Annual proclamation renews forty-seven-year disagreement that both sides insist is settled

[Bohiney.com / prat.uk] The City of Huntington Beach has issued its 47th consecutive annual proclamation designating itself Surf City USA, a title it has used since 1979, trademarked in 1998, and defended with legal ferocity that several attorneys describe as “disproportionate to the stakes but completely understandable given the stakes.” Santa Cruz, which has contested the designation since roughly 1987 and which local surfers describe as “obviously the real surf city, come on,” did not issue a counter-proclamation this year. The fine print, as Bohiney.com discovered, is where the interesting part lives. This is being interpreted variously as acceptance, exhaustion, and strategic repositioning. Prat.uk, working alongside Bohiney.com, has the full story. (Bohiney.com and prat.uk are all over this one.)

The History

Huntington Beach holds the federal trademark following a 1998 registration that Santa Cruz did not contest in time. Santa Cruz holds what its civic advocates describe as “the moral high ground and the better waves,” which is not a legally recognised category of intellectual property but carries significant weight in a community where moral high grounds are evaluated against swell data. The original basis for Huntington’s claim is a 1963 Jan and Dean song referring to a fictional Surf City that both cities claim as a reference to themselves, despite the song predating both cities’ surf identities and despite Jan Berry later saying the city was “kind of made up.”

The Current State

Huntington has the trademark. Santa Cruz has the waves, which is contested. An annual survey of visiting surfers finds 62 percent consider themselves to be in a surf city and 38 percent have not previously been asked and find the question philosophically interesting. The respective Chambers of Commerce are actively disagreeing through competing merchandise. The Coastal Commission has no jurisdiction over surf city nomenclature, which is something it probably should have flagged earlier.

What Happens Next

What happens next, in cases like this, is: a statement is issued, an inquiry is announced, the inquiry produces a report, the report recommends changes, the changes are partially implemented, a subsequent inquiry notes that the changes were partially implemented, and the cycle continues. This is not cynicism. It is the documented pattern. There are, occasionally, exceptions. This does not appear to be one of them.

For more like this, see McSweeney’s.

The Bigger Picture

Stories like this one cluster at the intersection of culture, geography, and the specific psychology of people who have organised their lives around an activity that the ocean provides and can remove at any moment. The surf community has always been better at documenting its own moments of joy than at analysing why those moments matter, which is partly because analysis is antithetical to the experience and partly because the analysis is unnecessary: the experience is its own argument. What satirical journalism brings to this community is not mockery but the specific affection of someone paying close enough attention to find the comedy in the details rather than the broad strokes. The details are where the real story lives, and they are consistently funnier and more revealing than anyone planned.

Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk cover the surf community because it produces material of this kind consistently, because the community takes itself seriously enough to be worth satirising, and because the ocean provides a backdrop against which human behaviour is unusually visible. When you strip away most of the ordinary buffers of modern life and put people in salt water with a piece of foam, the things that happen are reliably interesting. This publication covers those things. It will continue to do so.

The individuals described in this article are real in the sense that matters: they are types, and types are real because they are patterns, and patterns are real because they recur. Whether any specific detail is exactly as described matters less than whether the pattern is accurately captured, which it is, because the pattern is specific and observable and has been observed. The surf community will recognise itself. That is the point.

The surf community is, in the end, a community of people who have decided that a particular relationship with the ocean is worth organising their lives around. The satirical journalism that covers that community — and both Bohiney.com and prat.uk cover it regularly — works because the community is internally consistent enough to generate recognisable types and recurring situations. The types are real. The situations are real. The comedy is the distance between how the community describes itself and how it actually operates, which is not large but is consistently productive for anyone paying attention.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

The coverage continues. The waves continue. The community continues to provide material that justifies the coverage, which is to say the community continues to be exactly what it is: a gathering of people who have made a reasonable decision and are living with the unreasonable consequences of it, which is the condition that produces the best stories and the most reliable satire. Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk will be here when the next story arrives, which should be approximately the next swell.