New York City Is The Best City To Show A Surf Film

Oh, there’s been plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth this week, much hemming and hawing from the cheap seats over Stab’s insistence on parading our new experimental blind taste test in person, before dropping the whole project online.

What’s that they say, Hunger makes the best sauce?

Our first screening of The Electric Acid Surfboard Test last Thursday was thoroughly attended, the crowd on the promenade at Pacific City pushing back towards the growing line at the Bungalow, where another 500 guests had crammed into the bar’s myriad wood-walled nooks and settled in for the film that Dane had literally just finished tweaking (and would continue to tweak until…)

A captive HB audience watch Dane get dosed. Photo by Sam Moody

With EAST’s first premiere under our belts, we couldn’t be more psyched to be hitting the road with her, with big premieres planned for Australia and Europe, and a string of dates around the country with our friends at AwayCo, and the film dropping on iTunes next month, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for you to get a first look at the film before EAST gets fed to the wolves in early October, after our last premiere in France.

But first we’re headed to Brooklyn, a city near and dear to both Stab and my own personal heart, which anyone who made it to the last premiere we did with Dane and our friends at House of Vans, for Stab In The Dark, will know exactly, why.

Do we even need to justify New York’s place amongst the most epic cities to live and be a surfer, let alone to premiere a surf film. When I moved there in 2004, anxious how easily I’d find my people in that hot American mess of a city, a few weeks in I found myself thoroughly embraced by one of the most remarkable surf communities I’ve ever encountered ‘til this day.

Shaper Josh Hall, Pilgrim Surf Supply’s Chris Gentile, photographer and “quintessential Malibu gremmie, Dane Peterson, and Stab‘s EiC, Ashton Goggans. Photo by Sam Moody.

The New York premiere of EAST feels like one of those full-circle moments, personally. During my five-year residency, I was fortunate enough to have a second home inside Mollusk’s Brooklyn outpost (now Pilgrim Surf + Supply), in an ancient, now-leveled compound of galleries, artist’s spaces, and recording studios. For a few years I got to lurk inside Chris Gentile’s, 150-square-foot clubhouse, fondling and riding a countless number of the gorgeous boards that would roll through the shop—Lis’s and Skip Fryes, Mandala and Pavel quad fishes, one of Richard Kenvin and Joe Baughess’ first mini-Simmons, Danny Hess’ wood beauties, Christenson’s guns and twin keel fishes, Bonzers Liddle and Andreini hulls…

And while surely we had some big nights in the City during those years, my favorite memories of New York all revolve around nights spent outside watching surf moves at Metropolitan Ave’s dead-end at River Street in Brooklyn any of the countless times gatherings occurred; serving Alexis Bledel* a hot dog off the grill and getting countless open container violations from the NYPD; dialing artist and filmmaker Richard Phillips** into a super foiled, tricked-out longboard; combing through Bruce Brown films with Thomas Campbell while he was finishing The Present; listening to skateboarding pioneer, the late, great Andy Kessler’s endless stories of early-’80s New York; getting the call that Tom Curren was on his way to the party and would we by any chance have an amp, cause he wants to play, and an hour later watching Searching For Tom Curren projected on the massive oil silos on the shore of East River, Manhattan lit up in the background and Curren jamming behind us…

Yeah, New York’s the fucking best. 

The House of Vans premiere on Monday is nearly at capacity, we’re packed and ready to roll, all ten boards on their way to Brooklyn right now, and the guest list keeps growing. The Reverberation Radio boys will be spinning records, and our friends at PC Worship will be closing down the evening.

On Tuesday, we’ll be going for a surf day you’re all invited to, then partying at Pilgrim, where Dane and Former will be kicking off a two-week residency, Joel Tudor and Amsterdam Wetsuits will be slinging slick-skin neoprene, and we’ll be hanging with all the EAST shapers that can make it out, and showing the 10 profiles of each of the EAST’s Sunshine Makers.

This one’s for the River Street #HardBody crew, and all the New York heads. You know who you are.

No sleep ‘til Brooklyn.

-AG

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