Mad Style
by Ronald de Leeuw
Falling asleep in your car seat and magically teleporting to your bed, sitting as still as you can past your bedtime so your parents don’t notice you’re still there, or burning old guys in the water because they are now desk hogs with no more passion in life and live in denial about the fact that they need high-volume boards because they turned into high-volume dudes. To be young again.
Bedtime stories
One thing I miss most about childhood is being read to. Discovering something new each time, or listening to the same shit over and over again, while hearing the sweet voice of your mom or the slightly rushed one of your dad as he also wants your mom. Life was good in the Oedipal phases of our time. Now that you’re musky and have hair in interesting places, you’re not being read to anymore. You have to do everything by yourself. However, it is nice to get a little throwback every now and then.
Flow Violento reads like those bedtime stories. Bourdain-esque bedtime stories for big kids that get imbued with a thirst for discovering the unknown and sharing it with others.
If the last sentence resonates with you in some way, this book will definitely be your fix.
Factually, Flow Violento contains a variety of published surfing and fishing stories about traversing Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean over the course of about thirty years.
Realistically, the book is more about exploring these areas over a lifetime. The lifetime of Scott Hulet and his encounters with many others.
Scott started crossing the SoCal border when he was about three to four years old. He recalls clearly how the demeanor of his dad would change as they would cross, a certain type of tension and release.
I’m guessing it was the duality of any dad: happy to leave, but annoyed to have to Tetris the old carriage to the brim, knowing damn well that at least 35 percent of things packed won’t even be used.
That, plus the fact that Mexico and farther south are special, sometimes scary places. However, it’s also not as bad as the (surf) media often misleadingly portrays. But hey, three murdered surfers simply generate more clicks. Like our good old friend Jack Johnson sang: “We’ve all got the blood on our hands.”
Scott touches on scary encounters throughout the book but always seems to stay levelheaded. At least in his writing. In reality, I’m sure he got plenty of tickets to the bean ballet with the curtains all the way up.
“This is a district where it pays to have your hackles pricked, your ears to the ground, and, from David Mamet’s Spartan, your motherfuckers set to ‘receive.’ In the dicier parts of rural Mexico, situational awareness is an art. It’s having eyes in the back of your head while appearing nonchalant, like you don’t care what befalls you. This attitude will provide some window of escape should fate come knocking, the sort of surprise defense relied on by hedgehogs and pufferfish. An ‘only hope’ type of thing. Our crew performs the most natural human response to uneasiness: nervous laughter.” —Scott Hulet
How to read
In a way, Flow Violento is not about surfing nor is it about fishing. Sure, they are common threads throughout the 240 pages or so, but as with many stories, the actual themes of the book are much more about autonomy, freedom, and connecting with others. Who to share your campfire with, so to speak. Surfing and fishing are just glue in this case.
Even if you don’t give a rat’s ass about fishing, I wouldn’t recommend skipping these chapters. If you’re already familiar with Scott’s work and some of the articles that are in this book, you’re still in for a treat.
It’s an easy read if you flick through it like the travel journal since, at its core, it is. However, if you read it like I think you should, it’s quite a challenging ride as it shifts through time, regions, journals, Scott’s crazy vocabulary, and its marbleization of Spanish vernacular that simply doesn’t translate well into English.
Ipso facto, I would highly encourage having Google Maps, Google Images, and Google Translate ready. It’s simply more fun this way, and more importantly, it gives you a hint of what Scott has experienced to make this omnibus possible in the first place. It makes the book come to life.
Do yourself a favor.
Omnibus
What the hell is even that? Well, Scott is a writer at heart. From thriving more in writing programs at universities to being the founder of Longboard Magazine. However, Scott’s mostly known for being the editor of The Surfer’s Journal (TSJ) for about twenty years, where he still resides as the journal’s creative director.
A quick Google search, but also by simply opening the book, a picture of Scott is being painted as a peacock with many feathers up his rusty dusty in the form of accolades by peers and other folk. And it’s not that he actively seeks out this attention, on the contrary even. It’s simply praise for his work, that he contributes more to team effort than his own part in it.
But it all slaps, because Scott has a black belt of words.
With such an impressive resume and portfolio, you obviously have seen and written a lot. And that’s what an omnibus is: a collection of previously published works all in one book. Snapshots from his oeuvre, taken from different publications, that work and pace together extremely well.
Flow Violento
One might think it translates to aggressive flow. However, it’s Cuban–Puerto Rican slang for having, or dripping in, mad style, which comes from Reggaeton. The title of the book came from an emotional interaction with another gentleman in a jazz club in Havana after hearing a live waltz-time piano cover of “Essence of Matter,” a gorgeous song originally played by Eddie Harris.
With bloodshot eyes himself, the gentleman shared with Scott that the pianist had mad style.
Why was Scott so moved?
His relationship with music changed after suffering from a stroke, a little before COVID. It left him with aphasia and also some serious hemiparesis on the right side of his body. As Scott puts it himself: “Another side effect of having your eggs vigorously scrambled is that your emotions are closer to the surface.”
You can imagine that a stroke sucks big time for any person, but for a writer, surfer, and autonomous being like Scott, it sounds like the end of a world. Not being able to speak properly or even write is scary shit, especially if that is what butters your muffin. Despite being back on the editorial floor a week after the occurrence, it did leave him with a long recovery in terms of fully getting back in the game and even being able to surf. Luckily, life is about more than getting wet, but it did mean he had to do some serious thinking about life, death, and his work.
I’m not completely sure, but it also temporally coincides with the switch from being an editor to being the creative director at TSJ.
Fine wine
Neuropsychology is a peculiar thing. As we age, pretty much all of our cognitive functioning declines. We get shit at driving, become occasionally insufferable, and extremely susceptible to falling victim to credit card theft thanks to some Indian dude called Steve who totally works at Microsoft.
The one thing that does scientifically improve, generally speaking, is our vocabulary.
In a different lifetime, I studied neuropsychology. I was convinced I would work with the elderly at some point in my life. Especially given the rapid global graying, I thought I’d be ensured of a job somewhere down the line. And down the line I went.
Surf journalism got the better end of me. Scott told me recently that modern surf journalism is pretty much a vow of poverty, and about ten years in, I can tell you he is right. Luckily, I get by in different ways.
Being a neuropsychologist is a much more meaningful pursuit than writing about people who take themselves and their hobby way too seriously, but I am quite content that I don’t spend most of my days in nursing homes that scream tropical greenhouse with a hint of whiz.
What I’m trying to say is, I’ve seen and studied how traumatic brain injury (TBI) affects people differently, how difficult it is to bounce back, and how crucial those first months in recovery and rehabilitation are. Neuroplasticity isn’t a given as we get older. As connections and brain regions solidify, cortical imperialism isn’t the modus operandi anymore. You have to work hard to establish neurocognitive work-arounds or to regain some lost capabilities, if you’re lucky.
We all identify with, or as some, things. As surfers this is even more prevalent. A big part of TBI is mourning that old self and getting acquainted with a new. Scott’s trajectory is admirable. Because of all of this, the book is even more intriguing to me.
The funny thing is, in my opinion, Scott’s work actually has gotten better poststroke. It has a certain type of clarity. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but maybe words just have gotten even more precious to him.
Now—and this is just a theory—having a cerebral infarction is sometimes called an ischemic stroke. Ischemic means a restricted oxygen flow in brain regions. My theory is that the title of the book, in a way, also refers to this life-altering event that he experienced. Scott only knows.
Intents
The book is made with a great attention to detail. It’s not just the pacing and order of each of the chapters, but also the choice of materials, typefaces, illustrations, dust jacket, and goodies if you order through The Surfer’s Journal website.
The foreword is written by current TSJ editor Alex Wilson, and if there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s writing short stories. The way he introduces Scott and his work had me laughing out loud in the compulsory quiet compartment of a train to Amsterdam airport. Thanks, Alex.
The dust jacket is made by multidisciplinary artist Joaquin Salim, who’s known for his collage-style art, incorporating mixed media which make the book look tactile and feel like a lifetime curation of mementos from traveling that aren’t obvious shitty fridge magnets.
There are pictures from Dmitri Kessel, Abisai Morales, and Mark Kronemeyer. Scott’s portrait was taken by Ben Steele. The picture by Dmitri is a very special one since it’s part of the goodies.
The book itself has a luscious red linen cover with some bold illustration of a shibari crocodile on the cover. In fact, the book is riddled with gorgeous illustrations, and they are all made by Mexican artist Luis Safa.
Purposes
Overexplaining and overconceptualizing art sucks. Still, I had to know more about these illustrations. I just wanted to know what was up with this Kinbaku Crocodylia thing you see throughout the book. I had the feeling there was some connection between all illustrations, but I couldn’t lay my finger on what it was exactly.
Luckily, Luis is a very nice guy and patiently sat through my painful, partially Google-translated Spanish via Instagram’s DMs.
Luis has been illustrating professionally for the last fifteen years but has been drawing since he was a kid. The Chihuahuan illustrator has worked together with The Surfer’s Journal in the past, on issue 29.1, in an article called “Tranquila la Plaza.” TSJ came across Luis’s work when he made an animated video for a cover of “Se Vale Soñar” by Juan Cirerol, originally by a key figure in Mexican music: El Tigrillo Palma.
This song is part of a Mexican genre called corridos. They’re famously known for narrative, metrical tales that oftentimes are about oppression, history, and the daily lives of criminals, narcos, and cowboys. It’s sort of the avant la lettre of the corridos tumbados that we see nowadays. This newer stream in Mexican music is more heavily influenced by rap, hip-hop, and trap.
According to Luis, these corridos sort of embrace a narco culture, but he also points out that the whole narco-music world is a double-edged sword. Juan Cirerol takes some of those themes but doesn't embellish it. Luis thinks that Juan talks from a place of anarchism as an outsider, and he considers himself to be on that same side.
The above is important because I think you can see how journalistic and contemporary Luis’s work actually is. Taking into account what Flow Violento is about, it’s easy to connect the dots.
“I was very struck by the interest of a Californian surf magazine when it [my work] didn't have much impact in Mexico. I saw that Scott understood the world in which my illustrations live very well. From there, our collaborations have always had this organic synergy.” —Luis Safa
In a way, Scott and Luis are doing the same thing; they just use different mediums. To be able to see these parallels, you have to have quite the creative eye and a knack for curating cool shit. And when these connections are acknowledged and formed, you need to be able to let go of the reins when working together. And that’s what Scott did.
“So, he [Scott] gave me carte blanche for this project. I've always felt that Scott has a lot of confidence in my work, and the times we've collaborated, we've understood each other excellently. I didn’t have to leave the graphic line I work in or the world I draw in.” —Luis Safa
Luis’s way of working is often about collecting photos or images, sometimes taken by him or found somewhere else. He mixes them with phrases or words that he considers key. You see this throughout Flow Violento.
He likes to draw windows, cars, old metal, and animals. When you read the book, you can really sense these elements in Scott’s stories.
When I asked him about his favorite illustrations in the book, he told me he didn’t really have any. What he likes most is that they are all part of the same discourse, the same universe.
The caiman you find throughout the book symbolizes how, in some states in the north and northwest of Mexico, the government proposed banning corridos tumbados. Luis thinks it’s very hypocritical because, as we know, many times the government and the drug trade are two sides of the same coin.
Originally, the illustration is accompanied by a phrase: “Ándele, por estar escuchando corridos tumbados,” which roughly translates to This is what happens to you when you listen to those songs.
He thinks Scott chose the caiman on the cover because that particular image is so powerful. From the thickness of the lines to the idea it evokes. And with thickness, he means how bold the lines are. While the other illustrations are drawn with pencil, this was done with Sharpie.
In all ways, a statement piece that deserves to be on a cover.
Verdict
Many more things can be said about this book, but enough feathers for Scott and the others already. I think it’s clear that I like the book. Just know that I didn’t gain anything from this review.
You won’t regret it.
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