The Revolution Will Be Televised DIY surf uprising
DIY surfing wants you to buck the system! And stop buying all the things you can make for free. But in the cold, hard, green light of day, can you teach a revolution that should be self-taught?
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Surfing, the Spectator Sport: in which a strange video gets me thinking.
On January 25, 2010, I was conducting my daily trawl of the Internet when I found myself at the Vimeo page 8941685 - Sea Movies - Stranger than Friction. The clip, which had been uploaded the day before, was in black and white and featured a lanky kid named Ryan Burch surfing head-high lefts on what appeared to be a four-foot block of refrigerator foam. He folded his nearly six-foot frame into a streamlined crouch as he swooped down glassy faces with unconscionable amounts of speed. One subtle tweak of his primitive, finless craft and he streaked across the entire length of the frame before grabbing rail to cut back, kick the tail out, or spin a 360. It was high-performance surfing, but not as we know it: neither progression nor regression, but some sort of renegade lateral evolution; a duck-billed platypus with a Kalashnikov.
It took a few more clicks to get to Korduroy.tv, the site that had posted the clip. There, I found myself in a virtual grandfather's attic of DIY videos, surfing related and not. Check the page now and you can find an orbital sanding tutorial, Go-Pro camera videos from inside tubes in Chile, ding repair clips, James Brown demonstrating the hottest dance moves of the 1970s, cardboard surfboards, and Cordell Miller ripping apart Trestles, to name a few. It turned out, the man behind all of this was a guy called Cyrus Sutton.
Top of the Hill: in which Cyrus invites me to tea.
Ryan Burch walks me up the Hill to Cyrus's place, the oldest house in Encinitas. It's a converted hotel owned by California chronicler Garth Murphy who has filled the place with artifacts from around the world, assorted paraphernalia, art, sculptures, antiques, bones, Americana and straight-up kitsch. In the space that's left, he rents rooms to various creatives.
“As a kid who was born in the ’80s, I’m part of a generation that came of age feeling like we had endless resources, time and money – everything was abundant,” he says, looking straight through me with his hawk eyes. “Since then, the carpet has been pulled out from under us… we all thought we were going to go to college and get jobs and live like our parents, but it’s not happening. I wish it were still like it was for our parents, but we have to get used to it.”
And that’s where Korduroy TV comes in. “Korduroy TV is a bunch of middle-class, spoiled '80s kids who are trying to figure out how to toughen up and make things instead of buying things,” he says. “For my whole life, I’ve been told that if you want to be this, you have to buy this; you have to buy things to measure up, and that’s a shitty way to feel.”
Half Jokingly, Sutton refers to himself and his friends as “emo lumberjacks”, but his easy demeanour can’t conceal the seriousness in his eyes. “I think people are being sold values that are against their best interests. We are fucking brainwashed by Frankenstein capitalism, which is basically a feudal system where the kings and castles are Walmarts and big chains. They don’t want us to be free and happy and healthy, they want us to buy their medicines and make-ups and foods and clothes.”
The irony of starting a televised revolution isn’t lost on Sutton. When I suggest that he’s at the head of a counterculture, he snorts. “Counterculture is just a group of people doing free market research for companies so they can take those ideas and market them a year later. Companies are so strong they literally own us, and you can’t rebel against that. Part of Korduroy is my realisation that all subcultures eventually become marketing campaigns.”
Then his face softens, just slightly. “My art is a personal exploration executed in a way that people can understand… What we still have is the ability to make things. So my only hope is to create something that has a viral message and speaks to people and speaks against the machine."
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The Revolution Will Be Televised (text) by Tetsuhiko Endo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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