This is Airin Roso, longtime BMX freestyler, trick show promoter/rider, and and skate/bike park builder/maintainer. I'd never met him, never even heard of him before. But I've been out of touch of the mainstream bike world for a 20-some years. I ran into him randomly at Powers Bike Shop here in Richmond a couple of weeks ago. I was there to pick something up real quick, and Airin stopped there on the way through town, enroute to a contest in North Carolina. I couldn't find any big air clips of him, though ramps are his specialty. Airin used to do a front flip dismount in shows, off the bike, and land on his back on the box jump landing. OUCH. Here's a clip I found of him doing that into a foam pit.
We started talking, and wound up talking all afternoon about the old days of BMX freestyle, the current days, and all the different ways people contribute to the world of bike riding. He's made a really good living doing shows, mostly anti-drug shows at schools. Airin (I'm guessing it's spelled a bit different on his birth certificate) can bust some flatland, and has done ten foot airs on ramps, and is still riding hard well into his 40's. He's one of those riders that never stopped.
I actually got a really cool blog post idea from talking to him, which I started to write, but then got sidetracked by another writing project. That's why I haven't mentioned him in a blog post until now. Meeting him is one of the cool happenings in the last couple of weeks. That blog post will be out before too long.
Also on the BMX track, I decided to do a zine to actually sell. It started by working on a 40-48 page zine, the first in a series of Freestyle BMX Tales zines, about The Spot in Redondo Beach. Freestyle BMX Tales was my second blog of BMX stories from back in the day, from about 2009-2012. I wrote over 500 posts on that blog, and it got something like 120,000+ page views in its day. But I deleted the original version during a dark time after my dad died in 2012. So I decided to do a series of zines, and sell them, since zines wind up as collectible items by their very nature. And I just can't afford to write and publish an actual book right now. And I need to earn some money to get my life back on track.
Once I got going, the 40+ page zine turned into TWO 48 page zines, which I'm laying out right now. So it's going to be a little package of old school BMX goodness. Stay tuned, they'll be ready to go soon, before Christmas.
I couldn't get money and time together to do an art project for the December First Friday art walk here in Richmond's Arts District. And it was supposed to rain some. So I ended up wandering around the Arts District on First Friday, and met a couple of different groups and talked a while. I'm going to do a post about the one artist, who's info isn't in front of me right now. Again, the zines are the priority at the moment, everything else will come soon.
On my own art front, I have a gallery space in the Arts District that digs my work, and wants to put some up. That should be happening in a few days. I'll give all the details when it happens. I'm really stoked on that, and hopefully it will lead to some really cool events in the future. I'll have both big originals and small, inexpensive prints for sale there.
I've got a big drawing I'm working on, which I'll show once I get it done. It's for a friend who's totally helped me out over a couple of years. I've got a smaller drawing to do right after. So I'm staying super busy, but no big announcements at the moment. Lots of stuff soon. You can check out my Sharpie art with #sharpiescribblestyle on either Instagram or Google images.
Then, this past Friday, I went to Steve Crandall's art show, which you saw in the last blog.
Here's the 8 1/2" X 11" drawing of The Notorious B.I.G. I just did. Prints available soon:
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