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Surfing about Music. Timothy J. Cooley
Читать онлайн.Название Surfing about Music
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520957213
Автор произведения Timothy J. Cooley
Издательство Ingram
The allure of surfing and the success of the new industry that supplied the emerging surfing community were bolstered by new dry-land lifestyle technologies as well. Battery-operated transistor radios brought new musical sounds directly to the beach as DJs began to exploit (and create) a new music-fueled youth-culture concept.2 The established technology of film was used for the first time to create surfing movies in the 1950s, and those films were always accompanied by recordings of popular music, usually mixed together by the filmmaker using the first commercially available tape recorders. Particularly in Southern California, a seemingly sudden critical mass of surfers collided with postwar optimism, new ideas about music and youth culture, and technologies that brought it all to the beach, setting the stage for the creation of new cultural practices that would define New Surfing.
CALIFORNIA AND THE NEW FACE OF NEW SURFING
In this context of great optimism, increasing wealth, and easy access to beaches, New Surfing began to reach the popular imagination and became linked with California in specific ways that were distinct from the images of surfing in Hawaiʻi of yesteryear. Most notably, instead of the “black Mercury” described by Jack London half a century earlier (quoted in the previous chapter),3 the California surfer was white (though tanned), ideally sporting blond hair, male, young, and slightly edgy. Whereas historically in Hawaiʻi surfing was integral to mainstream society and was celebrated as the ultimate symbol of establishment (royal) power, in California it became associated with anti- establishment play by young men. During the first half of the twentieth century in Hawaiʻi, when Alexander Hume Ford was promoting surfing among Hawaii’s white elite, the face of surfing began to change, yet it still remained a symbol of Hawaiian establishment power. In California it remained esoteric and came to symbolize a stand against midcentury conformism. Though today surfing has become mainstream in many ways, it still retains some of the rebel spirit that it gained in the mid–twentieth century.
In colonial Hawaiʻi (the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth), the typical protagonist of the emerging New Surfing beach-tourist narrative was a relatively well-heeled white man, as seen in English-language popular Hawaiian songs from the first half of the twentieth century. Though some early images promoting California beach tourism were similar to those from Hawaiʻi, important differences began to appear. In Hawaiʻi, the centuries of indigenous beachside civilization remained part of the allure, even if only in the form of the female Hawaiian hula dancer and the Waikīkī Beachboy. By contrast, in coastal California indigenous peoples and sacred sites were less visible, sometimes literally paved over.4 California’s beaches were treated as blank slates on which developers could exercise their imaginations. The Los Angeles County attractions of Venice Beach and the Pike amusement area of Long Beach exemplified manmade urban pleasures, middle-class affairs that forever teetered on the edge of respectability.5
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