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Go Ride a Custom Craft!

Every man should own at least one fully tailored suit in his lifetime, but unless you get some dodgy polyester three-piece from a pushy Indian on Khao San Rd, you’re going to have to save some serious money to get a sartorial suit. Equally, hand-made custom Italian shoes, or even bespoke Australian hardwood furniture will set you back a pretty penny. However, if you want to stand out from the bland crowd and have your own custom fix, all is not lost. Instead of grabbing one of those boring white surf sticks off the rack, why not go to a local shaper and get a custom board?

With the international push for factory-manufactured surfboards, hand-shaping is certainly a dying art. And where it once was a burgeoning life progression for surf bums and failed pro-surfers, lately, small-time shapers have been struggling to even find grommets to come in and sweep away the shaping booth floors. It has become such an issue that lately the surf industry even consorted with Creepy Hitler (ie Tony Abbott) in a push for surf shaping to be regarded as a legitimate recognised trade that can then employ certified apprentices. See the article from Surfing World here.

The Gold Coast is littered with world-class surfboard shapers, with DHD and JS Industries creating boards for a huge proportion of the top surfers in the world. But as these boards are in high demand, the price and waiting list was a little longer than I wanted, and so after seeing how well El Rad rode a 6’1″ Stuart Surf FX1, I few weeks ago I ordered a 6’8″ version…and for just $100 more got an all-over orange spray and hand painted silver lightning bolt! And less than 3 weeks later I picked up my bespoke board, complete with my name along the stringer, handed directly to me by Stu himself. Oooh…how I love the smell of fiberglass in the morning!

There really is something satisfying about the whole process: checking out a bunch of different local shapers, chatting to them about your surfing ability and immediate aspirations, seeing the shaper work on similar boards in his shop, scoping his finished boards and lairy paint schemes, getting quotes and prices, ordering your custom stick, then picking it up and giving it that first careful test drive out in the surf…and strutting along the beach with your new colourful creation with a huge smile on your face afterwards. And as El Rad took advantage of a buy-two-at-0nce discount, we both got bespoke boards for a similar price to an off-the-shelf Studio Italia suit from Myer!

Surfing World Magazine recently had a whole issue focussing on hand-shaped and custom boards, and Base Surfboards (a co-op of DHD, Bourton, Simon (Anderson) and others) has a great page which outlines all the steps that go into making a board. Basically, cutting machines carve down a foam blank to within 70-85% of the finished board shape before the rest is sanded back by hand, then it’s fiber-glassed, artwork is painted, fins inserted and final glassing is done to the board.

And El Rad even went a step beyond the hand painted scheme that I ordered from Stuart’s collection – with modern advances in colour printing any image can be bonded to cloth which is then laminated under the fiberglass. And so taking influence from classic art, and willing to wait the extra week or more to finalise the printing that I wasn’t willing to wait, take a look at his “Liberty” HPX2 (a model which received a great review in ASL’s 2010 Surf Bible)! The half naked woman is in fact the central figure from Eugene Delacroix’s famous revolutionary painting, “Liberty Leading the People”. The board looks amazing, with a great painterly print effect – I’m jealous – it makes my orange bolt look tame, and puts the other boards in our collective quiver to shame. And not only is El Rad bringing some art to the sometimes shallow world of surf…and he gets to rub up against a beautiful topless woman every day out in the water…even if she is 180 years old!

Cooly’s Cool Cars

Over the Queens Birthday Long Weekend, while the southern mountains were covered in new snow and the air filled with grinding of chairlift gears and whoops of skier delight, up on the Southern Gold Coast, the air was filled with the sounds of rumbling bored-out V8’s and meaty exhausts. The Wintersun Festival made its last annual appearance at Coolangatta, filling all the streets with classic cars and hot rods, lots of folk in rock ‘n’ roll outfits and beehive hair (yes, Elvis era rock ‘n’ roll, not Guns ‘n’ Roses style, unfortunately).

It was pretty cool to see Coolangatta busy again, awakened from its winter slumber…but it did make it a pain in the arse to find a park for the surf during the week. Over the weekend half the roads were closed for street concerts, or just clogged with Ray Ban-wearing old dudes bubbling along in their gleaming labour of loves, and with very little surf around the best place to hit was Duranbah (the mosty northerly beach in NSW), and fortunately the traffic had scared off the water crowds…but unfortunately not all the smelly surf hippies.

I’ve always been a car fan, not so much for the very old hot-rod style rigs, but more the beasty 70’s American and Aussie muscle cars. On all the old cars the details and all the chrome is spectacular, much different to sleek modern cars (unless of course you buy one of those hideous HSV GTS). The Friday before the Long Weekend I managed to find a prime parking spot opposite the beach – as you can see in the above photo, my organge beast fits in quite well between the classics…but I did shit myself trying to reverse park it between those extra long cars, not wanting to even nudge the metalwork with so many car lovers around!

I spent half an hour walking the streets checking out all the cars – my favourite was the deep blue Chevy Camaro SS…until the owner took 5 spluttering, coughing attempts to start it. While these old cars look cool, there’s nothing like the reliability, safety and handling of new beasts – and to see how far they’ve come in 40 or so years, compare the Ford Mustang engine bay versus the Ford Falcon blown engine we saw out at the Holden Driving Centre that same weekend. Which would you rather own?

Gold Coast V8 Hotlap

Like any good country town, they love their cars up here – take a look at the “Green Gremlin” XR8 and “Fully Sic” ute I spied round the streets recently! There are a few rice rockets clogging up the roads with their wheezing turbo boosts, but really, the Goldy locals love nothing more than a classic Falcon or Holden V8. And I can understand why…I too have a soft spot for big Aussie donks.

Over the long weekend we drove up past Dreamworld and Movieworld through the endless sugarcane fields to the Holden Driving Centre as El Rad was fortunate enough to score a seat in a V8 hotlap! El Rad had given a two-person passenger pass in a V8 for his mate A-Fin’s recent 21st birthday…and when A-Fin’s dad couldn’t make it, El Rad put his hand up to live out his Mark Webber dreams. I just went along for the ride and to listen to the sweet, sweet sound of thundering V8 engines reverberate across the open grassland. And driving a 6-cylinder Ford Falcon myself, I was happy to see all the other hotted-up Falc’s on show. I could have upgraded to a second-hand supercharged XR6 Bullet 400kw custom rocket, but I didn’t have a spare $38,000 for the asking price. It was nice to take a look though.

Although a couple of the cars were stickered-up and pimped-out, they weren’t quite the real deal V8 Supercars you see on TV, however the Falcon that the guys got to take a ride in was a slightly de-tuned former racecar…and it had a spartan interior to match. And you can see from the smile on the boys faces they were pretty pumped after a few laps round the track.

So here are just a few photos of the fun. I realised that using a fast 1000th of a second shutter speed didn’t really capture any feeling of the speed of the cars, particulalry as I couldn’t get all that close the corners. So I took a couple shots at 100th of a second and panned the camera to get some background motion blur and wheel spin. And the final shot even has some exhaust flame out the back. Cool. I can still hear the rumble of engine and exhaust in my head right now…

Boobs and Beaches? There’s more to S.E.Q…

It’s not all boobs, beaches and barrels up here in South East Queensland – in fact there is a depth of culture that Melburnians may be surprised at. Australia’s Southern city does not have a monopoly on culture, no matter what some “Sex and the City” wannabes may tell you. Yes, Surfers Paradise and the Gold Coast is a little light-on in the artistic and cultural realm – everybody is too busy checking the surf – but less than an hour up the road, little ol’ Brisbane has Queensland culture covered.

Brisbane is a fun little city with a good array of unique architecture, trendy spots and hipsters-in-black to provide a cultural contrast to the salt-encrusted hair and golden-tans of the Goldy. Last week we made the easy drive up to the Brisbane Powerhouse for the 16th installment of the frequent Pecha Kucha nights held there to get our cultural fix.

Pecha Kucha:

Pecha Kucha is a the 20-20 Cricket of the art world…literally! About 8 to 12 creative individuals get up on stage to show 20 jpeg slides for 20 seconds each and chat about them. This limits each “artist” to 6 minutes 40 of presentation time so they don’t waffle on in a self-absorbed daze, and it gives the audience a panoramic snapshot of some of the diverse creative pursuits are being followed in their home town. Any sort of creative type can get up, from architects, to painters, furniture makers, graphic designers and commercial advertisers and filmmakers. It was started by a couple of architects in Japan, and one of the “inventors”, Mark Dytham was on hand last week to discuss his creation. I think he’s on the right track, not taking the concepts of “art” and all it entails too seriously- art is to be enjoyed not laboured over, with Mark telling the audience to make sure they head to the bar and stay out late as Pecha Kucha is all about “drinking, then thinking”. Pecha Kucha is held in 314 cities across the world (including Melbourne) – find out more about it here.

Brisbane Powerhouse:

The Powerhouse is a great location to hold Pecha Kucha. It is an amazing former-industrial space converted to a glorified gallery, bar-cafe and classy date-spot sitting majestically right on the wide Brisbane River, overlooking rich houses and schools on the opposite bank. But the bit I like most is how the re-developers have kept much of the original graffiti that was sprayed on the walls when the building lay abandoned for decades. And to show how art can turn full-circle, inside the Powerhouse there is a new Blek Le Rat feature stencil artwork (which would be called vandalism by Victorian politicians and whitewashed over), which itself takes aim at the question of “what is art?” It seems to me that Blek‘s classical figure is reaching out from his gilded gallery frame to grab a spray can in a statement that stencil/street art should now be recognised as a legitimate artform worth displaying. Part of the reason the Powerhouse commissioned the “Godfather of Street Art” to paint their wall is that the building is actually heritage listed for its graffiti! I wish Melbourne had a building as cool as the Brisbane Powerhouse. And while researching this blog I discovered that Blek also painted two more pieces on the exterior of the Powerhouse, which I will have to go back and find.

Another pleasure last week was to discover that the Powerhouse was showing a collection of war photo-journalism photography, from Vietnam, via Africa and the Balkans, up to current-day Iraq and Afghanstan. It was interesting to actually see some photos by the enigmatic Sean (son-of-Errol) Flynn, who Dennis Hopper based his American Photojournalist character on for “Apocalypse Now“. Coincidentally, I had been reading an old novel by Colin Falconer called “Dangerous” which had a very Sean Flynn-like character (named “Sean Ryan”, who was a Hawaiin-shirt wearing, war-photo-chasing adrenalin junky, former minor hollywood hunk and son of a famous Hollywood alcoholic womaniser…hmmm, Falconer must have just plucked those character traits from thin air!) It was chilling to consider the horrific scenes these photographers capture when compared to the light and fun world of wintersports which I operate in. I am glad I have never been at all tempted by photo-journalism, least of all war photo-journalism. If Falconer’s book is anything to go by, it would be almost impossible to lead a normal life after being stuck in the thick of the action trying to get a photo to help explain the insanity of war. Take a look at my photos below of what the night was like – I did get into a little bit of trouble to taking photos of the photos, but hey, what’s a bit of copyright infringement between friends?

Now if SEQ could just have a good cafe I’d never have to move back to Melbourne: all we want is a quaint little place that serves good coffee, quickly, has good food at decent prices, with free newspapers and magazines, and stays open later than 4.30pm on a weekday and 3pm on a sunday. Is that too much to ask?

The Colours of Queensland

I’ve been meaning to doing some business admin and finish off my last magazine article about our Los Angeles trip…but I’ve been procrastinating. With waves on the doorstep it’s all too easy to distracted by the surf. And I’ve even been procrastinating so much that when a colourful little lorikeet arrived on our balcony I found some bread crumbs and pulled out the camera. Tourists pay $44 at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary just down the road for pretty much the same experience – we are pretty bloody lucky to basically live in a tropical paradise, more so as our first floor apartment is located pretty much at treetop level. Birds (and bats sometimes) zip past the balcony and wake us up outside the window every morning. And take a look at the beach scene when I had a sneaky look at the waves this evening. Every day something colourful and magical happens on the Gold Coast…