plain old planing

photo courtesy of Woody Ekstrom

Surfer, Windansea, 1949. Photo courtesy of Woody Ekstrom.

La Jolla, 1949: The Little Sister

'The Little Sister" was published in 1949. The novel, Ray's first in six years, received a mixed reaction, with American critics (as usual) responding more harshly than their English counterparts. One American critic, writing in the New York Times, attacked the book for "its scathing hatred of the human race." But on the other side of the Atlantic, The Little Sister was seen differently: it described an alluring world, more formless, more dangerous, more free and exciting-and also more depressing-than found in England, a modern world, in other words, which seemed perfectly credible as a description of what went on out there in California, the crazy cutting-edge place that would eventually end up exporting its free-form, violent, consumer driven, personality-obsessed, and image-conscious culture to the rest of the globe. English critics and readers felt that the novel was inspired not by a hatred of the human race but a genuine concern for it. What Ray was doing was bringing news of the future to those for whom that future had not yet arrived, portraying a society in which drugs and addiction and the threat of casual, unstoppable violence was a daily reality. He offered a sense of the balefulness of hidden conspiracies, how the corrupt and powerful worked behind the scenes, undermining civilized behavior, and in that sense his California was ominous, portending what lay in store for not only America but the rest of the world. In England they got this, and in France they got it, too: his books were read by intellectuals and serious writers, such as W.H. Auden and Somerset Maugham and Albert Camus, J.B. Priestly and Edith Sitwell. 'Chandler," Auden wrote 'is interested in...The Great Wrong Place.'It wasn't simply a question of solving a mystery, or a puzzle, but understanding the malaise the work conveyed to the reader.'To read him is like cutting into an over-ripe melon," J.B. Priestly wrote, 'and discovering that it has a rare astringent flavour. He reduces the bright California scene to an empty despair, dead bottles and a heap of cigarette butts under the meaningless neon lights...and suggests...the failure of a life that is somehow short of a dimension, with everybody either wistfully wondering what is wrong or taking savage shortcuts to nowhere."

-Judith Freeman

The Long Embrace
Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved
2007

ROBERT WILSON SIMMONS MARCH 29TH, 1919-SEPTEMBER 26TH, 1954

"He also enjoyed driving into La Jolla village every afternoon to fetch the mail and do the shopping, chatting with the postman and the grocer as he made his rounds...activities which for him passed for a social life...They would sit in the living room, before the big picture window with it's view of the ocean, a view so extraordinary that Ray once wrote, "A radio writer once came down here to see me and he sat down in front of this window and cried because it was so beautiful. But we live here, and the hell with it." The truth was he disliked looking at the sea: 'too much water," he said, "too many drowned men."

- Raymond Chandler

from:

The Long Embrace
Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved
Judith Freeman

Simmons passed on September 26th, 1954...one of the first places his friends looked
for him was at North Bird, below Chandler's house. Chandler would lose
his beloved Cissy a few months later on December 12, 1954. Within a few years
his drinking would kill him.

Pulling out the 9'0" Balsa planing hull to ride a few for Bob today...
where Simmons rode his last one.

The Planing Totem & 180 South tonight in Del Mar.

5 pm Del Mar Shores Park. Free, outdoors. 9th and Camino Del Mar.
Films start at sundown. Aloha.

TSJ VOLUME 19 No. 5 Lindsay Lord/HYDRODYNAMICA

December 21st 2005

'Where do we really belong? In the new universe of ambulatory possibilities,
it could be a daunting question...Maybe it was part of the geography. Or our genetic makeup, the need to leave behind all that was known and established and settled, to explore a new land...even if it meant misfortune, disappointment, or unhappiness, and with the certain assurance of loneliness."

-Judith Freeman

The Long Embrace

Raymond Chandler and the Woman he Loved

2007

Post Photos by Greg Betz

6'9" Frye Longfish 2004

a few ol' sessions on the mothballed Skip longfish.

clip from 2009 posted again in honor of Alva's 53rd birthday.
think about this when you watch the new school trickery
at the hurley pro this weekend. 35 years ago TA's generation paid the price in
love, blood, broken bones, and pain that took 'em above the lip...on a harsh and
unforgiving medium...

"...do you ever get the feeling that the story is too damn real and in the present tense...and that everybody is on the stage and you're the only person sitting in the audience..."

year one...

"Meanwhile back in the year One...
when you belonged to no one...

you didn't stand a chance, son...

Cause you were bred
for humanity
and sold
to society...
one day you'll wake up,
in the present day
a million generations
removed from expectations
of being who you really want to be

skating away
skating away
skating away
on the thin ice of a new day.

so as you push off from the shore,
won't you turn your head once more
and make your peace with everyone...

...looking for a sign
that the Universal Mind
has written you
into the Passion Play

Skating away
on the thin ice of a new day.

SQUARE ONE: IN THE NEW SURFER'S JOURNAL...

SQUARE ONE: Serious fun with Lindsay Lord and the Yard Possums by RK.
Being loaded for distribution right now...
here's two pages from a 12 page spread.
for more please buy a copy and support real surf journalism
from the source. thank you.

MISTADOBLINA

see link at right...18 years later and no one
says it as well as Del.

TIJUANA II

'The dreamer is the designer of tomorrow. Practical men can laugh at him; they do not know that he is the true dynamic force that pushes the world forward. Suppress him and the world will deteriorate toward barbarism. Despised, impoverished, he leads the way...sowing, sowing, sowing the seeds that will be harvested not by him, but by the practical men of tomorrow, who will at the same time laugh at another indefatigable dreamer busy seeding, seeding, seeding."

- Ricardo Flores Magon

Written in the face of failure and death after the 1911
Battle of Tijuana. The Tijuana colonia that bears his
name is on the high mesa overlooking the Rio Tijuana
where it meets the Pacific at the Tijuana Sloughs.

recently...

NO ART/CHURCH OF CASH

see link at right. Marko, Bender, Barfy and the Pannikin
crew of the 80's...huge inspiration.

STOKED & BROKE LA PALOMA THURSDAY 9/9/10

Geraldine is ready for her close up...take 5!

Yard Possums represent in Cyrus Sutton's new
flick:

"What am I gonna do...wait around till I find some
girl to ride my piece of foam with me?"

- Ryan Burch

Everett

'Then there will be no music but the sound of rushing water...the strange, dimly- remembered sound of rushing water. When that sound dies, all dies."

- Everett Ruess
A Vagabond for Beauty
1930

TIJUANA

Filmed by Ryan Field and Richard Kenvin

LA JOLLA

'My heart is lost, lost.
My heart sets, sets.
My heart goes to the other world
My heart goes to the other world.
My heart goes to the ocean foam.
My heart goes to the ocean foam."


Death Song
Cupeno tribe (La Jolla area Native American)
The Way We Lived
California Indian Stories, Songs,
and Reminiscences
Malcolm Margolin

SAN DIEGO

"The great red light in the light-house tower had again blazed out, and had been some time burning, before Alessandro thought it prudent to resume their journey. The road on which they must go into Old San Diego, where Father Gaspara lived, was the public road from San Diego to San Luis Rey, and they were almost sure to meet travelers on it.

But their fleet horses bore them so well, that it was not late when they reached the town. Father Gaspara's house was at the end of a long, low adobe building, which had served no mean purpose in the old Presidio days, but was now fallen into decay; and all its rooms, except those occupied by the padre, had long been uninhabited. On the opposite side of the way, in a neglected, weedy open, stood his chapel,-a poverty-stricken little place, its walls imperfectly whitewashed, decorated by a few coarse pictures and by broken sconces of looking-glass, rescued in their dilapidated condition from the Mission buildings now gone utterly to ruin. In these had been put candle-holders of common tin, in which a few cheap candles dimly lighted the room. Everything about it was in unison with the atmosphere of the place,-the most profoundly melancholy in all of Southern California. Here was the spot where that grand old Franciscan, Padre Junipero Serra, began his work, full of devout and ardent purpose to reclaim the wilderness and its peoples to his country and his Church; on this very beach he went up and down for those first terrible weeks, nursing the sick, praying with the dying, and burying the dead, from the pestilence-stricken Mexican ships lying in the harbor. Here he baptized his first Indian converts, and founded his first Mission. And the only traces now remaining of his heroic labors and hard-won successes were a pile of crumbling ruins, a few old olive trees and palms; in less than another century even these would be gone; returned into the keeping of that mother, the earth, who puts no headstones at the sacredest of her graves."

-Helen Hunt Jackson
Ramona
Written in the Berkeley Hotel,
New York City,
1883

MALIBU

"I drove on to the Oxnard cut-off and turned back along the ocean. The big eight-wheelers and sixteen wheelers were streaming north, all hung over with orange lights. On the right the great solid fat Pacific trudging into shore like a scrub woman going home. No moon, no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf. No smell. None of the harsh wild smell of the sea. A California ocean. California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing...

Malibu. More movie stars. More pink and blue bathtubs. More tufted beds. More Chanel No. 5. More Lincoln Continentals and Cadillacs. More wind-blown hair and sunglasses and attitudes and psuedo-refined voices and waterfront morals...I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long."

- Raymond Chandler
The Little Sister
written in La Jolla, California
1949

3 years ago...

white pony # 1.

a hydrodynamica project board.

4'11" x 23"

TEN YEARS AGO...838G

We were beautiful...we were losers...
but we were in San Diego...alas...the backwater
that in many ways is really the cornerstone.
These images are from our old gallery space,
838G. During this time the concept for a film
that eventually evolved into Hydrodynamica was
born. the basic premise? By taking the urethane skateboard wheel
and shortboard surfing for granted we risked losing
our way...the ancestors needed to be understood and remembered.
something was definitely at stake. This stuff
is from midway through a twenty
plus year run we've had in this neighborhood east of
downtown san diego. cassius king gallery...
etc...the festivus is a continuation of
all the stuff we did before...and God willing
we ain't done yet.