What a great feeling it is when someone comes from behind for the win – a triumphant return to the limelight from the darkness, suppressing all haters in a manner that does not encourage conversation. Instead, it swiftly and simply suppresses any doubts. Globe’s Strange Rumblings in Shangri La is just that for the almost forgotten Dion Agius.
Agius was the hipster surfer of an entire generation. He was Globe’s golden boy, free surfing radically with his own personal .TV domain that we all tuned in to. Traveling the world, surfing every windblown air-wave we had never seen with the occasional short edit from mad-genius Joe G.
As long as there was a horde of leggy blonde supermodels waiting on the beach, Dion was in, and we wanted to watch every step of the way. The waves were fun, the drinks were cold, the tattoos were bad, and all was good.
But as the number of legs increased, the surfing grew scarce. He started eyewear companies and lived in NYC with Warren Smith, grew a beard and what looked like a belly, and was seen at more fashion debuts than dawn patrols. The balance was gone, at least in the media’s eyes. He was moving on, to no surprise of many. “Just a phase” they said.
Then came Strange Rumblings. That beautiful, knock-knee, looping frontside alley-oop; the awkward backside barrel weaving through those impossible tubes, and that backside top-knocker. They’re all back, ensuring that they never truly left.
It might be his hidden critic-shusher. There’s no Curren arc, no Occy bash. Instead, he repeatedly rides out of impossible sections with a crack to airdrop with little or no regard for the impending doom running away in front of him. It is a flat-line to an aggressive vertical adjustment into an under the lip hook that generally puts him IN the lip before projecting out and down with it. Then, of course, he stomps a landing like a skateboarder going for bolts on a stair set, smoothly riding it out. It is not what you would expect. That is what brought a smile to my face as I watched him decimate a French beach break lip, just as he did a few years back in the giant barreling Indo section alongside Jordy Smith in Kai Neville’s Modern Collective.
There are still the leggy blondes on the beach, still the goofy technically disadvantageous apparel. But this hipster just silenced the crowd. “He had his 15 minutes,” they said. “Yeah, but when are we actually going to see him surf?” Those kind of comments will be on the back burner for a little while. He turns well, travels far, gets deep in the tube, and looks good doing it. He spins, seemingly uninhibited, through the air in a 5mm wetsuit in Icelandic waters. How NOT standard hipster is cold water, colder weather, and intensely thick rubber suits?
Go enjoy Globe’s Strange Rumblings in Shangri La, and let someone surprise you. Enjoy that we were all wrong, and someone is better than was given credit for.
