Did you know that the first recorded incident of people smoking weed was 2,500 years ago. Yep, and the history of marijuana (what is was called for the first 50 years of my life). or weed, or cannabis, and human beings, goes back about 12,000 years, to the end of the last Ice Age. This 12 minute video is pretty fascinating, if you have any interest in weed. Check it out, and Happy Stoner's New Year tomorrow, aka 4/20, to any of you who smoke or take edibles.
Tomorrow is April 20th, a date which has some seriously negative associations. Adolph Hitler was born in April 20th in 1889. It's also the anniversary of the horrific Columbine school shooting in 1999, the mass shooting that dramatically raised public awareness of this American issue. You'd think that would be enough give this day terrible associations forever.
But April 20th, as you well know, has another, even bigger, association. In 1971, a few guys who called themselves the Waldos, at San Rafael High School, in the San Francisco Bay area, heard about a hidden field of weed. One of them was given a treasure map of sorts, the location of this hidden marijuana patch. They decided to meet at the statue in front of their school that afternoon, at 4:20 pm. They lit a joint in the car, and headed out to find and harvest that weed. They didn't find the weed. So they tried again the next day, meeting at the statue at 4:20, jumping in a car, lighting a joint, and heading out.
They never did find the mysterious hidden field of weed. But getting high every day at 4:20 became an inside joke among them. The inside joke spread organically spread among their siblings and friends, and later college roommates, even The Grateful Dead. Slowly, 4:20 became a time to smoke out every afternoon. In those days when it was completely illegal, saying "420" became a secret code to talk about weed, among this growing group of people. In time, someone figured out 4/20 was also a date, and people in the San Francisco Bay area started heading up to Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, to get high on April 20th. Here's a quick video with the Waldos telling the 420 origin story themselves, on the 50th anniversary of it.
I don't smoke weed. I did for a while, for about a year and a half, starting at a high school graduation party in May of 1984, when I was 17. Several of my friends smoked, but I was uptight, and afraid to try it. At that party I finally took a couple hits, From then, until I moved out of Idaho, I smoked just enough so I never had to buy my own weed. I'd get high maybe once every week or so, maybe a little more often at times. When I moved to California in 1985, I was totally focused on BMX freestyle, hoping to be a pro rider some day. I stopped smoking when I got to California. Maybe if I would have kept smoking, I would have become a better ramp rider, but who knows.
I'm a non-smoker for decades who thinks cannabis should be fully legal nationwide. I've had several stoner roommates, almost all of whom were really cool people. But I'm weird and highly creative normally, I don't need weed to help me think deep, write, or make art. Also, I like to eat way too much, and I get the munchies bad when I smoke weed. I'm already really fat now, which happened during my taxi driving days. So that's another reason I don't smoke.
But I'm all for legalization in places where it's still mostly or totally illegal. As a writer, I'm fascinated by the organic story of how "420" went from a inside joke among a few friends, to a worldwide symbol or marijuana, cannabis, or weed culture. So have fun tomorrow on 4/20, for all of you stoners out there. If you're going to get blazed, take an Uber of a taxi, don't drive.
I watched this Lego documentary recently, from 2016, and it's pretty fascinating. It follows a couple of stories, one being a guy applying to be a Lego Set Designer, which sounds like an awesome job to me. Another story is about a diehard, adult Lego enthusiast, who wants to start a print magazine about the Lego building culture. But he needs the official "OK" from Lego to do it properly. Nearly all of us built stuff with Legos as kids. This 45 minute video is a look into Lego, the company, and the many facets of Lego culture.
During the pandemic, in 2021, I was walking past a homeless hut built into the side of a hill, next to a freeway offramp. Every night, many of the homeless people in that area would wander the streets and alleys, looking for curb furniture and dumpster finds. They would take all these things back to their huts, and sort them out. There was a growing pile of discarded items by this fence. I found 4 or 5 of Chelsea Handler's books there, that the other homeless people tossed in the huge discard pile. One day, I found a full Lego set, the blocks to make a little van, and a small building. It had some tie to one of the Toy Story movies. I took it back to my storage unit, which was a second floor, indoor 5 by 5. Since the area around my unit was quiet most of the time, I could do artwork there in the hallway, or sit a read a book, during the day.
But that night, I opened up the Lego set, as a 55-year-old homeless guy, and got lost for 2 or 3 hours, building things with the Legos. I wound up with a funky hot rod pick-up truck, and another vehicle that looked like a mutant, souped up, corn combine (the big farmer's machines that harvest corn). I had a blast, and those two little vehicle creations sat on a shelf in my storage unit for over a year. Eventually I got behind on payments, and everything got auctioned off, including my Lego cars. I kept thinking that if I ever win the lottery, I'm going to buy about 100 pounds of Lego bricks on eBay, and have a room in my house just for building weird and cool stuff out of Legos. It's probably a good thing that I will never win the lottery.
Like most of you, I had a bunch of Legos as a kid, in the 1970's, when kits were just boxes of a few different kinds and colors of bricks. We had to make up our own ideas on what to build with them. I used to make little four wheeled motorcycles (quads hadn't been invented yet by the motorcycle companies), and my imaginary riders would ride them all over the bedroom or living room. I used to make other things, too, but the motorcycles with four tiny wheels were a favorite of mine.
Then I grew older, and I think my Legos got sold at a garage sale, most likely. I grew up, sort of, and went on with life. But on trips to big discount stores over the years, I'd wander the toy aisles, and see the different Lego sets that kept getting bigger, and morphing into cooler sets, year after year. It never occurred to me that there was an actual job that consisted of playing with Legos, and creating the sets that got tied to movies and comic characters, that came out year after year.
It turns out that Lego is a privately-owned company, headquartered in a small town in Denmark. The whole Lego brand worldwide is valued at $13 billion, as of 2023. It's a family business, already around for years, before their familiar plastic, interlocking bricks debuted in 1949. The business is still owned by the current generations of the family. There is incredible secrecy in the company about future products, and a very strong culture for those working there. This is a great video to just chill and watch, and will definitely bring back your own Lego memories from childhood.
This was the first video that BMX Plus! magazine produced, in 1985. In those days, professional quality video equipment was really expensive, and to make a video to sell copies of, you had to hire a professional video production company to shoot, produce, and edit the video. That meant spending tens of thousands of dollars for the project. Because of this high financial barrier to entry, not many BMX freestyle videos got made in the mid and late 1980's.
"You can't get good by sitting around thinking about it. It's something you have to physically get out and do."
-Brian Scura, Freestyle's Raddest Tricks
What we called BMX freestyle in the 1980's began in the late 1970's, when Bob Haro and a friend started doing tricks on their BMX racing bikes. This video came out in 1985. In the intro, Bob says he had been freestyling for 8 years, putting the birth of BMX freestyle around 1977.
Yes, people have been doing tricks on bicycles since bikes were invented, which around 1875. The first time a cute girl walked by a guy on an early bike is probably when the first bike trick was invented. That's my thinking, anyhow. But the thing we call freestyle, the hobby, sport, and lifestyle of doing tricks on 20 inch BMX bikes, began with Bob Haro and his friend John.
Within a year or so, he began doing demos at BMX races, and then doing shows at other events. He rode with R.L. Osborn not long after, living with the Osborn family, while drawing cartoons and working at BMX Action. He started making custom number plates for racers. Bob Haro did his first freestyle tour with Bob Morales about 1980. R.L., the son of BMX Action magazine founder, Bob "Oz" Osborn, started the BMX Action Trick Team in 1980 or 1981. Bob Morales started MF, Morales/Fiola, with top skatepark rider, Eddie Fiola, making stickers and leathers, I think, and went on to start Dyno, an accessories company. Soon after he was putting on the first BMX freestyle contest series, in the skateparks in 1983, turning freestyle into a competitive sport.
My point here is that from about 1977 to 1982, BMX freestyle was a handful of really entrepreneurial guys doing shows, and a larger group of guys who rode BMX bikes in skateparks. Mike Buff, Jeff Watson, Fred Becker, Tinker Juarez, Steve "Bio Air Bennett, Martin Aparijo, and Woody Itson were some of the main riders in those early years, all in Southern California.
Then freestyle started getting photos in magazines, which got a good response, and it began to grow larger. Bob Haro's number plate business took off. Dyno, Bob Morales' accessory company, got bought by GT Bikes. R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff toured the U.S. and parts of Europe. Everywhere these guys did shows, a few kids got hooked on this new thing called BMX freestyle, growing the sport organically. Bob Haro redesigned a Torker, and put out the first bike specifically designed for freestyle, in 1983, the Haro Freestyler, later called the Haro Master.
By the time BMX Plus! magazine put out this video in 1985, Haro, GT, Redline, Hutch, CW, and other companies had freestyle bikes on the market. BMX Action started FREESTYLIN' magazine in the fall of 1984. They also put out a video, made documentary style, of the BMX Action Trick Team, in 1985. That was the first wave of popularity of BMX freestyle, and that's when this video came out.
In the 1980's, the BMX media was all about the magazines, beginning with BMX Action, BMX Plus!, and Super BMX. FREESTYLIN'magazine, the "Thrasher" of BMX, came out in the fall of 1984. BMX Plus! put out some one shot freestyle magazines, Freestyle Spectacular, in 1986, and then came out with American Freestyler. Super BMX put out Freestyle magazine soon after. If you wanted to get sponsored, you had to get coverage in magazines, and there were six magazines, in 1987-1988. It was all about magazine photos. Many pros, and some amateurs, got a "photo contingency," a cash bonus, if they got photo in a magazine, bigger money for bigger photos. Some riders got coverage for their skill, and a few became coverage whores, always hanging out at the magazines or calling up photographers to see if they needed riders that week.
Videos in the 1980's cost a lot of money to produce, easily $20,000 to $40,000, to hire a video production company and make a half hour video, like Freestyle's Raddest Tricks, above. Consumer video cameras existed, VHS, and 8mm, (before Hi8), but the quality degraded really fast when you edited and made copies of them. Because of this, there weren't many BMX freestyle videos in that first wave of freestyle's popularity. BMX Plus! and GT Bikes ruled the 1980's BMX freestyle video market. Because there were so few videos put out, no standard form existed then. That's why many early videos didn't have sections for each rider. That concept was one of many at the time. Most videos had a bunch of riders, riding together at a shoot, to save money. Then they were edited in a montage.
Another thing, riders had their tricks dialed back then, because doing shows, riding in contests, and photo shoots for sponsored riders, were the main forms of showing your tricks to other riders and everyday people. It wasn't about doing something super gnarly and getting it on video one time. You had to be able to land that trick 9 times out of 10, or better, 10 out of 10. Because of this, when it came to the few video shoots, riders were doing the tricks they practiced every day. Each separate shoot in this video probably took place over one to three hours. So riders weren't trying something to get it once. They did the tricks they could do almost every time, and then the shoot was over. There was no going back to get the shot a week over. Either you pulled your best tricks at the shoot, or you didn't.
Since BMX freestyle was spawned from BMX racing only a few years earlier, riders wore racing leathers to promote their sponsors, and even helmets, goggles, and sometimes jofas (mouth guards).on flatland. They did this because the BMX companies, the magazines, and the video producers didn't want to get sued if some kid got injured trying this stuff at home. Yes, it looks goofy and hokey, but that was the nature of this brand new sport back then.
BMX freestyle was this weird hybrid of BMX racing and jumping, and skateboarding in pools, which is where the airs came from. Its influences ranged from motocross, to BMX racing, to surfing (skaters first rode pools to imitate surfing waves), and skateboarding. All of these influences were coming together, and nobody really knew what the fuck they were doing then, in the sense that everything was new. Riders, the magazines, and video producers were all trying different ideas with this new and emerging little sport, trying to find out what worked in riding, for photos and video, and on the business side. Much like skateboarding in the 1970's, BMX freestyle was considered a fad then, by most people. It was some weird little fad that would go away in a couple of years, but it was new and fun to watch. Obviously, over the 39 years since Freestyle's Raddest Tricks came out, BMX freestyle, or whatever you may call it now in its various forms, has evolved in many different directions. None of us expected it to get as big and widespread as it has back in 1985.
I bought this video for $29.95, by mail order, in the fall of 1985. I had just moved to San Jose, California, and was 19 years old. I wasn't going to college, I was working nights at a Pizza Hut, and I had no friends yet in San Jose. Freestyle was it, that was my whole focus, at that point in time. I was riding 2 to 4 hours everyday, often wandering around San Jose, exploring my new region. I was just starting my first zine, as a way to meet some other freestylers in the Bay Area.
I watched this video seven times the day I got it in the mail. Two of those times I sat on my handlebars of my bike, balancing on it, feet on the front wheel, through the whole video, without putting my foot down. That just seemed like the hardcore thing to do that day. I watched this video dozens of times over the next year. I watched it so many times, that I remembered the goofy, electronic "canned music," which video producers used in many different types of videos in those days, to avoid getting sued for copyright infringement. I heard some of this exact same music in at least two porno videos in the years after I bought this video. Yeah, they used the same canned music other video producers did then, which is pretty funny.
Freestyle's Raddest Tricks, the two sequels, and the GT Bikes videos GT-V and Demo Tape, were the most widely watched, and most influential BMX freestyle videos of the late 1980's. As my blog works towards its 1,000th blog post, and I look back on major influences in those early days of 1980's BMX freestyle, this video was a huge influence on me, and almost all of us.
The original King of the Skateparks, Eddie Fiola, tearing up the legendary Pipe Bowl at Pipeline skatepark, in Upland California.
This blog is coming up on 1,000 posts, I've got 10 to 15 to go. So I decided to write some long posts about some of my favorite moments in BMX freestyle back in the 1980's. I'm going to mix those with some of my favorite video clips from the early years of freestyle, as I work up to the 1,000 post milestone.
In those early years of 1983-1985-1985, BMX trick riding in Southern California turned into BMX freestyle, and then into an actual sport with competitions, thanks to Bob Morales. Freestyle began to spread across the U.S. and the world, through the BMX magazines, and Eddie Fiola riding Pipeline Skatepark was the standard for vert riding in that era. The Pipe Bowl was the place where those early skatepark riders blasted the highest airs in those early years.
A few facts, Stan Hoffman, owner of Pipeline, didn't put coping in any of the original bowls, because he was worried about injuries and insurance claims. So that's why there was no coping in the Pipe Bowl. Pro skaters, and Pipeline locals, Steve and Micke Alba, talked Stan into putting coping in the Combi Pool, which was built 2 or 3 years later. The Pipe Bowl had a 20 foot diameter full pipe, paying homage to the already well known spot, Baldy Pipe, which was 16 feet in diameter, up in the mountains above the San Gabriel Valley. The Pipe Bowl was 12 feet deep, and the face wall, where they did the big airs, had four feet of vert. This made it much bigger and gnarlier than the standard quarterpipes, which were usually about 8 feet high at the time. The fence around the Pipe Bowl was five feet high, and the locals measured airs above the fence. So "three feet" to locals meant three feet above the five foot high fence, or an 8 foot air.
In this clip we see Eddie blasting 3-4 feet above the fence, airing in the 8 to 9 foot range, again above the 12 foot high face wall. Eddie flat out tore this bowl up, he had lines all over the place, and had more style than anyone riding the Pipe Bowl. Also in this video clip we see Eddie do a 540 on the hip. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first BMX 540 on vert ever in a video. Word has it that Woody Itson invented the 540 air, about halfway up a quarterpipe, a few months before this. Eddie pulled it for the first time on video at this contest, a local public access TV show, which was also released on video. This show produced by Unreel Productions founder Don Hoffman, the son of Pipeline owners Stan and Jean Hoffman.
This video is a key clip in the history of BMX vert riding, and set the stage for vert progression, as it moved to quarterpipes, and later onto halfpipes during the rest of the 1980's, and beyond.
I still don't understand why the shadows during an eclipse make these cool crescent shapes, which turn into a kind of fractal pattern. But they do. I noticed this effect when I watched a full eclipse, when I was back east, 7 years ago. My phone's camera sucks, but you can see these pretty well. Pattern of partial eclipse sun coming through tree leaves, San Fernando Valley, April 8th, 2024. #steveemigphotos
$100 and a T-shirt is the best documentary about zines I've seen. It's actually a 45 minute doc, from the late 1990's or early 2000's, I think, from the Pacific Northwest. But this is only a 5 minute promo for it. I can't find the full documentary on YouTube anymore. Zines are what turned me from a dreamer into a doer. Publishing my first zine changed the course of my life, for the better, though it may not seem like that to a lot of people, looking at my life now.
This blog you're reading, Steve Emig: The White Bear, is creeping up on the 1,000 blog post mark. I've published well over 2,800 blog posts total, across more than 50 blog ideas I've tried, since 2008. About a week ago I noticed I was getting close to 1,000 posts, and I started wondering how to best celebrate this milestone. My original Freestyle BMX Tales blog, published from 2009-2012, got to just over 500 posts (here's FBMXT version 3). This blog, which I honestly thought hardly anyone would read when I started it in 2017, is now nearly double that.
After thinking about the 1,000 post milestone for a few days, I decided to write a series of posts about some of the things I've done that broke some new ground, in some way. Looking back now, from age 57, some things in my life seem like they were meant to happen. Over the years, I was drawn to several ideas and trends early on in their existence, the weird little sport of BMX freestyle being one of them, in 1983. This sounds weird now, as a fat, middle-aged, broke, homeless guy. But there were a bunch of times in my life where I got into something early on, or had an idea and acted on it, in some trend that got much bigger later as time passed. I've written about some of these things in this blog, but in bits and pieces over several years.
Writing and self-publishing is another one of those things. I published my first Xerox zine, as we called them back then, in September of 1985. Xerox (pronounced ZEER-ox, kids) was the best known brand of photocopy machines, which we used to copy pages for our zines. Somewhere in one of the early issues of FREESTYLIN' magazine, editor Andy Jenkins talked about zines. He said there were some skateboarders, and a few BMX freestylers, that self-published little, handmade booklets, about their local scenes. I didn't dream of being a writer when I was a kid. I liked taking photos, but I didn't even have a 35mm camera. I took pretty good snapshots. Something about the idea of making a zine appealed to me. I thought about publishing a zine for several months. I drew pictures, and designed what it the cover page would look like, while living in Boise, Idaho, in 1985. But I didn't actually make a zine. I just thought about making a zine. That's what I did as a kid. I had big ideas, and I daydreamed all the time. I thought about doing cool stuff, and then I didn't actually do it.
I graduated from high school in Boise, Idaho, in 1984, and didn't have any money to go to college. So I decided to "take a year off." I worked one job all summer, then worked at a big Mexican restaurant and lived at home, through 1984 and into 1985. My dad got laid off in the spring of 1985, and soon found a new job, in San Jose, California. He flew there and started working. My mom and my sister moved there in June, right after her school was out. I worked my summer job in Boise, managing a tiny amusement park called The Fun Spot, and rented a room at my best friend's house. The Fun Spot closed for the season in the middle of August, right before school started up again. Once that job was over, I packed up my ugly, brown, gigantic, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo down to San Jose. Just over a year out of high school, and a month and a half after my 19th birthday, I moved in with my parents and sister in San Jose, a place that was just beginning to be called Silicon Valley.
I didn't have any money for college, so "taking a year off" turned into a second year. I got a job at a local Pizza Hut, working the evening shift. I knew there were some pro riders, and a bunch of good amateur freestylers, in the Bay Area, but didn't know any of them, or where to find them. The San Francisco Bay area is huge, and this was long before the internet. So I decided to finally publish a BMX freestyle zine, as a way to meet other freestylers.
I had never actually seen a real zine, I only read about them in FREESTYLIN' magazine. I used some photos from a trip to Venice Beach for an AFA contest that summer, and spent a few days making my first zine. I put a few copies each in several bike shops that carried BMX bikes. The idea worked, I met some riders who lived in San Jose, John Vasquez and his friends. They told me when and where the meet-ups happened with other riders from the region. I started making it to the Beach Park ramp jams, and later to Golden Gate Park on the weekends, when possible. I became the "zine guy" for that scene, from late 1985 into mid 1986.
I published that first zine, San Jose Stylin', shooting photos with a Kodak 110 Instamatic camera, and typing on a 1940's era, manual (as in NOT electric), Royal typewriter, that I bought for $15 at the swap meet. The first couple of issues were just three pages, black and white copies, with stories and photos on both sides, and stapled in the upper left hand corner, like a test at school. Then someone told me zines, generally, were folded in half, like little books. Around issue #3, I started laying my zine out sideways on typing paper, and folding them into book-style zines. I soon bought an extra long stapler to complete the zine publisher's kit. I used that Royal typewriter, and one single silk ribbon, for all 11 issues of San Jose Stylin'.
When I made it up to the Beach Park Ramp Jam, at the shop where Skyway pro, Robert Peterson worked, I met pros, Peterson, Maurice Meyer, Dave Vanderspek, and amateurs John Ficarra, Chris and Karl Rothe, Darcy Langlois, and a few other riders, on that first trip. I handed out my zines. All the guys said, "Cool... when's the next one come out?" My reply was, "Next one?" My whole idea with the zine was to use it as an excuse to meet the other riders of the Bay Area, so I'd have other freestylers to ride with on the weekends. I didn't really think about doing more zines after that.
This is one early lesson about both zines, and about meeting your heroes, or people you look up to in some way. It's always cool to have a gift, even a really small one, when you meet people, particularly famous people, or people you want to get to know. A gift of some kind sets you apart when you meet people. A zine, even a sketchy one, was a cool gift to BMX freestylers in those days. In September of 1985, there were maybe 4 or 5 freestylers publishing zines, across the country. They usually only made copies for their group of friends, and maybe a few to trade with other zine publishers. So most freestylers had never seen a zine, or maybe only a couple of them.
Another good thing about zines (and blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels today), is that they give you a great excuse to interview people you want to meet. Now, decades later, in adult life, I see this on YouTube channels all the time. People start podcasts and YouTube channels as an excuse to meet people in sports, business, tech, or some subculture, that they personally want to meet. Even famous people do this. Race car driver Danika Patrick has a podcast, called Pretty Intense, where, as famous as she is already, interviews people in all kinds of other areas of life that she's interested in.
Lots of other people do the same. That's what I did with my zine in late 1985 and early 1986. I interviewed Skyway and Curb Dogs pro freestylers like Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, Hugo Gonzales, Rick Allison, and several more of the NorCal riders. I wrote about the contests we went to. I shot photos of those guys, first on my little Kodak Instamatic, and later with a 35mm Pentax. In the process, I got to know those guys, beyond just being one of the amateurs riding with them on the weekends.
My zine just kind of evolved naturally. One really good idea I had early on was to send my zines to the real BMX magazines, in Southern California. But I didn't just send one copy to each magazine. I sent one copy to each person on the editorial staff, and the photographers, too, I think. My thought was, to have them getting my zine in the mail, and checking their own personal copy out in their office. Then, on a coffee brake or lunch, they would tell the others, "I got this zine today from this kid named Steve up in San Jose, it's pretty cool." I wanted them to not only have a copy of my zine, but to talk about my zine, with each other. This turned out to have effects I never imagined.
In addition to handing out zines to the local NorCal freestylers, and mailing them to the staff at the four BMX magazines at the time, I made extra copies to take to freestyle contests, where I handed them out to other pros and the people I wanted to meet. This is also how I met other zine publishers at first. We traded zines at contests. Then we would mail copies of our zines to each other later on. Zine publishers was a tiny subculture, within the larger subculture of BMX freestyle. By issue 11 of San Jose Stylin', I had a snail mail list of over 120 people across the U.S. that I was sending zines to. None of them paid me, they just wrote and asked for a zine. I was spending half of the $450 a month I made at Pizza Hut on publishing and mailing my zines, and on long distance phone charges, which were a thing in the 1980's.
My life, for that year of late 1985 into mid 1986, was to wake up late, and often run errands with my mom, or do any chores around the house. Then I'd go ride solo for 2-3 hours every day, in the early afternoon. I'd go home, take a shower, and go work from about 5 pm until midnight, at Pizza Hut, five nights a week. Most of that year I was the shift supervisor for the night shift. All during my shift, I'd be chugging little cups of Pepsi or Mountain Dew (No Coke at Pizza Hut). I got home, often riding my bike the mile and a half, after midnight, wired on caffeine. I would do a few balance tricks in my bedroom on my bike, and then work on my zine, either typing, transcribing interviews (off audio cassettes), or laying the zine out with Scotch tape on pieces of typing paper. When an issue was done, then I'd do the folding and stapling, and labeling the copies that got mailed. To be honest, it's a good thing I got the job at FREESTYLIN', because I could not have afforded to keep publishing San Jose Stylin' much longer on my Pizza Hut wages. It was eating up half of my meager pay.
Eleven monthly issues of San Jose Stylin' landed me a job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, in the summer of 1986. Remember my idea of sending a copy to each of the editorial guys at the magazines, that helped with the Wizard Publications guys. With a bike, a suitcase, and $80, I got on a plane in San Jose, and flew off to a new life in SoCal. I was so nervous about starting work there, that I got the hives really bad, and wore long sleeve shirts to work for about a week, until they went away. That was about three weeks after my 20th birthday. Without ever going to a single college class, at age 20, I was replacing a guy with an English degree, and suddenly responsible for proofreading two magazines each month, among more mundane duties. Getting the job offer was totally because of my zine.
Once I got to Wizard Publications, I was suddenly working with two experienced zine publishers, Andy Jenkins and Gork (editor of BMX Action at the time), and one zine connoisseur, Mark "Lew" Lewman. It was only then that they showed me how to really have fun and do zine-style Xerox art, blowing up and shrinking and distorting letters and photos. While my first zine had solid content, it flat out sucked in the design category. I got to practice Xerox art while working at the AFA later on, as editor and photographer of their newsletter, and with the 30 or more zines I've published since 1986. From 3 full size, 81/2" X 11" pages, (12 zine pages) for that first zine, I've published several zines that clocked in at 48 pages or more, which are basically little, handmade books. You can put a hell of a lot of content in 48 or 52 zine pages. My first poetry zine in 1992 was over 80 pages, and bound with duct tape.
More than anything, publishing that first zine, month after month, turned me from a big daydreamer into someone who could actually finish projects. After a while, actually starting... and finishing projects, became a habit. Sure, they were small projects, but I became a guy who did things, I didn't just think about them. That made a huge difference in my life. Maybe I wasn't doing really big things, but as a zine publisher, I began to actually do projects.
I've been doing that ever since, at one level or another. And little projects add up, over time. Publishing one blog post isn't a big project. But it's a project. I've published well over 2,800 posts now, plus another 50+ longer posts/essays, on my Substack.
However sketchy my living situation may be these days, I actually am one of the most prolific bloggers on the whole fucking planet. For real. Seth Godin is the most prolific blogger I know of, but it's hard to find any other single bloggers that have written thousands of blog posts actual original content, no one seems to keep stats on the most prolific bloggers. But with 2,800+ posts written, I'm up there, probably in the top 1/10th of 1% of the 600 million blogs online. And it all started with publishing a six page zine, 39 years ago, because I wanted to meet some BMX freestylers in San Jose. Like the tortoise and hare fable, slow and steady work really adds up as the years go by.
I only lasted a few months at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, I was a really moody, uptight, dork then, and not the right fit for that business. They hired 17-year-old Spike Jonze after I left, he was the right fit for Wizard Publications. Meanwhile, I was editor of the American Freestyle Association newsletter for most of 1987, so I didn't publish any zines then. Then I got a job at Vision's video company, Unreel Productions. After a few months, I got the urge to do a new zine. So I started a zine called Periscope, and published a few issues over the next couple of years. The idea behind Periscope was that everyone sees the world differently, like a submarine commander looking through a periscope. So that zine was my little view of the world during that era. I've published somewhere over 40 separate zines, including the 11 issues of San Jose Stylin'. As I write this blog post, I have a master copy of my latest zine in my backpack right now, which I haven't made any copies of yet.
My most popular zine ever was The White Bear's Very, Very Unofficial Guide to Huntington Beach. I published that zine in 2007, I think, for passengers in my taxi. Back then, every summer, maybe 300 college age Irish kids came to Huntington Beach for the summer. They lived with 8-10 guys and girls renting one house or apartment, to keep rent cheap, and they all found local jobs. I kept picking them up in my taxi, and they were always asking where different things were. So I made a zine that had a whole bunch of the history of Huntington Beach, and also listed the best restaurants, dive bars, clubs nearby, weird places, and different stores and stuff. I actually learned a lot about H.B. while making the zine myself. I handed those zines out, over 250 of them, that summer. People heard about the zines, and would come up to my taxi when I was sitting downtown. "Are you the guy who wrote that book about H.B? Can I get one?" I probably spent $350 publishing those zines, and got $2,000 or $2,500 worth of taxi rides from it. That's the one time a zine made me money.
When I started publishing zines in 1985, the only zines I had ever heard of were BMX freestyle and skateboarding zines. Then I heard that the "zine thing" started with punk rock fanzines in the late 1970's. In the 1990's, zine culture exploded. While I was making BMX freestyle zines, and 1980's skaters were making skateboard zines, and punkers were making punk zines, the whole idea of zines spread. I remembered Thomas Paine's "anonymous pamphlet" calledCommon Sense, that was self-published and played a role in the American Revolution. We all learn about this as kids in school, and it could definitely be compared to a zine in its day. Ben Franklin published Poor Richard's Almanac, which I wouldn't call a zine, but he also published less popular things, and so did other people who had access to a printing press in the 1700's. So DIY (Do It Yourself) writing and self-publishing has been around as long as the printing press, invented way back in 1440.
But the true roots of modern zines seem to have been rooted in 1920's and 1930's science fiction fanzines, what we might call fan fiction today on the internet. In the 1960's, there were zines called "chapbooks" with beat poetry or maybe political or activist ideas. Then came the punk rock fanzines of the 1970's, leading into the hardcore punk and DIY spirit as a key element of punk rock. Those fanzines inspired all kinds of weirdos, like myself, who began to write and publish all kinds of zines, including BMX freestyle and skateboarding, in the 1980's. A bit later came the feminist world of Riot Grrrl zines in the early 1990's, along with many other niche zines, from subcultures like activists, vegans, LGBTQ, and others.
In those years right before the internet came along, the early and mid 1990's, there were so many zines being published, that a magazine listing and reviewing zines, called Factsheet 5, was available on newsstands. The Factsheet 5 database ultimately had over 10,000 different zines listed and reviewed in it. Zine culture got its own theme song in 1998 with the release of Harvey Danger's song "Flagpole Sitta," where the singer sings that he wants to publish zines, among other things.
Then came the mass adoption of the internet, and first blogs, even before "Flagpole Sitta" hit the charts, and we all thought the zine days were over. I mean, why spend the time and money to actually type up, print out, put together, and distribute zines, when you can potentially reach half of the population of the Earth, by publishing a website or a blog, for free?
As much as I like blogs, because they are easy, free, and can incorporate video and audio, it turns out blogs and zines are very different animals. You can't physically hand someone a blog. There's a weird kind of fun and craftiness about actually making a zine by hand. And people read zines. Blogs are much more hit and miss. With a blog, you have to not only publish it, but you have to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization), continually direct traffic to it, and keep active on social media to promote your blog, so readers will actually find it. Plus, your latest blog post is fighting for attention against the other 12 million blog posts published today, among the 600 million or so blogs already out there online.
You can make a zine, hand it to someone, and chances are they will read it, cover to cover, sooner or later. Even people who don't read much, will read a zine. Zines are much, much less intimidating to read than a book. All of that means that there is still a place for zines, and they still work well in all kinds of subcultures, for niche groups of people. Zines are still popular in groups ranging from BMXers to graphic designers to comic artists, to today's version of the 90's Riot Grrrrls, independent writers and thinkers, poets, artists, and 20 other flavors of activists. Just today, working on this blog post, I learned that Amy Poehler directed the movie Moxie in 2019, where a high school girl sees her mom's zines (90's Riot Grrrl stuff), and starts her own zine. I haven't seen the movie, but the trailer makes it look like a zine-inspired feminist revolution takes place at her high school.
Anyhow, now thirty years into the internet age, as Web 2 is fighting Web 3, and people even I think are old still run way too many businesses and much of national politics, zines still have a place in the world. There will always be independent thinkers and writers, and all kinds of subcultures and niche groups. Zines are a good way to cover those scenes. And I, for one, love that.
Publishing a zine changed my life, mostly just by teaching me that I can have a good idea, and put it out in a way some people can check it out, tosee if the idea catches on. Some ideas do, and some don't. Zines were a really fringe thing when I made my first one, 39 years ago. Zines are always fringe, and always a way for DIY thinking to get out to a small audience. Actually publishing zines is a great way to begin to share ideas on all kinds of niche subjects, and zines play a role that blogs, websites, podcasts, and YouTube channels just can't play. While blog posts, podcasts, and YouTube videos are quickly forgotten, zines are treasured items. They get tossed into boxes, the backs of sock drawers, and other places, where they often get rediscovered months or years later.
One of my favorite magazines of the 1990's, the Asian pop culture publication Giant Robot, began as a Xerox zine. I bought a re-pop version of Issue #1, with a sleeping Sumo wrestler on the cover, at a zine convention in the 1990's. That first issue was an epic zine, and the beginning of a whole Asian culture movement and popularity trend. Giant Robot lives on now as a shop and art gallery.
To bring this full circle, I was one of the early zine publishers in the new sport of BMX freestyle, in the mid 1980's. San Jose Stylin' was listed as the top BMX freestyle zine in the U.S. in the August 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine, which also contained my first freelance article. Just for the record, Mat Hoffman's very first editorial photo was in that article. For real. Cool coincidence.
BMX freestyle was only a couple of years old as a competitive sport when I published my first zine. I was one of the early pioneers of BMX freestyle zines, and still love both BMX freestyle and zines, decades later. Zine publishing is one of the things BMX freestyle led me to, that I got into early, and learned a lot from. I lost my zine collection in 2008 (with everything else from my BMX life), but I'll keep putting out zines now and then well into the future. I got to watch zine culture grow and spread, and keep going even with the internet and billions of web pages. That's pretty cool.
Here are some other videos and an essay about zines...
Shout out to Brian Reed, though I forget the name of his zine, he's the one zine publisher from that era, that I traded zines with, and am still in contact with today.
I've been doing a lot of more in depth writing on a platform called Substack. Check it out:
Gallery 5043, the unused door of an abandoned storefront in North Hollywood, where I used to randomly put up my artwork for anyone passing by to check out (and steal), back in 2020-2022. The place finally got rented out, and it's a weed shop now.
The 43 thing in BMX started with the Curb Dogs in San Francisco in 1986. The number 43 just started popping up all kinds of places for them. I heard about it when the NorCal posse came down to Wizard Publications, and Karl Rothe asked me how my new job at the magazine was going. I said, "I just transcribed the Robert Peterson interview with Windy, it was like 43 pages long." He freaked, and they told me about the 43 thing. That's how I first heard about it. It kept growing in BMX, behind the scenes. Over many years, it became the "lucky number of BMX," or whatever you want to call it.
So today is April 3rd, and 4/3/2024. 43 Day. BMX day. Go ride.
Here's my 43 Pinterest board, in case you need to find the just right 43 to use today.
I've been doing a lot of deeper writing on a platform called Substack, check it out:
