Locals Only

And I thought localism was the domain of ignorant surfers....

It's Ethereal

I 

I really liked this installation at the MOMA, it  had a nice feel to it. Big white curtains with speakers hanging in between them playing soft sounds. Hard to explain but good to experience.

Love Your Job

We took a visit to the MOMA in NYC, I was a little taken by this man. His job was to stand and watch one of the installations, making no one caused damage. He seemed to really dig his job, it was nice to see!

Moved The Cupboard to NYC for a bit

It's been a while, I moved the cupboard to NYC for a few weeks. It's my third visit there in as many years, and it's lucky that I'm so accustomed to cupboard dwelling, as thats about all you get when you rent a place or book a hotel over there.

We arrived at midnight in a suburb of brooklyn that shall remain nameless, and with the help of a very nice stranger who I thought may want to rob us, we found the apartment I had rented. Turns out the apartment was fantastic, it was just the proximity to the JZ train line that wasn't so great.. After having a shower and sitting down we were greeted by bright flashing lights and a prolonged cling clang thump! After a brief survey of the surrounds ( looking out the window) I noticed that the train was ten metres from our lounge room... a fact that was conveniently omitted in the apartment description. So every 15 minutes 24 hours a day the house shook and shone with the bright lights of the J train. Needless to say we only stayed the first night and that morning we began our odyssey of last minute hotel deals through booking.com..some were amazing ( Raddisson @ midtown) some were less than amazing ( Stay @ Time Square). Regardless, it was an adventure filled with many good times and some very sweaty times carrying bags through the subways.

Brain-Washing

I came in from the surf today, put my board on the railing and turned on the old shower at Narrabeen to wash the salt off. Maybe I'd had too much sun, or not enough food, or I was just going crazy from working in The Cupboard all week, but as I stood under the shower I thought of all the amazing characters that have stood under this same spurt of water over the years.

I'm not entirely sure how old the shower is, but I think it's early '70's. As I stood there lost in my liquid meditation, I remembered a picture in an old surfing magazine of Tony Hardwick, in about 1974, standing in this same post surf position, rinsing the salt off. The article was about Wicka and what was happening in his life, changing from "the mouth" of Northy to a responsible father and business owner. I remember seeing it in his scrap book when Dan (his son) and I were grommets. And here I was standing under this same shower, doing the same post surf ritual: board on the railing, tap on, watch surf, rinse the salt off, think about the waves just ridden. I've been doing it for as long as I can remember, it feels good, but it was only today that the sense of history hit me. Everyone from Midget Farrelly to Kelly Slater has stood in this exact position, rinsing the salt and mentally surfing the next set coming through. Pretty cool.

Just like the subway in NYC, the beach shower is also the great leveler of class and ego. It doesn't matter if you're the world champ or a sunburnt grommet, we all still stand next to the same clump of crappy concrete after a surf and wait for that spurt of fresh water to hit our salty faces.

Benzing

I've been watching and reading a lot of old & new surf material of late. It got me thinking about when I was a grommet surfing with Dad at Northy. Dad worked shift work to accommodate his surfing lifestyle and before I started school I pretty much shadowed him all day. This enabled me to see North Narrabeen circa 1982 with all it's character & charm. There are a couple of events that I remember clearly and that I think define the era ( for me anyway).

I was checking the surf with Dad at the lower carpark at Northy ( now it's shut to traffic), and Nat Young was parked in his old 1960's Mercedes Benz Sedan, pretty sure it was powder blue. I don't think Nat had been surfing, he was just hanging out. I stood around as Nat & Dad chewed the fat, and it turns out Nat had bought a light aircraft, learned how to fly it, crashed it, and was back in town checking the surf. Dad, who was also a pilot, was kind of amazed at the brash confidence of Nat, "Yeah, bought a plane, crashed it, didn't get too injured though, You been for a surf Rick?"

Another day, in the same carpark, doing the same thing, the surf had been really good and tensions were a little high due to some kooks crowding the lineup. Local tube riding legend "Blackie" who was known for his "layback" tuberiding ( laying up against the wave while tuberiding) had just come in from a session and he had had enough, right in front of us he started yelling and smashing his beautiful thruster on the copper log fence. He was still in his wetsuit, and he just smashed and shredded his board until it was a heap of fibre glass and foam. I remember Dad and I were a bit bummed because we were looking for a new board for me and Blackies would have been ideal.....

......I'm not sure that surfing or the Northern Beaches allows characters with that sort of style, arrogance, or animal attitude to exist anymore, and I'm a bit bummed about it..

Don't eat the Yellow Snow

Just returned from the snow with The Soul Predators, probably the best season in a decade, unfortunately I was unable to partake as much as I would have desired in the Alpine Activities. I some how contracted the KILLER SNOW VIRUS or KSV as it's commonly known. I don't know who started it initially, but my hunch is that it was someone who ignored the centuries old warning, "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow". 

Despite coughing like a badly tuned Kingswood and reaching temperatures that would make Amazonians flee, I did have some good times with the boys, and the band was cooking. Here's some shots I managed to take between shivering & coughing.

Eric/Gerry

There's something special about artists who say so much with so little. For me these people are the home base, the foundation, the place we all run to when we need to be reminded what it's all about.

I remember being a kid sitting with my ear up to the speaker of our record player listening to Eric Clapton playing in Cream, pushing hard against the speaker listening for the last notes of a fade out. It's a pure sound; one guitar, one amp and buckets of emotion. There's been a myriad of technically better guitarists over the last century but it's the ability to simply and beautifully convey an emotion that to me makes a great artist.

On a parallel to Clapton is legendary '70's surfer Gerry Lopez. Gerry lived and surfed at Pipeline on the North Shore of Hawaii. Mastering the wave like no other before or since. Gerry made extremely difficult and life threatening situations look simple and beautiful. So much so that the term "walk in the park" was used to describe the way Gerry surfed the Pipeline. Just like Clapton, Lopez captured and transfixed people with his style, simplicity and emotion.

To me this is what it's all about.

Youth/Cougars

It was sometime ago now but I still remember it clearly. I had been spending a bit of time going back and forth between NYC and Sydney, on this particular trip I happened upon Lenny Kravitz playing a week long residency at the hallowed Fillmore East.

Seeing as I was in NYC courtesy of the Tax Office (I'm a muso, it was research), I thought it my duty to go to the gig. So off I went to the Fillmore East down in Irving Plaza, and made my way up to the mezzanine level to wait for Lenny to do his thing. I was milling around by myself taking some shots when I noticed that the majority of the audience were women who probably had hit their prime in the 90's.

 Upon reflection I realised that Lenny also hit his prime in the 90's so this probably makes sense. This proliferation of women of a certain age didn't bother me, but rather intrigued me, so I found myself catching little pieces of their conversations. It was at some stage during these observations that I heard the tail end of a conversation, it went like this, "Yes, there is a lot to be said for young sperm".......  I think it stands as  an enduring statement about New York "women of a certain age".

City/Country

I'm a lover of the city, although as Howlin Wolf famously sang, "I'm built for comfort, I ain't built for speed". This places some strain on my lifestyle, I love to stay out all night playing and listening to music and hanging with friends, but when the sun comes up, all I want to do is go surfing. Inevitably one of these has to suffer, either I stay out all night, sleep the next day and miss the ocean at it's best, or I get to bed early, miss the nightlife but experience the joys of the sea.

This got me thinking what the ideal scenario would be, I came up with a few options I would like to pursue this year:

option a) Move to the inner city, pretend the ocean is not locatable.

          b) Move to the country, surf non stop. Tell me myself the city holds no appeal

          c) Make some more money, have a city house & a beach house

          d) Forget it all

I'm thinking of combining all 4 in some sort of goulash of lifestyles and locations.

Young at Heart

Young: not the act of being a certain age, but Young the place. If you want cherries you go to Young, it's a fair drive, about 8 hours from Sydney in fact. If you want just about anything else, don't go to Young. But here I was, in Young, and I don't even really like cherries.

In their infinite wisdom one of the band agencies I was working for decided that Young needed to be entertained by a very average covers band I was playing with at the time. So we packed the commodore & hit the road, arriving the Saturday afternoon of the gig ready to show Young what real music from the big smoke sounds like. After loading in from the ute filled carpark, we kicked in to our first set of covers, needless to say, our version of the Kylie & Robbie Williams hit, "Doin it for the Kids" didn't go down too well with the boot scootin' crew.

At some stage thoughout the night boredom struck, if my memory serves me correctly it was midway through "Mustang Sally". I thought that a sure cure for this boredom would be to run out on the dance floor and take my next solo with the guitar slung behind my head..So off I went, out on the dance floor, slung my guitar behind my head and shredded out a rockin solo..

While I was soloing I couldn't help but notice the lead vocalist looking at me with a cross between worry and laughter, this puzzled me a little, but I figured that my amazing solo just had her entranced. It wasn't until I brought my guitar back to it's normal position that I noticed a lady rubbing her very sore forehead.

It seems that as I lifted my guitar up to play behind my head, I had failed to notice a fairly drunk woman attempting to dance next to me. As I lifted my guitar up above my head I whacked her "smack!" straight in the noggin with the headstock of my guitar. Throughout my whole solo the band were in fits of laughter watching this woman stagger around wondering what had hit her in the head. I'm not sure how I didn't see her, although looking back now I remember that she was fairly short, with short hair and a holden racing team shirt on; for the town of Young this constitutes camouflage. Needless to say I beat a hasty retreat back to the safety of the stage and hid behind the drummer for the remainder of the night...

Take 'em off

So many stories from one little cupboard:

There I was, a resident in one of the many small spaces I've worked in. This particular one happened to be frequented by a small child of about 10 years old. One week as I was teaching him, I noticed a reddening of the face and a narrowing of the eyes.

I thought, "maybe he's a bit shy or a bit hot" so I offered some comforting words and continued with the lesson. As I continued with the lesson the redness turned into a full red balloon, looking a bit like Augustus Gloop did when he got sucked up the big pump in Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. This was followed by a shaking leg, neck, and popped out eyes. By this stage I thought the worst, epilepsy or some sort of bad reaction to the G major scale. Before I could grasp what was going on he muttered the strangled words, "can't...hold....on....any....more!" and then it was all over, wet carpet, wet guitars, wet kid, wet, wet, wet.

I grabbed him by the shoulders and carried him dripping to the foyer where his dad was waiting. Being a thrifty sort of fellow his dad simply took off his sons pants, then took off his own pants, and put them on his son. He was a tall man, so the fit left much to be desired. I was puzzled by this, but continued teaching as if nothing had happened. As the lesson concluded I returned the son to his dad, thinking that of course the dad would have gone to the car for some new trousers, especially as the foyer was in a shopping centre. I was wrong, the dad had simply waited in the foyer, in a shirt and his undies. I returned the child as if that was normal, and continued on with my day......

Fully Nelson

I spent some time in Indonesia a while ago, surfing & hanging out. A good time was had by all. Although strange thing occurred while I was a little way through my indonesian adventure; I became someone else.

Lord Nelson. I must say he is a fine looking person to turn into if you are going to turn into someone else, lot's of hair and a really nice suit. This metamorphosis occurred upon introduction to some Indonesians, it went something like this, "Hello, mister my name is Wyan I will drive your car", "Hi I'm Nathan, I don't need a car." "Oh Mister Neslon! Yes you need car, and a massage." From that moment on the transformation had begun, I was no longer Nathan from Sydney, But "Mister Nelson".