Glidezilla

wow look at the foil on that thing. courtesy of R.Lovelace.

needs. wants. board lust. shutting… internets off… right… now!

Posted in daily links | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Garbage Warrior

power to the peoples.

Posted in daily links | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Plastic Bag

Herzog fans: you are in for a treat. make sure you at least watch this video past the intro titles.

Posted in daily links | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Field Notes

Where the hell in the world has Ed Fladung been? and why isn’t he updating his blog. Let’s take a sec to run it down the line. It’s been a fiery month or so.

On March 5th, Luca turned thirteen months. In the past week or so he has: learned how to dance, learned how to open doors, learned how to “give me five” and walk up stairs. This kid is on permanent fast forward. All of a sudden, I turn around and he’s not a baby anymore. He’s a full on toddler. When I see him dancing or opening a door, my heart goes through my chest with love and proudness. I don’t know what it’s going to be like when this kid starts to talk.

Luca at 13 monthsLuca at 13 monthsLuca at 13 months

Last week I went on a hastily planned trip to Huntington Beach for some bizzyness and got to hang with co-conspirator and Chinese Wax Job maestro John Esguerra

RRReleasedRRReleasedRRReleased

We attended the RRRProject RRRelease art show at the Surf Gallery in Laguna Beach. We helped Scott Massey hang the show (or rather kept him company while he and Charles Adler powered through the hang) and I took some snaps of the opening shindig. The party was a lot of fun and I got to connect with several surf arty bloggy peoples including Erin, Eric O. and my two favoritist people in the world Rob and Maggie.

RRReleased panorama
RRReleasedRRReleased

While in Huntington Beach, I also got a chance to visit with Jeff Yokoyama of Maui & Sons / Modern Amusement / Generic Youth fame. Everything he touches is inspired. I had a lot of fun snapping photos of his shop and peoples. He’s created a wonderful world around him (oh and yeah, you can count atleast 6 thunderbolts in the image below).

Generic Youth

I also spent some time with local OC shaper Dan Taylor. Dan has a well rounded quiver of shapes he creates, but he’s known for his pitch-perfect thrusters and people ride his boards religiously. I got some snaps from the shaping room, with Dan.

Dan Taylor portraitDan Taylor in the shaping roomglasser

Back in Mexico, after totally funking the nose on my hull a few weeks back, it’s finally in the shop. Local bro Tzahui is putting the nose back together. and despite my initial trepidation, I’m sure he’ll do a great job. He’s been taking shaping classes with old school legendary shaper and local expat Rick James. La Nevaja is in good hands. In the meantime I’ve been riding the fish and perfecting my tail stalls to head ducks on a nicely little run of freaky combo swell we’ve been having. I love riding the fish like it’s a thruster. I really have to get back into riding thrusters one of these days. I just need to get my hands on a larger thruster, these 6’0″ potato chips just aren’t doin it for me.

More pictures soon!

Posted in life in mexico | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Daily Shaka

Hey I’m on The Daily Shaka, a newish surfy blog that has an interesting concept and implementation. Shaka is a blog aggregator. The blog curator collects surfy rss feeds from around the web and displays a summary of the most recent post of each blog. Basically, instead of having to twittle with an rss reader or bunch of bookmarks, you can make Shaka your homepage for surf blogginess and you’ll always be served with the fresh, hotness. In addition, there’s always a featured blog that has a visual carousel appearance and a pay-it-forward karmic kick to it. The new featured blogs are chosen by the last featured blogger. So Jamie Watson of Pineapple Luv was featured, and she chose me. And so now I’m up on the featured blog spot for a few days, and I’ve submitted a blog for the feature that I’ve been gigging on lately. You’ll have to wait to see what blog I’ve chosen, it’s a good one, maybe you haven’t seen it yet.

Go check out The Daily Shaka. and thanks Jamie for the nod!

Posted in daily links | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Out-of-Commission

Liddle KP 7'4" displacement hulla picture from better times

Yesterday, lost in the pre-session excitement, gathering all my surf detritus and loading it into the car, I temporarily placed the Liddle hull on the roof of the car while I put the seats down. Loaded my bag into the car and took off. whip around a turn and out of the rear view I see a large object slide down from the roof and hit the pavement. The board never made it into the car. A quick check of the tail revealed tiny scrapes nothing more. I felt up and down the rails, nothing, and so i didn’t think to take it out of the board sock.

At the beach, I exclaimed that i was so surprised nothing happened to the board, Volan is a strong substance. And then Ro points to the nose just as it’s coming out of the sock. An 8 inch gouge on the left side of the nose, from just before the stringer down the rail. Thing looks like it got its lights punched out. upturned foam, broken, munched, split fiberglass, shards. The beginning of my deep downward spiral.

I sat on the beach for 20 minutes cursing my forgetfulness, lamenting the damage done to a near pristine board and dreading what a bang up repair job my local homies would do (this operation is way past my ding repair skills). The nose essentially has to be re-built and foiled, never to be the same, patched with normal resin versus the wicked, greenish tint of Volan. My baby was damaged. I felt like packing up and going home.

Just then over my right shoulder came a casual “Hey”, and a well-used roll of duct landed in my lap. So like any good surfer, I taped up the nose, tucked my misery into a little box and drowned it in some mediocre waist high sliding.

So now the hull is out of commission, while I figure out the best way to repair her. I have no idea what I’m gonna do. I’ve been riding this thing pretty much exclusively over the past two months. I am a hull convert junkie and I don’t know if I can go back to round rails, they just don’t don’t have that same slice.

I am the world’s dumbest shit.

Posted in surfing | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Mia Doi Todd – Open Your Heart

Beautiful new music video for one of my favorite musicians Mia Doi Todd. Her new album is coming out I guess and is produced by Jon Brion. The video was directed by Michel Gondry. I love the rawness, kinda like a plain man’s Busby Berkeley.

Posted in daily links | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

January Swells

photo by Ed Fladung

My buddy Tom is making a mexicocentric gnar gnar surf film called Dias Tranquilos. He’s got some insane footage in the can and over the past few swells we’ve been shooting at the same spots and sharing boats. He just put together a teaser reel from some of the amazing swell that rolled through our parts last month. Some of the footage was taken during the same session as the photo above, check it out.

Incidentally, on the afternoon the above photo was taken, Tom was shooting from the middle of the boat and I from the front. After a particularly large outside set, the boat barely made it over and landed a bit on it’s starboard side, me in the air. I landed in between the front of the boat and the first row of seats, on top of Chicharro’s board bag. A soft landing followed by the unmistakable sound of a stringer cracking in half. Big oops.

Posted in daily links | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

RIP Brooklyn Banks?

If there was one physical place that manifested my skating style as a kid, The Brooklyn Banks were it. The gold standard for east coast street skating. ’88, ’89, this was my temple. After a week of school, Friday night I’d make my way into the city and for two solid days straight you could find me here (or in Washington Sq. Park). Big piece of my teen years. gone.

[via Secret Forts]

Posted in daily links | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

D.I.Y. America

Aaron Rose picks up where Beautiful Losers left off with D.I.Y. America, a new short series of films about DIY creativity from the worlds of skateboarding, punk rock and hip-hop. Above is the first in the six part series.

Good way to procrastinate this morning. oh and on my radio this morning?

Posted in daily links | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Andrew Paynter

Andrew Paynter makes beautiful photographs, in particular his “working artists” series.

Posted in daily links | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Guinness Surfer

I totally missed this one when it came out. Blame it on my lack of television viewing habit.

I really dig the style, editing, audio, etc… I usually cringe at any product that markets itself with surfing, but this is an exception. great spot, naturally by the very talented Jonathan Glazer (Director of the very badass Sexy Beast1). [via DMoyes]

  1. You gonna do the job? Do the job. Do it. Yes Grovesnor. Yes Roundtree. Do the job!
Posted in daily links | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Drift: Mandala Interview




Lines Converge: Manuel C. Caro’s Prismatic Path

Interview: Andrew Smith
M.Caro Portrait: Jay Watson
Shaping Bay photos and Art Direction: Ed Fladung
Hand drawn type: Beth Fladung

Drift has a new feature up, Andrew Smith interviews Manuel Caro of Mandala Custom Shapes and it’s a barn burner. Amazing read. Mani Caro simply and beautifully illustrates how the dharmic knowledge of handmade surfboards is silently transferred from older generations to new generations of shapers, ensuring that surfing retains its soul and karmic traditions. If you have any interest in surf culture beyond potato chips and competition results, click on over and read Mani’s piece.

When I was up in North County SD over the holidays, Rob70 and I paid a visit to Moonlight where Mani has his shaping room. I was fortunate enough to be able to slip in for a few minutes to take some photos. Unfortunately, Mani was home sick with a cold that day (I think). I was instantly drawn to Mani’s tools, shaping room detritus and wall decorations but the thing that struck me most about the shaping room was his profound collection of hand-foiled fins and template curves. A geometric collected history of surfboard shaping. I felt kinda guilty oogling his curve collection with my camera, like staring at someone else’s girl. But I knew I’d kick myself twenty years from now if I didn’t take the time to at least briefly document what I saw.

Like most Drift features, this article formed like Voltron: Andrew Smith put together the transcendent interview with Mani, Jay Watson took Mani’s portrait, my sister Beth hooked up the hand drawn type, I added my shaping bay photos and hooked the photo editing and art direction and of course the folks at Drift provided the stoke.

Go check it out.

Posted in projects | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Recent swells







Posted in my photos | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Geometrik

Some new stuff I’ve been working on.






Posted in my photos | Tagged , , | 4 Comments