{"id":50848,"date":"2015-02-23T09:00:12","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T17:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/?p=50848"},"modified":"2015-02-21T13:59:55","modified_gmt":"2015-02-21T21:59:55","slug":"rvca-collab-with-kelly-slater-and-kevin-ancell-the-pod","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/rvca-collab-with-kelly-slater-and-kevin-ancell-the-pod\/","title":{"rendered":"RVCA Collab with Kelly Slater and Kevin Ancell: #The Pod"},"content":{"rendered":"

RVCA is proud to announce a collaboration with professional surfer, Kelly Slater, and RVCA artist, Kevin Ancell, called #ThePod, paying homage to the movie\u00a0Blackfish<\/i>\u00a0and friends who have passed. #Free the Fucking Whales!!!<\/p>\n

Message from Kelly Slater:<\/p>\n

#ThePod is a collection of boards Kevin Ancell and myself collaborated on.\u00a0After watching the movie #Blackfish, I was so moved and perturbed with the wild captures and captive breeding of the Orcas that I felt\u00a0compelled to paint my boards to mimic their markings. Kevin and I had been thinking about something we could do together for a couple of\u00a0years and we happened to be on a trip together just as the idea occurred. The first board we did was painted in Kevin\u2019s word art to say\u00a0\u201cBLACKFISH\u201d. Kevin initially saw it as my project but asked if he could start adding some of his color into the messaging and the second\u00a0board was painted in the \u201cDFW\u201d tag.<\/p>\n

Soon after these two boards were made, I contacted Gabrielle Cowperthwaite, the writer and director of Blackfish, to get her blessings on the\u00a0informal project. We spoke about the subject matter and ongoing story of the Orcas with regards to Seaworld and other marine mammal parks\u2019\u00a0use (imprisonment?) of the animals and their captive breeding programs. Shortly after this conversation and a post on Instagram about the\u00a0boards, I was contacted by Mark Simmons (works with Ocean Embassy) who previously worked with marine mammals for 14 years and has a\u00a0further 17 years rescuing and rehabilitating them in the wild. He was interviewed, he says misleadingly, for the film. He had this to say…<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whales at Seaworld in particular are not suffering in any way, shape or form. There is peer-reviewed science that shows their\u00a0population of whales outlasts two of the most studied wild populations (Southern and Northern Residents – Pacific Northwest) and\u00a0is on par with the Alaska populations in terms of lifespan, longevity, infant mortality and average age of death.\u201d<\/p>\n

They say you have to choose your battles wisely in life and this actually becomes a complex battle which dives heavily into money, personal\u00a0emotions and belief, animal regulations, etc. I\u2019m pretty clear where I stand on it after hearing two sides…the majority of these mammals were\u00a0originally kidnapped from the wild or captive-bred, both things I simply believe are wrong. They spend their whole lives in small pools only a\u00a0few times longer than their bodies. These are majestic creatures born to travel great distances and are, in my eyes, a symbol of freedom and\u00a0individuality. They shouldn\u2019t be on display for tourists to buy tickets to and make money for these parks. I don\u2019t believe the people coming to\u00a0these parks are the ones who need educating on these animals and there have been no studies linking that knowledge to any protective\u00a0measures having been taken by that audience of people in the wild.<\/p>\n

When I asked Kevin Ancell what he thought about the topic he just said, \u201cFree the fucking whales.\u201d He also said he\u2019d dance for you, too, if you\u00a0\u2018brought him the only food he had a chance to eat\u2019 and he \u2018was stuck in jail\u2019.<\/p>\n

So we took that idea about freedom and applied it to our friends who have passed on that had an influence on our lives and have used the\u00a0boards as plaques to honor those people…some legends, some surfers, some just friends we knew at home. They\u2019ve drowned or disappeared\u00a0at sea or died of disease or old age. One was even senselessly and mysteriously murdered in my hometown. I don\u2019t have any tattoos, so these\u00a0are my markings.<\/p>\n

Our old friends are free now. We\u2019re hoping the new ones can have a better future and be freed again or for the very first time one day.<\/p>\n

#FreeTheFuckingWhales<\/p>\n

\"ThePod_Amygellert\"<\/a> \"ThePod_Buttons\"<\/a> \"ThePod_DFW2\"<\/a> \"ThePod_JayAdams\"<\/a> \"ThePod_malik\"<\/a> \"ThePod_ToddChesser\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RVCA is proud to announce a collaboration with professional surfer, Kelly Slater, and RVCA artist, Kevin Ancell, called #ThePod, paying homage to the movie\u00a0Blackfish\u00a0and friends who have passed. #Free the Fucking Whales!!! Message from Kelly Slater: #ThePod is a collection of boards Kevin Ancell and myself collaborated on.\u00a0After watching the movie #Blackfish, I was so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50849,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4022,6805,4042],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-2","category-good-work","category-surf-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/rvcaancellslater.png","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50848"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50979,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50848\/revisions\/50979"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}