But who did the video? The guy is known as Paper Fortress and has other cool videos posted on Vimeo, including a nice one featuring himself riding his BMX in the snow – it’s well worth checking out!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Enjoy your day…

Empty, endless, beautiful waves.

 *Solomon, as defined by Kook surf magazine as a “jaded surfer with no apparent emotion, unlikely to hoot in any situation ever”

Good advice. If your Mickey Smith fix can’t wait that long, or you want to see some his work, then why not check out his equally cool short movie ‘Darkside of the Lens’?

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are also a variety of worthwhile lectures available to watch at the ‘Do Lecture‘ series which fall under the heading: Ideas + Energy = Change

It is utterly heart-warming for the alternative surf fan to read Dane’s ‘official’ statement on his website Marine Layer Productions, which is refreshing, honest and even poetic. I’m not going to copy parts out of it here, as it deserves to be read in its entirety.

Instead, here is one of my favourite Dane Reynolds videos, where he swaps some of his more alternative surfcraft with Patagonia ambassador Dan Malloy and together surf some mellow waves. If the chilled surfing doesn’t do it for you, there is a smoking track which starts at around 7 minutes by Little Wings.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I particularly like this image, which challenges the conception of drawing waves as an inferior art form – in a catchy way!

To see more pretty epic paintings,  visit Shane Blackbourn’s blog

Answer: A love story between two cartons of milk?

Well, perhaps ii wasn’t first on your list, but Friends of the Earth have done just that with the help of production company Catsnake. Check out their original way to push you towards more recycling and less rubbish now!

Click here to view the embedded video.

A man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has the strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.

 Image from Wax Buddy where there are many more great photos to check out.

Hot Buttered Soul features surf footage from decades of the extended Hot Buttered family, including Terry Fitzgerald himself and his sons. It’s a strange thing to watch much of the recent fashionable power surfing style at its most fresh in the 70s. However, in a weird and shameful way the similarity in style makes me feel slightly short-changed by the action as we’ve become so accustomed to seeing footage of the unbelievably precise (if not at times the arguably mechanical) modern professionals. Nevertheless, any ardent Mick Waters, Andrew Kidman or Terry Fitzgerald fan will quickly get over any sense of disappointment with this film.

So let’s not be too critical – Hot Buttered Soul is still miles ahead of most of the surf films that come out these days. It’s amazing to watch the HB crew during their sessions in New South Wales in the late 80s, and there is one left-hand wave that Joel Fitzgerald rides (I believe at Periscopes, Indo, before the crowds arrived) that is worth the price of the film alone. It is a wonderful balance of the wave’s epic power and beauty and the surfer’s style and grace, who rides out of a bomb after what seems like an eternity. You’ll know what I mean when you buy the film – unforgettable.

Other than that, in direct comparison to Mick Waters’ classic surf film ‘Believe’, Hot Buttered Soul is perhaps slightly less intellectual in nature with less narrative progression. Rather, it acts more as a load of surf footage with the odd bit of inspirational comment and dedication to Terry Fitzgerald interwoven within. Indeed, when there is commentary, it is definitely worth listening to, as when Derek Hynd speaks of his profound relationship with an HB board: “here is an inanimate object giving me soul, and it’s a blowout of a feeling. No surfer on today’s tour can get that”.

Even more unique to this film is the soundtrack – one unedited take by musicians such as ex Tamam Shud guitarist Tim Gaze and surfer/musicians Neal Purchase Junior and Andrew Kidman. The soundtrack is as timelessly cool, albeit different, to the soundtrack to Louis Malle’s film Lift to the Scaffold which was recorded by Miles Davis famously in one session specifically for the film.

All in all, the film is ideal for the surf connoisseur. The film is a worthy tribute to Fitzgerald and his boards, and is loaded with soul – like the Hot Buttered sticks themselves – and provides those vital audio and visual vitamins for when you’ve been out of the water too long.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For more Mick Waters you can read a review of Believe or Little Black Wheels

In other news, you can also now follow Olu Olu and Jamie Pendergrass on Twitter

If Bradbury had been a surfer (and what grace he would presumably have had), the insipid mainstream would have been represented by mass produced pop out surfboards, with the marginal and beautiful by handcrafted alternative surfboards. I often wax lyrical about classic films such as ‘Believe’ which celebrate the work of individual surfboard makers and I am delighted to have my second board by shaper Rob Lion in my hands. At one point in ‘Farenheit 451’, one of the characters impresses on us the importance of using your hands to craft something made from the heart, in such a way that your soul has somewhere to go when you die:

 The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime

I’m sure Rob still has many surfboards to shape, but my new PMT is a thing of beauty and will hopefully last a long time! He, and the team at Fluid Surfboards who helped to finish off the board as Rob has now relocated to California, are true gardeners and I am extremely grateful for their fantastic work.

The epigraph to ‘Farenheit 451’ is a quote by Juan Ramón Jiménez which reads: “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way”. I hope to be able to ride the board with similar style.

Although Rob has now moved to California, you can visit his Royal Surfboards website.

Stuck in the UK? Visit the Fluid Juice website.

Todd Stewart’s short film called “The Surf Magazines Don’t Talk About Lapsed Catholics” is dark, unremitting and refreshingly honest. He covers an angle of surfing that is never covered in the glossy surf magazines. The grainy existential footage is full of despair and highlights the humiliation a surfer feels when he leaves his carefree days of his youth and enters a comfort zone away from the ocean (think of a London office). Although at 5 minutes long it is still difficult to watch, he picks up on brilliant details, such as entering a lineup of your once homebreak and being able to speak about surfing, boards and breaks with the correct language to make the locals believe that you are still a surfer. They may be fooled by the appearance, but you are not.

Does the short film act as a call to arms to fight existential inertia and get back to the water and authentic life? It is hard to say and I don’t think Todd Stewart is really pushing a moral message, even if indirectly it does encourage you to get to the water more regularly. As an aside, the link between Catholicism and surfing that is highlighted in the title makes me think of the GK Chesterton quotation used by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisted. The character Cordelia recalls the image of Father Brown to illustrate the nature of grace: “I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread”. Even if the surf magazines don’t talk about lapsed Catholics, the parallel between surf and religion remains an interesting one.

Watch the video here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Visit Todd Stewart’s website here: www.lapsedcatholics.com