The Gemini.
He’s a bit of a belligerent parent. A bit of your best friend. A bit of an asshole. A vain genius silently waiting for the world to recognize the balls and creativity that went into creating the Gemini surfboard, and then continuing to push the board after the whole surf industry decided to pass over the design and continue producing the tried and true thruster shape. He is a bit of a pussycat. A bit of a gangster.
Shapes are a big thing. While most of the pro surfers on tour insist on riding the paper thin boards that Kelly Slater put in vogue, soul surfers and other unemployed enthusiasts are rekindling a love affair with surf shapes and experimentation. An un-named radical surf shop in San Clemente is barely carrying thrusters. Their racks are filled with everything from $1000 + Takayama long boards to mid priced funky fat fish shapes to colorful Anderson glassed-on fin shortboards that resemble an Alia more then a modern thruster.
Some big name surfers are publicly experimenting. Dane Reynolds is on the cover of Surfing Magazine in a home made t-shirt and a matching unevenly shaped hand made surfboard. Reynolds, the most popular surfer in the world (last year, at least) is not participating in the ASP tour, and expanding the view on popular surfboard shapes. His last design for Al Merrick, the Sperm Whale, is a short fat hybrid thruster/funboard for the mushy messy California surf breaks. Other incredible surfers, like Rob Machado and Joel Tudor, have been riding and shaping all different surfboard shapes, for decades, and riding them all over the world.
“Anyone can ride a short board,” says a quiet Aussie expat, glassing his 6.0 single fin in Jeff’s glassing room. Under the mid afternoon sun, a freshly shaped Gemini sits on a pair of shaping forks in the outdoor alcove, just outside of the shaping room. It’s drying. There are no stickers and no decals and no bumps. It’s pure. Just out of the oven. Glowing white. Ugly. Strange.
Yes, it’s ugly. Compared with with the classic smooth lines and missile fast surfboard shapes of the late 20th and early 21st century, yes, the Gemini is sharp and ugly. It looks like a scorpion. It looks impossible to ride. It’s not an inviting look. It’s not a beautiful tan beach bimbo easy to get in the sack, blonde and always smiling. She is not purring lightly, telling you how wonderful you look. She is not singing melodic island songs around a rich beach fire under a star filled sky. Rather, she is cursing and pierced and dirty and raging punk, just off the A train, prepared to tear you the fuck apart, traveled and street smart and infected, more tenement house than Hamptons share, more early Winona Ryder, Hunter before he ran for mayor, Jim Brown in Cleveland, more the Dodgers before moving West.
Admittedly, you’d have to be bold to ride it. To pull up to any lineup with a twin nosed surfboard that looks like a catamaran on steroids is courageous and faithful. It’s hard enough to get a wave on a regular shaped thruster here. You would have go a little out of your mind, be a little bit of a show off to ride the Gemini, and you’d better be able to surf the hell out of it or you will risk looking even sillier then the entire line up already presumes you to be. It’s the opposite extreme of kook – the highly analytical surfer. The mad man. Taking a Gemini out for a mellow surf does not seem to be the way. One rarely takes a Ferrari around the corner to just buy milk.
Enter Jeff Alexander, and it becomes quickly apparent how the uninterested surf world begot the Gemini shape.
“I got this bitchin’ template for a shortboard,” he says. Who says bitchin’ anymore? In the house there is a definitive lack of technology. There is a nice small flat screen television set and a DVD player, but that is all. Jeff has one local $25 cell phone that beeps with SMS messages occasionally. There is no computer. There are no giant shaping machines. There are no Iphones and big cameras with various lenses and lava lamps.
In the shaping room there are planers and sand paper and wooden blocks and levels and jig saws and measuring plates and pencils and foam. The simple, hard, dirty, brute tools of a trade that is dying slowly. Who will be shaping surfboards in one hundred years?
To make something which you can hold. To make something which is definitely there. No questions, no abstract philosophizing, no environmental theorizing. There is no argument that a surfboard is there and someone made it and what you shall do with it. It’s not like global warming. There’s no combative doubt. It just is.
On the surfboard rack of Jeff Alexander’s cream white scooter is a Gemini shaped boogie board that his girl rides and a custom Alexander longboard with a giant stars and stripes flag painted across the deck.
“I surf the beach breaks up north now,” Jeff says. “They are all beginners up there, but they know they are beginners so there is no macho agro bullshit. I pull up and get a ton of waves. Everyone is mellow.”
At the beach he sits on his log; a cut stump in front of a smaller tree. He drinks a Bintang and watches his girl in the water at sunset. He haggles with a local vendor and buys a blow gun to do away with the neighborhood dogs.
“Can you get me some poison for the darts?” he asks the old Indonesian craftsman.
In the fading light, Jeff talks about the changes to Bali and Indonesia. The surfing industry. Global warming. Over population. Hookers.
Warungs and surf shops and ding repair businesses line the cliffs of Uluwatu now. The traffic in and out of Kuta is an urban mess that could rival rush hour in Los Angeles on any day. Garbage washes up along the beaches at high tide. The small streets are filled with vendors selling knock off luxury items and Quiksilver t-shirts, while the boulevards display American fast food restaurants gloriously. Airplanes constantly arrive and depart. Surf camps and cheap surfboards are everywhere.
He puts his head down and the planer roars across a 7.10 blank piece of foam and shavings fly across the room. And in the simplicity of that, in the simple everyday walk down to the beach where he paddles out into the water and tries to catch a couple of waves on a piece of shaped and glassed hunk of styrofoam and feel good; in that timeless activity, Jeff Alexander has forever ensconced himself. Tired, hungry, and fantastically poor in a small shaping room that he built and designed, a small box no bigger then 200 square feet, smaller than most secretary’s cubicles, Jeff Alexander wanders around making something you can reach out and touch and use and get happy on every single day. Keeping a strict handmade tradition, a meaning, a vision, while the rest of the world wonders whether the oceans are rising.
I get to make a living out of my hobby, he tells me, sitting at his round steel living room table, rolling a cigarette, drinking coffee. The luckiest guy in the world, he says.
For more on the Gemini surfboard or Alexander Surfboards, click here.
