endless summer

Effluvia Magazine recently posted a pretty select plethora of 50s/60s surf legend Mickey "Da Cat" Dora. Don't know Da Cat? Here's biographer, journalist and archivist James Brisick's lowdown:

"...If you took James Dean's cool, Muhammed Ali's poetics, Harry Houdini's slipperiness, James Bond's jet-setting, George Carlin's irony and Kwai Chang Caine's’s Zen, and rolled them into one man with a longboard under his arm, you’d come up with something like Miki Dora, surfing’s mythical antihero, otherwise known as the Black Knight of Malibu... His surfboard was his magic carpet and his wits were his wings, and from the late ’60s up until his death in 2002, excepting a couple brief prison stints, Dora lived the Endless Summer lifestyle, defining what it means to be a surfer... "

-from Requiem for Surfing's Black Knight - The Sanctioned Mickey Dora, "LA Weekly", published March 2, 2006

Check out the haunting and humorous photographs of Malibu's personal Poseidon at Effluvia Magazine, now . . .

california dreaming

Ah, to live deep in Venice, off the canals, with nothing but your beloved, a jalopy, 45's that made you cry, late night beer blasts and 1st Beach bon fires, a wooden Alaia long board, a conga drum or two, maybe a pair of roller skates, big hair, good vibrations and sea salt skin.

Hail Teena Marie, full of grace, full of sand and the spirit of the sea. You are in my dreams Winward Circle and Ocean Avenue. Hear my cries. These are my prayers to Pacific, my old and not forgotten home.

i love mickey dora

But then again, what's not to love?