VANS 2019 SPRING

A STOKED SNEAK PEEK

by Manny Aloha // @mannyaloha

In 1983 at ten years old I remember walking into school in Suffern, New York with my checkerboard slip-on Vans and kids laughing at me. I said to them, “Ok, but one day you’ll be wearing these too.”

I’ve been skateboarding for 35 years, surfing for almost 20, and creating art for at least 25 years. Vans were around way before I started any of these passions.

I grew up in the suburbs of New York but my parents divorced in 1980 and my dad moved to California. Although I was mad and sad, the next summer changed my life in the raddest way ever. To keep up with him jogging on the Redondo Beach bike path, my dad bought my brother and I our first skateboards and soon our first pair of Vans. I know I’m getting a little personal here but when I think of Vans, these are the emotional touch stones that are stepped on. Vans have been by my side through all the raddest times as well as through all my life drama, and maybe it’s the same for you. If a shoe could be a best friend...

Thats enough about me lets talk about the product.

One of the coolest things about any new Vans collection is that you can always count on finding their Core Classics. There’s nothing worse than loving a pair of sneakers then finding out that, “Oh that was last year’s model.” I’m so stoked that I can always find the same sneaker I fell in love with 35 years ago.

The word is that next year is all about the COMFYCUSH -super light, super cush, and equipped with the collapsible kickdown heal! I don’t know about you but I’m stoked to try’em out.

Deep down, I really wanted to keep this secret, but this sneak was easily my favorite in the showroom. Even though I’ve never done this yet, I imagine rocking these with jeans and a sports jacket. They scream unique laid-backness and when I look at them I say yes I want those. Mixed Quilting and True White Available Feb.1, 2019

Artist Yusuke Hanai’s classic style and Vans are like cheese, crackers and fine wine. I’m not gonna lie, as an artist, I’m a little envious. Congrats Yusuke! You’re officially my latest role model.

I’m so sorry but I’ve come to realize that my vocabulary is often limited to “awesome”, “so rad”, “totally”, and “so stoked”. With that said, I think it’s totally awesome that Vans design just as many kid sneakers as they do for adults. They make a sneaker for every age and every personality. There’s no doubt that its time to get my 3 year old his first pair. Time to hit up Grandma and Grandpa.

More info at VANS.COM

Hot Spring Dreams

Esalen institute, Big Sur California

Story by Megan Freshley // @summertimewitches

Photo by Amanda Marsalis

I’d had recurring dreams before, but none like this. Every night the same. Like James Earl Jones telling me to build a baseball field. But instead, the dream urged me to get nude at the edge of the continent and soak myself in some sulfuric water that rained down 300 years ago and hasn’t seen light since. That is until you remove a slippery wooden cork — and the water comes from somewhere closer to the dark, hot star at the center of the earth than humans are meant to go.

Ablution: a ceremonial act of washing parts of the body or sacred containers. In the dream, I need a good abluting. And in the dream, I never make it to the hot springs. Some circumstance pulls me away from Big Sur before I get the chance, and I drive over the jade-green hills of the Central Coast with a pang that carries into my waking mind.

What would you make of a dream like that? And what is its promise, if not some wham-bam epiphany ready to redraw the course of my life. As a witch, water signifies west. Emotional healing. Dreams and psychic information. Tears, spit, and Selkies. 

Someone said California is so spiritual because it’s as far west as you can go, and then if you want to keep going you have to go in. Esalen, a retreat known for its history of psychological visionaries and literary outlaws, sits perched on the very edge of everything, it seems, when you’re there. It’s a monument to introspection. It’s also home to these hot springs I can’t stop dreaming about not quite getting into.

So I buy plane tickets to San Jose to rent a car and drive three hours south past Gilroy, the garlic capital of the known universe, Monterey (pronounced “town” if you live in Big Sur), and Carmel-by-the-Sea: the last chichi outpost before cell reception dies, radio stations stop working, billboards vanish, and the sea starts loosening the knots in you with its aggressive beauty. Perilous curves pull you south through what feels like a veil between worlds. Perhaps you’ll see a glass mansion tucked into a cliff, a fox family darting across Highway One, a whale’s spout glittering on the Pacific far below.

Photo by Ali Kaukas

Big Sur draws hordes of tourists pouring in year-round to take selfies at McWay Falls and Bixby Bridge — and who can blame them? Celebrities evade the paparazzi long enough to squeeze in a day or two of undocumented fun. There are SNAGs-a-plenty (sensitive new age guys), all manner of Instagram influencers, and even the occasional New Yorker. 

Then there’s the tight-knit enclave of healers and homesteaders that makes up its local community. It only takes about a year of slow living in Big Sur to know not only everyone’s faces and what ridge they live on, but also their authentic longings, their fresh and healing wounds, their actual feelings on any given day. It’s a culture where dudebros can cry openly — so rare and beautiful. 

That’s thanks in part to those still carrying the torch of Big Sur’s psychology-imbued past, cultivated by eccentrics like Fritz Perls, Ida Rolf, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, and Abraham Maslow. In true bohemian fashion, it also seems like everyone’s either a millionaire or lives in their car here, a distinction that doesn’t factor in the least into who breaks bread with whom. 

I park on a Highway One turnout, inhaling air so clean it wipes the slate of my mind clean. In the blackness of the night, I can feel the old growth redwoods standing there, noticing me. My phone is only a rinky-dink flashlight now, guiding me on foot up the dirt road to my friend Coco Odyssey’s place. Her house ornaments the hill it’s on like the maiden on a ship, aptly named the Moonboat. 

My bed tonight is in Coco’s apothecary, home to Wildcrafted Love — her and Shankari Linda Barrera’s outfit alchemizing the magic of Big Sur’s plant allies into tinctures, teas, and oils. The room is lined with glass jars and herb bundles, and a cauldron wouldn’t look out of place at all. From my bed, I see so many stars the sky seems overcrowded. As if that many stars must be too heavy for one universe to bear. What looks at first like empty space is dense with galaxies upon looking longer. 

In the morning I finally reach Esalen and bee line it to the baths, eating a nasturtium and a bachelor’s button as a Eucharist along the way. Steller’s jays swoop overhead, and fried egg poppies float clumsily on their thin, hairy stems. I hang my outfit on its hook and sink naked as a nymph into one of the newly-filled tubs overlooking the mirror of the sea. I let the hot water cover me, staying till my fingers prune, waiting for some revelation to come strike me like a bell. 

Photo by Ali Kaukas

Learn More // esalen.org

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The Captain’s Porch

A place to reconsider time as movement

Words by Justin “Scrappers” Morrison // @scrappers

Photos by Sera Lindsey // @portablesera

Is time just movement? 

The mechanical numbers of the clock.

The fluid embrace of the tide.

The slow burn of the sunrise.

The timeless crawl of the starfish.

They’re all movements happening at different speeds. 

If time is movement then the speed of movements can vary and I get to choose which movement to give my attention to.

The ETA of life can be optimistic openness to whatever happens whenever it happens.

When I am still and distant from pressing city obligation I can choose what movements to give my attention to. I am never late, never early, never wasting time, or stressed out.

The Captain Whidbey is a place to reconsider time as movement. 

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The skipping stone fireplace crackles in the log cabin Lodge. A pebble tossed off the footbridge into the water sends ripples toward the Lagoon Rooms. A seal pops it’s head up for air and to snarl at a smoker on the deck of a waterfront Cabin. All these movements causing different times to believe in.

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The Captain Whidbey has witnessed the old up and down of every tide and cosmic movement since it’s 1907 construction. It’s log walls have given people like myself a place to relax and reconsider life from the perspective of a Pacific Northwestern island. Driftwood, rocks, shells, and other natural treasures pile up and await their discovery on the beach below. Cattle and organic produce farms down the road and seafood harvesters in boats outside bring what you’ll find on the Captain’s menu. Psychedelic swirls of orange and red bark peel at their own speed from the evergreen trunks of madrone trees hanging off the cove cliff as if they are getting ready to jump in for a swim. 

You can see movement and time in any way you like from the Captain’s porch.

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