Salve Froth Monster! This week it's a pics and vids only edition. Next week there will be more pics and more vids, and also some more philosophical writing about play and fun and work and struggle and joy and glide and timing and judgment. And then some menus, recipes, and workouts for good measure. I hope you enjoy this visual assortment! Pura Vidissima, Dion Jose and me after the water cut out. This is a posed photo after the fact. The water went out one day and Jose and I had to go down to...
8 days ago • 2 min read
Nonstop Surfing Under A Species of Eternity Dear Friend, Thank you for your patience as I didn’t get a zine out last week. Big ups to anyone who read the July 17th issue in its entirety and didn’t reach out after “not having received” a zine last Friday! For those who did reach out to “remind me” that they didn’t get one: I appreciate that you love getting them so much! Just maybe read them in addition to watching the videos? Usually the most salient info about where I am, what I am doing...
15 days ago • 17 min read
Dear Fellow Intra-worldly Being, I hope this finds you in good spirits today. I hope that you have found more than one moment to have played in the ocean this week. If not, then perhaps you played at other things. Perhaps you watched Spain annihilate France and England come apart to Argentina in the Copa Mundial. I know that some of you did your SurfReady365 workouts, and others did workouts on your own or with trainers and friends who are not me. Maybe you painted or sketched a drawing of...
29 days ago • 19 min read
Dear Friend, Unlike I promised last week, I’m going to give you a break from philosophy today. I’m in the weeds again with the topic of religion, play, and surfing. They are very rich weeds to be sure and next week should be a banger. Today I’m reporting on a fun surf contest I did in New Jersey, some games you can play in your own surfing, and will give you an update on how my cut is going, as well as my go-to recipe for TVP Lentil Bolognese. First off, this summer is flying (vid is from...
about 1 month ago • 21 min read
Dear Fellow-Being-In-the-World, This week I have some “hard core” surfing philosophy for you and some fun surfing photos from the past. Martin Heidegger made an important distinction in his philosophy between what he called ontic and ontological phenomena. Understanding this distinction is very helpful for investigating whatever sort of phenomena — stuff that appears — you’re into. He picked this up from his mentor, Edmund Husserl, who had a similar distinction between the natural and the...
about 1 month ago • 21 min read
Dear Grom-at-Heart, This week we’re back to video content. I’ve been writing lots on play this week and waded into some thorny theoretical territory that will take me more time to parse and organize. I’ve pulled down Derrida and Freud, and about to return to Gadamer’s Truth and Method because in What We Think About When We Think About Soccer Critchley reminded me that Truth and Method begins with an analysis of play. As for the Derrida and Freud, that has to do with what Fink and Huizinga...
about 2 months ago • 8 min read
What Is Play Without Fun?! Peyton Lee and the supreme joy of a fly away kickout. 2023 or 4. Dear Fellow Froth Monster, Today I want to discuss the role of “fun” in play a bit more, and then I want to share some of Huizinga’s genealogical/etymological research of what he calls “the play-concept.” First, fun. Of fun Huizinga writes that it “resists all analysis, all logical interpretation. As a concept, it cannot be reduced to any other mental category. No other modern language known to me has...
about 2 months ago • 23 min read
New Study On Play With A Detour Through My Dissertation Pita is my philosophy daemon! Dear Surf Nerd, I’ve got some heavy surf-nerding for you this week. As promised, I put my philosophy hat on, grabbed the books off the shelves, got my little blue notebooks down too, and went to work on the topic of surfing and play. At first this was just going to be a mere exegesis of Eugen Fink’s Play As Symbol of the World (1960). It has since morphed into something more far reaching. But let’s start...
2 months ago • 23 min read
CONTROLLING YOUR EQUIPMENT WITH FIALKA Get the inside take on what it's like to have modest goals as a later in life learner unaccustomed to the ways of the sea. Dear Companion in Froth, I have got a short one for you this week. I've been working hard on philosophy and it's slow going. I've also been down all week with some sort of post travel malaise. I arrived Friday night, slept pretty well, rested Saturday, coached Sunday, coached Monday, and then got home from my session with Sana and...
2 months ago • 2 min read