IT BURNS MY EYES

We’re all just slaves to style.

“What everyone seems to be overlooking is that bodyboarding has about six manoeuvres in total. So obviously style is going to play a huge role in efficient and aesthetic bodyboarding.”

- Reader post on www.movementmag.com

Mike Stewart calls Kavan Okumura the creator of mod style. A native Hawaiian with dark skin and Asiatic eyes, Kavan envisioned rail speed and tweaked air when there were hand-drags and floaters. His name should be hotlinked on bodyboarding’s wiki page along with fellow revolutionaries Tom Morey, Jack Lindholm and the scientists behind webbed gloves.

But Kavan’s fate was turned by excess. Drugs his undoing. His craving all consuming, first taking away the ocean, his family and then his freedom. Living rough on the streets to captive of a correctional facility in the Arizona desert, where Rick Bannister conducted the first interviews for this story as Kavan neared release after ten years. Like most inmates and terminally ill he’s found God and now works hard for redemption, with family and his old spot lifeguarding on the North Shore.

Kavan progressed the style that Stewart patented for future generations. Exported globally it evolved according to, amongst other things, the existence of waves, so we are now like the peacock and the fighting cock – one family joined only by DNA. But style must be paramount. Like world titles, board sales and Facebook friends, being the barometer of style is one of the purest aims of professional bodyboarding.

A Question Of Style is a feature first for this or any magazine. Through our website we lit the fuse on a debate about global style – who, where, what is it - and watched a great firestorm erupt. The best of those well thrown Molotovs are reprinted. It’s a new day of international discourse, postmarked with nationalist fervour, but signalling a new future. One where all the pretty children shall again live as one.

Unless they read The Roast, a petri dish of parochial and partisan ideology (BTW: that’s a defo compliment). Its abrasive satire is funny and intelligent. The photos are original and their own. Along with The Collective – a fab photo warehouse - they are our study of the new socialist media, radicals existing outside the stone gates of commerciality, producing world-class content online for free. The future or folly?

- Movement

Cover note: D. Singer shot by Ian Osterloh's new hyper pole cam. He calls it The Seagull and that's the view you've got. Five page feature inside.