We’re pushing off for our Stoked and Broke staycation today and I haven’t had much time or energy to rant about anything this week. But I did do an interview with Liquid Salt, a cool online surf interview website by Glenn Sakamoto. After being interviewed via email, I started to wonder who Glenn was and what inspired him to ask surfers questions in his spare time.

Cy prepping for Stoked and Broke with bamboo rickshaw

Below is an interview with the interviewer:

Describe your relationship with the ocean, where do you surf and what boards do you like to ride?

When I was a kid, I spent all of my summers down at the beach, boogie boarding or body surfing. Back then I spent more time riding my skateboard than surfing, but I always rode like I was on a wave.

Today, surfing in the ocean clears my head and nourishes my soul. I prefer a gentle peeler over a pounding beach break, so I surf places like San-O and the PV Cove. My favorite board is a 9′4 Bing Lovebird. It seems to handle pretty much anything.

What inspired you to start Liquid Salt?

Surfing is such a profound experience that I wanted to share it with others. Also I am very curious about what other people think and how they see the world. It just seemed natural to be able to merge the two.

Is this your full-time job or do you do other work as well?

It feels like a full time job. I spend an incredible number of hours being the web developer, designer, interviewer, photo editor, and basically the curator for Liquid Salt.

My day job is as a brand identity designer and strategist. I blend brand strategy with my background in design. My work includes identities, advertising, and packaging.

What is your process in deciding who to interview?

They have to be somewhat well known or established. Having a hidden talent like painting or photography is a plus. They must be interesting, and quite frankly I have to like what they are doing.

For someone coming to the site for the first time, which interviews would you recommend?

Doc Paskowitz, Paul Strauch, and Gerry Lopez. These individuals truly embody the “aloha” spirit. Even if you didn’t surf you could relate to the strong connection these people have with the ocean.

What is your (opinion) of surf culture today?

Surfing today is a unique culture that blends art, spirituality, nature, intelligence, athleticism and grace. All of this transforms into something that goes beyond sport and into a different realm. It’s very exciting.

Where do you think its headed?

It’s the young people like you and Dave at Almond who are taking surf culture to the next level. A combination of craft and aesthetics that will keep surfing true to the art form that it is.

www.liquidsaltmag.com

Autarkic

A Korduroy TV photographic collection curated by Ryan Tatar (www.ryantatar.com).

Part 5: Lachie Goldsworthy x Dain Thomas

all photos Lachie Goldsworthy (http://eraculprits.tumblr.com/)

Lachie Goldsworthy is one of the crew behind the Nine Lives Gallery in Australia. The Nine Lives is a gallery space in the heart of Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. They feature local, interstate, and the odd international artist – all of whom have provided an assorted array of visual pleasures. Citing a focus on affordable art, with no correlation between price and quality, Nine Lives aim is to keep the prices for works down allowing people the chance to have original artworks from talented emerging contemporaries on their walls. The space itself is a blank canvas of sorts, it can be used for exhibitions, showings, photo shoots, small events and temporary studio space. Prior artists include folks like Alex Knost and Ozzie Wright. On top of running this great concept, Lachie shoots film. One of his recent subjects was the proprietor of Sea Surfboards, a popular underground label featuring custom boards of all kinds and a unique clothing line. Check out Dain’s shapes and designs at www.seasurfboards.com and Lachie Goldsworthy’s photos at http://eraculprits.tumblr.com.

Maxine Graham, Kauai born and raised, is an artist/photographer/surfer who enjoys creating free-style abstract artwork on trucker hats and other media. Straight from the Garden Isle, these one of a kind hats are made with love and aloha. Custom hats available.

Check out her stuff out on Etsy at http://www.etsy.com/shop/elmaxo

This one speaks for itself.

Stoked and Broke – Do Nothing’s

This week we are preparing to push off for a 10 day tour of our backyard. A little staycation-odyssey if you will for our new film called “Stoked and Broke.” Tomorrow we’re making surfboard trailers that we’ll affix to our backpacks, made out of the bamboo from the backyard. Amidst the preparations, my mind has been trying to hone in on the message of the film. I’ve been thinking a lot about surfing and the effect its had on my place in society…

Before I started surfing I equated happiness with attaining goals- homework, tests, catching fish, penciling my height further upward on the door frame… And for a long time after I saddled surfing with goals too- going down the line, doing a lip bank, cutting back, hanging 5, 10, winning a trophy, slapping on a sponsor’s sticker… I cared about moving forward, charging up that next hill, placing my next flag. But as the years went by and high school came and went, this drive began to wain. Not just with surfing, but with life in general. Despite coming from a family of college professors, I never graduated from college.  Instead, I bought a van, put a bed in the back and got a gym pass for showering.  Maybe age just starts to wear you down, but it seems now like surfing had a lot to do with it.

A few years ago, I was peering through the viewfinder my Bolex on the balcony of a retired couple’s 18th floor apartment, which towered over a popular beach break on Australia’s Gold Coast. I counted under my breath and methodically clicked the shutter of the camera, taking a time lapse of the scene below. In the azure water, hundreds of tiny figures on boards thrashed shoreward and paddled seaward/ thrashed shoreward/ paddled seaward. It began to look absurd, like the sound of a word when you say it fast 10 times. I think that’s when the epiphany came. Surfing is totally pointless. It’s the ultimate non-productive act- the biggest waste of time ever championed by modern man. But surfing made me feel better than anything I’d ever felt, while grabbing at goals consistently left me hungry and hollow. Now this is pretty radical thing for a world that depends on people basing their self-worth solely on their accumulation of things.



Autarkic

A Korduroy TV photographic collection curated by Ryan Tatar (www.ryantatar.com)

Part 4:  Liz Lantz x Jill Hansen

all photos Liz Lantz (http://www.lizlantz.com)

Liz Lantz (formerly Liz Cockrum) is a friend of mine and a brilliant photographer based in north county San Diego.  Her photographs from her Hasselblad are always spot on… perfectly composed and exposed.  She has a great photo essay called “Sirens” detailing the surf culture in women’s surfing.  These photographs are of Jill Hansen, a Newport Beach local surfer, artist, and designer.  Jill has a fine custom wetsuit line she designs called California Candy, which features cutting edge designs and premium japanese yamato rubber.

Mick and Parko gettin’ a bit loose. A few years back these two rivals recorded this spoof.

Parental Warning - this video contains just about every profanity known to man…

Good surfing at the end though.

Keep your dome warm during these winter months with a knit beanie.

3 Shades of Natural Beanie

Here is a cool one for the future surfer…

Knit Baby Earflap Hat

Here’s a nice stop motion animation. Stop motion is achieved by taking a sequence of still photos and stringing them together to give the illusion of movement. Here’s a cool tutorial on how to make your own stop motion movies:
http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-Stop-Motion-Animation

Peter Schroff has always been way ahead of his time, from board designs and advertising campaigns that blew people away in the 80s, to fashion and surfboard sculptures, and his more recent escapades into performance art. This spirit of progression and innovation is captured in the documentary ECHO BEACH. (echobeachfilm.com )

This week I was going to follow the thread of my last post and continue with my emo-lumberjack, inner-searching, but instead decided to ramble about the minutia of my new found cleaning and organizing regimen.

Working for yourself and being an inherently messy person creates many problems, the majority of which stem from being terminally unorganized. Knowing this, I’ve setup a variety of checks and balances to keep my trippy, surfer-bum lifestyle from affecting my various attempts at entrepreneurship. I’d been feeling pretty good in this department thanks to a few tips I’d picked up from some personal productivity blogs. The key to the system is the separation of tasks from projects. According to research, the no-thought, task doing oriented side of our brains is like kryptonite to the introspective, project planning side of our brains. And when we make to-do lists which mix simple tasks with bigger projects, our brains freak out and get over-whelmed. The proposed remedy is to separate our larger projects from all the little things necessary to accomplish the projects. So I’ve been cataloging in a word document on my laptop with which I update whenever a moment of clarity shines upon me. I’ve then been referring to it weekly and making a list on a notepad of all the little to-do’s which will inch me closer to the big goals. Despite the peace-of-mind that comes from knowing all the shit you have yet to do, the physical clutter of unorganized crap can take its toll on other fronts.  Yesterday all the wrappers, sand, dirt, napkins, paper bags and funky wetsuit smells made me snap. Although we’re still a few days away from the official start of spring, yesterday’s stiff fresh breeze and clear sunshine spurred me to completely clean out my van and a japanese wooden teahouse that I call my office.

This wasn’t my normal 90 min, throw-all-my-shit-out-on-the-gravel, sweep and scrub, then throw all my shit back in (minus the orange peels, apple cores, recyclables, and dirty clothes) kind of job I perform on a bi-weekly-ish basis. But the kind of clean where you reach into the pouches, gloves boxes and shelves and ponder the origin and new destination of every misplaced receipt, note, and old flyer that had been merely reshuffled before. The biggest obstacle I face when doing this is staying on track and not tripping-out on some long-lost book that resurfaces mid-way or drifting off into the forgotten context of some journal entry scribbled on a crusty notepad… I managed to keep myself on the straight and narrow by forming an assembly line of chaos.  Piles of dirty clothes separated into whites and colors over here, mounds of camera gear with missing lens caps next to the clothes, a quiver of surfboards with old wax melting on the adjacent lawn, funky wetsuits heaped next to a five-gallon bucket with a solution of water, Woolite and mouthwash, stacks of cd’s from friends… Moving from one pile to another and inching closer to completion, beautiful things begin to happen- that foldable solar panel I needed for my cross-county hike magically appears under an old gas can,  a nearly full container of alcohol wipes that was on my task list to buy magically appears on the shelf, perfectly good pens in all shapes and sizes rise up from the cracks…

After a while the assembly line you’ve constructed to get you over the hump, is no longer necessary. Your brain sees you frolicking in a fresh new land of order and you pick up the pace, putting back all of your new found treasures back into their places with pride. As the sun set and the light began to dwindle, I stacked my shiny surfboards next to my teahouse, folded my minty fresh wetsuits in the back of my clean van, and set my fully-charged and wiped down camera gear into the teahouse knowing that all my shit was in place and ready to be shuffled, fouled and lost again.

Autarkic

A Korduroy TV photographic collection curated by Ryan Tatar (www.ryantatar.com)

Part 3:  Ryan Heywood x Wayne Lynch

all photos Ryan Heywood (http://www.ryanheywood.com)
Ryan Heywood is an amazing photographer from Australia who publishes a very popular online bodysurfing journal (http://www.bodysurf.com.au) among his other talented photographic exploits are documenting surf, skate, and youth culture.  His work continues to draw new lines and be a big inspiration for myself and other photographers around the globe.  Here are some photos he snapped of the legend Wayne Lynch, with friends and his 40th anniversary evolution boards.