The Summer of Alex Knost 2008 By Surfline

Part 1: The Wedge
I get a call on my cell from Alex Knost and his friend Tanner Prairie, who are in Alex's windowless, silver '70s Dodge van directly in front of me on Newport Boulevard.
I've been following them around the upper Balboa Peninsula trying to find parking, but because it's noon on a Saturday in July, an open space is about as rare as an "Obama '08" yard placard in this bastion of coastal conservatism.

The parking situation has prompted a change of plans. "We don't have any fins, but let's go bodysurf The Wedge," Tanner laughs. He turns around in the passenger's seat with a boyish smile on his face and waves to me. He is 18, shirtless, and sporting a blond mustache. He reminds me of the likeable-but-naive kid in the movies who goes off to war and never returns, prompting a touching eulogy scene in a graveyard featuring the hunky, anti-authoritarian leading man (presumably Paul Newman) who dodged the draft. Tanner is Alex's good friend, a prominent member of the Newport longboarding community, and a budding shaper with an exclusive clientele, the most prominent of which is sitting next to him.

If you're a surf media consumer, you know Alex. In recent years he's become the poster boy for the modern longboard movement. "He has such amazing board control," said Thomas Campbell, the painter turned surf cinematographer who can list amongst his many credits first exposing Alex's talent to the larger surf community in his 2004 film Sprout. "He's chosen to ride narrower-nosed longboards, and they force you to ride a wave exactly how it wants to be ridden. You can't noseride on a narrow-nose longboard when it's not time to noseride, because it just won't do it. You turn, trim, and boogie through sections when you need to, and then when it's time to noseride, you noseride. So it's refreshing to watch him, because he's surfing the wave how it should be surfed."

This explains Alex's highly unpredictable style, which comes across as a blend of the classic postures and maneuvers of '60s log-riding with the exaggerated recovery techniques of '70s experimental surfing and the attack-minded nature of modern shortboarding. But his surfing is only half the equation that's led to his recent notoriety.

Campbell makes an attempt at qualifying the other, less tangible half. "In relation to other surfers and entertainers, he...has...IT," Campbell says, slowing his speech to a crawl on the last three words for emphasis. "He has that unquantifiable thing. He has a crazy amount of confidence and focus, and he has star power. It's that simple. He's an amazing surfer, a great performer with his band, and a confident artist. Whether it's taking pictures, painting pictures, or designing clothes, he's just not afraid."

That "it" has made him a mainstay in the advertising campaign of RVCA Clothing, which has differentiated itself from other brands by teaming up with artists from the surf and skateboard communities on everything from print advertising to clothing design to gallery shows to an art magazine called ANP Quarterly. A sort of surf-ghetto Renaissance man, Alex's approach has fit well into RVCA's Artist Network Program, and with a major brand behind him, it's no wonder he's drawing attention.

At The Wedge, we park and change into our bodysurfing regalia. Alex looks like a beat poet. At 23, he is taller than average, and he sports a hipster haircut and a tan so true one suspects foul play. He smiles easily and contagiously, though his default facial expression seems to be that of someone listening with purpose to a conversation he's eavesdropping on: head slightly cocked, eyes narrowed, focus shifting. His wrists are ringed with distressed wristbands from parties and shows long over.

We head down to the beach, where the surf is powerful and head high. Unlike most experienced surfers--who tend to act contemplative at the sight of serious-ish waves--Alex and Tanner's approach is reminiscent of the pool-invasion scene from Caddyshack. They run screaming for the surf.

Though Alex has long since forsaken competitive surfing, he's the opposite of a beach bum. His band, The Japanese Motors, just finished recording their first full-length album for Vice Records, and with an October release date for the 12-song, self-titled CD, they have been playing any gig they're offered in preparation for upcoming tours. This means lots of late nights amongst the drunken.

Alex also wrote and starred in a 30-minute film called Beach Blanket Burnout: The Hangover of a Pop Culture, which was released in late July of this year on DVD. In the film, he plays the protagonist, surfer Buster Olson, who travels to Australia to escape a bad relationship...I think. Abroad, he reunites with a beautiful foreigner, drinks coffee, modifies his pants, surfs a bit, and has a nervous breakdown (in that order). Shot completely in black and white, subtitled (though it's in English), and with artsy framing and pans in the style of French Nouvelle Vague film master Jean-Luc Godard, stating that it's not a traditional surf movie is an understatement of biblical proportions. Alex's performance in the film is so personal, one can't help but guess that it's bound to draw criticism from an audience conditioned to expect exaggerated color, high action, and choreographed music--a fact not lost on Tyler Manson, who did the filming and editing.

"He does whatever feels [is] natural, whatever's fun," said Manson in a 2007 episode of his popular VBS.TV show, "Hi Shredability." "He doesn't give a shit. When people don't understand it, they immediately want to criticize him, and because it's different, he definitely gets a lot of grief for it."

But getting grief isn't a new sensation for Alex, who has, wittingly or not, positioned himself as the primary target for haters of longboarding, tight jeans, homemade haircuts, fashion-forward people, Mollusk Surf Shop, surfers who start bands, artists, stuff that's new and unfamiliar, or any combination thereof. This is the downside of putting yourself out there in a world of square-shoulderedness.

On the beach, an overweight man in his early 50s with a flattop haircut is watching Alex and Tanner take turns using each other as a human bodyboard. He turns to a similarly seal-like youth 30 or so years his junior and flatly says, "Look at those faggots."

Part 2: 34th Street

Three days after our Wedge session I get a call from Alex, who invites me to go surfing at 34th Street in Newport Beach. I arrive late, and with the south swell still pumping and drawing a big summertime crowd, I'm stressing I might not find him. But all worry instantly evaporates seconds after I arrive on the beach, where Alex's presence in the lineup is undeniable.

Thomas was right: There's an unpredictable, freeform quality to Alex's surfing, but when you see it live, there's no question he knows what he's trying to achieve. If Joel Tudor's noseriding is comparable to the sound that comes out of a 500-year-old Stradivarius in the hands of a master, Alex's full-body attack is the swan song of a 1984 Fender Stratocaster about to be beaten against a Marshall stack. In a good way. In the way that makes girls lust and makes guys buy Stratocasters and start bands. Constantly on the brink of losing control, he never does.

After surfing, we go for lunch at Alta Coffee in Newport's Lido Village, where hip shops and live-work lofts have replaced the boat-repair and sail-making industries that thrived there for decades. All the attractive 20-something waitresses call Alex by his first name and touch him lightly on the shoulder when they take his order or quickly visit.

He was born in the spring of 1985 and raised in the same Costa Mesa neighborhood as his dad, Jim, a lifelong local at Blackies, the beachbreak north of the Newport Pier known for year-round longboardable surf. Jim introduced his son to surfing around age 10, steering him heavily to the form of a generation past.

"Most kids my age were watching Taylor Steele's movies," Alex laughs, "but I was watching the 1960s stuff my dad was into--Barefoot Adventure, Five Summer Stories, Water-Logged--all the old Bud and Bruce Brown movies of the '60s, and the MacGillivray Freeman films... That was the shit I was watching. That or 'Happy Days.'"

Alex was a natural, though he never felt simpatico with his peer group. "Surfers were the jocks of my generation," he laments. "In high school I hung out with them a little bit, but I didn't really like their agenda, which was basically to elevate themselves by being rude to girls, being rude to Mexican kids, being rude to homosexual kids, being rude to dirtbags--the kind of stuff that's usually done by the football team."

Unable to connect with other surfers his age, he looked to the older crew of Blackies locals for guidance. "Because I was hanging out with some radical guys who were older than me, I grew up pretty fast," Alex remembers. "Some of them were skaters and musicians. They weren't really too interested in nine-to-five jobs or going to college, so at a young age I saw some things that most kids my age probably didn't see--girls, drugs, partying. But I learned a shitload through it all by listening to the conversations those types of people had, and seeing what their outlook was on the general public. I looked up to them because they were older, and they would tell me all these things that would make so much sense. They would say, 'Don't worry about high school. That shit doesn't mean shit.'"

"In relation to other surfers and entertainers, he...has...IT,"

- Thomas Campbell

Alex took advantage of opportunities to expand his horizons, traveling widely before he even had a driver's license. Surfing Noosa in tropical Queensland, Australia, at 16, he met Thomas Campbell, a longboarding aficionado, who invited him to Ceylon in the Indian Ocean. The resulting 16 mm footage made its way into Campbell's tectonic Sprout, which instantly elevated Alex into the upper echelon of what at the time was being referred to as the "retro" movement, placing him in the company of icons such as Rob Machado, Dave Rastovich, Joel Tudor, and Skip Frye, who were rediscovering the surfboards of the '60s and '70s.

Suddenly appreciated for the things his critics had previously used as kindling, Alex has embraced the creative opportunities being handed to him. You only have to spend a couple of hours in his company to understand the entrepreneurial drive and motivation under the rock 'n' roll haircut.

"He's motivated as f--k!" says Campbell, who helped produce The Japanese Motors' forthcoming album. "He's at the zenith of motivation right now. This is it for him. This is when the energy in his body and his mental capacity are connecting, and he's really able to focus. And he's doing it. It's fun to be able to work with people like that."

We finish lunch and start to think about our next moves. Alex has a busy week coming up, full of gigs, movie premieres, obligations to RVCA, and summer south swells at San Onofre. I ask one last time about his critics and if he sees them multiplying or disappearing as he experiences success, and his answer is as unorthodox coming from the mouth of a pro surfer as is the arc of his career. "I gravitate to people who inspire me. People with ideas," Alex says. "Someone once told me that ignorant minds discuss people, average minds discuss places, and genius minds discuss ideas."

That quote's most commonly attributed to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, who modernized the United States Navy after World War II and was known for his ability to organize and lead vast numbers of people toward the future. On the surface, the Admiral and Alex don't have much in common, though I did run into another Rickover quote that could apply just as easily to a 20-something surfer in Costa Mesa as it could to the future of war: "Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience."

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