If you took James Dean’s cool, Muhammad Ali’s poetics, Harry Houdini’s slipperiness, James Bond’s jet-setting, George Carlin’s irony and Kwai Chang Caine’s Zen, and rolled them into one man with a longboard under his arm, you’d come up with something like Miki Dora, surfing’s mythical antihero, otherwise known as the Black Knight of Malibu.
Definitely listen to "Miki Dora," the first single from Amen Dunes' newly announced third album, Freedom, due out March 30 on Sacred Bones. Its melody is closer to these on the haunted pop of Amen Dunes' 2014 album Love, but there's an insistent beat behind McMahon's voice now rather than a loose acoustic guitar, and it builds into something gutturally pulsating. McMahon's voice rises in the middle, and he sings "Sitting on the pier / Sipping on my beer," which is unexpectedly satisfying. It comes with a video, directed by Steven Brahms, which you can watch at the top of the page.Alex Robert Ross is on Twitter.In a town of creamy opportunism [Malibu, California], the thefts by which he supported himself were so small-time, high-risk, and potentially humiliating that they bespoke a cockeyed integrity. He made the patently tacky petty theft a symbol of bravado and status envy. “Mike, Duane, and I competed with each other to be ripped off by Miki—‘Miki stole my wax!’ ‘Yeah? Well, Miki stole my money!’—it was a badge of honor,” says Larry Shaw, today a psychologist who works with trauma victims. “We were a band of brothers—vulnerable, damaged boys—and Miki was our Pied Piper,” says Mike Nader, whose long, successful TV acting career was twice interrupted by substance abuse and who taught acting in East Hampton, on Long Island, before his recent move to L.A. to get back into films.