by Carrie Dietz Brown
Editor’s note: South Bay Standard Issue, the magazine, is borrowed from a piece of Dietz family lexicon, describing a repeating character we all know.
The South Bay Standard Issue spent too much time at the beach. Fun after fun, never reapplying sunscreen. A cautionary tale. An inside joke. You know it when you see it.
As a teen it was short hand, the type of dude one of our friends might be dating or bringing by for dinner. Sunburned to the gods with hiked up socks stretched taut over his shins. Skating was not only his craft but also his only form of transportation. He wore either very short pants or extremely long shorts depending on the vantage point of the viewer, like an Escher piece where fish seamlessly become birds. A mix of 70’s burnout, 90’s skater and early 2000’s rockabilly. Wielding extensive slang for different parts of a wave, he’d already audibly diagrammed that morning’s set from barrel to whitewash before you even said hello.
Just the chorus of Santeria was his favorite song. He’d bold strum it for you on any sticker-encrusted acoustic guitar around. Did it matter if you knew how to play it too? Of course not. A corporeal koan. What is the sound of trying to remember the chorus of Santeria while standing in a doorway of a party you are trying to leave?
It’s what’s bound to happen, existing this close to something as beautiful and otherworldly as the Pacific. All site-specific art is inseparable from the landscape. White reggae Spiral Jetty.
It’s just one of many recognizable South Bay archetypes. The enthusiastic new money, the quiet old money, the stunned low money, and the vulnerable no money. The Type A transplants, hopeful that beach culture will help them relax into a Type B. The musicians and artists, writers and designers, shop owners and surfers, all carving cracks of persistent creativity into the South Bay’s topography.
Regardless of whatever South Bay subculture we identify as, it’s only fair to assume there’s an existing (or at least deserved) inside joke at our expense. My ears are perked. For me, it would have to have something to do with sitting around teaching guitar lessons and making huge watercolors of Old Torrance alleys. With growing up a mile from the beach and never learning how to swim, with always looking for a laugh, and with forever being, much like the South Bay Standard Issue, here. Until the end.
