You Don’t Mock the Gods
The Story Behind Tom Curren s Offbeat New Search Vid
Sean Doherty
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“Curren’s in Mexico?”
Concomitant with any Curren project, this one began with an air of mystery. This wasn’t so much a search for Tom Curren. Nobody knew he’d even gone.
Two unmarked hard drives of footage turned up in the mail late last year at Rip Curl. Tom Curren, it turns out, had disappeared down to Mexico halfway through last year, shortly before the pandemic closed the border. He’d stayed in Mexico for three months with good friend, Buggs Arico who owns a joint at Salina Cruz. Australian filmer, Andy Potts had tagged along with cameras but no real plan to shoot anything. With the pandemic spreading through Mexico, shortly after they arrived the
Watch Now: Tom Curren Disappears to Mexico in “Free Scrubber”
Chronicling a three-month Mexican sojourn with the Santa Barbara legend
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A great Tom Curren edit does two things.
Firstly, it just lets him surf. You don’t tamper with the genius of the man and his surfboard. Just put him on a righthand point, roll the tape and get out of the way. Secondly, it needs to stop searching for him. For decades now filmmakers (and everybody else) have tried to paint some kind of definitive picture of Curren, the man, the surfer… and Curren has defied them at every turn. He now appears to be toying with them, creating a caricature of himself. He can’t be found, he can’t be interviewed, or he turns up on a smoking day riding a backyard skimboard held together by gaff tape. The metaphorical
Jan 28, 2021
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In early 2020 when the world was locking down in the beginnings of the Covid-19 pandemic Rip Curl got word from Tom Curren that he was heading to Mexico with old friend Buggs Arico to surf and avoid the carnage which was unfolding across the USA. Disease, riots, protest – a hot bed of change, emotion and confusion. As usual, Tom took to the ocean as a way of making sense of it.
We weren’t quite sure where it would lead. Soon after they let us know that photographer @andypotts would be heading down there too and that he would shoot whatever happens over a 6 week period – although it could have been longer – as no one was really counting as the waves blurred into the days and the days blurred into the waves.