"The Ballad of Evel Knievel." This is the opening song on the Evel Knievel record album my parents bought me when I was in 3rd grade, months before Evel's Snake River Canyon Jump. What does my Evel record have to do with the BMX world? You'll have to read the blog post, it's one of the most popular BMX blog posts of mine in the last year or so.
The first official Club White Bear T-shirt is now available exclusively from Block Bikes Online BMX Store. I just started doing a blog and social media for Block, and as most of you know, I'm currently homeless. I want to really thank Rich Bartlett at Block for looking past my current situation, and putting my smelly butt to work. But he's not a gazillionaire, and can't put up a fat salary until the Block online store gets cranking. So we came up with the T-shirt idea. The proceeds of the T-shirt will help me rent a room here, buy some food, and get back on the way to real life, so I can do more cool BMX stuff in the future. So buy a shirt, because the streets are no place for The White Bear. Get yours here: Block Bikes Online BMX Store
This post is a look back at my most read blog posts, and a reminder of what I do, tell first person tales of cool moments I saw happen in BMX freestyle in the 1980's and 1990's.
There you go, ten of the most popular BMX posts from this blog, and one about me nearly dying in a hospital last August, because of an allegic reaction to medicine. Thanks for reading my blog. There's a not so surprising surprise coming tonight or tomorrow. Stay tuned... And check out the new Block Bikes Blog I'm doing, covering BMX and all things bike.
Quick celebration time. I just noticed the last post was #550 for this blog, which means this blog now has more posts than the original Freestyle BMX Tales, my former biggest blog, did. Also, this blog is creeping up on 68,000 page views, which means it has passed my #2 most read blog, Make Money Panhandling, which had somewhere just over 61,000 page views, I think.
Thanks for reading this blog everyone!
When I started this blog, I didn't know if anyone would read it at all. I was, homeless, living in a tent, and blogging mostly to promote the Sharpie art I was trying to sell to start making a living again. This one has amazed me, and I'm stoked you all keep checking it out. I'll do my best to keep it worth reading/watching.
For any of you keeping score at home, or aliens who've just landed here and are doing research to see if I'm worth abducting, I've started somewhere around 40 to 50 blogs. All blogs seem like good ideas at the time, and most turn into one night stands of writing. The next morning, I go, "What the fuck was I thinking?" In addition, and unfortunately, I took down all my blogs in a dark period for me after my dad died in 2012. But here's a list of my top blogs, and rough stats (from memory) on them, since I've been blogging, for about 12 years now.
My main blogs: Freestyle BMX Tales- (the original version) I wrote a little over 500 posts, all personal stories from BMX freestyle in the 1980's and a little in the 1990's. This was my most read blog, with over 125,000 total page views in its run of about 2 1/2 years, from 2009 to 2012. FBMXT followed my first old school freestyle blog, FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales. Highlight: Over125,000 pagviews on a blog about old school BMX. Who knew people would read my crazy stories that much?
Make Money Panhandling- I started this blog as a joke, trying to learn about SEO (search engine optimization) in 2009 (I think). I wanted to think up the dumbest name I could, one that had "make money" in the title, and then use SEO techniques I was learning, to get the blog to show up #1 in Google search results. Once I started it, I realized I had a ton of things to say about homelessness and panhandling, since I'd struggled with it for so long. The point was not to encourage panhandling, though it did that for some. The point was to catch people's attention, and explain and shine a light on many aspects of the homelessness issue, and make people laugh, with photos of funny panhandling signs. This blog had over 100 posts, as I recall, and got over 60,000 page views. Highlight: TV host John Stossel's producer contacted me, and used my thoughts and knowledge as research for John Stossel's one hour show: Freeloaders. That's John panhandling at the very beginning of the show. The biggest freeloader in the show was the corporation GE. Yeah, as in General Electric.
FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales- I started this blog when I landed in Kernersville, North Carolina, in November 2008. In that move, I lost everything I had from my life in BMX freestyle, and went into a deep, deep depression. I lost my magazine collection, my videos and DVD's, and the master tapes of videos I produced, and over 40 hours of raw footage ranging from 1990 to 2007. I had one of the four best collections of raw footage in the sport, and planned to make a documentary (or 2 or 3?) out of it all, chronicling parts of freestyle. The other 3 video collections are owned by Vision/Unreel Productions, Eddie Roman, and Mark Eaton. I also found out that Andy Jenkins, Lew, and Spike didn't mention me in the FREESTYLIN' book, in 2008, which came out earlier that year. I wanted to write 20 or 30 posts, just to say, "Hey, I was there in those 80's days in the freestyle industry. Here's a few things I remember." Suddenly I started connecting with old school freestylers, and became somewhat less depressed. I kept writing, and wound up writing about 212 posts, and getting a little over 25,000 page views in about a year. All those posts were about the five months I worked at FREESTYLIN' and BMX Action magazines. Highlight: People started quoting my stories as source material for Wikipedia BMX articles, and other web posts and articles.
Steve Emig: The White Bear- This blog had no underlying theme, except my interests, and to promote my Sharpie artwork (#sharpiescribblestyle). My main themes are macro-economics and social dynamics, old school BMX freestyle stories, and to to promote my Sharpie art. This blog will be two years old in late June, 2019. It now has over 550 blog posts, and is has 67,882 page views, making it my most prolific posting blog, and 2nd in total page views.
All together, these four blogs have had...
-Over 277,882 total page views
-Over 1,362 blog posts
-Over 812 posts about old school BMX stories
While this personal blog will continue, I've also just started doing promotion for Block Bikes Online BMX Store, which is theBlock Bikes Blog, and will cover a lot of modern BMX, some old school stories, and all things bicycle. Thanks again for checking out my stuff. I'll work to keep it all interesting.
Did you know the original camels came form North America? Yep. Here's the most interesting story I've ever heard about finding apiece of camel bone that's millions of years old. This is now one of my favorite TED Talks. Latif Nasser makes this fascinating.
I had never heard of Patrick Bet David before I bookmarked this a day or two ago. This guy's an entrepreneur, he's obviously involved in today's rapidly changing, tech enabled world, and he makes A LOT of sense. I don't agree with everything, but that's the point. He's making me think about change that I haven't dreamed of... and I think about these types of things continuously.
As I've written before in this blog, I think we're in an 80 year (or so) period where our new technology is disrupting every business model, and every aspect of society. I call this The Big Transition. This video, which is a year old, challenges us to consider major disruption in 10 industries and one other area. Here are the industries he sees changing and/or disappearing: Restaurants, Movie theaters, Telecommunications, Wallets, Personal cars, Retailers, Insurance, Traditional journalists, College sports, Gas stations. Bonus: Politics.
I don't agree with everything, and he's coming at this from a completely upscale financial viewpoint. There are more poor people than ever, there will be millions more in the future, and they 1) need many of these things at some level (like Walmart and cheap restaurants), and 2) millions of late adapters and the financially left behind people slow "progress" down dramatically. That said, he makes a lot of valid arguments worth considering, especially if you're involved in these areas.
Things have changed dramatically in the last 30-40 years, and more things will change faster in the next 20 or so years. In any case, employee or business owner, these ideas are worth the time to listen to and mull over.
You know that moment when you're waking up, but you're still in a dream, and for a few seconds they both kind of make sense. Then you wake up more and go , "Oh shit, that was weird." The last nine months have been like that for me. This weird Robin Williams photo is part of a collage I made on an old skimboard years ago.
For nearly two decades, my life has been really weird. For a bunch of reasons, I couldn't make a decent living, and it's just been a long, long struggle to just get by. Taxi driving, 5 1/2 years, most living in my cab, led to full blown homelessness in 2007-2008 in Orange County, California, then my family flew me to North Carolina. In ten years in NC, I couldn't get hired for ANY job, except taxi driver for a year, and that didn't pay. Again, there was a bunch of weird shit going on behind the scenes, which I still can't fully explain. Last August, looking at 30 rough days in jail for my arrest for buying donuts at an Adli grocery store (really, buying donuts), I escaped North Carolina. But my limited money only got me to Richmond, Virginia, where I've been since. The charges were dropped months after I left NC, a place I have no desire to ever set foot in again (but my family lives there).
I got off a bus here in Richmond (50 shades of Greyhound), with about $3.50 in my pocket. I was in a city I'd never been to before, that I knew nothing about, and where I didn't know a single person. I had a typical, book bag sized backpack, a duffel bag with a few clothes, and art supplies for my Sharpie art.
After a couple weeks of mostly sleeping outside, simply laying down under the stars on loading docks and in parking lots, I got drenched in the rain one night, and wound up with a leg infection called cellulitis. It's something people with diabetes get a lot. Despite a family history full of it, I don't have diabetes. But my health got bad when I was a taxi driver, well over 350 pounds much of that time, and I started getting cellulitis, so I'm kind of prone to it.
In my first bout with it, back in early 2007, I didn't go to the hospital because I didn't have insurance. My left lower leg swelled up to 3 times its size and turned bright red with infection, and I just laid in my cab, outside Fashion Island mall, in Newport Beach, with a temperature of 102 to maybe 105 degrees, for five days. I finally went to the hospital, and spent three days getting pumped with medicine to kill the infection. How bad did it get? One doctor talked about possible amputation of my lower leg, at one point. Luckily, that didn't happen. I also learned that homeless people (I qualified as a taxi driver, living in my cab) are nearly always covered for medical, or by hospital's emergency funds.
So when I got the cellulitis here in Richmond last August, I went to VCU hospital, the local med student teaching hospital. They gave me three IV bags of medicine. Then I turned pink, and we realized I was seriously allergic to the medicine. So the medical team there spent the next 6 days trying to save me from the allergic reaction. I was damn close to dying.
I turned pink, then red, then dark red, then even kind of black in places. My body puffed up in random places. I couldn't even stand up for about a day. My face looked kind of like the elephant man at one point. Here's the weird thing. Well, it's all weird. But the weirdest thing. I had this deep sense, not really a dream, but kind of an inner knowing right as I began to turn the corner and get better. I had this sense that it would be an incredible struggle to simply survive the winter here in Richmond. I'd been homeless, in different ways, for about 9 years over the past 18 years. It was going to take everything I learned about survival to stay alive all winter. At the same time I turned the corner and I began to get better, this blog crossed the 43,000 page view threshold. 43 is everywhere, especially for old school BMXer Has Been's, like me.
But my inner sense was that IF I could survive the winter, Spring would bring a new beginning, in a big way. If I survived this test the Universe was throwing at me, I would see a turning of the tides this Spring, and would finally begin to rebuild my life into something cool again. There were several times over the winter when I just wanted to give up. Two or three times, I did give up... for 20 or 30 minutes. I screamed and cussed and stomped around, or just stood in the cold without my jacket, thinking. Then the frustration passed, and I kept trudging on.
I was outside during a ten inch snowstorm, all night, for 17 1/2 hours, in December. I slept outside on nights down to 12 or 13 degrees, with wind. Nearly everything I own got stolen. I lost two borrowed sleeping bags and a third one that I bought, along with three moving blankets that helped me keep warm. My bag with all my spare clothes was stolen in December. I've been living in the three layers of clothes on my back since. Yeah, I smell pretty bad most of the time. I clean up when and how I can. I've had my toes, and fingers and ears frostnipped more times than I can count, that's the beginning stage of serious frostbite.
There were three times this past winter, where, even after all the crazy years of adeventures I've been through, I thought, "That's it, I am not going to survive this." Make that four, counting the hospital stay. But I'm still here. And now it's Spring.
Sleeping outside is still not safe, but it doesn't have the every night, life or death consequences that a 20 to 25 degree night does. Through all of this, I've been blogging, and drawing my Sharpie pictures to sell, as I could. In addition, about a dozen people stepped up and gave me money to get a room for the night, or a few nights, and that was HUGE. I really appreciate it, and plan to pay all of you back as finances allow.
A couple of weeks ago, my plan was to write a zine about how to use blogging, the internet, and social media to help small businesses make more money. I got pretty good at this stuff in the three years of promoting my artwork, but the art just didn't have the profit potential to get me completely off the streets. As I started writing these ideas down, old BMX friend Rich Bartlett contacted me. We talked for quite a while, and I became the person starting a blog, and doing more social media promotion, for Rich's new project, the Block Bikes Online BMX store. He's had the Block Bikes shop in Lancaster, CA for 25 years or more now, and seeing where business is headed, decided last year it was time to take it online.
Though his shop is well known, Rich isn't a millionaire, and the work I'm doing didn't come with a big fat weekly check to start. We're working together, and the online store needs to start cranking in sales to be able to pay me well, as well as the other employees, and Rich, of course. This is the bike world, I need to get traffic heading to that online shop, to earn my keep. As we all know, there are no Angel Investors in the BMX world. It's not like high tech, where people have an idea, pitch it to a super rich person, and get $4 million to burn through, losing money every month, HOPING the idea will make a fortune some day.
In the BMX industry, we're real entrepreneurs, we have to actually make shit that sells, and keep innovating and selling, to make things work. So I started the Block Bikes Blog, and it's had nearly 1,000 page views in the first ten days, which is a great start.
So... I survived 8 1/2 months of homelessness, brutal and crazy the whole time. It felt like I was earning my PhD in street survival. Spring came, and so did a whole new start for me. Full circle, back into the BMX industry, 14 years after moving out of Chris Moeller's condo in 1995, and striking out on my own.
So that's where I'm at. Rich and I will be dropping the first Club White Bear T-shirt, probably tomorrow, available only through the Block Bikes Online Store. It's a way to help jump start the store, and raise money to help me stabilize my living situation. Rich bought my tiger drawing, and has helped me out as he could, and I've had a room a few days since we started working together. But I'm still homeless for the moment, and panhandling for food money and bus fare money when needed. But things are looking up.
Here's the T-shirt design. I can't float anyone free T-shirts right now, even the people who helped me out. I'll settle up with all of you, and send some gifts, once I get a stable roof over my head, and am making consistent cash. Let me know what you think of the T-shirt...
As I write this (morning of 4/25/2019), the T-shirts aren't ready to go... yet. But you can order one (or 5 or 20), either later today or tomorrow, here: Block Bikes Online BMX Store (Not sure of the price yet) .
Here's another "new start" I made once. Back in August of 1986. It changed the entire course of my life. I had no idea the adventure that new start would lead to. Now 33 years later, I have no idea where this one will lead either, but I'm stoked to get going...
I have a couple of new blogs I'm getting off the ground. Check them out:
Why is the economy collapsing and the world going crazy? I wrote this online mash-up book/blog thing to give my thoughts on that question. Here it is...
It was September of 1989. I sat on a bed in the hotel room Rich Bartlett and I were sharing in Midtown Manhattan for a contest weekend. It was a Thursday night, BMX freestyle had "died" earlier that year, and sponsorships, even for top pros, had been sucked into the Bermuda Triangle and disappeared. But Vision Street Wear was still jammin', and they paid for our room. Crashing in our room for the weekend, because they had no sponsors at the time, were Dennis McCoy, Mat Hoffman, Steve Swope, some up-and-comer named Rick Thorne, and a couple of other Kansas City riders.
Dennis was the top overall rider in the world, and the favorite of New York City locals. Mat Hoffman was the top vert rider in the world. We were all in NYC for a 2-Hip Meet the Street contest, at the legendary Brooklyn Banks. It was the beginning of weekend destined to be epic.
The guys claimed floor space for sleep later that night, 3 or 4 guys actually camped out in the huge walk-in closet our room had, which was bigger than half of the bedrooms I had growing up as a kid. Rich was pro BMX racer, who also rode dirt, street, and vert. He was Vision's sponsored rider. I was the video cameraman for Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, sent because VSW sponsored all of Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip vert and street events. Much like the punk rock scene of the 1980's, in BMX freestyle, whoever had a room paid for usually let several friends, and often strangers, camp out in their room for free. Things were cool like that back in the ramen days.
I'm focusing on Dennis McCoy for this post, because of the crazy love the NYC locals had for him as a street rider. Hoffman was there. Dave Voelker was there. Ron Wilkerson was putting on the contest, and riding in it. But Dennis McCoy was the name I heard the locals talking about all weekend long.
So what made Dennis so special to them? He was as "street" as it got. He could ride anything, and was known for learning new tricks and having them on lock from one contest to the next. You never showed Dennis McCoy a new trick you invented back then, until you had it completely dialed. Because, if he liked it, he'd be doing it better than you at the next contest. Nearly everyone thought Dennis McCoy was just gifted at picking up new tricks fast. A couple years earlier, I found out otherwise.
It was late Sunday afternoon, the weekend of the Austin AFA Freestyle Masters contest, in 1987. I worked for the American Freestyle Association (AFA), which put on the contests. Bob Morales, freestyler turned serial entrepreneur and promoter, ran the AFA. We had 3 or 4 full time employees, and a bunch of volunteers at contests.
Austin was an epic comp, Kevin Jones had unleashed the Locomotive on us all in flatland, and upgraded version of the Backyard scuffing trick, and changed riding forever in an instant. The contest before, in Oregon, the Backyard, a scuffing trick invented by NorCal rider Tim Treacy, blew up, and most serious competitors had learned it.
But the contest was over, Bob Morales had gone off to take care of the last paperwork and details with the venue staff. I was in a big back room of the building, like a warehouse, riding by the big open truck door. The place was empty... almost. I heard a freewheel behind me, and turned around. Dennis McCoy came riding out of the main hall, saw a glass bottle on the concrete floor, and in a well practiced move, flicked it, swap rock style, with his front wheel. The bottle went shooting across the huge building at warp speed, slamming into the opposite wall. It didn't break, but probably chipped a bit. I'm pretty sure Dennis could take out a small animal playing swap rock.
He rode up to me, and asked what I was doing. I'd met him a year before, and then wrote a zine article about how I thought Dennis should have beat Woody Itson in the 1986 finals, and he was pretty stoked, and I got to know him a bit. I was goofing around doing my normal tailwhips or squeakers probably, fun tricks I had dialed in.
Dennis asked if I knew how to do Backyards. He told me he missed the Oregon contest, the one before Austin, when the trick popped, and needed to learn them. I told him I had tried them but never got them down. Sometimes being the $5 an hour AFA wokrer guy pays off. Suddenly there was Dennis McCoy and myself, positioning our bikes on the back wheel, handlebars backwards, one foot on a back peg, then stepping up into the Backyard, and trying to scuff. I did it, and scuffed 2 or 3 times, then lost my balance and fell over. Dennis stepped into it, scuffed a couple times, and lost his balance, and stepped out of it. I tried again. Then Dennis. We went back and forth until we were both doing 6 or 7 scuffs each, rolling on the back wheel.
About that time, Bob Morales walked back into the area, and said he was done, it was time to head to the airport. He stopped and we all talked a couple minutes, and Bob and I got in the rental minivan (the same one that Ron Wilkerson "kidnapped" us AFA employees in- previous post). When I left, I could do the Backyard, stepping into it, just as well as Dennis McCoy.
I wasn't too interested in learning the Backyard, I was more into trying to invent new tricks, rather than learning the hottest new trick. But the hot new tricks were what helped us riders place well at contests. By the time the next contest happened, I could still step into a Backyard and scuff 4 or 5 times. Dennis McCoy, however, had the Backyard on lock and soon worked into his contest routine. I realized that he wasn't learning it any faster than me when we tried in Austin. He just went back to Kansas City, and that crazy fool rode like 12 hours a day. He just worked harder at freestyle than the rest of us.
Here's the AFA Freestyle Masters Finals from 1987, a few months after the Austin contest I spoke of. At 11:41 you can see Dennis do a long backyard, working it into circles. Dialed.
So when Rich Bartlett and me wound up with Dennis, Mat Hoffman, Swope, Thorne, and the others to session with in big bad New York City, we knew DMC would be a hard guy to keep up with. I have the next part of that story, the 1989 Brooklyn Banks Meet the Street contest, over on the new Block Bikes Blog, so go check it out.
I've got a new blog going, it's about building an art or creative business, and small businesses in general. You can check it out here: WPOS Kreative Ideas
At the moment, I draw pictures and blog, and I've just started doing blogging and social media for Rich at Block Bikes, promoting their new online store. So this doesn't apply to me now. I dig the people I'm working with these days. But like everyone else, I've had my share of lame ass jobs, and dumb ass, incompetent bosses over the years.
This idea came back in about 1997, when I worked for Happy Movers in Huntington Beach, California. Every morning, some customer would ask, "Are you guys happy?" We'd reply, "no ma'a,m we're movers, it's an oxymoron." I worked as a furniture mover, which is a just plain brutal job that sucked on may levels. I'd spend an hour in a old truck driving to some stranger's house, with a co-worker or two. Then we'd move all of that person's crap into our truck, drive the truck to another house, and unload it all. It was physically brutal. Customers were often streesed out or just lame. Nearly every Friday and Saturday, we'd move two full sized houses, or three apartments, each day. Really. Miles and miles of walking every day, lifting heavy things, and not all that much money.
One of the guys I worked with was also named Steve. I forget his last name. But he was about 5' 4", and had long, curly, brown hair you'd expect on an 80's glam rock musician. Steve also had these crazy huge forearms and calves, like Popeye, and a kind of a dopey looking face. We always joked that he was at least half Neanderthal. He was strong as an ox, worked hard, but was annoying as hell, and yelled at everybody when driving the truck on the freeway. Nobody wanted to work with Steve. So I kept getting stuck with him for a while. Steve did have a sense of humor... sometimes.
So one day we were kind of arguing in the truck, then we rolled up to our first job. It was a big, four bedroom house in Fountain Valley, a quiet, subdivision town, inland of Huntington Beach. The woman of the house was an attractive blond in her 30's, and walked out to the truck as we pulled up. Steve had her sign the paperwork, and he asked her the details of the job. She had a sense of humor, which was always good. Steve made some wisecrack about me, saying he'd work hard, and if she was lucky, I might be able to keep up with him. Something like that.
That's when a line popped in my head. I looked at the woman and said, "Yeah, you may recognize my co-worker Steve here from his modeling career..." Both of them looked at me, neither sure where I was going with it. Steve was known for actually punching people, HARD, randomly, all day when they pissed him off. He gave that look like I was about to unleash his wrath. I continued, "on the evolution chart, Steve's the third guy form the left." Our customer started laughing hard, then looked Steve up and down, and came back with, "I knew I'd seen him before."
I held my breath, waiting for Steve to just haul off and punch me in the arm or something. His surprised look turned into a smile. "Shit, that really is funny, man, I'm going to have to remember that one." Steve and I got along great that day, and our customer joked around with us all day long, which made things much better than most days.
So this line has been in my head for over 20 years. Making memes over the weekend, I remembered it. For all of you that have lame bosses out there, here's your Monday morning laugh. Print it out if you want, and put it on the cubicle wall, or tape it up in a bathroom stall of your boss is too crazy for you to put it on your own wall.
I heard the radio version of "Crazy on You" a thousand times in the 1980's. But never with an intro like this. Dayummmm. And then this collaboration below popped up on my YouTube stream recently. These ladies are way better rockers than I ever knew...
My avorite part is just how into it Jimmy Page gets. I knew knew Heart was this good. The lesson? Go see live music whenever you can.
It's Easter, the Christian holiday where we commemorate the day Jesus of Nazareth ("Christ" was not his last name, and actually he spent far more time in Capernum), the first century spiritual teacher, healer, and leader. On this day we honor him rising from the dead, three days after dying on a Roman cross, on Good Friday. OK, it's actually only two days after, so Good Friday probably actually happened on Maundy Thursday. And Maundy is not "Monday" with a hangover, it means commandment.
In any case, Jesus, the one in the Bible, not the one who's the bus boy at your local Mexican restaurant, (he pronounces it Hay-Seuss), was the best example of the potential of a human being, and he gave us two commandments: 1) Love God with all your heart and soul and might, and 2) Love your neighbor.
So, of course, millions of his followers have started countless wars in the last 2,000 years in his name. Hey, it's much easier to shoot an arrow, throw a spear, or shoot a rifle, than it is to sit down and find some common ground with the people who really bug you. And that's why many people celebrate Easter by getting up earlier than they do on weekdays, going to church, and worshiping at sunrise, aka Son (of God) Rise. And then they gohome and beginning the actual celebration. That's where we, the Tupperware Age people, hide wicker baskets we didn't make, filled with colored eggs, plastic eggs filled with candy and money, all we say were left by a fictional giant rabbit.
That rabbit, Peter Cottontail, is the one rabbit who seems to never think about sex, which bunnies are best known for. Because nothing makes our kids think of spiritual growth and transformation like a six foot tall celebate rabbit who poops plastic eggs. Somebody really should write a book about our holiday traditions, and how they came to be.
As for me, I woke up under the bridge where I sleep, because I'm homeless, lifting up my jacket (my sleeping bag, blanket, and duffel bag of clothes and art supplies got stolen) I use as a blanket, and saw the brilliant, absolutely beautiful, first light over the huge James River, that runs through Richmond, Virginia. I walked a mile to a bus stop, with ospreys circling overhead, looking for fish to catch, cormorants, who dive after little fish, and 40 freakin' vultures on a huge flood wall. Seriously, 40 VULTURES all in one place. Apparently the vultures here have there own sunrise service. I've never seen that many in one place.
Since vultures eat carrion, dead animals killed by other animals, I always wonder if they ever get impatient and just say, "Screw it, I'm tired of waiting, let's kill something!" But I digress.
It's Easter, one of two holidays where millions of people who normally sleep in, go to church just to hedge their bets, just in case Hell actually is real. In any case, it's Easter, spend the day doing some good. For we all know what Easter really means... that Peeps will be half price tomorrow.
Happy Easter everyone!
And if you have a sick sense of humor like me, here's Sam Kinison explaining how he knew that Jesus didn't have a wife...
I dug up the real 420 story for a zine more than a decade ago, and I like it as an example of how a story grows, and can become culture, starting from a tiny seed (no pun intended) and spreading organically to a worldwide thing.
Generally speaking, I'm anti-drugs. By that, I mean I think we should live lives without illegal hard drug use, and with as little prescription drug use as possible, only when medically necessary. But then there's weed. Many of my best friends over the years have been stoners, and stoners are, by and large, damn good people. Often not too motivated, but even that's not true all the time. Two of the smartest people I've ever met were serious stoners.
Personally, I smoked pot for about a year, starting from high school graduation, in 1984. I quit during the delayed entry program when I joined the Marine Corps, and definitely needed to start back after I was dropped for a lie of omission to the recruiters. Well, and that other thing, the test score thing apparently had something to do with me getting the boot. My high school friends always wanted to get me high, and I smoked just enough so I never had to actually buy any weed.
I stopped smoking when I moved to San Jose, CA in August of 1985, because I was getting really serious about BMX freestyle. If I had kept smoking pot back then, I might actually have been a decent ramp rider, since most of them were stoners then (but not all), but who knows.
When I went back to visit my old high school friends in 1987, for a week, between two AFA contests, they got me blazed all week. Then one gave me three hits of hash, which I'd never tried, and which I followed with two rum and Cokes at the airport, then I flew from Boise to Austin, high as a kite. My plane flew over a thunderstorm at night while I was super buzzed, that was some crazy shit. I was looking down out the window, watching clouds light up from the inside with lightning.
Then I never smoked again, except for a couple tokes at a Cirque du Soleil worker party, where I coughed, started laughing, fell over sideways, and promptly farted by accident. The rest of the circle of smokers laughed for half an hour or so after that.
I'm happy not smoking weed, but also stoked that it's finally being legalized. People don't need to be doing jail time for owning, smoking, and growing marijuana. More important, that plant has a lot of legit uses, like using the fiber for paper, in particular. We could save a LOT of trees by using more hemp paper. Paper made from hemp, folks, not rolling papers, I mean.
I also have long thought that all Congresspeople and senators should get high before every legislative session. 1) Smoking weed leads to getting along well with others. But more importantly, 2) if they all got high before the session, they would AT LEAST agree on munchies in 45 minutes or so. If we could get everyone in Congress to agree on that one thing, it could lead to more agreement in other areas. Our country needs that right now.
So if you smoke, toke it up, and celebrate this day, a day that's become an informal holiday because of a handful of people and their little inside story.
For all of you BMXers reading this, our attachment and love of the number 43 started with a similar type of story, only about 20 miles from where the 420 story began. Remember, old school freestylers, I've decided to put on The White Bear's 43 Jam next April 3rd, (4/3/2020), in Boise, Idaho. Boise is where I got into BMX, but more important, it lies at almost exactly 43 degrees of latitude. Keep me honest and help me make that happen. Whether you toke or not, enjoy the day.
"Beauty's where you find it." - Madonna, "Vogue". You know how every city has that road where the strip clubs, porn stores, and cheap, crackhead motels all seem to congregate? That part of town everyone pretends doesn't exist, and is often frequented by the people to do the most pretending? One of the Mickey D's where I sometimes eat breakfast is in that part of town. Photos of tree blossoms next to a bus stop in the sketchiest part of town. #RVAallday
Though this Barbara Walters interview with Guy Laliberte' is about his personal journey, at about 1:56 we hear about the initial creative scene that spawned an pioneering artistic idea that also became a business empire. Guy says that the street performers of Montreal had this old idea about starting their own circus. Guy and Gilles St.Croix spearheaded a group of those street performers in the mid-1980's to realize that dream, and Cirque du Soleil was born. Not only did a couple dozen street performers actually start a circus, they completely redefined what a circus was. How does that happen? That is the magic, and the potential, of a really amazing Creative Scene.
So what is a Creative Scene? We are all familiar with the concept of an "art scene" or a "music scene." Those are two types of Creative Scenes. They are a loosely knit group of artists or musicians, and people in roles that support the scene, with talented people that both compete with each other and work together on a variety of creative projects and ideas.
But as a 16-year-old BMX racer in Boise, Idaho, I learned that BMX bike riding also had scenes, and there was a creative aspect to it. That's when I became interested in the concept of scenes. I have been a part of many different scenes in my life, BMX/freestyle scenes, art scenes, entrepreneurial scenes, video and TV production scenes, skateboarding scenes, and rock climbing scenes. Oh, and I worked in the box office and on some of the set-up/teardown crews of Cirque du Soleil's first five tours to Orange County, California. I worked for Cirque when it was a single touring circus under the big top, one tour after the initial idea.
I came to realize that a small group of motivated people with a similar interest, one that involves some kind of creativity, sometimes turns into huge projects, sports, businesses, and even entire worldwide industries. I also saw that some scenes were great for the handful of people in them, but never really grew into anything larger. I became fascinated with Creative Scenes of all kinds. I wondered why some grow into huge things, and some don't, and what the difference was.
Then, in 2009, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I first heard of the book, The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida. In that book, he was describing high tech Creative Scenes, and why they tended to spring up in places that already had thriving music and art scenes. He even described certain cities having a "creative ecosystem," a "scene of scenes." In professor Florida's book, I began to understand the economic role Creative Scenes played in our Information Age, hyper-connected society.
Huge parts of of country continue to struggle economically, even now, 20 or 30 years after the loss of most of their local factories and high paying manufacturing jobs, and a decade after The Great Recession. I wondered if finding and nurturing creative scenes could be a legitimate part of rebuilding the depressed areas of the United States.
While I'm beginning to do online and social marketing for an old friend's bike business, to make a living again, this Creative Scenes idea is my main writing focus. In coming posts I'm going to be sharing a lot of what I've learned about Creative Scenes of all types, why I think some blow up huge, and others just cruise or fade, and other thoughts on this whole concept. Stay tuned. So go do something creative between now and the next post on this theme.
The Brooklyn Banks were already legendary in the skateboard world when Ron Wilkerson decided to hold a contest there in 1989. To get a go idea of what this place actually looked like, here's a video of Scotty Cranmer (pre-accident) and Ruben Alcantara, 15 to 18 years after the Meet the Street contest there, tearing the place up. This is farther back under the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, maybe 30-40 yards from where the 1989 contest was held.
The Brooklyn Banks were the de facto skatepark for all of New York City at a time when there were no skateparks in NYC. The banks were made long ago, laid by brick layers of incredible skill. They're all brick, but SMOOTH. They start small and mellow near where the road on the bridge meets the ground level. As you go back farther under the bridge, the banks got higher and higher. There were support columns rising vertically out of the banks, which made for places to do small wall rides or skate wallies. It's one of the most epic environments to ride skateboards or bikes, anywhere, that wasn't designed for skateboards or bikes.
I was one of the few lucky guys who actually got paid to go to Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip Meet the Street contest there in the fall of 1989. I'm going to tell that story over a series of posts on the new Block Bikes Blog. Follow this link to check out part 1.
I have a new blog going, it's about building an art or creative business, or any small business. You can check it out here: WPOS Kreative Ideas
Wall ride over my sister Cheri's head. The Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach, California, 1990. How did I get my sister to sit there for this? I did 2 or 3 wall rides first, to show her I could do it. Then I had her sit a couple feet in front of the wall, so if I bailed, I wouldn't crush her quite as bad. She was a single, college girl then, and there was a life guard she thought was cute off to her right, so I had her stare at him so she wouldn't freak. Video still from The Ultimate Weekend. Thanks Cheri, it made for a cool video shot and now a still.
I got into BMX when my family moved into a trailer park outside Boise in 1982. I was a shy, smart, weird, dorky, high school kid in a pretty jacked up family. My BMX bike became the outlet for my anger and frustration, more than anything, at first. After a while, as my skills improved, it became fun. I rode my bike nearly every day, from June 1982, until becoming a taxi driver in 1999. When I lost my license in late 2000, I rode nearly every day, solo missions, just for me, until I started back in the cab in August of 2003. BMX riding, and the BMX industry, in its many facets, has been a huge part of my life.
Things got really crazy from 2001 until the present fo rme, there was a lot of outside pressure on my life, crazy shit happened, and I faded from BMX riding itself, though I started blogging about it in 2008. When I landed here in Richmond, broke and homeless, last August, it was old BMX friend Steve Crandall of FBM, that first helped me out in the ways he was able to. He introduced me to Chad at Powers Bikes here, who has also totally helped me in the ways possible. I want to give huge props and a big Thank You to Steve and Chad for that.
Over the last couple of days, another old BMX friend and I connected via the interwebs. We caught up on what's happened over the years between then and now, and he asked me to start doing some online and social media promotion for his business. As all of you who read this blog regularly know, I'm homeless now, and have been struggling through a rough winter. Several of you have bought drawings or helped me in other ways. I really, REALLY appreciate that.
Now, it appears, I'm going to begin putting my new media skills to work, back in the BMX and larger bike industry. This old friend is working with me to get my life stable, as I work to promote his business. I just started a blog for him today, part of what I'll be doing. I'll be sharing most of my old school BMX stories there, from now on.
This blog will continue, I'll share my Sharpie art, ramble about economics and small business, and yes, there will still be some old school BMX posts as well. But this new blog is all about bike riding, BMX and everything other kind, so follow the link below, check it out, and let me know what you think, as I, finally, have the chance to work my way out of homelessness and back into BMX life...
Oh man... The 1980's. Yeah, that's me on the right, running the Ferris wheel at the Boise Fun Spot, making $3.10 an hour as a manager with 13 employees under me. That's three of them hoping I don't stop the wheel when they're on top, L to R, Kim, Michelle (I think), and Pam, my girlfriend the summer before this. Yeah, 1985, I was all about the Op short shorts for guys. Jeez... Photo by another employee, Vaughn Kidwell.
Business question. You run a local fast food chain restaurant, which of these customers is the most valuable to you?
- Crusty old man: He comes in every morning, buys a coffee and a cheap breakfast sandwich, $3.50 total, 7 days a week, and then talks to a couple of friends for 2 or 3 hours, and then leaves.
-Working woman: She comes to your drive-thru 4 days a week on average, every week, and buys a $3 coffee drink, and a $4 breakfast sandwich.
-Family of four: They bring the kids once every two weeks, the parents each get an $8 combo, and each of the two kids gets a $5 kids meal.
-Traveling baseball team with adults chaperones: Twelve of them pull off the freeway, and everyone gets an $8 combo. They live in another state, and never come back.
The restaurant's employees should be professional to everyone, unless people are complete idiots. I've worked three years in restaurants, and dealt with the public in other jobs. There are a bunch of idiots out there, the customer IS NOT always right, and shit happens. But being rude, screaming at, and actually fighting customers ALWAYS costs the company money. Sometimes a huge amount, in lost business. That's my point. I get treated like shit all the time, at restaurants I spend a lot of money at. Yes, I'm currently homeless, and I sit and "work" for a couple hours usually. I'm polite, I don't steal, I pay for my stuff, I throw my trash away when I leave. Hell I even put out a fire at a McDonald's the other day. It was a tiny bush fire from a careless cigarette, no big deal, but I'll be helpful now and then if needed. I get along with the employees for the most part. I'm pretty much the crusty old man. Yet, I get attitude from managers ll the time. Of the four examples above, that's the one most like to get an employee acting rude to them.
So what does the restaurant lose if they piss off these customers, and they go somewhere else?
The Working Woman wins, she brings $1,456 annually to the restaurant. You give her a hard time the one time she brings a cold sandwich back in and asks for a new one, this business is out nearly $1500. Ouch.
The Crusty Old Man comes in as the second most valuable customer, with $1,277.50 in annual business. He doesn't buy much at one time, he sits there a lot, but he brings a good chunk of continual, and dependable, cash to the business, just like the Working Woman.
The Family of Four is the most likely to be seen by managers as the "prime customer," managers tend to think these groups are their "bread and butter." They're important customers, but they bring in $676 annually, less that half of the money the Working Woman or the Crusty Old Man spend.
The Traveling Kids' Baseball Team is a boon to the restaurant's daily numbers, but their one time spend of $96 pales in comparison to the regular customers, and that's my point. I haven't seen a fast food manager in a long time who understands this basic concept. If you had to piss off one of these customer/groups, it's actually the best to have the big spending Baseball Team upset, they're never coming back anyway.
My point... take care of your regular customers, the best you can. Teach your managers to do this. You'll make more money, which is the point of a business.
I got my first taste of running a business a week or two before I turned 18. As a graduating high school senior in Boise, Idaho, way back in 1984, I got a job at the Boise Fun Spot. It was a cheesy little mini-amusement park, inside Julia Davis Park downtown, near the Boise Zoo. We had two kiddie rides, a Merry-go-round, a kiddie roller coaster, a Tilt-a Whirl, a Ferris wheel, a snack bar, and a miniature golf course. My friend Doug, also 18, was the manager. He actually managed the day-to-day operations. The Fun Spot was owned by a man who ran a local construction company. He'd found, that with good initial training, kids that were 18 or 19 could actually do a good job running this small business.
Doug got a higher paying job working construction, and tapped myself and this high school junior, Brian, as co-managers. He'd been training us all summer, and we took over. Tim, the owner would stop by in the mornings, drop off the cash drawer, ask how things were going, and then go run his construction company. He stopped by randomly, and for big repairs, but that was it. We ran the place.
So as I was turning 18, I got a raise to $3.05 an hour. Federal minimum was $3.35, but the Fun Spot, because of some Idaho farm worker law, could pay $2.05 an hour. That's what my employees were making. I made the (ahem) BIG BUCKS. Suddenly I had 13 employees under me, 5 acres of grounds to keep up, rides to run, and a business to make a profit at. Tim looked for young people who wanted a chance to be a boss, and took it seriously, and Brian & me, for the most part, took it seriously. That's the best business experience I could have had at that age.
Now, in my sketchy current situation, I spend a lot of time in fast food restaurants, either doing my artwork or working on the computer. McDonald's, about 12 years ago, made a brilliant corporate decision, to position themselves as a inexpensive alternative to Starbucks. Smart move. They started selling fancy coffee drinks, but $1 to $3 cheaper than Starbucks, they made a more lounge type store, added TV's, added wifi later on, and got rid of the playlands.
I know this, because I was having a breakfast in a McDonald's in Huntington Beach, CA when they were planning one day, explaining the new concept to the manager of that restaurant. But most managers today, don't seem to have been told this, and all fast food places just have a bunch lazy, unprofessional, largely incompetent people, and one or two good employees. The managers, and I'm talking all fast food places, simply aren't taught to be managers in most cases. One out of every 6 or 8 does a good job. They can to the paperwork needed, but not actually RUN a business well, which is their actual job. If you don't run your business well, especially in this transition time when new technology is changing business practices, then you go out of business eventually. We'll see what happens with fast food places. I think many big names will fold a lot of stores in the next decade.
Looking for something else, I just stumbled across this video. With a Red Bull video in any sport, you know there's going to be cutting edge action, great production quality, and a lot of money spent. And it's in Dubai, where money itself goes to vacation. Cool video.
The old school BMXers remember the classic, 5 spoke, plastic-type stuff, Tuff Wheels that Skyway put out. I found a great big "Amish" Tuff Wheel here in Richmond, this morning. This is on 15th Street (I think), Shockhoe Bottom area. Todd Lyons has this gigantic pair of Landing Gear forks in his garage, about the right size. Who wants to build the rest of a Giganto-Bike up? Heh, heh. #RVAallday, #RVA
Here's the late Alvin Toffler in 2007, explaining bits and pieces of the huge range of topics from the 2007 book, Revolutionary Wealth. Though his name is alone on most of the books he's written, futurists Alvin, and his wife Heidi, definitely worked as a team. From the 1950's on, studying human society, technology, social change, and other aspects of our world, they were always looking at where our society was headed far into the future. As much as the world has changed in the last 12 years, I think this book is still the best overall view of the wide array of changes human society is dealing with in 2019, and for many, many years to come. At 23:26, in the interview above, we hear this quote:
"We're on our way to what I believe are going to be a series of institutional Katrinas. We're going to see one institution after another collapse, or become totally ineffective."
By "Katrinas," Mr. Toffler is referring to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, that devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. That hurricane was still fresh in everyone's mind in 2007. Basically, he's saying in this interview, and he and Heidi say in Revolutionary Wealth, that virtually every aspect of our society is going to collapse, and be completely restructured and rebuilt, hopefully, as part of the transition from the industrial-based society to knowledge-based society. I use the terms the Industrial Age and the Information Age now. This is The Third Wave that the Tofflers wrote a book about in 1980, with that title, and summarized and built upon in Revolutionary Wealth.
The Tofflers saw three major waves in human civilization. The First Wave was the shift from a hunter/gatherer society to an agricultural-based society, roughly 10,000 years ago. The Second Wave was the shift from an agricultural-based society to an industrial-based society, beginning about 350 years ago. The Third Wave is the shift from the industrial-based society to a knowledge-based society, beginning in 1956. Alvin Toffler makes the case for that particular start year in this speech at the University of Toronto in 2007.
In Revolutionary Wealth, the Tofflers make the case in 2007 for why society has been changing rapidly for a couple of decades before the book, and go into detail on an incredibly wide array of technological, cultural, and economic changes that will happen because of this massive shift from what most of us call the Industrial Age to the Information Age.
The Big Transition is my name for the decades-long, scary, chaotic, sticky, crazy transition between the Industrial Age and the Information Age. It's a roughly 80 year period where every single business, industry, institution, political, and cultural structure will either be torn down and rebuilt intentionally, or will collapse and be rebuilt, in a way that fits our new, tech enabled, hyper-connected society.
From 1956 to 2040+/-, in my opinion, we are not in the Industrial Age or the Information Age, we're in the transition between the two. I've found that by thinking that we're in a known, chaotic, transition phase, which is expected to to have continuous rapid change, and be full of disruption, our current trials and issues make much more sense. It's a framework, a context, where all that's happening in our world can potentially fit. The period of major and rapid change also closely corresponds to the life span of Generation X, my peeps, roughly 1965 to 2043. We're the Middle Child generation right now, it's OK, blame us for the chaos, we're used to it.
I come at this as an amateur futurist, of sorts. At 52-years-old, I'm one of the older members of Generation X, I was a kid during the Apollo moon mission years, and grew up in the Industrial Age of thriving factories, spread across the country, in small towns, cities, and huge metros. The small-town Ohio world I grew up in expected the life to go on much as it had for the generations before. My dad was a draftsman who worked his way up to become an engineer, and we always had Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines in our 1970's houses (we moved nearly every year). In those magazines, I read about the great inventions the scientists and engineers predicted we'd have by the far away 21st century.
Yes, we were ALL supposed to have flying cars by now, and be colonizing Mars. You know what I don't remember seeing in those 1970's future tech articles? Cell phones. Only Captain Kirk, Spock, and the original Enterprise crew on Star Trek had cell phone-like communicators. And even they only had flip phones. No cameras, no video, no social media, no Bones looking up "Intergalactic Babes XXX" and showing Spock "illogical" sex videos. The scientists and engineers predicting the 21st century, back in the 1970's, got much of it wrong.
It was in those days, as a grade school kid, that I really became an amateur futurist. I think the main reason I dreamed about the future so much is because my family was quite dysfunctional, and the present usually sucked. The future just had to be better, didn't it? I thought so, and I began to wonder what that future would hold.
As things turned out, although I was more intelligent than the average kid, I didn't have money for college, and I got into a weird new sport in 1983, called BMX freestyle, while in high school. Trick riding on "little kid's bikes," that's how most people saw it. It definitely wouldn't lead anywhere. I published a zine about it, and that led to a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines at age 20, and a move to Southern California.
I veered off into the emerging BMX and skateboard industries, never took a single college course, and have lived a life I couldn't have imagined, even in my wildest day dreams as a kid. A lot of that life sucked to some degree, I've spent ten years in various forms of homelessness since 1999, but I've also had many successes early on.
I've been reading pretty voraciously my whole life, and have blended book knowledge on many subjects, with real world experience in highly creative scenes, lame-ass odd jobs, and various media outlets. I'm an intellectual mongrel with no papers, but a fairly unique perspective, it seems. The things that fascinate me are where major societal trends, social dynamics, economics, the rapid change caused by technology, and futurist thinking all come together. As fast as things are moving these days, I'm still trying to predict where we're headed in a few years, maybe more.
After reading Revolutionary Wealth in about 2010, I spent a lot of time thinking about how we actually make the change from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. As Alvin Toffler predicts in the quote highlighted above, disruption is a major part of the way this change happens. But I realized it doesn't happen all at once. We aren't sitting in an office cubicle farm one day, typing away on our big desktop computers and banging our shins on the CPU, and then somebody flips a switch, and we're suddenly in an open office tech start-up, burning angel investor money, sitting on a giant kick ball, and working on a tablet and smart phone the next day. I realized that the entire move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age is very long, it happens in fits and spurts, there's quick adaptation in some places, and heels-in-the-ground lagging by other groups.
This transition is incredibly chaotic and painful to most everyday people, at some point. I'm a recovering Luddite, I understand the resistance to this rapid change. But I also finally realized it was necessary to adapt and try to become relevant again, particularly as a writer and artist. Because this big transition happens over such a long time span, no one really sees it as one big transition. As I thought this all through several years ago, I began to call this period The Big Transition. It's a lame and un-creative name, I know, but I haven't found a better one.
Here's The Big Transition, as I see it. I'll take Alvin Toffler's beginning point, and start it at 1956. That works. In the interview linked above, he cites 1956 as the first year there were more white collar employees than blue collar employees in the U.S.. Television was new and about to become a household thing, and mass society was born. The birth control pill changed the social scene, the Beat Poets spread new ideas, and a bunch of social justice movements rose up in the 1960's, that's all the Tofflers' thinking on the beginning of this new society.
But the really big technologies that have completely changed, and sped up, all our of our lives; computers, telecommunications, digital photography, video, and the internet (among others), were just tiny experimental things in the 1950's and 1960's. Or they didn't exist at all. The Information Age, like every change in a human world, started with new ideas. A handful of "idea seeds" were planted in obscure R&D labs and other places, and new technologies started to grow. Life for average people, though, continued much as it had before, through the 1970's. Then we hit a critical mass where new technology, and outsourcing of factory jobs to places with cheaper labor, "suddenly" took tens of millions of good paying American jobs away. That's when the changes really hit average Americans (and those in other countries). That's when it got real, and the rapid escalation in the pace of change hit home to most people.
The Big Transition began with small changes in obscure areas of technology and social norms, and grew slowly. These seeds of change went largely unnoticed, but were there to find, if anyone went looking. A few people saw where things were headed. But most people, and most established businesses, large and small, dismissed the new tech. Some still do. That's how we find ourselves in a world where Industrial Age retail giant Sears is now bankrupt, J.C. Penney's is struggling, and 15,000 or so major chain retail stores have closed in the last few years. Meanwhile, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, HIMSELF, is worth more than entire Industrial Age corporations like GE, General Motors, or Ford. Bezos saw where things were heading, started an online bookselling website, and got made fun of by the business press for several years. He was ahead of the game, and when average Americans caught up, Amazon became a juggernaut. That's life as a pioneer.
This disruption and rebuilding was happening all along, but most people were struggling to survive, and not looking too far ahead. I am a perfect example. After an injury in 1999, I became a taxi driver, and ignored "that internet thing" through the early 2000's. On Thanksgiving weekend in 2007, after tech had changed the taxi industry, and I worked long hours, 7 days a week, for four years, I went from working 100 hours a week, to fully homeless, in a single day. Actually, it happened in a few seconds, as I dropped off the taxi keys, when I was no longer able to make money in the cab. I know the disruption that comes from ignoring the reality of new technology emerging, firsthand.
"Revolutions... destroy the perfect, disrupt the status quo, and change everything."
-Seth Godin
The key thing to understand about The Big Transition is that EVERYTHING will either be intentionally rethought and rebuilt, to function in our tech heavy world, if it hasn't already. More likely, it will stagnate and collapse, and then be rebuilt into a new version of itself, for a 21st century world. This will affect every business, every industry, every group, every institution, every product, every creative endeavor, every village, every town, every city, every major metro region. In some cases, a completely new thing will be dreamed, envisioned as necessary, and created. In most cases, the old will no longer fit the way society now functions, it will collapse, and a new form or version will be created, most likely by a person or group other than the previous leaders in that space.
It's also important to remember that, while our daily lives will continue to change in many ways, core values and beliefs, that actually help a community function better, for everyone, don't have to be thrown away. Honesty, integrity, hard work, industriousness, common sense, peace of mind, persistence, courage, creativity, and many other positive traits, will be as important as ever. But there will be a lot of trouble in places and institutions that are based on systems that only favor a few, no matter who those few may be. Those situations will continue to be some of our biggest struggles as a society moving forward. I've found that, with the idea of The Big Transition in mind, the knowledge that everything will be disrupted at some point, gives a context to all the crazy stuff happening on all fronts. That doesn't make it any less chaotic, necessarily, but it can help a person deal with it. "Oh yeah, I'm a _______, and there's this new technology someone in __________ invented, that we should keep an eye on, it could disrupt our industry (business, non-profit, sport, school, etc.)." Knowing that all this is going to happen anyway, can make the current chaotic events somewhat less overwhelming. It can also lead to more forward thinking, looking for the oncoming change, and finding the opportunities that come with that change, ahead of time. We're in The Big Transition. It's really long. It's supposed to be chaotic, that's the nature of a transition. Change is the whole point. With that in mind, go make something cool happen. Here are just a few examples of revolutionary ideas and disruption during The Big Transition:
A Southern California surfer/skateboarder, named Tom Sims, nailed a piece of tin to a 2" X 8" in 7th grade shop class in 1966. The snowboard. A motocross kid named Scot Breithaupt held an MX type race for some local kids riding bicycles in Long Beach, California in in 1970. BMX racing. In 1973, a businessman-hating, rock climbing, blacksmith started selling shirts, modeled after rugby shirts, made specifically for rock climbing. Patagonia, one of the most forward looking, environmentally conscious businesses, ever, was born. In about 1974, a New York City street urchin/poet/singer named Patty Smith inspired others around her to form underground bands with lots of attitude. Punk rock. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built a weird machine in the Homebrew Club, in San Jose, California, in 1976. Personal computer. Bill Gates wrote an operating system in 1976. Microsoft software. CERN engineer Tim Berners-Lee connected his hyperlink idea to the TCP/IP and ARPANET in 1990. The World Wide Web. A college age, highly entrepreneurial kid saw the internet for the time in 1994 and thought, "I can sell shit on this!" Gary Vaynerchuk went on to lead his dad's New Jersey liquor store from $3 million to $60 million in annual sales, and helped pioneer internet and content marketing. Also in the mid-1990's, a young college professor named Richard Florida, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, wondered why all the great computer science and tech people graduating from CMU were moving away. They were not starting high tech businesses in struggling Pittsburgh, and rebuilding the economy there. He began research that led the 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which changed the entirenature of economic development, and our understanding of cities. In 1999, 19-year-old Shawn Fanning wrote the code for a peer to peer file sharing service, focusing on MP3 music files. He uploaded Napster to the web, and with the click of a mouse, destroyed the music industry. Now we have more music, by more artists, available to nearly everyone for low or no cost. A new music industry has emerged, and continues to evolve.
I watched (OK, mostly listened) to this a few days ago. It's a really good, and inspiring, in my opinion, look at small business in America today.
Three years ago, I was living in a toxic environment, not getting calls back for any "real jobs" I applied for, and need to find some way to start earning a living again. I started with literally no money, just a few art supplies and a really crappy, refurbished, laptop. It was still running Windows XP in late 2015, that's how ancient my computer was. I think Fred Flintstone had traded it in.
Back then, I started focusing on making money with my unusual and unique Sharpie artwork, the only thing that made me a little money now and then. It's been a wild ride, and I never started making a decent living off my artwork. But I did sell around 100 original drawings in three years, starting at like $20 each, and I used Facebook, my blog, and other social media to promote myself. I created a ton of content, anyone can see nearly all of my drawings on the internet and about 4 other platforms. I got really good at a thing called "content creation." Other than people adding outside drama to my life, my main issue was that my artwork isn't profitable enough to make a drawing that takes a week to draw, and then sell it, and have the money to pay everything I need to.
So after surviving a really rough, crazy winter, in a new city, I did some soul searching. I realized that very few small businesses do much in the way of content creation, even though it's free. It just takes some time to create. Many things don't take that much time. You can snap a quick, cool pic in your business, and upload it to 3 or 4 places, in a couple of minutes or so. So I realized I can keep drawing, but on a less intense level, and take my internet and social media ideas and skills and help small businesses implement them. So that's where I'm headed, again starting a really low financial level. But I now have a body of work, both my artwork, and the online content I've created, to show that I know what I'm doing in these areas.
With this pivot in my work, I'll be blogging a lot more about small business ideas I have, stories of small businesses I've worked at, and creative things we did at those, and I'll be sharing things I find along these lines. This is a good one to start with. At 27 minutes, it's along watch for most of your busy lives, but easy to listen to while doing other tasks. Plus the last blog post took me two days to write, and I've got an offline project taking most of my time at the moment. I need a quick post today. So enjoy this documentary for now.
This is Professor Richard Florida, in a 2003 talk in San Diego, promoting his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class. At the time, he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh was hit incredibly hard by the loss of factory jobs in the 1980's and 1990's. Richard Florida was recruited to Carnegie Mellon, in part, to help Pittsburgh morph into a high tech stronghold to rebuild the economy of the region.
I've started using Twitter a tiny bit recently, and I left a fairly lame comment on Richard Florida's feed ysterday. As I thought about how his work has helped shape my own thinking on the big picture of our world, I decided it might be a good time to share how I saw his Creative Class Arc actually happen. So this post is a quick take on that story.
Carnegie Mellon University, as you hear in the talk above, graduated many outstanding computer science and tech people in the 1990's. But these high caliber tech people were nearly all moving to other cities, joining and building tech companies, and economies, elsewhere. Professor Florida dove into the research to figure out why. Several years of research culminated in a new understanding of how the high tech business world operated much differently than the traditional American manufacturing businesses.
In the Industrial Age world, cities tried to schmooze and bribe large corporations to build a factory in their city, and then the workers would move to that city for the jobs created. That city would grow and become more prosperous. In his research for The Rise of the Creative Class, one key finding of his was that high tech businesses moved to where the highly skilled people were located (21:20 in this talk).
Why did those tech people live those places (like Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, Austin, NYC, L.A., and Washington'D.C)? It turned out tech people were (and still are) very creative, and they were attracted to places that already had scenes of highly creative people. Places with established art scenes, music scenes, and entrepreneurial scenes. These tended to also be places that were open and tolerant to all kinds of people. Tech people, especially then, tended to be pretty weird and geeky, and they liked places tolerant of weirdos and the unusual. I'm grossly simplifying his first book on these themes (there have been three books since), but it will give a sense it.
Basically, REALLY weird, unusual people; artists, musicians, garage inventors, or similar types, find a place they like, and form a small scene. Word begins to get around, and some slightly less weird people move to the area, also highly creative, and join the scene. If it's an art scene, other types, like musicians, filmmakers, and others may move to the area, and before long you have a large scene of several different creative scenes. A "creative ecosystem," as Richard Florida calls them. The cities with those creative ecosystems, of multiple creative scenes, are the places tech people tended to be attracted to. Those were the places where the tech companies started up, some hit big, and today's tech hub cities were born.
"Creative people like to be around other creative people."
-Richard Florida in the speech above
By the time Professor Florida gave this speech in San Diego in 2003, I had lived through the entire arc of his Creative Class concept . I lived through it in a city that managed to fly under Richard Florida's radar, and everyone's, because it wasn't known for high tech, and it was in the shadow of dozens of other cities in the major metro it was a part of. I saw the entire Creative Class Arc happen in Huntington Beach, California, a little over an hour north of where the talk above took place.
What do I mean by Creative Class Arc? It's a place where small, highly creative scenes form. These attract other highly creative people with different talents and dreams. Someone starts doing something on one cutting edge, and others push the cutting edge in other areas. A key part of this is some form of media, happening far below the mainstream level, where word of this creative ecosystem spreads in small niches. Once the scene's location is known in highly creative niche groups, word spreads in larger and larger groups of creatively active people. The location attracts interest, then visitors, and ultimately residents, who are also actively creative. The various creative people in the creative scenes bounce ideas, energy, and inspiration itself, off each other. Creativity, new ideas, new bands, new galleries, new projects, new events grow like a slow crescendo. That's what I lived through in Huntington Beach, watching as the sleepy, working class surf town grew into a thriving city filled with too damn many Yuppies, including the much sought after tech workers.
Huntington Beach started as Pacific City around 1900, its developers hoped to create the "Atlantic City of the West Coast." That didn't work. The little beach town attracted a few lima bean farmers and others who liked living near the ocean. The developers gave a few blocks of downtown to a Methodist group, tp help it grow, and they took over the area around 11th street. At one point, around 1908-1915, if you bought a set of encyclopedias, you got a free lot in the downtown area. Then the city leaders named the city Huntington Beach, sucking up to SoCal railroad magnate Henry Huntington, so he would run a trolley line up from Long Beach, to help bring people to the town. That railroad line helped. But the town still didn't grow much.
Then, in 1920, oil was struck in downtown Huntington Beach. Suddenly it became a boom town. My research, for a zine I wrote in 2007, showed it was a bit of a Wild West type city, filled with hard working, hard partying wildcatters, oil workers, very likely ladies of the evening, and all of that, in the 1920's and 1930's.
In the 1930's, a music venue called the Golden Bear opened, right by the H.B. Pier. It became well known, and Hollywood Golden Era actors like Errol Flynn and Cary Grant came down from Hollywood to party in wild Huntington Beach at times. Before The Golden Bear closed (in the 1970's, I think) many top performers, including Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin played there. The oil boom seemed to give H.B. a kind of rowdy soul, it attracted adventurous and outsider types from then on.
Because of the oil pumps all over the downtown era, Huntington Beach didn't build up and become as popular as uber wealthy Newport Beach, just to the south, or other beach cities. Newport is the Beverly Hills of Orange County, that's where the big money has been in Orange County for 100 years or more. H.B. became the de facto working class beach, the dirty, oil well strewn, beach city. Rent was fairly cheap, there was decent, thought not great, surf, and there were 8 miles of beach that wasn't developed, unlike the rest of Southern California.
Hawaiian surf pioneer George Freeth (brought to California by Henry Huntington to promote Redondo Beach, in a weird coincidence) gave a "surf riding" demo at the H.B. pier in 1914. Later, Freeth's younger Waikiki surf buddy, Duke Kahanamoku spent a lot of time in H.B., promoting the sport. In the 1950's, surfers congregated more and more in Huntington Beach, much to the dismay of civic leaders of the time. Then the surf music and movies hit big in the 1960's, and Jan and Dean's song, "Surf City," is about Huntington Beach. The surf culture began to grow. To this day, the key corners at PCH and Main downtown, house Jack's Surf Shop and Huntington Surf & Sport. By the time I moved to H.B. in 1987, surfers ran the city, many civic leaders, and business people were surfers. When the surf was good in the morning, half of the businessmen (and a few women) weren't in the office, they were surfing (aka "Morning Board Meetings").
I was a BMX freestyler, part of the brand new sport of trick riding on 20 inch BMX bikes. I got laid off at a BMX magazine in Torrance, in December of 1986. I just didn't fit in with the staff that well, I wasn't punk rock enough, at the time. I got hired in H.B. by 23-year-old surfer/BMX freestyler/entrepreneur Bob Morales. He started the American Freestyle Association (AFA), which put on the local and national BMX freestyle contests. He also started new companies on a regular basis. To this day, when I hear the word "entrepreneur," Bob is the guy who comes to mind, though I know dozens of them.
As the action sports began to emerge and grow, the surf culture of Huntington Beach attracted skateboarders, BMX racers and freestylers, snowboarders, motocross riders, and later, in the 1990's several early UFC fighters, which spawned the MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) sport and movement. The surf culture foundation of Huntington Beach blended with the highly entrepreneurial and real estate investor based Southern California culture. Thinking up a crazy business idea at a bar one night, talking about it while checking out the surf at the donut shop the next morning, and then starting work on it that afternoon, that was a fairly normal thing in 1980's and 1990's Huntington Beach.
When I moved to H.B., the four blocks of Main Street directly inland from the pier, were run down, had about 4 dive bars, a liquor store, a punk rock themed indie record shop, with milk crates of records on folding tables, a couple surf shops, and some empty store fronts. There were always a few shady characters hanging out on Main in the shadows. There were no crowds. Skateboarders sessioned the P.O. Curb, by the Post office. The surrounding grid street area, old Pacific City, was mostly small apartment units on little lots, mixed with active oil pumps. Sixplex, small house, fourplex, oil pump. That was typical. Despite being a beach city, in Southern California's 1980's surging real estate market, it was nearly all working class people. There were also a ton of real estate investors and small time entrepreneurs.
Though "modern surfing" came about around 1900, the 1980's brought the short, Thruster type surfboards, and surfing, as a sport and industry, and particularly surf wear, grew a great deal in popularity and as an industry.
Skateboarding was invented by surfers in Southern California, when the waves were flat, in the late 1950's. It's initial boom was in 1965-66, again in about 1975-80, and it was booming again in the mid-1980's. Vertical skating, pool and halfpipe ramps, were the dominant aspect. But street skating, looking at the urban environment as one big skatepark, began about 1984, and was growing in the late 1980's. After another industry downturn around 1990, street skating blew up in the mid 1990's, taking over the industry as the Extreme Games, aka the X Games, took action sports to TV viewers worldwide. Vision Skateboards, one of "The Big 5" skateboard companies in the 1980's, was located in Costa Mesa, CA, just south of inland H.B. I worked at its video company, Unreel Productions, from 1987-1990, after leaving the AFA.
The paved area below the Huntington Beach pier was the place to be on the weekends, for me as a BMX freestyler. There were three freestyle skateboarders from Europe, all sponsored by Vision Skateboards' companies, who spent their days skating there. Freestyle skaters were the dorks of 1980's skateboarding, doing hard to learn, highly technical tricks, on flat ground. The three main guys were Pierre Andre from France, Don Brown from the U.K., and Hans Lingren from Sweden. There was also a BMX freestyler from inland named Mike Sarrail, and myself, every weekend. Because the H.B. Pier was a "known scene" for skating and BMX freestyle, top pros and amateurs from both sports showed up randomly, every weekend long to session. Street skating pioneers like Mark Gonzales and Ed Templeton were locals, and Natas Kapas, Per Welinder and BMXers like Marting Aparijo, Woody Itson, and others rode with us regularly.
Pierre ended up getting Etnies shoes going, aimed at making good quality shoes for skateboarding, with a French shoe company. He took it over, and turned it into a $200 million annual revenue company before the Great Recession (maybe $100-150 million now, last I heard). The parent company, called Sole Technology, puts out shoe brands Etnies, Emerica, E's, snowboard boot brand 32, and clothing brand Altamont. Don Brown is the long time vice president of marketing at Sole Tech. Hans went back to Sweden. In the late 80's, we would loan each other money to buy a burrito or a Coke.
Mark Gonzales, known as the Godfather of Street Skating, formed a skateboard company, and has shown art in galleries around the world. Ed Templeton started his own skate company, Toy Machine, was a top street skater for 15 years until breaking his neck (he still skates), and he also, has shown his art worldwide. Jason Lee, a skating protoge' and teammate of Mark Gonzales, and H.B.local in the 90's, is an accomplished actor now, best known playing Dave in the Chipmunk movies, and Earl in the TV show My Name is Earl.
BMX racing, basically motocross racing on bicycles with 20 inch wheels, was invented in 1970. The Godfather of BMX, and co-inventor of it, Scot Breithaupt, started his first track in Long Beach, a dozen miles north of Huntington Beach, in 1970. Another group started races north of L.A., in the Malibu area about the same time. They faded a few years later. Scot kept at it, turned into a hardcore entrepreneur with a bad self-destructive streak. The company he started as a teen, Scot Enterprises, now SE Bikes, still exists. BMX racing, on dirt tracks with jumps and berms, grew to a nationwide sport in the 1970's, fading in the late 70's, and growing again in the early 1980's.
A Southern California BMX racer, and highly creative kid, Bob Haro, and a few others, started riding their bikes in skateparks in about 1977. Bob went on to invent tricks on flat ground, called flatland, and on wedge shaped ramps as well. He and Bob Morales started doing "trick riding" demos about 1980. He invented the "quarterpipe" ramp, a portable ramp that allowed a BMXer to do airs, like they did in the skateparks. Bob Haro was also was a talented cartoonist, and started working for BMX Action magazine. His trick riding turned into touring "BMX freestyle" trick teams in the early 1980's. He, and other riders, got photos of tricks in the three BMX magazines, and BMX freestyle grew. I got into BMX racing in 1982, as a high school kid in Boise, Idaho, and into freestyle in 1983. I joined the only trick team in Idaho in 1984. Small BMX freestyle popped up around the U.S., and in the U.K., and freestyle first took off in 1984. My family moved to San Jose, California in 1985, a year after I graduated high school. It was also a year after the weird little Macintosh computer came out, and the name Silicon Valley was starting to get thrown around for that area.
I started a BMX freestyle zine in September 1985, met several top pros in the Bay area a month later, and was hired at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in August of 1986. I got along with the guys there, but didn't really click, and got laid off in December 1986. A couple months later, the magazines replaced me with a 17-year-old BMX freestyler/skater from the East Coast, a kid named Spike Jonze. Yes... that Spike Jonze.
BMX freestyle grew exponentially from about 1983-1989, then crashed as mountain biking (BMX for "grownups") became the hot new thing. Like skateboarding, BMX racing and BMX freestyle all but died in the early 90's recession. But the riding and skating continued to progress, and another thing happened. Skateboarders started their own companies, and took over the skateboarding industry, and BMXers took over the BMX industry. We put the "Fat Bald Men" running BMX, out of business. One of those bicycle companies, FBM, was named for those Fat Bald Men that ran 80's BMX industry. These tiny, rider and skater owned companies, were entrenched when ESPN jumped on the bandwagon in 1995, and blew things up globally with mainstream TV coverage.
Pro BMX racer, Huntington Beach local, and crazy jumper, Chris Moeller, started S&M Bikes with a friend, at age 16. Their bikes kept breaking when they jumped, so the two teens went to the welding shop that made bikes for a few small companies, and got them to build a stronger bike. Chris bought out his buddy, and turned a $1200 loan from his grandpa in 1990, into two BMX bike companies that likely gross $10 million + in revenues today. He also pioneered the sport of BMX dirt jumping, pushing the level of riding in the late 1980's and 1990's. I was his roommate an sidekick in the early 90's, when he ran S&M Bikes out of the garage of a one bedroom apartment in downtown H.B.. He had the bedroom, I had the living room floor, another BMX industry guy had the couch. Whoever was most sober answered the landline phone and took orders in the morning. Usually, that was me.
Now it seems really counter-intuitive that Orange County, California would wind up a hub for snowboarding. But Tom Sims, arguably the founder of snowboarding, was a SoCal surfer/skateboarder. People from elsewhere don't realize that you can go skiing or snowboarding an hour and a half outside of L.A., and find world class snow 6-7 hours north in the Mammoth Mountain/Tahoe area. Tom Sims built the first real snowboard in 7th grade shop class in about 1966. I've held that first snowboard in my hands. He wanted to "surf on snow." Another pioneer, Tom Burt on the East Coast, riding a Scurfer toy, also pioneered the sport there, and Burton snowboards came to be. Tom Sims got snowboarding going in the Tahoe area, and it was grassroots in the late 1980's, when a bunch of SoCal skaters got into it.
Tom Sims' companies, Sims Snowboards and Sims Skateboards, were under the umbrella of Vision Skateboards, housed in Costa Mesa, CA, next door to Huntington Beach. As skateboarding and BMX were fading around 1990, snowboarding and mountain biking, were gaining steam. So I was working on their videos, as well.
Back to Huntington Beach. Because of the people based in and around Huntington Beach in the 1980's, people reading surf, skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX and BMX freestyle magazines were hearing and seeing people in and from Huntington Beach for years. H.B. was a place they wanted to visit, maybe even live. It became talent attraction in action, without anyone actually trying to make it happen. Then, in the late 1980's, consumer video cameras became practical. Us BMX freestylers, skateboarders, and snowboarders started making our own videos, releasing them as full length VHS tapes in that pre-internet world. I was one of the first three BMX freestyle rider/producers. This was a media revolution in our little, action sports worlds.
I later realized something else happened with those videos. Without trying, us action sports video producers were also promoting our cities, (Huntington Beach in my case) and regions, worldwide. We made our cities cool to a highly creative group of people worldwide. This is an aspect of economic development, and the Creative Class concept in action, that no one in academia has touched on, as far as I know. But Hollywood eventually took note. We, in action sports, made Huntington Beach, and Orange County, CA, look crazy and fun and cool. TV shows like The O.C., Arrested Development, Real Housewives of Orange County, Laguna Beach, and others followed several years later, in mainstream TV. That's the creative core becoming cool to a large creative group, and then the city and region becoming cool, and a place to shoot shows, in the main stream TV industry. This media element of the Creative Class in action, I think, should be researched at some point. It's big.
In the early 1990's, snowboarding took off, and a couple of top pros, Damian Sanders and Steve Graham, and a few friends, moved into a house in downtown Huntington Beach. They also like riding motocross cycles. They started making videos. Another friend who moved in with them for a while was Seth Enslow, who wound up bringing motorcycle distance jumping back, becoming a new Evel Knievel almost. This little crew, another creative scene, made great snowboard videos, helped create freestyle motocross (jumping tricks on MX motorcycles), which became the fastest growing action sport in the 1990's.
Perhaps most important, Damian and his crew started dating strippers, and Damian married a Penthouse Pet named Brandi. They had a house party one night they called the Pimp N' Ho Ball, as a joke. Everybody dressed up, got drunk, and got stupid on video. They put some footage in their snowboard videos. It turned into a larger event, and eventually, the Pimp N' Ho Ball was a club event for thousands of people paying $50 or more at the door twice a year. It spawned a bi-weekly nightclub called Club Rubber. Damian and friend John Huntington turned into such innovative club promoters that Las Vegas came to them and said, "Your bringing this club to Vegas." Damian and John spend a lot of time in Costa Rica, surfing and counting money, last I heard.
So these snowboarder/motocross riding pranksters turned into legendary club promoters. Their clubs drew the top action sports athletes of the 1990's, many of whom lived, or spent time, in and around Huntington Beach, California. Their club, with the coolest, craziest guys in it, also attracted the top strippers and porn stars from Southern California and Las Vegas. No one in academia wants to hear this, but a lot of L.A. region and Las Vegas strippers, and porn stars, moved to Huntington Beach. Like it or not economic development people, having a subculture of strippers and porn stars in your city attracts a lot of single tech people. Just sayin'. I saw it happen. Probably a hard sell for civic leaders, but it might make for a really fun research paper for a grad student.
Surfing, in it's modern form, is about 120 years old. It's a good sized industry. Surf clothing sells worldwide. Skateboarding is about 60 years old, has several genres now, and is a worldwide industry. BMX racing is now an Olympic sport, and BMX freestyle has several genres, and is a fair sized industry, and a worldwide sport. Snowboarding is about 55 years old. It is a major draw to the winter Olympics now, saved ski resorts in the 1990's, is another good sized industry, and takes place worldwide, where there are mountains. Mountain biking is about 40 years old, popular all over the globe, involves millions of bikes sold annually, and has a big tourism aspect to it. Freestyle motocross (FSMX) is about 20-25 years old, became the fastest growing action sport in the late 1990's, and happens in small scenes around the world. It's huge in the U.S. and Australia. MX freeriding, the recreational aspect of FSMX , is another good sized industry. I didn't mention wakeboarding, free skiiing, kite boarding, BASE jumping, wingsuit flying (one time Huntington Beach resident, and my downstairs neighbor, Troy Hartman, was a pioneer), Boogie boarding, skim boarding, rock climbing,and other action sports.
All of these worldwide sports, and their supporting industries, were created not only by misfits, but by "stupid adrenaline junkies" deemed too stupid to start businesses but everyone else. In reality, these sports team with highly creative people who also make incredible entrepreneurs. None of these businesses, not one that I know of, ever took a dime of venture capital. These entire industries were built on sales and immediate profits, not burning money from angel investors. These sports, purely by accident, make tens of thousands of videos annually, promoting themselves, their sports, their scenes, but also, their towns, cities and regions. Whistler, British Columbia, for instance, was promoting summer mountain biking in 1985, and appearing in hit snowboard videos from 1990 on, long before the 2010 Olympics landed there. While action sports will never have the massive profit and wealth potential of high tech, these athletes are a part of the creative core. These sports are incredibly entrepreneurial, by their nature. Part of doing these sports is finding physical courage, getting up when you fall, literally, and persistence, things that transfer to business building.
So where does the Creative Class part come in? I didn't really mention high tech. There was a big Boeing space vehicle oriented plant in Huntington Beach, so there was some tech. Within an hour commute of Huntington Beach are tens of thousands of high tech jobs, particularly in Irvine. U.C. Irvine does some cutting edge tech work, tied tosome of those businesses.
What does surfing and other action sports have to do with creativity? Here's the part the no one in academia has figured out. In action sports, (surfing, skateboarding, BMX freestyle, snowboarding, wakeboarding, freestyle motocross and others), people go out day after day and try to do something new. The point of these sports isn't to win competitions, specifically, it's to progress. We are inventing new moves, tweaking and reshaping old moves, taking known tricks to new environments, and trying to improve and progress ourselves, the sports, and our whole culture of these sports. It's not just about going bigger, it's about creating new possibilities on the bikes and boards we use. Like any good artist, action sports people are continually working to progress and invent new things. (Note: I say "we," because I spent 20 years doing these sports day after day, but I'm old and fat at the moment)
Because of this, action sports people are very often artists and graphic designers of some sort, zine publishers, photographers, video camera people and producers, magazine publishers, tinkerers, inventors, event promoters, and entrepreneurs. In addition, as the early sports of the 1980's (surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX racing and freestyle) began to grow larger, we were immersed in the hardcore punk music and its D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) ethos. Nobody was making the stuff we wanted, so we started doing it ourselves, whatever it was. The surf culture gave us H.B./Orange County actions sports kids mentors, of a sort, they made boards, surf clothes, music, and surf movies, their own media before we came along. The older surfers set an example for us.
Here are some of the people and businesses that emerged and grew as the action sports wave of the 1980's and 1990's growth exploded. While I was riding my bike every day, learning and inventing new tricks, publishing zines, producing low budget videos, and working as a sidekick to small time entrepreneurs, people around me were creating and growing all these things, and many others. This was the small creative ecosystem I moved into, that I watched grow exponentially from 1987 to 2007.
Something happened around 2003. What was it? Huntington Beach had developed a reputation for fun, cool , crazy, weird people, doing lots of interesting things. The energy of H.B./Orange County had become known around world in the action sports world, through our self-produced zines, magazines, videos, and later TV shows. Then, around 2002-2003 the Yuppie hordes, many of them tech people from the Irvine area, students from U.C. Irvine, and even Hollywood, started moving in. Rents surged. Old surfers and deadbeat dads moved to Costa Rica, to drink 50 cent beers and surf all day. Huntington Beach exploded. The city is often recognized, by name, nationwide, even worldwide in some circles now. The creativity of the action sports culture wound up attracting a lot of tech people to live and drink in H.B., and commute to their tech jobs in Orange and L.A. counties.
The four block downtown area now is thriving, with dozens of trendy restaurants, bars, clubs, and boutique shops. It's a whole different scene now, but still with strong surf and action sports roots, and a statue of Duke Kahanamoku, the "Father of Modern Surfing," and the surf museum downtown.
As Sesame Street used to say, "These are the people in my neighborhood." These people and groups were part of the world we all lived in, in Huntington Beach, in the 1980's and 1990's.
I've got a new blog going on, it's about starting and building an art or creative business, or any small business. You can check it out here: WPOS Kreative Ideas
