So I was thinking, it would be great to document the trip me and the lady took out to the Tribeca Surf Film festival.
After fighting our way across Canal Street (probably jammed up because of San Genaro feast, something I wish we had stopped for on the way home), we arrived in Tribeca and parked easily.
Now, I have mixed feelings about anything surf related inside New York city, except people carrying their boards to actually go surf. Any surf-related shop or event seems a bit exploitative for a city that is primarily unconcerned with surf culture, since it requires a good deal of personal effort and dedication to connect with the ocean. In my mind, surfing shouldn’t be connected with fashionistas. At all. On board style. That matters.
Anyhow, getting in was a breeze, though we were running a few minutes late for the late night screening of ‘Dark Fall’. And, for the most part, the audience was full of Jersey surfers. People were calling out names, it was pretty evident that these were guys that they knew from back home. So that was cool. People were stoked. In New York, everyone usually has someplace else to be, but most of the audience stuck around.
A lot of what the interviewees had to say about life in Jersey rang true, and the director did most of his great, artistic work when centering the film around Jersey surf and life in general at the Jersey Shore.
The songs? Bouncing Souls, Bruce Springsteen…. and DEFTONES???? Fucking sick. Pretty cools to hear “Beware the Water” over some crazy Bonzai Pipeline footage. Some Misfits would have fit right in there as well, but you can’t have it all.
The director did a pretty good job, though I wish he took a page out of Patrick O’Dell’s (Epicly Later’d) book and got more into the backstories of the surfers he interviewed for the film. O’Dell does a fantastic job of fleshing out people’s past and establishing their relevance to skateboarding’s past and present. The featured surfers likely have good stories relating to the past ten years of pro surfing, so it would have been great to hear – but certainly not to the detriment of the film.
Anyway, we came, we saw, we liked and got the fuck out of there. Who the hell wants to be in Manhattan on a Saturday night?
