| vagabondsurf.com It's about life - not "lifestyle" |
| "YOU AND YOUR BREED..." PAGE 3 |
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| "Anyone having the misfortune of stumbling into your website would likely come away with the impression that surfing is primarily composed of eccentrics riding the bizarre!" I wish. Once upon a time that was how all surfers were seen, but those days are long gone. Surfing IS the mainstream now, of that you can be sure. Anything seen as different or unusual within surfing is simple "non-conforming material", which any decent quality control system would scrap out. But when you look just a little deeper what you see is a probably unintended evil lurking. The non-surf world knows surfing through media images. At the lowest level it's things like the Honda Element commercials, which have their own sly humor, but are made by and for non-surf people. The ad designers soak up the genre magazines for imagery and attitude. If what they primarily see are the Shorty Magazines, or Longboard, then they come away with a view of a narrow segment of surfing which in itself is transitory. I could go on and on about this - in fact this whole website pretty much can be a runon about this very subject - but let's fast forward. If the baseline of modern surfing is 14-24 year old males on 6'2" thrusters, what happens when you don't or no longer fit that mold? And why should anyone let marketing forces define you and your life experiences? Surfing is ripe and ready for a New Revolution right now. The whole planet is being surfed, the extremes of wave height are being explored, and all kinds of equipment and manufacturing methods are in play. My personal guess is that any surfing revolution now will start between the ears of the surfers, not between the covers of a magazine. It may indeed be more than half mental, and we need to be Feeding the Heads something healthy, rather than stuffing them with shallow brain candy. The currently espoused notion that Surfing = Walking On Water is the final affront. Is everybody who can stand on a board Jesus? The advertising wants to make you think so. But was Jesus all about "F^#king S*@t Up", as a recent Rusty ad campaign so eloquently highlighted? Is that what standup surfing is all about? |
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| That's what it's all about. How you do it isn't important. |
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