Van Hamersveld had a direct hand in shaping the landscape of '60s and '70s American pop-culture. He hobnobbed with Andy Warhol and the Beatles. He hung in the art circles of London, New York and California, all while retaining his surfer sensibility.

He's seen the design world shift from an analog to a digital world. No longer a wave-ridding youth, he jokes he's found a new form of surfing — on the internet.

Behind his round-rimmed tortoise shell glasses, in his pale blue eyes shines light-years of intense contemplation tempered by an extremely humble demeanor and genuine, hearty laugh.

In town for the East Coast Surfing Championships, we met on August 23 at the Freedom Surf Shop in Virginia Beach. As he talked about where he'd been and where he's going it was clear: there's no other way to put it. John Van Hamersveld is really, really freakin' cool.

OK, yeah. Very good, very good. Segmentation. And fragmentation. So when I went to art school that was the '60s. And 1960 was really the break between modernism and post-modernism and the Endless Summer was really a product of post-modern mix. The whole surf industry gets identified and focused and it turns into all of this memorabilia that we see today. The media in a sense grabbed hold of the surf culture.

I had read something that talked about the idea that the foundation of Eastern culture is the liberty symbol. This sort of controlled freedom around the constitution and that's it. OK, so in California there are no rules. It's a post-modern land in a sense. It has no rules, it's totally free. I used to like to think of surfing like Spaghetti Westerns but instead of weapons it's the surf board. So out of all that mix from Gidget to Big Wednesday are these identifiers and the Endless Summer cradles this spirit in an idyllic way and sort of becomes the image and sums up what it was.

So '64 and '67 are so absolutely different and that difference between the two is scheduled over the culture through the decades so that we can have hippies and we can have surfers.

In my archetype as an artist, a graphic artist, a media artist, I find myself having to find a whole bunch of these archetypes as I looked over them throughout the decades. It seems that 1950 to 1972 around there entering California and sitting with Mick Jagger was kind of like a summary of what happened to America. So was the devil money and prosperity? So in that there's all these post-modern ethics that set us up so there's kind of this sameness that goes on through the 30 years to where we are today and so everyone plays an archetype and maybe everyone dresses up in archetype and maybe this is all kind of pseudo and its like a virtual Playstation — the mall, the highway, whatever. Interesting times.

Especially yours. This is really good. So you were born in the echo-boomer land. So the parent is a boomer, you know, and went through the archetype of being a post-hippie, hippie, yuppie, whoever they are, whatever they have become, and then you were born and you grew up in a mirrored culture and a compliant culture.

Right, right. So in the compliancy the way it looks to me is the parent wanted to see you a bit as that rebel. So they invest in mirroring this image. Like how Volcom is the costume of the rebel. So we have all these movies that the boomer and the echo-boomer go to together like Star Wars. Star Wars — what an interesting thing that is. It's very post-modern.

Yeah, I don't have that problem. Jack Nicholson gets very uncomfortable standing in front of me over the decades because he doesn't know me, yet I've been a part of all of his mechanisms.

Very good, very good. The way I see it is that the '60s really are about packaging a new era, a new time, that the media had never had the chance to really take place the way it did creatively. So you had all these creative people who just got into the media. I knew Andy [Warhol] and we were both from art schools. People say, ‘how did you know people in London?' Well, London had art schools. The Pink Floyd and Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton and these other people, they're all from the same period so it's like camaraderie.

And so in doing Exile with Jagger…there was one meeting and he was sitting down with an older man and that older man could've been a dealer or whatever he was and Jagger was right there and I was showing him the packaging and there wasn't a lot of talk but all of a sudden, in the stonedness and the way it was, he said, ‘They'll love it.' Now there's a really interesting point — that he knew he could control his audience.

No, no. Very cool. When it first started I had a friendship with Steve Jobs and so the next computer was so far ahead of them all and it was such a great machine; it was like what the G4 and the G5 are today.

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