Welcome to Level 50 Tony Hawk

Skateboarding legend Tony Hawk decided to land 50 of his original tricks in celebrating of his 50th birthday.  You know what that means.  Yeah, he has really good health insurance.  Freakin' amazing stuff.  Go back and watch the 720 again. Watch the ending.

My 50th birthday was not this cool.  Yet, oddly, I was really stoked to hit 50 for some reason.  That was almost two years ago, I'm creeping up on 52 right now.  I've never met Tony Hawk.  But in the action sports world, "meet" means actually having him knowing who I am at some point, that's what I've never done.  But I was in the same realm as him over the years.  Here's a few of my stories about Tony Hawk.

I first heard of Tony Hawk in a BMX Plus article about a BMX skatepark contest at the Del Mar skatepark keyhole bowl.  They added a sequence of some local skater kid doing a 540 in the bowl.  That kid was Tony Hawk, and that was probably in 1984.

When I moved to Southern California in 1986 for the job at Wizard Publications, my new roommates/workmates, Gork and Lew, had a VHS copy of the second Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade video, Future Primitive.  I used to watch that video every Saturday morning and every Sunday morning and then go on solo street riding sessions all day.  That's where I first saw a bunch of Tony Hawk footage.   Tony does a 720 in the intro of the video. That was 1985.

When I worked at Unreel Productions, Vision sponsored the NSA contests, and I was the guy who made VHS dubs of all the raw footage that came in.  At that point, as a BMX guy who hung out mostly with skaters, we were still mostly focused on getting ready and skating /riding in contests.  But deep down, it was just fun, we new there was another reason we kept doing it, but I never heard anybody put a name on that reason.  In a quick interview by our cameraman at some contest, Tony was asked what skateboarding was all about.  "Progression, it's all about progression," was his answer.  It suddenly clicked to me.  Yes, we practice for contests because that's how you play the sponsorship game and that means something to family and outsiders.  But the continual progression was why we really did it.  I never forgot that.

Getting ready for the huge (at the time) NSA finals in 1989, aka Skate Escape, Tony Hawk came by Unreel to share ideas on what would make the contest better.  I came back from lunch one day, saw his blue car in the parking lot, and got all stoked, "I'm gonna get to meet Tony Hawk, finally."  I saw him walk by with Don Hoffman and the other guys, but I was the lowly "Dub Guy" at Unreel, so I wasn't cool enough to be in the meeting, and definitely not cool enough to get introduced to him.

Another time that year, I got to go with Don Hoffman to Tony's Fallbrook house to shoot video  of both Ken Park and Tony's roommate at the time Joe Johnson (the skater, not the BMXer).  Both times, Tony was off doing demos somewhere.  You can see me in the back ground of the Ken Park's section (in all white at :17, :26, :42, 1:34, 1;41) of Barge at Will, a few times.  If that music in the second half of Ken's section sounds familiar to you BMXers, it's because that's "No More Cheap Talk" by The Stain, which I used as intro music in The Ultimate Weekend.

That was a really cool day, because Frank, Tony's dad was there, and he had me run to buy us all sandwiches and drinks at some little liquor store nearby.  Then I sat in the bed of his pick-up as he and Don Hoffman sat on the tailgate talking about "the old days," of skateboarding.  That was one of those epic moments to just shut my mouth and listen to these two guys who'd seen it all before.

Sometime in the early 1990's, H.B. local Brian Jordan of J'Lofty hired me to make a video promo for the Action Sports Retailer trade show.  I managed to get to the deck of the demo vert ramp to shoot some photos.  It was mostly skaters on it at that point.  Just a big ol' jam session.  As luck would have it, Tony Hawk popped out right next to me at one point.  In the bike skate world, formal introductions are all that important, so I wasn't going to just act like a fan and introduce myself in the middle of a session.  So I stood there next to Tony watching guys skate.  Some newcomer to the scene, a kid named Bucky Lasek, dropped in and started to skate.  I'd never heard of the kid before.  That kid was Bucky Lasek, and on one run he did a backside 360 ollie right in front of Tony and me.  I thought that was amazing, I'd never seen anyone do that before.  It turned out to be far more amazing than I thought, because Tony Hawk started freaked when Bucky did it, and started slamming his trucks on the coping in appreciation.  Bucky does a backside 360 ollie in this video at :25. 

Oh, and then there was the time I nabbed a press pass to the 1999 X-Games.  I ran into Maurice Meyer, who I hadn't seen for years, as BMX vert practice was ending.  We started talking, and the skate best trick contest started at the skate ramp 100 feet away.  So we walked over there and kept talking.  By some weird bit of luck,  we saw this happen.  We were standing right behind the rows of chairs 20 feet from the side of the ramp.  We could see the look in Tony's eyes after the 3rd or 4th try as he walked off the ramp.  We realized he was either going to land it, or go to the hospital from trying.  As luck would have it, I had my Sony Digital 8 camera in my hand... with a dead battery.  I'm kind of glad, though.  Because I just stood there and watched history take place, soaking it in.  That's pretty cool.

Maurice ran out with the guys to congratulate Tony on the ramp.  At 6:04, you can see him in a white hoodie with sunglasses, right behind Tony.  I stayed where I was and just watched.  That was a moment to always remember. 

The Value of Murals by Eric Schmiel

With December's First Friday a couple days away, I'm checking out YouTube for videos of and about art here in Richmond.  Much like Winston-Salem, NC, where I last lived, there's not a lot.  But there's some.  Much of that has to do with Richmond's murals and annual street art festival.  There are dozens of murals here, maybe hundreds, and most seem to have been made 4-7 years ago.  These murals were the first thing that made me think, "Maybe I'll stick around here a while," when I landed here sort of accidentally (or was it FATE?) back in August.  The big and spread out art scenes and BMX scene (where I got my start in creative work in the 80's) here drew me in more.  But it started by seeing all kinds of murals while riding the buses around.

Looking through the online videos, I stumbled upon this friendly sounding guy dropping some cool thoughts about the whole concept of murals.  So I deemed it worth a share.  Check it out. 

RVA Street Art Festival 2013

Murals, murals everywhere.  That started to dawn on me after I landed here in Richmond in August. As I wandered around on buses, I just kept seeing murals, and that's the thing that first made me think I might want ot stay here a while.  Here's a cool time lapse video of the 2013 RVA Street Art Festival. 

For those of you outside this area, basically everyone who checks out my blog, "RVA" is the official, or at least publicly accepted unofficial abbreviation for Richmond, VA.  It's on big signs and stickers and car window stickers everywhere.

Graff writer/artist Pose at RVA Street Art Festival in 2012

I still haven't made it out to this spot yet.  But here's Pose, and a couple others on the periphery, putting up pieces in 2012.  The surge in murals here in Richmond seemed to be around 2010-2013, something like that.  I still don't have a real good feel on what's happening in the art scenes here now.  I've been busy doing my own thing, and just surviving.  Cool pieces, though.  #RVAart

Creative Life: 11/27/2018

One of my doodle drawings I left on the wall of where I was staying in North Carolina.  D.I.Y. from way back.

Being homeless at the current time, I have a few more challenges than most people.  Which is fine, that's the nature of things.  I bailed form a fucked up situation in NC, I landed here in Richmond by accident, maybe fate, and there's a lot of art and a cool BMX scene here.  So I'm working on stabilizing my life, and getting back to selling art.   I landed here the beginning of August, in a strange city, where I didn't know anyone, with about $3 in my pocket.  It's been been tough to survive, but for the first time in nearly two decades, I don't feel like I'm walking into a 75mph headwind.  Getting back on track FINALLY feels possible.

One thing that sucks when you're homeless is holidays.  Most people look forward to them, because they may be hectic, but there's good times to be had.  I can't wait til they're over.  I woke up early Thanksgiving morning, it was 30 degrees out, and I walked to the local McDonald's where I usually start my day, eat breakfast, and do my morning blogging and social media that helps me sell art.  It was closed.  I was broke.  There was no place to go that I knew of and could afford.

One of the hundreds of things that average people don't understand about the homeless situation is that homeless people don't go to fast food places to eat breakfast or lunch.  For the price of my sausage biscuit and Diet Coke (yeah, I know, Breakfast of Non-Champions), I'm not just eating breakfast.  I'm renting heat, I'm renting a place to sit down legally, I'm renting the use of a bathroom, I'm renting wifi to be able to work, I'm renting a place to draw for a while.  When I saw McDonald's closed, all of those things disappeared.  Luckily, Hardee's (that's Carl's Jr. on the East Coast for those in Cali), was open for the morning.  I cussed out the entire neighborhood in frustration, vented thoroughly, relaxed, and went to Hardee's.

There was a free Thanksgiving meal I heard about at the convention center downtown.  The Pulse bus down Broad (kind of like a light rail route, but with buses, pretty cool idea) was free for those going for the free meal.  So I went downtown, carrying all my belongings like I always do (until I can rent a storage unit or get a room), and entered a big room filled with the Riff Raff of Richmond.  Pretty sure they had a few police in plain clothes to make sure everything stayed chill, which it did.

I didn't go for the meal, really.  Homeless people do things for reasons most people don't understand.  I went to the meal to get out of the cold for 2 or 3 hours.  That's all I really cared about.  I almost just sat in one of the rocking chairs in the lobby and blew off the meal. 

Everything is closed on Thanksgiving, which is fucking stupid.  Homeless people aren't the only ones who need services on holidays.  Police, firefighters, garbagemen (and women?), taxi/Uber/Lyft drivers, bus drivers, EMS, doctors, truck drivers, and plenty of others have to work.  Those people need to eat breakfast and lunch, drivers need to take restroom breaks, most people need morning coffee.

It's the 21st century people, McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's Hardee's/Carl's Jr., Starbucks, gas stations, convenience stores, and drug stores should be open, full service hours, 365 days a year. Period. "What about the employees?" many of you are asking?  What about them?  If you want Thanksgiving day off, work at Chick Fil-A, or get a better job.  Managers should schedule so most people get most of Thanksgiving Day off.  But stay open, people depend on you, and let the people who hate their families get some freakin' overtime.  That's what I always did when younger.

We all had to wait, standing in a huge line, for an hour or so at the free dinner.  There are a disproportionate number of people with health issues in that crowd, some chairs in the waiting line are would be a good idea next year.  Some idiots jumped the line, probably the same ones who did that in grade school.  But we all got to eat, it was a really nice dinner, so thank you volunteers.

The family who were the hosts at my table were cool.  I sat next to the woman, who asked about 3 million questions, but was very warm and friendly.  We all got a goodie bag to take with us.  And bananas.  There were bananas everywhere for some reason.  I took one.  One guy at my table grabbed 3 or 4 and about 6 or 8 cans of soda.  Homeless people, many of them, anyhow, do that.

I walked back to the bus stop, it was still chilly, but not super cold.  I looked through the goodie bag, grabbed 3 or 4 things I could use, and gave the rest, still in the bag, to another homeless guy standing at the bus stop.  I can't afford to have to carry useless stuff around.  I have enough of my own.  That's another thing most people don't understand about the homeless.  Every "gift," no matter how well intentioned, is dead weight we have to physically carry.  That's why we dig through goodie bags and leave most of it behind.

Anyhow, I spent much of Thanksgiving day cold, because the places I rely on, were closed.  That part sucked.

Black Friday, in the shopping sense, is also meaningless when you're homeless.  I'm far from an average homeless person, I just want to work all day.  And the holiday weekend fucked that all up.  On Friday, the library was closed.  I was going to go somewhere to sell some art prints, I finally had some money from an art commission to make some prints.  That's something I'd been wanting to do for MONTHS.  I stopped by a gallery that has some of my work on the wall.  I was told the guy wanted to see me later.  So I wasted more money going to a place to work for an hour, came back, and he didn't have anything important to tell me.  I might sell one more piece this week... MAYBE.  Maybe not.  But I never got to the place to sell my prints.  So I was low on money.  When the normal places I hang out are closed, I have to spend more money to rent heat, a bathroom, and a place to sit.

Saturday, it rained all day.  A cold, miserable rain, it was 45-50 degrees out.  I had to go out in it to scrounge up money to get through the day.  I got totally soaked, and basically had to stay wet, and cold, all day.  Late in the day, when the rain was ending, I went to a laundromat to dry out my clothes.  If I had done it earlier, I would have got all wet again when I left, and would have had to spend more money to dry out again.

Sunday was beautiful and warm.  And I was completely burnt out and had no energy.  I got some writing done and  worked on a drawing.  But I didn't get out to sell any prints.  So the Thanksgiving weekend, by and large, was a pain in my ass, and I didn't get near enough done.  But now things are back to normal schedule for a while, and the First Friday Gallery Art Walk is this week, so I need to gear up and promote my stuff.

So that's why holidaze suck when you're a homeless artist.  OK, back to work.  I'm going to post some Richmond area art videos ahead of First Friday, and do a lot more art-related posts in general from now on.  Onward.

Even Jim Cramer thinks it's a bear market now

It's the Monday morning after Thanksgiving weekend, and CNBC show host, analyst, and morning commentator, Jim Cramer, is now calling this fall's stock drops a bear market in this clip.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 350 points out of the gate.  But Cramer sees it dropping back within a few days.  How does he really feel?

"It's Not a good time."
"Every time you try to make money, it (this market) cuts your heart out."
-Jim Cramer in the clip above.

Just for the record, I don't hate Cramer.  He's a longtime stock trader, he knows that world, and he's really entertaining (usually).  But his job on CNBC is not to make you the most money.  His job is to keep you in the stock market, even when you probably shouldn't be in it.

The Dow is at 24,616 as I write this, up 330 points this morning, but down from it's high of 26,828 on October 3rd.  It's down over 8% in under two months.  The Dow is an average of 30 "industrial" stocks, and has been the benchmark of the U.S. stock market since 1885.  Here are the other major averages:

Nasdaq:  High- 8,109 (8/30/18)  Today (11/26/18)- 7,041  It's down over 13% in 3 months
Index of 100 stocks, primarily tech stocks
S&P 500: High- 2,930 (9/20/18)  Today- 2,664  It's down over 9% in just over 2 months
Index of 500 different stocks
Russell 2000: High-1,740 (8/30/18) Today- 1,508  It's down over 13% in 3 months
Index of 2,000 different stocks

Meanwhile, I'm a currently homeless artist/blogger and lifelong amateur futurist.  I look a big, long term things happening in our world, and try to figure out where we're heading as a society.  In an August 10th, 2018 post I wrote this:

"There WILL, without a shred of doubt, be a serious recession in the next year or so.  This next recession WILL be as intense as the Great Recession of 2008, and it will likely be worse."

Here's that full post: "It's Time to get off the Titanic, a brief history of our future 

The Dow was at 25,313 when I wrote this post.

In the stock market, a "correction" is a drop of 10% from the recent high mark.
A"bear market" is a drop of 20% or more over a time period of two months or more.

Still think I'm full of crap?   Or maybe there's a point to looking a super long term trends.

The Ultimate Weekend Story #6: Riding to the Huntington Beach Pier

This post is about the section of The Ultimate Weekend from 10:41 to 12:17, the beginning of "Saturday Morning" in the video, me riding to the H.B. Pier, to me flipping off the walk your bike lights.  I self-produced this video in 1990.

I spent my first six months in Southern California, in 1986, in the Redondo and Hermosa Beach area, known as the South Bay, in two apartments I shared with my magazine co-workers Gork and Lew.  After five months working at Wizard Publications, and a month riding with Craig Grasso everyday after I got laid off, I got a job at the American Freestyle Association working for Bob Morales.  Bob picked me up in the AFA van one day, and I moved south, past the "Orange Curtain," (from Democrat L.A. region into Republican stronghold (until two weeks ago) Orange County).  My new home city, which I'd only been to 3 or 4 times, was the surfer filled city of Huntington Beach.

Huntington Beach began it's official life as Pacific City, in the early 1900's.  Some developers with big ideas imagined the empty stretch of beach as the "Atlantic City of the West Coast."  That idea fizzled out quick, and it was largely a little village of lima bean farmers.  The original pier was built around 1902, around the time of the Pacific City idea.  The name was later changed to Huntington Beach, to suck up to railroad magnate Henry Huntington, to bribe him into building a railroad extension from Long Beach, about ten miles north, to H.B., so more people could get to the rural beach town.  It worked, and Huntington Beach was incorporated in 1909.  Finally there was a way to get people easily from distant Los Angeles and Long Beach to H.B.  But still, hardly anyone wanted to move to H.B.

In 1914, the 4th of July celebration at the pier included a "surf riding" demonstration by a Hawaiian, an Olympic swimming champion, a diver, and surfer named Duke Kahanamoku.  When his slightly older surf buddy and leader of the Wakiki surf posse, George Freeth died in 1918, Duke went on to promote surfing around the world, bringing back the ancient sport of the Hawaiian kings.  He became known as "The Father of Modern Surfing," But still, not too many people wanted to actually live in the little town by the sea.  At one point, if you bought a set of encyclopedias, you got a free lot in downtown Huntington Beach.

Then, in 1920, wildcatters struck oil in H.B., and suddenly A LOT of people wanted to live there.  And a few encyclopedia buyers became millionaires, as the legend goes.  H.B. became something like an old west town, with hard working oil men, rowdy bars, ladies of the evening (the former Youth Hostel was then known as Hotel Evangeline), and a lot of money changing hands.  If you walk out behind the Longboard bar on Main Street, across the alley is a little tiny brick structure, and there was a slightly larger one with three doors nearby.  Those are the old "drunk tank" jail cells from the 1920's.  The cops would just drag the drunks from the bars and lock them in for the night to sleep it off.

The oil boom in Huntington Beach had several long term effects on the city.  First, it attracted a lot of people, and a lot of riff raff.  Second, for decades, the north part of town was filled with oil wells and pumps, many right along the beach.  You can see them in this 1949 home movie clip at 2:56.  So, while people flocked to Southern California in the 1940's through the 1980's, many people avoided H.B. and built beachfront homes on nearly every other stretch of beach, from Malibu to Newport.  But Huntington, the "dirty oil town beach" didn't get nearly as developed, except for one condo complex just north of the pier.  Because the wealthy people favored Newport Beach, Sunset Beach, Long Beach and on up to Malibu, H.B. was a lot less expensive to live in.  Even when I moved there in 1987, there were still a bunch of oil pumps downtown, and right along Pacific Coast Highway.

Because Huntington Beach was cheaper to live in, it became the working class beach city, and a home to lots of surfers.  There's no great point break in H.B. to surf, but there's 8 miles of southwest facing beach breaks.  The waves aren't great, but they're consistently pretty good, and it was the cheapest beach city from the late 1950's to the mid 1990's.  So it became known as Surf City, the city Jan and Dean wrote their song "Surf City" about.

In typical small city fashion, the city leaders of the late 1950's and early 1960's wanted to get the "lazy surfers" out of their town.  It didn't work.  As the surf culture grew and expanded, H.B. went on to become a hot spot for skateboarding, BMX and freestyle, snowboarding (there's snow 1 1/2 hours away), motocross (Seth Eslow lived there) and the early UFC fighting and MMA.  It's still a major action sports hub area.  Surfer and BMX freestyle pioneer, Bob Morales, who grew up a bit inland, chose H.B. to set up the AFA, and that's how I landed there.  My job, officially, was to be the editor of the AFA newsletter.  I wound up doing everything, from putting AFA logos on T-shirts to driving the 30 foot trailer to contests.  It was actually pretty cool, though I struggled on my $5 an hour pay rate. 

 On one of my first photo shoots at FREESTYLIN' magazine, I drove photographer Windy Osborn to, shortly after starting at Wizard Publications, I met English freestyle skater Don Brown, and I knew that he and a few skaters, as well as a few BMX freestylers, hung out and rode beneath the H.B. Pier every weekend.  So after I rented a room and got settled in H.B., (after a couple week's crashing on Bob's couch), my weekend ritual was to get up, make a huge plate of pancakes, pig out, and ride down to the Huntington Beach pier and freestyle all day.  Unless there was an AFA contest somewhere, I was at the pier.  In those days, the fancy restaurant on the pier, looking out over the beach, was Maxwell's, and the area below it, by the video arcade, looked like this.  The walk and bike path widened, and us BMXers took turns with the freestyle skaters, getting crowds and riding for them.  Every 20 to 30 minutes, the beach police on their ATV's would roll up, tell us to stop riding or skating, and that the crowd was blocking the bike path.  This, supposedly, caused a danger because all the Fred and Frita poser cyclists, in their brand new spandex and over-priced/under ridden road bikes, would ride down the crowded bike path at speed and run into people.  Somehow that was our fault.

There were literally thousands of  beach goers every weekend, and we continually drew crowds of 100 to 150 people, and sometimes up to 500.  Then the police would stop us, the crowd would wander off, then the skaters would come out, draw another crowd, and do their thing, until they got shut down.  This happened every Saturday and Sunday from early 1987 to about 1991 for me.  Being the geek that I am, I once figured out that I did flatland in front of over 140,000 people, 100 or so at a time, during those H.B. Pier weekends.  While I didn't do near as many shows as some freestylers, I performed before far more people, as a street performer, than most.  As a skating and riding spot, the H.B. Pier goes back to the mid 1970's, when skaters came down to session the bank that used to be there.

So when I got around to shooting the Huntington Beach Pier/Saturday morning section for this video, I just shot my normal life.  I wake up in my room on Sims street, near Warner and Bolsa Chica, on the north end of town.  I can't remember what the huge scab on my knee was from, but it was a bail of some sort.  My room is a mess, and I head down, and make breakfast.  The furry bowling ball of a cat, Silus, was my roommates cat, and the most unfriendly feline I ever met.  The fucker bit my palm once when I was trying to get it away from the sliding glass door as it hissed at another Tom cat outside.  It wasn't unusual to see Silus on the counter eating out of a pot of something after my roommate Kevin cooked.

Making Oreo Double Stuff pancakes was not my normal weekend breakfast, although the slice of cold pepperoni and pineapple pizza with the pancakes was pretty normal.  When I made this video, I wanted to show "the real BMX freestyle lifestyle I knew," and not the hoopty shit that you saw in a BMX Plus or Vision Street Wear video.  No uniforms, no flatland on miniature golf courses, or that kind of stuff.  But in addition to showing some new and progressive riding, I also wanted to show off some video making skills I learned working at Unreel.  I'm actually pretty proud of this little montage.  I chopped a bunch of my weekend life into short bits, it moves pretty well, and it gives a really good glimpse of my life as a freestyler for those early H.B. years.  I did actually ride about 5 miles to the Huntington Beach Pier every weekend when there wasn't a contest.  I skipped the ride down Warner to Bolsa Chica Beach, and the 3 miles of pedaling the bike path down Bolsa Chica beach and along the cliffs.

The part you see in this video is when I get to Goldenwest and the bike path, the north end of the downtown area.  That quick shot with tons of people on the beach is pretty funny, it's a compression shot from Goldenwest and PCH.  I was shooting far up the beach, and making it look way more crowded than it ever really was in 1990.  That was a super crowded day, and I made it look even more crowded.  Now, 30 years later, that's pretty much what it does look like on the weekends.  But back then, it was usually fairly empty until up near the pier.

The bike path continues next to Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), but the part I show in this video, with the sandy dirt path, and the big, 11 foot high, mural covered, retaining walls, that's the old railroad bed that Henry Huntington built 100 years ago.  The murals were old ones in 1990, and many later got covered with new, officially sanctioned murals in the 1990's, and later officially sanctioned graffiti art.  Then they all got painted over again with beige paint, because the graffiti art attracted unofficial graffiti writers from all over.  Typical.  So while it wasn't my plan, I ended up documenting several of the old murals, which were probably done in the 1970's.

Our favorite wall, The Blues Brothers Wall, is just south of the 14th street steps.  It was pretty flat, and usually had less sand in front of it than most other walls, and had a big lip to wall ride on the left end, and a small lip farther to the right.  So my typical weekend ride turns into a quick wall session with Keith Treanor, then unknown and super hungry ripper from New Jersey, and Randy Lawrence, a kid form the desert who moved to the beach and worked as a bike shop mechanic at the time.  I met both at the H.B pier on the weekends.  Keith, of course, went on to be a pro mini ramp and street rider for S&M Bikes for many years after this video gave him a chance to show his stuff.  They'll be a lot more about him as these blog posts go on.

Randy Lawrence is the most natural BMX rider I've ever seen IN MY LIFE.  He would just naturally learn stuff in minutes.  Back when we first met, '88 or so, he could learn ANY flatland trick we could think of in ten minutes with Mike Sarrail and I coaching him.  Seriously.  He made me sick, in a good way.  When I say the most natural rider, I mean that he just learned anything like he was born to do it.  No one, not Eddie Fiola, Mat Hoffman, Mike Dominguez, Dennis McCoy, ANYONE, seemed so born to ride a BMX bike as Randy.  Randy's brother was pro motocrosser Phil Lawrence, who along with Jeff Emig (a second cousin to me, I think) was one of the pioneering motocross freeriders in the early 90's, who set the stage for the early Crusty Demons of Dirt videos, and the sport of Freestyle Motocross.  Much to my surprise back then, Randy became a motorcycle mechanic, tuning bikes for Doug Dubach, and later Jeremy McGrath through most of Jeremy's championships.  Now Randy trains young motocross riders, he's legendary in the motocross world, and his son Ryder Lawrence is one of the best up-and coming kids in the BMX world.  When you do this at age seven, there are some big things in store in coming years.  The way Ryder flows through that hilatious nose bonk, and rides it out, that's the same natural riding flow I saw in Randy back in the late 80's and 90's.  If it ever gets to the point of trying to genetically engineer the perfect BMX  or FSMX rider, start with the Lawrence family.  There's just something in their blood that's perfect for two wheels.  Unless you tell Randy to do a simple X-up, that is.

In this section of The Ultimate Weekend, Alan Valek (who uploaded my video to YouTube, thanks again for that Alan!) watches from the top of the wall as we do wall rides and fakies.  This was the only place I could do fakie wall rides, because of the smooth lip.  Keith and Randy step things up with no handers.  If you pause the quick flash edit, it looks like this:

That's Randy and me doing the first over/under wall ride ever in BMX history.  The idea just popped into my head right then, and we tried a couple.  Randy's got the white tank top on, Keith has the black T-shirt, and I have the red T-shirt on.  In this pic, and the video, Randy's up really high, going opposite.  Dave Clymer, a year or so later, is the only other rider I've seen get that high on the 11 foot high Blues Brothers Wall, and Dave was going his natural direction.  I didn't realize Randy was going opposite until I shared this still a few months ago, and Randy told me that's opposite for him.  I just did a little wall bounce, not sure how high he was going to go.  I just wanted to see if we could time it and both be on the wall at the same time.  To be fair, the Blues Brothers Wall is slightly under vert, maybe 80 to 85 degrees, but it's definitely a wall, and not a steep bank.

The next highest I ever saw anyone get on that wall, after Randy and Clymer, is Keith's wall ride in this section, going his natural direction.  That one scared the crap out of me, Keith's back tire broke loose, and it slid across the whole wall, but he rode it out.  A hair under Keith's front wheel was how high Josh White went. Josh told me about the wall at the pier, and we found it together one Saturday.  For over a year, I rode on the bike path up top to the pier, never going down the other path to find these walls.  Josh, one of the more amazing vert riders ever, got about 8 feet up the wall, 2 feet lower than Randy Lawrence going opposite.  Josh was also doing fakie wall rides to turndowns out that first day we rode it.

Years later, I lived about three blocks from this wall, and I sessioned it all the time, and went rock climbing on the wall down to the beach right there.  I got into bouldering as something to do away from the BMX world, and I had a 300+ foot traverse on the lower wall just down from here.  This is one of my favorite places to ride ever.  I tried to learn framestand wall rides there, I could stand up in a low, long wall ride, but never get my hands off the grips.  Too chicken.

We actually didn't ride this wall as a group really, but would hit it individually when in the area.  Keith stepped it up that day, getting stretched no handed fakie wall rides.  Then he decided to go for the rail grind into the sand on the spur of the moment.  At the time, no one had done a handrail slide down steps, but people were talking about them.  Skaters had been doing board slides on rails for 3 or 4 years, and I think 50/50's were starting to happen.  Meanwhile, BMXers were trying to figure out a way to slide handrails on bikes.  We talked about sprocket slides, like today's crank arm slides, but it just seemed too dangerous, with little chance of ever riding it out.  As double peg grinds started becoming standard on vert ramps, and a few riders toyed with feeble grinds on street ledges, the idea of a double peg grind on a handrail down stairs was forming.  But it hadn't been done yet.  So Keith decided to try this rail into the sand with no notice, and luckily I had the camera rolling when he headed that way.  I'm not sure what any of us expected, but Keith's front wheel washed out on the sand in front of the rail, and it turned into a funny bail.

Then Randy held Keith on the rail, trying to get the mechanics of sliding and pulling up and off it at the bottom.  The sand made for a crash pad to soften the landing.  Remember kids, there were no skatepark rails then.  This was 1990.  Hell, there were no skateparks in Southern California then.  The whole technical problem of how to bunnyhop, angle the bike, and land on both pegs hadn't been figured out yet.  So putting his bike on the rail to slide and land in the sand was a way to get part of the idea worked out.

Randy's 360 off the wall and into the sand, next to the woman laying out, was another spur of the moment decision.  She was laying there when we shot Keith on the rail.  As we were walking back up towards the wall, Randy said, "I could 360 over the wall and land by her."  I didn't think he was serious at first, because there was a 2 or 3 inch lip on top of that wall, and doing a bunnyhop over it into doing a 360 drop five feet, seemed pretty crazy then.  But it was Randy, so I walked a ways away, so the woman wouldn't wonder what I was doing, and Randy did a great 360 drop first try, and the poor, unsuspecting woman was totally startled.  We, of course, thought that was hilarious back then.

After that, we see close-ups of another painted wall, and then the "walk your bike lights" that had recently been put up by the pier.  Every bike rider hated those lights, which were on during the weekends.  Those damn lights, again, were put up because of road bike posers riding fast down the bike path, on the weekends, when it was crowded, and then running into pedestrians.  Those weekend riders never showed up to actually put miles in during the week, when the bike path was not crowded, and you could ride the whole eight miles of Huntington Beach's bike path at speed.  They just showed up on the weekends to pose.  Debbie Hendrickson, a serious cyclist and Sim snowboard team manager, told me the hardcore cyclists called the posers Fred or Frita.

So that's the story of this little section, and one of my all time favorite places to ride, The Blues Brothers Wall.  There's only one thing left to do in this post, tell you how to make Oreo Double Stuff pancakes.

Oreo Double Stuff pancakes:

Ingredients:
"Just add water" pancake mix
water
Double Stuff Oreo Cookies

Take a bunch of Oreos, a couple for each big pancake you plan to make, and crumble them up into big chunks, say 1/4" to 3/8" round.  It's best to leave the cookies and cream attached to each other.

Put the pancake griddle on the stove, and turn the heat to about 6 1/2 or 7, slightly above medium if it's gas, and let it warm up.  The key to good pancakes is to have the griddle at the perfect temperature, and the batter at the right consistency.

Pour the dry pancake batter mix into a big measuring cup or small bowl.  I don't measure the water, I make batter by feel and sight.  I add a little bit of water, and stir it by hand with a fork.  Then I add a bit more water, and stir it more.  At first, the pancake mix turns into a dough-like consistency.  Then it slowly works towards batter.  I like to work to the point where the batter pours slowly, but steadily.  It's a thick liquid.  

Once the batter is near a good consistency, add the Oreo chunks and mix them in with a fork until they are pretty evenly spaced in the batter.  I tried Oreo pancakes with regular thickness Oreos, and you couldn't really taste the Oreos at all, so go with the Double Stuffs.

By then, the griddle should be hot.  In fact, it should be a bit too hot.  I always pull the griddle off the stove, and wave it around to cool it a bit, then put in back on the stove, before pouring my first pancakes.  If you do this, don't hit anyone.  Once you start making pancakes, it stays a bit cooler from the batter.  For most people, I'd advise putting a little cooking oil on the griddle, or melting some butter.  Me, though, I cook my pancakes without oil on a Teflon griddle.  They brown lightly on the bottom, and I wait until the batter is about ready to bubble, and I start edging the plastic spatula under them, until I can get under the whole pancake and flip it.

I normally use a square griddle, and make 4 pancakes, 4" to 5" in diameter, at once.  I flip all four, and the watch them.  A square griddle cooks hotter in the center, and I'll get the spatula under the flipped pancakes, and spin them so the outside edge is towards the middle of the pan, to cook them evenly, and let them finish cooking.  Then I set them on a plate off to the side.  I don't care if they cool off a bitas I make the rest.  If you have company, put an oven safe plate in the oven, turn it up to about 225 to 250 degrees, and just set all the pancakes on it to keep them warm until you're ready to eat.  Remember to use a pot holder or two to get that plate out of the oven, and set it on another pot holder on the table.

With the Oreo cookies and frosting in the pancakes, in big chunks, you don't really need maple syrup on these pancakes.  But don't let that stop you, 'cause maple syrup is awesome.  To really live large, make a big ol' plate of Oreo pancakes, scoop some vanilla ice cream on top, or maybe Oreo Cookies and Cream, and then hit it with some maple syrup.  You can go back to the gym, or go ride, tomorrow.  If you wind up trying these, show me some photos on Facebook.

For more crazy pancake ideas, check out my Pinterest Board: Cinnamon Rolls and Pancakes.

And that's it about riding to the H.B. Pier.

I'm currently writing a series of big, fat zines called, Freestyle BMX Tales, after my former blog that had over 500 posts about BMX freestyle BITD.  Each zine will be at least 48 pages, full of my old school BMX stories, and written around a theme.  I'll be hand making all of them, in typical zine fashion, and signing and numbering each one.  Zines, by their very nature, are collector's items.

The first Zine in the series is about The Spot in Redondo Beach, the place I rode with Lew, Gork, Andy Jenkins, R.L. Osborn, Chris Day, and Craig Grasso, among others.  That was when I first moved to SoCal and started working at FREESTYLIN' magazine in 1986.  It will be done and ready to ship about December4th, 2018.  You can pre-order the first copy by sending $6 paypal to me at:  stevenemig13@gmail.com . ( steven, not steve in the email address) Mark it "The Spot zine" or something.  So far, the first 5 are spoken for. 

I'll be sharing most of my BMX stories on the new Block Bikes Blog from now on, check it out...

Exciting BMX racing... on FLAT pedals... in 2018? Yup.

One surprise after another here.  The first ever Red Bull Pump Track World Championships is in...  Arkansas?  Yep.  BMXers versus mountain bikes?  I was betting on mountain bikes, and the top four men and women are all on BMX bikes.  This is just some crazy bike handling, high speed, torquing the turns, in the rain.  Skills all the way around.  This is just a good watch for any MTBers or BMXers out there who like to go fast. 

I'm old.  I'm fat.  I've got a lot of taxi driver weight to take off before I could ride one of these very well.  But I can't wait to get a bike, and hit some pump tracks.  This shit just looks like so much fun. 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  Let the turkey coma fade.  Have that third helping of pumpkin pie.  Then get out to your local pump track tomorrow.  You can shop all weekend online, right? 

Economic Rehab... revisited

On this beautiful, sunny day here in Richmond, two days before Thanksgiving, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped about 400 points this morning right out of the gate.  The Dow is down about 8 1/2% from it's high a couple months ago.  The Nasdaq, the more tech oriented stock index, is down about 14%.  Remember that recession thing I keep talking about?  Yeah, the beginning of it would look something like this if it were actually going to happen.  But, of course, it's not, because former Fed Chair Janet Yellen said that they've figured out how to never have recessions again.  Hmmmm... Maybe it's time for Wall Street to go back to REHAB.  Here's my post from September 15th, 2018.

Recessions are Rehab for Wall Street

The Dow closed at 26,154.67 on Sept.14th, 2018.  As of this writing, it's 24,521.13.
The Nasdaq closed at 8,013.71 on Sept. 14th, 2018.  As of this writing, it's 6,865.42

Dig BMX's History of the Ice Pick grind

I'd like to thank Matt Picker for the head's up on this video.  DIG BMX had this idea to document the progress of a single trick, starting with the ice pick.  Until Matt told me about this video today, I forgot they'd contacted me about this idea a while ago.

Cool idea.  Even cooler, from my perspective, is that I shot the video of the first ice pick grind.  My shot from The Ultimate Weekend (1990) video of John Povah grinding the little handrail into the kiddie pool at the Regional Pool (Cypress, CA) is when John took Mat Hoffman's ice pick stall on vert, and turned it into a grind.  In 1989-90, the corporate money pulled out of BMX freestyle, riding went underground and low budget, and rider-made videos, like me making The Ultimate Weekend, was in its infancy.  But the riding was progressing at high speed.

Props to DIG (pun intended) for coming up with this idea, and it's cool to see how a little trick Keith Treanor and John Povah had been thinking about, and John pioneered, turned into something huge and gnarly as fuck since.  The one I totally remember in this sequence was Josh Heino's ice pick at El Toro.  That blew my mind when it came out.  It was so huge and crazy for that time.  I've never even managed an icepick stall on street, but this is a really cool watch to see one trick progress over a couple of decades.  

Just realized this is blog post #430 for this blog.  That's a lot of posts in 17 months.  The number 43 is EVERYWHERE for me lately.

Creative Life: 11/19/2018

Lookback drawing I did nearly three years ago, when I started focusing on the process of turning my Sharpie art into a living.  Still not there yet.


The other night, I was freezing my ass off in the little spot where I sleep, because one of my sleeping bags got wet in the rain that day.  That's just one of the things I deal with being homeless for the time being.  But during that rough night, I started thinking about a lot of things.  Like a fireplace.  But also, about my life in the BMX world way back when, and how many people commented on my blog post about vert rider Joe Johnson.  Joe himself heard about the post, and commented on it as well, which was really cool. 

The simple truth is, BMX bikes completely changed the course of my life, and with a bunch of hard work, gave me some early success in life, far beyond what I thought was possible.   It continues to blow me away how many people, literally hundreds, sometimes well over a thousand, read my posts about BMX freestyle in its early days.  I tossed out the idea of doing some zines about this stuff, and immediately, like withing a few minutes, I got a couple of excited responses.  And that's just from people reading my stories of little events.  I haven't really gone into  more depth, of how BMX freestyle changed all of our lives, why action sports all developed with Generation X so much, and how these sports changed us, and society as a whole. 

As I thought of all the things I would put in a book about BMX, I realized that it really would be a book worth reading.  My inner critic, what musician Amanda Palmer calls "The Fraud Police," has been telling me otherwise for years.  But there's a lot there.  But I don't have the resources to write and publish an actual book, or even an ebook, right now.  But I can start publishing a series of zines about different aspects of riding, and those early days in the freestyle world.  So I'm going to get started on that today.  The first zine in the Freestyle BMX Tales series (the title of my former blog where I wrote over 500 posts about freestyle), will be about The Spot in Redondo Beach.  When I asked about what people wanted  to read in those comments, Facebook friend Bill Bunting said, "Craig Grasso!"  So that's a good place to start.  I don't know how long it will take to write and publish, I'm doing a lot of art and social media work as well right now.  But it might be a week or two, but not more than that.  So that is coming soon, Zine #1 in the Freestyle BMX Tales zine series, "The Spot in Redondo Beach."  Every zine will be handmade by me, signed, and numbered.  Zines, by their nature, are collector's items.  So I'm just making that a little more official.

Club White Bear members, you're getting this one free, the first copies.  Everyone else, if you trust my sketchy ass enough to pre-order, you can send me $6 by paypal to stevenemig13@gmail,com .   It's "steven" not steve.  Can't remember why I did that.  Anyhow, if you pre-order, you will get a numbered zine starting at #5, in the order your order comes in.  Otherwise, I'll let everyone know when it's coming out, and you can order then if you're interested. 

I'm still doing a ton of my Sharpie art, in my original and unique #sharpiescribblestyle.  But I'm shifting gears a bit.  Doing original drawings that take me 35 to 45 hours to draw, and selling the originals for $120-$250, like I've been doing, is part of the reason I'm still homeless.  It was a way to get my art going, but won't make me a living.  So I'm going to be doing some smaller drawings, some more BMX and skateboard drawings, and making "prints," to sell at much more reasonable prices.  The initial "prints" will be good quality color copies on card stock, which makes for a good quality picture to frame and hang. 

So that's where I'm at right now, lots more stuff coming in the near future.  Providing I don't die from hypothermia or whatever, that is.

Meeting Joe Johnson

This post was inspired by seeing a photo of Joe Johnson, that I'd never seen before, in a Facebook group a few days ago.  It's the photo you see at 3:58 in this clip.  I saw that, and I realized I forgot just how high Joe Johnson could air.  When I saw that photo, and the string of comments, I thought to the time I first met Joe, and I knew I had to write a blog post about what I remember of  him and his riding.  So here it is.  When I went looking on YouTube for footage of him, I first found this clip above, which I'd never seen before, and then realized this was part of a documentary video on the New England scene.  So I watched the whole thing.  A Wicked Ride is long (1:44:00), but it's a great video of a scene that I knew little about, even though I knew some of the people in it fairly well.

Like many firsts in my BMX freestyle life, this story starts with the Tulsa, Oklahoma AFA Masters contest in April of 1986.  I moved to San Jose from Boise, Idaho the previous September, following my family there, a year after graduating high school.  I started a freestyle zine, called San Jose Stylin', as an excuse to meet the great riders of the San Francisco Bay area.  It was the most cohesive scene in the world at the time, where everyone from the region got together every Sunday at Golden Gate Park in The City.  My zine, covering the scene, which contained interviews with Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, and Hugo Gonzales, caught the eye of Andy and Lew at FREESTYLIN' magazine.  I sent each of them a copy every issue, along with the BMX Plus editors.  At the first contest of 1986, at the Velodrome in SoCal, I went up and introduced myself to Andy, who introduced me to Lew.  I was floored when they said they really liked my zine.  I mean, I was a kid from fucking Idaho, I still read every single word, including the ads, of every issue of FREESTYLIN'.  Suddenly I was talking to the editors and hearing their stoke on my zine.  Serious fanboy moment.

A few weeks later, I got a call out of the blue.  Andy Jenkins, editor of FREESTYLIN', was on the phone.  He asked if I planned on going to the next AFA Masters contest in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I had saved up my Pizza Hut earnings for a plane ticket, and was going to go there and compete.  Glad to hear that, he asked if I wanted to write the contest article for FREESTYLIN'.  I can't remember how long it took to pick my jaw up off the floor, but I muttered "Yeah," and we went over the details.  Windy, the Wizard Pubs photographer, was going to shoot the photos, but they needed someone to write the article.  Somehow, thanks to the zine I typed on a 1920's era, manual, Royal typewriter, I would write the article.

I was 19 at the time, it was the first time I flew to a place where no one was there to pick me up. I couldn't rent a car, and I didn't bother to figure out exactly where the contest was being held.  I packed my suitcase, putting my wheels in it, and put the rest of my bike in an odd sized box and called it "camping equipment," a trick Robert Peterson taught me to avoid the $40 bike shipping fee airlines charged at the time.  You could do things like that then.  My parents dropped me off at the San Jose airport, and I flew to Tulsa, via Dallas.  In the DFW airport, I ran into GT pros, Eddie Fiola, who I'd met before, Martin Aparijo, and some blond kid I didn't recognize.  Eddie, after I introduced myself at the gate, introduced me to Martin, and then said, "This is our new guy, Josh White, he just did this crazy photo shoot for FREESTYLIN'."  We were all on the same flight into Tulsa, and I asked if there was a chance to catch a ride to the contest site with them.  They had a small rental car, three guys, gear, and bike boxes, so there just wasn't room. No problem, I thought, I'll just hang in the luggage area, there will be a ton of riders flying in, it's freakin' Tulsa, after all, nobody lived close by.  I'd just catch a ride with some other riders.

I sat, alone, in the baggage area, for about an hour after my flight, and didn't see anyone with a bike box.  I was in a strange town, on my own, not enough money for a taxi, too young to get a rental car, and I had no idea where the contest was actually being held.  I was starting to get worried.

Finally, I saw some dark haired kid dragging a bike box off the conveyor belt.  He was a really average looking kid, straight dark hair, very normal haircut, jeans and a T-shirt.  He was also alone.  I had my stuff on a luggage cart, and I headed over and said, "Hi," to him.  I followed him as he got a luggage cart and loaded his stuff on it.  He said his name was Joe Johnson, that he rode for Haro, and was from New England.  I told him I was writing the magazine article for FREESTYLIN'.  We both probably thought the other was lying, but didn't say so.  I was thinking, "You ride for Haro?  OK, co-sponsor kid from the East Coast, that's cool."  Just two random BMX freestylers meeting in an airport, and connecting because we were freestylers.

Joe said he had a ride coming, and I could probably bum a ride to the hotel, and then to the contest site.  I said, "Cool."  We both were pretty quiet, and talked on and off, and did infinity rolls and any other trick we could think of on our luggage carts for 45 minutes or so.

Suddenly I looked up, and a van pulled up.  The Haro tour van.  WTF?  My jaw dropped again, and stayed on the ground, as legendary Haro pro Ron Wilkerson got out of the driver's side and yelled, "Hey Joe, what's up?"  Or something like that.  I was lost in another fanboy moment.  There were about 8 people and bikes crammed in the van already, but they offered me a ride, I jammed my bike box and luggage in the back, and sat on a bunch of bike top tubes, my feet hanging over all the handlebars, all the way to the hotel.

It was a Holiday Inn Holidome, with a swimming pool, miniature golf holes, a pool table, and a bunch of couches and chairs under roof, with a wall of windows on one end.  Everywhere I looked there were pro or top amateur riders.  Joe told them I was writing the contest article for FREESTYLIN', and that became my intro.  Jon Peterson, the Haro assistant team manager, took me under his wing, told me I could crash on the floor of their second room, along with Joe, Dennis McCoy, Rick Moliterno, and manager Billy Hop, as I recall.  I literally felt like I'd won some kind of BMX freestyle lottery.  Not only had I lucked into a ride to the hotel, I was staying with the Haro team.

Only 8 months before, I was a kid in Idaho, riding with my trick teammate Jay Bickel, an SE co-sponsored rider.  My biggest dream at that point was that, maybe, someday, I could tag along on a magazine photo shoot to watch.  Suddenly I was hanging in the hotel with freestyle royalty, and playing pool with Woody Itson.  I hung with the Haro team all weekend, and I learned that those two new kids I met, Josh White and Joe Johnson, both fucking ripped.  They were both exploding onto the national freestyle scene that weekend.  There was another kid I met there, nobody caught his name over the weekend.  We all referred to him as "The Storm Trooper" because he wore a full face helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, and shoulder pads to ride vert.  That was at a time where most pros wore only an open face helmet and leathers to ride.  Windy got a couple really good photos of that kid, and Andy Jenkins called me up a week later to find out if I knew his name.  I called around, and learned that kid's name was Mathew Hoffman.  The weird thing is, although I actually shot photos from the deck of the Haro quarterpipe in practice, and watched all weekend, I don't remember any riding really.  So much other stuff happened, I blanked out on the riding since.  I guess I was just overwhelmed with being in the middle of the guys I'd been reading about in the magazines for a couple of years.

In a really cool coincidence, my article from the contest, an articlearticle about zines,  listing my zine first in the country, and Josh White's epic first photo shoot, all came out in the August '86 issue of FREESTYLIN'.  For you old schoolers, that's the one with the white cover and the little tiny photo on it... of Josh White.  You can check out a scan of that magazine here.  In that first magazine article I ever wrote, is this passage about the 16Expert ramp class:

"In (16 X Ramps) White didn't quite pull the air he did in practice, but he edged out the ever incredible Tony Murray- anyway- that may give you a clue to where this guy's headed.  Tony's new Haro teammate, Joe Johnson, took third.  If his name doesn't ring a bell, give it time.  Executing prime lookbacks, can-can lookbacks, and NO HANDERS five feet out, Joe is a force to be reckoned with."

I'm not sure what a "prime" lookback is, I think I was just trying to use unusual adjectives in the article.  Reading that article again, for the first time in probably 30 years, reminded me of another thing about freestyle ramps in the 1980's.  Every ramp rider had a home ramp they rode, ranging from the early six foot high, Bob Haro era quarterpipes, to 8 and 9 foot ramps.  Generally, no bike ramps had vert then, but some had a few inches of it.  Transitions had yet to be standardized, and ranged from round to very elliptical.

My first and only driveway quarterpipe, for example, was bought for $25 from skaters.  It it went up to vert in five feet of height, but that transition only spanned three feet from bottom of the ramp to where it hit vert, going forward, it was a complete ellipse, with a gap in plywood and then a foot of vert.  That's an extreme example, but homemade ramps ranged from my beast to the GT tour ramp, which was nine feet high and smooth, but only five feet wide.

My point here is that every rider was used to their own ramp, it's particular transition, how high it was, how much flex it had, how much it moved, where the soft spot in the tranny was from those two curved 2 X 4's, and every other nuance.  Then riders went to a contest, and had to get used to a totally different ramp.  So pretty much every ramp rider could get two or three feet higher on their own ramp, then they did at contests.  The best ramp riding was never at contests in the early years.  So when I wrote in the article that Joe was doing variations five feet out, as an amateur, that was amazing for its day.  Most of the ams who could do 6 to 8 foot airs at home, maybe did high airs of 4 or 5 feet at a contest.  Though it doesn't sound that impressive now, Joe doing the hardest variations of the day, head high, at a contest, really set him apart. 

That August issue of FREESTYLIN' hit the newsstands in late June '86, and on August 1st, I started my new job at Wizard Publications.  I was suddenly in the industry, and Josh, Joe, and Mat became this amazing new wave of vert riders who seemingly popped out of nowhere, from random parts of the country not known for great riders, and made the pros nervous with their skills.  I got to know them all a bit, and watched as Josh went pro, and Mat and Joe ruled the amateur class for another couple of years.

The other thing I remember about Joe was that he did the best version of several variations, including the pros.  His no footed can-cans and one handed no footed can-cans, were better looking in photos, and more consistent in real life, than anyone else.  

Like everyone else in BMX freestyle, I watched these new vert guys blast the eight foot quarterpipes at the AFA Masters contests.  Then Ron Wilkerson started up the 2-Hip halfpipe contests, in 1987, because that's where vert riding was headed.  Joe, Mat, and Josh, all brought up on quarterpipes, really adapted well to the halfpipes, and I think that's where Joe, especially, was really able to show his stuff and set himself apart even more.

The ramps got bigger, I think the traveling 2-Hip halfpipe in 1987 and beyond was 9 or 9 1/2 feet high, with a touch of vert.  But it always seemed to get set up with one side slightly over-vert, and one side slightly under.  For that reason, nearly every rider, amateurs and pros, had one side they favored, and they did all their variations on that side.  So in 1987-88-89, contest runs were: pump air, variation, pump air, variation, pump air, variation.  And if a rider landed low on a single air, BAM, momentum gone, and three or four airs were needed to get back up to height.  One of our Unreel cameramen, at the big 2-Hip finals comp in Irvine, CA in 1988, asked Dave Voelker, an amazing quarterpipe rider, about the halfpipe.  I loved his answer, "You have to be able to land on these things.  I never really had to do that before."  

Joe Johnson was the first rider I remember who consistently did back to back to back variations, at height.  In those days, "height" meant 5 to 6 feet out, usually.  But it made a huge difference in his runs.  Even the pros didn't do as many hard variations back to back then.

In the clip from A Wicked Ride, above, he and Windy Osborn both mention the photo shoot at his house.  That happened during my short stint at working at Wizard Publications.  I know this because I remember Windy talking about how insanely high his airs were at that shoot.  I also remember because she hand printed the black and white 8 X 10 photos in her darkroom, like always.  The favorite ones got picked to be in the magazine, and went with the artwork to the printer.  All the other B&W 8 X 10's became fair game for Andy, Lew, Gork, and me to snag and tack up on our office walls.

At the very end of the clip, you see the black and white photo of Joe doing a front foot rocket air, called a Neil Armstrong, with both feet on the front pegs, which was, and still is, freakin' impossible in my book.  The photo is phenomenal.  I love that photo.  I don't think it got shown in the first article about Joe, because I had that original, Windy Osborn shot and printed, 8 X 10 on my office wall.  Really.

Even crazier, years later, when Wizard Publications was closing down, I was roommates with Chris Moeller of S&M bikes fame, who had been a test rider and contributing writer at Wizard.  He got the call that they were cleaning out the building, and Moeller and I went down and dug through the "trash."  That included HUNDREDS of 8 X 10 photos.  This huge box of them had been thrown in the dumpster.  I wanted to keep all of them, being the only guy thinking about the distant future then.  But Chris, Bill Grad, and me shared a tiny, 1 bedroom apartment.  Chris had the bedroom, I had the living room floor, and bill had the 2 cushion couch.  We just didn't have room to save the Wizard photos.  God's gonna pimp slap me for that one in the afterlife, I know.  So Chris and I went through them, and picked a few each to keep.  One of the three or four I kept was that shot of Joe doing the Neil Armstrong that had been on my office wall.  You know how I talk about losing all my videos and stuff when I moved to NC in 2008?  That photo was in the storage unit I lost.  Damn.

I went on to work at the AFA, and then Unreel Productions.  As a rider, I started doing tailwhip footplants on street, real slow and clunky, but original for the time.  Joe, meanwhile, invented the tailwhip air.  I became convinced that they could be done on a jump, and started trying them.  My problem was, I didn't get much air and sucked at jumping. I just didn't get high enough to get the bike all the way around and land them.  I also convinced myself that bunnyhop tailwhips were possible, and I began trying them in 1987.  At that time, telling people I was trying bunnyhop tailwhips would be like a rider today saying, "I'm working on bunnyhop double backflips."  It was so impossible, it became a joke.  Nobody thought that trick would ever happen.

Meanwhile, Joe Johnson, who actually had amazing riding skills, got single tailwhips on vert wired, and the started doing one handed ones.  While most of the 1988 vert riders hucked 900 attempts, Joe worked out the double tailwhip.  Like you see in the clip above, Joe landed the first double tailwhip, on vert, at the 2-Hip King of Vert in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.  I hate to admit it, but I totally forgot that was the first double tailwhip he landed.  I forgot, because  a bit later that afternoon, Mat Hoffman landed the first 900 in a contest... and that overshadowed everything else from that contest.  What makes forgetting Joe's first double tailwhip even worse is that I was there... on the deck of the ramp... with a fucking $50,000 professional betacam camera.  Yeah, really... here's my footage of Joe's first double whip, at 11:31.



Somehow I forgot I happened to shoot that epic trick the first time he landed it.  Sorry Joe.  That 900 Mat landed at 14:43 in this clip above dulled my memory of the rest of the weekend. 

I do remember, though, being at Woodward in Pennsylvania for the 2-Hip King of Vert there a couple of months later.  Again, I was the Unreel Productions cameraman, sent there because Vision sponsored the 2-Hip contest series.  At :38 in the top clip, you can see Joe huck the first attempt at a triple tailwhip.  It was the spring of 1989.  My footage from that contest was edited into the Ride Like a Man video by Eddie Roman.  The triple tailwhip try isn't in the video.  I do remember that I got to State College, PA for that college, and found that the airline had lost the batteries and videotape for my camera.  I got them at the last moment, and I think a battery went dead or something.

Luckily, in this here internet era with YouTube and all, I found this clip, with just Joe's runs from Woodward.  You can really get a sense of how freakin' high Joe was getting really well from this  angle.  If you read this blog on a regular basis, you know that the stories of the old freestyle days I tell are my memories of these events, usually stoked back into my head by watching video of the events if possible.  I'm not telling all of you the unbiased, official, historical account of these events.  And like I've said many, many times, I was an industry guy with a weird string of jobs.  Because of that, I wound up standing nearby when some amazing stuff went down.  I mean that absolutely literally.  At 3:49 in this clip, Joe flies out to catch his breath and stoke up the crowd.  You'll see a guy on the deck, just to the right of Joe, in a Vision Street Wear T-shirt and lavender shorts (they were free from Vision).  That's me.  Standing nearby as the crowd chants for Joe to try a triple tailwhip.  Then Joe rolls in, and four walls later, tries a triple tailwhip for the first time in human history.  We went berzerk.  Joe actually came crazy close.  No... wait... he got the bike all the way around on the third whip, and he's from New England.  He came wicked close to pulling the triple tailwhip that day.

On the way out, I was walking with Mike Miranda (Vision BMX team manager) and a couple other guys, including Karl Rothe.  We saw Joe in a car window, and Karl said something like, "Man Joe, you must be sportin' some major wood after almost landing a triple whip."  Then he saw an older woman in the car next to Joe.  I think it was Joe's grandma.  We just started cracking up as we walked off.

That year, 1989, was the year that the mainstream bike industry decided "BMX is dead" and pulled money out to put it into mountain bikes.  Things faded everywhere as top riders lost sponsors.  I don't think I ever ran into Joe after 1989.  He faded away into New England life I guess.  That December, I came agonizingly close to landing a few bunnyhop tailwhips.  But not quite.  I never did land one.  But in 1990, Bill Nitschke, a much, much more talented rider than me, made them real in front of a Burger King.  The Whopper, the kind with all hop and no cheese, was born, sparked, no doubt, by seeing Joe Johnson make the tailwhip and double tailwhip airs a reality.

As time went on, Mat Hoffman took vert to yet another level in the Eddie Roman produced video, Headfirst.  He became the vert rider most people in later years think of when asked about the late 1980's.  But vert would never be what it is now with out the clean cut, quiet, New England guy, Joe Johnson.

I'm going to be sharing my most of my old school BMX stories on the new Block Bikes Blog from now on, check it out...

Become poem

This is a poem I wrote way back in the P.O.W. House days, around '92 0r '93, that you old and mid school BMXers remember.  I didn't lose it in 2008 like all my other poems and creative work, because it's the one poem I memorized.

Become

You must risk

If you're to succeed

For when you grow

Sometimes you bleed

Each must climb 

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

Kevin Smith interview with Stan Lee

As you know by now, comic book legend writer and creator, Stan Lee, has died at age 95.  Ninety five?  Must've had some Spidey blood in him.  I was never a comic book kid, or graphic novel guy later, though I read a few.  My main influence from him at an early age was the old Spiderman cartoons on TV in the early 1970's.  I watched those things every day.

My real influence from Stan Lee comes mostly second hand, from people who were totally inspired by his and other comics, and them made work later that I really dig.  People like Kevin Smith.  So I could think of no better way to say goodbye to Stan Lee than to find a funny little clip of Kevin and Stan talking.  This little piece of an interview is great, yet only had 96 views when I pulled it up.  R.I.P. Stan Lee.

Marketing legend Gary Vaynerchuk on dealing with the coming economic collapse

If you don't recognize the face above, Gary Vaynerchuk pioneered the idea of selling wine online in about 1998.  In about five years he took his family's New Jersey liquor store from $3 million to over $60 million in annual sales.  He actually kicks himself for not building it bigger then.  He did that by using the fledgling internet for marketing in ways most people thought were stupid.  Then he took off with his brother and  started a digital agency, what was once called a marketing agency.  In about six years, that's doing $200 million+  in sales annually.  Now he tries to get Fortune 500 companies to market in a 21st century way.  Not bad.  Oh... AND Gary is one of the the top keynote business speakers around the world, AND he puts out more content, across multiple platforms, than anyone on the places where business, the internet, social media, and marketing intersect.  Simply put.  He knows his shit.

People give me grief at times for writing about economics and saying there's a sizable recession coming in the near future.  I'm broke, currently homeless, and they say that's why I have no business having an opinion on this, much less expressing my opinion.  I even got physically threatened for this writing this blog, bordering on death threats, and told to stop writing it by many people.  That's not gonna happen.

I've been an amateur futurist my whole life.  I've watched the markets since buying an ounce of silver as a kid during the 1980 surge.  I actually enjoy reading, thinking, and projecting all these ideas into the future to see what it may look like.  I called the 1993-1994 interest rate rise ahead of time, while working part time, telemarketing for a mortgage broker (Dundee Mortgage in Santa Ana, CA).  I shared my ideas with the owner of the company one night.  He liked my enthusiasm, but told me I was wrong, that he'd been in the business for 25 years, and that's not how things worked.  He was out of business two months later.  I called the last two recessions a couple of years before they happened, as well.  Right now, there's a lot more time for me, and data for everyone, to get a sense of the next economic downturn.  So I'm looking a lot closer at things this time around.

The simple fact is, the big blocks are stacked and ready for a pretty gnarly recession.  I'm not writing this to scare people or piss off Republicans, Conservatives, Industrial Age company management, or any other group.  This is what I see happening, I've showed in previous posts why I see it happening, and it makes sense to acknowledge that there's some kind of downturn likely soon, and prepare for it.  That's all.

Thanks to the work of super brain quant (from Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros., Goldman Sachs) turned journalist, Nomi Prins, I've realized just how much money is being created and flowed to Wall Street and financial markets worldwide to help us keep the next collapse at bay.  It's kind of like playing blackjack in a casino with $100 chips, but having a debit card with $10 million in the account.  Every time you lose your all your money, you just hit the ATM and get some more.  Eventually that account will run out, but for now things look fine.  That's an oversimplified way to think about our economy right now, but it gives you the basic idea.  We should have had a recession start in 2016-2017, but there's a sort of rolling bail out keeping it from happening... for the moment.  But that can't last forever.

Gary Vee, as most of his fans (including me) know him, sees it from the businessman's standpoint.  Shit happens, another recession will come at some point, might as well work it into the long term plan.  He's actually COUNTING ON the coming recession as a businessman.  He's been through a couple serious ones, he knows there will be massive turmoil, but there will also be a ton of opportunities for people who do have steady cash flow and assets when the next one hits.  He's betting on that.

So in this video, part of which I've seen in another, longer version, he tells you his thoughts on this coming economic downturn.  But in this video, he also mentions, for the first time I know of, that colleges will go out of business.  In fact, HIS college, Mount Ida University, is now gone.  I've been saying that colleges will go under for several months, after learning that much of the $1.5 TRILLION in student debt has been repackaged and sold as Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (called SLABS).  That's very similar to the way subprime mortgages were sold and rebuilt as CDO's, which helped trigger the Great Recession of 2007-9.

After learning about SLABS, it was apparent that many would fail, and it will most likely cause a collapse like in 2008.  BUT, this time, it will be the money that's going into colleges and universities that slows down to a trickle.  Which means sketchy colleges will likely go under, and even major, well known schools, could really struggle.  When you add to that the way technology has made most information available to just about anyone, for free, then things look bad for the college system as a whole.  I think we will ultimately see a big collapse of many schools, and a complete restructuring of the whole college system, eventually.  Virtually EVERYONE thinks our education system sucks now, so this shouldn't be a big surprise.

I've been saying this for quite a while, but nobody wants to hear it.  Since I'm busy on other things, like surviving, I haven't looked into it deeper.  But hearing Gary Vee finally talk about colleges going under, including the one he went to, I just did a quick search to see if others had.  Holy crap!  Dozens of small colleges have shut down in the last 2-3 years or so.  The college meltdown IS ALREADY HAPPENING.  But it's not from a collapse of the SLABS yet, these colleges are closing down for other reasons.  It's just small colleges and it hasn't garnered mainstream attention yet.  At some point, it will.

There's a ton more to be said here.  But I'll save that for later posts.  At this point, adding in thoughts from Nomi Prins in a very recent interview, it seems this economic downturn has already started as a kind of slow motion car crash.  The Central Banks are working to keep a crash from happening, and it's working to some degree.  But there are stress cracks in their plan, and a serious recession is looking much more likely to mainstream financiers and average investors.  Ms. Prins sees it happening in bits and pieces, not on massive market crash up front.  When investors and financiers lose faith, and start getting really worried, things go down hill faster.

In any case, here are a couple of articles about colleges that have already closed or merged with someone else.  There are over 100 in two years.  Freakin' wow.

Spate of recent college closures has some seeing long predicted consolidation taking place (10/2017)

How many colleges and Universities have closed down since 2016?
( I counted 109 on their list at the moment)

The Queen tribute drawing process

 Because of my financial situation, I haven't been able to shoot good video or do a time lapse of my drawing process.  Here's some photos of the process of the Queen tribute drawing I just finished.  First of all, I "cheat."  I pick a photo, blow it up on a copy machine, tape the pieces together full size, and pencil the whole back.  Then I tape it down, go over the basic outline, doing a graphite transfer.  That sounds like tracing.  But if you saw my pencil outlines, you'd realize that I just get a rough outline, and ultimately, I shade in ink.  One pass. 

Once I have the pencil outline, I break out the Sharpies.  Then I use a standard, black, Sharpie fine point to ink the basic outline.  That's what you see above.  In this drawing, the "stomp, stomp, clap" words I drew old school drafting style, measuring and drawing them by hand.

 For this drawing, I put a lot of the song titles in the background of the darkened stadium.  This photo was actually from Queen's last live show with Freddie Mercury, while he was still alive, in Wembley Stadium.  I didn't realize this at first, it just had a cool look, and room for the big words I wanted in the back, which are a reference to the song "We Will Rock You."  I color one color at a time, working towards the final color with my layers of scribbles.  So things change colors several times as I draw.

 Here I've colored three or four colors on the left side, three on the cloak, (before shadows) and added album titles written in the background on the right.  You can see Freddie Mercury starting to stand out.

 Here's my "mobile studio, this time at Wendy's, with the photo on the computer in the background to check the colors.  The backgrounds are mostly done, the cloak is done, and there's pink shading, the first color down, on the shadows on Freddie.

 Here's a somewhat close-up of the drawing, a week and a half from the start, after 35 or so drawing hours I'd say. 

Here's the final drawing, at the library.  I'm going to get a new silver Sharpie and outline the letters in "Queen," to make them pop a bit more.  Other than that, it's done.  Like I said, I picked this photo to work from intuitively, I liked the pose, the par can light colors on the right, Freddie standing out from the background, and it had room for the "stomp, stomp, clap."  

While I'm drawing these, I listen to the music and any documentaries I can about the band.  I was already a huge fan of Queen.  But finding out that this photo is from Freddie's last concert, and one of Queen's biggest shows ever, is icing on the cake.  This drawing is 18" X 24", done with Sharpies on paper, and in my unique #sharpiescribblestyle.  It's $125 for the original, there will be no copies or prints, if you're interested.  You can contact me at:  stevenemig13@gmail.com .

My drawings on the wall at The Mix Gallery in the Arts District

 Here's the young Bob Dylan drawing I did for an art collector in North Carolina, and he's the guy that didn't pay me for this drawing before I left.  Because of not getting paid that day, I wound up here in Richmond, and wasn't able to make it up to Chicago, where I was planning to go.  It's a long story.

Heading down to the library yesterday, I noticed I could see one of my drawings, Bob Dylan above, in the window of The Mix gallery, which is at 12 West Broad, here in downtown Richmond.  It's about three doors down from the big statue of Maggie Lenard Walker in the Arts District. 

I ran into the guys at The Mix the day after getting out of the hospital back in August.  I went into the E.R. with cellulitis, a fairly serious leg infection I'd had long ago.  I ended up spending six days in the hospital, damn near dying, from a severe allergic reaction to a the medicine they gave me, which I'd never had before.  Two days earlier, I could barely stand up in the hospital, I got that sick. I had to go to a homeless shelter for a night after the hospital, and, still sicker than a dog, I walked two miles, with nasty little blisters called pustules, popping up on my legs, in 93 degree weather, while carrying all my bags, to find my way back to the part of Richmond I kind of knew.

Someone I met told me there was an "African Store" in the arts district that loved Bob Marley stuff.  So I went to the Arts district looking for this store, to see if I could sell a small drawing for some food money.  I never did find it, I think that person who told me was talking about the bong shop near VCU.  But while I was looking for it, I took a break to rest, and wound up talking to a couple of guys from The Mix, and they took me inside, and the man I talked to there ended up buying the Bob Dylan drawing and the Tainted Love/Harley Quinn drawing below.  I sold them really cheap, compared to my standard prices, but I desperately needed to rent a motel room for the night to keep healing up.  I really didn't want to part with Tainted Love, I drew that one for me a year ago.  But it helped me get a room, and keep living.   

 I started stopping by the gallery now and then, and Jay asked me to do a Biggie Smalls drawing for them.  Tonight I saw that all three of these drawings are up on the wall, and all visible from the sidewalk.  So if you're local to Richmond, and want to check out some of my work up close and in person, head down to The Mix at 12 West Broad in the Arts District.  Check their Facebook page for hours and info.  They own these drawings, and I haven't stopped by there in a while, so I don't know if these are just on display, or if they're for sale.  That's their call at this point.  But it's really cool to see some of my work up and visible in the Arts District, and I'm stoked some people here will see it.

I haven't been down to The Mix in quite a while, not because of any issue with them, I've just been busy trying to stay alive as a homeless man, and to work on selling work so I can work my way off the streets and into a decent room somewhere.  I'll keep everyone posted, in this blog, and on social, if I do more work with The Mix in the near future.  Thanks to Jay and Ebani for hanging my work, and I'll come by soon and see what's happening guys.  All three of these drawings are 18" X 24", done with Sharpies on paper, and drawn in my unique #sharpiescribblestyle.  Check 'em out.