Josi Stephens

66 analog affection

There 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 ILLUSTRATION: KELLY HALPIN

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.

If you are not star struck when Jamie Lynn picks up the phone or Jeremy Jones makes a 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.

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

oddest places and never when expected, never on time. I internally named my task The Search For Jamie.*

It is way too defeating to admit how many times I called, texted, emailed, and sent smoke signals in his direction. No selfrespecting lady would ever go to these lengths, even for a legend. For the first time in my life, the mantra, ‘it’s my job’ overtook my wounded pride; the campaign had to keep on. After many days of this I finally saw his name on my incoming call list. It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t pissed or that I didn’t curse him, I did. But what I would come to know after this experience was this: there is no substitute for human interaction. While the minutes ticked by, Jamie talked to me about many topics: art, his life, how he felt about things in general. Most of this I have forgotten but what I do remember and the notes I took would change the way I think of art and connection. The conversation we had could not have happened over email or text. I never would have understood his thoughts on things so completely without being able to ask questions in real time.

My irritation with his lack of web presence was about as ill founded as it gets. He doesn’t need to post pictures of lunch or shots of him interlaced under the arms of babes; it doesn’t add to his worth or place in our culture. Jamie, like many others, came up in a time when phones hung on a wall, our faces flesh colored, not green with the glow of an iPhone screen, hands free to hold and eyes forward to see life as it happened. His version of linked-in, however flawed it seems sometimes, is when two people plug into each other, not the wall.

I am not completely hopping on the “Technology bad! Old times good!” bandwagon. In front of me is a 27-inch iMac, an iPhone 5s, and a shiny new iPad. I would die without email or Photoshop and my Instragam hours logged are severely high. Yet I know that there is no room for black and white thinking these days. In the grey zone is where life really starts to happen. When I need to talk to an artist now, I just call them. It is surprising how many actually answer. (All of them.) When we talk, I learn so much more about who they are and what their intentions sound like. The connection is so real that when we meet face-to-face it feels like seeing an old friend. This new realization has changed my life. The best things happen when we get together and make memories in the flesh. Snowboard culture is about community and brother/sisterhood. We rely on each other for our lives – trust must be had.

Hanging on one of our walls in Asymbol is a shot by Vernon Deck depicting a heavy posse of riders crisscrossing down a hill. Their faces are all obscured; they could be anybody, which makes this photograph about everybody. That feeling of joyfully riding with your friends – nothing staged or contrived – it is the rush that we live for, it is the dream that we chase every time that board is strapped on. Thank god that Deck was there to capture this moment; it is the essence of what snowboarding is and the vision takes me to a magical place. But whether this shot existed or not, these moments happen to us and they are imprinted on our hearts like words on a page. It is increasingly easy to put the gram before the experience and that is what eats away at our golden moments. In this industry a hand shake still counts and knowing someone who knows someone still gets you a job. This way of life is a fading art and what is left is precious. Let us use social media not as replacement for actually connecting, especially now as life speeds up so fast and time is still so very short.

My search for Jamie Lynn, with all of its continuous twists and irritating turns, woke me up to what I have been missing. You. I don’t need to see what you had for dinner, though it looks real yummy. I do not know you better because I read your Dalai Lama quote, though it’s real talk and I agree with it. To quote 70s music critic Lester Bangs: “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what two people share when they are being uncool.” Let’s get uncool together.

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*EDITOR’S NOTE: Read more about Josi’s search for Jamie Lynn on page 39.

Oregon born, raised by the sea, Josi Stephens is a writer of words, designer of clothes, doer of things at Asymbol, lover, fighter and renaissance woman. @mustang_josi