Cover image and this page:
Keiron ‘Seamouse’ Lewis - www.pinnipedstudios.com
Issue one
PAROCHIA:
a ten point manifesto of global localism
1 We are interested to the exclusion of all else in the misunderstood and increasingly commodified act of riding a wave. 2 We know that surfing isn’t all there is in the world, but we like to focus that world through a salt-tainted lens of our own construction. 3 We seek to understand intimately the ebb and flow of the surf spots near our homes so that we may apply the principles we have learned there to other contexts without prejudice and with a free and open heart. 4 We are cognisant of the richness of the culture and history and the beautiful meaninglessness of riding a wave, but we don’t take it too seriously and just seek to have as much fun as possible when we paddle out. 5 We embrace our freedom to womble all over the world (virtually and physically) and to take influences from every era, locale and style of surfing. 6 We would like to get away from the surf-business madness, but understand and acknowledge that we are implicated in that madness and that it will find us no matter how far and wide we roam. 7 We aspire to be spirit-guides of a new creed – the cutting edge of a fundamental placelessness that embraces every beach, point and reef on the planet. 8 As a result of spending as much time as possible immersed in the ocean, we care about the products we consume – the style in which they are produced, distributed, packaged and disposed of. But we try not to be boring about it. 9 We aspire to be custodians of our coastlines we exploit. 10 We aspire to make art out of the bits and pieces of our chosen lifestyle, and as such we are part of the analogue backlash railing against the ubiquity of the pixel. Parochia is a Loose-Fit title, published by The September Project. Designed by www.a-sidestudio.co.uk
The reproduction of any editorial or images without prior permission is strictly prohibited. Views expressed in the individual articles within Parochia are those of the contributors and are not necessarily shared by the publisher. The publisher is not responsible for any breach of copyright in the material supplied to Parochia. Parochia likes to receive submissions of words and pictures: parochia@loose-fit.co.uk
Legends Stick
LOOSE-FIT
boards have all the hard-won hydronamica of a hundred years of board design encoded in their DNA.Rest assured that when you’re riding a Loose-Fit wave vehickle, you are staying true to the surfer’s creed. With the global surfboard market disappearing into a soulless singularity of epoxy pop outs from filthy factories that have never benefited from so much as a whiff of coastal ozone, every surfer – from the kookish newbie to the salty cynic – should value the handbuilt quality of their sticks. Too many dedicated surfing craftsmen the world over have been forced by the ubiquity of moulded boards to punch a swell-ignorant clock in order to make a crust. That’s why Loose-Fit seeks to supply handwrought craft of unbeatable value from all over the world to the good people of its local scene. They might be local to the Southwest of England, but they’re focussed on bringing the best of global surfboard design to our neighbourhood. To this end they have been working closely with some of the world’s best designers and boardbuilders to offer you a range of surfboards built by hand from the finest materials available. The boards come to the customer direct from the hands of the finishers themselves, so Loose-Fit are able to offer them at really affordable prices. All Loose-Fit branded boards are custom-built from Walker Foam blanks and are available in either traditional polyurethane and polyester or EPS and epoxy. Resin-tints, pinlines and the whole galaxy of custom flourishes are available on request. Think of your ideal board, Loose-Fit will make it a reality.
When a dignified but pompous matron accused the great man of being drunk at an engagement, Winston replied. “Correct madam. But in the morning I will be sober. You however, will remain ugly.” Churchill Noserider - from £625 Just like the greatest Englishman who ever lived, The Churchill is solid, steady and dependable when your back’s against the wall of a tide of onshore mess. Given the correct rider input, however, it can be refined and dynamic in the glass-off. This 50:50 rail profile of this classic singlefin design allows naturally for superb trimming and ambrosian turn transition. It begs to be ridden from the forward third of the board thanks to the rolled-vee-to-concave bottom profile. This board is cross step-tastic. You’ll be fighting them on the beaches, alright.
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The Earl of Lonsdale, as well as giving his name to the world’s most famous boxing brand, was the founding father of the AA. Lonsdale Longboard - from £595 The Lonsdale is a verstaile, performance-oriented longboard with an increased rocker profile. It punches looser and faster than the Churchill. The pintail bites tight in harder-hitting surf, while the sidebiting fins in the 2+1 setup compensate for any loss of drive in the mushier stuff. This is the perfect one-board quiver.
Nick Radford, low-five on a Loose-Fit Lonsdale Russ Pierre - www.russpierrephotography.blogspot.com
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Left: the Lonsdale Right: the Churchill
The Analogue Backlash
The Holga starter kit, which includes the camera, a roll of 120mm film, batteries, light-preserving tape and two beautiful booklets on the cult of Lomography, is available now from Loose-Fit priced £59.95. The Lomo camera range starts at £19.99. www.loose-fit.co.uk
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James Bowden - www.jamesbowden.net
THE
first cheap, plastic medium-fomat cameras bearing the Holga brand rolled off the production line in Hong Kong in 1986. It was originally conceived as a cheap medium-format camera for the US market and quickly caught on, particularly in the art schools of America and Germany. Since then the camera’s popularity has been directly and inversely in proportion to digital photography’s relentless expansion. Using 120mm medium format film, the images have to be correctly exposed. But it’s the chance light-leaks, the beauty of the depth of field as well as the sense of anticipation one experiences when you get the film back from the lab – that makes the Holga cult so popular. The pixel has a lot to answer for. Think of it. All over the world, at any given moment, there are millions of digital images being made. These are not photographs, (that is, a picture formed by the means of a chemical action of light or other form of radiation on a sensitive surface). No. These are something altogether different. CCTV. Speed cameras. Web cams. Camera phones. The images made even by the high-end digital SLRs are not, in the strictest sense, photographs. The huge, crushing weight of digital imagery is, rather, the visual excreta of a society obsessed with its own image, the fart produced by an endemic form of cultural gutrot that encourages teenage girls of every gender to post excruciatingly banal pictures of themselves on the web ad nauseum, at once validating and negating Warhol’s fifteen minute dream of meritocratic fame. The ubiquity of these electronically generated images doubtlessly cheapens the resonance of the image itself. Fuck facebook. I want my photography back. Anyone their little brother can easily buy a shedload of digital camera gear, and within weeks become almost unrecognisable from a ‘professional photographer’. Point the camera in the right direction, set the camera to full auto and flash: Bob’s you’re aunty’s louche photographer live-in lover... you’ll get a technically perfect image every time. But therein lies the rub. To reach the level of true photographic artistry, the sophistication of the equipment you’re using is irrelevent. Real photographers just happen to use a camera as a medium to create an image. True photographers are sculptors of light, stealers of a moment when light and action interact. And all over the world, the same world where these billions of images are daily being generated, there is a backlash against that images saturation. Enter the Holga. Colour saturates. Light bleeds and creates coloured washes of space. And it is good. Join the analogue backlash.
James Bowden - www.jamesbowden.net
J Newitt
J Newitt
Typhoon Warning! Takuji Masuda and the art of shifting spaces
OK
Takuji Masuda by Ivory Serra
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, so. It’s an unlikely scenario. I’m strolling down a shell-blasted Sarajevo street some time in 1997. We’re looking for an address that doesn’t exist any more. Along either side of the road along with the pock-marked remnants of houses, shops, schools, are armoured vehicles branded with the insignia of a dozen nations. The shells stopped falling a while ago, but it’s an uneasy peace. My two companions are causing a lot of consternation amongst the camo-clad crew of these vehicles. One is Takuji Masuda, a deeply tanned professional surfer and experimental media Svengali – a sinewy bundle of muscle fibre from Japan. He is dragging his huge bag along behind him on a skateboard. My other companion is six feet three and 250 pounds of legendary surf photographer. Art Brewer’s ample frame is labouring under the weight of a huge bunch of Da Kine-branded camera bags and backpacks. This is hardly La Jolla Shores. Through a strange confluence of time and space I had found myself in Sarajevo with Takuji and Art. Dots were joined between my then dormant life as a surfer and my masquerade du jour – that of a reporter out on the edges of European sanity. The Sarajevo trip was for Super X media. It was typical of the wild juxtapositions of Takuji’s globally wandering existence. He had made a career out of joining the dots of global subcultures, inscribing creative scrawls out of the process. With this latest project he drew in the likes of Craig Stecyck, Art Brewer and Glen E Friedman to focus on a skewed world of communications through a skate and surf-tinted lens. Hitting the Californian earth at Pepperdine University as a teenager and mastering the art of longboard surfing with frightening speed, it wasn’t long before the young Japanese man was touring the world as a pro surfer with the likes of Joel Tudor and Nat and Beau Young. Takuji would become Japanese national champion and would ride north shore spots like Pipe and Sunset perched resolutely on the front third – before creating a media phenomenon in Super X. It was a way of crystallising the increasingly fleeting, rapidly changing world of youth and surf at the end of the 20th century in word and image. If you get the chance to get hold of a copy of the magazine, take it. It’s unique, entertaining document – a dispatch from the fringes at the very beginning of the internet’s ubiquity – and surfing’s global domination. Typhoon surfboards is one of Takujis latest projects. “Our brand motto is ‘under the radar’” Takuji tells me via an iphone whilst perched on the bluff overlooking Waimea. “My paying customers range from people like Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis, big wave charger Flea Virotsku, to Nobu Kitamura (who created the endlessly hip fashion brand Hysteric Glamour).” The thing that characterises Typhoon surfboards is their indivisible beauty and minimal design which reinterprets the classicism of traditional surfboards with a contemporary twist. “In the past we had boards shaped by Tyler Hatzikian, Mike Diffenderfer, Herbie Fletcher and Chris Christenson, but the latest shapes are by Kyle Bernhardt.” Kyle is one of the last shapers on the Northshore of Oahu who shapes, glasses and sands Longboards by hand. “I like this because I can still run down to Pipe with fresh dusty board – you know we’re keeping it real!” The latest crop of designs are devloped by Takuji and his good friend Malia Jones, mostly for friends and not for competitions or photoshoots. “We are very boutique and very specific, but we believe the boards are worth every cent!” In addition to taking custom orders for Typhoon Surfboards Loose-Fit have a number of boards in stock, including a demo model.
West wetsuits UnZipped Making products to keep you warm in the water is a dirty business, but someone has got to do it!
MOST
wetsuits are made from foamed rubber processed from polychloroprene rubber chips (which is commonly called neoprene). These chips are melted and mixed together with foaming agents and pigment and then are whacked in an oven to make it expand. The base ingredient of these rubber chips is butadiene. Butadiene is a byproduct of petroleum. Australian company West (along with other pioneering, environmentally focussed outfits like Patagonia) make their wetsuits from rubber derived from limestone, rather than petroleum. Both methods of making rubber for our wetsuits have environmental impacts. Petroleum has to be explored for and then drilled, then transported. It is a finite, ancient resource. But, then, so is limestone, which is the product of hundreds of thousands of years of sedimentation and must be mined and transported from mountains using diesel-burning equipment. Limestone has to be heated to extremely high temperatures to produce the acetylene that forms the base of this alternative neoprene. When it comes down to it, petrol and limestone based neoprenes are chemically equivalent and both keep you nice and warm. Some people have argued that the less petroleum used the better, full stop, and some people have claimed that limestone-based neoprene is stretchier and lasts longer than the oil-based stuff. It’s difficult to disentangle cynical green wash from genuinely forward-thinking manufacturing policy, but surfers, as custodians of the coastal culture, need to make informed choices. The fact that research and development in alternative materials is going ahead full speed in a company like West makes us want to use their products. The instinct is nurtured when you notice fact that the West range of rash vests are made from ‘Ecolycra’, which is a heat-efficient, UV resistant compound, 85% of which is composed of recycled plastic bottles. The remaining 15% of the material is made from woven bamboo fibres (and bamboo is a famously fastgrowing, sustainable resource). Nice. The unasked question remains: how does limestone-based neoprene stand up to repeated, Guinness-tainted wetsuit wazzes?
- Nitro The Nitro features 100% fluid welded seams, which give the best possible waterproof seal. The Nitro is made 50% from Ultraspan Neoprene, which is the most advanced and most stretchy neoprene on the market today and incorporates high air content keeping the suit light and warm. The ‘Batwing’ seal at the back stops flush and locks in extra warmth around your back area. The ‘glide skin’ on the chest and back panels meanwhile, provide protection against the cold and wind, as well as grip on your board while paddling.
- Lotus The Lotus is a premium, no-compromise wetsuit for cool to super cold water with the latest front-zip design. It features 100% fluid welded seams and is made entirely from Ultrapsan Neoprene. This means you get unrestricted movement in every direction, coupled with unbeatable comfort. The Lotus also features Pyro Fibre, a fleece lining which offers warmth and comfort in the areas that need it most, as well as Glide Skin on the chest and back panels.
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Hand Printed Culture
T-SHIRTS
might be a ubiquitous statement of fashion these days, but the fact that their first branded manifestation arrived courtesy of surf culture has been lost to popular history. Surfboard builders working under the pier in fifties California realised that the best way to sell their product was to create a cult of personality around their hot riders. Kaboom! All of a sudden, the top surfers not only rode the surfboard, they also wore the t-shirt branded with the surfboard builders’ logos. Soon the kids locked into the cradle of modern surf culture could wear the t-shirt even if they would be more at home on tinkering with a Hemi engined hotrod than exploring the subtle possibilities of trim inherent in a Dale Velzy Pig. Branded Tee shirts have since those days become a fashion staple. What was once emblematic of the free ‘n’ easy surfer lifestyle has been co-opted by every youth creed the world over and tees have graced the collections of high fashion brands as well as being used as political agitprop. On their continuing journey from cult insider-sign to global ubiquity they have promoted everything from Acme Plumbing to Zappa and back again. But, if like us you’re a little sick of the mass-produced Tee-shirt’s gradual decline into terminal mediocrity – fear not. The future is hand-made and the future is screen printed. Upstairs from Loose-Fit’s Bristol store you’ll find the sort of analogue screen-printing equipment to make your dreams a reality. Yes, for just twenty English pounds, you can have any Loose-Fit design hand printed on any of the super-tactile organic cotton t-shirts that they stock. Go and see the guys at Loose-Fit’s Bristol branch. Now.
Design a T-shirt for charity! Why not submit a T-shirt design to Loose-Fit? If they like it and it is chosen to form part of their range, they will donate a percentage of each of that T-shirt’s sale to the charity of your choice. See if you can knock Nick Radford’s woodcut ukelele (pictured here) off the top spot of favourites and help out your favourite cause. Send submissions to: parochia@loose-fit.co.uk
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John Witzig Michael Fordham caught up with the influential Australian writer/photographer
FEW
people have shaped Australian surf culture’s idea of itself as keenly as John Witzig. The co-creator of Tracks magazine in 1970 (along with Albe Falzon and David Elfrick), he joined Nat Young, Bob McTavish and his brother (film maker Paul Witzig), in the epoch-making first journey of their short-Vee-bottomed boards to Hawaii, and most significantly, to Honolua Bay on Maui. All through the late sixties and early seventies, with his camera and his pen he defined a new generation of shortboard surfing, and authored the infamous ‘we’re tops now’ article in John Severson’s surfer magazine, in which he proclaimed the death of California as the defining force in world surfing. “I always hated that headline,” he told me, “it was the last time I ever supplied an article without one!”….
How significant do you think the influence of drug culture was in surfing during that period? Were surfers at the spearhead of the drug culture’s influence on the mainstream? I’d guess that surfing wasn’t too different to many other parts of the community – a bit more rebellious I suppose and that leant itself to all sorts of experimentation and risk-taking, drugs included. In my observation, it seemed that it was more grass and acid as against smack and the really heavy duty stuff, but I may not be the best person to comment on that as I wasn’t all that interested. I doubt that the surfers of that time spearheaded anything. How overtly politicised was Australian surf culture during that period? I don’t think that ‘surfing’ was politicised. Individually some of us were, but I’d guess that most didn’t give a shit. If there was a prevailing attitude, that’d be it. It probably still is. That’s quintessentially Australian!
Why specifically do you think it took a small cadre of Aussies (plus Mr Greenough) to re-imagine what it was to ride a wave? Because I don’t have a real answer to this, I’ve resorted to cliché in the past (‘an idea whose time had come’). I do know that Bob McTavish in particular was inspired by the way George surfed on his kneeboard – far closer to the curl and the power of the wave, with more radical changes of direction – than was being done on the longer boards of the day. Bob certainly set out to make equipment that would allow him to surf more like George did. If you have a look at footage of Greenough at that time it’s pretty amazing stuff. It’s more surprising (maybe) that no one in the US seemed to notice. There was a famous quote from one of the Americans (and I forget who it was, but maybe Leroy Grannis?) – “what can you learn from a mat rider”. George surfed a mat better than most people rode a board. Did Vietnam demystify America for Aussie surfers so radically that what was aspirational for years became something to reject overnight? I don’t think that sums up the situation. I was at university and was certainly radicalised by Vietnam, but I never thought my attitudes were shared by many of the people I knew at the beach. Conscription for the war played a part – no doubt about that. The more general mood was one of Australia waking up a bit and not minding what we were seeing about ourselves – a sort-of nationalistic adolescence. That, in part anyway, involves the rejection of what you’d previously thought was wonderful. It had its ugly side, but some good things came out of it. The fact that it was the mid-’60s did no harm. The feeling was that we could do anything. Why do you think George Greenough chose to make Australia his home at that time? I think that George felt at home here immediately amongst a mob of Australian ratbags. We were far from uptight, and prepared to give things (anything) a go. George liked that. He was sensible enough to be born rich and had been doing it in California anyway.
Above: Witzig’s 1967 shot of Nat Young in Hawaii in the process of sparking the shortboard revolution. For more dispatches from the history of surf culture, check out Michael Fordham’s Book of Surfing: The Killer Guide to Surf Culture. Available at Loose-Fit (Bantam Press £20). www.bookofsurfing.com
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Braunton 01271 813300 Bristol 0117 9731255 www.loose-fit.co.uk