Judging a book by its cover: skate edition

This one's for the guys at Exodus Skate shop here in Winston-Salem.  I went around promoting my art and handing out copies of a little drawing with my "Become" poem on it today.  This afternoon, fat, sketchy, smelly, and homeless, I walked into Exodus.  The guys behind the counter kinda mad-dogged me, wondering who this old sketchy-ass guy was, and why he was in their shop.  I made a joke about it, and they chuckled a bit.  So I gave them the poem and drawing (Chris Miller in a full pipe), and they thought my big Kelly Slater drawing was pretty cool.

I told them I worked at Vision Skateboards back in its heyday, but I doubt they believed me.  I'm the guy in white shorts and T-shirt in the background of this clip at :16, :26, :43, 1:35, and 1:40.  This is Ken Park's segment from the 1989 Vision video Barge at Will.  The location is Tony Hawk's Fallbrook house and ramp.  Tony wasn't there that day, but I wound up having lunch sitting in the back of a pick-up listening to Frank Hawk (Tony's dad) and Don Hoffman, (my boss and longtime skate industry guy) talking about the history or skateboarding.  Then Chris Miller showed up.  He dropped into the halfpipe and did a four foot high backside air all the way across the ramp first thing.  Pretty epic day.  I did actually work some, shooting video and Super 8 film.  It was one of my better days working at Unreel Productions, Vision's video company.

Sharpie art master Jessie Armand

When I first looked up Sharpie art online a few years ago, this black and white work by Jessie Armand was the coolest looking stuff out there.  At that time, I'd been doing my "scribble style" with Sharpies for a decade, but I didn't really do vary good drawings.  I had this cool shading technique, but hadn't figured the right kind of drawings to really take advantage of it.

I tried doing this kind of drawing a few times, but my shapes and doodles didn't look near as cool as this.  I stuck with my scribble style, which I realized is unique.  No one else in the world, as far as I've been able to find, shades with a scribble style like I do.  On the other hand, quite a few people have picked up Jessie's style, and have done art on Lamborghinis, motorcycles, walls, guitars, and other things that look pretty awesome.

So if you want a great black and white design on your car, hit up Jessie Armand.  If you want a cool picture of your favorite athlete or musician, hit me up.

Here's Jessie doing a Lambo:

Little man BIG message

This popped up on Facebook the other day.  It's become an instant favorite of mine.  I'm not 29, I'm 51, but I'm now in the midst of making the kind of commitment Peter Dinklage speaks of here.  There are several edits of from this 2012 commencement speech he gave.  This is my favorite. 

Well... that sucked

NSFW  Here's the nice, mellow, heartwarming song that popped into my head last night.

So... I'm currently Winston-Salem's Premiere Homeless Sharpie Artist.  That's the title I've claimed.  I really want to eliminate the "homeless" part as soon as possible.  I came to Winston nearly 2 months ago with $10 in my pocket and some art supplies, and not much more.  I've been homeless, and living in a tent while I work to promote and sell my artwork so I can make a decent living again.  All in all, things have been going well.  I have three drawings going up for sale on a wall of a local shop (details soon), and I've met many other people who like what I do.  Since my large drawings take about 25 hours to do, I need to charge quite a bit when I sell them.

Because of that, I spent yesterday doing a smaller drawing that I can make copies of and sell real cheap.  After that, I dodged the afternoon thunderstorms as best I could, and wound up heading into my campsite a little after dark, which I normally try to avoid.  Walking through the dark in an area known for copperheads isn't the smartest idea.  I stumbled up to my tent, drained the water that collected on the edges outside, fought with the zipper, and crawled inside.  I immediately noticed someone, or something, had gone through my stuff.  Not good.

As I moved around and checked things out, I noticed a 3 foot long gash in the side of the tent.  Obviously, that could let water, bugs, snakes, bears, aardvarks, and anything else in.  OK, we don't have aardvarks here, but you get the idea.  A little more looking around, and it was obvious that the damage was the work of a person or two. Adults, not kids like the last time.  My educated guess was that someone was trying to get me to move somewhere else.  Obviously, they don't know my history.  You can only terrorize someone who's afraid.  I've been attacked, harassed, and fucked with so many times, in so many ways, over so many years, that I'm just not intimidated anymore. 

So I pushed my garbage bag full of dirty clothes in front of the hole, blocking the bottom part of it, and went to sleep, hoping nothing bad crawled in.  This morning I patched up the hole with shipping tape.  Not pretty, but it'll do.  It was, quite obviously, a knife that cut the tent.  Lame.  Even crazier, on my walk out of the woods, there were three blue rubber gloves along the trail, all inside out.  Not sure why three.  There was probably another one somewhere.  OK, let's all think REALLY hard for a minute.  Who would mess with a homeless person's campsite and wear rubber gloves because they're worried about leaving finger prints?  Hmmmmmmm....  You probably had the same thought I had.

Just another day as a homeless guy working my butt off to make a living from my art and writing.  Today's another day, and I'm going off to keep working, doing the stuff I'm good at. 

6pm, same day- It later occurred to me that the gloves were probably used to go through my stuff, and had nothing to do with fingerprints.  I keep stuff in trash bags to keep everything from getting wet in the rain.  With the humidity here, things get pretty musty in the bags, and my dirty clothes are downright nasty.

My latest drawings: Johnny Cash and Kelly Slater

 Johnny Cash, The Man in Black.  This is the second Cash drawing I've done, the first is now on the wall of Deli on Main in Kernersville, NC.  Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24."

I did a drawing of pro surfer Karina Petroni doing a duck dive a while back, but I've been wanting to do a real surfing drawing.  I found this old pic of Kelly Slater to draw.  I'm not totally happy, but pretty stoked on it.  I definitely need to do more surf drawings.  Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24."  #sharpiesandshadows.

The best grape soda I ever drank

I hit the only surf shop in Winston-Salem area to see if anyone was interested in buying my Kelly Slater drawing.  They liked it, but my drawings are expensive.  Lesson: I need to make small copies of drawings people can actually afford. 

I headed to the bus stop, and downed the last of my water in my water bottle.  Then waited nearly an hour in the sweltering heat for the bus.  I got off the bus early, and headed half a mile to a church that I heard had a free meal on Tuesday nights.  By the time I got there, I was bead tired, my throat was bone dry, and it was insanely hot.  I sat in the shade for a couple of hours, not sure what time the meal was.  Finally a kid asked if I wanted something to drink.  His parents were doing something inside the church and he was outside with his friends.  I said, "Water or whatever would be great."  He went inside, and came out with an ice cold Fanta grape soda.  I've never been one to pick grape flavored stuff.  When offered a popsicle as a kid, I'd go with red or orange.  But that ice cold grape soda hit the spot in a way I couldn't believe.  Thanks kid.

More than hour later, a guy told me the free meal was on Wednesday nights.  Then he went in the church and hooked me up with water, Gatorade, and some snacks.  Thanks man.  Homelessness is tough.  But random people step up and help out at times, which is awesome.  I shared the snacks with a guy I know who was at the bus stop.  He got approved for "rapid re-housing"... after working at it for 17 months.  He's living in the woods waiting for the final inspection of his apartment.  He was stoked on the snacks.

The jobs picture right now in 2017

Here's economic development expert Richard Florida on the different groups of workers in today's society.

Why am I so interested in jobs and creating new businesses these days?  Here's why.

The types of workers in 2017 society:

The Creative Class (arts, entertainment, science, management, etc.)  are about 35% of the working population.  As a group, they make over 50% of the wages in the U.S.  Most are doing well.  These are the jobs least likely to be replaced by new technology.

 The manufacturing workers are only about 7% of today's workers.  When you add construction and transportation workers, it rises to about 20% of total workers.  Some make good money, most just make OK money.  Many of these jobs will definitely be replaced by technology in future years.

Agriculture only employs about 1% of workers in the U.S. these days.  Most don't make a lot of money.

Service workers make up about 45% of the current workforce.  Most of these jobs don't pay that well, and many of them leave workers in or near poverty.  Millions of people work two or more of these jobs.  Many of these jobs will also be replaced by new technology in the coming years.  This is where much of the once great American middle class now works.

If we want to keep this country strong, we will need TENS OF MILLIONS of new, good paying jobs in coming years.  The only viable way I see this happening is by millions of people starting their own businesses.  

Small batches from small companies: Skate industry in 2017

Trying to get an idea of where the bike and skate industries are right now, I ran into this Sean Mortimer article on small companies in the skateboard business.  If you're in the business of any action sports, this is worth a read. 

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Drawings getting shown and crazy taxi stories coming...

As many of you know, I just spent five years in a really toxic living situation.  I did that because I thought I might be able to get a small business going and get back to making a decent living again.  After three blitzes of job hunting, I couldn't find a job, even a lame one.  I just never heard back from businesses.  Too old?  Too fat?  Too crazy because I had been a taxi driver?  I don't know.

So about a year and a half ago, starting literally without a dime, I stepped up my artwork, and began to sell drawings.  I didn't sell them for huge amounts, but I did start selling them.  The bad part was that the place I was living in was in continual financial crisis, because I didn't handle the money.  So every time I made $50 or so, a "crisis" would be created that sucked up the money.  I was never able to get traction, reinvest money in my art, and get things going.  So at this point, my artwork is still a "hobby" and not a real business.

To leave that situation, I had to become homeless.  I've been there before, so that didn't worry me as much as it would most people.  Homelessness is by no means easy or fun, and on any given day I could be attacked and/or killed by cops, thugs, a black bear, stray dogs, or get bitten by a poisonous snake.  A homeless man here in Winston-Salem wound up in intensive care after a beating by young thugs a few months ago.  It can happen.  I've only run across one snake, and it was a little, tiny one.  Unfortunately it was in my tent.  But I was able to catch it in a little box and relocate it.  And the black bear spotted a few miles away didn't seem to come my way. 

What I wondered was if I could actually make the jump from homeless guy to working artist/writer while in Winston-Salem.  People here aren't used to those kinds of success stories.  In L.A., it happens all the time, it's actually a cliche' in the entertainment industry.  I once went from sleeping under a bridge to staying for free in a $2 million house in two weeks.  But there's a much bigger prejudice against homeless people here in North Carolina.  A lot of people honestly think that homeless people are being "punished by God," and therefore deserve to stay homeless.  I've run into that attitude over and over and over.

But not everyone thinks that.  In the sketchy 7 weeks I've been on the streets, I've been blogging and drawing non-stop.  And it's paying off.  Tomorrow I will drop off two of my drawings to be included in a local art show (details on where and when soon).  For a mid-sized Southern city, Winston-Salem has a really good art scene.  I'm working on becoming part of that scene.  I'm stoked that in 7 weeks of homelessness I've been able to do something that eluded me for five years while I had a roof over my head.

But I'm still homeless.  Many people look at it as a life sentence.  But homelessness, like pregnancy, doesn't last forever.  If I only sell seven of my original drawings (now $150 each), that's enough to rent a cheap motel room, start eating healthier, and be able to work many more hours a day.  But at this point, it would be hard to get that many orders because few people know who I am here, and my online friends who wanted drawings already have them. 

So I'm going to start writing and publishing my crazy stories from my years as a taxi driver.  Every time I share some of these stories with people, they tell me to publish them.  So I'm finally going to do that.  I'm starting with the sex-related taxi stories.  A couple of Facebook friends suggested that when I asked what subject to start with.  I'm going to do a good-sized zine, and add some goodies into the package, and sell them.  Each zine will be signed and numbered, and it will be a limited edition.  If you're interested in some funny and crazy reading, let me know on FB.  Details should be out tomorrow.

This IS NOT porn.  You can buy the 50 Shades trilogy and urban fiction at Wal-Mart, even here in NC.  None of my stories will be that graphic.  But they are weird, crazy, and often funny stories.  Hopefully with this zine and some drawing work, I'll be able to make the jump from living homeless to renting a cheap room and eating real food again.  We'll see. 

Journey of The White Bear 1990

In the late 80's, skater Christian Hosoi was known for his high airs and style, and always battling Tony Hawk, the technical vert trick master, for the win in vert contests.  Christian teamed up with Vision Skateboards in 1990 and did a company called Tuff Skts.  It didn't last that long, but it gave me a chance to shoot video of him and his crew for three days, and then edit a promo video.  The original promo was 7 minutes long, and had music from Bad Brains and Muddy Waters, two of Christian's favorites.  But the women in the Vision promotions department told me that it made them look like hoodlums.  So I edited it down to four minutes they approved of.  This little clip of that from Sk8-TV is the only part that survived.  Bummer.

I got a great education about video production at Unreel Productions.  But I didn't really like most of the videos they produced while I was there.  The weird thing about Unreel, was that it didn't have to make money.  We were basically going out and shooting all kinds of events, and every video would sell 3,000 copies or so because of all the shops that carried Vision.  But we didn't have a TV series contract like big production companies.  So we'd just shoot all this footage, and then months later, someone would say, "let's make this kind of video," and we'd go through the archives.

The reason that bugged me is because skateboarding and BMX freestyle were progressing like crazy, but our videos weren't on top of that progression.  Plus everything had to have a million Vision Street Wear clothes and logos in it.  So in early 1990, I got an S-VHS camera of my own, and I started shooting footage of my friends and riders that I knew.  I wanted to produce my own video of what riding was actually like.  Nearly every weekend, I went one place or another and shot whatever riders I could find that were up to something cool.

As fate would have it, the Vision empire was collapsing.  It just got too big too quick, it was micro-managed, and key people were bailing like rats on a sinking ship.  At one point, we were having two or three going away parties for good people every week.  So it wasn't completely surprising when there was a meeting in early 1990, and we were told that Unreel was being dissolved.  Don Hoffman, the head of Unreel, kept working as a freelancer.  I was still the lowest guy on the totem pole, which meant I was cheap and knew how to work most of the equipment.  So the woman just above me and I were moved to the Vision main office in Santa Ana.  She found a new job on a real TV show soon after.  From then on, I sat in an office with nothing to do, and read through all the computer files of my former co-workers, and watched videos all day.  That sounds great, but I was bored out of my mind.  So I quit around the first of July.

On my last day, one of the women in the promotions department (where my office was) asked me if I had any plans for the next few weeks.  I didn't.  "Do you want to drive the mini-ramp rig cross country on a little skate tour?" she asked.  Here's the funny part, one of my goals as a BMX freestyler was to go on a summer tour doing shows.  I never did it with a BMX team, but I jumped at the chance to drive/manage the skateboard tour.  The next Monday I hopped in the dually pick-up with a skater named Mark Oblow, hitched up the ramp trailer, and headed east towards Atlanta.

In a great bit of luck, it turned out to be over 100 degrees every single day, wherever we were.  On top of that, the blue Ford Vision dually was geared to pull trailers.  It chugged up hills, not even whining, while pulling the 24 foot ramp trailer.  But on the flats, it did 55 miles per hour.  Period.  Maybe 60 on a long downhill stretch.  In case you didn't know, the American West is huge.  It's ridiculous at 55 mph.

Mark and I left the hotel a couple hundred miles west of San Antonio on the morning of day 3.  We had to be in Atlanta the next evening.  We weren't going to make it.  On top of that, we had to stop in Houston and pick up a couple of 15-year-old skaters named Mike Crum and Chris Gentry.  As soon as we pulled away from the house, they asked if I could buy them cigarettes.  As the responsible "tour manager," I said, "No."  So I pulled over at the next 7-11 and made Oblow buy them cigarettes.

We headed east through Texas, and I wound up driving 24 hours straight to make it to Atlanta by Friday evening.  I finally let Oblow drive for three hours, so I could get some sleep.  But I couldn't sleep with him driving the rig.  So I took over for the last three hours.  27 hours of driving in 30 hours and I ended up by doing head nods while stuck in Atlanta's Friday night rush hour.  Don't ever do that.  It was stupid.  But we made it on time.

We met old school vert skater Buck Smith in Atlanta, and did a week of demos at Stone Mountain, and then headed back west, doing demos all the way to El Paso.  It wasn't the craziest tour ever, but it definitely had its moments.

After the tour, I started doing some work for a little surf video distributor called NSI video.  That fall, I finished my $5,000 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend.  The video had a lot of firsts in it.  The first handrail slide down steps by Keith Treanor.  The first ice pick handrail slide by John Povah.  The first mini ramps in a BMX video.  The first spine ramp in a BMX video.  The first 360 over a spine in a BMX video.  The first footage from the Nude Bowl (an empty pool out in the desert) in a BMX video.  I only made about $2,500 back, so it was a financial failure.  But every rider around saw the video, and it made it around the world to some extent.  So in that context, it was a success.  Here it is:
What I didn't realize at the time was that I was one of the pioneers of the "rider-made" video movement, which spread through BMX, skateboarding, and snowboarding in the 90's.  A handful of us riders, Eddie Roman, Mark Eaton, and myself in BMX freestyle, made our own videos the way WE wanted them to be.  Soon every little start-up company in action sports was doing the same thing.

Journey of the White Bear 1985 to 1989

This is one of the craziest bits of footage I shot, from the 2-Hip King of Dirt at Mission Trails in the spring 1991.  This clip is from the first S&M Bikes video, the ultra low-budget, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer.  There was no jump in BMX like the huge Death Jump at Mission Trails at the time, and in my opinion, was really the first mega ramp.  It was an epic day for BMX jumping.

In the last post, I gave an overview of my life as a kid, up to the time I was 19 and moved with my family to San Jose, California.  Here's stuff that I did and worked on after that

1985
-Moved to San Jose, California from Boise, Idaho in late August.  Started a BMX freestyle zine called San Jose Stylin' as a way to meet Bay Area riders.  It worked.  I did 11 self-published issues of the zine, paid for with my Pizza Hut job earnings.  I worked up to a free mailing list of about 120 people across the U.S..  If you don't know what a zine is (pronounced "zeen."), watch this.

1986
-I became the team manager of the Off The Wall BMX freestyle team, and hooked five or six NorCal amateurs up with the team.  The bikes were neon, Taiwanese made pieces of crap, and we all bailed on the team pretty quickly.  The company turned into Air-Uni and eventually Ozone, which had good bikes.
-In April, I got a surprise call from Andy Jenkins, the editor of FREESTYLIN' magazine, asking if I could write an article about the AFA Masters contest in Tulsa, Oklahoma that month.  I met then unknown riders Josh White, Joe Johnson, and Mat Hofman at that contest, and hung out with the Haro factory team all weekend.  Epic weekend for a BMX freestyle kid from Idaho.
-My article appeared in the July issue of FREESTYLIN', along with my blog being named the #1 freestyle blog in the country in another article.
-I appeared in this Bay Area TV segment (at 5:07, chasing my bike) focusing on the Golden Gate Park freestyle scene and Skyway factory pro Maurice Meyer.
-I got hired at Wizard Publications, publishers of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN'.  Andy Jenkins had been the editor of  FREESTYLIN' for two years, and made the push to hire me.  I worked there from August 1 to the end of December, when I was surprisingly laid off.  I became roommates with co-workers Craig "Gork" Barrette and Mark "Lew" Lewman.  I was really an uptight dork then, but the main reason I got fired is because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy, Andy and Lew's favorite band.  On the plus side, I leanred the basics of Xerox art from those guys.  A couple months later they hired a kid named Spike Jonze to fill my old job.  Really.  He fit in much better than me with that crew.  He's done pretty well for himself since, as well.

1987
- I spent the month of January unemployed and riding all day, every day with Craig Grasso, (in this clip at :24, 1:54, 2:36, 4:11, 4:34, 4:45, and 5:35) a damn good rider and a hilarious dude.
-I got hired at the American Freestyle Association (AFA) in late January to write, shoot photos, and edit their newsletter.  Went to work for Bob Morales, the guy in the red T-shirt in this clip.  Bob was the iconic young entrepreneur, he always had a million ideas and not enough money to pull them off.  I did a little bit of everything that year for $5 an hour.  Bob's the guy that turned BMX trick riding into the sport of BMX freestyle by holding first skatepark, and then flatland and ramp contests.
-Bob walked in one day in the late spring and asked if I wanted to make a TV commercial for the next contest.  With the help of Unreel Productions (the Vision Skateboards video company), I made a really bad commercial, and then produced six contest videos for the AFA.  That was the start of my video career.  A couple shots from those early (and pretty lame) videos wound up in this trailer (at 2:18 and 2:19) for the documentary, Joe Kid on a Stingray.  Vision Street Wear sponsored all the AFA contests, and they sent a video cameraman to shoot footage of each one.  So Bob sent me to Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, and they told me what to do, step by step.  I spent so much time at Unreel, that they hired me in December of 1987.  I didn't have a title, but I was what they call a production assistant in the TV/video world.  I spent most of my time making copies of tapes for people at Vision.  Like the two previous jobs, I just learned by doing.  Dave Alvarez, the amazing (and highly underpaid) video editor at Unreel taught me tons, as did the producers there.  I continued to ride my freestyle bike two or three hours every day in hopes of becoming a pro freestyler.

 
1987 to 1988

Led by producer Don Hoffman, I was basically the assistant to all 10 or so people at Unreel as they produced videos and TV shows like these: Sims Snowshredders, Vision Psycho Skate, Freestylin' Fanatics, Vision Skate Escape, Sims Snow Daze, BMX Extremes, Mondo Vision, and Red Hot Skate Rock.  You might recognize the guys in that last one.  We also did a whole bunch of trade show videos and commercials, like these:  Gonzo goes to New York,  VSW 1987, and Street Tough.

In 1987 I was still ridiculously shy and naive, and started dating a woman five years older than me who was a singer in a band.  I decided I would write her a hit song, so I started writing lyrics.  I soon realized a couple of things: 1) If you can't sing, writing songs is really writing poetry, and 2) poetry is a really cheap form of therapy.  I wrote dozens of really bad poems and threw most of them away.  When she dumped me in the spring of 1988, I was crushed, and I spent most of the night listening to Don McClean's "American Pie," and writing a poem called "Journey of The White Bear."  It was the first pretty good poem I ever wrote.  I kept writing poetry and not telling anyone.

1989
In early 1989, I got a call from pro rider/contest promoter Ron Wilkerson to edit 2-Hip contest season video.  I borrowed an S-VHS edit system from Unreel, and edited 2-Hip: The '88 Adventure as a side project.  It was later renamed 2-Hip BHIP.

I also became the staff cameraman for Unreel that year, which included getting sent to all the 2-Hip contests that year to shoot video.  At the first King of Vert contest, in Ontario, Canada, I was shooting video when this happened.   It was a really big deal in BMX freestyle.  You can see my footage of it at 14:43 in this clip.  At the Colorado Springs contest, you can see me in this clip.  I'm the left deck of the ramp, second guy from the far end, in a black and white shirt.  At 1:02 Mat Hoffman does a barspin disaster right in front of me.

By 1989, Vision's nemesis, Powell-Peralta, was ruling the skate video world with the Bones Brigade videos.  Don Hoffman and us at Unreel stepped up our game and put out Vision's Barge at Will video.  For once, I had some footage I shot in a video that the public saw.  I shot all the footage for the Mark Cernicky section, some of Kele Rosecrans' section, and a bit in the Joe Johnson and Ken Park sections.  We shot both of those sections at Tony Hawk's Fallbrook ramp.  I didn't get to meet Tony, but I had lunch with his dad, Frank Hawk, which was cool.

I showed up for work one morning, and one of the women in the promotions said, "Oh, today's the Tom Petty shoot."  "The what?" I asked.  I wound up going up to the valley side of the Hollywood Hills for the skateboard shoot for Tom Petty's "Freefallin'" video.  It was the first major music video to feature skateboarding, with Vision skaters Eric Nash, Joe Johnson, and Kele Rosecrans featured in it, and Miki Keller, the only woman there who could actually skate a ramp, is in the background.  She went on to be a pioneer in women's motocross.  As for me, I got to hang out, eat free food from the craft service table, and shoot behind the scenes footage.  That's about as easy as a day can get.  Good times.

Unreel tried to sell a series of action sports TV shows to ESPN that year (six years before the X-Games).  The reply from the suits at ESPN was, "Nobody wants to watch skateboarding on TV... and what the hell is snowboarding?"  Classic.  So Unreel syndicated the shows as the Sports on the Edge series, which was the first syndicated action sports series on TV.  

While Unreel Productions was trying to sell high quality action sports shows to ESPN, BMX pioneer and force of nature Scot Breithaupt reappeared on the scene as a TV show promoter.  His salesmanship powered through the ESPN brass, and he sold them a bicycle based TV series.  His production company, the aptly named L.M. (Last Minute) Productions, didn't have a crew, equipment or a place to edit.  So he came up with ideas, pulled crews together at the last minute, shot vide of different events, and quickly edited shows.  He rented the Unreel edit bay at night to do his editing.  I got the job of staying there at nights as they edited, and making sure Scot didn't "borrow" any Unreel footage (or equipment) for his shows.  As they finished editing a show one Sunday night, Scot was wondering what he was going to do for the next show, which needed to be at EPSN two weeks later.  I talked him into the idea of doing a street riding show.  It took me about 20 minutes to convince him that "street" was the new thing in freestyle, and somebody needed to put it on TV first. 

Scot and I worked together to put on a street contest the next Saturday.  I got about 50 good riders to show up, and Scot got ramps, and old car, and a parking lot to hold it.  The "Huntington Beach Street Scene" turned out to be the first made-for TV bike street contest ever.  Eight days after the event the show was completely edited, and shipped off to ESPN.  For anyone who's ever worked in TV production, the idea to think up a show and have it at the network two weeks later is ridiculous.  We did it anyhow.  The show aired a few days later, and got the highest ratings of any of Scot's series.  Unfortunately, the show never made it on You Tube, and the master tape is probably in a garage somewhere.  Scot, now known as the Godfather of BMX, passed away a couple of years ago.

 

Who the heck is Steve Emig?

This was my favorite place that we lived in Ohio.  It's called Holiday Lakes, outside Willard.  We lived there for about 2 1/2 years, 6th through 8th grades for me.  I think this video was uploaded by one of my sister's friends from back then.

I was born in 1966 outside Akron, Ohio, and my family moved around small towns and rural areas of Ohio as I grew up.  My dad was a band geek as a kid, playing clarinet and saxophone.  He became an avid car guy and target shooter in his younger years.  Among his cars, he owned three of these babies. My dad was a draftsman, so he actually drew pictures for a living.  He taught me how to draw Army Jeeps when I was 8, and later how to draw isometric and oblique pictures.

My mom listened to country music all day long and liked to do crafts.  Ceramics was the one she was best at.  I have a sister, Cheri, five years younger than me.  My family was more dysfunctional than most, and less dysfunctional than some.  We moved to a new house or apartment nearly every year.

I was pudgy, smart, bad at sports, I had buck teeth as a kid, couldn't say my "R's" or "S's" well.  Yeah, I was a dork who got picked on a lot.  When things got bad, I'd usually run off to the woods and wander around on my own for hours.  John Denver's "Country Boy" was my theme song as a kid.

At age 10 in Willard, Ohio, a kid showed me a skateboard for the first time.  It was handmade by his dad out of pressed aluminum with steel roller skate wheels.  He showed me how to ride it.  I rolled about a foot on his rock sidewalk, hit a pebble, fell down, scraped my knee, and said, "Skateboards are dumb."  I changed my mind a few months later, and saved my allowance money for nine months to buy a green, plastic Scamp skateboard at Western Auto.  It cost me $11.92.  A couple years later, I bought a homemade board for $2 at a flea market.  It was surfboard shaped, made out of a 3/4" piece of oak, and had 2 1/2" wide GT wheels.  I rockwalked that board until about 1988.

When I was in 8th grade, in the late 70's, my dad's company was having troubles, and he found a new job... in Carlsbad, New Mexico.  That was a huge culture shock for a small town kid from the Midwest.  I went from this to this overnight.  It was a rough year.  But then that company had problems, and we moved to Boise, Idaho.  Though we moved to a new house every year, I did manage to go to Boise High School for the full three years and graduate. My plan was to go to college and become a wildlife biologist.  But I didn't have money to start college, so I "took a year off" and ended up never going at all.

At the end of my sophomore year of high school, in June of 1982, we moved to a trailer park in the "desert" outside of Boise.  The plan was for my parents to save money for a year and then buy a house.  Officially, the park didn't have a name, but all the street names started with the word "blue."  So everyone called it Blue Valley.  There was nothing but miles of sagebrush in three directions.  The other direction was bounded by I-84.  It was really hot in the summer, so the dozen of so junior high and high school kids in the park would watch TV all afternoon, and then we'd come out in the early evening after supper.  Like kids everywhere, we'd play basketball, whiffle ball, football, or just talk smack to each other.  But all us guys had cheap BMX bikes, and we'd also go out to this little area of jumps and berms some motocross rider had built a couple of years before.  As the summer progressed, we spent more time riding our bikes and less time playing other games.  BMX became our thing. In October of that year, someone heard that there was a BMX track near downtown Boise.  We found it, and raced the last race of the year.  The track was at the edge of the foothills, in a drained sewer pond.  It didn't look like much to most people, but it was amazing to us.  Despite our cheap bikes and lack of actual racing experience, we all won trophies.  Our daily competition with each other paid off, and we surprised and pissed off the local racers by doing so well.  "Where'd all these fast kids on lame bikes come from?" they asked all day.  BMX became our thing.

I raced BMX for all of 1983, and helped re-design the Boise track, and then designed a new track.  But the emerging sport of BMX freestyle, doing tricks on BMX bikes, was way more interesting to me.  I joined the only BMX trick team around, and did shows with Justin Bickel and Wayne Moore.  For once, I was actually good at a sport.  OK, hardly anybody else actually did that sport, but I didn't care.  Much to my parents' dismay, I spent hours a day learning tricks on my little BMX bike.  Without realizing it, my life turned in a totally different direction.  The idea to be a wildlife biologist faded, and I worked at restaurants and rode my bike, and not much else.

The year after I graduated high school, 1985, my dad got a job in San Jose, California.  I finished my summer job in Boise, managing a small amusement park called the Boise Fun Spot.  In August, I packed up my ugly, brown 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose to live with my family. 

While my year in Carlsbad, New Mexico was a tough one, I came to love the desert and the wide open spaces of the West.  I also made several trips to Carlsbad Caverns, a truly amazing and beautiful cave system.  When I lived there ('80-81), another cave, called The New Cave then, was just beginning to be explored.  Now it's called Lechuguilla Cave, and is one of the largest cave systems in the world now, bigger than the original caverns that made the area famous.

Become poem from about '97

Become

You must risk

If you're to succeed

For when your grow

Sometimes you bleed

Each must glance

Over the fence

For the only cage

Is ignorance

Each Jedi knight

And Shaolin monk

Evolved from

A lowly punk

Don't get caught

In the world's throws

We must become

Our own heroes

-The White Bear

The Star Wars drawings

 I was 11 when the original Star Wars movie came out, and I liked it just like most other kids.  I waited years for the second and third movies, and became a fan of the original trilogy characters especially.  In my bedroom/studio where I drew most of these, I had a whole bunch of cool photos taped up on the wall, including this high contrast photo of Yoda.  I'd been thinking about drawing it for months, and finally got around to it late in 2016.  I drew that one just for me, to hang on my wall.  I put a whole bunch of Yoda's quotes in the purple, which are actually harder to see in real life.  I also tried to figure a way to draw The Force.  I blended other colors around the outside to kind of give that impression.

 Once I drew the Yoda drawing, I started thinking of doing other Star Wars characters, and picked this photo of Princess Leia to draw.  In another weird quirk of fate, I was in the middle of drawing this when Carrie Fisher get sick, went to the hospital, and then died.  That was beyond weird, surreal, really.  I was watching lots of interviews of her as I drew it, and her one woman show, Wishful Drinking.  In the upper right hand part of the drawing, I put some of her quotes.

With Yoda and Leia drawn, I found a picture of Darth Vader, and drew that one, too.  Instead of quotes in the background, I put a bunch of negative stuff that we hear in everyday life that sums up The Dark Side of humanity.  In the bottom photo, I have the three drawings hung up, and I'm toasting them with my R2D2 fliptop mug.  I scored that great little treasure at Goodwill for a dollar.  As soon as I was done with these, somebody wanted them, and they're now living on the wall of a beach house in Illinois.

Janis Joplin

I always loved singer Johnny Cash as a kid, and drew a pic of him when I started drawing musicians.  When I got interviewed about my art for the local Kernersville (NC) newspaper, the Johnny Cash drawing was included in the article.  Not long after, I showed it to Jo, the owner of Deli on Main, a great little sandwich shop on old Main street in Kernersville.  I traded some of Jo's great food for that drawing, and Johnny Cash is now hanging on the wall of the deli.  A couple weeks later, Jo asked if I could do a Janis Joplin drawing for her.  I picked this classic, live, singing shot.  I spent quite a while looking at the old posters of her shows, and I tried to put a background in that would fit in with those classic posters. 

Like all my musician drawings, I listened to her music the whole time I was drawing this.  It helps me kind of get the feel and vibe of who I'm drawing.  I've been a big fan of Janis forever, and wound up stoked on this drawing.  Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24."

Bruce Lee

A year and a half ago, after not being able to find a job anywhere, I decided to step up my artwork and start making money selling drawings.  I spent a couple hours on the computer looking for stuff that I really liked, art that I would want to put on my wall.  I love graffiti and street art, and was surprised how many cool stencils I found.  So for my first drawing to step things up, I drew a high contrast face shot of Bruce Lee. 

He was my first hero as a kid in the early 70's, and I didn't even see his movies for years.  But my friend's older brother had the poster of Bruce from Enter the Dragon with the scars on his face and chest.  All us little kids in the neighborhood wanted to be Bruce Lee.  So as my drawing skills improved, I took my shot at drawing that epic poster of my childhood, this image of Bruce Lee. 

In many cases, as you age, you learn things about your childhood heroes that make them lose their luster.  Bruce Lee was just the opposite.  I learned later that he was not only a martial arts movie star, but he actually was an amazing fighter.  He was also insanely fit.  He was also a student of philosophy, both Eastern and Western.  He created his own martial art genre, Jeet Kun Do.  And he wrote, starred in, produced, and directed movies.  Pretty amazing guy.  This drawing landed with a good friend in Southern California.  Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24."

Karina Petroni duck dive

This is a pretty crappy photo, I mean worse than most of the other crappy photos of my drawings.  But this drawing is halfway across the country now, so it'll have to do.  I'd been wanting to try a surfing picture for a while, as well as a good looking woman.  So I looked up pro surfer Karina Petroni, and found this cool pic of her doing a duck dive.  For all you non-surfers out there, a "duck dive" is what surfers do when they're paddling out and have to go by a wave coming in.  Ducks to the same thing, hence the name.

So... why Karina Petroni?  Because one year when I was driving a taxi in Huntington Beach during the huge U.S. Open contest, I had Karina and some of her friends in my taxi for a couple of rides.  She not only got second in the contest, but she was just a really cool chick, and damn cute as well.  So when I went looking for a female surfer shot, Karina popped into my head.  Oddly, I couldn't find a really good surf photo of her that suited my needs.  But I loved this duck dive.

This was my first attempt at doing a surf drawing, and it's not too bad.  I wasn't totally happy with the whitewater at the top.  But I love all the different shades of blue and green in it.  As fate would have it, I just finished my second surf drawing a couple of hours ago.  It's an old shot of Kelly Slater in a small tube.  In my years in the action sports world, I realized there are two sports that make nearly every photo look amazing: surfing and rock climbing.  I definitely need to draw more surf pics in the future.

So what does a pro surfer do when not on the pro tour?  Something like this.

The Ramones

 When I first moved to Huntington Beach in 1987, I met a BMX freestyler at the pier named Mike. Over the course of the next couple years he started introducing me to the punk and underground music I'd largely missed until then.  He was a huge fan of the Ramones.  We actually met Joey Ramone one night at the lunch truck outside a club called Scream.  Before long, I had Ramones Mania in my Walkman in my Vision Street Wear hip sack as I rode night after night.  So when I started drawing pictures of musicians, doing a couple Ramones pics was inevitable.

Both are Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24".

BMX freestyle legends

 I come from the world of BMX freestyle in the 1980's and 1990's.  I stumbled into the industry thanks to a zine I published, so I got to know all these guys over the years.  Ron Wilkerson (above) was a top pro freestyler for Haro Bikes for years.  He invented a lot of lip tricks on vert, and can ride anything.  He also put on the 2-Hip King of Vert Series and the 2-Hip Meet the Street series of contests, as well as starting two bike companies, Wilkerson Airlines in the 90's, and 2-Hip Bikes which is still going today.  He's one of the most influential freestylers ever.

The middle drawing is an unfinished one of Eddie Roman.  Eddie rode for Skyway bikes, could ride flatland, ramps, and street, and made several of the most influential BMX videos ever.  He was one of the lead guys as street riding turned into its own genre in the late 80's.

The bottom drawing is another San Diego street legend, Vic Murphy.  This one-footed tabletop jump was off of a curb cut.  You know those little bumps at the edge of a driveway?  Vic hit one of those and blasted this super stylish jump, which is one of the great street riding photos of the early days.  I think it's a Spike Jonze photo, from his days at FREESTYLIN' magazine.  Normally I always draw the backgrounds in my drawings.  But this one of Vic just seemed better against the white paper.  I really dig this drawing, it's one of the favorites I've done.

Dave Vanderspek GPV drawing

 Dave Vanderspek was a pioneer BMX freestyler and skateboarder from San Francisco in the 1980's.  I work from photos on the drawings I do now, and this is from the best photo I've ever shot.  In the mid-80's, BMXers started putting old bike parts together with no pedals, and bombing down hills powered by gravity alone.  These bikes were called Gravity Powered Vehicles, of GPV's.  At a GPV race outside Palm Springs, California in the summer of 1987, I shot the panning shot of Dave Vanderspek below.  The crazy thing was, it was only the second roll I'd ever shot trying panning shots where you blur the background.  The stars aligned that day, and I got this great shot of Vander, a favorite of the guys at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, where I worked briefly.  This photo ran in both magazines, and in a special issue called Homeboy. 

When I started drawing pics of old school BMX photos, I knew I had to draw my Vander photo.  Yeah, the photo's black and white, but there's a quick shot of Dave in this video (at 7:25), so I was able to get the colors for the pic.  Dave died in a bizarre way at age 24, but even so, he was one of the most influential BMX freestylers of the early years of the sport.  R.I.P. Dave.  43.

Cleveland Cavaliers drawings

 I was born in Barberton, Ohio, just outside of Akron, where Lebron James was born.  I'm not a huge pro basketball fan, but I had some friends in that area when the Cavs won the championship, so I drew a couple of these.  Nobody wanted to buy them.  So... if you know a diehard Cavaliers fan...

Carolina Panther drawings

 Here's Cam Newton doing his Superman thing.  I often put words in the pics, a bunch of Cam's stats in this case on the left.

I did this one as the Carolina Panthers were heading to the Superbowl the year before last.

The Birth of my Sharpie "Scribble Style"

When I first heard of the idea of a Doodle Wall in 2002, it was much more random than this.  But this time lapse gives a quick look at the idea.

It was 2002, and I was renting this tiny room that a Mexican family built on the side of their house in Garden Grove, California.  Basically, they would just rent it out cheap to young Mexican guys new to the country.  But I worked with the dad of the family, and when I got booted from my old place, he said I could move in.  It was dark, and felt like a cave.  One day on MTV's House of Style with Cindy Crawford, I saw a segment about making a doodle wall.  The idea was to buy a roll of butcher paper, tape it up to a wall, and have you and your friends just randomly doodle on it.

So I had the idea of drawing a mural on the wall.  I wanted it to be like I was sitting in a cave, looking out at a sunset.  I've never been a painter, so I bought a cheap pack of 12 markers, got a big roll of paper, taped it up on the wall, and started drawing.  It completely sucked.  The marker colors just weren't cutting it.  So I started making big collages of photos cut out of my old BMX, skateboard, and rock climbing magazines.  In between the photos I would experiment with different kinds of doodles, trying to find a good way to shade with markers.   I ended up getting booted out by the Mexican family, and put all my stuff in storage.  So I stopped drawing.

In late 2003, I cleared up a problem with the DMV, got my driver's license back, and went back to taxi driving.  I lived in my taxi, figuring I could save up enough to rent a room in a few months.  But the taxi company took out the dispatch radios and put in a computer dispatch system.  That completely screwed up the business, and I lived in my cab, worked 70 to 100 hours a week, and scraped by for over two years.

I was burned out, really fat, and hating life.  At that point, a cab driver named Richard offered me a different deal.  He had a little indie art gallery housed in an industrial unit in Anaheim.  He said I could live in the gallery for $50 a week, and drive his taxi on the weekends.  I took the deal, and suddenly I was sleeping on a couch in a big room whose walls were covered with art by Orange County artists.  On the weekends, the gallery was open, and local bands played.  But it was quiet during the week.  Most of the time it was just me, a cat named P.A., and her six kittens.  So I became the janitor/kitten wrangler and artist in the gallery.  In the crazy years of full time taxi driving, I totally gave up on doing anything creative.  I just struggled to make $600 a week to pay the taxi company for the cab, $300 a week to buy gas, and food money for me.  On my second night in the gallery, I drew a little picture.  I just kept drawing, making big drawing with markers, taking up where I'd left off 2 1/2 years earlier.  One day while drawing a tree, I scribbled a bunch of colors over each other, and it looked pretty cool.  I kept playing with the idea, and my "scribble style" of shading with Sharpie markers was born.

Here's a later clip of the AAA Electra 99 Gallery (and museum), hosted by founder Richard Johnson, where my creativity was reborn in 2005. 
AAA Electra 99 was so far underground in 2002, you needed spelunking gear to find it.  That's part of what made it great.

Art is an industry...no, really, it is

These public paintings on Trade Street in downtown Winston-Salem art part of what anybody wandering through will see.  From what the old timers tell me, this street that once served the tobacco trade turned into an art district when downtown emptied out years ago and rents dropped.  I tried to find a good clip of Greensboro's art scene, but for some reason, no one around here seems to do much promotion on YouTube.

This article in the Greensboro News & Record, reporting a study by Americans for the Arts, states that in 2015, the economic impact of Arts and Culture in Guilford County was $162.2 million, which supports the equivalent of 5,963 full time jobs.  In the state of North Carolina,  Arts and Culture is a $2.1 BILLION industry.  Nationwide the economic impact of Arts is $166 billion.  Billion with a "B."  It's not about selling out, but people spend a lot of money on concerts, plays, and other forms of the arts.  But the mindset of most people is still, "stop goofing around and GET A REAL JOB!"

Creative work CAN be a job, there is an series of industries supporting it, and those industries are going to grow in the future, unlike textiles and furniture making in this area.  Wake up and smell the 21st century people, good ideas are the best commodities now.

Two maps that tell the story

You don't even need to play this clip, unless like to listen to President Trump talk.  You know this map, we all saw it election night.  But I want you to look at it in a different light.  The massive red areas are the parts of the country that voted for Donald Trump.  He won the electoral college with those votes.  Visually, the red of the Republican voters areas completely dominate.  But all those little blue spots are not only the places that voted for Hillary Clinton, they are population centers that gave Hillary nearly 3 million more actual votes than Trump.  So this map not only shows where the voters are located, it shows that over half the people who voted (which was only about 40% of Americans) live.  The little blue areas are where over half the people live.

Now, take a look at this map that shows where the highest incomes are in the U.S..   It's mostly the same places that voted for Hillary.  The maps are nearly identical.  Most of the higher incomes (meaning business owners and high income jobs) are in the bigger cities that voted Democrat.  Most of the high tech companies, old and new, are also in those urban areas.  Most of the innovation that leads to new products, businesses, and even new industries are also in those small blue areas.  Most of the U.S. economy is in those small blue areas.

What the comparison of these two maps really shows is that the huge areas of the country in red can't create high numbers of good jobs in the tech-enabled 21st century.  Much of the "red" part of the country are either struggling, or in full-on decline after the Industrial Age fizzled out.  I don't care who you voted for, if we want the U.S. to thrive, we need to get the people in the red states coming up with new ideas for businesses in the future to replace the millions of jobs lost to outsourcing, and the millions more lost to new technology. 

I've written about the Retail Apocalypse several times, and no one has made a good map of all the 4,000+ stores closing this year.  But there is a map of the Sear's/Kmart stores closing, and most of those are in the small cities, towns and rural areas east of the Mississippi.  In other words, the red areas in the East are taking the biggest hits and losing lots of retail jobs now. 

To re-strengthen America's economy, we need highly creative people in the red areas to step up their game, think up new ideas, new businesses, and even new industries to kick start the lagging economies in those areas.  Now you know.  Tell somebody else.