Surely by now you’ve heard that long-standing US surf mag Surfing has folded? It’s not the first cab off the rank either, with other legendary publications like Waves and Transworld Surf already going the way of the buffalo thanks to increasingly digital times. And it raises a lot of questions, this whole death-of-print thing. Questions about our attention spans. Questions about journalistic integrity. Questions upon questions, really, but one that’s slipped under our noses until now is: with surf mags no longer being the medium of choice for today’s surf-media consumer, what will become of the once-hallowed grounds of the grommet surf den?
See when I was a grom (and for many moons before that too), there was no better way to declare your devotion to the sport of kings than to plaster every inch of your bedroom with posters ripped straight from the bleeding heart of your favourite surf mags. What a glorious feeling it was, applying thick globs of blu-tack, eyeing off a space on the wall, then, once the masterpiece was mounted, standing back to admire both your beautiful handiwork and your undying dedication to the cause. Because it was about more than just aesthetics, that act, it was a statement of resistance. It said ‘Fuck you, school!’, ‘Fuck you, Mum and Dad!’, ‘Fuck the whole world!’ because right now this strange and wonderful thing called surfing is my God and Saviour, and if I’ve got to live by your rules and do all this other shit you want me to do, then this place here is my sanctum, and I’ll decorate it however the hell I want.
And so it was, posters of Andy, posters of Rasta and Taj and Bruce, all these larger-than-life figures looming over you in some immortal moment of shred right through your adolescence. You’d eyeball those things for hours, argue about their various merits while smoking cones with your mates, and could still picture them perfectly even years after you’d moved out because in some abstract, expressionistic way, they represented a big part of who you were in that time and place.
Do surf posters still line the walls of grommets these days? I hope so. Being thirty, it’s been a while since I’ve entered into a teenager’s room, but I’m guessing the tradition still persists. In another ten years, though, who’s to say it will? Who’s to say anyone besides nostalgia-struck forty-year-olds will even care?
Maybe they’ll have an app for it by then.
