Product Description
The surfing iconoclast who became an icon, Miki Dora was the epitome of 60s beach culture. His dark good looks were the envy of Malibu. His talent earned him trophies (which he disdained) and the nickname "Da Cat." And in the end, when he didn't like the commercial direction of the sport he helped define, he turned his back on the beach, wandered the world, served time in jail, and, finally in 2002, suffering from pancreatic cancer returned to his father's house in Montecito, California to die at age 67. A Malibu graffiti that appeared during his years on the road sums up his role in the surfing imagination and still holds true: "Dora Lives." Years in the making and compiled with the cooperation of Dora while he was alive and his family after his death, Dora Lives is the definitive record of the legend. Transcribed interviews with Dora and texts by former Surfer magazine editor Drew Kampion and writer C.R. Stecyk are combined with nearly 100 photos and stills from photographers, filmmakers, and Dora's personal albums. The story starts out in Budapest, Hungary, where Miklos Dora was born in 1934, follows the child amigra to Hollywood High (except when the surf was up), and finds him at the center of the post-Gidget surf boom of the 60s. At that time, Dora stunt-doubled in a few films and competed when he felt like it, but mostly he embraced the hedonist milieu and burnished his antihero legend, culminating in a mid-wave mooning of the judges at the 1967 Malibu Invitational. Shortly after, he left for points (and point breaks) abroad in France, Indonesia, Australia, and Madagascar until 2001, when he returned to the West Coast to die.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 5 reviews)

Great content, bad typesetting

This is a beautiful book with great pictures and stories. It would have gotten 5 stars if it weren't for the fact that the type is so hard to read. Everything from the choice of type (some sort of bad version of Bodoni) to how small it's set (maybe 5 pt. type) makes each page a real chore to read. Bummer! Otherwise, fascinating stories about Dora and his Malibu milieu.
September 09, 2008

BIT OF HEAVY READING

Have always liked the mystic behind Da Cat, but this book was a bit of a heavy read. Can't really put my finger on what it was about it that made it difficult to read, it just was. Regardless of that though, he certainly was a character. Bit mad. Bit anti-establishment. Bit sad.
April 05, 2008

dora apocalypto

I didn't know Dora (too young, I came later) but I know many people who did. As with any good story teller, and he apparently was, there a figments of even "truth" that accompany the life exaggerations in this book. To a man, (at least, my acquaintences)described him as an invenerate lier, cheat, and con artist.....but entertaining, non-the-less. The consumate surf bum and original "me, me, me" before the in vouge "me" decade practitioner.

That is the problem with this (well-written, at least) book on Dora's life. Half, at least, is probably crap....but what crap it is!

I would rather listen/read-about Dora's lies, than have to wade through a lot of pontification by other surf media "journalists" (Rabbit, Hynd, etc.) any day.

In death even, exaggeration can become myth, can become legend, then even truth.
February 16, 2007

Dora Lives: The Authorized Story of Miki Dora

I bought the book for my son for christmas and had Amazon post it direct to him in Laos he received it the day promised and he is very happy he said the book is great and is spending time reading. Thank You Amazon
January 09, 2007

A BALANCED PORTRAIT

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. Yes, I agree that artists need a fair degree of leeway in order to function. And 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.

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 her 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.

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 is an excellent example:

"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."

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?

--Bill Brent [edited 24 July 2007]
September 27, 2006

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