Beach Culture: Salty Vision of Meaning of Life
Just because surfers have spawned a billion-dollar fashion industry, do we need to listen to their ruminations on the meaning of life?
A new publication from the folks at Surfer Magazine thinks so.
Beach Culture--Real Life in the Coastal Zone hit the stands this month with a note from publisher Steve Pezman declaring: “Unabashedly hedonistic and narcissistic, the beach culture is now truly a significant marketplace of the modern human condition.”
By the time a subculture becomes self-reflective, it’s a good bet that the sea gulls of mainstream merchandising are already nipping at its leathery flesh. In fact, the fashion industry has been scavenging ideas from the beach culture for decades. Now the fashion industry has absorbed everything that defined beach culture.
The line between the realities of the surfer-skateboarder-snowboarder subculture and marketing mythology washed away long ago. But Beach Culture isn’t about to back away from the pose of macho individualism that sells neoprene bikinis in Des Moines.
Intent on establishing the superiority of the surfer world view, Editor-in-Chief Paul Holmes writes that “testing limits (through surfing or skateboarding or playing volleyball) builds character, enhances the sense of individualism in a land of lemmings.”
And then: “What does George Bush know about staring into the face of a 20-foot, fish-killing, close-out set?
“Nothing,” he answers. “And that’s his problem.”
Of course, the most compliant conformists are those under peer pressure to be different, and surfers have always been dragged around by fashion currents--even, perhaps, the one-tenth of 1% or so who have actually surfed 20-foot waves.
Anyway, readers should know better than to take the highbrow beach blather seriously. Sand has never been particularly fertile turf for the rigorous analysis of society.
The beach is, however, a great place to forget modern reality and enjoy life. And Beach Culture makes up for its inability to articulate a post-adolescent world view with lots of blazing color and visual attitude that says it all.
That the editorial content and advertising are a bit blurred together is part of the gestalt, Dude.
The best thing in this premiere issue of this “seasonal bimonthly” (next one hits the stands in April) is a well-reproduced collection of art by artists who surf. Their mercifully brief commentary demonstrates that the beach life can be inspiring.
So. If you forget all that brow-wrinkling stuff and let Beach Culture wash over you like a warm wave, if you absorb it like summer sunshine chances are you’ll find it pleasant and invigorating.
Abuzz Over a Monthly and Its Fall Premiere
For several months now, there’s been a buzz about an aspiring Los Angeles monthly called Buzz.
Now the proposed magazine has named several of its columnists and it looks as if Buzz has actually moved beyond the realm of cocktail chatter.
The launch is scheduled for October.
“Our relationship to Los Angeles will be what the New Yorker was to New York 50 years ago,” publisher Susan Gates said last fall. “Bright and crisp, the voice of what’s going on in the city.”
A magazine consultant and former circulation executive, Gates has been working on the project with co-principals Alan Mayer (editor) and Eden Collinsworth (president) at a five-acre spread on Mulholland Drive.
Although the magazine will hardly spurn gossip, it hopes to rise above the dirt-dishing connotation of its title, reflecting a buzz of the sort that makes up good conversation at a dinner party, Mayer said.
But “rather than have professional journalists writing about what people are doing, we’re going to have the people themselves write about what they’re doing,” Mayer said.
The magazine’s monthly columns will be the exception to that rule. So far, Buzz has hired George Christy, who also writes for the Hollywood Reporter, to do a column called “Restaurants and Such.”
Real estate broker Cheryl Crane, best known as Lana Turner’s daughter, will write a column called “Gimme Shelter,” about real estate and “the way people live in Los Angeles and why.”
Other columnists named by Mayer include Mary Gwynn, who will contribute a parenting column titled “Oh Baby,” and novelist Harlin Ellison, who will write a column titled “The Valley,”which he promises will “boil the blood, open the eyes and sting the soul.”
Defenders Make Pitch for Desert Protection
For an unabashedly biased look at the controversial California Desert Protection Act, pick up a copy of the January/February Defenders magazine, which is published bimonthly by the Washington, D.C.-based organization Defenders of Wildlife.
The two main articles in this special issue--Peter Steinhart’s “Desert Hope, Desert Folly” and Elena Jarvis’ “Rambo’s Racers”--reveal as much love for off-road vehicle enthusiasts and other desert despoilers as a road runner has for a rattler.
The pictures in this issue speak even more forcefully than the well-crafted words. Coyotes, quail, golden eagles, mountain sheep and owls prowl beautiful desertscapes. But then cattle, Army tanks, motorcycles and bulldozers prowl similar scenes.
(Defenders, c/o Defenders of Wildlife, 1244 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036)
Prenuptial Contracts Boost Prying Business
Donald and Ivana, take note: A prenuptial agreement may not be enough. According to the current issue of P.I. Magazine (“fact and fiction about the world of private investigators”), the number of premarital investigations conducted by private investigators has jumped 800% since 1987.
Potential spouses of either sex are apparently deciding that they have as much right as the government, insurance companies and credit agencies to pry into someone’s past--especially since they’re going to be sharing a bed as well as a bank account with said person.
“Our heart just doesn’t control the brain like it once did,” Ralph Thomas, director of the National Assn. of Investigation Specialists, tells the magazine. A complete background check can be done in about 24 to 48 hours with a price tag of a few hundred dollars to $1,000.
(P.I. Magazine, quarterly, 755 Bronx, Toledo, Ohio 43609).
