Renowned surfing historian and editor
Chris Ahrens
will discuss his new book   
WINDANSEA:
 Life. Death. Resurrection
Wednesday, January 8^th, 7 pm

“This book about Windansea began in the summer of 1980 when I sat with Windansea local and one of the world’s top surfer’s, Chris O’Rourke. O’Rourke, who died from Hodgkin’s Disease the following year told fascinating, cinematic tales. While I never published Chris’s entire story, I’m glad I kept my notes. Two decades after O’Rourke’s departure, Surfer’s Journal requested I do an extensive feature on Windansea.  Woody Brown, who first rode Windansea in 1937, served as a trailhead that led to Mac Meda Destruction Company, Windansea Surf Club, Butch Van Artsdalen, Mike Hynson, Tom Ortner, Brew Briggs and finally, Chris O’Rourke.

Nobody drives their car into the shorebreak or rides Flexi-Flyers out of sewer pipes anymore. The shack, once considered an eyesore reserved for surf bums, is now a historical landmark visited by tourists snapping those “You won’t believe what I did on my summer vacation” pictures. Random polling indicates that fewer than five percent of non-locals have heard of the Mac Meda Destruction Company, the fictitious company founded by Jack “Mac” Macpherson and Bob “Meda” Rakestraw, ostensibly to keep Windansea sacred while having more fun than the law allows. Still, Windansea retains enough badness to get a tooth loosened for being on the right wave at the wrong time. Modern-day Windansea sometimes generates the melancholy felt when the house is full, but the party is dying. While real fun still happens, the old days are often reenacted by dimly lit luaus and surf reunions, reminding us of an outlaw past. Some people have more affection for the Windansea parking lot (the Lot) than exists in entire families. After estrangement from wealthy birth parents, many Lot locals find cohesion with other lost souls gravitating to the ocean.

The Lot is where you check the surf and tell the stories. It serves as bleachers from which to observe the main break, the Womp, Big Rock, Middles, Simmons’, and Dunemere. At first glance, Windansea waves appear as mushy peaks breaking near shore. Your first paddle out proves this wrong. The peak rises far from the sand and is quick and thick, unloading more water than nearly any other SoCal surf spot. While Windansea mimics a smaller version of one of the North Shore’s premier spots, Sunset Beach, a few hundred yards south, Big Rock serves up a quarter-scale model of the Pipeline in the shape of a punchy locals-only razor reef. This partially explains why La Jolla surfers rip in Hawaii.  Like all natural wonders, Windansea packs an emotional wallop. Thousands of years of tribal joy and sadness, along with the great rides and wipeouts of Butch, both Woodys, Simmons, and O’Rourke, can still be felt there.”

Chris Ahrens was first published in Surfer Magazine in 1973. Since then, he has written for every major surfing magazine in the U.S. and occasionally served as a magazine editor. He is an award-winning documentarian, a weekly columnist for the Coast News, and a regular contributor to The San Diego Reader. His four popular books of surf stories culminate in his latest work, Windansea: Life. Death. Resurrection.

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The public is invited to read from
THE SERPENT
AND THE FIRE:
 Poetries of the Americas
from Origins to Present,
 edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada;
 the great and encyclopedic
Jerome Rothenberg’s  final anthology.
Thursday, October 24, 7PM

The Serpent and the Fire is an experiment in omnipoetics that reaches into the deepest origins of the Americas, north and south, to redefine America and its poetries.  It breaks out of deeply entrenched models that limit “American” literature to work written in English within the present boundaries of the United States. Editors Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada gather vital pieces from all parts of the Western Hemisphere and the breadth of European and Indigenous languages within: a unique range of cultures and languages going back several millennia, an experiment in what the editors call an American “omnipoetics.”