A beastly dark primitive takes out the encroaching white-short, bleach blonde civilized nightmare and then steal his wallet on the beach.
I never really cared about 'surf culture' until I started to learn about the life and legend of surfing's original antihero, Miki Dora. I was content to just surf and ignore all the other bullshit that surf 'culture' represented. Infact I pretty much closed my mind to surf history as a result. I identified as a skateboarder who liked to ride waves. Then I began to understand the role of Miki Dora in the wider scheme of things and how his life and fame became not only a metaphor for surfing's expulsion from eden and subsequent commercialization but a wider metaphor for the beginning of the end of California's Utopic appeal and the commodification of youth, alternative, drop out and radical subcultures in general.
I'm excited that his legend is getting so much attention but like the paradoxes and contradictions he wallowed in while he was alive, this struggle over his legend looks set to continue to propagate the eternal struggle between purity and profit.
At one point in his life, Dora was on the lam for an extended period. Some of which was spent in South Africa, surfing of course, but also looking for diamonds in the Namib desert. He was guided by bushmen and relished in their primitive existence while he sought to get rich off little fragments of the earth's core. While, I was reading about this, I realized that Dora really is the personification of civilization versus nature, and he was not a walking paradox after all. He could not have taken any other path. He was thrown into an historical, time, setting and arena that led us to our current struggle. How to survive in this current system while satisfying our primal urges. How to remain human, as we become ever more entangled in this removed, distant, techno-centric, symbolic existence.
This shit plagues me daily and it was the impetus behind Foulweather #2. I can only hope I have made a small contribution to making contemporary sense of the meaning of Miki Dora's life.
