#22
Issue #22 R.R.P $14 USD
R.R.P $20 AUD / NZD
THE WARUNG OF KNOWLEDGE STEVE PENDARVIS + JACK COLEMAN LA UNDERGROUND + EVO REVO + E6 GRAINY DAYS JIM DRIVER + JUNJI KUMANO + JOE HODNICKI
The Warung of Knowledge
Where Boards Aren’t Shaped, They’re Born Story by Nathan Myers Photos by D.Hump
MAIN >> Tyler Warren with Jason “Salsa” Salsbury, looking over the “Bat-Tail Bar of Soap” as it comes to life in the Temple’s shaping bay.
Spin the wheel, ride the board. That’s the rule down on the black sands of Canggu, Bali, where the men of Deus ex Machina are celebrating their anniversary with a loosely unserious surf competition. There are fifteen boards on the wheel. Revolution era Trackers. MiniSimmons models. Modernized quads. MR Twinnies. All sorts. They’ve got names like “Lil’ Buddy,” “The Jewel,” and “Bar of Soap,” and they got color, art, pin-striping, and tinting like a candy shop on magic mushrooms. Each time someone spins the wheel, the surfers all hover around to see what happens next. What fiberglass fortune awaits them in the lineup? They cheer and hoot, like horny bachelors lining up blind dates. Then they grab their partner and dash off to sea. What happens next? “What’s the point of all this?” I ask a man standing next to me. He’s wearing a Darth Vader helmet, drinking beer through a straw with a squeeze bottle of hot-sauce in his pocket. Perhaps not the best person to ask. “You just answered your own question,” Darth replies. I would disagree but he’s already gone. The surf is pumping. Dogs romping on the beach. Balinese women making offerings to the sea. White men boozing breakfast. The surfers grab whatever The wheel decides and disappear into the surging chaos. No one expected it to be this big today, but everyone’s up for the challenge. Pros and bros. Locals and imports. They’re all just surfers in Bali – this is what it’s all about. Over the loudspeaker, an announcer babbles something like coded
>>Raul Hernandez, in the tornado funnel.
messages. “Looks like T-Mars will be riding Salsa’s Phantom twin,” he says. “And there’s Bexon using Ano’s speedster that Pickle mowed. He’ll be fanging the ledge on that one.” I have no idea. I’ve wandered into some resin-crazed cult. All I can do is nod and smile. It’s 10 a.m. It’s blazing hot. Someone passes me a beer. I’d arrived earlier at the Deus shop with a broken Thruster. Early this morning I’d been pulling in to beachbreak closeouts somewhere up the coast. I’d been dreaming the water photographer with a crew of Aussie pros might bother to shoot me. Cover shots. Fame and glory. Why such delusion, I’m not really sure. Too much time alone. Too many surf magazines. Who knows? After one too many attempts, I collect the shards of my decimated fantasy from the sand and go looking for something else to ride. There are roosters in the sand. Clouds on the volcano. Rice fields listing to a tradewind lullabye as the sun begins its daily scorch. The Bali backroads cross and tangle like some fairytale forest. Just when I’m sure I’m lost, the Deus “Temple of Enthusiasm” looms out of the paddies like some prehistoric monolith. The sign reads: Restaurant. Bar. Motorcycles. Bicycles. Clothes. Art. Photography. Music. Surfboards. And yes, inside the towering rafters are all those things, incarnated like some warehouse of hipsterism. Stretch-neck tees and Brixton hats. A $500 duffel bag and shiny custom motorcycles that rev in your bellyguts. All this… but no people? “Are you guys open?” I ask a sole attendant. “Where is everyone?” “They’re all down at the beach,” he says. “Spinning the wheel.”
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, I ve wandered into some resin crazed cult. All ,I can do is , nod and smile. It s 10 a.m. It s blazing hot. Someone passes me a beer.
TOP INSET >> Salsa test-rides a Chris Garret “Mini Hull.” BOTTOM INSET >> Tyler, on his way to taking the top spot at the “Deus 9’ & Single Log Fest.” RIGHT TOP >> Big-bearded surfer/shaper Thomas “Doc” Bexon, sliding an east-side point and looking hood ornament status on his self-built log. RIGHT BOTTOM >> Ellis Ericson, looking period correct on a Tracker style board, crafted in his own hands.
After the contest, there is a party. At first, I’d thought the contest itself was the party, but hindsight would soon render me blind. Blurry. Unable to walk. In the open-air quad, there’s a blues band on stage playing loud and loose, like some low-fi Johnny Cash dipped in a bucket of Xavier Rudd. There are boards on the grass and people dancing all around them. Quads and logs. Fish and wood. Over in the corner I spot the remains of my discarded Thruster and I feel ashamed. A surfer without a board. Someone hands me a beer. A strong local micro-brew called Storm. I didn’t even realize there was a non-Bintang option. Times are changing in Bali. There’s a big open fire. Girls taking their tops off. And all these tales of heroic waves and epic wipeouts careening ’round in the broken air. Whatever. I’m just trying to find a surfboard. The guy with foam dust in his hair seems like a good start. “Do you make boards for Deus?” I ask. He hasn’t eaten in a week. “For Deus?” he says. “Well, yes, I mean, I make boards for people, and Deus sells them, and…well, yes, I do. I think.” “Sounds confusing,” I say. “But it’s actually just the opposite,” he says. “Trying to shape boards on my own was the confusing part. This is simple.” His name is Chris Garrett. People call him Phantom. The man has a tendency to disappear. Back on the Gold Coast, he’s something
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of a legend. Shaping a thousand custom boards a year. Completely self-taught. DIY, foam to fins. He takes zero notice of the “pro surfing” industry. Barely knows what it means that guys like Rasta, Parko, and Fanning order his boards. He doesn’t give them a bro rate. “I’m a bit asleep at the wheel sometimes,” he admits. “Maybe that’s part of my process.” Shaping boards is all he’s ever done. When he was young, he couldn’t explain his specific needs to other shapers so he just started doing it himself. After ten thousand boards, his designs are dictated by the wave and rider, rather than pros and ad dollars. It made him the idea man to set up the Deus shaping rooms. The party swirls around us. Gaining momentum. Losing control. Phantom is a fascinating and baffling man to talk to – both clueless and clued in, like any good mad scientist. I ask him how he ended up out here, and Garrett scratches his head for a moment. Unsure, perhaps. “One day my accountant asked me how much I liked shaping,” Garrett says. “I said, ‘It’s my favorite thing in the world. I’ll be doing it even after I’m retired.’ My accountant says, ‘That’s too bad, because you’d be making more money if you just stayed at home doing nothing.’” Garrett laughs at his story, but it’s also a bit disturbing. A bit coo-coo. Back in Oz, he shut down his factory, sold his house, and tried to live more simply. He began growing his own food. Making his own biodiesel. Shaping out of a tin shed behind his house. “There’s some pretty interesting ironies in the surf industry,” he says. “It’s as if the things we
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There are boards on the grass and people dancing all around them. Quads and logs. Fish and wood.
TOP INSET >> Tyler doesn’t just get dusty in the shaping bay, he gets dirty in the Deus glassing pit. BOTTOM INSET >> Thomas’ careful little “Spoon.” LEFT TOP >> “Soap Bar” trio, shaped at the Temple. Just add water. LEFT BOTTOM LEFT >> Ellis showcases one of his Tracker-inspired boards and a handmade 12½-inch fin. LEFT BOTTOM RIGHT >> Super modified Chris Garrett creation for his finless program.
value most are the ones that are worth the least. Surfboards are the one thing we actually need to go surfing, and most shapers can barely make a living. All the money is in t-shirts.” Yes, we treat our holy men like hobos. Our hobos like heroes. We follow the herd in the name of individuality. We talk too much. Whatever. Garrett’s t-shirt reads: “Ugly But Interesting.” After simplifying his life, Phantom’s tiny shaping operation showed its first humble profit in years. “I’ve always thought of shaping as removing everything from the blank that shouldn’t be there,” he says. “It was almost like I had to do the same thing to everything else in my life.” Deus invited Garrett to come to Bali and make boards there permanently. He’d never worked for anyone else in his entire life. Making boards was all he’d ever done. But the idea of further simplifying his life – not to mention the waves – appealed to him. The Phantom disappeared again. “The Balinese are really inspiring people to work with,” he says. “They’re very creative and crafty, but their values are all about family and free time. For them, everything is seen on a spiritual level. Everything is connected to the gods. Imagine if our surfing was on that level.” The party is still evolving. Spinning out of control perhaps, but in the good way. The bluesman’s howling a sonic wormhole of vibration into a didgeridoo. People are pounding drums while an Indonesian girl sings black magic lullabies. There’s a projector painting old movies on the wall; guys riding singlefins at big barreling Indo waves. Everyone hoots when they come spitting out as if they know the riders personally. I must be a
bit drunk, because I don’t remember dudes getting this barreled back in those old movies. “Which film is this?” I ask a skinny shirtless kid beside me. “It’s not Morning of the Earth, is it?” “It’s not really a movie, just yet,” the kid says. “Just some of my recent footage.” “This is recent?” The film is grainy. The boards are classics. I’m feeling dizzy. Something I drank, perhaps. The kid’s got Kurt Cobain hair and a rainbow tattoo around his nipple. “Yeah, this is all last week in Lombok,” he says. “We’re putting it into the movie this week.” The kid is Jimmy James Kinniard, a young Aussie filmmaker who recently relocated to Bali. Jimmy explains how he’d been hanging around the Deus compound when all this just started taking shape around him. The boards. The motorcycle trips. He just started filming it. Dustin road trips and re-imagined surfboards re-discovering the future. Wormholes. Rabbit holes. Tuberiding. It’s like some alternate reality. The boards are basically retro, but, under the feet of modern surfers pushing themselves into modern waves, they take on a new meaning. A young Australian surfer-turned-shaper named Ellis Ericson – following in his father’s shaping footsteps – keeps re-tinkering the designs, trying to find the perfect balance. He’s aware of the history, but he’s focused on progression. Going backwards to move forwards – a classic surfing maneuver.
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We treat our holy men like hobos. Our hobos like heroes. We follow the herd in the name of individuality.
TOP INSET >> Salsa gave the “Mini Hull” his stamp of approval. BOTTOM INSET >> Spoon face. MAIN >> Salsa, serious bottom-turn rail grab to deal with Indo power on an Ericson single.
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This place was more than a showroom or a motorcycle garage or a restaurant...it was a volcano of creative inspiration.
TOP INSET >> Tyler guides a direct Lombok line. BOTTOM INSET >> Colors of the Deus surf rack. MAIN >> Matt “Cuddles” Cuddihy, part of the Deus extended family, pilot study on a fresh Thomas log.
Jimmy filmed everything. The shaping. The surfing. Dusty roads. Foam and resin. Blood and beer. Some strange summer of love with a bygone moment in surf history. Next he’ll cut a live soundtrack in the photo studio set out to tour the film. “Tracking,” it’s called. “That’s kinda how things go around here,” says Jimmy. “You get an idea and suddenly everyone’s jumping in making it happen. It’s not just boards or motorcycles or film…it’s everything all at once. It’s just creativity. Doesn’t matter what it is.” The lights are spinning now. Flickering. A solitary dancer still snaking his way to the dij and drums, which will surely last til sunrise. Jimmy James stares up at the footage on the wall. Eyes glazed over. My own eyes are barely open. Bleeding in their sockets. Flickering visions of military tri-fins rolling off an assembly line. Boardshort soldiers marching off the cliffs of Uluwatu. Fade to black. In the morning, the floors aren’t even sticky. No sign of the previous night’s strange ceremony. And I still don’t have a surfboard. But first, I need coffee. Don’t ask me where I slept. Don’t ask about the pounding in my head. Just get me some damn caffeine. I wander into the showroom with espresso foam on my lips. The rafters are two stories high, like a pagan surf cathedral. Pop art and custom bikes. An art gallery and hand-carved skateboards. Surfboards lined up from 4-foot to 10-foot. Tints shimmering in the light. Drool stains on the floor. I can’t even remember what my thruster looked like anymore.
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“You looking for a board?” The big, bearded guy standing behind me, I’ve seen him before. He was at the beach and at the party, half in the background and somehow related to everything. This is Dustin Humphrey. A year or two ago, Humphrey was the most vital photographer in surfing. Then suddenly he just gone. Selling motorcycles in a rice paddy, apparently. No one really understood what he meant until he wandered into the Temple of Enthusiasm. From the photo studio to the shaping bays, the layout was playground of Dustin’s passions. His ultimate clubhouse, built for all his friends to bring their visions to reality. This place was more than a showroom or a motorcycle garage or a restaurant…it was a volcano of creative inspiration. “Yeah, I’m looking for a board,” I say. “A friend once told me that the best times in his life were always when he had good boards,” says Humphrey. “That feels about right to me, too. You gotta have boards you’re in love with.” “I broke my thruster yesterday and it was almost like I was happy it was gone,” I say. “I’ve fallen out of love.” Many of the photos on the walls are D.Hump classics. Outtakes from Sprout, Sipping Jetstreams and all those years of endless travel. But the images are mostly abstract oddities, too. Personal favorites, rather than the cover-shot money makers.
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,,
I broke my thruster yesterday and it was almost like ,I was happy it was gone. I ve fallen out ,, of love.
TOP INSET >> Jai Lee, riding the “Jai Lee Model,” a noserider supreme born in the Deus shaping bay via Doc Bexon. BOTTOM INSET >> Cuddles, maintaining in Indo. MAIN >> Ellis, timeless tube, where he and surfing have been. Screen grab from Jimmy James’ Tracking movie.
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The shapers shut the doors. They try to create boards in a vacuum of creative privacy, but it never works out.
TOP INSET >> Ellis gets involved in the whole board-building process. BOTTOM INSET >> Down low and go go go! Ellis. LEFT TOP >> Ellis threads it at Deserts, leashless, on a singlefin. RIGHT BOTTOM >> Salsa, pulling a “Soap Bar” through a lesson in drawn-out roundies.
He spent a lot of years shooting high-performance surfing, he explains, but the guys he really loved to shoot were the experimental guys: Rasta. Ozzy. Malloy. “I think doing all the Sprout trips with Thomas Campbell had a big impact on how I think about surfboards,” he says. “The boards in that film all had stories behind them. They meant something. I don’t know why that matters, but it does.” “Come on,” he says. “Let me show you something.” Dustin’s definition of a Deus board is that it’s created entirely, start to finish, here at The Temple of Enthusiasm. He leads me back to the shaping bays and shows me how it all goes down, from blank to tint, they do it all on-site. A Deus shaper like Phantom or maybe Australian longboarder Thomas Bexon or Californian artist/shaper Tyler Warren will come out to Bali for a couple months and develop some boards. Commissioned artists. They’ll do their own fins. Their own resin tints. Their own art elements. For a while there was a fine artist doing local Batik-style clothes, so they were glassing those into the decks. One night Ozzy Wright came through and scratched art into some decks. Every board has a unique origin story. The shapers shut the doors. They try to create boards in a vacuum of creative privacy, but it never works out. The Temple is pulsing with activity. Pros and tourist come back to check the work. Artists pop in and offer ideas. Halfway through a shape he’ll step out for a taco and end up with a tattoo. A band is playing. A fashion shoot is going on. Stuff just happens here. That’s why the boards have to be created here in the Temple. That’s what makes them unique and gives them their story. “You don’t make surfboards to make money,” says Dustin. “We build boards here because that’s what we love doing. Check this out.”
He produces a working replica of George Greenough’s “Velo” kneeboard, made legendary in the late-’60s Crystal Voyager and Innermost Limits of Pure Fun films. “We were just sitting around talking about those boards the other day, and ten minutes later we’re back in the shaping bay working on them.” It’s an amazing piece of art, but with the US$2,000 price tag, I gotta ask: “Is this meant to be ridden, or hung on the wall.” “That’s up to whoever buys it,” says Dustin. “Hopefully a bit of both.” Down on the beach, the sushi chef has a board shaped like a coffin lid. Jet black. Single fin. R.I.P. Made it himself, caught up in the excitement. “How’s it ride?” I ask. “Well, you know,” he says, “it’s a coffin lid. What do you expect?” “Can I try it?” “Of course.” It’s late afternoon. The thrusters are heading home, grumbling about the tide and the crowd, but the coffin lid is heading out for seconds. It actually prefers sucky conditions. Grumpy crowds. Hangovers. It’s a coffin lid – what do you expect. Phantom shows up with a green finless thing he’s been developing for Salsa. Total UFO, with six channels, foam wings along the rails, and all sorts of cosmic chemistry quantified into the foam.
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The craziest, rainbowest , collection of foam funk, I ve ever seen, and everyone s excited to put it in the water. But first a pre surf beer.
TOP INSET >> Matt, styling high on a back-lit curl. BOTTOM INSET >> Ellis, with carefree singlefin flare. MAIN >> Tyler, riding his own shape beneath the Indo sun.
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Go for a paddle. Cop some slide. Nothing too serious. Why would it be serious? When did surfing get so serious, anyway?
TOP INSET >> Ellis and Salsa, “Summer of Love” meets modern day. BOTTOM INSET >> Deus tint drip. RIGHT TOP >> Matt, ridiculous commitment, using all 9’5” of fulcrum. RIGHT BOTTOM >> Salsa angles “Big Red” within the cave.
“Wow,” I say. “Have you been doing some finless research?” “This is my first,” says Garrett. “I never really research anything. I just dream it up and make it.” “Can I try it?”
The Thruster, god bless it, is indeed the ultimate performance board. But when did surfing become a “performance.” At some point in life, you realize the chicks on the beach aren’t actually watching your rides. They don’t care about your air-reverse. And the dudes in the water just don’t want you in their way (or there at all). And the photographer, if you didn’t come there with him, you’re not leaving with him either. So, if you’re performing, it’s only for yourself.
“Sure,” he says. Humphrey arrives with a 9-footer. The bluesman has a short, yellow Tracker and Jimmy James has a too-short MR Stinger creation splattered blood-red and dirt-black. More crew. More boards. The craziest, rainbowest collection of foam-funk I’ve ever seen, and everyone’s excited to put it in the water. But first a pre-surf beer, which they claim makes the boards go faster. And then maybe we’ll spin the wheel and figure out what to ride. “Can we spin the wheel?” I ask. “I wanna spin?” Dustin scratches his head. “I think we burned the wheel last night.” This is the Warung of Knowledge, a local beach hut that the Deus gang unofficially claimed as their own. The back room is piled with foam creations. Each one with a story embedded in the foam. A row of Deus bikes is parked out front. The crew gather each morning and afternoon to check the surf. Go for a paddle. Cop some slide. Nothing too serious. Why would it be serious? When did surfing get so serious, anyway? There’s a question for the history books.
Maybe I’m just hungover…but I’m starting to think about boards in a different way. Maybe it’s just that the waves are a bit sloppy right now. But maybe boards are better when you just love them for what they are. A coffin lid and a UFO. A cruise missile and a soul funnel. Ugly but interesting. Shaping is not about boards. It’s about people. So what should I ride? I’ve just borrowed two boards and there are more on the way. You should try this. No, check this thing out. It goes so fast. Enthusiasm. Maybe too much. But the waves just keep coming. Every day, something different. The story continues. Surfboards are not inanimate objects. They carry the memory of every wave, the dents and dings of every rider. I’m going to order something soon…but the decision isn’t 6’1” or 6’2” anymore. The decision is: Who am I? I walk down to the water’s edge. A moment away from all these zealots of slide spinning their wheels of enthusiasm. The clouds are ruined cathedrals. The sun is apocalypse red. The tide is turning. A young Indonesian surfer is just getting out of the water. He’s carrying my broken Thruster.
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