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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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]
You gonna do the job? Do the job. Do it. Yes Grovesnor. Yes Roundtree. Do the job! ↩
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.
This got lost in the mix a few months back, my homie bromie Isaiah Seret directed the above clip, it’s the second in a twelve part music video series by Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros. As far as I can tell, they are making a video for each track on the record and each video is loosely connected in a story arc that follows the fictional character, Edward Sharpe, on his mission to heal humanity. This from wikipedia:
After breaking up with his girlfriend, moving out of his house, and joining Alcoholics Anonymous, [Alex] Ebert began work on a story about a messianic figure named Edward Sharpe. According to Ebert, Sharpe “was sent down to Earth to kinda heal and save mankind…but he kept getting distracted by girls and falling in love.” Ebert later met singer Jade Castrinos in Los Angeles. In the summer of 2009, as Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, Ebert and Castrinos toured the country with a group of fellow musicians in a big white school bus.
Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros’ record Up From Below was by far my favorite record of ‘09. If you haven’t heard it, pick it up, nowskis. Start with the infectious Home track (free download). If that doesn’t make you fall in love with the chick working in the cubicle next to you, then sheeit, you jus’ ain’t got no heart.
Props to Isaiah Seret for a beautifully lensed video.
Joni Sternbach’s Surfers series is finally out in book form, it’s called SurfLand and is published by Photo Lucida. SurfLand is hardbound, 80 pages, 52 photographs and runs $50:
Sternbach makes her photographs in tintype, a labor-intensive technique little changed since it’s invention in the 1850s. Spontaneous and unpredictable, the streaks and tonal variations in the finished photographs reflect their hand-made character, the corners rubbed where they were held in the camera.
Posing on rocky outcrops, in front of uprooted trees, or on thick mats of woody flotsam, Sternbach’s surfers inhabit strange landscapes. The best of Sternbach’s photographs convey insistent longing. They are about relationships – the relationship between surfer and board, between human and landscape, between photographer and subject, and between the surfers themselves…she has discovered a new sort of home – a place without walls, defined only by belonging and the physicality of existence.
- Philip Prodger, Curator of Photography, Peabody Essex Museum
By the way, Joni Sternbach is a faculty member of the International Center of Photography in NYC and she does one-weekend courses every semester on the tin type collodion process she used to create the images in SurfLand. Check out ICP for more info
Hey yall. Andy and Ashley Davis have a new shop called Ebb and Flow located next to Patagonia in Cardiff-by-the-Sea. They are having a store opening Saturday August 8th from 5-10pm and The Mattson 2 are on the bill as well as art by Andy and Ashley’s homemade creations.
Recently, you released a chart purportedly describing the organization of the House Democrats’ health plan. I think Democrats, Republicans, and independents agree that the problem is very complicated, no matter how you visualize it.
By releasing your chart, instead of meaningfully educating the public, you willfully obfuscated an already complicated proposal. There is no simple proposal to solve this problem. You instead chose to shout “12! 16! 37! 9! 24!” while we were trying to count something.
So, to try and do my duty both to the country and to information design (a profession and skill you have loudly shat upon), I have taken it upon myself to untangle your delightful chart.
Click through for a larger version of the graphic and to read some of the unwittingly dumb shit and the willful obfuscations that are contained in the original graphic.
Never, ever, fuck with a graphic designer. Geez, I love a good cuss word.
New Kings of Convenience. Awesome! The first song is called “Mrs Cold” and it’s everything you hope to hear from these guys. There’s a radio rip floating around the internets. The album is coming shortly, StereoGum has the skinny. Erlend and Erik sent this postcard out to friends on their mailing list, I guess. love it. It’s nice to hear new music from them, it’s been toooooo long.
oh, there’s also a few live shows up on youtube where they play most of the new album. can’t wait.
Habitat Skateboards are putting out a limited edition line of Charley Harper skatedecks and shoes for it’s sponsored pros. Real classy. I’d love one of these up on the wall. Serious collectors items.
Charley Harper is a mid-century modernist illustrator and painter whose popularity is deservedly surging at the moment partly due to several high profile projects by Todd Oldham and Ammo Books.
Hi, my name is Ed. I’m a graphic designer who lived in L.A. I quit my job, sold my car, rented out my house and moved to Mexico. Along the way, I learned how to surf and fell in love. This blog is my story. In these pages I write about and photograph my daily experience. I also post about things I find interesting: art, design, photography, music, tech, etc...
