My Granddaughter Was Six Months Old Yesterday. That's All.

Bruce Brown

Summer means many different things to different people. To some it might mean the thrill of a high speed catamaran. Others like to float around and soak up a few stray rays. Still others like some kind of inland activity. But for us, it's the sport of surfing.

The first trick was to find a camera that was waterproof, and there weren't too many of those in the 1950's.  He had taken many, many photos and much 8mm film of the surf and the surfers with other cameras, beginning with some photos he made for his mother when he was a high school kid so that she could see that the surfing he did [mostly instead of going to high school] wasn't dangerous and wouldn't result in a broken neck.  Although, to be fair, the waves where he surfed in Alamitos Bay could be wild, even in the days before the construction of the Long Beach breakwall, but what sons don't keep a little bit from their mothers?

Anyway, Brown enjoyed the water and the surf, no surprise since he hung out at the Huntington Beach pier, the place that bears the closest resemblance to my view of the Kingdom of Heaven, and equally enjoyed trying to capture the kinetic action of surfing on film.  So much so that he joined the Navy out of high school and made sure he graduated at the top of his class in submarine school so that he would have his choice of assignments.  He chose Hawaii, the home of Waikiki, the North Shore, Waimea, and the Banzai Pipeline.

After the Navy he became a life guard in San Clemente, trying to save money for that rad camera that would make all the difference, when he heard that the master surfboard shaper, Dale Velzy, was offering $5000 for a film that would highlight the Velzy surf team and the company's product.  This was 1957, when $5000 had the buying power that over $40,000 has today.  This would mean not only a waterproof camera but travel and living expenses for a whole year.  So, in a mad gamble, Brown quit his day job, took the money, bought the camera, and lived out of his beater Ford for the next year.  All he did was surf, sleep in the car, travel back and forth from California and Hawaii, and, oh, yes, take miles of 8mm film of surf, surfers, surfing life, and surfing styles.  The result was the documentary Slippery When Wet, narrated by Brown with a soundtrack by the mildly demented alto saxophonist, Bud Shank.

There were other surf films at the time, but none had the laid-back panache of Brown's.  As was the custom in the late 1950's, these films would be shown in high school auditoriums, at midnight shows in local movie theaters, or even on the outside walls of buildings on Friday or Saturday nights in SoCa.  Sometimes, they would not even have sound and the filmmakers would narrate them live.  Not only did Brown's film offer a soundtrack, he gradually, over the course of making Slippery's sequels, Surf Crazy, Barefoot Adventure, Surfing Hollow Days and Waterlogged, learn how to distribute a surfing documentary so that it could be released like any Hollywood film. 

What surfers once looked like when they traveled.  Heck, what everyone once looked like when they traveled. August, Hynson, and Brown boarding a plane.

The crowning achievement was realized in the documentary, Endless Summer, which was initially released to a growing collection of West Coast theaters in 1964, gradually working its way east where, two years later, it would bring the surfing ethos to a small barrier island in New Jersey where, on a rainy afternoon with nothing else to do, a nine-year-old from Ohio would see it with his father and begin an Ahab-esque fascination with the pursuit.  The nine-year-old wasn't alone.  Perhaps only the Holy Bible has so dramatically altered so many lives, but that may be an excessive observation.  Still, Endless Summer is regarded, without question, as the greatest movie about surfing that has ever been made.

Here's an academic description of the film:
"In his narration, Brown muses that if someone had enough time and money, they could literally follow the summer around the globe, and so Brown and two of his surfing buddies, Robert August and Mike Hynson, decide to do just that. With their surfboards as luggage, August and Henson travel from one coastline to the next, trying the waves in Hawaii, Africa, Australia, Tahiti, and a number of other nations where most folks had never even seen a surfboard before. Along the way, August and Hynson learn a lot about people around the world, and grow up a bit while they search for the elusive perfect wave."

Here's what Roger Ebert had to say:
"The peculiar charm of "The Endless Summer" is something I haven't got quite worked out in my mind yet. This is all the more strange because here, at last, is a completely uncomplicated film, fresh and natural, designed only to please. It does."

If people thought that surfing was about Frankie, Annette and playing bingo on a beach blanket, or what was captured in the insipid songs of the Beach Boys, Endless Summer rectified that misconception.  It is by turns lyrical and absurd, comical and rather sweetly touching; it is very much a product of those particular days in the middle of the 1960's, before drugs, Charlie Manson [another fellow who enjoyed hanging out in Huntington Beach, by the way], and the rancid horror of Vietnam began to discolor history.  The two surfers of the film, August and Hynson, reflect in their personal histories the twin experiences of surfing in the period now known as post-Summer.

Robert August took the smart route, turning his minor celebrity into a surfboard conglomerate that also offers skateboards, clothing, and anything else that feeds the surfing lifestyle.  He still surfs in HB or at his estate in Costa Rica and looks about twenty years younger than his age.  Hynson chose the stupid path and surrendered to drug addiction and smuggling, joined a notorious criminal gang and took the better part of four tragic decades to re-build his life.  To see those two young men in the film is to see a portion of our own history, with its successes and its excesses, revealed in an uncommon pursuit for the perfect wave.

Brown would continue to create documentaries, not all of them about surfing.  In the early 1970's, he would join with actor Steve McQueen to make a motorcycle racing documentary titled On Any Sunday, which would be nominated for an Academy Award.  There would also be a sequel in Endless Summer II, but the times had changed by 1994 and the charm in that film is a little forced.

Brown still lives by the ocean, managing his catalog of fims and giving interviews.  In a recent story, he spoke of his next goal: "Robert August sent me a new board -- for a fat man. He called and said, 'What are you doing, letting the resin cure?' I've been quite the hodad lately, but I'll be back at it soon."

All of his films, including those early black-and-white ones, are available in downloadable form via Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime or what have you.

Here's the original trailer for Endless Summer.  I won't watch it until the end because I will suddenly have the urge to go out to the garage and wax my [Robert August] surfboard.

Thursday's Verses

Come, thou Holy Spirit, come,
and from thy celestial home
shed a ray of light divine!
Come, thou Father of the poor!
Come, thou Source of all our store!
Come, within our bosoms shine!

Thou, of comforters the best;
thou, the soul's most welcome guest;
sweet refreshment here below;
in our labor, rest most sweet;
grateful coolness in the heat;
solace in the midst of woe.

O most blessèd Light divine,
shine within these hearts of thine,
and our inmost being fill!
Where thou art not, man hath naught,
nothing good in deed or thought,
nothing free from taint of ill.

Heal our wounds, our strength renew;
on our dryness pour thy dew;
wash the stains of guilt away;
bend the stubborn heart and will;
melt the frozen, warm the chill;
guide the steps that go astray.

On the faithful, who adore
and confess thee, evermore
in thy sevenfold gift descend;
give them virtue's sure reward
give them thy salvation, Lord;
give them joys that never end.

What Is It About Harvard People And E-Mail?

Harvard Dean Steps Down Following Secret Searches of E-Mail Accounts

Unfortunately, This Doesn't Come As A Surprise, Either

100,000 Christians die for faith every year: Vatican

This Comes As No Surprise To Law Enforcement, Clergy, Heathcare Pros, Etc. Just To Politicians, Reporters, And University Professors

“The most comprehensive review of the scholarly domestic violence research literature ever conducted concludes, among other things, that women perpetrate physical and emotional abuse, as well as engage in control behaviors, at comparable rates to men. The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project, or PASK, whose final installment was just published in the journal Partner Abuse, is an unparalleled three-year research project, conducted by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centers, and including information on 17 areas of domestic violence research.”

Tuesday's Wave

"We can know what God is not, but we cannot know what He is." —St. Augustine

Memorial Day

Memorial Day in Roxbury means at least a couple of things, from the fun of our very particular town parade to the quiet witness of small American flags sprinkled throughout the three cemeteries.  Below is the collect for today:

Lord God Almighty, who have made all peoples of the earth for your glory, to serve you in freedom and peace: Grant to the people of our country a zeal for justice and the strength of forbearance, that we may use our liberty in accordance with your gracious will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Sometimes the old poetry teacher in me comes out, too.  Below, A.E. Housman's "Here Dead We Lie":
 
Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.

Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.

[For Jeff and Scott, who were young; and for those of the 1/4th Marines who fought the good fight and kept the faith.  "Whatever It Takes."]

Yes. Next Question.

Did Eric Holder lie in Congressional testimony last week?

Yes. Next Question.

The Atlantic: The IRS Scandal Is a Test: Is It Too Hard to Fire Misbehaving Bureaucrats?

Dingo

It was called Dingo’s Beach Club and it wasn’t on any of the tourist maps. Actually, it wasn’t on any map at all as it existed mostly in the mind of a fourteen-year-old Mexican entrepreneur [empresario], with the help of what appeared to be a battalion of his siblings. Dingo, whose Christian name was Domingo, had claimed by right of imagination a portion of beachfront on the Costa Maya near the border with Belize where there was nothing except the ruins of what was once going to be a 3000 room hotel. As could often happen south of the border, the financial backing for the hotel evaporated, leaving a partially poured foundation that featured a phalanx of rusted rebar jutting from concrete that was cracking in the sun. When Dingo arrived on the scene, it served mostly as a home to iguana.

So, like any enterprising young person, Dingo found some discarded beach chairs and torn umbrellas [well, some may have been “found” at the hotel beaches in Playa del Carmen], arranged them in a pleasant crescent on the beach, “bought” a cooler, ice, sodas and baked goods from the local Bimbo [that’s a bakery and market chain in Mexico, just so you know], and painted a driftwood sign that simply said “Dingo’s”, with an arrow pointing towards the beach. To help generate traffic, Dingo also offered the driver of the local pollo bus a piece of the action if he would stop at the entrance to the property to “check the bus’s radiator”. “But only if he carries turistas”, Dingo explained to me.

No one came, of course, because Dingo’s had to compete with luxury hotels and well-maintained beaches from Cancun to Tulum; until the day when a couple of surfers realized that Dingo’s Beach Club was the site of one of the best surf breaks on the eastern coast of Mexico.

“Senior Whiskers [pronounced whee-skers], that was the day when my thoughts became eléctrico. That is the day when this became Dingo’s Beach and Surfing Club”, he explained to me.

Not having the backing, however transient, of a bank or brace of investors, Dingo harvested discarded portions of fiberglass hulls from boats in a repair yard in nearby Puerto Aventuras, cut them with an old hacksaw into the rough shape of a commercial bodyboard, sanded down the edges, and offered them for rent for a mere 10 pesos a day. Plus gratuity. The day after his first rentals, he had his sister sew pieces of old wetsuits into bands that could be worn around the hands of the bodyboarders, since Dingo’s sanding of the ragged fiberglass edges would not have satisfied any heath and safety inspection. Plus, having renters cut open their palms tended to reduce the attractiveness of renting.

“It is my own line of boards. Is it not eléctrico?” I had to agree that it was.

It was a pleasant place to surf, although one could not let go of one’s board, as it would suddenly become group property. Even if the price of lukewarm Bimbo soda was a little steep [“Twenty pesos, but tax free.”], Dingo was a good host and a number of gringo surfers would stop by, admire his organizational skills, stay away from the deadly Dingo bodyboards, surf that funky break all day long, get their pictures taken with Dingo [tax free], and enjoy some time at what was one of the last undeveloped beaches in Mexico.

Everything has a lifespan, of course. I had hoped to return to the Costa Maya the next winter, but work got in the way. The year after that, Hurricane Wilma hung around the coastline for four days and stripped the landscape of trees, the homes and hotels of their roofs, and, as I discovered, altered the sea bottom so that the wonderful surf break disappeared. By the time I returned, nearly four years later, Dingo’s Beach Club, and Dingo, had disappeared and some Mexican surfers had started to put up a small village of bungalows by the beach. They were half-built and abandoned, of course.

No one I spoke with knew of what happened to Dingo and his siblings, but I figured wherever he was, it was going to be eléctrico.

[Excerpt from Reading Water, all rights reserved ©2011]

From Federalist 25 By Alexander Hamilton

“The people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.”

Archaeological News

Structure at bottom of Sea of Galilee could reveal secrets of ancient life in Middle East

Good For Them

The NYC city council has just passed a resolution allowing religious groups to worship in public schools, taking a stand on a decades-old controversy. Since 1994, state legislators and activists with a radical interpretation of the First Amendment have been trying to evict New York City churches from public schools. The official New York City Board of Education policy forbids religious institutions from renting public schools, a restriction that applies to no other type of organization. Churches and their supporters have been fighting back, and the battle over the enforcement of this policy has taken a serpentine path though both state legislative bodies and state and national courts.

Thursday's Verses

Dance, my heart! dance to-day with joy

The strains of love fill the days and the nights with music,
and the world is listening to its melodies:

Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this music.
The hills and the sea and the earth dance.
The world of man dances in laughter and tears.

Why put on the robe of the monk,
and live apart from the world in lonely pride?

Behold! my heart dances in the delight of a hundred arts;
and the Creator is well pleased.

                                                                                - Tagore

I Wish He Had Tried To Stop Chris Stevens' Bleeding

President Obama tries to stop the bleeding

The gov Slides Gently Off The Rails

Malloy: ‘There’s A Reality That 19,000 People Are Going To Commit Suicide Because There’s A Gun In Their House’

Depression, the reason for most suicides, occurs with or without a gun in the home and those who are determined in their self-slaughter will fulfill that desire.

But At Least People Are Safe From Tobacco, Soda, Salt, and Trans Fats; So There!

New York City seeing spike in anti-gay crime, officials say

At Least He Wasn't Named "Moon Unit" or "Apple"

"Nolan Ryan's Oldest Son Named Astros President"--headline, Associated Press, May 20

Always Great For Connecticut To Make The National Conversation

So ... Never mind that Connecticut passed exactly the sort of restrictive gun control laws that Senators Murphy and Blumenthal favor; the fact that Congress rejected such legislation amidst extensive discussion of practical, constitutional and philosophical issues is taken to impose a moral obligation to surrender money as some sort of purchase of absolution. 

It's not unusual for politicians to simply assume the unquestionable moral rectitude of their positions and the matching bankruptcy of their opponents. After all, if they weren't arrogant and even a bit monstrous they wouldn't be in a profession that exists to threaten people with fines and prison for refusing to bend to their will. But this is the first time I've seen a price put on voting the "wrong" way.