Title: Dora Lives: The Authorized Story of Miki Dora

Author: C. R. Stecyk

Type: Hardcover

Pages: 142

Date Reviewed: September 27, 2006

DORA LIVES is a posthumous biography on Miki Dora, a pioneering surfer from the 1950s and 1960s, and on page 23, it says this about artistic temperament:

"Perhaps the greatest creation of the artist is the persona of the artist himself. You can see the artist as 'a sensitive' ... or as a human being that has failed at being completely hypnotized like the rest of the population. The artist is painfully (and perhaps not unconsciously) aware of this - aware of his or her objective isolation, as opposed to the subjective isolation of the general, so-called 'normal' population, which the artist perceives as not unlike the walking dead. There's an ethic in surf culture that opposes the overly structured life. That refuses to comply with insistence. That resists temptation. Of a sort."

I don't entirely agree with this statement, but I agree with the sense of it. I do agree that there is a contentment in being unconscious about one's loneliness, and that artists tend to be restless souls who are painfully aware of their "objective isolation." Such psychological language is almost too high-falutin' for a surfer bio, though, and I'm not sure I understand the unexplained difference between subjective and objective isolation -- just one of several unelaborated pronouncements in the above paragraph. Yes, I agree that artists need a fair amount of structural leeway in order to function. I'm exhibiting that right now by reading and reviewing this book in bed at 12:45 on a Monday afternoon while still in my bathrobe, when perhaps I should be working in my home office.

I think it's a bit arrogant to label the general populace as "not unlike the walking dead." I'm suspicious of any attempt to blame society, however covertly, for one's situation, since it does nothing to solve one's problems. We are all society, even (perhaps especially) artists. I think perhaps the writer is attempting to make some statement about the examined versus the unexamined life. Yet each of us has some degree of self-awareness, yes? However fragmentary and inconsistent one's self-awareness may be, I don't think anyone thinks of himself as the "walking dead," except perhaps the hyper-sensitive artist. I've made statements, often artistic ones, about standing apart from the "herd," yet ultimately, does this really help the artist with his situation? Maybe it helps her come to terms with her alienation. I know that this is why I became an artist rather than an academic. I didn't see any comfort there.

Referring back to my initial statements, I think it's almost the place of the artist to locate comfort within discomfort -- to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, and to use that tension as a creative springboard. I don't think that the structural and political demands of career academia would have set well with my temperament. There are some kinds of discomfort that one never succeeds in accommodating.

On page 32, I found a setting worth noting:

"Tracey, suddenly without a paycheck and completely broke, figured he might as well just sleep on the beach, which he did. After awakening in the morning damp, he spent the next day harvesting palm fronds, driftwood, and assorted junk from the lagoon and built himself a shack to call home. It was the beginning of something.
[...] "As her father would describe in the novel GIDGET, the first-person recreation of his daughter's summer published in 1957, Malibu was one big party, orchestrated by Tracey, and it ran all summer long. And at the end of it, at Malibu's 1st Annual Luau, Tube [Tracey] torched his grass shack.
"The following summer it was the cops that tore down the shack. Apparently, the city fathers were concerned that the trend at Malibu wasn't entirely wholesome; after all, it was a public beach. Those summers of love - before the beats, before the hippies, and very likely anticipating both - were profoundly brief and retrospectively perfect, so the nostalgia for them became a powerful intoxicant to chroniclers of surfing history."

This is a setting whose echo reverberated to my very core in the earliest '70s, when my family returned to coastal northern California after a three-year sojourn in Japan (with my Dad, who had been employed by the Navy to fix its airplanes). My grandparents had recently bought a summer cabin in the redwoods near Cazadero, about ten miles from the coast at Jenner. When we went down to the state beach one afternoon, we came upon a small hippie colony of driftwood shacks. This was my first direct encounter with a bohemian culture, and it had a profound and lasting impact on me. Witnessing them living in this fashion gave flight to my romantic ten-year-old imagination, and I knew from then on that I never had to work on planes or do anything I didn't want to do with my life. I identified immediately and completely with the bedraggled souls camped out on that beach.

I suppose every artist has some sense memory like this, some epiphany or satori where the realization hits him that he, like some accidentally observed bit of outcast culture, is "different," and from that moment on, his life is changed.

One aspect of this book that evokes surfer culture is a total lack of chapter breaks, which imbues it with a surfer's sense of the eternal now. The copious full-page photos -- often in color, sometimes colorized to heightened dramatic effect, and often composed of fold-out plates -- add to this effect and give the reader a larger-than-life sense of involvement with the story. Like a wave, they pull the reader along.

The text seeks neither to glorify Dora nor rebuke him for his flaws and excesses, presenting a balanced portrait of a man living at the margins of a glamorous, hedonistic society -- namely, postwar through '60s Hollywood - playing it for all he can while flipping it the bird. In Miki Dora, unbridled opportunism clashed with a palpable moral outrage at Hollywood's hype, that relentless synthesis of media and glitz belying its trade in the exploitation of souls and resultant carnage. Like the lava meeting the surf, such a deep-seated conflict solidified within Dora as that most confounding and unlikely of heroes, the rebel with a cause. This cause emerged as an unquenchable quest for an unattainable purity -- a cause he could only deign to access by granting himself unlimited license to ride the wave of showmanship and the celebrity it brought to his feet. Cynics such as Dora need no external authority to grant them access past the gates of privilege, as they see it for the sham that it is. Thus, they remain "unhypnotized" -- at least, by privilege. But what about their own need to rebel?