San Jose del Cabo :: Baja Sur

After one too many denim deals went wrong in LA I was forced into exile. I grew out my best latino mustache, took on the alias Enrique (my real name) and headed straight to LAX. My destination was the southern most tip of the Baja Peninsula. After a few days of posting up on some right handers and trying to blend in with the locals I ran across a couple of women from London in town on business...... Needless to say sun block rubdown, shrimp taco and luchero sessions ensued.

Spring Has Sprung

Greetings from Baja Sur. Spring is in the air get used to it.

St. Patrick's Day :: Encinitas, CA

Grab your most un-Irish friend of Irish decent. And if you you dont have any friends that have an Irish accent kick it with an Australian, they can be equally as hard to understand.

Yes! Surfers are Douche Bags!

Matters of business require my presence in the City of Angels. At some point I will sneak down to San Diego to share some burritos and waves with the homies. None the less I still hold a strong discontent for bro's and a sense of brotherhood with all us bro's that hate on bro's.

Which one of these two surfers do you think constantly talks about how siiiiick Kelly is... A or B?
A.
B.

Dolphins Are Gay Sharks

:: Christopher Reuss :: Emuse :: Gothic Dolphin :: Alex Kopps::

Here' trailer for Displacement a new film that the Gothic Dolphin himself is putting out this fall.

Venice Beach, CA

What would a trip to Venice be without heckling a weirdo, bar hopping on bikes, and grabbing some in-and-out burger? "Those are good burgers, Walter."

Rule the World :: VOTE

Winter Surfing :: Long Beach , NY

Tuesday morning I was woken up by a dream. While putting on my 5/4/3 winter wetsuit for the first time, I found out that Jake had forgotten the gloves and booties he promissed to lend me. I started smacking him around and told him that he'd done it on purpose. Two hours later as we pulled into the parking lot, he told me that he too had the exact same dream one month earlier when Chris Gentile took him surfing in NY for his first winter session.
I had pretty much been a hater on cold water surfing. I had dealt with Santa Cruz 4/3 with booties which was fine but I thought to myself, "It's going to have to be at least 4ft with light offshore winds for me to pop my cold water cherry." Truth be told it was kinda anti-climatic. I paddled out into waist high clean surf, and the only thing remotely uncomfortable was that my face stung when I duck dove. The highlight of the whole session were the two girls that pulled up in their little Red Bull car asking us if we wanted some Red Bulls. I guess we did look like a couple of extreme dudes all buff in our winter surfing gear.

Get Your Burger Out

I thought I was obsessed with with cheeseburgers (distant 2nd to burritos), but you don't see me incorporating it into my daily attire. I guess it is too cold in NYC to be rocking one of these burger-rific dresses. I'll bet you a cheeseburger that I'll spot a couple come spring time and it'll be in Williamsburg worn by a Vegan. Can you begin to fathom the irony behind that?

Barc"th"elona

I started out my day long journey to Barcelona with a 5:30 cab ride to Heathrow and ended it with a kind Catalan gentleman telling me "Tienes que volver." "you have to come back." A trade show and a meeting with one of the founders of my favorite Basque line Loreak Mendian planted me in Barcelona for the day.

The MapThe StoreI managed to break free of my meetings and the trade show by 16:30 which left me just enough time to figure out the metro and manage to get lost somewhere in the vicinity of the Loreak Mendian store. I kept showing the locals the snap shot of the map I had on my blackberry, and every time without fail I received a "dalle" and then was told that they thought it was that way. ps: Barcelonans are the nicest people to ask for directions in the world. I think my Spanish might have taken them a little off guard by being a little too formal and a little too casual. Think of someone starting a conversation off with a "Excuse me sir" and then ending it with a "Thanks Bro you're the man." I even received a few kind pats on the back. After an hour of being lost I feared the only thing worse than the defeat of not finding the shop, which would be missing my flight, thus I hailed a cab to the airport.

Tip Top TapasMy only expectations after finishing up my meetings was to go and buy shirt from the Loreak Mendian store and enjoy some genuine tapas. What I settled for was getting lost for an hour and over priced tapas from a place called Tip Top Tapas at the Barcelona airport.

Panic on the streets of London

Matters of international business exported me to London for a few days and here is what there is to report.
A. Newcastle Brown Ale: (Newquay Brown)
Its not as classy of a drink as it is here in the states. It's the equivalent of someone coming to the states and ordering a Budweiser. During the summer of 99 in Portugal this guy looked at me and Jayson drinking a Super Bock and said "Why are you not drinking Budweiser? It is the King of Beers!" If he only knew we called in Buttwiper in college.

B. Leave Your Shank at Home:
London is cracking down on a severe knife problem. I think that the campaign slogan should be, "Don't be a wanker drop your shanker!"

C. Americans are not the only environmental A-Holes:
Shock value or not there are still people that think global warming is a fallacy and they are not just from Texas. I spotted this billboard while on the Heathrow express.

29 years on planet earth

And it still is all about burritos, babes, and waves. Thanks to John McSwain for the lazer portrait.

Human Tetris

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov (Алексей Леонидович Пажитнов, born 1956) is a computer engineer from Russia now living in the United States, who developed the popular game Tetris while working for the Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a Soviet government-founded R&D centre. Pajitnov was to leave his mathematics school (#91) in Moscow. Pajitnov created Tetris with the help of Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov in 1985. The game, first available in the Soviet Union, appeared in the West in 1986. Pajitnov also created the lesser known sequel to Tetris, entitled Welltris, which has the same principle but in a three dimensional environment where you see the "board" from above. The Soviet bureaucracy licensed and managed Tetris, and advertised it with the slogan "From Russia with Love", Pajitnov did not receive royalties.

New Year :: New Cruiser

My Christmas present to myself this year was a new Krooked Zip Zinger, with some 62mm Satori softies for the harsh metropolitan city streets around the world, and some Ace trucks more suitable for grinding my way into 2008.

Orange....ish :: Alert

I was told over the PA that the Atlanta aiport was under and orange terror alert on December 30th, 2007. I was happy to see that it didn't stop people from buying iPods from a vending machine or standing in line for a seasonal ginger bread mocha.

Pensacola Beach :: Florida 1997 vs. 2007

On December 25th, 1997 my high school buddy Jeff and I scored Pensacola Beach as good as it gets. 4 ft surf with feathery easy little barrels working on the outside sandbars. 10 years later Jeff is selling real estate in Nicaragua and I am slinging premium denim in NYC, but every year we try and recreate that xmas of 97. This year Jeff found himself boardless. So we stopped by the local surf shop so he could rent a board. A 6'2" beast of a quad fin fish "it really sucked" is the best they had. Little tubers were breaking on the inside sandbar some were makeable some were not. A pact was made that we would both leave boards at our families house so that we would never find ourselves boardless in Pensacola.

MOvember

November is prostate cancer awareness month. MOvember "MO Australian slang for Mustache" is a month in which all are encouraged to grow out their best MO to raise awareness towards prostate cancer and other major male health issues.

What I am here to talk about are the overly ironic mustaches. I am over the "hey look I'll grow a handle bar so everyone will know I'm joking around and not serious about having a mustache" mustache. Grow some cajones and keep it within the smile line. The goal of a good mustache should be that when someone looks at it they ask "is that for real?, no its a joke!, no its for real!, wait or is it a joke?" Keep that in mind the next time you manicure that hair on your upper lip.

Mutual Thanks on Thanksgiving

Right when I moved to NYC I met old school NYC skate legend Andy Kessler. He talked shit on surfers yet surfed. So we had that in common. There can be an intimidating crew of locals and/or visiting pros at the Autumn Bowl in Brooklyn, and when I first got my key and started showing up Andy gladly made it known to all that I was one of his boys. So instead of getting the who the fuck is this guy skating with a stank surfer style vibe, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Every now and then I'll get a call from Andy and the conversation starts with a "Hey you homo have you gotten in the water lately?" and always closes with a "Well we should go and skate soon."

Back in the Spring of 2005 Andy busted his hip skating the former Blinde bowl in SoHo. Like many Andy didn't have health insurance so in that fall all of his creative friends got together and applied some artwork to his model blanks. An auction/party was held to raise money to chip away at Andy's surgery bills. Wouldn't socialized medicine be nice? My friend Dewey and I built a website for Andy pro bono to sell the remaining pieces. My favorite was this Ric Charnowski piece that had Jesus is Answer stuck to it. Ric Charnowski and Buddy Nichols made the skate films Northwest, Fruit of the Vine, and Tent City. These titles feature the most credible pool/bowl skaters and the infamous Anti Hero team. Andy knew I had been eye balling it and 2 years later he has given it to me as a sign of thanks. So on this Thanksgiving thursday I wanted to give thanks to Andy "you little fairy" for saying thanks to me.

Joe Strummer :: Punk Rock Warlord

My sisters told me that when I was 4 I would walk around the house singing "Rock the Casbah!, Rock the Casbah!" You can imagine my delight when I found out Joe Strummer : The Future is Unwritten was playing at the local movie theater in Biarritz. I bought a ticket then ran to buy a bottle of wine to polish off while watching the film. This weekend it is being released in States. Go buy yourself a ticket. I can pretty much guarantee it'll be the best $10 dollars you will have spent all week.

Arcade Fire :: Neon Bible Video

Check out Arcade Fire's online video of Neon Bible. Watch it one time through as is and then the second time around try clicking on his hands and face. The Québécois's strike again with their musical savvy. P.S. The Canadian dollar is stronger than the US dollar at the moment......bummer.