Australia Bushfire Help and Balsaboard Raffle

Only $10 could win you a balsawood Malibu shape or shortboard. Well spent money, helping with the Australian bushfires. Quote from Riley Surfboards Facebook page:

Riley Balsawood Surfboards teams up with the ASP and United Links to raise funds for Victoria fire victims
Sydney, Australia – February 13, 2009

The victims of the deadly bushfires in Australia need assistance and support as soon as possible. Therefore Riley Balsawood Surfboards has teamed up with the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) and United Links to lend their support and raise funds for the victims of the Victoria bushfires.
Funds will be raised by holding a raffle where the first prize is an Australian made Riley balsawood surfboard signed by the 2009 top 44 WCT surfers and past surfing world champions (this is an inestimable prize). Further prizes include Australian made, 100% organic cotton t-shirts and shaping DVD’s. All proceeds of the raffle will go directly to the 2009 Victorian Bushfire Fund which was launched by the Red Cross in partnership with premier John Brumby and the federal government of Victoria. The fund assists the individuals and communities affected by the horrendous fires.
Raffle tickets can be purchased on www.balsasurfboardsriley.com for $10 each. Additionally, for every Riley organic t-shirt sold until March 26th $10 are donated to the fund and the customer automatically enters the raffle. The raffle drawing will be held on 26.03.09 at 12 pm and the winner will be contacted via email and phone and will be announced on the website. The prizes will be sent anywhere around the world courtesy of United Links.

Links for 12/16/08

The New Dimensions Interview by Lance Monthly

I had written a nice text about how I was introduced to The New Dimensions in the 80s. But I lost it trying out the new “Press This” feature of this blog software. It boiled down to the essence that any surf music fan worth his salt has to know this great teenage band from 1962.

Michael Lloyd, lead guitar; Jimmy Greenspoon, piano; Art Guy, drums, Danny Belsky, saxes; David Doud, bass; and Craig Nuttycombe, rhythm guitar.

The band never had any singles released. We worked with these hustler types by the name of Robert Hafner and Tony Hilder. They had a deal with a tiny budget label called Sutton to issue the New Dimension albums as ‘rack jobs.’ Essentially that meant their records would be pressed on cheap vinyl normally reserved for placemats, packaged in fairly generic sleeves, and shipped directly to the cut out bins with no hope of promotion, airplay, or royalties. We had three studio albums, ‘Surf ‘N Bongos’, ‘Soul’, and ‘Deuces & Eights’. We were part of a live album from the Santa Monica surf fair titled ‘Shake! Shout and Soul!’

Read the interview here.

Book on Miki Dora

Legendary Surfers highly recommends this. So I’m sure this is a good read. If you don’t know who Miki Dora was you haven’t seen many sixties surf films. He was one of the original Malibu locals until he was so pissed off by the crowds that he left to tour the world. He worked as a stuntman in the Beach Party movies. He was not known for riding big surf, but he would do it, like in Ride The Wild Surf. If I remember correctly, there are rides from that season in Endless Summer. Of course he’s also featured at Malibu in that film, were he displays his perfect command of that classic California right hand pointbreak. When I mixed the first Surf me Up, Scotty! album, they sent me a short audio clip of Miki Dora talking on the beach, to mix it under the music. Where they found it I have no idea.

Here’s the author’s (David Rensin) page.

Here’s a Miki Dora interview on YouTube.

Surfwise
Paskowitz Family Documentary

Every once in a while a man takes his life into his own hands. I can’t wait to see this! I guess Paskowitz should be a household name to a guy with a 9ft Malibu in the corner of his home office, but I’m afraid you have to look elsewhere for further info on this obviously very special family. Wait, the movie should make me that much wiser.

Surfwise – A film by Doug Pray

Beatnik Beach Film Night at the Egyptian Theater

beats

Domenic Priore from Dumb Angel writes:

(It’s all about the ocean, mannnnnnn…… — Dom)

It’s been a while since I contacted everyone about a blog or somethin’ cool, but this time, it’s for real….

Dig, The American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater is letting us do our “Beatnik Beach Film Night” this Friday night. We did one last summer at Sponto Gallery in Venice, then in December we brought it to the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Now, everybody’s been asking us for months to “do this in town” (Venice is a long haul for most of you), so we’re doin’ it up right then, and including a truly great piece of Beat cinema from 1961, “Night Tide” (starring Dennis Hopper and Linda Lawson), plus our slide show of Greater L.A. area Beat coffeehouses and jazz joints of the late ’50s and early ’60s, along with two primordial shorts from the Venice West Cafe back in the day.

If you’ve never been to the Egyptian Theater, it was the immediate predecessor to Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. When Sid Grauman opened it in 1922, it had the same elaborate Hollywood flair (it’s gone through a nice rennovation in its current incarnation as the American Cinematheque). This is gonna be a fun night, in the right place, with all the right people, yeh… We are working on some special guests; all three filmakers may very well be there for Q&A, at least. The American Cinematheque’s description below says it better than I can (o.k., I helped write some of it). Thanks for plannin’, and makin’ an evening of it this Friday. We’re gonna have a ball… — Domenic Priore

Friday, March 30, 2007: Egyptian Theatre

The Friday, March 30th program is a 7:30 PM screening of NIGHT TIDE, (1961, 84 min.). Director Curtis Harrington’s debut indie feature is a masterpiece, a haunted, poetic hymn to the dark world of the fly-by-night carnival, lonely midways at dawn and the siren call of eon’s-old passion spawned by the devils of the deep blue sea. In a fond nod to Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s CAT PEOPLE, at-loose-ends sailor Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper) falls in love with sideshow mermaid, Mora (Linda Lawson) who may just somehow be related to the real thing. Shot in and around Santa Monica and Venice Beach in the beat culture’s heyday, the film continues to exert a strong spell, and is brimming with the heady atmosphere of bygone coffee houses, poet hipsters, languid jazz and bongos on the shore. With Luana Anders, Gavin Muir. “…captures an intangible quality of what Santa Monica was like in the early 60s. Quite apart from Los Angeles, it was a quiet residential community. The funfair pier has just the right air of seedy despair about it. Everyone seems to be living ‘just off’ the mainstream.” – Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant Preceded by the shorts: “Venice In The Sixties” (15 min.) directed by Leland Auslender. Originally shot for a television show and never used, this is essentially a full-color look inside the atmosphere of the Venice West coffeehouse, its various sections, activities and people; “The Beat From Within: Reflections of a Beatnik” (10 min.) Produced by Ralph Morin and directed by Tom Koester, this short covers a day in the life of a Venice beatnik in glorious black ‘n’ white.

Plus, following the screening, Authors Domenic Priore and Brian Chidester (Beatsville, Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Last Stand in Hollywood, Dumb Angel #4: All Summer Long) will present a unique one-hour slide show documenting the Beat Generation’s long stretch over the Greater Los Angeles area between 1956 and 1966, via visuals of coffeehouses and jazz joints from the Sunset Strip to Malibu, Venice and Newport Beach. Legendary locations only heard about in books or in liner notes, from the Gas House and nearby Venice West Cafe, to the Unicorn and Shelly’s Manne-Hole in Hollywood, the Lighthouse and Insomniac in Hermosa Beach, then all the way down to Cafe Frankenstein (owned, operated and painted by Burt Shonberg). Arists from John Altoon to Eric “Big Daddy” Nord gave these places a colourful splash, as did the wide variety of Folk singers and poets who performed on their stages.

P.S. Also, a new Dumb Angel blog is at: http://dumbangelmag.blogspot.com/

Beatnik Beach Film Night

This I found today at Dumb Angel Gazette:
quote from site

Thursday, December 7, 2007. 7:00-11:00 p.m.
Roxie Cinema, 3117 16th Street at Valencia, Mission District, San Francisco, California

Authors Domenic Priore and Brian Chidester (Beatsville, Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson’s Lost Masterpiece, Dumb Angel #4: All Summer Long) will present a unique one-hour slide show documenting the Beat Generation’s long stretch over the Greater Los Angeles area between 1956 and 1966, via visuals of coffeehouses and Jazz joints from the Sunset Strip to Malibu, Venice and Newport Beach.

Legendary locations only heard about in books or in liner notes, from the Gas House and nearby Venice West, to the Unicorn and Shelly’s Manne-Hole in Hollywood, the Lighthouse and Insomniac Cafe in Hermosa Beach, then all the way down to Cafe Frankenstein (owned, operated and painted by Burt Shonberg) in Laguna Beach.

Artists from John Altoon to Eric ‘Big Daddy’ Nord gave these places a colourful splash, as did the wide variety of Folk singers and poets who performed on their stages. Accompanying the slideshow will be a rare screening of Dirty Feet (1965), shot primarily at the Prison of Socrates coffeehouse in Balboa. Special guest speakers TBA, there will be another short Beat film or two (including a color one shot inside Venice West), plus a few new routines by San Francisco’s own Devil-Ettes to jazz the room.