Schroff Neverland

  On an afternoon last June, Peter Schroff and I were sitting on the stoop of my apartment waiting on a pal who was to bring us an air wedge and a long reach. I had just locked my keys inside my truck. Looking back, it’s no coincidence that this was the first time in several years I had locked myself out. Peter has that kind of effect. He almost always carries with him, at minimum, two bags—each decorated with a collection of tags, charms, and amulets. The jingle of plastic on metal produced by his mysteriously alien gate tends to cast a spell on his interlocutors. As I apologized for the lag, Peter told me that it’s nice to have unexpected lapses in the action and that we should savor the wait.

  While taking a few laps around the block, we stopped at a lemonade stand run by my neighbors Summer and Autumn who’d been raising money to put towards their college fund. Delighted, Peter reached for a deep fried Oreo—then passed me the morsel and kept the toothpick. He looked right at Summer and, without breaking eye contact, proceeded to plunge the pick straight into his septum, slowly driving it further and further until finally it punctured through the other side. (A fin slash to the nose at Lanikai in the late 70s had left him with a hole which never closed.) I resonated with that gobsmacked look Summer couldn’t seem to shed. She was, for the first time, bearing witness to an almost 70-year-old man sporting bell bottoms and a pale blue 10-gallon hat who had just defied the basic laws of anatomy. Peter’s performance had, for a moment, dislodged Summer from familiar reality and placed her in an unshakable trance—the very same which transports one into a world wherein keys and their importance no longer exist.

  Peter started handshaping surfboards in 1969 and quickly thereafter became a seminal figure of the emerging “Neon Surf Culture” in Newport’s Echo Beach. Raised around his father’s auto body shop, Peter used airspray guns to create labyrinths of color on his designs which quickly became synonymous with the Schroff experience, and eventually, of Newport surf culture altogether. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Schroff's notorious ads in Surfing and Surfer magazines inspired a cognitive leap in the trends of surf marketing. Warholian tableaus of Peter dressed in all black while ominously staring into a Christmas ornament, or snapshots of him wearing a tuxedo alongside minx-gowned Playboy models immediately shifted attention away from the product and onto the persona. Eventually, big box brands caught on to the seduction and Peter was hired as a lead designer and consultant for companies like Gotcha, O’Neill, and Quicksilver—at one point earning $250 an hour for, as Peter put it, “giving them an edge.” After 25 years as one of the culture’s lead architects, Peter was ultimately pulled away from surfing in the late 80s by his work as a night club designer and the performance art crowds of downtown Los Angeles.

  After being solicited to re-enter the board building business by an eager upstart in the 2010s, Peter was first exposed to the gratuitous saturation of outsourced boards on the market. At that time, machine cut, mass-produced, and generic models had already begun to suffocate an industry once stewarded by those like Schroff and his eccentric ilk. In response, Peter put on the first iteration of his now infamous “Chainsaw Massacres”—a performance piece wherein Peter, dressed in nothing but a speedo and his 10-gallon hat, voraciously eviscerates a machine-made pop-out while smoking a cigarette. The inaugural performance was hosted by the Rockaway Beach Surf Club in 2015 during one of Peter’s regular visits to the city. In the time since, Peter has resumed operations of Schroff Surfboards—fielding regular custom orders from his home and studio in San Pedro, California while continuing to jolt the surf world with intermittent showings of his exquisite board torture. After reflecting on his time in the art world and ultimate return to surfing Peter said confidently:

  I am here to salvage what’s left of our surf culture. I think God put me here to do that. He put me on the hill (overlooking the port of San Pedro) watching all the containers of shit coming into this country. I mean, fuck! This is the consumerism capital of the world. We waste shit and shop at Walmart. It’s pretty creepy out there. I am the new gatekeeper so to speak.

  During his two-week stay in NYC, Peter shaped and sprayed 13 custom boards. Despite his celebrity status in the surf world, Peter is unflinchingly adamant on meeting in-person with each and every one of his customers. Barring, perhaps, his euphemistic language of ‘pimpery’—Peter’s delicate treatment of the tradition is not unlike its genesis in pre-European Hawaii. Right on the precipice of completion, he says, each board whispers their name to him and he etches it into the foam. Having seen a number of “tricks” spill into the shaping dungeon on Grand for their meeting with Schroff, it very soon became clear that each one crawled out in that familiar trance. Whether through design, advertising, conversation, dress, or toothpicks—Peter has a persistent way of estranging you from the otherwise unchecked parameters. His impossibly unique and resolute spirit alienates you from the neat and tidy laws which govern the pragmatic score and sweeps you away to Schroff Neverland. As an iconoclastic advocate for the handmade, he’s working tenaciously to estrange us all from the normalization of the machine and its whale-like gulp of the independent krill.

  In January of 2025, Peter visited NYC to premiere his documentary, "Shaping Kulture,” at the shop. The day after the screening, he came back to the neighborhood to make acquaintance with the shaping bay. While down in the cellar, with a healthily stocked fridge, the two of us conducted the following interview:

GN: Good to have you, Peter. Have you spent much time in New York before?

PS: Well, my girlfriend and I decided to do our first venture to New York about 1978. I was 24 I think. We check into the Chelsea Hotel.

GN: What was it like back then?

PS: You have no idea what a fuckin dive it was. I just had a friend who stayed there after the remodel. 1000 fuckin bucks a night! Anyways—it was the kinda place where you would not take your shoes off. Each floor had a communal bathroom. But we had a book … New York on 15 Dollars a Day. So we knew all the things to do, cause we had a guide.

GN: Amongst them?

PS: Well the first day, we woke up and thought we’d try the subway. They had a stop pretty close to the hotel to my memory. We walked down there around lunch time or something. Train comes by, everybody runs on. We look at each other and we go, “maybe we’ll try this tomorrow” and we walked back up the stairs. Californians are not used to this kind of intensity. So that was the first initiation. Around 1977/78.

She was a modern dancer and there’s no modern dancers in LA. It’s just Europe and New York. So she had to move out here eventually. And I agreed to move out with her. Which I never did—because of the cold. So I’ve had a relationship.

Let’s just say, on average, since 1978 I managed to come out here 3 or 4 times a year on average. So it’s my home away from home kinda thing. I have a lot of friends here and a lot of history here. Done performances here. And so I feel comfortable here.

GN: What kind of performances?

PS: First was probably in the early 80s. They’ve been described as German expressionist. Very intense. Kinda thing that the chainsaw came from. Very intense and very (long pause) methodic.

GN: What led you there?

PS: It was mostly from my studies at Cal Arts and galleries and exhausting the traditional medium. I just fell in love with being vulnerable to a live audience. It’s live. You can manipulate it. It’s pliable. You can do a painting but you're locked in. It’s done. It’s dead after it’s done. And the gallery is just a documentation of its death. So that’s why I fell in love with performance. When you’re doing it, it exists and when you're not doing it…. it’s gone.

Over the years, I just kept dissecting and dissecting. And finally, I ended with dressing all in black. Turtle neck, long sleeves. I’d have two photo lights on stage, one light with the audience and one light would be in my face. And I’d just shine it in peoples faces. And if somebody had an open door, I would invade them. And I’d jump into their brain. And we’d have a conversation.

So I shine the light in somebody’s face and if they left the back door open to come in.

I go—
“Hellooo! ….. You left the back door open!”
“Holy shit!” They’d say. “Not again!”
“Yup, I am here. I am back”
“I don’t know if I am ready for you to come”
“You want me to come back later?”
“No, nooo, no.” They’d say. Terrified.

So, you jump into their territory and fuck! I get people on this show and they say they’d do everything in their power to get the fuck out of there. It gets kinda heavy, you know? It just depends how far I took it.

GN: It doesn’t seem coincidental that someone obsessed with surfing would strike an interest in live performance. Surfing has a similar vulnerability—the medium, much like a live audience, is fleeting and in flux. Reaction rolls at a speed that obfuscates external influence or corruption. It seems like both practices could be effective in revealing elements of character that might otherwise remain forbidden or concealed by our learned behavior.

PS: The mouse is chasing the tail here. You answered your own question! And you’re pretty much spot on. And that’s the beauty of having conversation with other people. They have a whole completely different history. Ever since we’ve come out of mommy’s pussy and we’re spanked on the butt, we all have different experiences and different realities. And it’s so nice listening to you because I got to see things from a different perspective and it was beautiful your delivery on that. And I couldn’t have said it better. But you answered your own question.

What I am getting at is, the correlation is strong. The uncertainty and the myth and the adventure of surfing and being vulnerable with a live audience on stage and not knowing what you’re gonna do next is such a strong parallel.

GN: What endears me to surfing is that it allows me to be more vulnerable than I would have the confidence to be anywhere else. Maybe live performance is similar.

PS: God! That was beautifully delivered. So kudos.

GN: So any live performances that you’re still practicing today?

PS: I think the chainsaw shows are the major continuation of the performance. I’ve never been political in my whole life but when I was away from surfing for 25 years and I came back, I went—holy shit! What happened to this world? First of all, there’s no more handshapes cause we’re using the machine and then you got these imported boards from Thailand. You know slave labor and stuff. And undercutting my buddies! Shipping container full of these things and people are gobbling it up.

If you’re going to be an activist, you go after the biggest targets. So the first target was horseshit (you know Hayden Shapes). Then Kelly joined firewire. And Kelly is the biggest target.

I later did a collaboration with horseshit. For the Electric Acid Test. They said—“we have a pretty embarrassing question to ask… Will you collaborate with horseshit?” And I said fuck yea! Cause if you reject that it’s a dead end. But if you collaborate with someone who you ridiculed in the past, people will listen. I kinda crippled Hayden. Mr. Cock. So he knows how to behave himself now.

GN: If you were placed at the roundtable with all of the execs of Slater Designs, Firewire, Hayden Shapes and the lot—What would you say to them?

PS: I’d say, look guys: You play with fire you might get burnt!

I used to work with Mike Price who was the CEO of firewire before he went back to South Africa about a year ago.

GN: What’d you do with him?

PS: Oh we were like best friends! We sucked up so much blow together in the Gotcha days! All the surfboard companies were fueled by blow. The 80s surf companies—that was like gasoline. He is a brilliant person—just top notch. But we took a different fork in the road. He got desperate and kinda sold out.

GN: I heard by way of Jamie Brisick that in 1981 or 82, under the label Underdog Surfboards, you loaded up a van gut full of 70 odd Schroff shapes and sent them out to the East Coast. Seeing as they would’ve likely been the first wide-point back, performance based boards on the East Coast—what was the reception like? It seems like the surfing subcultures of Echo beach and New York are comparable in both their waves and attitude.

PS: Very interesting question. It’ll be interesting to investigate. None of this would have been possible without drug money backing it. I just want to make that clear.

GN: Whose drug money?

PS: I can’t say that! But that’s what made it possible to branch out. Usually, the dealers or the smugglers—sitting high on the hog—are looking for adventure. So we sent the runner boy out to rent the van. And he brings back a dark brown van. Middle of fuckin summer! I got fucking 70 or so boards to put in the back and you can’t have a dark damn van! So my dad has an auto body business and he painted the top of it white at least. I was still feeling a little guilty about the expense. You know this stupid thing. My dad doesn’t do anything by the book, you know, half his buddies are drug smugglers. So he disconnects the odometer cable. They’re gonna go 6K miles and charged by the mile it would’ve gone crazy. At the time, our famed team rider Dan Flecky, the little prince, wasn’t gonna ride in the van so he flew out to meet our runner in New Jersey. Then they did a trip from Jersey, down through the gulf and then back though the middle to Cali. Dropping off a lot of fucking boards along the way. So anyway that was the adventure. It was an amazing trip. I didn’t go. But we established all these relationships with surf shops. From 1980-85, before I burned out on business and started coughing up blood, there was a nice exchange happening.

Eventually, I decided to license out the business because it was just too much pressure for me. I am good at making surfboards but the clothing thing just buried me over my head. I know how to run a surfboard factory because I know how to do everything and I know how to deal with all the surfer types. But when you get into making garments, I don’t speak spanish, I don’t speak Vietnamese, I don’t know how to sew—I was a fish out of water. And it was very stressful. You get 3 thousand pairs of trunks made and they’re all fucked up and you got a ship date to make… that was always happening. I didn’t know how to reckon with it very well. It took a toll on me. And when I started spitting up blood I just went this isn’t worth killing myself over. I just threw my hands up. I licensed it out to the people doing the screen printing and I went on a retainer with Gotcha.

GN: What were you doing for them?

PS: Pretty much, what I do. Giving them an edge. And so that was good. And then Gotcha got too big for its britches and they were doing too much blow and stuff. It takes a little toll. They lived out their heyday. Then I went to Quick(silver). So I did the Quick thing for a bit. It wasn’t much different than gotcha. McKnight is a little bit more modest than MT. He has a little bit more longevity. Both MT and McKnight are brilliant people.

Then I met a girlfriend while on a Quicksilver job in New York. At Balthazar! Her and my partner at Quicksilver had a conflict. So it kinda brought the Quicksilver relationship to an end. Then I started doing clubs.

GN: How was that?

PS: Oh I loved doing clubs. Clubs are good. You get to cut loose. Clubs are great because it’s dark, everybody is half fucked up, and the music is disorienting. Nothing has to be perfect. You just get the concept down. Nothing is gonna be put under a magnifying glass. So I did clubs for a bit and that went really well. Then I kinda dabbled with O’Neil and OP and by that time I had a pretty good reputation. My rate was $250 an hour in the late 90s. Everything was swinging along pretty good! Then the 2000s hit and the surf industry collapsed.

GN: Why do you think it collapsed?

PS: Just generification. You can only take so much cream off the top before it collapses. The surf industry just milked everything out. After a certain point you couldn’t tell the difference between a Gotcha or a Quicksilver or Volcom or Rusty. They had their little formulas and it all looked the same. The reason why people wanted to surf was because it was something different and eventually it all turned into this Champion athletic aesthetic.

GN: You mentioned that, at one point, you stopped surfing for 25 years. What was it that brought you to quit? I totally commiserate with that impulse. What was it that reintroduced you to surfing and drew you back into its pulse?

PS: I dropped out of it when I moved from Orange County to LA. I was over surfing. I spent 31 years surfing and I was sitting kinda sweet and could reap the benefits of my image. I could be in LA and have our studio doing performance shows. I’d go to Gotcha or Quicksilver a couple days a week and do my thing. I’d go surfing once in a while but would never shape my own boards. I was just kinda over it. For basically 25 years. Then, the industry collapsed, so I had no income anymore. My $250 an hour was all dried up. Just boom! Gone! I had just built a penthouse in Venice. My lifestyle just went boop! I went, holy fuck!

Then, some dreamer called me up and wanted to start the surfboard company up again. And I go, shit. I get these guys all the time. Little pipe dreamers. I think I said to him—you write me a check for 10 grand and then we’ll talk. I didn’t want to waste my time with another tire kicker. And so we went through that and he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. Good guy, we’re still friends. I thought I’d shape a couple boards, have them scanned and just have them machined out. So I did that. Then I took a look around and went, “what the fuck am I doing!” So I yanked the scan and started surfing again. Because you gotta surf to shape, test em, get in the groove. That was the start of it—being open-minded because my $250 an hour dried up and I had to start making a living again.

I did other adventures—I got into large scale projections. I met a guy in the art world in the mid 90s. Artist started doing these projections on buildings and I was always intrigued by that. You can just take something and fuck! Share it with the whole city on a tall building. And I happened to meet a guy at landmark. You know what that is? Landmark education. It’s one of those self-help kinda things that you don’t really wan’t to know about. After my decadent days I figured I needed a little disciplining.

The guy I had a conflict with over my girlfriend at Quicksilver he started tweaking or something and went into landmark. And I made up to him. Anyways, you know how life goes. He drug me in there. I paid my dues. A few years of being disciplined. So I am very disciplined now, or at least I can pretend to be. He was a technical guy that knew how to do all this techno stuff. He’d hire all these computer people. We’d just create these projections and it was wonderful. You know we’d party a bit and eventually he started making moves on my girlfriend. One day I went down to get cigarettes and my girlfriend said the guy tried to stick his tongue down her mouth! And that’s not cool. So we kinda had a falling out. And at the same time I am kinda liking getting back into surfing.

What drug me away from surfboards in the 80s was the art family. We had a tight community downtown. We’d just hang out, do performance, have relations, go to shows together. We go to the same bars, restaurants. Downtown was a hotspot. Just the element. So that’s why I kinda shifted. That became my world. The art community downtown.

GN: Was it more your growing distaste for surfing or interest outside that brought you away from it?

PS: Fuck. That’s a complex fucking question you know. I gotta have a bit of weed for that. You wan’t a hit? That’s a tricky question. Can you ask it again?

GN: What bought you away from surfing? Do you think it was more so…

PS: Not brought me, took me!

GN: Well maybe that answers my question.

PS: I left an important component out of the picture. (Exhale) Sometimes I run out of gas. I don’t like getting fucked up but sometimes it gives me a little jolt. (Sip of beer.) Fuck that’s like koolaid! … I bitch therefore I am.

So, what happened downtown in the mid 80s after I moved there with my girlfriend? We set up a kitchen. We had 3000sqft. Basically the whole place was a performance space. So we’d practice there and there was a place down the street where we took improv classes. From Scott Killman. He was really good. I did a lot of improv studies. I am German, so everything is premeditated. It’s really hard to shed that. So everything is just so sweet downtown. Eventually, it was so booming downtown with all this culture that the developers came in. You know how they do. It gets popular and a developer comes in and they start opening condos and shit. So our rent went from 25 cents a square foot to a dollar a square foot. So we all moved out. That’s when art kinda died.

So it all makes sense. I left the surf family for the art family. The art family eventually dried up. Or was killed off. So then it turned into the art, party, music thing in Venice.

GN: So how’d you find your way back into it?

PS: Well the pipe dreamer approached me and I got back into it and saw what was going on with the Asian surfboards. And being a performance artist, I had a lot of buddies that were kinda rooting me on in New York. Brooklyn buddies and stuff. And they were all hanging out at the Rockaway Surf Club. And so I said hey! Talk to the ring leader there and let’s do a little sacrifice with horseshit (Hayden Shapes). So that was the first (chainsaw) show. That’s when I started building the family again. May will be the 10 year Anniversary of the first chainsaw show. With Brandon. I call him Howard cause he looks like Howard Stern. The owner of the surf club back then.

Oh fuck it was so funny. I was staying at knucklehead’s house. And I came over to the surf club for coffee, hanging out, just visiting. Knucklehead has a room he let me and my dog stay in. Well I don’t call it a dog. My wife kinda thing. And so we’re having our coffee and cigarette. And all of a sudden, Howard gets this fuckin call at like 7 in the morning. And I hear this bitch screaming. This was the morning after the chainsaw show. It was posted and went viral. You can imagine—some maniac half naked chopping up fucking horseshit! And on the phone it’s horseshit’s wife fucking screaming and he’s freaking out and saying they’re gonna call the business bureaus on him and I am just busting up in the background. So that was the taste of returning to the surf world. The family and all.

I am here to salvage what’s left of our surf culture. I think god put me here to do that. He put me on the hill (San Pedro) watching all the containers of shit coming into this country. I mean, fuck! This is the consumerism capital of the world. We waste shit and shop at Walmart. It’s pretty creepy out there. I am the new gatekeeper so to speak.

GN: In the movie you said, “I want some kind of benefit from this dusty little adventure.” That strikes a chord with one of my own central conflicts with surfing. Inherently, it’s this fleeting and transient thing. That’s why it's so irresistible. Attaching meaning or benefit from the ephemeral often spurs some tension.

PS: There’s something sexy about that. It’s kinda like that sexy beast that just attracts you, but you can never quite master it. As soon as you master it, it loses its way. There’s something about that suspense of surfing that’s so seductive. I thought I was home free about a year ago. Then I had this creepy little voice coming through the left ear, “Maybe you should order a blank. Redrum.”

GN: In my experience, there’s an anxiety about the ‘benefit’. Always vanishing the second we touch it. It’s so opposed to all the metrics of accumulation and gain with which we’ve been taught to qualify success and worth.

PS: I know. That’s the scary part. It’s scary because the world tells you it’s scary. Stay away from there! Just follow the cookie cutter rules. Because there’s a lot of fucking people out there and if you get astray, we’re not gonna deal with you. And that’s what I am confronted with all the time. The most work is staying one step ahead of the system so you can get away with all this shit. I am doing rentals! I am retired. I count on my mini motel. They just shut down my mini motel because they’re cracking down on Airbnb shit. I am just doing long term rentals. So now I am super fucked! I just spent all my money making this paradise for travelers. We did a year and a half of business, we finally started getting out of the fucking hole, then the city makes a new rule. So yeah, it’s tricky. I understand what you’re saying and there’s no magic answer to it.

You can walk on the beaten path or you can walk on the razors edge. Choose your fork in the road.

GN: What is the “benefit” from this dusty little adventure?

PS: Well you know, I got something from a friend the other day. Ah, here it is. My mind immediately goes to it. It might sum up the question. “Time for shedding what no longer serves you. Make room for what will.” And that sounded a little bit stuck up to me. Sticky. Benefit means you’re looking for something. There’s watching and looking. Two completely different vocabulary words. Tell me the difference between looking and watching.

GN: Looking is trying to find something. Watching is letting things come to you.

PS: Observing. It may come to you it may not. As soon as you’re slapped on the butt, you’re trained. You come out of mommy’s pussy. You go to school. And you're cultivated on how to make you the least amount of a brat you can possibly be and just go with the program. Yes or no?

GN: Yes.

PS: So, you’re not supposed to see anything outside of that. You’re trained by a formula. And the formula puts perimeters around your peripheral vision. That’s the way it is. Can you imagine what’s outside of the program? There’s opportunities in every fucking molecule out there! But you can’t fucking see em! You see what you’re programmed to see. If you catch a glance they go, “Oh no! That’s a UFO you stay away from that shit!” An artist will say or a writer will say everything to do has been done! How much of our brain do we use? That’s a pretty arrogant statement. There’s opportunity in every fucking molecule. We just don’t recognize it. That’s the area that I am interested in now. Cause that’s a pretty bleak life out there.

GN: Those opportunities hidden by system and structure—any advice for sniffing them out?

PS: I hate to tell you this. There’s no magic fucking answer. I started assuming, around 18, that there’s more to this that meets the eye. Cause as soon as you’re slapped on the butt and programmed it’s pretty much all over unless you get bored with that formula and start investigating. But when I was 20, I started hearing things. Eventually, I started meditating. Not some kinda guru thing—that’s a dictatorship in its own kinda way. Eventually my back gave up. You know from being in a twist all the time. So I got up one morning, I think I was 25, boom! Down to the ground. Crippled. Disc pressing up against the nerve. I am crippled at 25! Sometimes had to be in a wheelchair. Too painful to walk, ice picks up the spine. So I tried acupuncture. Chiropractor. Physical therapy. Nothing worked. Then I kept hearing about yoga. And I fucking hated the idea of yoga. But I started doing it. Found this old English woman. She’s my cup of tea. I started studying with her and studied with her for 25 years. She taught me to use these muscles and those muscles to create space. Don’t be a lazy cunt and jam your spine. She passed away during Covid. I think she lived for those yoga classes and they closed them. When she died she looked about 18 years old from the back. She’s probably 5’5, 90 pounds and stronger than me. I wouldn’t want to reckon with her. We were a family. Then the Covid fuckin shit hit and that’s when she died. She probably hit 90 or something and looked 18.

But anyway I learned a lot from her. And to answer your question—there’s no magic answer. But if you just listen to those molecules… they’ll guide you.

Oh! And dreams. You gotta wake up immediately, write them down and study them. Cause you’ll find out things about yourself, how you react. Sometimes it’s quite embarrassing to see. Usually in real life you can kinda hide it. Oh I fucked up I don’t want anyone to know that kinda thing.

So that’s kinda the evolution of how I got to feel comfortable outside of the structured world. Or the way the world is set up. It’s available if you want to put in the elbow work. And like I say—fuck. Every morning I practice my 20 minutes of yoga cause I like feeling good. I don’t like yoga but I like it a lot more than that crippled shit. It’s all logical if you’re honest with yourself.

All really good questions. I am impressed. Can we take a cig break now? Bring it up and we’ll do it up there. Mostly I do these things at my house and there’s a smoking parlor there.

GN: It’s difficult to have an interdisciplinary approach to art making that involves, in some capacity, surfing—that’s not disregarded as “surfy” and therefore illegitimate. I am curious to know if you resonate with that challenge. And if you think people in the art world interpret your work as legitimate even when it pertains to surfing.

PS: Fuck man. Remember what we were talking about earlier. Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha, Chris Burden. There’s a handful of LA artists that transcended the surf art into the New York league. But not many. And that’s what I am up against. Because I am over educated for the surf world. Not in an egotistical way. But I have to stoop down to a certain level of communication. Stooping or climbing a ladder is just part of the program. Judgement is what fucks everything up. That’s the beauty in Warhol. He blew the judgement thing off—you could actually look at a Campbell’s soup can or a Coke bottle. He took it out of consumerism—out of the program—and put it on a gallery wall. He poked holes in the system. I don’t know if you’ve seen Warhol films like Trash or Joe Dallesandro or Nico films—they’re all fuckin on speed. Lou Reed and the whole kit and caboodle.

It is what it is. If that wasn’t enough then it’s bringing in the chainsaw to the picture. Becoming an advocate for handmade in our surfing culture. Which, as I said, is a world I wouldn’t have touched with a 10ft pole because I don’t like to blend politics with art. But… what goes around comes around I guess! So now that’s a component of the whole picture. Now I am blending them all together—the politics, the art, the commerce, design. The walls are slowly crumbling around.

GN: What’s born out of that blurring of distinction?

PS: It’s definitely an experiment. Because judgement is the issue here. That’s the experiment. Can you function without good or bad? Do you have to judge something in order to relate to it? Can you relate to something moment to moment? Molecule to molecule? Without making judgement. And that is a transition. Going from the matrix into a creative intelligence. They don’t want you to use your intelligence. You learn the program and you go along with the program. Eventually, you don’t need your brain. We don’t know where it’s gonna go. But it doesn’t have to go anywhere.

GN: When did you start naming your surfboards?

PS: When I came back to it. I just got a flash one day. That it’s kinda similar to prostituting. I saw myself pimping to tricks. And so the bitches meet the trick and I get related to them. What he likes, what he’s been riding. Issues that he’s had with past bitches. And so I wanna be a good pimp—So I study him and go into the dusty sweat box and make something. And it’s a challenge. That’s what motivates me to shape. How can I conceive a bitch that’s gonna make this man sitting behind a computer happy. What’s gonna bring him joy and recreation in his life. And the bitches whisper their names to me right as I finish and I write it on the board.

I didn’t see it as negative I saw it as a reminder. You know what this is? (Points to index finger ring) Every month I paint this red. It’s my red ribbon. You know red ribbon on the finger is a reminder. They used to do it in the 50s. Especially women. Just to remind them of something. It’s just to remind them of something. They’d look at the red ribbon. Cause your hand’s always crossing in front of your face.

GN: Your motto, in shaping and otherwise, seems to be “It’s never enough.”

PS: Well that’s human nature, it’s not my motto. I’ll tell you another story. It just popped into my head. I was gonna put it on a header in old English on knotty pine. “It’s never enough.” I met this girl in yoga and we’d been going out for a bit and she looks over at my desk and goes “What’s that?” And I say it’s a header we’re gonna put up in the old patio area. And she’s a channeler. Whatever a channeler is. And she goes, if you put that up I am not coming over here anymore. So that’s the last time she came. So we woke up and fucked in the morning and that’s the last I saw of her. She’s gotta wear the pants in the family I guess.

I didn’t see it as negative I saw it as a reminder. You think a fuckin bear thinks about anything? No! It just does what it does. Human beings gotta conquer the world. It’s never enough. It reminds me to take a deep breath, it’s not the end of the world. The header is just a reminder that our nature is “it’s never enough.” It’s never enough luxury, never enough alcohol, never enough blow. So if I see that red ribbon… it’s enough.

GN: Well I think that’s a perfectly appropriate place to end.

PS: Toodaloo!