drift, perspectives in surfing

The school of cool grows, feasting on pop-culture’s be-pop carcass and spewing its chic, middle-mass maw. Swinging some oh-so-cool bumper sticker preaching a beach-blanket candy-coated funk jibe that oozes a calculated economic call to the holier-than-thou So Cal cats that cradle the new dollar; greenwashing words on the way to the middle marches. [words and pictures by Mark Dickinson]

The soul of surfing is on its way back and it’s more expensive than ever: cooler, cleaner, more calculated lines so prettified by colour-coded design, fonts and post-modern pastiche that it wheezes its well-wrought little parodies and ultra-refined graphics into a package so full of nostalgic decay, even the maggots in the surrounds are dazzled by the atomic fervour of cool.

Substance unfortunately waits in the shadows, weak, bent and disfigured; truth the articulation to sell by. We are not worthy, master of beatitude. The shadow of legitimised fabrication is spawned to parallel, not granulate or incline the radius. The picture lacks dimension, the truth a play of servitude we colour by rote. Hope articulated in the affront of hypocrisy ringing the round and calling every single pretty figure out into the mist; the beautiful people wrapped up in their living boxes with inverted smiles.

‘From out of this feeling one gives to things, one compels them to take, one rapes them – one calls this procedure idealising.’  [Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols]

Let us impoverish things further, let us praise the mediocrity of fools and the shallow folds of each new venture. ‘Where there is struggle it is a struggle for power’. Things do not turn towards emboldened perceptions; they are rather Machiavellian transits for the commercial authority of what is, and more importantly what is not, cool. We are not more or less than, just humanity banging the cage, the fetish of error garlanding the walls we prettify.

So many false idols trapeze the industry – limp figures profiting out of a twisted global logic; a weird ecological slant that makes claims on behalf of the planet, but always preaching the ‘newness’ of things dazzling and bright with vacant eyes ‘a ring without a gem;[...] OMO in man’s countenance’. [Dante, The Divine Comedy; ii: Purgatory]

There is something of worth in the act, diminished by the fervour of commerce; there’s much beauty in the being of it, but little to propagate the peripheries. In the immersion of being the ego flows entirely at one with self, devotion being a scarcity of being in and for the world. We return solely or forfeit a right; fun and for its own sake – a truth, which embarks sheltering the world within a world. It is a sad cloud that perpetrates the marketing of the soul; yet we may wake, smell the salt sea air and slide into a cessation of boundaries, free from the servitude of cool.