WRESTLING ELEPHANTS

I first encountered Oscar Niemeyer’s work in a book. I was staying in Rio, Barra da Tijuca, a “nouveau” neighborhood notorious for its horrible architecture. Niemeyer’s architecture had curves, abstract forms, sexiness. I learned of a home called Casa das Canoas in São Conrado, not far from Barra da Tijuca, and I went straight there, on the bus. Casa das Canoas is located up a long winding hill, which I walked up, backpack over shoulder, sweating in the heat. I passed a favela, a pair of shirtless men carrying a 1970s television set down the sidewalk, a colonial home of vibrant blues and pinks.

            My entrance to Casa das Canoas did not go well. The home was fenced off. I pressed a button, got no reply. Pressed it again, got no reply. Suddenly a gate to the far left of the house opened and a car exited. Coming from a youth in which we hopped fences to skate empty pools, I saw this as my in, and shimmied past the gate before it closed. As I approached the home an irate proprietor came storming out the front door, shouting at me in Portuguese. I dug deep into my reserves of sincerity to talk him down. After slapping heart with hand several times, the global sign for ‘I’m an honest man,’ he finally calmed down. And gave me a tour of the house.

            Built for Neimeyer himself in 1953, Casa das Canoas brings the exterior into the interior, which is to say there’s a lot of floor-to-ceiling glass, with striking views of the tropical jungle and the shimmering ocean way down below. The house is curvaceous in the way that the human body is curvaceous. There’s a big granite boulder that has been integrated into the space. There’s a pool that sits just outside the living room. It feels something like a tree house, but instead of the homespun, dark-wood vibe, it’s sculptural white, modernist. It feels aspirational, a place to make epic work, or, in Niemeyer’s case, design epic buildings.

            So began my fascination with Oscar Niemeyer. I visited Edifício Copan in São Paulo, a 38-story residential building with a sinuous façade that suggests levity, a curtain billowing in the wind. I went to Niterói Contemporary Art Museum in Rio, a UFO-looking building set on the edge of a cliff, with sweeping views over the water. And I read Niemeyer’s memoir, The Curves of Time, while staying at Barra da Tijuca in 2011. At the time I’d become obsessed with bodysurfing. The Rio coastline is textured with those iconic granite rocks, the kind found in the living room of Casa das Canoas.  They create wedgy waves with almost no shoulder. On a board you’re rocketed into the flats, but bodysurfing you match the speed, you stay in the pocket, the ocean pulsing through your belly. I somehow likened this to Niemeyer. That reading of and flow with the environment, that oneness with nature.

            Passages from The Curves of Time that have stuck with me:

 

“I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to free-flowing, sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman. Curves make up the entire Universe, the curved Universe of Einstein. “

 

“In my lectures I have always emphasized that I do not consider architecture terribly important, and there is no contempt in my words. I compare architecture to other things that are more connected to life and Man; meaning the political struggle, the personal contribution that each of us owes to society, particularly to our less fortunate brothers. What can compare to the struggle for a better and classless world where all individuals are equal? In spite of this opinion, architecture has kept me very busy, leading me, as I do now, to defend my works and my point of view as an architect, and to debate architectural issues with a passion that life, so fragile and insignificant, seemingly does not justify.”

 

“On several occasions I have mentioned genetic information and how, in my opinion, it accounts for our qualities and defects, thus influencing our reactions. I shouldn’t complain about this hidden being within us that genetic information creates and which so often dominates us. I have already mentioned how this “double” controls me when I begin a new design, taking me by the arm and leading me in trance along the pathways of fantasy to the new, unexpected shapes that are responsible for this architectural spectacle.”

 

“I once imagined that the followers of contemporary architecture, grown tired of so much repetition, would someday become disappointed with the dogmas they once fiercely advocated and choose something different, finally assured that invention must prevail. This is occurring now, but once again they are making a mistake by tacitly following the adventure of postmodernism, reproducing the same building designs but adding anachronistic and outdated architectural details. This is the same “gratuitousness” they once criticized and have now admitted in its most simplistic form.”

 

“I have always confronted life as an unwavering rebel. After reading Sartre, I viewed life as an unfair and unrelenting tragedy. When I was a young man of only fifteen, I was anguished to think of man’s destiny, doomed as we are to total abandonment, and defenseless against it. I was frightened by the idea of someday disappearing forever. Like everyone else, I have tried to erase such thoughts and instead take advantage of the pleasures of this brief and joyful passage on earth that fate grants us without consultation. I have felt the ecstasy of the fantastic natural world around us, and, arm-in-arm with my friends, I cast aside the disturbing thoughts that so afflicted me when I was alone. I wore a mask of youthful optimism and contagious good humor. I was known as a high-spirited and spontaneous personality, a lover of the bohemian lifestyle, while deep inside I nursed a tremendous sorrow when I thought about humanity and life.”

In the summer of 2015 I traveled to the Maldives to write a travel piece. I learned that the Maldives is the flattest country in the world, i.e., they have the lowest high point (lowest high point. I love this!), i.e., first to go underwater with the effects of climate change. I wanted to make a short film of some kind, wasn't sure what, I brought a GoPro camera, I am fascinated by our selfie culture. I wondered if there might be some kind of theme of self-obsession in there. The first day I arrived I mounted my camera to the nose in classic narcissistic fashion (pointed backwards, mirror-like), I paddled out to Sultans, a wave loomed, I pressed PLAY, stroked, hopped to feet, pumped, flung myself at the lip to do a floater, and like a cartoon the lip dislodged my camera (I didn't insert it properly) and it sunk to the bottom (I didn't put on the foamy float thing). I tried to find it but I couldn't. So I rode a few waves. Then I thought, 'Gotta find the thing, I traveled all this way, and I want to make some kind of film'. So I paddled to the boat, grabbed mask/snorkel/fins and went searching. After about ten minutes I found it. It had been rolling the whole time. There was like 45 mins of this wave/dislodge/raked over bottom of the sea/find footage. I passed it along to the brilliant director/editor Isabel Freeman, from NY, resides in London, editor of "Stephanie in the Water." She teased out a frame—elation, loss, back on the horse—as well as the excellent Terry Riley/Don Cherry tune. I wrote a VO script based on love and loss (my wife died suddenly three years ago). And there you have it.

http://www.huckmagazine.com/art-and-culture/video-surfer-jamie-brisick-finds-solace-water/

I was obsessed with the “Dogtowners,” a band of raffish, pot smoking, wildly gifted skaters from Santa Monica and Venice. I studied their pictures in Skateboarder, noting not only their knock-knees and splayed fingers, but also their facial expressions. Tony Alva pursed his lips. Stacy Peralta edged his tongue out of his mouth. When Mom offered to buy us back-to-school clothes, I flipped through the Dogtown articles and made a list: oversized Pendleton with red checks, Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax T-shirt, low slung Levi’s cords, tube socks bunched at the ankles, two-tone Vans deck shoes. After shopping at the Oaks mall, I took my new gear out to the backyard and grinded it against the pavement to make it look more “Dogtownerish.” I drew Dogtown crosses on my notebooks and my desk at school. I drew imaginary Dogtown crosses on my thigh with my index finger. I read about the elfin “Jay-Boy” Adams’s death-defying trick in which he skates at full speed up to the moving Pacific Ocean Park bus, skids into an extended Bert that literally throws his lithe, horizontal body under the bus, then snaps his board around seconds before the rear wheels crush him.

Out the back, a fifteen-foot wall of water looms. I scratch frantically and barely make it over the crest, which gives me a brief glimpse at the procession of waves that follow. It’s otherworldly: silvery, smooth, impossibly large lines stack to the horizon. In the magazines they call this “corduroy” but in fact it looks sci-fi. It’s everything a surfer dreams of, but on a scale that is deadly. It stirs both rapture and dread.

Hawaiian John Shimooka whips around and drops over the ledge of a wave that looks six times taller than he is, an avalanche of whitewash exploding behind him. Brazilian Fabio Gouveia catches a beast that caps on Second Reef, a gentle entry followed by a heaving inside section.

I catch a wide shoulder, an icebreaker, and ride it to the channel. With a surge of half-confidence I paddle deep into the pit. A wave looms: it’s double overhead, pops up extremely fast, and is so steep and hungry to throw me shoreward that it takes only a stroke or two to catch. I pop to my feet, attempt to angle down the reef-ribbed face but instead airdrop and land in a kind of jackknife and abruptly halt. There’s a millisecond in which all goes calm and mute. Then with a loud, violent explosion comes the lip on my head, which feels like a refrigerator dropped from a second story window. It squashes me flat on my board then ragdolls me in a thousand different directions. My heel grazes coral, my board slams me in the back, my jersey peels inside out and dangles from my shoulder. I feel nauseous, violated. Only when I break the surface do I realize that my left knee is severely wrenched.

Malibu was our playground. On the half-mile stretch of sand between First and Third Point, we encountered rakish surfers, scraggly bums, nervous Vietnam vets, and leather-clad punks. Out in the sparkling waves, West Val stoners, East Val preppies, Hollywood vampires, Santa Monica blue bloods, Venice gypsies, Topanga hippies, Colony gazillionaires, and beer-swilling Wall Knuckleheads all converged, creating a magical soup that educated us in ways no school ever could.
       
We’d catch rides from parents, aunts, distant cousins, friends of friends’ older sisters—anyone with a driver’s license headed west. Full of butterflies and ambition, we’d pull our boards from the car, sling our backpacks over our shoulders, and cross the pearly gates entrance to First Point. The hot sand under our feet was instant liberation.
       
The lineup was one of the most crowded and heated in the world. One morning Angie Reno dropped in on Cliff, a 6’4”, 220 lbs. Herculean regular foot. They exchanged words, dunked each other’s heads under water, then took it to the beach. Angie threw a few scrappy punches. Cliff wrestled him to the ground. Angie squirmed free, ran over to his longboard, punched the fin out, and went after Cliff, using the fin as a kind of hatchet. For a second we thought we were about to watch a scalping of the Last of the Mohicans variety, but Cliff knocked the fin out of Angie’s hand, and laid into him. The smack of fist pounding wet, blubbery torso sounded the way smashing watermelons do. The following day Angie showed up at the wall with a crazed look on his face. In his pocket he clutched a gun. Before he could get to Cliff the lifeguard intercepted. Angie was taken away in handcuffs. We did not share this story with Mom and Dad.

Our crew consisted of my brother Steven, Cousin Pete, John Fiedler, a few Agoura High surf pals, and a dozen or so fellow teenagers we met along the way. We set up camp on a berm overlooking the inside section of Third Point, dubbed the “Kiddie Bowl.” Amid the hundreds of surfers in the water we engaged in our own little unspoken competition. The hierarchy was constantly shifting. A single excellent ride during a sizeable south swell could make you king for a week. Likewise, a cowardly hesitation could render you the laughingstock.

Between surfs we “terrorized.” Lunches were sabotaged; boards were set adrift in “Polio Pond,” the fetid creek that drained into Third Point. Locals were scrutinized and nicknames were assigned. “Fruit Loop” rode a pink and yellow twin fin and wore striped Dolfin shorts. He strutted up the beach with cigarette dangling from lip, bleached blond hair in a great bird’s nest of a pompadour. He surfed with an incredibly low center of gravity, almost sitting, and spun a dizzying number of 360s. Once we counted seven on one wave.

“Coke” was sunburned, barrel-chested, wetsuit-less even on cold days. He surfed, as Cousin Pete put it, “like he hasn’t taken a shit in three weeks.” Entering the water one bright summer morning, he nodded to thirteen-year-old John Fiedler.

“Coke.”

“What’s that?” asked John.

“Wanna buy some coke?”

Towheaded, bowl-legged “Cock ‘n’ Balls” trotted across the sand to Third Point, yellow single fin underarm. At water’s edge he took off his boardshorts and draped them around his neck like a cape. He surfed for hours in the nude. Was it a celebration of surfing’s freedom and pure expression? Or was it was genius crowd control? No one dared drop in on him.

Greatest moments? Hard to say. A torrent of them, really. I have vivid recollections of a sleepless night in Rio de Janeiro in 1990. I was jetlagged (jetlag can be more intoxicating and transformative than LSD), I was listening to the Rolling Stones “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll” on my Walkman. I kept rewinding “Time Waits For No One.” It created a sense of urgency. There was a life that I was reaching for, and somehow the song contained it. I was in Rio for the Alternativa Pro, and like every surf contest, I visualized myself winning it. That life, that higher self, that inner Superman was there for the liberating with every event—an amazing sense of renewal and self-invention in the pro surfing game. It was like 4 in the morning. I was pumped. I wanted to put on my clothes and ride the elevator down and cross the street to Praia do Pepe and sprint the soft sand beach in some kind of primal roar. But I thought better of it. At that time Rio was one of the more dangerous cities in the world. So I just kept listening.

http://pilgrimsurfsupply.com/radio/william-finnegan-jamie-brisick-in-conversation/

http://pilgrimsurfsupply.com/radio/wrestling-elephants-steve-pezman/

I first encountered Rabbit in the pages of Surfer in 1978. Clad in an Everlast robe, clenched fists pumped triumphantly overhead, he looked fierce and kingly. And he was. That year he won the world title.

In 1982, when the Op Pro came to Huntington Beach in California, Rabbit’s sponsor, Quiksilver, arranged for him to stay with a local team rider, Bobby Knickerbocker, a sixteen-year-old kid who lived with his single mother in an oceanfront home in Newport Beach. Bobby did what good friends do in moments like these: he called my brother and me and told us to get our arses over there immediately. ‘Just don’t tell anyone Rabbit’s staying here,’ he made us promise. In our little world, Rabbit may as well have been Michael Jackson.

My brother and I stayed for a week. I had no memorable conversations with Rabbit—I was reduced to stutters in his presence—but I observed him closely. His diet consisted primarily of what today we call ‘super foods’: brewer’s yeast, bee pollen, soy milk, sprouts, avocado. When he wasn’t surfing he locked himself away in his room, as if preserving his energy. But when he slipped into his blue, red and white Rip Curl spring suit and made his way to the water, the showman came out. He didn’t walk across the hot sand he trotted, as if being chased by a swarm of screaming groupies. In the water he sprint-paddled and caught four times as many waves as anyone else. He surfed as if he were in the finals of the Op Pro. You could almost see him picturing his fellow surfers as opponents, the wooden lifeguard tower as a grandstand.

Rabbit was never my favourite surfer. He was unbelievably good, but his style didn’t caress me in the gut the way others did. But his charisma and flamboyance shaped the way I thought about pro surfing. In the 1977 surf movie Free Ride he hops from one pinball machine to another, playing both at once with cool and command (this is how he earned his nickname). In the playground of a Coolangatta park he rides a swing-set as if it’s a surfboard, cross-stepping, ducking, weaving, crouching low into an imaginary barrel with a face full of stoke. Rabbit was a spur. He made me want to drop to the popcorn-scattered floor and knock out 200 push-ups right then and there.

http://www.huckmagazine.com/ride/surf/westerly-interview/