Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2017 i Surfing World Magazine

There was a time in my life when surf movies meant everything to me. If I wasn’t surfing, I was watching surf movies. And if I wasn’t watching surf movies, I was daydreaming about watching surf movies. I was such a surf movie tragic that I would put my boom box next to the TV and record all the soundtracks onto cassette tapes, just so I could listen to them on my walkman and imagine the film in my head on the way to school and on long family drives. I could tell you the order of every wave and every session and every song in Filthy Habits. I could quote Mad Wax verbatim. My bro and I would play the pause game for hours on end, pretending to be…

Deep mud and frozen grass. A field of broken bones in the gold dawn light. Lost in northern Europe, surfing’s two most fear-immune surfers are on the cold dawn hunt for something to make them sweat. And they found it. The wipeouts were horrific. Thick, dark slabs of wave-meat shuddering down onto ankle deep water and a black stone shelf. Sometimes Shane and Albee land on their feet and run. Other times they don’t. “I’m not sure how many of these trips I have left in me,” says Shane. “I don’t wanna be surfing a wave like this when I’m 50.” Do you know what a Blood Eagle is? It’s a Viking execution, where you hack your victim’s ribs open with an axe and pull out their lungs like an…

Late one night, the sand turns into a glimmering galaxy of phosphorescent lights. The manta rays have been jumping in constant copulation all day and every single star is competing with the sun. The gods are looking down on this journey. Way out in the desert, a stranger hangs their head out the window of a passing car and hollers at Dave and Steph: “You two should make a baby!” It’s true. They should. And Dave and Steph are both enlightened enough to laugh off the awkwardness of such roadside heckling… because on camera, yes, it looks a bit like they’re dating. Even more so when they surf. The cat-caller had probably just witnessed one of their tandem waves at a long Baja pointbreak. Weaving. Crisscrossing. Laughing. Like a ballroom…

With the Internet not yet capable of providing the speed to deliver us daily unfettered surf content, DVDs yet to become the collector’s paradigm they did in the early 2000s, and far from appearing wrapped in plastic around an issue of Waves magazine, you could argue that the 90s is the greatest era of “surf video”. And that in the 20 movies that Taylor and Jack put out between them over the course of that decade, are all the nuances of the medium, the ultimate captures of 90s surfing. In an effort to immerse myself in the 90s world of Jack McCoy and Taylor Steele, I decided to watch every surf video they released in that decade, in one single day. I set aside the day,…

Many times we tried and failed. Sessions in the snow… novelty at best. Keep driving. Session at crowded cove. Keep driving. Dense fog… keep driving. Howling wind… keep driving. Machado takes the wheel and drives in 12 hour shifts, attempting to scout the entire coast of Chile. Taylor rides shotgun, running logistics and keeping the conversation on point. These two, they’ve been doing this together since high school. And Taylor will tell you, Rob’s playlist has never wavered. Marley. Hendrix. Pearl Jam. As much as Rob is the ultimate driver, Craig is our ideal passenger. Easy going. Thoughtful. Sharing snacks and chiming in on conversations. Then he disappears into the back seat with a book and hours go missing. We know these two Zen masters of surfing for their perfect…

Most, if not all of us who love surfing have grown up watching surf movies that have shifted surfing culture entirely. Fewer of us have been the subject of those important surf videos. And even fewer again have been the creative force behind them. Ozzie Wright, however, has done all three. He’s fanned out on, starred in, and created surf movies that have impacted more than one generation, and left lasting impressions on the minds of surfers all over the world. Ozzie grew up on left field creations; Crystal Voyager, Mad Wax, and Filthy Habits. His section in Seven Days Seven Slaves, surf publishing’s first independent cover mounted video, blew minds and ushered in a new generational punk approach to surfing perfect waves, and his creative work behind Doped Youth…

A private island. The middle of the Pacific. A legendary sea-captain. And two of the most gifted surfers on the planet. It wasn’t easy getting this close to nowhere, but we’re here now. Landing in on the tiny, dirt airstrip is a great victory. With John and Kelly you never quite know. Will they show up? These two surfers exist on a different plain. Another planet. At any given point in time, there are probably two or three different camera crews standing around wondering if they’ll arrive. Many of them are left forlorn, but not us. We held the plane… Kelly finished his cereal… and Proximity soared. Now we had them. They step off the plane and paddle out from the runway. Just like that, into the barrel. It’s windy…

First of all, let’s get one thing out of the way, and that’s that interviewing Bruce Brown is an absurd notion. A ridiculous idea that shouldn’t be possible. It’s like someone saying you can interview your favourite childhood memory. Or that a rad cartoon character from a show you watched as a kid was actually a real person you could call on the telephone and ask a bunch of things. Bruce Brown isn’t a real, living, breathing person like you, or me, or the actors on Home and Away. Bruce Brown is that hilarious voice of Endless Summer. Bruce Brown is creator of the greatest surf film of all time. And it is the greatest surf film of all time. When John John Florence and Blake Kueny released their most…

Nathan Oldfield is a humble artist. In defiance of so many modern conceptions of artists as tortured, suffering martyrs, Nathan pieces together beautiful projects in the space between living a full life as a surfer, father, husband, devout friend and nearly 20 years as a schoolteacher. His “editing suite” is a standing desk nestled between the kids rooms and the family bathroom. He slaps on noise cancelling headphones and tinkers away at editing his movies as kids stream past and chores wait to be finished. His workflow is a refreshing reminder that making a creative contract with inspiration need not be your job, but a natural part of crafting a meaningful life. Nathan recently completed his sixth film, The Church of the Open Sky. Like his previous films, including Seaworthy,…