Category: Environmental Justice
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Bangladesh: Dying for Fashion
ONE YEAR LATER: 4/24/14. Parent company of REEF and VANS, VF Corp, continues to refuse to sign Bangladesh accord. Updated 5/30 : Along with VOLCOM and REEF, I found BILLABONG men’s shorts, Made in Bangladesh Updated 5/26 : Bangladesh factory banned by Wal-Mart is still used by the VF Corp (see note 2 below), the…
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Endless Cannibalization of Authenticity, Cease
Bruce Brown’s 1966 The Endless Summer(TES) presented an alternative narrative to the shenanigans of the many beach/surfy lifestyle movies that erupted from Hollywood after Gidget emerged to much fanfare in 1958. In TES, there are no post-surf bonfire orgies, no frustrating hetero-love triangles that finally resolve in dramatic Hollywood fashion, and certainly no surfing ladies…
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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Surfing
ob but really look on… Los padres de la hacienda had fought the mud from the periphery of the building for years, mud that was laced in the building’s own genetic-code, mud that dressed the building in droplet skirts when La Virgen wept from heaven (so they said), mud that speckled the interior of the…
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First documentary on gay surfers (trailer)
The first documentary to tackle what it is like for gay surfers in the line-up and in the surf industry is being made as we speak. I am stoked to be a part of this project and am very much looking forward to listening to my fellow surfers talk about their experiences from around the…
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Surfing’s Culture of Silence
“Platforms are judged by the value generated by their ecosystem, not by the value the platforms directly capture.” -Dalton Caldwell (Please be advised, this post contains explicit language from Twitter feeds.) The language of surfing has long been dominated by the motion and gestures of the body. The narratives we construct, the legends, the mythologies,…
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Manly Men: Fiji Pro, June 7th 2012
The amount of references that are made to how “manly” the men on the ASP World Tour are in video commentary and elsewhere, is utterly overwhelming at times. With comments like “These dudes are manly men”, “He better man-up”, descriptions of turns as “mannish hacks”, or even references to waves as women (“approach accordingly”), it…
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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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“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…
