Join Surfrider

isd_500Join Surfrider today!

Hey Folks, today is International Surfing Day and in observance of such a prestigious day, I’d like you all to seriously think about signing up for a Surfrider membership. As Jim Moriarty says, “Climate change isn’t the day after tomorrow any longer, it’s started the day before yesterday”.

If you’re a surfer, you know how much water quality affects your daily life and if you’re not a surfer or water-lover, you can still understand how important clean water is to both humans and sea life. To celebrate International Surfing Day Surfrider are giving away an ISD themed shirt with your $20 membership. That’s right, 20 bucks. You probably spent more on coffee this past week.

I was on twitter this morning, and Surfrider’s official tweet channel reported that, today, 700 people had signed up for memberships from over 15 countries as part of International Surfing Day. Make that 701, I signed up for my Surfrider membership and I couldn’t be happier.

You should too.

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The Golden Pig | Surf Colonialism

The Golden Pig

Documentary about the island of Nias. Provided to Surfrider by Australian film director Joel Peterson. The film showcases the dangers of modern surf colonialism, focusing on the impacts it can have on native populations.

The waves at Lagundri Bay on the Indonesian island of Nias are what dreams are made of. The Golden Pig highlights incredible early footage from surf explorer Kevin Peterson along with “first contact” interviews with locals of Nias.

Your concept for this weekend is: “Surf Colonialism”, no wikipedia entry yet, whose gonna put it down? Really awesome that Surfrider is putting this film out there across the interwebs.

[via Surf Economics - one of the more interesting surf blogs I've come across recently]

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Charleston Surf Rumble

77091-004-7485222Bkinda like this, but without the cutlery and with surfboards and short shorts

Attention all surf doggers in the Charlotte/Columbia, North/South Cackalacka area: big huuuge rumble set for Saturday, June 27th. Bring your knives. Here’s the press release:

For Immediate Release

Surfside Story: Yuppie Club Challenges Rival Gang to a Surf “Rumble”
Charleston South Carolina’s “Macho Noseriders” Challenge Columbia’s “CKS” for a High Noon Surf-Off, June 27 somewhere near the Folly Pier.

CHARLESTON, SC., JUNE 27 – Charleston South Carolina is about to host another historic event as one of its preppy surf clubs, the “Macho Noseriders,” takes on the street-tough “CKS Surf Gang” of Columbia, South Carolina for what is being called “The Surf Rumble at Macho (Folly) Beach.” Scheduled for high noon, this surf competition is in benefit of the “Clean Up Folly Beach” program and is expected to draw tens of people, including family and friends of the surfers.

“At the end of the day our mission is to preserve our nation’s beaches while promoting our favorite sport,” says, Macho Noserider spokesmen Matthew O’Hara. Matthew, donning a Ralph Lauren popped-collar Polo, cashmere sweater vest, matching J. Crew pleated board shorts and teal aqua socks then added, “And what better way to promote our mission than by cleaning up a giant piece of garbage I like to call ‘The CKS Surf Gang’ of Columbia South Carolina.”
Read More »

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The Illest Style

maiden voyage1photo by J Dub Singles

Is this the illest style you’ve ever seen or what? Erin Bang Bang. My chiropractor would be proud. I want this print on my wall. not now, but right now.

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Bookmarks for June 19th

  • I-Movix SprintCam v3 NAB 2009 showreel on Vimeo
    1000 frames per second video. ultra slow motion. skip to the 2 minute mark to see the block of jello bouncing (shot at 2500 fps). so amazing. I'd love to see this camera used on a fatty Teahupoo wave from inside the barrel.
  • Al Jazeera English – Focus – Iran on the brink?
    if there is only one article you read about what's happening inside iran right now, politically, read this one. amazing! Mark Levine walks through the different power structures in the government and the potential scenarios for dealing with the protests.
  • Food, Inc. Movie Site and Trailer – Hungry For Change?
    Great trailer, for what looks to be a great movie. That most people won't want to see, because the truth hurts too much. Incidentally, they used to say "you are what you eat". and us gutter punks would chime back "if you are what you eat, then we're all dead meat!" and stick up our two fingers and make the screw face like Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. The early 90s were a bright, young, innocent time. Now the refrain goes something like "if you are what you eat, than were all highly processed food products" or even "if you are what you eat, then we're all full of shit." that last one is more true than most people know.
  • Asia Times Online :: Divine assessment vs people power
    a huge article on the internal power struggle going on in Iran right now. This is just about election results. It's about a failed system of government and their attempts to stay in power: "As much as corporate media – from anywhere – has been rendered mostly irrelevant. Iranians are deploying an absolute non-stop, 24/7 thriller; a guerrilla communication redux, an ultra-raw version of history in the making via blogs – this is a nation of young bloggers – YouTube and Twitter, battling by all means necessary ultra-slow or shut down Internet, jammed phone lines going in and out, blocked chats, blocked SMS."
  • Nathan Bransford – Literary Agent: Query Letter Mad Lib
    This is an explicit how-to recipe on the proper way to put together a "query letter" for contacting potential literary agents. good advice, wish i found it first before sending out a bunch of queries. oops.
  • On Assignment: Covering Tehran – Lens Blog – NYTimes.com
    images from the Iran election protests taken by 28-year old Newsha Tavakolian, a Times freelanc photographer. These images have a very different feel from the ones we've been seeing from Getty and AP. much more intimate.
  • AgentQuery :: Find the Agent Who Will Find You a Publisher
    trying to find an literary agent to help you publish your blog book? this is a great resource.
  • Shane Lavalette: A Quiet Heaven in Vrindavan, India | GOOD
    beautiful photography by Shane Lavalette taken in India. very quiet photos. something not normally in unison with India. Shane is also the editor/curator of wicked zine Lay Flat.
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Just Keep Paddling…Simple

photo by Ed Fladung

Jim Moriarty is the CEO of Surfrider and writes a blog called Oceans Waves Beaches, which has tons of good/interesting/thoughtful content. Jim is totally dialed-in online and uses serious social networking skills to build “onramps” for people to learn about and support the clean-water initiatives Surfrider are fighting for.

Earlier this week Jim posted a little something about me and my photography. He compared me to Charles Eames, probably the best compliment I have ever received. Ever. See the post here: If Eames surfed… he’d be Ed Fladung

The photo above was featured on Jim’s post. The person in the photo is a guy named Gabe, who works for a large sneaker company up near Portland, Oregon. I met Gabe through Chum, when they were down here on a surf trip last year. I sent him a link to Jim’s post, with the subject line “Almost Famous”. This is what he wrote back:

Ah, that Mex trip seems like a very distant dream sitting in my cube buried under an ever-growing mound of emails.

Wish I could follow my folly like mister QP and “quit my job, sell my car, rent out my house and move to Mexico.”

Until then I’ll live vicariously. Thanks for the stoke,

G

And this was my reply:

The grass is always greener.

Sometimes, as I sit here, sweating profusely, at my computer in the 90% humidity, trying to hussle up some work, I think to myself, shit it would be so awesome to work for someone else, a large sneaker/lifestyles brand and collaborate with other people in the office and kick off work at 6 and go grab some thai or vietnamese food and a good microbrew stout beer… sometimes I even miss the smell of the low-pile industro carpeting and off-gassing of plastic cubicles.

and then a friend calls up and says let’s go surfing, and the world is right again.

keep in touch. saludos,

// Ed

Though the tagline of this site reads: “I quit my job, sold my car, rented out my house and moved to Mexico.” That line is essentially a very dense and layered subject boiled down to an easily digestible one-liner. It works great to get the immediate message across – it’s good marketing. But behind it lies a more complicated truth. And though I’m hesitant to talk about it much here, it’s important to show that side.

Life is hard, no matter where you rest your head. It helps being in a warm, sunny, (occasionally) surf-filled little mexican town, but even that has its own complications. When you trade latitudes, longitudes, cultures and socio-economic structures, you’re essentially trading one set of good and bad things for another. After a year or two, you’ll start to miss the good things and a few years after that, you’ll start to forget about the bad things. The real juice in life, is learning how to combine the good things from both places and minimize the bad. Not exactly easy but not altogether unattainable.

I really appreciate it when people write in and say they dig my photography and live a little bit vicariously through me. And I admit I live a very blessed life. I had the opportunity to change my life and take a different path, one that altered my life irreversibly (for better or for worse). It helped that I had my family here to support and encourage me. But I would like to acknowledge that Mexico hasn’t always been the easiest. In ways it has been much harder than the slightly more predictable trajectory of my old life. On a daily basis, I consciously choose to keep it positive, rather than trying to grab on to the negatives and write about them, I just them float by. Sometimes the negatives are almost too easy to dwell on. They make for impassioned, juicy writing. But after a while the negative current envelops you and you begin to forget the good things about the place where you lay your head.

In A Brokedown Melody, Gerry Lopez sums it up beautifully and eloquently: “all ya gotta do is just keep paddling… simple.”

He’s so right.

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Bookmarks for June 18th

  • How to Quiet Your Mind | Think Simple Now
    quick tutorial on quieting the internal chatter that ruins your peace of mind: "If you observe our problems, you will notice that most problems are rooted in the mind. The basic premise is the same: some external event happens, we choose to see only one side of the story, and then interpret the situation such that it causes some form of mental conflict, resulting in some form of emotional suffering." [via @nybe]
  • Know your type: Futura: idsgn (a design blog)
    The "Know your type" series is for all of you aspiring typography nerds that haven't reached "nerd" status quite yet. you know you love type, but you don't know why. Futura is the first in the series. You may have seen Futura from Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson movies. It was also the first and only font on the moon.
  • Fever° Red hot. Well read.
    damn! for those of you that are heavy RSS readers, this is a new hosted RSS reader application called "Fever", from Shaun Inman, creator of Mint. Fever rethinks how you group rss feeds and does away with "information glut, un-read item guilt and un-Bold elbow", basically your rss reading experience no longer has to be primarily about changing feeds from unread to read, you don't ever have to worry about that little unread count ever again. awesome idea.
  • Clay Shirky: How Cellphones, Twitter, Facebook Can Make History [VIDEO]
    must watch! – While filmed in May, his points are brought into sharp focus by recent developments in Iran (see #iranelection), as social media tools prove their power to change the world. Shirky explains: “Media is increasingly less just a source of information; it’s increasingly more a site of co-ordination, because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well…members of the former audience can now also be producers and not consumers.” [ via @jdotsmith]
  • Moray Eel eats Thumb | quietube
    this week on "that's fucking amazing": Diver messes with Green Moray Eel and gets thumb bitten off. Thai doctors create new thumb from toe and it works!
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Double-Digit Corduroy

corduroyphoto by Ed Fladung

My shaper homies Marco & Amy are in town for a few days and today we got together for a morning session at the local triedntrue. We were expecting some heavy swell this past weekend but it turned out to be another infamous phantom swell. Not enough west in the fast moving southie, swings right past us on its way to Cabo, this weekend was criminally dumb flat. I was gonna grab the longboard and last second made a switch for the singlefin egg. We got to the beach just in time to see perfect head-high A-frames coming in, glassy, lined up like corduroy almost double-digit deep. What a surprise!

I’ve been riding the fish religiously for the past few months. I’ve really grown to love it. I bought it almost 5 years ago and rode it off and on, as an alternative to the shortboards I usually ride. Over the past few months, I’ve learned how to really turn the fish on, I can ride it almost like a shortboard, even for a twin keel. The fish is on its last legs. It’s more ding plug, now, than actual board. Every time I try to fix one of the broken tails, just the pressure of its own weight while standing the board vertical breaks them again. And it’s starting to de-lam in several places, in some spots it feels “squishy”. Marco is taking the fish back to the lab to shape a “son of the fish” with the same exact dims. I’m thinking of putting some Marlin Bacon 101 bamboo fins on it, glass-on of course.

Meanwhile, back at the spot I was surfing the singlefin egg for the first time in a few odd months and in head-high conditions. My first few waves were skittery, skatey and unsure. Kookville, as my legs were stuck in more of a shortboard stance as my back foot reached for the tail and the board skitted all over in jittery, unflattering carves. I finally remembered that you can’t sit on the tail of the singlefin, you gotta walk it. So I moved up the board, feet almost together and slotted the rail in the wave and the singlefin lit up. My turns were long, deep and sure with the rail pitted, the singlefin loves it when my weight is in the middle of the board. I used every foot of the deck, walking up and back to adjust to the part of the wave. I even had a killer floater as two wave sections collided. I kinda reconnected with the idea that each board has its own experience and requires different skills. Each board has its own feel, my surf stoke hit eleven.

Marco has been experimenting in the lab with parabolic epoxy boards. Today he was riding what I call “The Crazy”, a 6′2″ carbon-fiber, epoxy-core, parabolic stringer, bat-tail, quad with FCS CRV fins installed. Marco has a checkered flag/hot-rod design theme on it, but I thought it should have a picture of some wolf man on the bottom, pure lab-generated monster. We switched boards mid-way through the session and I got to try “The Crazy”. It took a few minutes to get used to the thinness of the deck, much less foam than I’ve been riding lately. But man this board hums down the line. I struggled to properly place my back foot with no traction pad to guide me, but when I hit the sweet spot my carves were juicy. The quad set-up felt like I had a mini outboard motor pushing me along, this board is fast. I dropped in to one wave only to see it closing out, as I hit the whitewater I boasted a big fatty air to floater (that probably means a tiny little mini-air to floater), and dropped six feet or so to the bottom of the colliding sections. Stoked again.

Back on the beach, I grabbed the camera and snapped photos of various peoples, boards, etc… I met this old school surfer crony, his name is Ricardo and people call him “Abuelo” (grand-dad). He knocks jokes back a mile a minute and held the award for the weirdest board award. Ricardo was riding a foam-top he probably bought at Sam’s Club and hacked it from 8 feet to 6 and moved the fins to about an inch from the hacked-off tail (which was never properly sealed). The fins were too small, so he made larger fin casings out of bleach-bottle plastic and literally sowed them with wire and bolted them on to the fins underneath. The board looked like a frankenstein version of a mini-sims. Ricardo totally ripped on the board like a longboard pro and he says he likes the foam top because of the hard bottom edges. I got a bunch of good portraits of Ricardo and his board. But I’m telling you all of this instead of showing you, because after shooting a roll of film, back at the house when I went to eject the roll of film, I opened up the camera to find no film inside. Awesome Dude!

Overall, a killer session minus one total noob screw-up.

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Liz Cockrum

siren01photo by Liz Cockrum

Liz Cockrum’s Sirens will be showing at Eric Phleger Gallery.
Artist reception on June 27, 6-8 pm.
828 North Coast Hwy 101
Leucadia, CA.

Liz Cockrum makes beautiful photographs, but more than that, she tells a story. There is a line that runs through all her photos. That line is the relationship between the photographer and her subjects. When I look at Liz’s photos, I see fine art, but I see it carried out with the precision of a photojournalist. Further, where photojournalism often tells a story in a detached and clinical manner, Liz’s photos break this boundary. The storytelling aspect of photojournalism is still there but the photographer and subject share a personal relationship, one of common interests.

From her artists statment about Sirens:

My intention with this body of work is to celebrate the courageous and innovative females who are pioneering this shift towards a more positive, open surf culture. These images speak to broader ideas related to women in modern society, the power of determination and sub-cultures within a larger community. Through portraits, landscapes and details I want to explore a little-seen side of surfing, and focus the viewer’s attention on the individuals who are an integral part of a unique culture.

Beautiful work and words and great blog too.

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Process Redux

RoRo | photo: Ed Fladung
self-portraitself-portrait | photo: Ed Fladung

cookie the legendCookie the Legend (uluwatu) | photo: Ed Fladung

Experimenting with processes analog and digital.

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Mattson Family Art Benefit – June 26

MATTSON_BENEFIT_FINAL11X17 2_500Poster art by Julie Goldstein, designed by Mark Tesi

PineappleLuv: Mattson Family Art Benefit – June 26

California surfing and art collecting and surf-art collecting peeps and general all-round quality peeps: the Mattson Family Art Benefit is next Friday, June 26th. It’s a silent auction to help The Mattsons recover from some gnarly medical troubles. The auction will be held at Surfindian in Pacific Beach, San Diego. Jamie Watson, mizz Pineapple Luv is the benefit curator and she has more info on her blogarooney.

A bunch of rad folks donated their art to the benefit, there’s even a ¡VW Bocho! piece in there by yours truly. So go support a good cause.

L.A peeps this is reason enough to get down to SD, make a day of it and hit up all the area breaks before the show. Do it!

Featured Artists:

Alberto Cuadros, Andrew Paynter, Andy Davis, Candace Anderson, Chivo, Ciro Bicudo, David Hanson, Droog79, Dustin Ortiz, Ed Fladung, Frank Cubillos, Heather Brown, Jair Bortoleto, Jamie Watson, Jay Watson, Jenny McGee Dougherty, Jessica Nichols, John Zane Zappas, Joseph Conway, Julie Goldstein, Justin Furniss, Kassia Meador, Katrine Hildebrandt, Kieron ‘Seamouse’ Lewis, Kim Nguyen, Kyle Lightner, Lindsay Preston, Liz Cockrum, Luke Taaffe, Maggie Marsek, Meegan Feori, Michael Singman-Aste, Peter Jackson Hussey, Peter McBride, Renata Morrone, Rick Albano, Ryan Tatar, Serena Mitnik-Miller, Scott Massey, Scott Szegeski, Ted ‘Clayfin’ Gallup, Theo Hetherington, Thomas Campbell, Tiffany Campbell, Todd Stewart, Troy Dockins, Ty Williams and Yusuke Hanai.

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Iran’s Disputed Election

i01_19361479 2_500photo: OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP/Getty Images
i18_19370691 2_500photo: REUTERS/Stringer

Iran’s Disputed Election – The Big Picture – Boston.com

Amazing pictures and in-depth captions and reporting up at The Big Picture. I’ve been following along and I can’t believe my eyes. Huge protests and government backed militias and police squaring off over contested election results from last Friday’s presidential election where based on voter turnout pretty much everyone thought the opposition/moderate/reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi won by a landslide, yet when it came time to call the election, election officials said that hardliner current prez Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “won by a landslide”. And from there the protests started.

Power to the people.

This quote seems eerily fitting:

What Ahmadinejad needs right now is Katherine Harris, some hanging chads and Chief Justice Rehnquist. Oh yeah, and a totally docile public. – @AdamIsacson

You can follow protests and news from Iran in real time via twitter hashtag #iranelections. Since all news and broadcasts are being censored, there are hundreds of Iranian twitter users who have taken it upon themselves to cover the protests and subsequent government initiated violence. Here is a Tweet Grid of several people twitcasting directly from within Iran. Twitter is the go-to place to get real-time information and most internet savvy media outlets like the Huff Post are filtering in semi-live curated tweets to their Iran Election coverage.

Relatedly: does anyone still doubt the power/importance of Twitter? If so, go here.

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Bookmarks for June 15th

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Colima

colimaphoto by Ed Fladung

Greetings from Colima.

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The Sasquatch and The Ballerina

sasquatchphoto by Ed Fladung

ballerinaphoto by Ed Fladung

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