FESTIVAL DAYS
The funny thing about surf culture is you don’t really appreciate your own until you see someone else’s.
I saw this happening in France in the 1990s, when the Biarritz Surf Festival, founded by Robert Rabagny, turned its back on its own rich (albeit more recent) surf culture to totally embrace the Hawaiian/Polynesian creation myth. Poor old Robert was totally besotted with big, fat, and fun-loving kahunas like Buffalo Keaulana, Boogie Kalama, Reynolds Wright and flew them in and feted them in the typical Basque way (sometimes even taking them to his second favourite party of the year, the Running of the Bulls fiesta in Pamplona), while pretty much ignoring France’s legends like Jacky Rott, Jo Moraiz, Joel de Rosnay and Michel Barland, who had picked up Dickie Zanuck’s balsa Velzy-Jacobs pig from where his buddy Peter Viertel had left it at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz in 1957, and copied the crap out of it.
