In my opionion, one of the most interesting Creative Scenes happening in the world today is these guys, the Bored Ape Yacht Club founders. This is the first serious interview I've seen with these guys, other than this early documentary by The Defiant. And just for the record, some of these founders were BMXers and skaters, into punk and hip hop, Miami locals back in the day. They mention that in the documentary. So they have a little action sports roots, as well, which is cool.
You can talk smack about NFT's, Web 3, blockchain, DeFi, and the whole crypto world. It's cool right now, most people are already on that bandwagon. That whole world is getting trashed right now. There were a lot of slimeballs, and just like the early internet, this crypto winter is shaking out a lot of the garbage in the crypto/blockchain/Web3 domain, which is healthy. But in the middle of this interview, they go into a lot of the amazing ideas and potential of all these technologies for creative people and entrepreneurial people. For all the lame stuff in the whole blockchain realm, there are also all kinds of amazing possibilities for creative people. This interview gets deep into these.
For those few of you who have read my idea of The Phoenix Great Depression, these guys, and people and other creative scenes like them, are the Phoenix part. Big chunks of our world today is still run by people with and old, 20th century, Industrial Age mentalities and that's breaking down, bit by bit, industry by industry, and being replaced by Information Age versions or new industries altogether. People and groups forging into new areas, technological, creative, and any other way, are building whatever form of society we evolve into, after the remaining parts of the Industrial Age die off, and we move closer to whatever the true Information Age, whatever that ends up being 10-15-20 years from now.
Darryl Grogan's section from his own, mid-1990's video, Synopsis. Check out the ollie impossible variations. For any of you who don't skate, an ollie impossible is a trick where you pop the board off the ground, and then flip it end over end, and land back on it. In the early 1980's just a couple of years after the ollie itself was invented on vert, and then on flat ground, everyone thought this trick was impossible. Until Rodney Mullen started playing around with the idea, that is.
This blog post was inspired by a video that popped up on my YouTube feed a few days ago. For 3-4 years now, I've been blogging about this crazy long recession that I think is going to really shake up life for pretty much everyone. The main wave of that recession is finally here. I was tired of writing about what I saw happening in the coming months and years. So, a couple months ago, I started a new blog called The Spot Finder, just to do something completely different, to get my mind away from economics and the future. I started putting together blog posts about BMX and skate spots, since many are now legendary, and have their own stories to tell. Doing that blog, I started getting a lot of really cool videos showing up on my YouTube feed. One of those inspired this post.
This video, "The Best Impossible Ever Done" by Metro Skateboarding, shows his take on the five best skaters doing ollie impossibles. I immediately knew there were a couple of things missing. First of all, he didn't mention that Rodney Mullen invented the ollie inpossible way back in 1983. Here's a clip of Rodney from 1983, the year he invented the ollie impossible. While he doesn't do an impossible in this clip, there's a still photo of him doing an impossible at 1:58 in the clip. To really put the the ollie impossible in perspective, Rodney had just invented the flat ground ollie, which became the single most foundational trick in street skating, in 1981, two years before the impossible. Rodney went on to be one of the most influential, and talented, skateboarders of all time, as you can see here, and here.
The other thing I noticed missing from that "Best Impossibles" video was Darryl Grogan. Who? You may be asking. I'm writing this post to tell you about an amazing skateboarder many of you, have never heard of. In the late 1980's, I was a local BMX freestyler at the Huntington Beach Pier, sessioning there most every weekend with BMX freestylers Mike Sarrail, Randy Lawrence, and freestyle skaters Pierre Andre', Don Brown, Hans Lingren, Jeremy Ramey, and whatever BMXers or skaters wandered by on any given day. One night, Mike and I were driving by Pay-n-Play, a place right by Huntington High School. There were indoor raquet ball courts, and two smooth, well lit, basketball courts out front. Both freestyle skaters and street skaters practiced there at night, sometimes, in the late 80's and 90's. So Mike and I were driving by ,and we saw a freestyle skater with a headband, and thought it was German freestyle skater Per Welinder, so we went over to say "Hi". It turned out to be another really talented freestyle skateboarder we'd never met, Darryl Grogan.
Darryl came up in the late 1980's, and was giving Rodney a run for his money in the freestyle contests of the late 80's, until the freestyle contest scene ended. So we met Darryl, talked ot him a bit, and went on our way. This was probably in late 1988 or early 1989, I think. Sometime later, Darryl showed up at the pier now and then, and I got to know him a bit better.
Much later, one day when my bike was broke, I took my skateboard to the pier to skate. While I was a hardcore, if mediocre, BMX freestyler, I hung out with skaters all the time, and skated little bit, and knew a handful of freestyle tricks, like shove-its, some footwork, and stationary finger flips.
Darryl Grogan was the only one there at the time. Before long, Darryl was showing me the basics of how to do an ollie impossible, which he excelled at. He told me to put my back foot right behind the trucks on the tail of the board, and turn my toes inward a bit. Then he showed me how to jump, and do the scoop to get the board to flip end over end. So I started trying that, and Darryl went back to practicing whatever he was working on. A hour later, I was getting the flip part, and started trying to land ollie impossibles on the my board. I gave up seriously trying them soon after, but would try them every once in a while.
About three or four years later, I did actually land 4 or 5 ollie impossibles on the flatbottom of our mini ramp at the P.O.W. House, in Westminster. It took a while, but Darryl's tips helped me get that trick eventually, though I never landed them again after that one day. For that reason, in my mind, I tied ollie impossibles to Darryl.
As a skater, Darryl was a super perfectionist, pretty typical among freestyle skaters. He talked a lot about "body mechanics," getting his body position just right to do whichever insanely hard trick he was learning at the time. Since I worked at Unreel Prductions, and had access to video equipment, he asked me to do a little promo video of him, to take to a contest in Europe. So I went out, this would be in 1989, and shot video of him at his favorite spots. Then he came down to Unreel a couple of times and I edited the clip on our "offline, S-VHS edit system. It was simple cuts editing, but Darryl was fascinated by the video making process. In the months after that, he would call me up once in a while and I'd go shoot some video of his later tricks and lines. So I got to know Darryl better in 1990-1991. At that time, he was one of the top few freestyle skaters in the world. There was talk that he might finally be the guy to beat Rodney Mullen in a contest, which hadn't happened in 6 or 8 years at that point. Then the recession happened, and they stopped having freestyle skating contests.
While shooting footage, Darryl and I would talk about how we learned new tricks, me on bikes, him on his board. For me, talking my head into believing I could actually land a trick was usually the mian issue. For Darryl, body position, body mechanics, was the main issue. He would talk about, "OK, I put my foot at a 45 degree angle, and my shoulder down at this angle, and..." He would keep playing with body position until he got if figured out, and then he'd pull things that were ridiculously hard. Back then, 1989-90-91, he was doing ollie impossibles to cross foot landings, and he'd STOMP them. I remember one night, he was doing some impossible variation, and he kept landing in a nosewheelie... by accident. Yeah, impossible to nosewheelie, by accident, in about 1990. He didn't even realize he was doing it. I told him, and he thought about it. A couple weeks later he called me to go shoot some video, and told me he was doing impossibles to nosewheelies, on purpose. His level of control was just freakin' insane.
That year, Unreel got shut down, and I moved to the main Vision building to work, things were going downhill at Vision, and for skateboarding in general. I quit Unreel that summer, and started doing freelance work. At some point, Darryl and I headed off in our separate ways, and I didn't run into him for 3 or 4 years. Then, in the mid 90's, I went into a skate shop for some bushings or something, and there was a video playing. I asked who's video it was, then the guy at the shop said, Darryl Grogan's video. I looked him up and got back in touch. In the years when we'd been doing different things, I wound up working as a crew guy on TV shows in the summers, and Darryl went to film school and was becoming a real cinematographer, shooting actual film, not video. He started doing skate videos, shooting on a film, which only a few people, mostly Stacy Peralta and Don Hoffman at Unreel, had done.
With skateboarding, and the rise of street skating in the early 90's, Darryl had taken his freestyle tricks to a street board, and was doing some super technical combos and lines. The video at the top of this post is one of those segments, as is this one. There are a couple of Darryl's tricks that I think just should NOT be humanly possible. One of those is the handstand with hands on the sides of the board, rolling forwards, to the hand flip out. The other one is an ollie impossible to one foot landing. If you ever want to go to the hosptial for a couple of weeks, try impossibles to one foot landings. There are a dozen ways you could wreck yourself missing that trick. Those are not possible. But Darryl would stomp them.
Once again, I wrote a big long post for one basic reason. If you talk about the skaters doing the best ollie impossibles in the history of skateboarding, Darryl Grogan has to be on that list. Now you know.
If you want to learn ollie impossibles yourself, here's Daryl's how-to video, linked below. After he gave me tips on doing impossibles, he went back to lining his back foot straight, not toes pointed inward, like initially told me. Here are the links to four of his videos, all shot on film and produced by Darryl, in the 1990's. If you're a 90's era skater, you'll recognize several of the skaters in his videos.
Since those days, Darryl has gone on to make his living as a cinematographer, filmmaker, and Handi-cam operator. Here's some of Darryl's film work from recent years. There are a lot of action sports people who have found work in the TV world, Darryl's been doing high quality work, behind the scenes for over 20 years now.
Jim Cramer, probably the best known stock market personality, talks about the horrific drop of the major tech stocks in 2022. He's right, they tanked, a whole lot of shareholders lost a combined $5.4 trillion in value this past year.
Way back in the early 1990's, I thought becoming super rich was the key to living the life I wanted. That life was doing as little as possible to make a living, make a ton of money, and then I could go ride my BMX bike all day. I was 24 in 1990, and getting rich is on the minds of lots of 20-somethings, guys in particular. Hell, Save Ferris even has a song about this mentality. Anyhow, I started reading, and actually studying, the Forbes 400 magazine every year. The basic idea was, "Hey, here's a single magazine with 3 or 4 paragraphs about the top 400 wealthiest people in the United States. If I read this, I can learn what these people did right in the world of money, how they built their wealth, and what they're interested in as we head into the future. So I did that. Year after year, starting in 1990 or 1991, I think, I started studying that annual special issue, the Forbes 400.
I could, and probably will someday, write a lot about what I learned from studying the Forbes 400 magazine, every year, over about 20 years. But here's a few quick basics. I learned that about 1/3 of the wealthiest people in the U.S. inherited their fortunes. So being born into money is the best way to get super rich. Ask the Walton family, and the Mars (candy) family, among others. But that doesn't work for the rest of us, unless you marry one of those people. (Paris Hilton is taken guys, sorry).
The people who made huge fortunes, by and large, did it by building huge business empires, and then taking those huge businesses public, when they owned a huge chunk of the stock. The value of their stock surges when it starts getting traded in the stock market, generally. When I first read the Forbes 400, those main fortunes were much smaller than now, and many were big industrial companies like Levi Strauss, and Seagrams, that you'd never think of now. The tech billionaire thing was just beginning then, Steves Jobs and Wozniak from Apple, and Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft, were about the only tech wunderkids then.
Another way several people became super rich was through real estate. Even with the real estate crash of the early 1990's, a lot of the wealthiest people made a lot of their money through real estate then. Donald Bren of the Irvine Company, here in Southern California, is a prime example from that era.
The biggest shocker to me, was that, of the 400 richest people in the U.S. then (1991-992ish), ONLY TWO people became super wealthy by investing in stocks. Only TWO, out of 400. Those were, of course, Warren Buffet, and his partner, Charlie Munger, of Bershire Hathaway. Their main technique is called "value investing," which means buying large chunks of stock in really solid, well run businesses, usually ones that owned great brands (Coca-Cola, Dairy Queen, etc.). They did lots of research, found the companies they thought were the best overall, and then they... waited. They waited until the stocks in those companies dropped to a value they had already determined was a significant discount to the fundamental value of the business. Warren Buffet was taught an old adage by his mentor, "Buy when there's blood in the streets." When the world gets crazy, for whatever reasons, and investors turn their backs on solid companies, driving those stock prices down, that's when Warren and Charlie would buy big chunks of stock. And then they held those stocks... forver, if possible. They will sell at times, usually when a far better deal is happening, but it's rare. But the only two guys who actually invested their way to top 400 fortunes did it with a buy and hold strategy. Yes, there are also hedge funds and corporate raider types, that take over companies in hostile takeovers, and wind up with lots of stock. But that's far different than simply picking stocks and investing. Just of the record, I had one of these billionaires, Larry Ellison of Oracle, in my taxi once. Ever have a 20 minute, one on one conversation with a multi-billionaire? I have (He talked about his yacht, mostly, and it was 2003, he was only worth $9 billion then).
Now I'm a homeless guy, I have no money to invest, it's easy to dismiss this post. I don't care. I called the 2020 stock crash before it happened, and have made several other solid calls in the past 3-4 years, in this or other blogs. I've also made bad calls, of course. I'm not going to invest in stocks, even if I won the lottery tomorrow. But if I was, it would mostly be the stocks Cramer is talking about in the segment above, except for Facebook. I think they're in a long, slow downward spiral, but they'll still be around for years.
If I WERE going to buy stocks to hold for the next 5 to 10 years, and not touch them for that whole time, it would be the stocks Cramer is telling people to avoid above, I'd be buying them right now, or in the next month or so. Apple, Google (Alphabet), Amazon, and Microsoft. I'd throw in Pinterest and Shopify stock as well, because I just like those businesses, and they're down big as well in 2022. Then I'd just forget about them, and let them ride. I wouldn't touch any other stock out there. None of them. Yes, there are plenty of stocks that will have big gains, at some point. But I wouldn't bother looking for them. I think crypto and other things are far more interesting in the coming years. I'd just buy these stocks, forget about them, and hold them for at least 5 years. That's my personal opinion. This video above, that's as "blood in the streets" as it gets.
That's my thought on the stock market, as 2022 skids to a close.
Oh, by the way... close to half of Berkshire Hathaway's stock holdings are of Apple, according to the most recents reports. Berkshire stock, is up about 1.2% in 2022. The guys who have been buying andholding good stocks for 60 years or so. Berkshire's stock is about even for 2022, about the same performance as gold this year, when so many stocks tanked. Warren Buffet is 92 years old now, and Charlie Munger is 98. I wonder what they're buying right now...
This is just my personal opinion, do your own due diligence, and consult any experts you think will help before making your own investment decisions. And yes, this is another of my "told you so" posts that I will link to a year from now, or sometime in the future.
Closing prices on those stocks and some other investments today, for reference when looking at this post later on- 12/28/2022
Too much inventory? Slow down in demand? How will the recession affect the bike industry (including BMX)? Rob here give you his thoughts.
I'm way outside the actual bike industry, totally out of the loop on traditional industry insider news. But I'm an amateur futurist, among other things, who's been blogging about a "the next Great Recession" since 2017 or early 2018. I just geek out on economic and future trends. Covid should have been the start of a LONG major recession, but The Fed (Federal Reserve), created $5 to $6 TRILLION dollars in 2020, and threw it at the economy. Bailouts, "Quantitative Easing", super low interest rates, stimmy checks, PUA, PPP, and all sorts of other programs tossed loads of money at Wall Street, big banks ,businesses, city, state, and county governments, and most of us individuals. Yep, even I got some. We were all hood rich for about a year, when this current recession should have been happening. All that money is why we have the current high inflation. Big influxes of new money devalue a currency, and in 12 to 18 months, prices rise to adjust to the lower value of the currency. Hey, the party was fun... while it lasted. That's the nature of parties.
But now The Fed (and other central banks around the world) is stuck. They've been raising interest rates to fight the 40 year high inflation. But that has caused a major drops in the inflated prices of stocks, crypto, and the downturn of the real estate market in many areas. If they back off and create more new money, inflation takes off and goes even higher. So they're driving us into a major recession, intentionally, to fight the inflation they caused by bailing us all out of the pandemic business shutdown crash. So things are all out of whack, in nearly every business category, in nearly every investment category, in ost of the world. Uh... bummer.
The bike industry is small, pidly compared to the really big industries, like food, oil, chemicals, telecommunications, cars, and of course, high tech. But it's still a decent sized industry, and employs (and sponsors) a lot of people. It looks like we're in for a slowdown. From my vantage point, this reminds me of heading into the early 1990's, which became a loooong recession/stagnant period. BMX "died" in 1989. Sponsors dropped nearly every freestyle team, except Haro and GT, as I recall.
I know nothing of this youTube channel above, but Rob in the video makes a lot of sense, and does it in under 5 minutes. If you ride, work in the industry, or are sponsored by anyone in the BMX, MTB, or other parts of the bike/action sports world, watch this video. Then do some research with the industry people you deal with. See how things are in your part of the industry, and if you need to make some changes in what you do.
I just found another video on this subject, recorded on Black Friday, November 25, 2022:
Christmas is over and "Ho, ho, holy shit there's some crazy lines in this video." Just watch it. It's not like you're working at work this week, anyhow.
One serious, and free, Christmas dinner. Heck yeah!
While I am still homeless in the San Fernando Valley, I still managed to have a really cool Christmas. I spent the morning working on the latest drawing, and then headed to a church that had a free Christmas meal. Salad, turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and homemade cranberry sauce, with pumpkin pie for dessert. As a rule, I don't travel all over for free meals, because the homeless people who do usually spend all their time just doing that, and nothing else. I call that the "Homeless Merry_Go_'Round. They get free food, but never get much else accomplished. I'm too focused on getting some creative work done every day.
But there's one place that has a great weekly meal, plus holidays, that I recently started going to. I got stuffed, so thanks to all the volunteers!
They even gave everyone a packed stocking full of gifts, which I didn't expect, and they had a raffle for some gift cards as well. So I had a great Christmas meal, then went to another spot, and did some more drawing for much of the afternoon. Good day all around. Hope all of you had a good day, and didn't get stuck in airports from all the crazy weather in much of the country.
And if you're a sarcastic weirdo like me, who grew up in a family where Christmas wasn't usually very merry, this link is for you. (NSFW- or anywhere else)
It's December 21, 2022. Congress is trying to pass the $1.7 trillion Omnibus bill before leaving for their holiday vacation. Above, David goes into a few of the things in the bill, how it will cause more inflation, and thoughts about it. Obviously, he doesn't really read the whole thing.
$1,700,000,000,000
That's the number.
How much is $1.7 trillion? Here's one way to try and put it in perspective, that I just figured out. For $17.4 billion, the federal government could give every single one of the 580,000 homeless people in the U.S., $2,500 a month, to pay for housing, for a whole year. $2,500 a month should be enough to rent some place to live, for one person, in pretty much any part of the country, even here in Los Angeles area. That $17.4 billion would be 1.02% of the Omnibus bill, housing every single homeless person for a year, in a room or apartment they pick, and leaving almost 99% of the money for other purposes.
$1.7 trillion is the same as giving $8,100 to every one of the 209 million adults in the U.S.
I know... booooooooring!
How' bout this? The $1.7 trillion in the Omnibus bill could by a new, 2022, Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat, for every single one of the 19 million men, women, and children in the entire state of New York.
19 million all American mucle cars in one state. Just a way to put this amount of money into perspective. In 2018, 66,717 Dodge Challengers were sold, the peak year of sales for that model.
To be clear, I'm not saying the Omnibus Bill should or shouldn't be passed. I'm sure there's a lot in there that needs to be spent, and I'm also sure there's a whole bunch of "pork barrel" spending that doesn't really need to be spent. My point in this post is just to try and put the huge amount, of $1.7 trillion U.S. dollars, into a frame of reference, so we get some idea just how much money that is. Yes, it will help cause more inflation down the road, 12 to 18 months, on average, after the chunks of money are spent. It won't increase inflation in the next few months, though. It takes a while for large blocks of new money to work into the everyday economy, causing inflation.
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I have a new blog called Adaptive Reuse SoCal, about finding new uses for old, unused, and abandoned buildings, as well as the economy, and commerical real estate in general. Check it out!
1970's era skateboard Hall of Fame women Vicky Vickers, Deanna Caulkins, and Robin Logan, with drawings I did for them. This happened a while back, but I just found the photo, misfiled in my hard drive.
About 4 or 5 years ago, a friend of mine, who was also a friend of Robin Logan, had me do a drawing for Robin's birthday. Robin is from the Logan family, that put out the Logan Earth Ski skateboards in the 1960's and 1970's, and they are still putting out boards. Robin later had me do a couple of other drawings for her, including one for older brother Bruce. She also had me do these two drawings from classic photos of Vicky Vickers and Deanna Caulkins, when they got inducted into the Skateboard Hall of of Fame. I was stoked on this project, because these women were teenage girls, already top skaters, tearing it up on skateboards, back when I first got into skateboarding, during the 1970's boom. It was just a really cool project for me to be a part of. So that's Vicky, Deanna, and Robin above (L to R), the day she gave them the drawings.
As I improved, and became a bit better known for my Sharpie Scribble Style, after I started seriously selling drawings in late 2015, I began to get a few special projects. Yes, they're all cool, but I was asked to do 2 or 3 drawings for people's birthday's, a couple of memorial drawings for people's friends who had died, and then projects like this, for women who were defining skateboarding when I was a kid, just getting into it. Those are the projects that have more weight, where I really wanted to do my best.
Like any artist, I'm never 100% happy with any drawing I do. There are screw-ups in every one, in most cases, that only I notice. I shade in ink, and I very rarely use any whiteout to touch up. So I have to blend in any tiny mistakes I make, or start the drawing all over if it's a big enough mistake. The pressure is on, artistically, in every drawing. But certain projects hold a bit more pressure.
In any case, I just found this photo above, misfiled in a folder, and wanted to share it, since it's cool to see women that had a lot of influence in early action sports with my work on their walls. Thank you Robin Logan for tapping me to do these two drawings.
Video as we know it now didn't really exist in the 1970's, and there isn't a lot of film of individual skateboarders then. But here's an intro piece of Deanna Caulkins from her induction into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame.
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Laptop just wouldn't power up a couple of weeks ago. Couldn't figure out why. Tried the basic tricks the online tips videos showed, and they didn't work. Couldn't access anything but Twitter ( @steveemig43 ) for 2 weeks. Learned today that static electricity can cause this issue. Maybe that was it, it's been pretty dry here at times. Anyhow, battery drained naturally over time, recharged it today, and laptop powered back up. I'm back, and will be up and blogging again soon.
My page view counters aren't working on any blogs for some reason. Dang. 43.
