Kristie Griffith's Blog/Article Archive.

CLOCKWIZE–Sardinia, Italy…. Paris at Montmarte… My Italian Wheels…. on the Parisian Subway….

On Friday night I went to a private screening of the edgy surf doco Sea of Darkness produced by Martin Daly and Robbie Taylor and directed by director/surfer /South African Michael Oblowitz (he’s in pre-production for a horror film with Val Kilmer heading to Vancouver and back in the day directed music videos for Bowie, Clapton and more….)

The screening was held at The Ocean Room tucked behind Sushi Roku on Ocean Boulevard. The chairs were super plush and rocky and only had about seven rows or so. The film opens with Jimi Hendrix playing in Hawaii and connects the Hippie Movement with surfing. Jimi was friends with surfer Mike Hynson. I can’t give away too many details-there are some sensitive topics still being re-edited but let me just say it is filled with pirate soul, addiction and paradise found and lost.

Mike Boyum, G-land discoverer/mystic/macrobiotic food guru is central to the film. He bounces around from island to island, country to country, smuggling drugs. Martin Daly, Indo boat owner/operator/lost treasure finder /SofD producer/co-star was at the screening. He could have been part of the whole drug-running crew but he opted out and focused on deep-sea diving and treasure troving. One of the boats he operates now is Quiksilver’s big Indies Trader that discovers new surf spots and conducts research all over the world (it used to be a drug-smuggling boat). Part of me crushed on some of the guys on the screen. The part of me that remembers when I used to think guys like that were “mysterious.” Now I think they are “addicts.”

The story is about Boyum discovering G-Land and hanging out with friends like Jeff Hakman and Gerry Lopez and other stoney hot-shots (Maui Mafia??-ooh I best watch my fingers and what they type) while simulatenously getting into the drug trade. The drugs caused the Muslim, Indo government to take away Boyum’s beloved G-land camp and he became a refugee-thrown out of Nirvana. He lost it all. The house, the servants, the girls and he subsisted on a macrobiotic diet and mushroom smoothies. He hatched one drug-smuggling plan after another, hooked a bunch of friends into his schemes and ruined all their lives and his own.

One of his friends (Jeff Chitty) is the main storyteller throughout the film. Michael tracked him (camera in hand, of course) to a remote New Zealand town, post-20-year jail stint and got him to talk. He talked. And talked. And talked. About cocaine injested for smuggling, of being on the lam, of prison.

Sea of Darkness is a documentary, not a movie. So the ending is what it is. One talented, beautiful surfer got his face blown off in New York dealing the drugs the other boys smuggled in. Boyum eventually fasted himself to death near Cloud 9. He lasted longer than Jesus. Daly said to me at the English Pub we all went to after Sushi Roku: ”You saw how pretty he (Chitty) was. He went from stealing people’s girlfriend to being people’s girlfriend.” Oh the images that came to mind.

The whole Quiksilver crew/story is woven into the film as well. Back when it was as rootsy as it portrays. Daly sat across from me. Attractive and 52. Kind of like a hot Dick Brewer. He was staying at the Viceroy in Santa Monica before heading back to his gig in the Mentawiis/Indo. 

John Milius is interviewed in the film. Chomping on his big cigar like Tim Dorsey, the Big-Wednesday writer/director says that these men did not die god-like deaths. They didn’t go out in a big way. Not like how they lived. He says that in life, it might seem like moral choices don’t matter. That the Universe isn’t paying attention. But that it does matter.

Maybe Sea of Darkness  is a story of addiction. Maybe it’s a story of loss and broken hearts.  We said our goodbyes and Captain Martin Daly headed back to the Viceroy. He will soon head to his house in Jakarta where Jeff Chitty is waiting for him. Straight outta prison via New Zealand… The Vagabonding goes on.

In the past couple of months I went to Los Angeles and tagged along with skater/artist Lia H. on some cool night shoots. One of my profiles on her just ran in L.A. Weekly. I brought my video camera along and took footage of a couple of night outings sneaking into skate parks and just following her while she does her thing. She is going to be on Fuel TV’s The Daily Habit this week and my footage will be used in the montage they edit together on her. Her episode will air July 23rd….Check it out! xoxo

This is a profile I did on Rob Machado awhile back for AOL’s Lat34.com (click on pictures to read):

The new foam magazine is out. I have a large article featuring four women who “rock their bikinis” (and their sports). I interviewed Gabby Reece, Amanda Beard, Stef Tor and Steph Gilmore. Check it out.

I just graduated the Travel Channel Academy’s intensive VJ bootcamp in New York City and had the time of my life. For my final project I hung out underneath the Brooklyn Bridge and filmed skaters. I met a guy named Cheeto-a very cool cat and grafitti artist. I’ll throw up my minute film piece on him later this week.I now have the skills to travel anywhere in the world with my laptop and HD camera and make stories that are broadcast quality for television and the web.These pieces are ready for broadcast as produced. That includes editing, voice-overs, music, etc. In effect, I am the producer-editor-camera chick-writer-director-talent, etc. This is the future of television and broadcasting.

In foam’s winter issue you can check out my in-depth profile on down-to-earth, talented surfer/artist/ mama Shannon Payne McIntyre as she roams the South Pacific. Learn all about her Fuel TV show On Surfari (filmed with hubbie Shayne McIntyre), the latest addition to her family (hint: Baby on board!), her art and how you can be a world traveler just like her-on any budget!

Update: Here is the full article….

This interview almost never happened. At the end of August, Shannon Payne-McIntyre sent out a Myspace bulletin from Indonesia pointing her friends towards her blog. She wrote about being three months pregnant, teaching surfing to a group of Afulu village girls and learning to work with cement to build platforms around wells so local women could fetch water more easily. She closed musing on the beauty of the Hinako Islands, the great waves she was scoring and her “great times with good new friends and epic memories!” And then she disappeared.

After weeks of unreturned Myspace messages, posts, e-mails and phone calls-I got word from Shannon. She had been on outer Indonesian islands and on a boat trip and was back on Bali. Then she disappeared again. Days later, she resurfaced. Foam was rushing to press when Shannon called from San Diego. She was jet-lagged and exhausted yet ready to shed light on her Indonesian adventures.

Shannon Payne-McIntyre is a 33-year-old artist, surfer, vagabond and mama. She grew up in Santee, an inland town in San Diego County. An area, she describes, as having been full of “monster trucks and tumbleweeds.” At 16, she began to surf and landed a job at Sea World so she would have an excuse to make the 40-minute drive to the beach.

At 18, she moved to San Diego to attend Point Loma University where she majored in art and scored great waves. She also met Shayne McIntyre at a surfer’s bible study. “He was a La Jolla guy,” Shannon said. “One night they had a band, a disco band. People were slam dancing. He claims that I knocked him over but I don’t remember that. I remember seeing him there and thinking he was kind of intimidating. I thought that guy’s kind of cute but he looks kind of scary at the same time. He was with a football player guy that shoved one of my friends.” Their paths crossed again a few months later at a rave and they re-connected. “On our first date we surfed Wind n’ Sea and just became best friends after that,” Shannon said.

Shayne taught Shannon how to shape boards and as her senior art project she painted some of her creations and orders started pouring in. The gig was successful but hard work and didn’t allow for as much travel or surfing as she would have liked. Four or five years passed, she and Shayne were married and she was struggling to get ahead.

Shayne’s mom was a flight attendant and she hooked Shannon up with an interview at American Airlines and Shannon was hired as a flight attendant. It was the perfect job for a surfer and her and Shayne were able to fly around the world for free but everything changed when 9/11 happened. The airlines didn’t need as many flight attendants so Shannon took a two-year leave of absence but retained her travel benefits. She was able to focus on her art and take surf trips with Shayne.

American Airlines flies all over the world and so did Shayne and Shannon. From India to Russia to Oman, they were jet setters of the surf set. Shayne had a video camera and they began to film their travels and pretend they had their own surf/travel TV show. They would film each other surfing and then run up to the camera saying “Welcome on Surfari!” They came home and Shayne made a trailer and sold the series to Fuel TV. Fuel licenses the show to National Geographic International and as a result, the couple is recognized all over the world by fans of the show. “At about the time my leave of absence was up I became pregnant and then milked my maternity leave,” Shannon said. After that, she never went back.

The McIntyre’s have produced three years of On Surfari. “Shayne is more business and organized and I am more artistic and go with the flow,” Shannon said. “I kind of think of myself as creative director/co-producer, picking out music (created by Chad Farran) and making sure we get the cultural shots. Surfing is a thread throughout the show but we try to make it appeal to non-surfers as well. We include a lot of cultural things about each country we go to.” After each trip, Shayne gets home and hits the edit bay, taking two to three weeks in post-production before turning the episode in to air.

Not surprisingly, through their travels they found a new place to call home. After 15 years of living in a killer ocean-view studio in Point Loma, they decided to base themselves abroad. “Southern California is not the cheapest place to live,” Shannon said. “I was about to turn 30, I was pregnant, and I wanted to own a house somewhere. We had a job where we shot for National Geographic International. I hadn’t heard much about Puerto Rico. We went there and just fell in love with the place and the people. It’s a U.S. territory so you don’t have to have a passport. Homes are really affordable, by the beach and waves are really good. We like the tropics.”

The McIntyre’s may call Puerto Rico home, but they roam the world when adventure calls, ypically traveling four to six months each year. Their latest trip to Indonesia was a grand adventure. They were there filming On Surfari and helping out with several different organizations. For the first two weeks, they were in the Hinako Islands on the Indo Jiwa boat with Christian Surfers filming for a DVD that will accompany The Surfer’s Bible. The tour with the boat is called Holidays With Purpose. The group toured and surfed the outer islands of Nias and in the days between surfing, worked with local villages.

“My favorite day was teaching surfing to kids that were traumatized by the Tsunami,” Shannon said. “All the kids from those villages had experienced the Tsunami so a lot of the kids were afraid of the ocean. The boat captain said he hadn’t seen a lot of those kids smile in a long time so we went and did the whole surfing thing. He said it was the first time he saw those kids smiling and having fun in a long time so it was really rewarding in that way.”

Holidays With Purpose and LEAP (local empowerment assistance project) were created by Australians Ruby and Channa Senaratne. Profits from the Holidays With Purpose boat trips are funneled back into the local community and the boat trip is less expensive than most. “It was really one of the coolest trips I’ve been on,” Shannon said. “For anybody that wants to go on a boat trip in Indonesia, It’s so much more rewarding. Some days the surf isn’t totally epic and then what are you gonna do? Just sit on the boat and hang out? Instead of doing that you get to interact with the villages and hang out on land and help the people.”

After two weeks on the boat she met up with her parents in Bali before heading out to Sumba.“Sumba is an amazing place that puts you back in time,” Shannon said. “There is an organization there called the Sumba Foundation that is dedicated to stopping malaria and bettering the health and lives of the local people. We visited several clinics and villages and watched exciting traditional events and we enjoyed the surf everywhere we went.”

Shannon said that the Sumba Foundation runs three to four clinics that take blood samples from people, study the blood under a microscope and find out in one hour if the person has Malaria. She learned that for 20 cents (10 cents for children), a person can be administered a Chinese herb that makes them feel better within 24 hours. Yet people are dying of Malaria in Indonesia due to lack of money and access to such treatment. The Sumba foundation aims to eradicate Malaria, known as the “poor man’s disease, in the area.

Being three months pregnant with a three-year-old in tow and surfing reefs off of Indonesian islands is pretty hardcore but Shannon is an adventurous soul. Further, it was also not the first time she had been in the Hinako Islands. Before Shayne and Shannon were married, they were already surf nomads and it was on a trip to the Hinako Islands that their future as husband and wife was sealed.

“This past trip was the first time I’ve been back to the Hinako Islands since he proposed to me there,” Shannon said. “He carved me a little wooden coconut shell ring. We were in a little lagoon area. He said ‘I have something for you.’ There was a little blue piece of coral and I lifted it up and there was the little coconut shell that he had carved. It was cool ‘cause we were the only two on the island because everybody from the island went to another island for church or something. So it was a really big deal.” It was quite a trip. Days before the proposal, the couple was lost at sea for three days on a small fishing boat/surf charter. A sail and mast was constructed out of a rain tarp and a floorboard and the boat eventually found its way back to Nias.

Shannon and Shayne are open to whatever opens up to them. They take each adventure as it reveals itself. Just before Indo, they had a wedding to attend in Washington. They went all Kerouac-style and hit the road, stopping at surf shops up and down the coast, opening new accounts for Shannon’s art and meeting new people. They enjoyed discovering hidden beach towns through California up into Oregon and ending in Washington. She sells 11X14 prints of her colorful, playful, travel and surf-oriented original art pieces to shops at affordable prices and is carried in over 120 locations.

Shannon’s lifestyle may seem like a dream to some but she encourages other girls to get out there and see the world. “Before Shayne and I had sponsors or jobs traveling he was a bus boy and I worked at a flower shop and we would still do a lot of traveling,” Shannon said. “We would work consistently for three or four months and then save every penny towards traveling.” Her advice is to save your money, go where the dollar is strong and have no fear. “There are beautiful people everywhere you go,” Shannon said. She feels it is important to follow your dreams, wherever they come from and wherever they may lead….

JAMILAH STAR BIG WAVE SURFER AOL PROFILE
LAT34.com
(http://www.lat34.com/surf/girl_on_jamila_star_2)
By: Kristie Griffith
Photos: Nikki Brooks

This is my article on Tiare Lawrence, Hawaiian stand-up paddler (SUP) out of Makaha. It is in the current issue of Foam magazine. Words below pictures…

Tiare Lawrence… Makaha’s Adopted Daughter

By: Kristie Griffith

Maui-bred waterwoman Tiare Lawrence is known around Makaha as the “Hanai Keaulana,” which is the Hawaiian way of saying she is pretty much an adopted family member of the famous Hawaiian surfing clan the Keaulanas. Makaha is a strong hold of Hawaiian surf culture, and the Keaulanas might be considered the nucleus of that beach.

Growing up on Maui, Tiare and her siblings (all younger-two boys and a girl) were referred to as the “harbor rats.” Every day before and after school and on weekends, they faithfully made their way to the Lahaina Harbor to ride various types of surf craft-from bodyboards to longboards to canoes. Tiare also began paddling for an outrigger canoe club and dancing the hula.

She met the Keaulanas as a child through her uncle Archie Kalepa and grew up spending holiday breaks in Makaha with the family. Brian Keaulana, the renowned waterman, lifeguard and stuntman, chose her as his tandem partner when she was 12. The duo competed together for two years in Maui contests until she started becoming a woman and was too heavy to lift. When she entered high school, she competed in a lot of bodyboarding and longboarding contests. Her life changed direction right after graduation, when she was one of five local girls chosen to dance professional hula in Japan for Tokyo Disney. She had a blast, visiting various cities and enjoying the people and the culture.

When her time was up, she moved to Oahu. Her boyfriend during that period was from there and he got her into shortboarding. Although settled in Makaha, she was lured back to Maui for a lucrative job with the performance troupe Ulalena. In what might be a first for a Hawaiian surfer chick-she headed to Montreal, Canada for circus school. The discipline she studied was called Tissue [in French it sounds cooler (tiss-oooo)]. It consists of performing acrobatics on synthetic silk sheets that hang 30 feet. “It was eight hours every day of blood, sweat and tears-literally,” Tiare says. “I never thought my body could go as hard as it did. Your hands, because you are gripping for dear life on a tissue, your hands get really worn out. You can get burns from the tissue, when you slide down the sheets. The sheets burn your skin. We had to do 100 pushups. We’d put one leg on a chair and the other leg on another chair and do the splits and balance for five minutes.” She returned to Hawaii looking like a bodybuilder and rivaling her male cousin’s biceps.

Tiare went with the flow, performing for Ulalena as a hula dancer and aerialist in tissue for two years until a doctor gave her an ultimatum-be an acrobat or be a surfer/paddler. Her shoulder was too wrecked and overworked to do both. She gave up the money and the troupe and moved back to her soul home-Makaha, near her adopted family-the Keaulanas. “They mean the world to me,” Tiare says. “Especially Uncle Brian because he’s my biggest motivator. He has motivated me and inspired me and he is someone that has always believed in me and believed that I can go big and I can do it… I lost my dad (as a teenager) so having Uncle Brian and Uncle Buff at the beach, I have a sense of security with them.” Tiare also loves Makaha for the consistency and power of the waves. She surfs everyday during the winter when the waves are big and about three days a week during the summer. She can’t wait for the big winter swells to march back into her life.

Her latest love is the revived beach boy discipline, stand-up paddle (SUP). The boards are large, generally 12 feet long, 30 inches wide and four to five inches thick. SUP’ers can even snake longboarders by sitting way outside. The boards are ridden standing up with one long paddle (six inches longer than the surfer) used to steer the board and propel it through the water. SUP is perfect for Tiare, as it blends her loves of surfing and canoe paddling into one activity. As yet, there are no women-only categories for SUP and Tiare competes against the men. She recently made it to the semi-finals of the open C4 Waterman event at Queen’s in Waikiki. She is also training for a 28-mile race across the Molokai Channel at the end of this month, which will take five to eight hours, depending on conditions. “If it’s dead wind, I’m not crossing it,” she says. “It’s gonna be way too gnarly, it would take like 14 hours. But if there’s wind and surf, I’m gonna do it.” If Tiare crosses, she will be following in the footsteps of her Uncle Archie who was the first person to cross the Molokai Channel on a stand up paddleboard during the 2004 Quiksilver Molokai to Oahu Paddleboard race.
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In addition to SUP, Tiare competes with the Hawaiian Canoe Club on Maui. During the race season, June to October, she flies over three times per week for practice and competition. At night, she is a cocktail waitress at a local hotel that strategically allows her days free for surfing, school and training. She takes classes at a local junior college where she is trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. One thing she is certain of is that she is pushing her surfing to the limit and wants to step up to the boys in competition-just like her S-hero Rell Sunn did. At 25, she has plenty of time to hone her skills and keep the bros on their toes.

Tiare has a sweet groove going on and, although single, is open to meeting a cool person. “Do you know any hot young guys? Bring em’ my way! They have to surf, have to be ocean-oriented so they can block waves for me! Block guys from catching waves and let me go and catch the wave!” Spoken like a woman with her priorities straight…..

Sponsors: Honey Girl Swimsuits, Xcel, and C4 Waterman.