surfing and deep thinking
Series two.
A fantasy.
< This here pic is of Art Faunce meeting Ted McDing at a Maroubra get-together last month, hard to believe it but this was the first time they ever ran into each other in the water.
There.
You see, a statement like that, in surfing context, means they ran into each other. Like they didn’t just accidentally meet, which is what running into someone means outside of the surfing context. Except not only in surfing did they run into each other, they also accidentally met.
See?
Round and around we go.
This is why surfing is different and surfers are strange dumb animals of only moderate intent. You can’t ever become a surfer, you have to be born one, and being born one means you can understand all ^ that.
So much for philosophy.
The question just about everyone can understand is this .. should Art have jammed a TC style heel-down snap-back cover in that little open pocket there, and possibly speared Ted an inch coming out, or should he have just gone for the overhead view of the carnage McDing has already created by swanking off a Sainsbury floater ?
header poster of tc pipe snap by redbubble
petebowes.com 
Pete, I think you’re missing the point here… it’s probably time you settled down with a glass of chunky Barossa red and dipped into some German cultural theory.
A bit of, dare I say it, ‘deep thinking’?
Yes, I’m talking Walter Benjamin… but I’m betting you already knew that, you cagey old bastard. I’ll wager you posted this JUST to provoke some schmuck like me to drag Walter, kicking and screaming, into this rather messy mix.
Am I right? of course I am. This harmless little meeting of minds (Art’s and Ted’s, not ours) is not what it seems.
The depersonalising ‘gaze’ of the lens has caught, no… I’ll go further – it has transfixed Art and Ted in one solitary and overtly gendered moment.
One frame Pete, one frame in a whole sequence of lived experience. My point, I hear you ask?
Let’s disregard Art for one moment… he doesn’t look too steady in any case, and unless he jams a heel pretty damn quickly he’ll be rolling around in the foam teasing a 14′ white-pointer in his too-tight seal suit.
Ted’s situation is different, very different. How?
It’s eminently recoverable, that’s how. Yes, go on… laugh! But I happen to know that Ted used to pull this move over and over again; first in the privacy of his own bedroom and then, when he had it down smooth as silk, in bigger waves than that one.
One frame beyond this artificial ‘fixing’ of Ted McDing something miraculous happens! Ted pushes back off his shoulders, tucks his feet under his torso, half-spins to starboard and is back on his feet! 🙂
One of the nicest carving bottom turns you’re ever likely to see and Ted’s slotted into the pocket and heading north.
I guess you’re still a little perplexed at the ‘overtly gendered’ reference? Two grown men in, what seems, a combative and highly masculine moment… there’s testosterone oozing out of that image.
Do you agree? Of course you do.
Anyway, back to gender… Ted and Art became very close friends after this incident. In fact, they left their wives and families and set up house together in Balmain. You might’ve seen them on the ‘surfer-themed’ float in the 2011 Gay Mardi-Gras… it was truly stupendous!
They were both wearing their black seal suits (with appropriate rips and tears), Art was doing Ted Spencer knee-bend cutbacks and McDing reverse shoulder-flips all the way down Oxford Street.
You should’ve been there Pete! 🙂
you ain’t going to like the next one
Try me.
Ted McDing’s not the only surfer who can recover from seemingly impossible situations in the privacy of his own bedroom.
each sentence “had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes”, a “freeze-frame baroque” style of writing and cogitation. “His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct”.
ok, that’s Benji by susan sontag out of wikiP – this is a surf blog
My point exactly.
Bravo, back to Mick and his messages to the hopeful and hopeless 🙂
Ya gotta have a KG of Peruvian marching powder onboard before ya try to truly replicate a TC turn
Are you suggesting that Tom had some sort of IV Peruvian drip line inside his helmet with a direct feed to his frontal lobe?
That’s what you’d need pete, TC was born on the buzz
well worded old chap , most of the names of that epoch as it unfolds, where born on the Buzz
And once they blow their loot they go running to the media to sell their story in the hope of getting some more loot I wonder if Saint Nick will sprout some of his nicksthompson type plagiarism on this one
soap fucking opera .. next we’ll get the newport plus underbelly series.
Is that a gun in those tight boardshorts or are you just happy to be in a boy band
Here’s a poem
Strange Dumb Animals of a Moderate Intent
Love is all, Love is all
Tuozon Arizona
Get back JoJo
Get back, Get back
O, yeah
Looking through a glass onion
Fuck, that’s a good poem
give it a rest knocknuts …
ok