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here have been many, many times lately where I have wondered how I ended up writing mostly about snowboarding and the culture that surrounds it. It isn’t really that interesting to anyone who isn’t directly attached to it and holds no obvious relevance to the well being of the world. By some strange stroke I landed in this tiny universe of folks who place the highest premium on recreation and the cultivation of a life that ensures it. That is not to suggest
WORDS: JOSI STEPHENS
I L L U S T R A T I O N : K E L LY H A L P I N
that I don’t thrill in it. I do. Life just seems to have this funny way of putting you in the path of what you need, regardless of what you thought you wanted. With the lions share of my words written about snowboard life in the bag there is no choice but to give in. This is what I love. These are the people I love. And most interestingly, there is more gold in these hills than I had ever dreamed.
point to tell you how much he loved your review of his movie, then you have lost the plot. It is my hope to never lose the point of why this sport matters in our sometimes joyless, always cynical world. This is a universe in which legends are real people who stand next to you on the tram, share beers and talk story, very few lines separating us.
If you are not star struck when Jamie Lynn picks up the phone or Jeremy Jones makes a
There is one thing, however, that is being made clearer as I move forward in this realm. Unlike so many other lifestyles, this one is hardly made better by the over sharing and under connecting of social media as a whole. Initially I was just as caught up, it’s hard not to be. There seems to be this wide-open window into the lives of people that you admire and through this portal you become integrated into their worlds, or more honestly, the tiny fraction of their worlds that highlights the good stuff. And you in turn do the same for everyone else. It feels good, it looks good, and it sounds way better than the complete truth of life. (Which, for me, is that most pictures I see of myself suck ass, a good portion of the time I don’t have a clue what I am doing, and I don’t know myself half as well as my feed implies.) When I set out to define and understand the work of Asymbol’s gilded roster of artists, there were no rules or methods to aid me. It was my luck to be assigned as my first artist to write about Jamie Lynn. It took a few hours of internet research to realize that there was nothing new or terribly interesting written about him out there in the ether. He, like so many others of his generation, is a ghost, a phantom that shows up in the
