life to photographing it. “I’ve been watching The Cribbar since I was a kid,” says Plant, a surfer from the age of six who was brought up in Cornwall. “I’ve seen it barreling like you wouldn’t believe and I know there’s a great
water shot to be had of it. I want to be the one who gets that shot.” With a degree in fine art from the Chelsea School of Fine Art, Plant brings an artist’s eye to his quest. His photographs have a painterly quality which chimes perfectly with The Cribbar’s place in British surfing. The wave was first surfed in the mid-1960s by pioneers of UK surfing including Roger Mansfield, Trevor Roberts and Chris Jones, as well as the American big-wave specialist Jack ‘Mahogany’ Lydgate. Ever since, its cold, blue and terrifying walls of water have captivated British surfers: The Cribbar is a homegrown surfing icon. Or, as Plant puts it: “I love the place. I’ve swum in big seas - Cribbar, Aileen’s, huge Mullaghmore – and when those waves go off, the detonation crashes right through and out the other side of you – you actually feel it hit. It’s all so big and you’re so small, you just marvel. I wouldn’t want to miss it for the world.” Which is why Tony Plant will wait, and wait, until he gets the shot he’s been dreaming of since he was a child. As the Guinness ad says: “Here’s to waiting.” www.tonyplant.co.uk
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San Onofre, California, USA.
Swinging days and lazy nights with the Old Man of San O. Text Sam Bleakley + Photography Craig Havens
remember the pungent smell of kelp drawn out by a searing Californian sun as I waded into the pebble-bottom shallows at San Onofre. I was nine years old and had only ever surfed with my dad pushing me into the waves. At San O, I went solo, paddling out beyond the whitewater. I turned my head to shore. The morning fog had wholly burned off and dad’s face lit up. Fellow Cornishman, Surfer mag editor and close family friend Paul Holmes had loaned me a 6’0” channel-bottomed board shaped by Hawaiian Brian Bulkley. To me, a gangly kid, it was perfectly crafted and totally ‘magic’. I saw the thick frown of an approaching set spoil the otherwise calm skin of the sea, paddled further out towards it, swung back around and stroked into that wave alone. It turned green, peaked, and as it broke I took off, angled and found trim. Groomed by the cobbles, the wave unfurled further than I could see. Light bounced back off the face, which turned to a wet glare. I rode its entire length, locked in the pocket. The feathering frown became a big smile, Hollywood-style, white teeth showing. Dad and Paul hooted proudly. That wave was a defining moment – I was finally a surfer. Paul gave me the board and I took it home to Cornwall. It set me up for life. nglish painter Peter Blake’s The Meeting always reminds me of that formative surfing experience, because it captures the bleached-out feeling of a hot Californian day. I even stuck a print of it on my bedroom wall. It shows the British artists Peter Blake, Howard Hodgkin and David Hockney meeting on a Southern Californian boulevard running by the beach. A blonde in hot pants flies by on roller skates. The painting is a pastiche of Gustave Courbet’s modernist masterpiece Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, where Blake leads us from the modernist countryside idyll to the postmodern dream of the Californian beachside. The image captured my imagination because it captured a ‘lifestyle’. The likes of Dorian Paskowitz and Tom Blake
appropriated elements of Polynesian culture and made them ‘cool’ when they started riding the two-mile stretch of greasy waves afoot the dirt cliffs at San Onofre in the 1930s, making it the most important place in the early development of a growing Californian surfing scene. Regulars built palm-fond and grass shacks and lit fires at sundown while they played slack key guitars and rejoiced in the smooth peeling waves. San Onofre became ‘San O’ – and a subculture sparked. In the 1950s the Californian performance surfing epicentre shifted to more challenging waves at Malibu and Windansea. San O kept its soul, and would become more about surfing families than surfing fashions. The post-war boom led thousands beyond the final frontier, towards the Pacific and its setting sun. The ‘dead’ Californian desert was brought to life through irrigation, and the sun was harnessed in a lifestyle of eternal light. But surfers were outsiders, agitators, and followed a different path to corporate America. Where the mainstream embraced the Hollywood myth of eternal daylight, surfers were prepared to remain on the fringe. Years later when I returned to San O it was not quite as I had remembered it on that formative wave. Of course, my eyes were a little more open – the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station that was built in 1968 no longer looked NASA-like, but scarred the wrinkled sandstone skin like a huge whitehead pimple. Army choppers flew overhead and the enormous military training ground of Camp Pendleton, right behind the beach, made me uneasy. But I also felt the great sense of community that grew because of it. In 1952 San Onofre Surfing Club was formed purely to keep access alive when the Marines took so much of the nearby land. San O became a deeply symbolic and special place for so many surfers, with access solidified by the 1973 California State Parks system. The wave is so easy to ride that many learn here, and there’s a hard core of older locals who simply want a mellow time cruising on heavy longboards at the roiling peak called ‘Old Mans’. The sweet surf kept dancing by at San O, but slowly my Californian dream collapsed. I
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The entrance to San O, a few kilometres from the Camp Pendleton base.
started to see a reclaimed desert – a cultural aridity based on the shopping mall strip and entertainment complexes exclusively for the rich. I used the bus service and saw inner city dereliction and the sad Americans that America left behind, because everyone has a car in the land of stars. In the richest country on Earth, here was the underbelly of body and spirit. Southern California is a simulacrum, a copy of an environment that never existed. The manicured lawns and kaleidoscope of gardens are a mirage, considering the arid climate, where water rites offer political battlegrounds.A desert, irrigated to form a ‘utopia’. But ‘utopia’ literally means ‘no place’. The map precedes the territory. The manufactured image of health and happiness that became synonymous with the Southern Californian lifestyle offers a contradiction – ‘paradise’ at the ocean’s edge means sitting on a geological fault as well as holding back the encroaching desert. The threat of the earthquake is transmuted into the excitement of the Disney ride, and the Hollywood action disaster movie. Disaster is transformed into a spectacle. In the same tone, the Californian surfer, like the Polynesians before him, made the wild Pacific into an area for recreation. s I gazed down from the cracked earth on perfect six-foot waves spending their energy in long rights and lefts, I was reminded of my own California dream. I paddled out on a recent trip to San O for the final event of the
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Oxbow World Longboard Tour as the sunrise threw a blanket of colour across the coast. The crop of top longboarders were competing man-on-man, throwing their lightweight sticks around, not in imitation of shortboarding where your feet are rooted throughout the ride, but by constantly working the rails – shifting weight around the board through walking and stalling, often with immense subtlety or nuance. The best combine power, elegance and speed, looking to the past, but constantly pushing ahead, with continual reference to style and flow. Where in traditional longboarding you might sacrifice mobility for trim, looking for the long noseride, in contemporary competition you must mix it up, to maintain maximum speed. What San O surfers like Tom Witt, Brad Vetter, Josh Baxter and Colin McPhillips show is complete mastery of radical, progressive turns, clean footwork, elegant noseriding, and overall flow. Above all they have uncanny timing and anticipation. Maybe this is part of growing up in a cyber-world in which the instant is the thing, where time is collapsed. They have a sense of San O’s rich history and a vision for the future. Certainly San O’s breed seem less affected by the stress of competition – just wanting to go out and have fun, in the moment. A few older cats sat watching the contest and a new south swell from the tailgates of oversized pick-ups. Regular legends Henry Ford, Mickey Munoz and Linda Benson were clean spirited
and personified the radiant aloha spirit. In the busy, family-orientated line-up the searing Santa Ana offshore winds blew all the steam away, and eight-year-old girls shared rides with eighty-yearold grandmothers. Frequent Australian visitor Nat Young and David Nuuhiwa were out freesurfing – you could not have picked a finer duo to be present. Nuuhiwa took 1960s nose-riding to its zenith with a grace unmatched until San Diego’s Joel Tudor cat-walked in the 1990s. He might have won the 1966 World Championships at Ocean Beach, had it not been for Nat, who blew everyone away with his aggressive style, carving arcs and ‘S’ turns on a revolutionary shorter board with a George Greenough-built dolphin-like fin. It was a lesson in the future of surfing and heralded the shortboard era, leaving nose riding in the dust until the resurgence of longboarding in the 1980s. Today, the world title fight was between the magnanimous Hawaiian Bonga Perkins and the young Frenchman Antoine Delpero. Philosophical Antoine is a natural stylist, with sinuous noserides and soul-arches, but it was the gregarious Bonga who tattered the surfaces with explosive turns mixed up with beautiful noserides. This was postmodern surfing at its best, reconfiguring the whole history of longboarding and California, and then projecting it into a new realm. Hawaii, the regal home of surfing, wore a well-deserved World Longboard crown, crystallising the enduring connection between Polynesia and San O as the sun slowly dipped into the Pacific
Is French pro Mathieu Crépel set to become snowboarding’s next big superstar? Text Ed Andrews
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“Waagh,” screams a crowd of girls, clapping their hands and swaying their hips as another rider drops into the half pipe. “Allez, waagh, allez!” The shrill cheers cut through the deep throbbing house bass echoing around the natural amphitheatre of Plagne Bellecote, a small satellite cluster of apartment blocks and fast food restaurants in the Paradiski area of the French Alps. It’s early April and the sun is drenching both riders and spectators alike with its warm glow. They are gathered here for Chromatophobia, a unique super pipe competition. Whereas other competitions keep to a traditional format that sees riders execute their lines with android precision, having done so infinite times before in practice, Chromatophobia is different. The previous night saw each rider write down a trick that then got placed in a hat. Two of these were then picked at random for every competitor to either include in their runs, or face having their final score halved. And last night in the lobby of a rather opulent hotel, an alley-oop backside rodeo and a corked frontside 7 were selected to a few cries of, “What? Are you fucking kidding me?” For some of the riders, such tricks just don’t feature in their repertoire.
“Snowboarding is a creative sport and we needed a format that would show that.”
This new concept is the brainchild of Mathieu Crépel, the French world champion snowboarder who introduced this compulsory trick aspect at his own invitational big air contest in the Pyrenees last year. “Nowadays, all the contests have pretty much the same tricks. Riders work on a run all season long, and if it’s good enough, they can pretty much win everything with that one same run. And that kinda sucks,” he told me earlier that day in the hotel bar, overlooking the slopes of La Plagne. “Snowboarding is a creative sport and we needed a format that would show that. Even though we picked pretty basic tricks, some of the top riders won’t be able to do them, and that’s exciting.”
But as the competition gets underway, there is something missing. Surely the architect of such an event should be dropping in before anyone else? Crépel, however, is injured – badly. Having broken his foot riding in Japan six weeks earlier, he walks with a delicate tread after coming out of the cast the week before. I had first met Crépel at the Burton European Open in Laax a few months earlier. Back then, when I caught up with him between runs, he was bright and professionally obliging, breaking away from the crowds of riders that constantly flocked around him to do a quick interview. But now, despite maintaining the polite amenability that makes him such a popular character, he also seems distracted. “You seem a little unhappy?” I put it to him. There’s an awkward pause. He inhales and turns to look out the window where the sun is breaking over the horizon. “When you are hurt like this,” he says almost mournfully, “that’s when you understand why snowboarding is your life.” A dramatic statement, sure, but duly grounded on personal history. Hailing from the resort of La Mongie, in the Hautes-Pyrénées, Crépel was born into a family of keen skiers. “As soon as I could walk I was on skis – training, racing, all that stuff,” he tells me. His dad, a former ski instructor, made the switch to snowboards in the mid 1980s and, according to Crépel, was the first snowboarder in the whole of the Pyrénées. Later, he would give a seven-year-old Mathieu a home-made snowboard fitted with ski bindings that had been cut down to fit him, and with that, Mathieu the skier was gone forever. “After that, I just stopped skiing – I hated it,” he chuckles, his mood seeming to brighten as he reminisces. In the years that followed, he would regularly make the trek with his parents across the breadth of France to compete in as many contests as possible. Such commitment meant leaving school on a Friday afternoon, driving through the night, competing and then making the same long journey home to be back at school for Monday morning. “So having to do that each week, you really didn’t want to fuck up a contest,” he says. “I think it gave me a little more motivation than the others.” Mathieu’s professional career really took off when, at the age of fifteen, he was picked by Terje Haakonsen to compete at the Arctic Challenge in Norway. In the ten years since, his life has been one snow season after the next, with his competing in the half pipe at the 2006 Olympics and winning the TTR that very same year. Although he failed to win a medal at the Olympics, he has already qualified for the 2010 Games in Vancouver.
After years of such dedication, does he ever feel that he missed out on some of his childhood? “When I was fifteen, I would see my friends having a normal life, going to school every day and partying,” he says. “I couldn’t do any of that so I lost contact with some really good people. But I don’t think I’ve missed out because snowboarding has given me a lot of other things.” One of these things is a lucrative sponsorship deal with Quiksilver which he’s had since he was ten years old. Today, everything he wears, including his watch, bears the ubiquitous mountain and wave logo. For the last three years, he has put out his own signature line of Quik apparel and fronted numerous ad campaigns. And it makes sense. There is something undeniably, dare I say it, ‘cool’ about him. He’s young, good-looking, very switched-on – and he also happens to kill it on a snowboard. But with so much invested in him, does the pressure of being a poster boy for an international mega-brand ever get to him? “No pressure at all, they seem pretty trusting of how I manage my seasons,” says Crépel, not with a PRsavvy air, but an innocence that indicates he doesn’t give such things much thought. “It’s great because I get to work on the other side of snowboarding as well, organising events and designing clothes.” In the clothing stakes, Crépel has been instrumental in producing a line of outerwear made from recycled PET (plastic bottles, to you and me) and recycled cotton. “I think it’s the future, we should pretty much get every product this way and get rid of all the bad habits we have,” he says. “We really have to revisit the whole capitalism thing.” Fair enough, but what about his carbon footprint? As a voice calling for change, would Crépel himself be open to travelling less? “Hmmm…” he muses in a pained voice, “I’m pretty sure we can still travel. With the life I have today, I have to take the plane a lot so I do a carbon compensation payment every year.” As the group of girls continue to scream, Mathieu is at the bottom of the half pipe, microphone in hand, interviewing the riders in both French and fluent English for his own set of podcasts. Snowboarder, curator, TV presenter: what next? It reminds me of a question I posed to him back in Laax. In the presence of snowboarding’s first superstar, Shaun White, I asked him what he thought of this new celebrity culture that surrounds pro snowboarders. “It’s good to have stars because snowboarding is still a young sport,” he told me. “Shaun winning the Olympics did a lot for snowboarding. But in France, it’s still pretty hard to get in the mainstream media. But we are getting there.” And, unbeknownst to him, Crépel seems to be leading the charge. The screaming is something that will inevitably become familiar to him
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While finance companies plea for government bailouts across the globe, starving artists are simply vying to survive in a shrinking art market and credit crunch. But despite the dire status quo, a handful of New Yorkers are embracing the recession as a catalyst, rather than constraint, to their creativity. Taking advantage of New York City’s streets, these guys are turning garbage into real works of art. And, better yet, unlike the architects of this global mess, these artistic luminaries are actually expanding their careers – and selling more than ever. Take a leaf out of their book. Get creative.
Text AND PHOTOGRAPHY Faith-Ann Young
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The lanky, eccentric artist Nate Hill became infamous in the NY art scene last year for his eerie ‘urban taxidermy’, in which he sewed together dried, dead animal body parts found in Chinatown garbage piles with a leather needle and carpet thread, in order to craft mystical, fantasy creatures. The grand oeuvre of this project was a life-size pair of humans, A.D.A.M. and E.V.E. Except in Mr. Hill’s world, instead of being made of Adam’s elbow, E.V.E. was made of fifteen animal species including bird, buffalo, cat, cow, coyote, dog, fish, guinea hen, lobster, octopus, ox, pig, rabbit, shrimp and squirrel. This year, in reaction to the economy, and
in juxtaposition to his more sinister man-ocarcasses, Hill started a brand-new art-comedy project called Club Animals. Hill and five or six artist friends don Disneyland-esque, plush animal costumes and frolic through the streets in an effort to brighten people’s moods. Why? “Obama said that now is the time to put off childish things, but we could not disagree more.” Thus far, Club Animals has hosted a human petting zoo in a taxidermy-filled Lower East Side bar, where they welcomed guests to gently pet and tickle them. The furry crew also did a mini marathon where they raced Union Square in NYC four times in full mascot gear. Then there’s the
‘Free Bouncy Ride’ services they offer on New York City subways, in which they urge passengers to sit on the plush animals’ laps and be bounced up and down like three-year-olds on grandma’s knee. “In these times of job loss, government bailouts and even a potential Depression, Club Animals has turned from adult concerns of money and finances and concentrated our minds on to those of children,” explains Hill. As for the fiscal implications of the project, there are none. Price of bouncy ride from Grand Central to Wall Street: $0. www.clubanimalsnyc.blogspot.com
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Brooklyn-based painter Sarah Bereza specialises in whimsical oil portraits of women painted in warm pastel hues, often posed in positions of jest or sexual innuendo. Her painted subjects seem to stare out from their ornate frames like modern nymphs, half-mocking and half-seducing. Bereza’s work has been featured at numerous solo and group shows from London’s Fulham Art Gallery to Brooklyn’s Jack the Pelican Presents, and even earned critic’s choice from Saatchi Gallery during the New York Pulse Fair in 2008. Inspired by the recent financial meltdown, Bereza has since begun a new type of portrait series. This time, rather than painting women
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in seductive poses, she drew distressed i-banker wives or debutants – shocked, anxious and possibly penniless. “I am interested in the feelings of the wives who have to learn how to live with less money from their banker husbands, of women trying to find a love+money connection without success,” explains Sarah. And her process is just as recession-conscious as her subject matter. Aside from the oil paints, her materials come from the lumberyard. Instead of buying expensive wood frames, she makes her own decadent-looking ones from a concoction of Styrofoam, fibreglass, urethane and epoxy. “Our way of life in the US certainly wasn’t sustainable.
It is a wonderful feeling that we have a new president who can make some major changes to help bring our country into a new era of global consciousness.” Despite her dramatised portraiture of recession-ruffled society women, Bereza is largely excited about the changes that the recession is spawning: “The farmers’ market is always packed now, and there is this renegade group of people in Brooklyn who are throwing seed bombs all over. Plants and flowers are popping up everywhere in abandoned lots and buildings.” www.sarahbereza.com
Twenty-eight-year-old Justin Gignac crafts the most literal ‘recession art’ of our recession rebels. A natural entrepreneur with a crafty sense of humour, Gignac combines a determined work ethic with a typically Socratic mindset. While interning during university, he entered a heated debate with a coworker over packaging and marketing. The coworker argued package design wasn’t important. Gignac strongly disagreed and decided to prove his point through an experimental project: “I figured the only way to prove them wrong would be to package something that absolutely nobody would ever want to buy.” Gignac began plucking odd ends from New
York City trash bins and arranging them in clean, gift-friendly square cubes, while working as an art director to support himself post-graduation. These cubes of ‘Original New York City Garbage’ initially cost $10, but Gignac had to raise the price because he couldn’t keep up with the orders. Today, his ‘Original New York City Garbage’ boxes are $50 and limited-edition cubes, with collections from special occasions, like the last game at Yankee Stadium, going for $100. Like the packaging myth he has since debunked, Gignac is sceptical about the media’s portrayal of the recession: “It’s just fear perpetuating fear. Things kinda sucked a little to start with and then everyone
gets scared and the suckage snowballs.” Meanwhile, his business continues to progress: “I’ve been really fortunate that my ideas still cut through in spite of this economy. In the past few weeks I’ve actually received more orders than usual. I’d like to expand my garbage empire at some point and have about fifty emails in my inbox from people all over the world interested in franchising my idea.” When asked why garbage is selling so well, he responds with wit: “Who knows. Maybe, in comparison to everything else going on, it’s a damn good investment.” www.nycgarbage.com
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The word ‘Morbid’ is etched in dainty swirls of cursive on China Morbosa’s neck. The label ‘Lawless’ is displayed prominently on her collarbone. Like her tattoos, Morbosa’s art is a deliberate mix of gritty and delicate. In May, the twenty-sixyear-old hosted an exhibition, Putting the Recess Back in Recession, at the hip street art gallery Alphabeta in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in which she spray-painted a city skyline on the wall and hung from the ceiling antique doors and broken window panes that she found off the street. Like the exhibition’s title, each painting was playful yet paradoxical: a cartoon-esque drawing of a chiselled, gun-toting man, graceful birds in flight,
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and tugboats (christened ‘Tug-of-war’) chugging merrily over misty glass panes. The autonomous, free-wheeling nature of Morbosa’s artwork can be traced back to her childhood. Having grown up in an agrarian family in New Mexico, her family “instilled a strong belief in questioning authority, stemming from being completely immersed in the direct effects of capitalism on the agricultural system.” During her teenage years, rather than being formally trained, Morbosa honed her artistic style on the street, experimenting with graffiti to vent her frustration. “I began using graffiti and street art as a rebellion against the feelings of powerlessness
I had as an individual,” she says. “My street art roots became the foundation of the style and ideas currently reflected in my work.” Perhaps it has something to do with her namesake, China (her real name, by the way), but Morbosa’s artistic career is growing exponentially these days. She participated in an art party in Brooklyn in late May, and is currently designing a guitar in collaboration with talented guitar ingénue Kaki King. Widely lauded for her exhibitions in NYC, she’s also planning on infiltrating the LA art scene this summer. www.chinamorbosa.com
On a dark Brooklyn night in 2005, Ellis Gallagher (aka Ellis G) was mugged on his doorstep. Though only $82 were stolen, he remained haunted by the dark. Then, enticed by the shadow of a fire hydrant some days after, the former graffiti tagger knelt down and traced the silhouette with a piece of chalk from his pocket. “The darkness of the shadow looked like a graffiti fill-in where you outline it with a contrasting colour. So I outlined the dark shadow in white.” From then on, he began to trace the outlines of shadows cast by commonplace street objects all over Brooklyn: telephone poles, fire hydrants, bikes, fences. “I went bananas on the Brooklyn streets from there.”
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His chosen medium, chalk, is a pretty unbeatable recession tool since it is cheap, biodegradable and fun to use. At a time when many are being forced to reflect upon their life choices, Ellis’ street shadow art causes spectators – who may not go to museums or see art often – to do a double-take and look outside the norm. “There is a free museum on the streets that is constantly rotating the works,” he says. “Street art is everywhere, you just have to look.” A bubbly character, Gallagher is a master of self-promotion, diligently signing each piece with his tag ‘© Ellis G 2009’, and inviting the media to chronicle his street statements every other night. The result? He’s lectured at Brooklyn Museum and
has been featured by everyone from The New York Times to Der Spiegel. The cops have also taken notice and tried to incriminate his art as graffiti. After spending seventeen hours in jail for chalk drawing, a brief trial ensued in which the judge found that chalk did not fit the definition of New York graffiti as “etching, painting, covering, drawing upon or otherwise placing of a mark upon public or private property with intent to damage such property.” In other words, Gallagher is back, with chalk-in-hand, going bananas on sidewalks all over town. www.myspace.com/ellis_gee
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Cuban surfers are among the most dedicated in the world, risking imprisonment to find materials and relying on donations from foreigners to get boards and leashes. Never mind the blockade. As Sarah Bentley finds out, there’s no stopping the Cuban surf revolution. Text
Sarah
Bentley
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Photography
Babak
SalarI
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Surfboards are prize possessions in Cuba. This one is shared among the many budding riders in the local surf community.
sssst, psssst...” Eduardo Valdés, head of the Associacion de Surfistas de Cuba, looks uncharacteristically shifty as he peers through a wire fence, trying to attract the attention of a worker at Cuba’s national plastic factory. It’s here that the island’s chairs, tables and packaging are produced and employees, like in every industry in Cuba, supplement their meagre wages by selling the materials of their trade on the black market. Pretending to take a cigarette break, a man sidles up to the fence three metres to the left of Eduardo. Looking in opposite directions, a rapid-fire exchange takes place. “What you want?” “Three bottles of resin.” “45 CUC.” “No way, man. 30.” “40.” “35.” “Wait for me outside the bar around the corner. Give me thirty minutes. I need the money now.” Forty tense minutes later and the worker appears clutching a flimsy plastic bag containing three cylindrical shapes wrapped in newspaper, presumably the resin. Eduardo doesn’t check the packages are kosher – “The workers would rather have a repeat customer than rip you off ” – but bundles them straight into his rucksack. The liquid booty secured, he makes a hasty retreat home to his workshop, where a longboard donated by a tourist is waiting for him to liberate all three bottles of resin onto its rough surfaces. If caught, both parties could face time in prison, an inconceivable fate for Cuba’s affable, wave-loving surf honcho but a risk he must nevertheless take each time he produces a new board for the island’s diminutive but dedicated surf community. “It’s stressful but what choice do I have?” he says. “Resin’s not for sale in Cuba. You have to steal it or buy it from a worker. If I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t be able to make boards.” Cuban surfers aren’t the only ones lining the pockets of the plastic factory workforce. After the release of The Fast And The Furious – a film most Cuban men saw on bootleg
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DVD – car modification took off, leaving surfers in competition with car modifiers who use the resin to mould oversized bumpers. Consequently, the black market price shot up to approximately 10-12CUC per bottle, a third of a doctor’s monthly wage. “As if the workers care about the development of the surf scene,” says Eduardo. “They just want to make money and people into car customising seem to have a lot more than us.” The American trade embargo – preventing Cuba from buying everything from medicines to food to resin for surfboards – has effectively strangled the Cuban economy. Cubans cannot buy from or sell to America, and foreign subsidiaries of American companies are also banned from trading with the island nation. As a result, Cubans have had to get creative and find alternative ways to get hold of the most basic goods. The lengths surfers like Eduardo have to go to secure raw materials linked to their passion is the warp and weft of daily life here. Everyone is an expert law dodger, fixer and hustler. Excluding the mangy items included in the weekly food ration, all Cubans, from revolutionloyal old ladies to MTV-influenced teens, buy pretty much everything – yoghurt, meat, music, clothes, cars, electrical equipment – from enterprising comrades on the black market. Since Raul Castro took over from Fidel in February 2008, he has relaxed laws allowing nationals to buy previously banned items like cell phones, PC’s and toasters (apparently the electrical grid couldn’t previously cope with mass toaster ownership). No one can afford this swag unless they’re engaged in illegal shenanigans, receive remittances from friends and family abroad, or have a steady income of CUC, the currency that is supposed to be exclusively used by foreigners but isn’t. Give a beggar a peso, the currency supposedly used by Cubans, and he’ll fling it back at you in disgust. Unlike in the West, the hoop-jumping nature of obtaining stuff (and CUC to buy stuff) separates the wheat from the chaff. Cuban surfers aren’t doing it on a whim or to buy into a ‘cool lifestyle choice’. They’re doing it because they’ve
fallen head over heels in love with the feeling of wave beneath board and are prepared to lurk around plastic factories, risk prison terms and rotate five boards among twenty surfers in order to get their fix. Although he has no other job – “I’d be broke even if I worked so I might as well not work and be one hundred per cent dedicated to surf ” – Eduardo charges nothing but the cost of materials to shape boards. “Everything I use, all the tools from the mask to the drill, sander, the boards themselves, have been given as presents from surfers abroad,” he says. “It would be wrong for me to make money off it and besides, I’m a surfer, I understand the frustration of sitting on the shore with no board to ride.” he Associacion de Surfistas de Cuba is Cuba’s sole surf organisation. It’s not technically ‘official’ – although its thorough website Havanasurfcuba.com would have you believe otherwise. They have been in talks with the Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation (INDER) for years about starting a surf school to no avail as yet. To maintain this quasi-recognition, Eduardo uses an email account he purchased from a nurse, and the website is managed by coach Bob Samin, an Australian who lives between Cuba and India. Samin updates it whenever he is out the country as cyber cafes in Cuba are outrageously expensive and home Internet connections are seemingly scarce, although if you hang with enough young people you’ll definitely come across illegally rigged home connections. There are surfers scattered across the country, but the core community of twenty regular riders reside in Havana. Their regular riding spot is Calle 70 in Miramar, a five-minute drive from Eduardo’s house. The ten surfers that have come to represent the scene look like they could be from anywhere in the world, all decked out in their most treasured surf wear – scuffed Vans, board shorts and baseball caps – scored from visiting surfers or friends and family abroad. The group’s casual friendliness,
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When their local break is flat, Havana surfers hang out watching surf movies and reading surf mags.
relaxed attitude to foreigners and absence of an agenda make them a refreshing posse to be with. Thirty-year-old dentist Danito – “Our only black surfer,” exclaims Eduardo – is still wearing his green medical smock. “To come I had to tell work my Grandma was ill,” he says with a wry grin. “When the waves are good, my Grandma gets ill a lot.” As an entity the group are the picture of good health and, even though Jamaica is Cuba’s closest Caribbean neighbour, the absence of weed is notable. At 10CUC per pre-rolled joint, no one can afford to smoke and, even if they could, they’re too afraid of the repercussions to bother. “We’ve all tried it but we don’t have much of a drug culture in Cuba,” says one of them, who asks to remain unidentified. “There are addicts but no culture like in Europe or the US. We’re more into drinking. People make rum at home and sell it from their windows. It’s lethal.” With mainstream media consumption limited to TV channels and newspapers, the crew’s knowledge of global surf culture has been dripfed to them through DVDs, VHSs and magazines sent over or left by foreign surf enthusiasts. Some of the surfers download content from the Internet onto memory sticks that they share with friends by physically passing around – a sneakernet as opposed to an Internet – as Cuba’s Internet system
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is too slow and labouring to be pinging large files back and forth to friends who are rarely able to check email accounts anyway. As we head down to Calle 70, squashed inside Danito’s majestic Chevy, they tell me about Cuba’s best surf spots. Guantanamo province at the opposite side of the island gets good ground swell. Yumuri, thirty kilometres east of Baracoa, has the best right in Cuba with Rio Duaba on the southern coast boasting good rights and lefts. Playa Mar Verde, Bella Pluma, Playa Verraco in Santiago de Cuba Province all get good surf but work best when there’s a tropical low in the Caribbean. Despite all this info, most have never surfed outside Havana. Cubans rarely travel within their own country, except to the immediately surrounding locales, due to the high price of petrol. Bob Samin (who compiled the island’s recommended spots online) recommends hitching a lift on the back of a truck for a cheap and atmospheric sojourn. Despite the lack of boards, which means surfers can go weeks without hitting the water, there’s no quibbling with the crew’s fitness and health. Cuba boasts the best selection of honed chests, thighs and arms I’ve ever clapped eyes on. A possible explanation: there is little for Cuban teenage men to do other than play sport and chase girls. Ninety per cent of Havana’s nightclubs charge a CUC
entrance price so the surfers can’t afford to get in and they laugh at the idea of going to the cheap national pesos cinemas. “They play old, rubbish movies,” protests Hubert, a twenty-eight-yearold skater and surfer and the local scene’s hot allrounder. “We can’t afford the cinemas that play new American films, so we go to a friend’s who has a DVD player and watch a new bootleg movie. But mostly we spend our time surfing and skating. We’d go crazy otherwise.” e’re now at Calle 10 and those with a board are getting ready to go for a surf. Before paddling out, Eduardo tells me about the passers-by that occasionally mistake their pending session for a desperate bid to swim to the US. “They shout, ‘Take me with you,’” says Eduardo. “And I’m like, ‘You crazy?’ I know the ocean. I understand how dangerous that crossing is. The people that get on rafts must be clueless. That or they’re insane. “They think the streets are paved with gold in the US and Europe. Sure we would love to travel, to be able to surf on the West Coast, Hawaii, and experience other cultures, but we know it’s no paradise. Every country has its own unique problems.”
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Considering thousands have risked life and limb trying to leave you’d assume Cuba was a hellhole of a country with daily life nothing more than a cocktail of drudgery and misery. The reality is quite different. The weather is sweet, the landscape stunning and the focus paid to classical culture and the arts commendable. Everyone is fed, albeit some exclusively on the extremely meagre food rations, but no one is starving. The kind of poverty and violence which plagues every Latin American country – especially those that’ve subscribed to the Washington Consensus policies of trade liberalisation and aggressive capitalism – is nowhere to be found in Cuba. Cubans below the age of fifty are highly educated and everyone is entitled to free, world-class medical care as highlighted by Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko. The sort of social problems endemic in Europe and the US – homelessness, drug addiction, gun and knife crime, gangs, obesity, weird cancers caused by even weirder chemicals in processed food – are absent. On the street people seem happy. Salsa plays. People dance. Everyone is beautiful. But this is surface level shit and, understandably, those Cubans frustrated by the restrictions imposed on them by the regime and the blockade get highly irritated when foreigners bang on about these great assets.
Eduardo gets to work on a surfboard originally donated by a visiting surfer. Aware of the economic hardship faced by many surfers, he fixes them free of charge.
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Jose Juan, a club promoter who specialises in reggaeton parties for Cuba’s burgeoning wealthy young, sums it up succinctly: “If the government lived by the ideals they impose I’d respect them, but they’re hypocrites. I love how Fidel has refused to be bullied by the West, but the party’s policies are contradictory. Unless you’re content to just pick potatoes, ride your bicycle and make love to your girl, life in Cuba can be frustrating.” And a sure fire way to escape some of that frustration? Hit the waves, or in the case of Eduardo, the waves and the workshop. n the basement of his house Eduardo toils away, shaping and sanding boards. The workshop looks like an Aladdin’s cave of usefulness with surfer chicks and pagethree titillation covering the walls. Hammers, sanders and reclaimed rubbish jostle for space on the crammed, dust-covered work surfaces. Little is thrown away in Cuba, with everything reincarnated into something new once it fails to serve its original purpose. Dominating the garage is a massive workbench-cum-vice, one leg secured into a bucket of rubble, the other semi-cemented into a large, empty tomato tin. He used to make boards by reclaiming the foam
from old American refrigerators called Western House, but since there are so few of these models left today he now relies on acquiring old longboards. It’s a rudimentary but effective system, old cheese graters used to shape the boards then smoothed off with sandpaper. Fibreglass is scavenged from local boat yards, glossed onto the boards then sanded off to a smooth finish. “The waiting lists for boards is long but the good thing is it gives people time to save for the materials,” says Eduardo with a dry smile. “Even when you’re number one on the list it can take months to secure materials and get an old board donated. Only really dedicated people surf in Cuba, you have to really want it or you’d lose interest before you got started.” He smiles again. It is the kind of serene, content beam expressed by those whose calling in life – salsa, medicine, dance – can fortuitously exist in its true, purist form within the constraints of the regime and outside the commercialism of the West. “Life can be suffocating, so surfing is like oxygen. As long as we can surf, we can breathe.” For more information or to donate surf gear contact Eduardo on olgagh@infomed.sld.cu or log on to www.havanasurf-cuba.com.
BERLIN BERLIN BREAD & BUTTER
BERLIN AIRPORT BERLIN-TEMPELHOF
01.– 03. JULY 2009
BREAD & BUTTER IS COMING HOME! WWW.BREADANDBUTTER.COM
Photographers across the U.S. are turning their lens on their home state to build a picture of a nation as it embarks on pastures new. Text Andrea Kurland
When you think of America, what kind of image springs to mind? Buxom cheerleaders botoxed to the hilt? Or something more Abercrombie & Fitch – you know, that whole white picket fence, star-spangled vibe? Perhaps it’s a little less rosy like, I don’t know, jumped-up soldiers ravaging oilrich lands? Few countries are so cloaked in clichés as the United States of America. But, as outsiders looking in, what do we really know about the country? And, perhaps more importantly, how do Americans themselves see their diverse and complex land? Those were the questions troubling British photographer-turned-curator Stuart Pilkington when he came up with The 50 States Project – a photographic venture that’s letting every corner of America have its say. The idea was simple. Fifty photographers from fifty states submit a series of photos that they feel represent their part of the patchwork. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t actually know that much about the USA,’” says Stuart, who came up with the idea when Obamamania was in full swing. “I know Los Angeles, I know New York, but I don’t know much about the other states.” Sick of relying on Hollywood for cultural
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insight, Stuart fired off emails to a handful of art photographers to see if his project had legs – “This really would have been the clincher, whether it connected with anybody” – and luckily it did. Brian Ulrich from Illinois jumped straight onboard, putting Stuart in touch with a string of like-minded photographers across the map. Things snowballed from there and, soon enough, fifty cameras in fifty states were itching to get clicking – including that belonging to Mississippi’s Maude Schuyler Clay, cousin and former apprentice to “the godfather of colour art photography”, William Eggleston. Their first assignment? People. “I don’t have any preconditions and try to be as open as I can,” explains Stuart, who will send the photographers six one-word assignments over 2009. “It’s a difficult brief to hit, in terms of representing an entire state – so I’m happy for them to express themselves in any style, and if from there you get some feeling for the country, that’s the secondary objective. It’s organic and about seeing what they come up with.” After the first series of images were published online, a buzz around the project brought the usual mix of kudos, and the odd pernickety opinion. “Some valid points were made,” admits Stuart, “the fact that we didn’t include Washington, DC,
and about how representative the photographers were in terms of ethnicity and gender. I did try for a balanced approach – but it just proved difficult. For some reason, there seemed to be a dearth of American art photographers from minority backgrounds.” The 50 States Project may have inadvertently unearthed a sadder social truth – about race and opportunity, and their inextricable link – but it set out to forge bonds, not break them. “What attracted me to this project was the idea of working with fifty other photographers, all people I have never met, on something as intimate as the states we call home,” says Peter Kearns, representing Montana. “I love being part of a project that captures the details, intricacies and complications of our country at such a transitional time in our history. I feel like the project is greater than just me and my camera.” “Myself and the fifty photographers are on a bit of an adventure, and we don’t know where it will head,” adds Stuart. “There’s a great feeling of camaraderie, which I think is a fantastic thing.” And no amount of nitpicking can argue with that Photos from the six assignments will be published over the course of 2009 at www.the50statesproject.com.
South Dakota by Aaron Packard.
Alaska by Ben Huff.
New Jersey by Juliana Beasley.
Idaho by Shawn Gust.
Tennessee by Caroline Allison.
Kentucky by Sarah Lyon.
Georgia by Maury Gortemiller.
Nevada by Heather Protz.
New Mexico by Jesse Chehak.
Missouri by Carmen Troesser.
Wisconsin by Mark Brautigam.
New York by Naomi Harris.
Florida by Steven Katzman.
Michigan by Peter Baker.
Delaware by Chad States.
Montana by Peter Kearns.
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From left to right: Nick Zinner, Karen O, Brian Chase.
listen
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN SELF-DOUBT AND EUPHORIA, THE YEAH YEAH YEAHS RETURN WITH A BRAND NEW SOUND. INTERVIEW NIALL O’KEEFFE + PHOTOGRAPHY DERRICK SANTINI
For the first twenty minutes of HUCK’s interview with Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O, she is cheerful and talkative, albeit a little nervous. Then guitarist Nick Zinner arrives and she suddenly changes. Her conversation becomes more hedged and hesitant. Every comment she makes is directed to her diminutive bandmate for approval, which is rarely forthcoming. Zinner meanwhile says little, and what he does say is barely audible. Drummer Brian Chase sits between them, utterly silent, while the room buzzes with low-level tension. Fortunately, this in-band tension continues to drive the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to make records that are passionate, powerful and unpredictable. New album It’s Blitz! finds the band pursuing a synth-led, quasidisco sound, apparently at Karen O’s insistence. The result is an album as different from its intense predecessor Show Your Bones as that record was from trashy rock‘n’roll debut Fever to Tell.
The band’s surge to prominence in the first part of this decade, and the crisis of confidence that followed, clearly damaged friendships within the band – it’s no secret that they almost split up during the troubled recording of Show Your Bones. Yet it’s equally clear that they’ve since evolved a new modus operandi which allows them to produce great records without necessarily being able to sit comfortably in a room together or live in the same city: Karen long since relocated to LA, while her bandmates remain in New York. Perhaps that formula gives Karen the final say on musical direction, or perhaps the band is more of a democracy than it looks. Either way, Karen remains a style icon and frontwoman extraordinaire, Nick a guitar player of stunning inventiveness, and Brian a drummer capable of fusing jazz virtuosity and punk energy in a manner hitherto unimaginable. For all this we must be thankful.
HUCK: What is the reason for the long gaps between records? Karen O: The gaps probably have to do with just pacing ourselves. ‘Are we ready? Yeah, we’re ready now.’ But I think the problem is that once we do start we can get caught up in a vicious cycle of self-doubt and then euphoria. Did the new record have a troubled gestation? Karen O: No, this one was really different because I personally felt the only way we could write a record is if we really had a different attitude about it – a feel-good attitude. It was really different from last time, that way, which is great because writing studio records is so difficult. Especially today when you have the option of putting maybe 500 tracks on something and taking them away, ‘Chinese Democracy’-style.
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So, the interpersonal dynamic has improved, has it? Karen O: Yeah yeah yeah… I have the job of always shoving everyone out of their comfort zone, including myself. Nobody likes that person! When someone’s really trying to provoke you into really going somewhere new… Do you feel like you’ve grown in confidence and taken control? Karen O: I feel like, earlier, that wasn’t necessary because we were just starting off and every song we made we were highly satisfied with – we could do no wrong, in the beginning. It was after people started taking us seriously when we really had the identity crisis – that’s when this role had to be born… Out of my own need, my lack of patience with doing the same thing, or lack of attention span for doing the same thing, I really always wanted to push it somewhere new. Because the thing is, you can’t do the same thing twice. Even if you tried. If you were a genius you couldn’t do the same thing twice, so why be a second version of the first thing that you did? It seems just so inferior to going somewhere else. Why the move west? Karen O: I was grieving the dissipation of the [New York] scene. That was so exciting when it came up and when it started going away I felt almost a sense of grief, and I wanted to just get out and move onto the next thing. I just felt almost too nostalgic for when everything really happened, because it was like a flash – the shelf life for those kinds of things these days is super short. So it was hard for me to stick around and watch that specific scene die off. Brian: Everybody wanted to play music and they were very passionate about it, but then for it to become a huge international success out of something so innocent was very jarring. And that scene can’t really sustain itself in that environment necessarily so it needed time for it to crash. What was the cause of the identity crisis during the Show Your Bones era? Karen O: More than anything it was just being taken seriously – that spun us out. Honestly, it was the last thing we were expecting. We were so innocent it was ridiculous. We were passing out flyers and getting really psyched that 200 people were showing up to our shows, and just had no aspirations. I didn’t know what touring meant or anything like that… It’s definitely a lot to take in, especially in your turbulent twenties. You played your first sober gig during the Show Your Bones tour. What’s the current policy? Karen O: Now it’s just a happy medium between
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the two where I don’t, like, deny myself a drink, but I don’t get wasted anymore, which is really good because at the end of a show I’d be really like, ‘Wow, that was great’ – but I’d just know that nine out of ten times it wasn’t great but I just thought it was… Did the Karen O stage persona exist before the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Karen O: I remember when I was in, like, the fifth grade, I was a really shy kid and I went to a school where there were only like sixteen kids in my grade, and there’s a variety show type thing and I remember I put on these really dark sunglasses so I couldn’t see – they were like the darkest sunglasses I’ve ever worn, I couldn’t see anything, and I did The Beatles, I lip-synched to The Beatles’ ‘Twist and Shout’, exactly. Jaws were dropping, because they couldn’t believe that that was the same person. Because I had no inhibitions and I really milked it for what it was worth. It blew the teachers’ minds, because I was a really quiet little kid… It’s been brewing for a while. How did the new sound come about? Brian: There was like a strong focus on the keyboard. We were fascinated with the sounds and wanted to explore those options, but it was also a really effective tool and device to get out of old habits. And that’s important too. To find yourself in a new context and a new setting, with different parameters, and with that there’s a whole new route to explore. I think that was a huge asset in focusing on keyboards. Karen O: I always count you [Brian] as really supportive of just opening up more. You don’t have a resistance to change so much. I feel like you’re just down to go with the flow for the most part… You don’t really stir up too much drama or anything like that. The drama’s just between Nick and I. But it’s really – especially on this record – not that dramatic. That was more the last one, I guess. Karen O: Yeah! Right! I can’t play that down but that was pretty dramatic. But still probably less dramatic than most people make it out to be… It’s a good angle. Will you wipe the slate clean again before you start the next record? Nick: It’s possible… It probably won’t be synths on the next record. When you bought a cheap keyboard on eBay, did you know it would change your life? Nick: Yes. It was all part of my masterplan. Karen O: I think subconsciously there’re goals or directions that we all feel, y’know? And it kind of happens naturally even though there’s definitely… what is it: the id and the ego, there’s this battle
going on because I’m always more, like, once that change gets going I just want to run with it, y’know? But I think you [Nick] want to put the brakes on a bit more… Even though, definitely, it’s very much – y’know – in your… creatively, you feel it anyway. Strongly. Nick: Yeah. I feel it impulsively and then… sometimes I may sort of stop and think about what I’m doing, and that’s when the danger of stepping back is – Karen’s great at encouraging… It’d be so boring if we all thought the same. If we all said, like, ‘Oh, we need to sound like this.’ ‘Yes, I agree.’ ‘I agree.’ So dull. You’re not in any hurry to ‘mature’… Brian: It feels like there’s a lot of temptation with the traditional path of what’s expected from a rock band… But it takes a little more sense of purpose and resolution to know what’s needed to stay on track, stay to the core. Karen O: That’s where I have to say, if ever the gender thing came in a little bit, it’d be the fact that I have little to no allegiance to the conventional rock path because I never felt that this is a conventional rock band that we’re in, and so I’ve never been seduced by it whatsoever. If anything, the opposite. Too much the opposite maybe! Were you bothered when It’s Blitz! leaked? Karen O: I think that, yeah, we’re a little bit oldschool. But I don’t really know how much difference it really makes in the end, because I just don’t know if less people get to hear the music because of that or more people do… There’s no way of telling. So you just don’t have record sales to quantify how much people are listening to your music, so it’s just more abstract, that’s all, which is hard to get used to and stuff, but not that hard. Nick: I guess we’ll know when we go on tour and start playing shows, and just get a sense of how… Karen O: What do you mean ‘go on tour’? I’m never going on tour again. No touring?! Karen O: Not long bursts. Just manageable bursts. Do you find the performances draining? Karen O: It’s probably the other twenty-three hours of the day that’s the most draining, between the travel and terrible sleep cycle and general malnutrition. Even as you get comfier, it’s still a constant battle to keep your body on track and therefore your mind. The shows are great. They’re really something to treasure, bring us places we’ve never been, and man, just the energy of them is so remarkable. I think that’s the highlight. The rest of it, not so much It’s Blitz! by Yeah Yeah Yeahs is out now on DGC/Interscope.
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Stylish sketches for your feet. hand-drawn by KEVIN CRAWFORD.
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LEFT TO RIGHT DC Volcano GA. Fox Phantom Mid. Kustom Kerrupt. Globe Destroyer. Onitsuka Tiger Fabre BL-L. Supra Society / Terry Kennedy Pro. 91
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LEFT TO RIGHT Converse Weapon. Etnies Fillmore. Gravis Chuck LX. Element Darrell2. Nike 6.0 Air Mogan Mid. Vans Wellesley. 93
Adelmo Jr. blasts a frontside shove it in Brooklyn as Anthony Claravall racks up footage from behind.
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Stray bullets, pavement cracks and a city that never sleeps. LRG risk life and limb on their skate video debut. Text
Jay
Riggio
It’s a beautiful sunny day in Bushwick, Brooklyn. A crew of LRG skaters have congregated at a spot in a housing project playground. Team rider Jack Curtin is warming up with some standard boardslides on a seemingly perfect nine-stair rail. Bondo, the fast-hardening putty used to instantly mend any skate spot blemish, has just been applied to smooth out a burdensome crack before the rail. LRG filmer Anthony Claravall and photographer Brian Uyeda are readying their thirty-thousand dollars’ worth of camera equipment for the busting that’s about to commence. A crowd of little kids are running around in circles, excited by the presence of rolling wheels and a minor media circus. They take turns trying everyone’s boards. Though none of us are where we’re supposed to be, it all seems to be sort of working out. Jack locks into a few solid crooked grinds across and down the rail. It’s on. Waiting in the far distance, Jack gets psyched for his next attempt, while Claravall and Uyeda await his arrival. Suddenly, a loud succession of noise erupts from nearby. “Pop, pop, pop, pop!” “Pop, pop, pop!” The children scream and disperse like cockroaches under a flashlight. “They’re shooting, they’re shooting!” yells LRG am, Rodrigo Petersen. It’s definitely gunshots. Everyone crouches to their lowest gravitational point. The once crowded park has emptied – people sent running in all directions. With the exception of a few stray park dwellers lying on their stomachs assuming the bullet-dodging position, the rest of us, the skaters, are the only ones left standing. “Grab the wax. I don’t want to forget it if they
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start shooting again,” says Claravall, calmly. “You want to keep skating?” somebody else asks. “As long as they stop, I’m cool with it,” says Jack. The general consensus is that if they start shooting again, it’s a wrap. But until then, there’s a job to be done. This was my introduction to the LRG team during their recent stay in New York City. For the past three weeks, the team has taken turns visiting the city in order to rack up footage for their upcoming and first-ever skate video. My old friend, videographer Anthony Claravall, is the man in charge of the much-anticipated flick. His job consists of planning the trip, filming shit and taking the team to skate spots in every borough of the city. “I’m from New York, so I always told myself, if I was ever going to make a video, I was gonna have stuff from New York in it,” explains Anthony. The Big Apple has forever been considered a skate Mecca – an endless landscape chock full of insanely good street spots. But while New York’s spots look crispy clean and smooth as hell on videos and in magazines, their seemingly nice appearance couldn’t be further from the truth. “The East Coast skaters are no joke because the terrain is pretty treacherous,” says LRG pro and San Francisco local Karl Watson. “Cracks in the ground, bad weather and crowds of people all make spots really hard to skate.” Thanks to New York’s notoriously rugged landscape, nailing a trick at a spot usually earns one bragging rights all round. “New York’s just harder to skate. It’s mad old and the weather tears up a lot of spots, so it’s just rougher and grimier and more hectic all the time,” says Jack Curtin, more accustomed to DC terrain.
Brian
Uyeda
When watching any skate video, it’s easy to lose sight of what goes into the process that culminates in a polished, shrink-wrapped DVD. For starters, acquiring two minutes of usable footage for any rider will take at least a year-and-a-goddamnedhalf to film. “For one trick it takes a lot,” Watson laughs. “Sometimes we have to go back like four or five times just to get that one clip. And that’s only a few seconds. So we work real hard for our parts.” Throw in injuries, footage obligations to other sponsors and getting creative at places where shit’s already been done ten times over, and you got yourself a long road of work lined up. The truth is, the entire process is gnarly as fuck. “There’s a lot of problems in every city you go to film in, but really the most difficult part is basically getting people psyched,” says Claravall. “This means taking them out of their element, taking them on a trip so they don’t have to worry about picking up the kids at a certain time from day-care or being home ’cause wifey’s freaking out. Eliminate that stuff and get them someplace where there’s shit to skate.” Amongst the LRG team, there were no illusions as to what the city has to offer skate-wise. “That’s just street skating, man, that’s the whole challenge. It’s not like a perfect setting in a skate park,” says Curtin. “It’s on the streets and you gotta try to make shit happen.” All in all, the dudes came and went, did their thing and bounced. It’s all business for the LRG crew as they continue to dodge stray buckshots, pedestrians, vices and god knows what else on their ongoing pursuit for footage www.l-r-g.com
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“The streets of London are crawling with canines – carnivorous outlaws devouring toddlers left and right”. The tabloid headlines can shout what they like but, unethical treatment and bad breeding aside, man’s best friend is still just that – an agile companion who lusts after sticks. Photography
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Josh
Cole
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Dmolish
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Wildman
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Snoop, a two-year-old Staffordshire Bull Terrier, was going to be put down before his owner rescued him.
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Brandy is a four-year-old Pit Bull and breeding dog. Pups can fetch up to ÂŁ1,000, depending on their bloodline.
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Bruiser’s mum was a fighting dog but he’s a family dog. Now three years old, Bruiser holds a certificate that traces his bloodline back to Pat Patrick, an infamous American fighting-dog breeder.
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Luther is a prize-winning Pit Bull. His bloodline traces back to a Northern-Irish gang with a well-known penchant for belligerent canines.
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Riley is a chocolate Pit Bull crossbreed. At the comparatively old age of four, he’s not a fighter, but a lover.
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Stacy Peralta
On the movie they didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want you to see.
Groove Armada
Bringing festival love to London town.
Plus:
â&#x20AC;Ś A sombre ode to the end-of-season blues.
Life Cycle, Jeff Soto.
Back Pages The
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Stacy Peralta Dogtown legendthe film they lifts the lid on u to see. didn’t want yo It seemed so obvious to me, a slam-dunk, a downright compelling true-life American story. The story of how the Crips and Bloods – two of the world's most 'iconic' gangs – have been allowed to wage a virtual war within one of the richest cities in the world for four decades, a war that has taken over 15,000 lives in that time. Yet I couldn't find a studio or production company interested in financing my documentary. I went door to door, pitching my project to all of the 'right' people in Hollywood. They all said it was a great idea and needed to be done – but no one would write a cheque. This went on for nearly a year until I finally met a man who showed a glimmer of interest. His name was Baron Davis, an NBA All Star point guard currently playing for the Los Angeles Clippers. Baron grew up in South LA and, with first-hand experience of the everyday violence that accompanies life there, he wanted to do something to help heal his community. After weeks of talking he agreed to put up fifty per cent of the budget. Now all I needed to do was find the other half. I thought that would be a piece of cake. It wasn't.
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So I began wondering what I could say in my pitch to get people interested and came up with a question: "If affluent white teenagers in Beverly Hills were forming neighbourhood gangs, arming themselves with automatic assault rifles and killing other affluent white teenagers living in upscale neighbourhoods who were also armed with AK 47s, what would the response of our society be?" I posed this question to a Silicon Valley businessman named Steve Luczo. He thought for a moment and then answered: "Affluent white kids would never be allowed to gang-bang as our society would do whatever was necessary to make sure a problem of this magnitude was stopped immediately." So with Baron Davis and Steve Luczo in place as co-financiers I got to make my documentary film, Crips and Bloods, Made in America. Through the film I met with gang members of all ages, Bloods and Crips, from different neighbourhoods throughout the affected region. It was so troubling to me to see how confused these young men are. They know that life is different fifteen minutes in either direction
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from where they live but they don't know why. They don't understand why things are so bad where they live and they don't understand why no one from the outside seems to care. They don't understand why there are so few job opportunities in their community and why so many of their fathers, uncles and friends are serving time in the penitentiary. The more time I spent with them in their community, the more I began to see a far different America than the America I was raised in. It's not just that most of these young men come from broken homes, it's that they are born into non-homes of unwed teenage girls who were also born to unwed teenage girls. Ask them and they will tell you they have never sat down at a dinner table with a mother and father present. These young men attend public schools at the very bottom of the American educational food chain, less learning centres than glorified day care centres. They grow up seeing dead bodies in their neighbourhood streets and hearing helicopters flying overhead day and night. The sound of gunfire is as common as birds chirping. Most cannot
venture out of their own neighbourhoods for fear of being gunned down. These young men live in conditions that most of us would consider un-American with no trace of the American Dream. Through the process of making this film, I realised that if we are ever going to break this cycle of violence, we need to find a way to look at these young men with a compassionate frame of mind. We need to understand that conditions in these communities are only perpetuating the problem. And if those same conditions were suddenly found in affluent white communities, perhaps we’d look at this problem differently. My film premiered to standing ovations at the Sundance Film Festival and is now playing in selected theatres across the country. It is my very deep hope that the film will help motivate a much-needed dialogue on this subject, a subject that affects not just the African American community of South LA, but ethnic minorities in cities across this nation and indeed across the world. Stacy Peralta A version of this column appeared on The Huffington Post. www.cripsandbloodsmovie.com
IF YOU DIG CRIPS AND BLOODS, MADE IN AMERICA CHECK OUT: GARAPA (2009) traile
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Director: José Padilha Revealing the full effect that extensive malnutrition is having on Brazilian communities, José Padilha’s new doc focuses on three families living in different areas, but all facing the same problem. Watching his subjects struggle to survive on local sugar-cane solution known as ‘garapa’, Padilha becomes deeply affected by what he witnesses, making for a deeply poignant film.
OUTRAGE (2009) tr
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Director: Kirby Dick This suitably titled new offering from controversial documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick exposes allegedly closeted U.S. politicians who hypocritically promote antigay legislation, and actively campaign against the very community to which they supposedly belong. The film, which also features interviews with openly gay politicians, caused quite a stir when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, and is due for UK release in August.
POLYTECHNIQUE (2009) Director: Denis Villeneuve On December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into a Montreal university, opened fire on students claiming he was “fighting feminism” and ended up killing fourteen women. This Canadian film is shot through the eyes of two students who witnessed Lépine murder their classmates before turning the gun on himself. An intense, yet strangely beautiful film, that has been well received at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Stacy Peralta.
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Jeff Soto in London. Photo: Paul Willoughby.
If you dig Jeff Soto check out… Andy Kehoe Living In Twilight Jonathan LeVine Gallery, NY
Artist Jeff Soto goes all Camus for his London show.
May 16 – June 13 For more make-believe creatures and far-off lands, Kehoe’s your man. The Portlandbased artist seems struck down with that Peter Pan bug, only his nostalgia for the past comes through as meticulously rendered odes to folktale and fantasy. With LeVine behind him, this show – his first time
“I started thinking about how I live my life, about my parents, my grandparents, and how we’re all going to die.” Jeff Soto is contemplating life. It’s what happens when you become a dad, right? You think about things – your past, their future, the whole circle of life – and if you’re talented like Soto, those existential thoughts become incredible works of art. Two months after the birth of his second daughter, the Californian artist has found himself facing a trio of firsts: first time in London, for his first international solo show, painting a street piece for the first time in ten years. His show – The Inland Empire – has gone down a right royal storm and, judging by the little red dots on almost every piece, pretty much everything has sold. So c’mon, Jeff – why so morbid? “Bringing a kid into the world, at least for me, was pretty serious stuff,” says the thirty-nineyear-old, taking a break from the giant wall he’s working on. “And when we had our first daughter, I started thinking about the way we lived our lives as a family, about the world, the future, environmental issues and the wars that were going on – kinda like all the horrible shit that was happening on the planet. I think that’s when my work started to get a little darker.” A stalwart of the
underground American art scene, Soto has seen his work thrown into a multitude of boxes: ‘lowbrow’, ‘pop surrealism’, and the all-too-familiar, mediafriendly ‘urban art’. But, as an illustrator-turned-artist who grew up tagging drainage ditches as a suburban teen, where does Soto feel he fits in? “Aesthetically I understand urban art and what’s going through these guys’ heads when they’re painting illegally, because I did that for so long,” he says. “But I also understand pop surrealism, because that’s coming from an illustration background. Everyone tries to categorise everything – that’s what we do as humans, we put things into categories. I tend to want to call it contemporary art, because sometimes I’m caught in the middle and don’t know where I belong.” If there’s one place Jeff is sure he does belong, it’s Riverside, California – a low-income area east of Los Angeles, also known as the Inland Empire. “It’s kind of a weird place,” says Soto, “a lot of poor people, very conservative people, lots of gangs and drugs – but it’s also not that bad of a place. Why do I still live there? I don’t know. It’s my roots.” If the paintings here today are anything to go by, Soto’s existential moment was something of a blessing. Toted
as a “politically charged” show, The Inland Empire seems caught somewhere between despair and hope. There are Soto’s signature creatures – sci-fi critters with puppy-cute eyes – but there’s also war, pollution and our self-inflicted economic mess. “Everything comes back to where you live,” explains Jeff, “and right now my area is being hit hard by the recession. But it’s also about nostalgia from when I was little. I used to think things were so simple when I grew up, but then there was the Vietnam War, the recession in the nineties… every generation has the terrible things they remember. So I started thinking about this crazy life cycle thing – we’re cute little babies, we grow up into bratty teenagers, we go on to have kids and then we die and our kids take over from where we left off and it never ends.” Heavy stuff, Soto – so can we walk away from this with any hope? “It’s bittersweet, I guess, but of course there’s hope,” he says. “Every generation has their great point in time – something important that’s happening. And right now, I can’t leave London without buying my daughter a Peppa Pig doll. She’s crazy about that pig!”Andrea Kurland
going solo in New York – is set to be something of a big deal. www.jonathanlevinegallery.com
Stella Im Hultberg Memento Mori Thinkspace Gallery, LA July 10 – August 7 Bringing a splash of grace to the narrative table, Stella Im Hultberg is what happened when expressionism met feminism and decided to get it on. Think Egon Schiele reincarnated as a woman with an ink brush in hand. Throw in the eroticism of Gustav Klimt and the feline touch of Audrey Kawasaki, and you’re almost there. Confused? See Memento Mori, and all will become clear. www.stellaimhultberg.com
Wagner Pinto Floating Concrete Hermit, London June 4 – July 4 Taking pop surrealism back to Basquiat’s day, Wagner Pinto takes all the colour and chaos of his Brazilian roots and conjures up the kind of psychedelic trip that makes Hunter S. Thompson look straight edge. Expect something a whole lot more abstract than his lowbrow brothers’ narrative form – a street-savvy Picasso, one might say. www.concretehermit.com
www.jeffsoto.com
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If you dig Lovebox check out… B’estFest Bucharest, Romania July 1 - 5 Music heads east with B’estFest taking over the Romexpo grounds in Romania’s capital, giving you music from the likes of The Killers, Moby and Orbital and a proper bed to sleep on. www.bestfest.ro
ada bring y. rm A e v o ro G the gritty cit to rm a h c l a v festi
Sónar
Barcelona, Spain June 18 – 20 A blend of music and multimedia in the heart of Barcelona, Sonar offers cuttingedge digital art, music and technology spread across various day and night venues. www.sonar.es
As the year approaches the summer equinox, it’s becoming increasingly clear the festival season is well and truly here. Once synonymous with swigging cider (or less legal intoxicants) in muddy fields, the outdoor music experience has invaded the urban jungle in recent years. And despite being nowhere near a field of cows, London’s own Lovebox has managed to retain a charm of its own. The two-day festival was started eight years ago by the dance duo Andy Cato and Tom Findlay, more commonly known as Groove Armada. According to Findlay it began as just “us in the park with a few DJs” but the first Lovebox (which took its name from an early Groove Armada album) on Clapham Common in South London sold out in just twenty-four hours. “We were trying to bring the real festival spirit of something like Glastonbury to the city we loved,” says Findlay. “Without Lovebox, I don't think London has a great festival, really.”
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Since this humble beginning, the event has relocated to Victoria Park in the heart of London’s East End, and adopted it as its spiritual home. Unlike other genre-specific festivals, Lovebox has become renowned for its eclectic mix of music. Across eight different stages, revellers this year will be able to see anything from Duran Duran to N.E.R.D., Doves to Simian Mobile Disco, Ladyhawke to the Trans-Siberian Marching Band – and of course Groove Armada themselves headlining the main stage. But it’s not just about the music. Lovebox also boasts fairground rides, magicians, organic food stalls, clothing boutiques and even ten-pin bowling. With this combination, expect to see indie kids rubbing shoulders with yummy mummies and pushchairs; hardcore clubbers next to hippie types – all (hopefully) enjoying the London sunshine. “We're trying to reflect all the best sides of London,” says Findlay. “We don't have the
mega budgets of our rivals, so I like to think we care a lot about the spirit of the event. All the arenas look amazing, the line-ups are totally on the edge, and we have great punters too! Initially it was just a laugh. But then, without wanting to get too worthy here, you start feeling a responsibility to the people that work there, to the punters that come and to the whole legacy of the event.” As well as just finishing their as-yet-untitled new album, Groove Armada have recently teamed up with DC to produce two limited-edition shoes for the summer. “They've been really supportive of us over the years, and we've done some good parties together, so it seemed like a bit of a no-brainer,” says Findlay. “On the design front, it was more of an, ‘I like this, I don't like that’ vibe, but we love the results.” Ed Andrews
Main Square Festival Arras, France July 2 – 5 Now running into its fifth year, this festival not only has Kanye West, Lily Allen and Coldplay playing, it also boasts some eco credentials too with recycling, waste separation and biodegradable cups for your booze! www.mainsquarefestival.fr
End of the Road Festival Larmer Tree Gardens, UK September 11 – 13 Set in the beautiful surroundings of a Victorian pleasure gardens, this festival may not pull in the massive headliners (last year Bon Iver and Conor Oberst headlined) but more than makes up for it with the super chilled atmosphere, great local food and a whole host of wonderful touches like the secret stage
Lovebox takes place in London on
in the woods and the wild
July 18 –19. For the chance to win a
peacocks roaming the festival
pair of Lovebox tickets and limited-
grounds.
edition DC Groove Armada shoes,
www.endoftheroadfestival.com
visit www.huckmagazine.com.
From left to right: Tom Findlay and Andy Cato.
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la roux La Roux Polydor There’s been much debate in Britain about which of the many pop strumpets who were thrown the massive albatross of being touted for glory at the beginning of the year would come good. Helped along by a Skream dubstep mix, which gave her priceless underground credibility, La Roux’s second single, ‘In For The Kill’, hit hard in April/ May. The original of the track leads her debut album, and is the best song on there, but Elly Jackson and her production partner Ben Langmaid (La Roux is a duo) never stray too far from pop gold. He brings a boffin’s knowledge of eighties electronic music to the table which she completes with lyrics and vocals that are sensationally sensitive, sometimes fierce and nearly always concerning adolescent love and self-preservation. This album is hardly era-defining, but it still neatly destroys the competition. Phil Hebblethwaite
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kid congo & the Pink monkey Birds
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Dracula Boots In The Red With fanspastic recent releases from The Hunches, Vivian Girls and The Strange Boys, L.A.’s In The Red Records are on fire at the moment. All those bands, though, should bow down before Kid Congo Powers, former member of three of the greatest rock'n'roll groups ever: The Cramps, Gun Club and Bad Seeds. Here the guitar 'stylist' and his Pink Monkey Birds get down with power for a second time.This is dirty-ass, rumbling voodoo funk of the most primal order. PH
toddla t Skanky Skanky 1965 Every Toddla T single so far has boomed and all the best productions on the last Roots Manuva album were his. No shock, then, that he's turned in a jaffa of a debut that fits tight through the round and bouncy window. With a nod to his hometown of Sheffield, he simply calls it electronic music, but there's real bashment/dancehall flavour here that comes from his love of Jamaican vocals. Properly buff. PH
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amanda Blank
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I Love You Downtown Filthy-mouthed rapper Amanda Blank made a name for herself as a Spank Rock associate with a decent flow. Here she steps into the spotlight as a solo artist with surprising and mixed results. Helped along by productions from Diplo, Switch and Spank’s man XXXChange, it’s more pop than hip hop, but do we really need another hipster female MC trying to steal Peaches’ grotty thunder? Why not? At least Amanda Blank is funny. PH
dJ vadim U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun BBE After making a full recovery from cancer of the eye, Vadim has built on his experiences to bring a record that goes on an incredible, eclectic journey that just can’t help but ooze optimism. Fusing the sounds of soul, reggae and hip hop, U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun brings an unmistakably positive vibe. And if there were any justice in the world, stand-out track ‘Hidden Treasure’ would be the feel-good hit of the summer. Ed Andrews
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Looking For Eric Director: Ken Loach Legendary British director Ken Loach may be better known as a firebrand social crusader than a warm and cuddly comic, but both elements of his personality are on display in the bizarre and brilliant Looking For Eric. Steve Evets is a fragile revelation as Eric Bishop, a Mancunian postie coming unmoored from the world. As his teenage stepsons sink further into Manchester’s gangland subculture, Eric is offered succour by the unlikely figure of Eric Cantona (playing himself), who appears as a kind of guardian angel to guide Bishop through the hard times. Loach treads deftly between whimsy and political commentary to create a genuinely heartwarming oddity that everyone can love, but will put goosebumps on the flesh of football fans in particular. Matt Bochenski
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Director: Anders Østergaard The cliché that something hasn’t really happened unless it’s on YouTube is leant some profundity by this inspiring, and occasionally horrifying, documentary. In September 2007, as Burmese monks marched barefoot into the guns of an oppressive military regime, the bravery of a small band of reporters forced the world to sit up and take notice. With foreigners banned from the country, journalists from the Democratic Voice of Burma took to the streets armed with video cameras, risking their lives to record history in the making before smuggling the footage out of the country and onto the Internet. An inspiring, if tragic, call to arms. MB
Moon Director: Duncan Jones British directors make the best sci-fi films. Nic Roeg and The Man Who Fell To Earth. Ridley Scott and Alien. Danny Boyle and Sunshine. And if Duncan Jones hasn’t quite earned his place on that list just yet, his feature debut, Moon, suggests that it won’t be long before he does. Starring Sam Rockwell as a miner whose three-year lunar contract is nearing its end, this is a subtle and intriguing examination of what it means to be human. Channelling many of the genre’s past masters, Jones gets the nitty-gritty details spot on, even if the big twist leaves the drama a little inert. MB
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Soul Power
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Director: Jeffrey Levy-Hinte Everybody knows about the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, the celebrated fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman staged in Zaire in 1974. Less well known is that for three days before the event, the biggest R’n’B stars of the age – including James Brown, Celia Cruz and BB King – performed a twelve-hour concert that would pass into the realms of myth and legend. The footage of that concert, shot by such luminaries as Albert Maysles, is finally unleashed for the first time in thirty-five years in Soul Power. Fully upgraded to HD glory, it’s a stirring behind-the-scenes glimpse at a truly one-off occasion, one which had a powerful impact on performers and audience alike. MB
Subway Art 25th Anniversary Edition Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant Thames & Hudson I know what you’re thinking: not another book on graffiti, right? Only this isn’t so much another book as the same book pimped-up twice the size. And that’s no bad thing. Veteran snappers Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant brought out the first edition in 1984, having spent years knee-deep in NYC, breaking into yards alongside kids who snuck in as nobodies and came out pioneers. What they ended up capturing was the birth of a scene that would eek its way into every crevice of street culture. And besides – if it weren’t for these kids, Banksy would just be another geek with a silver tooth. So let them have their book, super-sized and all. Andrea Kurland
Made for Skate Jürgen Blümlein, Daniel Schmid and Dirk Vogel Gingko Press ‘Fascinating’ is the best way to describe this illustrated history of skateboarding footwear. But this isn’t just for sneakerheads. Complete with a limited-edition cover from Element, the book takes you from when kids rode barefoot on planks of wood strapped to roller-skates through to million-dollar endorsements, putting skateboarding into context and showing just how far it’s come. But let’s not forget the shoes, all those awesome shoes: the Dunks, the Half Cabs, the All Stars. Open up a page and you’ll find a pair of kicks you rocked all those years ago, and you can’t help but smile as the memories come flooding back. Ed Andrews
Thread Patrick Trefz powerHouse Books Forget your slash-and-burn cocktails of glossy money shots and centre-fold surf porn. Long-time Surfer Magazine staff photographer Patrick Trefz delivers a deeper, subtler art of persuasion with this photo book. Shot over two years from the distant standpoints of back roads, sidewalks, train tracks and cliff tops, his soulful images focus on the surfer’s search and journey to the beach. The 128-page book is a photographic accompaniment to Trefz’s hypnotic 16mm film, which wove together five surfers’ exploits from the shores of the Basque Country to West Africa, Pipeline and NYC. It includes an essay by Christian Beamish and a foreword from subculture photographer Ari Marcopoulos, who has shot everyone from Jean-Michel Basquiat to snowboard legend Craig Kelly. Tors Arnold
Breath Tim Winton Macmillan This coming-of-age tale, set in Western Australia, sees Winton back on familiar ground. The story follows Pikelet, an innocent lad growing up in a rural backwater who befriends a local ruffian. Their hearts in turn are captured by a bohemian surfer, who pushes them to tackle bigger challenges along their journey through life. While the darker tones of a weird, first-time sexual experience leave a strange after-taste, Winton redeems himself by depicting one teenager’s soulful introduction to surfing with a wistful beauty. A simple story effortlessly told, and a deeply satisfying snapshot of growing up near the surf. Steph Pomphrey
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When you’ve been all the way to the edge it’s not always easy to come back ‘One of the best novels about surfing’ Surfers Path ‘A love letter to the sea and a moving coming-of-age story…Rapturous’ Sunday Telegraph ‘If you read one book this summer make it Breath’ Mariella Frostrup
Breath. The brilliant new novel by Booker Prize shortlisted Tim Winton.
At last in paperback. Available from
Read a chapter at picador.com View the trailer at www.vimeo.com/picador
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It’s late March, and it’s happening again. It’s melting. We sit outside a snack bar in Les Arcs 1800 where a thick fog has descended, adding to the melancholy that smothers this 1970s concrete plaza as the locals mourn the passing of another winter. The waitress moodily discards our food on the table, tired of serving another ignorant, stammering Englishman, unable to converse, merely beg in a cretinous accent. The seasons are changing and the inevitable thaw is setting in once more. The slushy snow appears sepia through my goggle lens, tobacco stained – dying. Shop windows are swamped with hand-scrawled signs offering desperate price cuts on goods that will be worthless in a few months. We gnaw on stale baguettes filled with tepid hotdogs, the vinegary ketchup stinging against our chapped lips. A family of newbie skiers scoff chips on the next table with equal dissatisfaction; dressed for the Arctic, they got the seaside – wet and miserable. This isn’t the dream, surely? In October, I was watching videos of sunshine skies, deep powder and pillow lines. Somewhere along the way, that has all been missed. Once again, I’d forgotten that this happens. But with the day’s lift pass weighing heavily in our pockets,
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we head back to the lift once more. We’ll fight our way through the fog while we still can. For every run is precious, isn’t it? But as we ascend, the wind picks up and brings with it a shifting in the cloud. A faint glow appears through the whiteout – visibility, a distant memory, but now a welcome gift. We must get up higher. We skate off the lift, barely stopping to do up our bindings as we chase the glow. Past the crowds of punters wobbling, side-slipping and snowploughing into the haze, we navigate our way along the poles at the side of the piste, following the signs to find the next lift. We repeat this several times but with each chair, a crisper shadow is cast on the snow below. Hope springs eternal. We reach the gondola that will take us up to the summit of the Aiguille Rouge and pen ourselves in with the other animals. The metal box creaks and strains as it drags us out of the mist, and into a whole new world. White jagged peaks, sitting like islands in the sea of grey cloud that festers in the valleys. Mont Blanc, the Grand Motte, mighty behemoths of rock dwarfed by the infinity of the brilliant blue sky above. Stunning. All it took was this vision to once again cross that anorexic space between love and hate. Ed Andrews