Great Friday
As this arrives in your inbox Friday evening (thank you for subscribing!), I’ll be sitting down to dine with two of the most important and influential dudes I’ve ever known or worked with — both instrumental at every stage of me making the beautiful mess that is my “career” in surfing.
We’re sitting down for our reunion dinner at Musso and Frank’s in Hollywood — a place with more history and star power than any restaurant I’ve ever heard of. Literati powerhouses like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Bukowski, John O’Hara and T.S. Eliot all drank and dined here (it opened in 1919!) as well as Hollywood staples past and present including Charlie Chaplain, Marilyn Monore and Quintin Tarantino — who shot the opening scene for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with Al Pacino, Leo DiCaprio and Brand Pitt at Musso’s. It’s a spot.
Now why do I tell you all this overly glamorized Hollywood crap? Well, because as influential as all the people listed above may have been to me (and they all were to some degree) the two dudes I’m sitting down with right now mean way more to me than all those others ever will.
The first is Scott Chenoweth, who I raved about on here before. He’s the oft-bearded-scuba-diving-White-Diamond-riding-Venturian-raised-LA-based artist who has interpreted my brain into art better than anyone I’ve ever met. We’ve made hundreds of magazines together, quit companies, started companies and sat through boozy, caffeinated, sweaty editorial meetings in both a corporate setting and startup settings. We’ve screwed up, celebrated, been victorious, failed and were once so “startup broke” that Scott made a clandestine request to Stuart (see below) to borrow some cash so we could buy fireworks for a 4th of July party — a day Scott will never sit out. We’ve made all the things I’m most proud of together and we did it the “long hard stupid way” every time. We worked at Surfing Mag, started What Youth together and he’s been instrumental in getting Inherent Bummer where it is while expanding his artistic services into far and wide reaches of the universe.
The second is Stuart Cornuelle — easily and without a doubt the most brilliant and interesting person walking this earth. I met Stuart when he wrote one of the best letters ever sent in to Surfing Magazine. The letter was so good, in fact, that we instantly wrote back in an attempt to hire him. He clearly had a command of writing and surfing so far advanced that myself and everyone on the editorial staff questioned our credentials when reading it. Stuart would become a large part of my life from then on and his intelligence, wit and enthusiasm to be an entrepreneur fueled many great things we did and is why I refuse to go quietly into that corporate life. He led the way for us starting What Youth and taught me anything I think I know about what starting your own anything entails — more than a whiteboard I quickly learned!
Stuart also wrote better than any writer I know and he refuses to be considered a writer. At this point in life I think he has more degrees than anyone on earth and has gone on to impart his brilliance in several industries and institutions. Perhaps the best part of all about Stuart though is that he rips! Because he’s so bright, when you meet him you wonder how he could get so smart and spend any time doing anything but learning. But he absolutely rips and has great style and it always makes me smile watching him surf. He’s also from Hawaii which is another anomaly we’ll have to save for another day.
While we toast to the impossible feat that is maintaining friendship after decades of toil in the trenches of art and business, why don’t you mix up something with a little kick to join us and enjoy the new playlist Alex Lavayen made you (it’s one of our finest and strangest), or get nostalgic with Ben Bourgeois and watch Momentum: UTI, celebrate the many ways of interpreting surfing with “Punker” Pat Towersey and hit play (don’t scroll!) on tonight’s Friday Night Flick — a heart-wrenching, stark and powerful movie about Ian Curtis and Joy Division. Come to think of it, this exact scene from the film served as the marching anthem for why we quit our safe and sound jobs at Source Interlink — the parent company to Surfing and Surfer Magazine — to start our own mag. It’s also exactly how I plan to walk into Musso and Frank’s tonight.—Travis Ferré
