Beach Culture
The state's proximity to the ocean influences many aspects of California culture and daily life. Surfing is an extremely popular sport in California, where the famed spots of Trestles, Rincon, Mavericks, The Wedge, Malibu, and "Surf City, USA" reside. Some of the world's most renowned surf companies, including Hurley, Quiksilver, Volcom, O'Neill, Body Glove, RVCA are all headquartered in California. Older surfers such as Corky Carroll, Robert August, Hobie Alter as well as some of today's most renowned surfers, including Bobby Martinez, Dane Reynolds, Tom Curren, Taylor Knox, and Rob Machado are all from California. Many surfing magazines are also headquartered in California, including Surfing Magazine, Surfer (magazine), and Surfer's Journal.
In the 1960s, surfing became immensely popular due to surf rock bands like the Beach Boys, surf films like Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer, and Hollywood blockbusters like Gidget. Due to this mainstream surf culture explosion, surfing soon embodied the ideal Californian lifestyle and became a teen sensation as well as a sport. Malibu, California was at the heart of surf culture not only because it is a world-class surf spot, but also due to its youthful "beach" atmosphere and warm weather. Young men began strutting around the beach in boardshorts and women wore more revealing bikini swim suits, which, along with the surfboard, became symbols of beach culture. The surf culture boom of the 1960s soon led to an enormous increase of surfers at beaches around the country and helped surfing develop into the sport it is today.
Surfing (particularly in Southern California) has its own slang, which has coincided with Valspeak. Words like "tubular", "radical", and "gnarly" and the overuse of the word "like" are associated with both. In the late 1960s, Santa Cruz and Northern California developed their own slang like "groovy", "hella", and "tight".
Read more about this topic: Culture Of California
Famous quotes containing the words beach and/or culture:
“A young person is a person with nothing to learn
One who already knows that ice does not chill and fire does not burn . . .
It knows it can spend six hours in the sun on its first
day at the beach without ending up a skinless beet,
And it knows it can walk barefoot through the barn
without running a nail in its feet. . . .
Meanwhile psychologists grow rich
Writing that the young are ones’ should not
undermine the self-confidence of which.”
—Ogden Nash (1902–1971)
“With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufacturers and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)