The Ben From Brazil

Latest Update: October 8, 2006

By Ben Marcus

14:10 SUNDAY OCTOBER 8, 2006 DIEDRICHS

Crud, missed the post office. I have been severely lagging in filling orders for WET rounded up by Russ Warner at Warner International. The orders are for 2, 2, 25, 25, 50 and 500 but the problem is, Russ wants me to put a $4.95 sticker over the “Summer 2006” blurb on the cover and it has taken me too long to get that together. The time I was going to dedicate to that was taken up by the 20 surfers project and now it’s time to get back to business.

So I packaged up the 2 and the 2 orders, which are going to Missouri and Oregon, with leaders of apology and I also boxed up 25 issues where were a legitimate, paying order from a surf shop in Rhode Island. I took them all to the Post Office but it closed at 13:30. Would have been there sooner but we went to the breakfast place in Topanga where they let you take your dogs, and the serviced was doggy. Very slow, but the food came fast. So that took forever and by the time I got back to sea level and wrote the cover letters, the post office was closed.

I tried to use the postage machine and went to Ralph’s to get cash but when I came back I found out that it only took coins.

So, bugger. I am in Diedrich’s and Mike Tuttle introduced me to an Italian woman who sells Aquablu bikinis and an American woman named Jennifer who dances Samba and is apparently a samba teacher. I told her I was going to Brazil and she said Boa viage.

Or however it is spelled.

This morning I worked on the History of the Surfboard book. I started piecing together what I had. I fixed a short sidebar interview with Herbie Fletcher about riding mini guns and Mike Hynson circa 1968. I also remembered some history about the week in 1969 when Greg Noll rode that giant wave at Makaha. It was the end of an era for Greg and big-wave riding but the start and ending of other eras:

On December 1, 1969 the United States Selective Service held the first draft lottery since 1942, drawing 366 blue plastic capsules from a large glass container assigning call of order numbers to all men within the 18-26 age range specified in Selective Service law.

On December 2, 1969 a story in the Los Angeles Times carried the headline  "Wild Cult Blamed In Tate Slayings," and displayed a photo of Charles Manson for the first time. The story explained how "an occult band of hippies, directed by a leader who calls himself 'Jesus,' committed the five killings." 

On December 3, 1969, John Lennon is offered the leading role in Jesus Christ Superstar.

On December 5, the US detonated "Diesel Train" a 20-kiloton nuclear device in the Nevada Desert.

On December 6, 1969, a spectactor at the Altamont Raceway in Livermore was stabbed to death by Hells Angels "security forces" as the Rolling Stones performed their new hit, Sympathy for the Devil.

And within all that, on December 4 - the same day Chicago police officers killed two Black Panther leaders in their sleep - Greg Noll was the last man standing on the biggest day of surf Oahu has ever seen. With the North Shore completely closed out, Noll and friends drive around to the West Side and replayed the ending of Ride the Wild Surf. Noll is the last man out the back on a truly massive day. He manages to catch a wave, wipes out at the bottom, makes it to the beach and then, like a modern Sisyphus, he packs it all up, moves to northern California and goes fishing.

Interesting week.

One of the Diedrich’s locals just showed me that famously faked photo of the white shark leaping out of the water at a hovering helicopter. I had to convince him it was fake.

The Artist just walked in and now we are going to work on her press release. She is an interesting girl who has been involved in some cool projects and now she is selling a jewelry line in Los Angeles that is doing well, right off the bat.

She is a friend of Juliana’s, who did a project called While You Were Sleeping in Rio. She tape recorded the dreams of street orphans, then put tape recorders in pillows and put the pillows on the streets for citizens to listen to.

Very cool and unusual, and she was also part of the Flaming Lotus Girls project to build the “Serpent Mother,” for Burning Man 2006.

Check it out. They actually did this, in the desert:

   http://www.zentropolis.com/
logs_2006_09_16/Pages/Fire_Dragon.htm

   http://www.flaminglotus.com/
serpent_mother/web/serpent_cheat_sheet.html

This is the start of her press release/bio. I feel like a manicurist when I do this, opening my computer and taking down people’s lives and organizing them in a thousand words or less.

VM is just one week into her new adventure as a jewelry designer and her work has received an excited response from Fred Segals, Kitsons, Madison, Planet Blue and Jennifer Kaufman. Vanessa is new to the world of jewelry design and her line glitters with new ideas, especially the black buffalo horn featuring gold and semi precious stones. An honor’s graduate from the California College of Arts and Crafts with a Master’s from Goldsmith’s University of London, Montiel has been involved many projects around the world. In 2001 her While You Were Sleeping project recorded the dreams of street orphans in Rio de Janeiro and played them back within pillows scattered around the city. In 2006, Vanessa became part of a Flaming Lotus Girls welding  and hammering stainless steel into a 165-foot Serpent designed to exploded into an interactive cocophony of fire that shot all the way down its spine. The Serpent Mother was featured at BM in 2006 and burned/ as the girls burned through 7000 gallons in the course of 7 days. the breathed fire for Burning Man 2006. From India to Florence, Vanessa has combined her art with her travels and her 2007 Spring line is inspired by both. She came to Los Angeles in September of 2006 with a jewelry case full of designs and a heart full of hope, and within a week she was in some of Los Angeles’ best stores, and had formed a partnership with Gisela Marin at Nyali.

Vanessa Montiel was born in Mexico City and grew up in the Hollywood Hills, but the moment she graduated from high school, she was gone. Fifteen years later, she drove into Los Angeles with a jewelry case full of designs, a heart full of hope but no idea how it all worked: “I thought I didn’t know what I was doing, but maybe I was wrong,” Montiel said, while sitting at Paradise Cove in Malibu, at the end of a hectic week. “I have been involved in art projects for almost 20 years, but I had never designed jewelry, or tried to make money from my art. My art has always been ephemeral, temporary and I used materials from pig intestines to fire. This is something very new for me but it is exciting, it is fun. It is rewarding to receive that kind of reception but it also means there is a lot more work ahead.”

Here are two of her pieces. It’s quality stuff, she is a smart girl, she works hard and she appreciates it when people help here, so I am on her side.

And I also think she is going to sell a ton of this stuff.

She is leaving for Santa Cruz and we need to get this press release done. I have asked Joni to lay it out and we shall see what she says.

She just came in to see if I am ready. Guess I better be ready.