Siesta
taken next door to “Tacos el Gordo” between Bucerias and Mezcales.
Surf Video Redux
I’ve been messing around with Thumber and some old surf videos I made a few years back. I like the mosaic-style. These would be super cool as printed posters. It seems that the longer the movie is, the smaller the frames get and the more abstract the mosaic becomes.
Peep the source videos: Saturday Morning Sliding and Sunday Log Rolling.
This was inspired by Brendan Dawes’ Cinema Redux project. I think I’ve linked to him before.
Bookmarks for August 21st
- Crazy Sprinkler Lady | Today's BIG Thing
"Open your eyes, people. The government is putting rainbows in our water supply." - Nouriel Roubini's blog
this guy is a total pessimist when it comes to the economy, but he's been completely right so far. if you want a litmus test of how things are going, this is the guy to check. survey says: things are not looking good. - Dr. Doom - Profile - Nouriel Roubini - Predicting Crisis in the United States Economy - NYTimes.com
"On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."
know the ledge. - Headlines - The Morning News
TMN has a a great links list they call "Headlines" for news oriented links. If the folks at the Jon Stewart show put out a news link list, it'd look like this. it even has an rss feed. I've been reading it over the past month or so, and it has grown to be one of my morning coffee musts. go grab it. - SuperTouch » NYC///OPENINGS: THE YEAH YEAH YEAHS’ NICK ZINNER AT FUSE GALLERY
amazing photos. amazing show.
Art is
via my uncle Timbo:
Art is
more expensive than sausages
more expensive than women
more expensive than anything
Tinariwen on the speakers.
Jamie Robinson
photo by Jamie Robinson
Jamie Robinson is a young brit who’s living in Vallarta with his mexicana girlfriend, Viry. He’s learning to surf and documenting his life along the way on his blog. Jamie is a dawn patrol kinda surfer. He’s got a camera and brings it with him most of the time. It’s great to see another surfer out there docu-ing the local scene. Go have a peek.
Field Notes
Still working furiously. 18 hour days. no joke. strapped to the computer, my arm has a rash from this cheap Ikea MDF desk. I’m going blind. I’m trying to wrap things up in time for our trip next week to NYC. Summer is in full swing and by the time we get back I fully expect Vallarta to be deader than a doornail. Septhambre. That’s fine, more waves for me.
It’s been raining like mad this past week. After two weeks of absolutely no rain, all the green jungle vegetation was starting to turn brown. Last Thursday, a torrential downpour sent water flowing into our kitchen and living room from a door to our open air service room. The sight was totally out of place, Marcia and I both had to take a second to register what was happening. It must have rained 12 inches in a 6 hour period. insane.
We’re being infested with ants. Rather than kill them all with some noxious poison, I put out some sugar water in a bowl to divert their attention from our trash. They loved it. They went home and told their friends. And their friends told their friends. After a few days we had ant trails all over the house. It took me about a week to figure out that I needed to put the bowl outside.
You can tell I haven’t gotten out of the house much lately, huh?
The surf has been dead. I’m sure there’s been some small waves here and there, but no real swells to speak of. This summer has been a total bummer. We are mid way through the season and we’ve only had 3 storm systems pass our way. Last summer we had something like 14. Something about the storm angle being off and heavier than normal jetstream flow across Chile. Global bummer.
For anyone keeping tabs, the seedling is coming along nicely. We’re in the 18th week and he is of the male variety. We’re slowly circling in on a name. Something that sounds good in both english and spanish, and that isn’t easily twisted in school yard fun. A hard criteria.
Club Of The Waves
Club Of The Waves is a wicked surf culture and art site packed with surfing lore from artist and photography profiles to surf history, environmentalism, charity and user forums. It’s a great information resource, I’ve lost countless hours of valuable surf time perusing its intimidating amount of content. Andrew is the site’s curator and publisher. I hoping to see the spirit of COTW transitioned to art shows and books.
I’m honored to have been recently included in the photographer profiles.
If you don’t already know about The Club, head on over and don’t make any plans, it’s addictive. I especially dig the Where in the World… feature. It allows you to search artists and photographers by location – google maps style. PDNonline just launched something similar, PhotoServe (albeit slightly more involved), today actually. In other words, Andrew is ahead of the tech curve.
Maya Hayuk
paintings by Maya Hayuk
I’ve been diggin on the art work of Maya Hayuk recently. Her kaleidoscopic / day-glow / geometric / handmade/ abstractness is really doing it for me, right about now. You might have seen her work on the front of Mollusk NYC, which shares a building with her studio. Incidentally, they call the building Monster Island1. Fecal Face has a great interview with Maya, from Feb’08 and Etsy just put out a video feature on Maya’s work as well. I was poking around her site when I ran into her photography, it turns out she’s an accomplished photographer as well. Peep these shots from a brazilian mag called Trip of the Beastie Boys, amazing! [via Wooster]
- two words: RAD! ↩
Bookmarks for August 18th
- SPIEGEL ONLINE - The Dangerous Neighbor: Vladimir Putin Takes on a Powerless West - International
Complete guide to the current Russia/Georgia conflict. very good read. [via JM Colberg] - An alternative to sIFR: Facelift Image Replacement
great for bloggy headers n stuff. good technique. - WordPress › Facelift Image Replacment (FLIR)
FLIR plugin for wordpress. nice - OIL ADDICTION
great animation. - Crazy Neighbors, Bureaucracy Lead To Closure of Doughboys on 3rd Street
A sad and harrowing story about the closure of "Dough Boys" one of my favorite 3rd street + Crescent Heights eateries. what a fucking shame. I totally believe this guy got majorly railroaded. I miss their french onion soup and redonkulously baguettes. - Script Review: 'Where The Wild Things Are' Is Magical, Though Not Necessarily Totally Flawless
absolutely mesmerizing look at the screenplay. this is my must-see movie of the year. - Ocean 'dead zones' becoming global problem - CNN.com
"there are now more than 400 dead zones around the world, double what the United Nations reported just two years ago."They discovering new dead zones all over the world. We have our own floating version, here in Vallarta.
- Andrew Gransden Photography - Wedding, Lifestyle and Nature Photography in Scotland
nice design for a photography portfolio. big huge header images, but not sure i dig the lightbox for viewing portfolio images. it does showcase his images very well. - Bacevich on Moyers
know the ledge: "Andrew J. Bacevich, the retired Army Colonel and International Relations expert, who's become one of the most insightful critics of contemporary American militarism" - Ryan McGinley and Tim Barber's Disturbing New Wrangler Ads
great photos! - A film about debt | Another inconvenient truth | Economist.com
"David Walker, who until recently ran the Government Accountability Office, has made it his mission to get the nation to acknowledge and treat this “fiscal cancer”. His efforts form the core of a new documentary, “I.O.U.S.A.”, out on August 21st. The message is simple enough: America’s financial condition is a lot worse than advertised, and dumping it on future generations would be not only economically reckless but also immoral." - PhotoCalc — The Photographer's Calculator Application for iPhone and iPod touch
"PhotoCalc is a utility for iPhone and iPod for photographers to calculate exposure reciprocation, depth of field, and flash exposure.” this thing is awesome. I don't know if I'd actually ever use it out while shooting (plus I don't have or plan on getting an iPhone any time soon), but I'd definitely study the calculations and memorize a handful of useful ones.
Bookmarks for August 14th
- Sivers/Ferriss interview that will make you think
interesting bits from a Tim Ferriss interview. I especially loved the part about using Google Adwords to test the title of his book (the 4-Hour Work Week). brilliant idea. - YouTube - We Are The World Japan
this is untouchably classic. holy bells. - Planet° Magazine Travel Photo Contest
PLANET Magazine, a leading global culture lifestyle magazine blending the latest in contemporary art, music and fashion with coverage of distant cultures, unique travel experiences, and global awareness is pleased to announce our 1st annual Global Travel Photo Contest, with the ultimate Grand Prize: A round-the-world ticket, open for one year (or $1000 cash prize), with a 10-page portfolio assignment covering your trip to be published upon your return. - A tremor in Blingopolis - The Boston Globe
Dubai and oil: "For many here, the recent oil bonanza has revived memories of the boom of the 1970s. Then, too, the region was up to its eyeballs in liquidity, buying up large swaths of London and New York. And then -plop -oil went south and the good times came to an abrupt halt. In fact, while Americans look back on that period with a grim resolve that it never be repeated, so too do many Arabs. The entire episode is remembered now with collective shame -the idea that the region managed to parlay all that wealth into three decades of violent turmoil and harrowing poverty" - Twisted Sisters - CocoRosie - NYTimes.com
An exhaustive (and I do mean exhaustive) article on "freak folk" duo CocoRosie. go search out a track called tahitian rain song". perfect. - The Fernando Marti case: Presidents on alert *
mexico is still *no joke*, when mexican friends of mine say that Mexico is becoming to americanified, i think of scenarios like this. - TECH TIP III
great tech tip for automation of resizing of blog images. no photoshop required. this guy is smart! - Riviera Nayarit Celebrates First Year Anniversary With Impressive Record Of Achievement
two words: unchecked development. Good article to get a sense of the level of development that is plaguing Nayarit. This "growth" comes at the expense of the environment, public access to beaches, authentic culture, etc. with little to no government regulation. The silver lining: word on the street says that construction suppliers are refusing to dole out new supplies, because developers aren't paying their bills. that's not a good sign.
Rake | Thalia Surf Shop
Wow. Thalia Surf Shop has some beautiful new graphic/illustration t-shirt goodness coming from a line called “Rake”. Not much information on the interwebs about the new line or whose behind it, but the designs are stunning. They’re definitely channeling the spirit of Alexander Girard with an updated surf-culture aesthetic twist.
me likes. me takes one of each. me thanks you in advance.
Points North | Surf There Now
photo by Evan Asano
Evan at Surf There Now has a killer post: Points North - Surf Exploration In Northern Sumatra
The swell finally arrives. We wake up at dawn at a renowned surf break, a “secret spot” our guides insists that we keep unnamed. We are mesmerized by surf perfection. Waves start more than a mile out from our anchorage, open up wide on the shallow reef in a blue barrel and reel across it in beautiful groomed lines. There are few waves in the world that break with this consistency and length.
For the next two days we surf until we can’t any more. The wave has broken two of our boards and torn the fins off of two others. We’ve been spun on wipe-outs to the point of not knowing up from down and been dragged across the sharp reef. We are sunburned, chafed, and exhausted. By the time the swell subsides, we’re too spent to surf anymore. It’s everything we’ve traveled across the world for.
I dream of shit like this constantly. Awesome! and it made for a great ‘morning cereal and coffee’ read. The article and accompanying photos are published in recently shuttered Everywhere mag1. Thanks Evan!
- what a shame! ↩
Bookmarks for August 8th
- How Hollister Co. Stole Surf: Eight Years After Abercrombie & Fitch Invaded The Surf Market, What Can be Done To Defend Against Them? | Transworld Business
very interesting article. and doesn't dood look a little jacked? Incidentally, on Hollister in Mexico: that shit is *everywhere*. - Thomas Frank, "The Wrecking Crew," interview | Salon Books
Thomas Frank on the Bush administration: Sabotage by designThe author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?" discusses the corrosive relationship between conservatives and business, liberal bias and his new book about Republican misrule.
- Watercolor Roundup: 200+ Beautiful Brushes and Textures | Design Reviver
link pilfered from Stevey. - RYZ sneakers
"crowd sourcing" designs for sneakers. think "threadless" for shoes. interesting. but my question is: what's up with the snow boots? - YouTube - IBOGAINE IN THE NEWS
SF Kron 4 report on Ibogaine a hallucinogenic herb from south africa that seems to cure drug addiction. there's tons of post-ibogaine treatment testimonials on youtube. Very interesting drug. - ibogaine treatment testimonial / awakening in the dream
There is an Ibogaine drug addiction treatment program near Sayulita, called "Casa Iboga". 23 year old talks about her treatment on the psychedelic herb. - Water found on Mars
amazing image. - Blogging Behind Bars
convicted drug dealer bogs about the deplorable conditions in his arizona jail and has the posts smuggled out by family and posted to the internets. awesome!
Potato Chip Love
Head to the grindstone, little action on the blog means this bwoy is busy bees. Working on epic book version of this blog. keep yer eye out wee lad. 14 hour work days = almost two weeks without water, not much swell to speak of, so haven’t missed much. On evidence of slight uptick in swell, went last night to the favorite walled-up bowl break. At first glance, flat as can be. With patience – waist to chest high pulses rolling through. The potato chip handles nice tight S-carves and fatty whitewater floaters. For some odd reason I was super connected to the board, personal form in fine style. ‘Twas one a my best, mellowest sessions in months. I truly digs dema small waves, I can get open on knee highs and potato chips.
Back to worky, meh sez.
5′10″ by Jim Moriarty
Jim Moriarty, CEO of Surfrider Foundation, has a new semi-annual videocast series called 5′10″1. The concept is to talk about 5 concepts in 10 minutes. Quick, simple and dialed in. The videocast format is a brilliant way for Jim to quickly update the masses on Surfrider’s focus and goals. Delivery of transparent information in a very quick and easy manner is the key here.
It’s great to see that Surfrider truly “gets” the power of the internets. I’m definitely inspired by Jim’s eloquence, focus and conceptual creativity2.
Bookmarks for July 31st
- A-Side Studio
makers of incredible beautiful design. - Top 25 documentaries | Kottke.org
suspiciously absent: Baraka and Riding Giants. - Christian the Lion
two guys adopt a lion cub. he grows too big. they re-introduce him to the wild. amazing video. i love stuff like this. it's subtitled, so turn down the volume, the soundtrack is horrocious. - Surfline | Who the F&*K Knows
good article on determining wave height. if you write about surfing, this is a helpful guide. - Wordpress - Clean Up Your Backend
great list of plugins that help you administer a wp site. stuff the user never sees, but makes your job 10x easier - Designing for WordPress - CSS-Tricks
video series to setting up and designing your own theme for WP. very cool. - The 2008 Helmut Newton photo machine
too bad they don't have anything like this for surfers
Andrew + Rockaway Taco
Super dialed-in güero hermano Andrew Field has opened up an authentic Mexican fish taco joint in Rockaway Beach (86th & Beach). It’s called Rockaway Taco and you can bet they’re the best tasting tacos you’ve ever had, outside of Mexico.
Andrew got a nice write-up from Soho Lunch, recently:
in any case. we had tofu tacos, fish tacos (beer battered talapia), and chorizo tacos. i ordered chips and guacamole and he actually cut up corn tortillas and fried them. i watched him make the guacamole himself. pretty impressive. it was cheap and good and made you forget about the projects behind you.1
All you New York sliders and Molluskonian trimmers, go out and support a surf bro on his quest to bring authentic mexican food to the hungry, cold water masses.
- Hey this chick doesn’t like capitalized letters either! ↩
Bookmarks for July 29th
- History of Marc Andreini's shaping | Goleta Surfing
great illustrated history of Andreini's shaping career. [via JDubSingles] - Mexican Nacionales in Nexpa 08
video from a recent contest in Nexpa - Nothing Happening Here | Delicious Ghost
wait for it… wait for it… - A Small Design Study Of Big Blogs | How-To | Smashing Magazine
interesting study on design trends for very large sites. lots of stuff here to help prevent you from having to re-create the wheel on your next web project - Video Premiere: Gnarls Barkley “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul?”
this video goes from crazy to really freaking crazy. i love it!
Kalle Carranza
I never get tired of watching Kalle Carranza do his thing. Kalle is Mexico’s most famous surfer and famously laid-back and humble. Part of the Reef team, Kalle travels and surfs. I spotted him on Facebook, where he’s slowly dropping crumbs on his travels through Thailand, Cambodia, Loas, Vietnam and now he’s in China.
Finding the Glide
How many times have I pulled up to the rock bluff overlooking the miles of raw coastline that contain my most frequented surf breaks. I pull out the binoculars to scout for waves and for crowds (or lack thereof). Only to find small waves and large crowds. Crushed enthusiasm, I say ferck it and head back home. I’m definitely guilty of embracing the skunk.
Things are different when you travel 1000 miles on an airplane for a surf trip. You take stock of the local swell report and choose your spot for the day wisely, but once you’re there in those strange waters, you can’t turn back. There’s no going home. You must find the glide. Every spot at every size, has a glide, a sweet spot, waiting for you to find it. Sometimes it takes a longboard. Sometimes it’s the thigh-high walled up inner section with the slow crouching thirty-foot ride. Sometimes it’s a kooked-out drop into the closing tube going the wrong direction. Whatever the conditions may be, the glide is there, somewhere, maybe not in plain view, maybe hidden away, but it’s most certainly there. You just have to look for it.
I re-discovered the glide this past week.
Rio Bonito
The Oregon/Nayarit surf blog bro-down extravaganza ended today with a drive up the coast to “Rio Bonito”, a juicy, sand-bottomed river mouth break, right around the corner from freakin’ nowhere. As the roles reversed, it was this intrepid Oregon crew who showed me, the itinerant Mexico rustaboot, a new spot. I don’t know how the hell these guys found their way to this little jammy, but believe me I know how to get back here. We caught the joint on a pretty mellow day, mostly closeout waist high, with an occasional head-high thumper. I dropped in on a few, with seconds of glide, ledge overhead to punch out the back and a few pearls as the singlefin kicked out from the steep angled drop. Even at small, closeout sizes, the waves were walled up nicely from the water exiting the river.
Rio Bonito wasn’t exactly firing, an epic day it wasn’t, but we all tried to get a little something. You can tell, though, that this spot gets huge, breaking in long flowing lines from both sides of the river mouth. Luckily Rick, Gabe and Ean have two more days to soldier on and with hints of incoming swell, hopefully they’ll be running to the plane on Saturday with wet swim trunks.
Marcia and I are headed up to Guadalajara for the weekend. And as per usual, that means a nice big swell should be rolling through. Ah the irony.
Bookmarks for July 24th
- New Bike Lanes Spotted Around LA | Los Angeles Metblogs
now this is something I can get behind! - Rodney Mullen | LoveLove Blog
entrancing video of Rodney Mullen talking about why he loves skateboarding. he's so open and emotive it's inspiring but slightly agitating as well. You can tell he gets deep, i'm not used to seeing that level of emotional honesty on youtube videos. - Eye-opener with a pitch - Las Vegas Sun
fox news gets shameless with sly, unethical product placement. why are the liquid levels exactly the same? and hers doesn't have lipstick on the straw. - "Why America Is Fucked" from the upcoming Draplin Project
despite what you may think, this is not political, it's cultural. NSFW, lots of good 'ol american cussing. - ENVIRONMENTAL TRAGEDY IN BALI | Surfline
From bad to worse: Taiwanese fishing boat dry-docked at Padang Padang; efforts to remove proving unsuccessful as new swell fills in.
Bookmarks for July 23rd
- Trying television: Mexico's emo riots on Current TV
Former LA Weekly staff writer Daniel Hernandez posts about a Current TV video piece summarizing this spring's "emo riots". Hernandez is interviewed. video by loan Grillo. - Who is Aaron Rose | Flux
great interview with Aaron Rose [via Shakas & Singlefins] - How To Change The Look of Thematic With a WordPress Child Theme | ThemeShaper Forums
good tutorial on using Thematic as a parent theme (or framework) and then customizing the look with your own child theme. - Bingin Beach | Micks Place
you can't stop the ocean. rizal tears up padang despite invasions of man-made reef wrecking crapola. - A Royal Farewell in Bali - The Big Picture - Boston.com
pictures from a royal cremation ceremony for the head of the Royal family in Ubud, 2 of his family members and 68 commoners. amazing
Sissyfisher + friends
Sissyfish enjoying some warm mexican water
Rick, the SissyfisherKing is currently down mexicoway with his homies Gabe and Ean. We connected up Monday night for some wicked Chilés Rellenos + chelas with the ladies and little ones (ours being still in seedling format). Dinner was civil and restrained. After grub, the boys retired to the livingroom for a full on bro-down nerd fest, as we talked blog-related schmata and plotted the next day’s surf activities while I heavy-petted and studiously-vetted the various surf vehicles the crew had slogged all the way down here from Oregon. Rick’s MCaro-shaped round-pin quad was pretty amazing in and out of the water. Drop in, set the rail and hum. dialed.
Tuesday morning we reconvened for a dawn patrol sliding session at my favoritest rocky left point break La Chuleta. Afuckingmazing, as usual. That place is blessed with serious surf/stoke/prana. We all got in some quality slide time. I took an hour or so out to snap some jammies from the boat. These are two of my favs, not intentionally out-of-focus, but what are commonly referred to as “happy accidents”.
Lisa Candela’s Sayulita
Virgin Single Fin print by Lisa Candela
My karmic soul sister Lisa Candela gets a nice big write-up at Apartment Therapy for her Sayulita series. You can see more of her ultra-saturated analog bliss over at Lisa’s portfolio site.
Candela takes all her photographs on film, then makes limited edition digital archival pigment prints on this wonderful heavy watercolor paper. And in her gallery on Crosby street — you can see each encased like little treasures in hand-made frames of driftwood (made by her partner David Decker).
Lisa and David own Candela - Decker Gallery and the Sayulita series is showing there, until the end of July, as part of the temporary exhibits. Dan Eldon’s work is exhibited there permanently. For more info on her work, contact the gallery at:
Candela - Decker Gallery
31 Crosby Street. New York, NY 10013
{Between Broome and Grand}
Phone # 1-212-343-1717
Environmentalism: The New Religion
There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world. Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.
- Freeman Dyson, on the conundrum of global warming.
[via Steve Isaacs > via terminally incoherent > Marc Lafountain > Kevin Kelly]
