The Daily Shaka

Hey I’m on The Daily Shaka, a newish surfy blog that has an interesting concept and implementation. Shaka is a blog aggregator. The blog curator collects surfy rss feeds from around the web and displays a summary of the most recent post of each blog. Basically, instead of having to twittle with an rss reader or bunch of bookmarks, you can make Shaka your homepage for surf blogginess and you’ll always be served with the fresh, hotness. In addition, there’s always a featured blog that has a visual carousel appearance and a pay-it-forward karmic kick to it. The new featured blogs are chosen by the last featured blogger. So Jamie Watson of Pineapple Luv was featured, and she chose me. And so now I’m up on the featured blog spot for a few days, and I’ve submitted a blog for the feature that I’ve been gigging on lately. You’ll have to wait to see what blog I’ve chosen, it’s a good one, maybe you haven’t seen it yet.

Go check out The Daily Shaka. and thanks Jamie for the nod!

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Out-of-Commission

Liddle KP 7'4" displacement hulla picture from better times

Yesterday, lost in the pre-session excitement, gathering all my surf detritus and loading it into the car, I temporarily placed the Liddle hull on the roof of the car while I put the seats down. Loaded my bag into the car and took off. whip around a turn and out of the rear view I see a large object slide down from the roof and hit the pavement. The board never made it into the car. A quick check of the tail revealed tiny scrapes nothing more. I felt up and down the rails, nothing, and so i didn’t think to take it out of the board sock.

At the beach, I exclaimed that i was so surprised nothing happened to the board, Volan is a strong substance. And then Ro points to the nose just as it’s coming out of the sock. An 8 inch gouge on the left side of the nose, from just before the stringer down the rail. Thing looks like it got its lights punched out. upturned foam, broken, munched, split fiberglass, shards. The beginning of my deep downward spiral.

I sat on the beach for 20 minutes cursing my forgetfulness, lamenting the damage done to a near pristine board and dreading what a bang up repair job my local homies would do (this operation is way past my ding repair skills). The nose essentially has to be re-built and foiled, never to be the same, patched with normal resin versus the wicked, greenish tint of Volan. My baby was damaged. I felt like packing up and going home.

Just then over my right shoulder came a casual “Hey”, and a well-used roll of duct landed in my lap. So like any good surfer, I taped up the nose, tucked my misery into a little box and drowned it in some mediocre waist high sliding.

So now the hull is out of commission, while I figure out the best way to repair her. I have no idea what I’m gonna do. I’ve been riding this thing pretty much exclusively over the past two months. I am a hull convert junkie and I don’t know if I can go back to round rails, they just don’t don’t have that same slice.

I am the world’s dumbest shit.

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Mia Doi Todd – Open Your Heart

Beautiful new music video for one of my favorite musicians Mia Doi Todd. Her new album is coming out I guess and is produced by Jon Brion. The video was directed by Michel Gondry. I love the rawness, kinda like a plain man’s Busby Berkeley.

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January Swells

photo by Ed Fladung

My buddy Tom is making a mexicocentric gnar gnar surf film called Dias Tranquilos. He’s got some insane footage in the can and over the past few swells we’ve been shooting at the same spots and sharing boats. He just put together a teaser reel from some of the amazing swell that rolled through our parts last month. Some of the footage was taken during the same session as the photo above, check it out.

Incidentally, on the afternoon the above photo was taken, Tom was shooting from the middle of the boat and I from the front. After a particularly large outside set, the boat barely made it over and landed a bit on it’s starboard side, me in the air. I landed in between the front of the boat and the first row of seats, on top of Chicharro’s board bag. A soft landing followed by the unmistakable sound of a stringer cracking in half. Big oops.

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RIP Brooklyn Banks?

If there was one physical place that manifested my skating style as a kid, The Brooklyn Banks were it. The gold standard for east coast street skating. ‘88, ‘89, this was my temple. After a week of school, Friday night I’d make my way into the city and for two solid days straight you could find me here (or in Washington Sq. Park). Big piece of my teen years. gone.

[via Secret Forts]

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D.I.Y. America

Aaron Rose picks up where Beautiful Losers left off with D.I.Y. America, a new short series of films about DIY creativity from the worlds of skateboarding, punk rock and hip-hop. Above is the first in the six part series.

Good way to procrastinate this morning. oh and on my radio this morning?

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Andrew Paynter

Andrew Paynter makes beautiful photographs, in particular his “working artists” series.

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Guinness Surfer

I totally missed this one when it came out. Blame it on my lack of television viewing habit.

I really dig the style, editing, audio, etc… I usually cringe at any product that markets itself with surfing, but this is an exception. great spot, naturally by the very talented Jonathan Glazer (Director of the very badass Sexy Beast1). [via DMoyes]

  1. You gonna do the job? Do the job. Do it. Yes Grovesnor. Yes Roundtree. Do the job!
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Drift: Mandala Interview




Lines Converge: Manuel C. Caro’s Prismatic Path

Interview: Andrew Smith
M.Caro Portrait: Jay Watson
Shaping Bay photos and Art Direction: Ed Fladung
Hand drawn type: Beth Fladung

Drift has a new feature up, Andrew Smith interviews Manuel Caro of Mandala Custom Shapes and it’s a barn burner. Amazing read. Mani Caro simply and beautifully illustrates how the dharmic knowledge of handmade surfboards is silently transferred from older generations to new generations of shapers, ensuring that surfing retains its soul and karmic traditions. If you have any interest in surf culture beyond potato chips and competition results, click on over and read Mani’s piece.

When I was up in North County SD over the holidays, Rob70 and I paid a visit to Moonlight where Mani has his shaping room. I was fortunate enough to be able to slip in for a few minutes to take some photos. Unfortunately, Mani was home sick with a cold that day (I think). I was instantly drawn to Mani’s tools, shaping room detritus and wall decorations but the thing that struck me most about the shaping room was his profound collection of hand-foiled fins and template curves. A geometric collected history of surfboard shaping. I felt kinda guilty oogling his curve collection with my camera, like staring at someone else’s girl. But I knew I’d kick myself twenty years from now if I didn’t take the time to at least briefly document what I saw.

Like most Drift features, this article formed like Voltron: Andrew Smith put together the transcendent interview with Mani, Jay Watson took Mani’s portrait, my sister Beth hooked up the hand drawn type, I added my shaping bay photos and hooked the photo editing and art direction and of course the folks at Drift provided the stoke.

Go check it out.

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Recent swells







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Geometrik

Some new stuff I’ve been working on.






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Luca at Year One

Luca at 11 monthsLuca and his abuelito Francisco

Today is Little Man’s first birthday. Year One. On this day February 5th, one year ago, Luca came into our lives. It’s been a long, strange, hard, wonderful year. A year probably very typical to any new parent and yet so totally foreign to anyone who hasn’t broached that life passage yet. Lil’ Man has grown so much, I can’t believe it. More than that, Marcia and I have grown as well. Grown up. Aged. Deteriorated. Gotten younger at heart. Pushed. Pulled. Exploded. Lost. and Found. The one thing this year has represented to me, above all else is ‘Love’. Unselfish, pure Love for another human being. If I could, I’d put all my experiences, hopes, dreams and desires into him and extinguish my life from this existence, like a mother spider whose young are hatched and her ultimate gift to sacrifice her body for her babies’ survival. Yes, cryptic. But most parents probably feel the same kind of love towards their kids. That’s the kind of ‘Love’ that I have learned this year. And I’m glad the person I get to share it with, is this gentle, brash, glowing, feisty, shy soul we call ‘Luca’. Sometimes I ruminate to myself, I wonder who he was in his last life. I’d love to have met him/her.

Here’s to Luca’s first birthday. chocolate cake for everyone (quite coincidentally, daddy’s favorite).

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Chinese Wax Job II

Chinese Wax Job II
art by Ed Fladung

John Esguerra’s epic, surf, art and surf-art zine Chinese Wax Job II is out at your favorite zine counter. You can order it online from Teeluxe.

CWJ2 features the art works of Patrick Griffin, Julia Chiang, Marcus Oakley, Jeff Canham, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Jay Guillmero, Stine Belden Roed, Ryan Tatar, Ty Williams, Dominick Volini, Tofer Chin, Daniel Piwowarczyk, Steve Green, Ed Fladung, Scott Massey, Paul Gallegos, Pat Conlon, Manny Pangilinan, Brock Potucek, Betsy Walton.

You can see a grip of my photos in the spread above. I’m stoked!

I really like the fine arty spreads and dig the vibe. i love the balance of different styles of art tipping towards abstraction – inspires me to get off this computer and create some paintbrush-to-paper art. I know he puts the zine out and all, but check out John Esguerra’s spread below. Totally sick! If that doesn’t inspire you, it’s been too long since you’ve been for a surf.

here are a few more wicked spreads:

art by John Esguerra
art by Scott Massey
art by Marcus Oakley

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Bookmarks for January 22nd

  • FIRST LOOK: Exit Through The Gift Shop – A Banksy Film
    holy crap! i can't wait to see the Banksy movie! awesome.
  • My favourite fonts of 2009 | i love typography
    gorgeous typography here. just as exciting as the curves on a surfboard. i could look at this stuff all day long
  • Stewart Tears Apart The Dems On MA-SEN And Health Care (VIDEO) | TPM LiveWire
    summary: how stupid can democrat politicians be? someone said (i forgot who) that we deserve the politicians we get. great.
  • Colorful writing – The Mex Files
    the fine art of "notas rojas" (red notes). Mex Files details the "purple prose typical of the yellow journalism" of police reports in local mexican newspapers: "While sometimes the author — to stretch out the word count — has to resort to low tricks like referring to a police car as a “blue and white 2008 Dodge Neon, with plate number… “, the nota rota writer strives for variation in his or her craft. The banality of criminal activity sometimes reduces even the most creative of nota roja writers to clichés (there are a plethora of ways to say “corpse” — the center of attention but least interesting character in any murder story – all of which have been use to death), but the best are true artists. They still manage to surprise us, enlighten us and delight us with their mastery of the language."
  • Jessica Hische / Humble Pied.
    great newish video + ichat based site about creatives sharing advice. and the best quote I've heard all week: "“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.” – Jessica Hirsche
  • I Gave My 3 Year Old an iPhone: Have I Created a Monster?
    awesome piece on young children using the iphone to learn. some of you are already cringing (yes you, in the back), but I think it's great. this kind of thing is gonna be so standard in 20 years. I thin it's kind of scary to think that the jobs your kids will have when they grow up, won't be invented til they're in high school. and your kids will learn two to four times as much as you have, in your whole lifetime, by the time they get out of college. [via Stevey]
  • YouTube – adidas Originals – Star Wars Collection
    the shoes? meh. but that Imperial March remix is wicked awesome.
  • Polaroid PIC 1000
    mock-ups of the new film-based under-$100 Polaroid cameras that are coming out. These are the result of The Impossible Project that I linked to a while back. They bought the rights to produce Polaroid cameras and film stock. Freakin' awesome. I'll have the wood grain one, thank you!
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Change Congress

Today the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC. that corporations and unions can pour unprecedented amounts of money into elections. This from Lawrence Lessig and his project Change Congress:

Right now, special interests have more influence over our political system than regular folks because of our broken campaign finance laws. These special interests pump millions of dollars into congressional campaigns each cycle, and as a result, they block real change on issue after issue.
Here at Change Congress, we believe that politicians should work for the people, not special interests. But it’s not enough to push politicians to stay out of the system of corruption—we have to reform the system itself. That’s why we support a hybrid of small-dollar donations and public financing, to keep big money out of politics.

Lessig wrote that mission statement for Change Congress before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC.

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