Good Morning, Sabahs
My Favorite Warm Weather Shoe
Preamble I.
There’s a rule about turntables. Especially the fiddly ones from post-college, where you have an anti-skate weight. That tiny weight, strung on a piece of angel’s hair/nanowire fishing line, which is usually 9 times out of 10 fine and needs nothing, will always, ALWAYS, fall off as soon as you’re as high as possible.
I’ve been too high before and found the counterweight completely detached, and usually I have the wisdom to let well-enough alone and not try to fix it and put on a record. The fine dexterity required to reanchor it is better left to the sober light of day. Too high to do the anti-skate is a true mode of being. Sometimes, though, you must set it right, substances be damned.
The album we have on is the latest one from The Avalanches (“We Will Always Love You”). Driving back from Memorial Day in Palm Springs, I had the great joy of relistening to the entirety of their criminally underrated Wildflower. The Avalanches are high priests and technomancers of the sampling world (although their last album saw them writing original tracks for the first time). Here’s a nice video with all the samples in their second record, for the uninitiated. I hope this helps you enjoy the following post (by all means, put on any of their albums), which is about leather Turkish moccasins, which I have found are the best for travel.
Sublime Prosaic is many things of course, but if it’s ever a bad time…well, you know where to reach me.
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Preamble II.
It’s nearly June in Los Angeles. This means it’s time for the ocean-borne mists to get lost and come inland. A marine layer settles over the coastal areas. Though it’s now summer, it does not yet arrive in this famously summer-y place. A land roasted for its sunny weather sees the skies turn May Gray, succeeded by June Gloom (and then No-Sky July, and if it gets to Fog-ust it verifies the climate is basically broken; we have no words beyond that for a cold, rainy September or October, as they can only indicate the global jetstream that sustains the seasons and the planet has completely collapsed).1 The more immediate and grounded cruelty is that places with historically worse weather (Chicago, New York, Montreal, Reykjavik, London, Stockholm, etc.) get moved (“mood of the city”-style) to get out and get their summer while the LA-bound watch the calendar for that still-coming stretch of weeks that lets us commune with the sun.
Preamble III.
I also return (or at least I’m just hopefully pressing on) from Sad-batical. My home, especially on the doorstep of summer, is in total disarray. The wardrobe, or the capsule or whatever I call it sometimes, is an afterthought. Seasons of life. This is a season for uncaring.
On matters domestic, I have a small nation of meaningful objects that don’t seem to fit in the furniture that is supposed to hold them. Panic would say “buy new storage furniture,” but experience says “don’t.” You just wait it out and make sense of it later.
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A Shoe for the Real Ones
I’m packing for Cabo San Lucas (matters matrimonial require my attendance). I’ve been once before and found the whole place to be a riddle (the food, the scenery, the everything, honestly what is going on in Cabo?). I hope to find more than a swim up bar to recommend it on the return trip. Or maybe the point of Cabo is that the landscape is blank canvas upon which our imagination can be worked. My last visit was for a true wedding of American Excellence abroad, which featured cigar rollers, bespoke fireworks over the beach at night (well, two nights), an oil painting of the wedding ceremony (done in real time at sunset, as one does), and a drink station where a craftsperson would make you a shot glass out of ice (handcarved to order, I can scarcely believe my memory of it, but this happened), filled with Don Julio 1911 for you, which you would then shoot back, and then take a more literal second shot by hurling your disposable ice glass at a bell some distance away.2
Many people imbibe and throw in the direction of the bell, fewer hit it.
Sabahs, as things turn out, are the perfect shoe for Cabo. They are my favorite warm weather shoe and, in imitation of the company’s founder, I’ve taken them everywhere.
I bought my first pair in 2014, right after NYT gave me a founder’s profile of Mickey Ashmore. His business model back then was to show up in town (I met him in the lobby of a hotel in Santa Monica) and just roll out a bunch of colors and sizes of these Turkish loafers so you could try on for fit. Ashmore has a background that by now is kind of tired (I use “finance guy left the business and founded [x business, his true passion]” as a joke all the time), but the brand experience for me has stayed compelling the whole time. The Wall Street Journal, whose men’s fashion section usually means the deathknell for something I’ve worked hard to know and care about, had this to say in 2016 about Sabahs: “[they are] riffs on a Turkish slipper (minus the elfin turned-up toes)…” They are made by hand in Gaziantep, Turkey, and the quality is excellent.
The brand has stayed true to its original vision and continues to deliver nearly a decade later. What we have in Sabahs is a leather travel shoe that wears harder than the vacationer’s classic espadrille, and hits more global notes than the sometimes worrisome boat shoe or camp moccasin (it struck me as a positive development when I saw a few specialty menswear retailers in the UK now carry them as well).
I have three pairs of these shoes (i. original navy [baileen blue], soles worn through and held in reserve until they announce a reasonable refurbishment program, ii. a bright teal bought for reasons I still don’t understand, and then iii. a final navy-ish pair which is wearing in nicely [to replace the first pair]). I wear them often enough in summer that I sometimes get the distinctive crescent-shaped vamp as a tanline on my feet. I don’t mind.
In a world of marketing bullshit where brands owned by LVMH (or imitating them) claim you can wear a loafer from the beach to the Michelin dinner on the hill, these shoes actually do that. I’ve done it. I love espadrilles, huaraches, Belgians and all the rest of the great warm weather shoes, but Sabahs are the king.
So I’ll have a Cabo packing edit for next week to go with these shoes, but until then thanks for reading and we’ll let The Avalanches and this gallery of Sabahs play us out.
Hey 2025! You will surely have the greatest bingo card of all time.
I would try to rewrite the foregoing sentence, but there’s no way to make sense of it anyway, so it is left as is, so as to better convey the decadence, tumult and confusion accompanying such a celebration of love.