Author of the Lost Classic Surfer Novel, "Tapping the Source"
"John from Cincinnati" is HBO's freaky new series about modern surf culture in San Diego's hardscrabble Imperial Beach. This isn't your happy wistful Beach Boys version of surf culture that most of America is familiar with. The surfers on this show are hopefuls on their way up, has-been burn-outs, old school surf legends, sports business sharks, drug dealers, bikers, Vietnam vets, groupies, wannabes, and one bonafide space cadet - all hanging out and about California's cheapest and last beach community before you get to the Mexican border. It's no accident that Kem Nunn, the co-creator of this powerful and well written new series, is also the author of the greatest novel about surf culture, "Tapping the Source." Some even say, including me, that it's one of the greatest of all Southern California novels - and that's saying a lot.Unlike "John from Cincinnati", "Tapping the Source" was set in seventies Huntington Beach, then the center of surf culture, as opposed to Imperial Beach's present-day rotting edge. In an interview, Nunn said, "Surfing plays this metaphorical role for what we had here (Southern California beach culture) and what we have lost."
Published in 1984 and nominated for an American Book Award, "Tapping the Source" is the story of a teenager sucked into the gritty drug-dealing underbelly of seventies surf culture. While Nunn's novel has its own unique voice, melding the noir feel of a Raymond Chandler novel with the whacked-out sixties gonzo of Hunter S. Thompson, it has never achieved the same level of recognition as other classic Southern California novels. Nunn has said of his novels, "It's very easy to get marginalized. ... And it's hard to get people in New York to take books with surfers and bikers in them seriously."
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