Looking Sideways: 10 Things
Here are this week's ten things I thought were worth sharing
1. This week’s conversation with snowboard legend Dani ‘Kiwi’ Meier is the type of chat that caused me to view my own life differently. Why? Because while it is ostensibly about his life and career in snowboarding, it is really about the biggest themes of all.
Such as: is experience a prerequisite for knowledge? How can you use the lessons of life to strive for equanimity? Is life about taking or giving back? Can we put storytelling and curiosity at the centre of our lives?
As I always say about the podcast, action sports are as good a lens as any through which to examine these issues, and Dani’s quest to find answers to these questions has led him to a gloriously idiosyncratic career.
On the snow, his surf-influenced, rootsy take on professional snowboarding saw him help create the European pro scene as we still recognise it today.
Off the snow, his work ethic, ability to see the bigger picture, and incessant curiosity marked him out as a genuine innovator. Take The Crystal Awards, snowboarding’s original culture-driven contest comp that soon became one of the most copied formats ever. Or his work with his agency Mana Media, which saw him work with the biggest brands on the planet and succeed in taking his culturally sympathetic story-telling approach to the biggest canvasses of all.
Now, in mid-life, Dani is taking stock of his life and career, and I’m so fortunate he was gracious enough to share his insights for this episode. Click here to listen.
2. Earlier this summer I was lucky enough to interview activist Rob Hopkins for an episode of Type 2, the podcast I put together with my friends at Patagonia Europe. Listeners loved Rob’s cerebral yet accessible take on the environmental challenges we face (click here if you’ve yet to listen), and I found his take on COP26, written in the immediate aftermath of the event, to be similarly compelling. Click here to read it.
3. New Owen Tozer work alert! Back in the dim, distant pre-Covid era, myself and Owen went to Japan and spent a couple of weeks in Niseko with our pals from the Dragon Lodge. While there, we caught up with my old pal Owain Basset, who has spent the last few years designing truly beautiful hand-crafted snowboards out of a workshop in his backyard, a body of work he has now put out into the world as Island Snowboards. We had a lot of fun hanging at the workshop and spending some days on the hill, something Owen casually turned into a truly beautiful film. Watch it above.
4. Hat tip to previous pod guest Selema for tipping me off to ‘White People Explain Racism To Me’, an incendiary article by Nation writer Elie Mystal. Click here to read it.
5. Over the last few years, my pal Sam McMahon has carved a niche for himself as one of snowboarding’s most interesting film-makers, as his latest for Nidecker proves. Watch it above.
6. Not long now until the London Surf Film Festival kicks off at the Genesis Cinema in our venerable capital. It is running between Friday 3rd and Sunday 5th of December, and you can buy tickets here. I’m taking part in a panel discussion about storytelling and action sports - find out more as it is announced here.
7. The John-John and Rasta bromance is one of the most heart-warming storylines in surfing. Watch the latest instalment above.
8. The ongoing racism scandal in English cricket involving Azeem Rafiq is about so much more than…well, racism in cricket. Ultimately it is about power in society, and how the powerful react to being challenged, and as such has many parallels with some of the conversations that have been taking place in our little world in recent years. Nobody has summed the entire farrago more incisively than the peerless Jonathan Liew in the Guardian (who is to my mind one of the essential voices in sport right now). Click here to read his take.
9. Rest in peace Zane Timpson. What a loss.
10. I’ve become increasingly interested in NFTs in the recent weeks, mainly because I don’t really understand them properly yet, and it seems clear they’re a harbinger of yer genuine web 3.0 era . With that in mind I’ve been doing a lot of reading around the subject, and found this essay from Bobby Hundreds and this Wired piece about the environmental impact to be particularly interesting.