I just posted Dave Parmenter's EOS page, which gave me the opportunity to pull together a small digital chapbook of Parmenter quotes, which you'll find below. The supply is endless. Thirty years' worth. Put Dave's fingers anywhere near a keyboard, or press "record" if he's in a talky mood, and the 

 start flying like arrows. Poison arrows, mostly. His stamina is amazing; Surfing called Parmenter "the most interesting surfer in the world" almost 30 years ago, and, agree with his views or not, he's still very much in the running for that title.

Dave likes to think of himself as a modern-day Tom Blake. He's clear on this point. Describing his relationship to Brian Keaulana a few months ago, he said: "I was Tom Blake to his Duke Kahanamoku." But I always thought of Parmenter as more in the Dora mold. Partly because he's the smartest guy in the room, but also he's half-buried in contradictions. The heartfelt mixed with the bullshit. Progressive one moment, retrograde the next. The surf-media-industrial-complex malcontent who keeps landing smartly back in the spotlight. A champion of the backyard boardmaker/craftsman who has a garage full of imported factory-made molded-composite SUPS.

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." Walt Whitman's quote, but Dave Parmenter wears it very nicely.


"If they're ever going to popularize women's surfing, the girls are going to have to start performing in the nude."

"Sometimes I feel like moving to Australia, marrying a girl with terminal cancer, and living there awhile." 

[This quote baffled me, baffled everybody I think. Until Dave moved to Hawaii, married a girl with terminal cancer, and lived there awhile.]


"The officials wouldn't let me watch the bikini contest. Nobody was allowed near it with a waist size under 36."

"The kind of eccentric geniuses who gave surfing its depth and rich heritage? They're not going to buy surfing when it's sold as aerosol cheese spread. No way. Surfing is now attracting the tin-plated trophy-grabbers, the little leaguers, the frenzied rioters."

[At the 1988 Op Pro, in gutless waist-high surf, Parmenter paddled out for a man-on-man heat on a 10-foot longboard, rode it beautifully, but lost nonetheless.]

 "I was bored stiff. I was bored at the prospect of paddling out once again and surfing against feeble opposition in small meaningless waves. So I thought, Wouldn't it be grand to show where modern surfing came from? And what better way than to go out, do a drop-knee turn, and ride toward shore without all the herky-jerky posturing, and the frantic waving of arms and bobbing of heads? Why not just go out and show my competitor how much contempt I have for his kind? Show the establishment how much contempt I have for what its forum for the cutting edge has become?"


"The biggest trend in surfing today is a worldwide shift to the longboard. You can scream and rant and bang your head on the floor, you can scrawl hate with wax on the sidewalk, you can send seething letters to the editor about fat old kooks on logs. But it won't change the evident fact that, demographically, longboarding is modern surfing. Or more exactly, Postmodern surfing."

"The modern shortboard is like a fashion model: they're sexy and curvy, and you look good with your arm around one on the beach. They are neurotic, anorexia, and will disappoint you down the line."

 followed my old pro tour mates Tom Carroll and Ross Clarke-Jones as they took up the White Man’s Burden and quested the Seven Seas for enormous mutant waves that seem to be an 

 for retired pro surfers, waves that are sort of a cross between the Elephant Man and Godzilla but with the temperament of David Berkowitz."


"The typical young surfer of today no longer has any reverence for the wave. Surfing, for them, has become another 'fuck you' sport like skateboarding, with the wave just another piece of urban terrain to scrape up against and deface. Their surfing is base nihilism. Like their punk anthems, the key is to abrade: learn three notes, crank up the amps, and disguise an utter lack of talent with sheer noise."

"We should step away from just covering the top pros and focus more on the people in the sport who really have something to say. There are surfers out there who live exemplary lives. They don't over-consume, they're not using a lot of plastics and hairsprays. The kinds of guys who could help people understand that everything is connected; that it all ties together; that the forest we burn this year in the Amazon will affect the weather next year in California. There are a lot of great minds in the sport, but they don't get a voice because we're so obsessed with 15-year-old kids in the latest neon wetsuits who know how to hit the lip."

DAVE PARMENTER: SURFER, SHAPER, QUOTE MACHINE

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