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Come on, Undefined! Move your bloomin’ arse!*
Quandary: How to categorize this activity we do, this communion with, this union between, this time spent upon, beneath (or whichever requisite prepositional elbow word used to marry nouns and verbs you choose) the ocean? Sport? Lifestyle? Experience? Religion? Spirituality? The number of opinions skirting this question are as many and as varied as there…
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strange imperialism and neoliberal ethos of the Surf Industrial Complex
Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net “Surfing is good for the world.” -Fernando Aguerre When I decided to boycott the women’s longboard championship in China last year, I received an email from the then ASP World Tour CEO, Brodie Carr, who suggested that I “proactively go there [China] as an ambassador of a sport that possesses…
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China and Big Surfing
“Sports themselves are not political, but they have important political functions. The close connection between sports and national identity takes different forms in different countries at various stages of development, and in China it has special significance. The phrase ‘a weak country has no sports’ has particularly painful associations for Chinese people [owing to China’s…
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Newest! Sponsored! Imagined bliss
“Separation is the alpha and omega of spectacle (Debord, 1967).” The first, most important single element to grasp about today’s state of affairs, the reality we are currently entrenched in, is the ubiquity of alienation, that is, separation from our food, others, and ourselves: the subject-object duality. The second essential idea to grasp, is that…
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a mutiny of thoughts
I’ve been taking my 6’0″ out the past couple of mornings. I enjoy the feeling of quick, sharp turns, lip-snaps and the weight/unweight a shortboard offers when the waves have push and a certain steepness to them. I really like messing with my body, confusing my muscles out of their usual neuronal firings in order…
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“Standing Her Ground”: Curl Magazine #31
(This interview about women in surfing and my decision to boycott the ASP World Tour, was just published in the summer issue of Curl Magazine. There is no online access to this article so it is being reprinted here, with the images and captions provided in the article. I have also added links throughout the…
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“little hoss” and a call to action
Since writing “embracing their femininity”, I stumbled upon a photo feature of surfer Erica Hosseini in STAB Magazine’s Hard Cover Book, December 2011, that pushes Big Surfing’s fetishized “feminine” to it’s most hyper-sexualized yet. STAB ostensibly tries to get away with this image by using a play on Hosseini’s last name, a double entendre, a…
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objectification ate my empathy!
A certain level of empathy is involved with revolutionary thought, innovation and social change. When being exposed to social, political and even economic disparities, brutality, inequity, oppression, etc., one of the key elements in motivating individuals to do something in order to better circumstances (for themselves as well as for others), is that there must…
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“embracing their femininity”
Three of the top five ladies chosen in this year’s Surfer Poll Awards have bared glistening, bronzed bodies to the world in nearly naked poses that range from playful and flirty to sexual and seductive. The only reason Alana trumped Sally Fitzgibbons in the polls is because Fitzgibbons didn’t get her skin-show on before…
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surfing 2.0: fetishism and spectacle
One of the most compelling traits of consumerist culture is the constant message of “never enough.” You can never have too much… S/he with the most toys wins… You can never be too successful… You can never have too many trophies… too much money… too many friends on Facebook/Twitter… etc. This is the fall-out of…
Cori Schumacher
State of Flux
