Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

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Surfing—or at least some version of it—had entered the commercial mainstream. Yet the surf culture popularized in the 1960s was essentially a moneymaking artifice. For every Bikini Beach (1964) or Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) that purported to reveal the ways of the surfer, there was a shoestring-budget documentary—a traditional “surf flick”—relegated to high school and civic center auditoriums up and down the coast. This more organic community would itself soon reach the mainstream, but not before establishing a foundational element of contemporary surf culture: the primacy of travel to the modern surfing experience. Surfers, like waves, move across and along the oceans. If the first half of the twentieth century was marked by the revitalization and growth of Hawaiian surf culture and its first tentative steps into the wider world, the second half was characterized by widespread global interaction, with surfers ready participants in the rise of Cold War travel cultures. The expansion of the white middle class in the 1950s opened up new horizons for those afflicted with wanderlust. Places that were once only reached following weeks-long transoceanic voyages could, with the growth and increasing affordability of commercial air travel, welcome wide-eyed tourists after flights lasting mere hours.