VIA – NY TIMES

Is New York Becoming a Surf Town?

Wax Magazine’s cover – Neoprene Waves by John Luke

Wax, a New York City-based magazine for “urban surfers,” just released its inaugural issue. While “urban surfer” may strike you as an oxymoron, the magazine insists that surfing is something many New Yorkers — especially those in creative fields — engage in. But is “urban surfing” truly focused on the sport itself or does it have more to do with an aesthetic sensibility?

In the magazine’s editor’s note, the creative directors Aeriel Brown, David Yun and Zak Klauck claim that surfing can be more than merely trendy here (despite the “multiple surf shops, the ads featuring surfers on their way to Rockaway, the ever-increasing price of used boards on Craigslist”) and more than an obsessive, singular devotion. It can, instead, be part of a lifestyle that embraces the contradiction between working in an urban environment and escaping to the ocean whenever you can, as the magazine’s directors told me:

You can’t “live to surf” here like you can in some other places, and in a way, that makes the surfing more interesting. Surfing here sometimes means thrusting yourself into a 5mm wetsuit at 6 a.m. on a cold winter morning and duck diving into frigid waters — all before getting on a train and going to work in Midtown. If that’s not devotion, I’m not sure what is. But, it is a particular type of devotion and that’s one of the things that we are trying to celebrate.

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