The Ben From Brazil

Latest Update: October 7, 2006

By Ben Marcus

6:35 AM SATURDAY OCTOBER 7, 2006 OFFICE

Good morning. I finally have time to catch up with this.

Yesterday was mostly spent finishing those 20 surfer profiles for the website. I got them all done, 20 x 500 words in four days. Finished. I keep thinking they are going to tell me they don’t need them now and they are sorry. I hope they don’t do that. That took up too much time that I don’t have.

Yesterday morning I sat at Diedrichs and worked. There is a woman visiting who is launching a jewelry line and I helped her write a press release. She calls herself a “public artist” who has worked on some pretty cool projects along the lines of Cristo: there for a while, and gone. Like waves, sort of. Most recently she was part of the Flaming Lotus Girls who got a $50,000 grant from Burning Man to build a 30-foot tall, 20 ton Serpent Mother sculpture out of steel and stainless steel. She welded part of it. I can’t believe they were allowed to build it.

She is cool: 4’ 11”, 100 pounds, kind of a surfing Frida Kahlo. She has never tried to make money from her art before. She has her work produced in Bali and it’s quality. She hit town with a jewelry case full of samples and a heart full of hope and raised eyebrows at Kitson and Madison and Fred Segal and she is kind of killing it. I’m on her side and trying to help.

Yesterday I got a reprieve on Brazil. Rosaldo sent an email saying:

Ben, I trying to change the dates of your tkt...you come on october 12th and go back on 17th...The presentation will be on october 16th. Does it works for you ?

So I said it works for me fine and then he said.

This way we will have more time to get organized. Just make sure you got your visa issued asap...my birthdau is on ocotber 13th..you will have right on time. I ll go ahead and chenage tkts dates.
R

I don’t know what I am getting into really. I don’t know how big this surf culture and arts festival will be, but I like Surfando Antes Dos Anos 50 and hopefully the Brazilians will like it.

Yesterday morning I saw Chris Carter at Diedrichs. I got him a copy of WET and showed him the profile on Janet Macpherson and said he was in it. We talked a little bit about magazine production and then he went back to his palaces in Point Dume.

What else yesterday? A surfboard collector in Hawaii sent me some articles on the Bing Pipeliner that I need to add into Chapter Seven or maybe just make a sidebar. I also should do a sidebar on Miki Dora’s Da Cat model. But today I am going to power through Chapter Eight, collect as much information as I can and start to get it organized. Right now Chapter Eight starts with the shortboard revolution sparked by the 1966 World Contest and it goes to the thruster in 1981, unless I find another historical roadmarker to stop at.

I got a subscription check for $48 in the mail, but a photographer is getting edgy about getting paid.

I had asked Cingular to take KG off the service and they did that sooner than I thought so I spent some time trying to get her cell # back.

In the next two or three days I need to write as much of that book as possible and also send out 600 issues of WET. I have to put a price sticker on each one and subscription cards. The orders of 25, 25 and 50 won’t be hard, but the 500 order is going to suck.

What else? I need to look at my itinerary and be sure when I am leaving so I don’t blow it. I guess I am flying in through Sao Paulo so I get to see that spectacle again. Last time I flew into that immense, crowded, dirty city it looked like science fiction, like Blade Runner.

Last night went to Open Season in the valley. Drove over Kanan Dume Road as the Harvest Moon was rising, which made me think of Neil Young and made me pine for the 70s, and youth and all that. That drive over Kanan is really nice, like going through a nice part of Montana, but on the other side I arrived in Middle America and I came up with a new made up word: Agouraphobia is the fear of living away from the ocean.

I saw Open Season because I have an idea for an animated cartoon or children’s book called Malizoo. The animal citizens of Malibu can’t get along. Stella the Selfish Starfish lives in the Colony and does business with Maurice the Deal Mako. Snoop the Puparazzi lurks in the bushes trying to take photos while he is chased by Mark the Hired Mussel who does security. There is a long cast of characters who live in the ocean, on the beach, in the Malibu Creek Lagoon and up in the hills and their differences are all set aside when a brushfire breaks out and they must work together to put out the fire.

Imagine a squadron of pelicans dumping water from their beaks onto the fire. That sort of thing.

It would be fun to write and I wanted to see Open Season because it seemed similar. It was funny and I laughed out of control a few times.

After that came back and watched Gidget with the artist, who had never seen it.

It’s 7:00, the coffee shops are opening and it’s time to get to it. Today I want to finish the press release for the artist, take a gouge out of the History of the Surfboard, send off at least 100 magazines and just get it all together before I leave. And I need to be sure when that is.