The dancing dandy starring in the film above is Mr. Harrison Roach, one of the darlings of the post-modern ride-anything movement.
For the last 10 years Harry and a handful of « open-minded » free surfers have managed to scrape livings as an aspirational, relatable, journeyman aesthete. For Harry and surfers like him, their marketability has come not in spite of, but because of, his abstinence from anything like mainstream high-performance equipment, ie. the modern thruster.
And this makes some people very angry.
Many of you watching this right now have long held the belief that the heavily-glassed, elegantly tinted alternative equipment these “hipster kooks” ride has concealed fundamental flaws in their surfing.
« Put these guys on a real surfboard, » you say. « Then we’ll see how pretty they look.”
This is what happens when you put one of surfing’s foremost alternative stylists on teamlite foam and fiberglass.