THE GLIDE + FRANK

The man behind many of the images in Deep Water, increasingly celebrated surf artist Jon Frank, will unveil his collaboration with Australian Chamber Orchestra maestro Richard Tognetti when The Glide hits the big screen in Melbourne and Sydney after performances in Slovenia and New York. Combining Frank’s magic with a live performance by the ACO, The Glide explores the links between music, surfing and the ocean, stemming from Tognetti and Frank swapping notes during the making of award-winning documentary Musica Surfica. “Jon and I have collaborated on this project by choosing different styles of music,” Tognetti explained. “I would send him a piece and see if he would respond to it in a filmic way. Other times he would send me a piece of film without any music to it and I’d respond. Sometimes he’d have an idea for the music and other times I wrote the music.” The end result was recently described as “the best music and vision experience of my life”.

The Glide is on at The Playhouse in Melbourne on April 4 and Sydney’s City Recital Hall on April 7 and 8. For more information visit the ACO website.

And please check out Frank’s new website, where you can buy prints of his work and view his amazing, rarely seen Nineteen Ninety Nine series.

TO THE FOUR CORNERS OF MY LOUNGE ROOM

For the past two years I have been wrestling with Peter Troy. Metaphorically of course, the legendary surf explorer having passed away in September 2008. After his death, Peter’s widow Libby uncovered a pile of letters he had written during his travels – travels that began in 1963 and eventually accounted for almost 150 countries, from Europe to Hawaii, South America to Africa, introducing surfing to Brazil and discovering untold perfect waves, like Nias, Tamarin Bay and Pacasmayo in Peru. Peter had documented every step of his remarkable journey in letters home to his parents, scribbles on Ampol road maps and spreadsheets of travel expenditure. Surf filmmaker Paul Witzig described Peter as “fastidious” and “extremely frugal”, and the detritus from the former accountant’s travels were quite incredible, if only for their level of detail, with every kilometre and every red cent accounted for. During two decades of trail-blazing adventures, Troy had created surfing’s Tree of Smoke – a labyrinth of carbon paper and fading passport stamps.

In April 2009, I spent two days with sparring partner Sean Dohery at Libby’s apartment overlooking Old Woman Island on the Sunshine Coast wading through the pile of letters, newspaper clippings and photographs, scanning everything we could. I spent the next 18 months sifting through the scans, transcribing letters, and slowly making sense of where everything fit; from the early days as an original and influential figure at Bells Beach (Troy organised the first contest at Bells in 1962) to a more recent expedition to Antarctica. Amongst Bolivian train timetables were passages of breathtaking lyricism. The romantic traveller was never far from the surface. Nor was the book. Peter had laid it all out on a scrap of paper from The Castaways Motel in Miami in 1963 – the title, the chapters, even the cover images. I just had to find it.

To the Four Corners of the World – The Lost Journals of the Original Surf Explorer by Peter Troy, edited by Brendan McAloon and published by those fine purveyors of surf media, Flying Pineapple (the faceless men behind Parko + Friends) was launched at Torquay’s Surf World Museum on January 13. The project reunited me with some old friends, particularly the sartorially splendid Stuart Geddes of Chase & Galley, which recently relocated to Collingwood under the umbrella of The Compound Interest: Centre for the Applied Arts. It burnt out a much-loved G4 laptop, introducing me to a string of backyard computer repair men in suburban Geelong. It taught me a few things about printing books in foreign lands. And it tested my resolve. While Deep Water was draining in its own way, this latest outing has me shying from anything remotely in the surf travel genre. At least for a little while...