The Seven Samurai or From Here to Obscurity

From Stab issue 58, in stores now and available online this week. The fantastic trinkets, magazines, leafy drinks and films that form Dane Reynolds’ earthly pleasures this year… 1. Huge magazine (Wallace Berman feature): I bought this magazine in Japan in which a large portion of it was dedicated to Wallace Berman. Of course, all of it was in Japanese except one page which described him as “the hippie beatnik punk who actually did turn in, turn on, and dropped out.” That’s sick. The article’s rad ‘cause with only the art and the photos as a guide it lets your mind wonder. I know nothing else about him, but the art is remarkable. 2. Nas (Illmatic): I used to like rap music. I also used to wear tank tops and think that nice things were cool. By nice things, I guess I mean that while we weren’t poor by any means we didn’t ever buy any luxury items. It was all necessity. Then I started making some money from surfing and shit, what else would I spend it on? I bought a car, a laptop, video games, I don’t know, shit like that. Thought it was rad, but eventually figured buying shit wasn’t fulfilling.  Anyway, I’d drive around in a nice car in my tank top playing rap music. Somewhere in my late teens there was a fundamental change and I no longer wanted to do that. But, lately, I’ve been feeling nostalgic for the rap and Illmatic was always the sickest, along with Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt and Raekwon’s Only Built 4 my Cuban Linx. 3. Boss loop pedal: I suck ass at guitar and have no one to play with but I wanna learn and improve so instead of sitting there practising scales which is totally boring you can record a little riff and noodle around till something sounds right and add another layer and do it again and eventually you have a giant wave of sounds and then you erase it and start over. Hours of fun! 4. Canon Snappy S: I always hear people saying they got into photography because it was a way to remember all the moments they had when they were travelling, but that’s not true for me at all. I think, initially, I wanted to take photos as a way of making art. Which is precisely why I suck at it. I think too much. And a camera with a sharp lens just exposes my poor judgment so I bought a really shitty camera for two dollars and now pictures don’t seem so precious, and perhaps they still suck, but now they look like they should suck because they were shot with a Canon Snappy S I bought for two dollars. I like the rawness and candid quality I’ve gotten with this camera. 5. Tea: I haven’t been able to drink coffee lately because of the anxiety and so I’ve been drinking green tea and some other blends of tea and I’ve been totally enjoying it. 6. Chelsea Makai photo book: This is the sorta shit I’m into. I showed (Quiksilver photographer) Todd Glaser and he was like “It looks like they have really bad printing” and I know they have bad printing and hardly any of the photos are great on their own but it’s sick because it’s stream-of-consciousness and as a whole, the book is totally inspiring and makes me stoked. 7. Searching for Tom Curren: We watched this several times on a recent boat trip. His surfing’s so engaged and connected, always on a rail, crouching with perfect form. It’s so different to how people are attacking waves these days and it was totally inspiring. Plus, I love his sound bites: “You… seem… to have… unlimited amounts of speed” while he’s getting a giant barrel on that fish.