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Celebrating classic and modern Polynesian Pop

Tiki Central / General Tiki / Correct usage of term 'Surf(ing)'

Post #7102 by BC-Da-Da on Thu, Aug 29, 2002 10:18 AM

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Yes, and I have road rage because I use to drive on roads alone and now there are people on them. And I do horrible things in my life now, because I was abused as a child. It's fun to think of things romantically. But when you don't join in progress, it just runs you over.

How did this ever go from Surfers feeling a certain ownership of waves, to being about violence on the highways or to an analysis of abused-kid-turned-serial-killer? I'm of the mind-set that we need to be very careful before we blindly proceed with the progressive leadway. Maybe that's just the influence of MAD magazine in me speaking out. I don't fear progress, but at the same time, I'm not sure we have progressed as humans, all that much... just made things more easier and comfortable, which is not always better, per se.

Everything has a past, everything changes, some good some bad. Everybody needs an excuse to be an asshole. I don't however, sometimes I just feel like it. Other times I need an excuse.

While I don't disagree that people have a curious way of justifying their actions to themselves, I'm not sure how guys like Noll or Dora rejecting '60s Surfing for what they saw as a cheap replica, was a bad thing. They simply saw the Beach Boys and all of the Pop Surf ephemera as being less than primary, and were rejecting it on that basis (I love that stuff, but I'm coming from a different post-'60s perpective). I'dsay that they were cetainy NOT living in the past, OR getting run over by progression, but rather, just denouncing something that they felt was bogus.

In many spheres of sophistication, not "selling-out," or being abe recogiZe the Real McCoy from the sham is considered noble and respectable, and I have nothing but respect for those guys from the '40s and '50s Sufing scene. They dedicated themselves to something that was not popular and was often misunderstood, and they lived their lives FOR it and AROUND it for fifteen years, unmoved. Romantic or not, that's how it was in the '40s and '50s.

PS. Good thing nobody commercialized or ruined TIKI. It still just the way it was?
Right next to the concrete pond in good SoCal.

Tiki, as a Pop phenomenon, was commercial from day one... that's what it is! The moment it leap from the Polynesian islands and into the hands of non-natives, it was commercial. Maybe even before that. Perhaps you could say that Tiki was ruined when the gap between tradition was created by the missionaries and for two hundred years (in Hawaii, at least), many of the original practices were lost to oral institution, never to be completely comprehended in their original intent again.