Hot off the presses. My review of RC Shaw’s surf memoir, Lousibourg or Bust, is in the reviews section in the back, page 123. And because this is a glossy, high-end, old-school, quarterly journal, I can’t provide a link, because these guys don’t do that. So — go old school and buy a copy! The […]
Three days short of twenty-five years ago, I was working late as usual, so I didn’t hear the news until I got into my truck and turned on the radio to WHFS, Maryland’s indie rock station. There was an odd silence, dead air, then the sound of muffled sobs. Was the DJ crying? I turned […]
Here’s the full-length version of my review in the current print edition of The Surfers Journal (Oct 2018) Name-dropping in the lineup is always a risky move, especially if the name is “God.” Given the weaponization of God’s name – throughout all history, of course, but with a growing ferocity in the current American civil […]
There’s No Crying in Surfing: New Film Revisits the Complicated Legacy of Andy Irons One of the now standard shots in adventure film is to start with a solitary skier or snowboarder working a chute or a powder field, and then slowly pull back – way, waaay back – to reveal the massive, dizzying scale […]
From the cutting room floor… Kissed by God also zooms in, right to the edge of discomfort for the subject (and us), on the interior lives of those Irons left behind. Which is why you may not want to see if this film if you are not comfortable seeing grown surfers cry. The film opens […]
The American West is a blank canvas. It is a vault of sky, an infinity of light, a sun-blanched stage bounded by horizon stretching wide enough to show the earth’s curve. Crossing the great empty middle of the country, your first glimpse of the mountains is more hallucination than hard fact, a haze of gray […]
