Make Things
Surf films, music, fiction, and friends — There's no equation for art
Hello hi, I did not mean to leave you hanging for so very long. I have been writing a coffee table book about surfing and I had to like, make the deadline. That thing publishes in spring and for sure, you will hear more about it. A fun rule about writing is, the shorter the word count, the harder it is to produce. Anyone can spit out 1000 words. But can you spit out the 1000 words the feels perfect and right? That’s quite a bit harder and in fact, this whole struggle is related to today’s story about creativity and making things. Thanks for sticking around. 🫶
The other night, I rode my bike downtown to see a pair of surf films and hear Jack Johnson play music. Before he was a famous musician, Jack was a sponsored surfer and film-maker. Together with film school friend Chris Malloy, he released Thicker Than Water in 2000 and The September Sessions in 2002. I am a simple kid who likes surf films and live music, so I felt like I had come to the right place.
In the lobby before the show, I ran into some friends and a guy named Nathan who I guess I’d met at some point in the past. This is the problem with both the bike and surf industries — there are a lot of guys to remember. I am bad at this part.
Earlier, I’d watched as a woman tried to get a photo for Instagram outside the theater. She was forced to rely on her dad, and he held her phone horizontally, until she corrected him. Then he didn’t quite know how to frame it so that she looked perfect. Wearing a blue O’Neill shirt, he looked like surf industry or trades — and like he knew more about how to navigate a barrel than what how to post on Instagram. I can’t fault his choices.
Eventually, they got it done, and dodging traffic, I dashed into the road and grabbed a photo of my own. Only later did I discover that by some trick of the light, only half the theater marquis appeared in the image. It looked like I’d attended someone’s wedding instead of the surf films. I hope it works out for the lucky couple.
If you’ve never been inside the Arlington here in Santa Barbara, it’s an old one-screen movie house used now for everything from concerts to weddings. I once saw Ani DiFranco play there and she walked to the front of the stage, took a look around, and declared, “This place is weird.” She was not wrong.
Built to resemble a Spanish-style outdoor courtyard, the auditorium features balconies and cupolas and a star-dotted ceiling. A wad of cables runs down the center aisle connecting the sound board to the stage. It’s all a bit janky and small town, and that’s alright, because so are we.
It’s a little strange to revisit surfing from the 1990s. It’s neither new nor old, but an awkward age in between. Also, I’m still not sure why boardshorts were so long. Thicker than Water has an endearing youthful optimism and authenticity. In the film, no one’s really famous yet — the film includes Kelly Slater, Rob Machado, and Jack Johnson — at least, not like they would become. It’s easy to picture the origin story of college friends who decided to make a surf film together.
“Maybe if I learn to do airs, the girls will like me,” one of the guys says in the film. Dream big, kid. Anything is possible.
During the q/a, one of the Malloy brothers described Thicker than Water as a love letter to surfing and as cringe as that may read on paper, it felt true in the moment. There they all were, friends exploring and seeing the world for the first time, meeting strange characters along the way, and hand-cranking through 16mm film stock. Gerlach wore a microphone in his hat to capture sound — which in Ireland included some wildly incomprehensible dialect. The outlines of each surfers’ now-familiar style appear like the first glimpse of a polaroid photo just as it begins to develop.
For The September Sessions, Jack Johnson and his band played the score live. If you’ve never seen a surf film shown with a live score, it’s — well, I was going to say it’s immersive, but that’s a hilariously bad word choice. It’s a wild high-wire act where you wonder if they’re going to lose their place and fall. I’ve seen this trick twice now with different artists and it’s a ride worth taking. Go watch your friends’ band play alongside the surf film they made. It’ll be cool — even if they aren’t (yet) world-famous recording artists.
Then the surfing was over. Jack Johnson’s music is a sunlit beach and a sparkling turquoise ocean — and that feeling of longing you get when you wish you go back to that one perfect day that lingers in your memory.
Sitting two seats over from me was a little old lady — this is truly the only accurate description here — and suddenly, her best friend Jack was playing all her favorite songs. She was as giddy as a teen seeing her first live show. She waved her arms in the air. She tried to take videos with her phone, whose flash stubbornly remained on, no matter how many times she attempted to turn it off. She was just so fucking happy to be there. We should all be that happy.
At the end of the night, I walked out into the dark, quiet streets to find the bike I’d left down the block. I was thinking about friends and making things — and the importance of creativity, whatever the finished product turns out to be. I’ve been working on a novel recently. I might sell my novel. People might want to read it. Or, I might just write it to enjoy the process. Either way, it’s mine and it feels good to be making it.
I have a book club with a few friends that’s not super organized or structured, obviously. I mean, I’m in charge of organizing it, so you can imagine how that’s going. Haphazardly, with little respect for the passage of time. Our most recent book was Jennifer Egan’s, The Candy House, which is a fractured narrative written in much the same style as her previous book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. It’s a brain teaser of a book, but stylistic pyrotechnics aside, it serves as an extended argument for human creativity and story-telling.
The book is set in the near future, and the context is pretty obviously built on current ideas about machine learning and automated language models. In one passage, there’s an effort underway to use math to replicate human interactions and emotion. One character, known as a counter, busily works to solve these equations only to find that he can’t figure out an equation for humor or for love. The machines can only understand so much, Egan seems to say. Creativity remains ours alone and the machines can never entirely capture what it means to be human.
Of course, you are reading this thing on a screen, the words magically conveyed through the air to arrive in your pocket. And I typed it out on a computer while letting my mind wander to the internet and all its wondrous horrors, the thing that is so much the opposite of spending time talking to friends and making things in real life. It would be nice if we could always get together and tell stories and sing songs. It would be amazing if my handwriting were legible enough to write to you on paper and not use the computer at all. It is not. You do not want me to do that, really.
Still, we can make these imperfect connections that make the times we share in real life that much more magical. So go, find your friends. Watch films, read books, and talk about them. Try to make something. And I’ll hope to see you all out there somewhere soon. I might even remember your name. ✨