Damn. I heard about that on NPR I think but I hadn’t seen the article or the video.Thanks for posting that, John. Parts of that made me mad, made me laugh, and actually tear up.
Just my 2 cents: Whether or not average surfer guy would recognize a Jim Phillips as the work of a master… it’s not really a question that has any need of an answer and it does me more good to, ah, actively not care. We ALL do, and for US, it’s a huge feeling to access/perceive that.
It takes me a bit more work to not despise the bi-peds in that story though.
Then there are those of us who, because we are stupid enough to think that the label matters, pay a premium for a board supposedly from a shaper like Phil Edwards, Brewer or Velzy only to find that it may have been shaped by a ghost shaper like Jim Phillips, Terry Martin, etc. - in some cases even when it has the advertised shaper's signature on the blank.
It brings to mind a different, but perhaps related on some level, Youtube video I saw the other day...
I think he brings up a good point when he describes the perversion and fetishization of objects that are dangled in front of us by the marketing experts who sell us 'culture.' Not knowing any better, we 'buy in' so we can be part of the group... whichever group it may be.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a product of the media as much as the next guy. I just think it's important to have a clue as to what they're doing and how they're doing it.
John,if you go to Silly’s thread about how to “own a lineup,” you’ll read about a guy that used to surf my local beachbreak who was always talking to himself.
If you take Mr. Mckenna’s speech, and recite it in a very angry tone, yelling at times and occasionally punching your board, you just may get all the waves you want.
At least we need to recognize that there are some of us who are not completely products of our culture. Instead, we use the icons of our culture… the symbols our culture has handed us… to communicate a hopefully bigger and deeper set of values that we share among us in our collective identity. And in doing that, we change the meaning of the symbol.