Firsts. The Vision Skate Escape was the 1988 NSA halfpipe finals, held at U.C. Irvine Bren Center in Irvine, California. It was the first time a spine ramp was used in a major skateboard competition. Powell Peralta had just invented the first spine ramp a year or so earlier in Bones Brigade: The Search for Animal Chin video. When the Powell skaters were asked about the Chin ramp spine, they said, it was intimidating because it was so big. So the Unreel team went with a full halfpipe/spine to mini ramp. It was the first mini ramp in a major skateboard contest. Mini ramps had also just been invented about a year or two earlier. It was the first time a punk band called the Red Hot Chili Peppers was hired to play at the NSA finals. The Chili Peppers had been a band for about six years at this point.
In 1988, I was working at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video production company, and skateboarding was in it's third big wave of popularity, and hitting its 1980's peak. The vert skaters were the top guys at that point. Freestyle skaters did technical tricks on flat, and street skatingwas just turning into a thing then. This was the biggest skateboard contest ever put on, at that time.
Skateboarding had hardly ever shown up on TV, other than tiny news bits or commercials, at that point. ESPN was a little upstart cable network, mostly showing hours of kickboxing or fishing videos. It would be another seven years before ESPN got around to starting the Extreme Games (they changed the name to X-Games in 1996). In 1988, Unreel, Vision, were pushing the envelope to try and get another full hour of skateboarding on ESPN, following the minor success of Holiday Havoc, about a year earlier.
I ran all kinds of errands for about three weeks leading up to this event, picking up supplies, taking things to the ramp building warehouse, and things like that. The contest was a two day thing, with prelims on Saturday, and finals on Sunday. It was set up in an unusual, head to head format. Two skaters would each take a run, and one would advance. Then another two would go head to head, and it kept going. By the finals, Tony Hawk and Christian Hosoi had skated several all out runs over two days, and both were pretty exhausted. But when the Chili Peppers played at the end on Sunday, they got a jam session going, Tony, Christian, and Chris Miller are the guys you see most in this video. Getting to play while the Chili Peppers played live up on the deck was a once in a lifetime chance, at least at that time.
The live hosts of the show were KROQ radio deejay The Poorman, who is also the guy who created the Loveline radio show that later made Dr. Drew famous. With Poorman was skater/rapper/musician Skatemaster Tate, and Vision pro vert skater Ken Park.
Like any fairly large live event, there was a lot of people, and a lot of work involved to make it happen. For both days of the competition, I was in a booth at the back left of the arena floor, wearing two big headsets, calling cues and communicating with different crew guys. Don Hoffman, head of Unreel was directing the action next to me, his headset on the main channel. We had another group out in a big TV truck out back, the same way they tape major sports events, like football and basketball. That was really big time for skateboarding in 1988.
Three of us from Unreel, Dave, Amanda, and myself, all pitched in on a room in a hotel in Irvine that night, along with Elaine, Amanda's sister. That allowed us to be a lot closer to get there in the morning. It was a long day of work on Saturday, and when we were done, Amanda decided we needed to go have milkshakes, or something, as a late night snack. Somehow we ended up at The Arches, a really upscale Newport Beach steakhouse, best known as John Wayne's favorite restaurant (before he died, obviously) by locals. It was one of the only places still open. The even crazier part is that Poorman and one or two of his friends came along as well. The Arches didn't have milkshakes, so we ended up eating full meals, which turned into a $140 bill. We told the waiter we worked for Vision Skateboards, and he said Brad Dorfman, owner of Vision, was a regular there. When he brought the bill, he asked if we wanted to put it on Brad's tab. For real. We all looked at each other, really tempted to do it. But common sense, and the desire to still have jobs on Monday, prevailed, and we split the tab. Poorman turned out to be a pretty cool guy to have dinner with, he had some good stories, and was a funny guy, just like on air.
By the time the contest was over Sunday afternoon, so was my job. I took my headphones of and told Don, "I'll be in the pit," and ran up to right below the mini ramp, where the inevitable slam pit formed, as the Chili Peppers started playing. I blew off a lot of steam, and it was a great show. The chairs everyone had been sitting on were all zip-tied together. So chairs were pushed out of the way to make room for a pit, and a few chairs, sometimes 2 or 3 tied together, went flying through the air at times. Like all good punk gigs, I was sweaty and happy and tired by the end of their set. The tech guys, the lighting guys, cameramen, and the ramp crew, had to tear down, but we were done. So I headed home for a much needed shower and good night's sleep.
Vision put out several videos, and a few TV shows, while I worked there. I was called The Dub Guy in the Unreel office. My main, day to day job was to make copies of different videos for people all across the Vision empire, which included Sim skateboards and snowboards, Schmitt Stix skateboards, and Vision Street Wear clothes. So running dubs was what most people knew I did. But I ran errands to Hollywood, or wherever, to pick up tapes, equipment, and whatever else was needed.
Basically I was the one permanent production assistant at Unreel. In 1989, I also became the official cameraman, so I got sent on video shoots now and then, as well. When Red Hot Skate Rock was released, I learned I actually got named in the credits. At the time, I thought it was pretty cool, but not that big of a deal. But none of us expected the Red Hot Chili Peppers to be a major band 35 years later. Now, as a broke, Has Been geezer of 56, it's cool as fuck my name's in the credits of a Chili Peppers video from the 1980's. The Peppers have just gotten better over time. And me... well I didn't. That's life.
I've had a lot of weird things happen to this blog, and some of my other blogs, over the past 4-5 years. I have a page view counter on my blogs, because people actually check out my blogs. I actually have 25 blogs with 900 or more views. I've tried all kinds of crazy ideas on blogs. The vast majority of my views have come to my top 5 blogs. I've racked up over 450,000 legit, total page views, across more than 25 different blog ideas that I've tried. I don't live and die by views, but it tells me some people are actually reading my posts. And that helps make up for the fact I've been doing this for free for 14 1/2 years.
Over a few years now, I've had my page counter freeze, and actually disappear at times. I've had poems, and a short story about creativity, disappear from one blog. The post is there, but the text is gone. Poof! gone. don't know why. I've also had my three alternate Google accounts shut down, over one night, and have no idea why. There was no warning or communication. I also got banned from linking all my blogs on Facebook and Instagram for 3 or 4 years. It's not just "algorithm warfare" these days. There's all kinds of weird stuff going on to promote certain people and websites and social media content, and to bury other sites, posts, and videos, to keep large numbers of people from finding that content. We lost net neutrality, and all kinds of games are being played to mess with lots of people making really good content. But... if you make good content, on a regular basis, people will find you... anyhow.
So in the last couple of weeks, my page views suddenly spiked to huge levels. According to what I can see on my analytics, I've gotten over 13,000 views, from Android device(s) running Safari... in Singapore. In two weeks. Somehow, I don't think this blog (and a couple of others) suddenly went that viral on the other side of the world. So now, after years of other weird stuff happening, I'm getting a buttload of fake views from Singapore, or some shady thing routed through Singapore.
So, Steve Emig: The White Bear blog really has about 145,000 page views, which I thank all you actual humans for, over the last six years. I don't know what's happening, but my solid page view count is getting messed up, to the upside, and I don't know why. So I just wanted to say that.
I just realized this is post 900 for this blog. That's cool.
CNBC segment on the large number of small colleges closing down, June 20, 2023.
I came to the conclusion that a "College Apocalypse" was coming in 2017. After a conversation about student debt with a college educated friend, and his friend who lives much of the time in Denmark, I looked up student loan debt online. I was just curious why student debt had skyrocketed so much in recent years. It took about 10 minutes of Google searches to learn about SLABS and how student loan debt had changed since the Great Recession. The new model just seemed unsustainable to me. I self-published my ideas on this in the spring of 2020 in the bottom of this chapter of my book/blog about the 2020s, Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now.
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Back in 2017, when I first got on Google to learn why there was so much student debt (then about $1.3 trillion, now over $1.8 trillion (see here) I knew nothing about the demographic issues or that small colleges had already been closing down at a high rate, for several years, by that time. I came to the idea of a College Apocalypse just looking at the economics of student debt, the SLABS business model, combined with a little bit of common sense, and just projecting those trends into the future. It appeared to me that the next recession would cause a major issue for many colleges and universities. And no, the irony of a lowly, if relatively intelligent, high school grad explaining this idea isn't lost on me. Like several things I blog about, no one else seemed to be paying attention to this issue, so I dug into it, and wrote about it a little.
Here's what I see happening in the next 10 to 15 years for colleges and universities. First of all, do you know what SLABS are? I believe we will see a major breakdown of the SLABS (Student Loan Asset Backed Securities) market over the next year or two, which is the primary way student debt has been financed, particularly since 2009. SLABS are a student loan version of the MBS (Mortgage Backed Securities) and CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) business model that helped crash the U.S. economy in 2007-2008, leading us into the Great Recession.
Since 2009, many more student loans have been bundled and resold as derivative investments, as have commercial loans (CLO's), commercial real estate loans (CMBS- crashing as we speak), car loans and credit card debt (ABS- Asset Backed Securities- also crashing now) and some other forms of debt. This is an unsustainable model, for any kind of debt, and all of these types of financing are now, or at some point will have major repayment issues, in this coming recession. When enough people or businesses can't pay their loans, then the securities created from all those loans lose value. When that happens, those securities (MBS, CDO, CLO, CMBS, SLABS, ABS) go down in value. At some point, the institutions holding those securities (banks, foreign governments, cities, pension plans) have to mark down their value, and take a big loss. This is part of what happened to Silicon Valley Bank in March. That's what happened with home mortgages in 2008. Now it's happening with about every other type of debt, even credit card debt.
Even if the demographics issue, the fact that a college degree no longer guarantees a high paying job after graduation, pandemic related issues, and the crushing student debt load for 40 million plus Americans didn't exist, the college system would see a massive crash of the current financing system. It will be harder to finance students going to college at today's higher interest rates. This crash will lead to many colleges losing revenue, and having to cut back. In time, some more colleges, and larger ones, will be closing down. My best guestimate is 20% to 40% of all colleges (over 4,000 exist now) will close in the next 10-20 years. That estimate is based on looking how the Retail Apocalypse has played out so far, over about 20 years now. This will force a complete re-invention of the American higher education system. This is what is going to happen over the 10 to 20 years, regardless of any actions taken by the government or college and university leadership in the next few years. They can help make the process easier, but most likely won't, for a variety or reasons.
Let me make clear here that I'm not against colleges and universities as institutions. We need them to teach and train people to work in many different types of careers. No, I didn't go to college, at all. I'm completely self-taught since graduating from Boise High School in 1984. I've never taken a single college course. That's just the way my young adult years worked out.
My family always struggled with money, there was no money set aside for me to go to college after graduating high school. So I "took a year off," 39 years ago (shit I'm old). The $1,000 that I saved the summer after I graduated high school, working for $2.10 an hour, was needed by my family to move back into our Boise house that Fall. My mom and sister moved to Virginia, where my dad had taken a high paying, two year job. The job, several months in, suddenly ended one afternoon, a couple months after my mom and sister moved to Virginia, and bought an apartment full of new furniture. They needed my savings to catch up on bills and get back to our house in Boise. And yes, if was cool living alone, as an 18-year-old, in a three bedroom house for 3 or 4 months. Good thing I wasn't that big of a partier.
In addition, I didn't really have a strong direction in my life at age 18, except BMX racing and freestyle. Like several of my friends, becoming a wildlife biologist, kind of sounded like a cool idea, but not that cool. We were all outdoorsy guys in Boise, and looking for a career where we could be outside as much as possible. So we all thought about becoming wildlife biologists.
The way things worked out, I got a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines a month after my 20th birthday, replacing a guy with an English degree. With a week and a half of training by him, and the MLA Handbook, I was suddenly proofreading two magazines that were leaders in their field. Yeah, it wasn't Time or National Geographic, but while my former high school classmates were entering their junior year of college, I was actually working in the publishing world. That job changed the course of my life, and I'm really glad I took the path I did.
Within a few months, I knew I wanted to run my own business some day, and I didn't need a degree to hire myself. So the idea college, in my life got paused, and then just drifted away, as I began to work around a bunch of really entrepreneurial people in the BMX and skateboarding industries.
My younger sister, Cheri, on the other hand, wanted to be a teacher since she was a little kid. That takes a degree, and she worked her ass off to put herself through college, get her bachelor's degree, and become a teacher. I'm proud of her for that. She went on to get her masters degree, and every possible credential, which is great. Different people have different paths in life.
I'm not writing this post because I have any beef with colleges in general. I've come to believe, through my own personal learning and research, that we are in the late stages of what I call The Big Transition. My Big Picture is that we are about 3/4 of the way through a long transition period between the fading Industrial Age and the emerging Information Age. This is based on the work of futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, and Alvin's 1980 book The Third Wave. Their theory just made sense to me, but Alvin's last book came out in 2006, and he died in 2016, and his great work has been largely forgotten at this point. But the long period of change between the Industrial Age and the Information Age, that he first described 43 years ago, has continued to play out.
I started calling it The Big Transition in my personal writing and blogging 7or 8 years ago, as I was trying to figure out where things were going in the world, due to my own futurist tendencies. In the mid 2010's, I came to the conclusion that every single business, industry, institution, and person would have to make this transition from and Industrial Age model to an Information Age model. We've seen this transition happen in telecommunications, computers, music, publishing, TV/movies/video, and in recent years in retail stores. The College Apocalypse, which is really just beginning, is the old college and university system moving from an Industrial Age based model into an Information Age based model. That's really what this is all about, and why it was predictable from my Big Picture of where society is going.
Like for all the other industries and institutions that have largely made the transition, the long process of completely changing how higher education works and operates will be messy, controversial, and catastrophic to those who cling to "the way things have always been done." The transition was really hard on all the other industries, as well. We once paid $15 for a ten song record album on "vinyl," now we stream music, and have access to tens of thousands of songs for free or close to free. But now the live concerts are really expensive. We once had three channels of pretty bad TV shows to watch. We can now stream millions of shows and videos on a supercomputer we can carry in our pocket. We've survived those transitions. We will survive the College Apocalypse, but there will be a lot of carnage along the way, that's the nature of major transitions. Well over 100 smaller colleges have already closed down, since about 2005, or been absorbed into larger schools. Many more will close smaller campuses, or close down completely. The rest will work out new models that work much better in today's world.
So how does this play out? First, let's look at the headwinds for colleges right now. Well over 40 million Americans have student debt loans that they are supposed to begin paying again in September. Most of those people will struggle to try and pay those loans. A huge percentage, probably well over 50%, simply won't be paying their student loans a year from now, as this coming recession sinks in.
In addition to that, colleges no longer guarantee a high paying job after graduation. The Starbuck's barista with a master's or PhD is an archetype at this point. Millions of people don't work in the field of their degree, millions more have gone to college but didn't get a degree. The massive rise in student debt will scare away more and more prospective students as time goes on, as will the much higher interest rates on that debt. Add to that the demographics wave, a smaller generation, the later Gen Z kids, which will just mean less possible students starting in 2024-2025. Then we have a recession beginning, which will further financially stress tens of millions of people living paycheck to paycheck already.
As the next few years progress, many colleges will struggle with fewer students enrolling, and a tougher economic climate overall. Colleges have their own debts to pay as well, they aren't immune to interest rates. We will see more and more signs of colleges struggling. The top ones should largely be fine, just like the high end malls and luxury retailers. There's plenty of money at the top, we all know that. On one hand 2/3 of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, yet Lamborghini has an 18 month waiting list to buy a new sports super car. That's our world today.
All of this is what I can see from outside the college and university system, and doesn't include all the internal issues that everyone inside, from deans to professors to students, are actually talking about, like corporatization of schools, tenure issues, today's polarized politics, and all the rest.
I think we will see more and more talk about higher education, student debt (the U.S. government's going to eat most of that $1.8 trillion, people can't afford to pay it), and the economic struggles of individual colleges and universities, going forward. Closures will begin to get more press, but they will be slow the next year or two, and gradually increase in frequency. This will really make news when a major school, a state school, or a big name school with particularly bad financial issues, closes down.
What schools are most likely to close? I don't know. But I would look closest at the schools in the cities that have dead malls, and where the major department stores have closed down in recent years. That's a good place to begin the search. There will be schools in major metros that close, too. But I think a lot of closures will be in the places already struggling financially.
Think of the Retail Apocalypse, the closing down of over 30,000 retail stores in the last 12-15 years. From 2010 to 2015, maybe a couple of thousand stores closed nationwide. Malls began to struggle. Then the number of stores closing really began to grow. Around late 2016, the term "Retail Apocalypse" was coined. By 2020, over 12,000 stores closed in a single year. I think the College Apocalypse will begin to increase in that kind of way. The coming recession will really put pressure on the whole higher education system. If the federal government tries a massive bailout of colleges and universities, all that bailout money would increase inflation in the years afterwards, and they're fighting inflation right now. The U.S. government is already well over a half a trillion dollars (see here) into the 2023 bank bailout, and banks take precedence over colleges.
What will the long term effects of the College Apocalypse be? Only time will tell the full scope of effects. One big effect I see is where most of the schools that close down are located. I think we will see a lot of colleges, large and small, close down in the small and mid-sized cities, outside of the major metro areas. Yes, the 2nd and 3rd tier cities that are already struggling, will most likely see the worst effects of the College Apocalypse. After the loss of much of the U.S. manufacturing sector 20-40 years ago, many of these mid-sized cities are now "Eds and Meds" cities. That means the local colleges or university, and the local hospitals, are the biggest employers in town. In many cities, the major hospital is tied to the local university. So if the university goes, the hospital may go as well, or at least reduce its size. In the next 10-15 years, we will see dozens of cities lose their major employer, again. That will financially decimate a lot of the cities and towns who have struggled since their factories closed down in the 1980's, 1990's or 2000's. So I expect to see a major loss of population in a few dozen cities and towns in the next ten years or so.
There it is, the most extensive thoughts I've written on a trend I expected to come, for about five years now. It's my belief that this trend is just getting going, and will become a major issue nationwide, over the next 3-4 years. These are my thoughts, my personal opinion, and I've linked supporting data for many of the points I've made, where possible.
Again, I don't expect colleges and universities to disappear, but to change dramatically in the next 10 to 15 years. I think by 2035 or so, we will have a much more Information Age friendly, more affordable version, of our higher education. But the transition to getting there will be a chaotic, messy, and heart-wrenching for of many people involved. The good thing is that we now have seen many industries go through this Big Transition, and have models for how these periods of transition play out.
As of the late summer of 2023, I'm doing a lot of my writing on Substack, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out!
Mindwalk, a movie made in 1990. A poet, a politician, and a scientist walk around the unique island fortress of Mont Saint Michel in France, and talk. That's it, that's the movie, they walk around and talk.
A Facebook friend in Spain, whom I've never met in person, posted a photo of Mont Saint Michel today. That reminded me of a movie from 1990, that I first heard of in about 1994. This is one of the two most intelligent movies I've ever seen, the other being What the Bleep Do We Know? . I heard of this movie from this guy, about 15 years after that video was shot. Bryan Gregory, best known as one of the founding members of The Cramps, was every bit as sarcastic when I worked with him in the mid and late 1990's, but also incredibly intelligent, and still highly creative. He told me about this movie one day, at work, when we both worked in a porn store. The movie blew my mind. I just watched it again, now almost 20 years after I first heard about it. The ideas expressed in the movie stand up well to the test of time.
We need to move past stereotypes, like your image of "punk rocker" or whatever came into your mind when I said I worked in a porn store. I probably had more intelligent conversations at that job than any place I worked. Really. And, as Sonja says in the movie, we also need a new way of looking at the world. If you're a person who thinks, this movie is well worth watching.
I've started a new blog, about side gigs, and ideas and info for small businesses. Check it out.
First of all, it was 1988. Keep that in mind. The band Metal MC was supposed to be part Anthrax and part Beastie Boys. It was neither. On one hand, blending hard rock and rap in one band did get huge about a decade later, with Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and others. So you can't blame the guys for trying. Maybe they were just the wrong guys, maybe they were too early on that idea. But Metal MC didn't take off. But they did give us SoCal BMX freestylers an excuse for a really fun jam, one summer afternoon in 1988.
The area on the bike path, underneath the Huntington Beach Pier, looked like this when I first rode up in the early spring of 1987. That's French freestyle skater Pierre Andre' in the video, one of the H.B. Pier locals in those days. That is the best video showing the area we rode and skated every Saturday and Sunday, in the late 1980's and into the 1990's. There's an open restaurant area in this spot now, where there used to be an arcade, a bike rental place, and the Green Burrito Mexican restaurant on the south end of the building. The bike path is still there, but the whole are looks much different now. Here's a quick history of the H.B. Pier, from 1902 to 1985. The end of the pier got trashed in another storm in early 1988, and was rebuilt and reopened in 1991, I believe.
Most of what people now know as "Main Street" in Huntington Beach today, didn't exist in the 1980's and 1990's. The Main Street I was introduced to was a bunch of two story brick buildings, and there were a few empty shops. There was a liquor store one block inland, on the corner, and very few people, like a handful, walking around at night. The legendary Golden Bear nightclub, where Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and hundreds of other great musicians played, from the 1930's to the early 1980's, had closed down in 1983.
There were about 5 bars in Downtown H.B. then. Cagney's was behind Jack's Surf Shop on PCH. Heading inland there was Perq's, Ma(fuckin')zotti's, The Long Board, and Skeefer's. Maybe one or two more. Main Street was dingy, and most people in the city didn't come down there often at night, they went to the Newport Pier area bars, or other spots to party. The Electric Chair record shop was just inland of where the fountain now is, a small storefront, with milk crates of punk albums and 7 inches on folding tables. The P.O. Curb, now replaced by the low wall protruding from Rockin' Fig Surf Shop (still in the same location) was getting skated every night.
Huntington Beach was a weird, occasionally wild, little surf town then. There were oil pumps all over downtown then, even right on PCH (Pacific Coast Highway). As a Midwest kid who spent high school in Boise, Idaho, I'd never seen a town like Huntington Beach, except maybe Venice Beach, but that had a whole different vibe. The H.B. scene of the 1980's was something much different than it is today. There were surfers, skaters, BMXers, wandering punkers and a few skinheads, and a bunch of weird characters. Then there was the crowds that came to the beach on the weekends. That was the Huntington Beach I moved into in early 1987, to work for the American Freestyle Association as the newsletter editor/photographer, and all around assistant to Bob Morales.
There were always a few BMXers and a few freestyle skaters, that hung out at the Huntington Beach Pier on the weekends, in the late 1980's and into the 1990's. There were a bunch of reasons for this, besides the hot women in bikinis. The long wide area of pavement next to the building, on the south side of the pier, was a good place to both ride skateboards and BMX freestyle bikes. During the week, there really weren't many people riding or walking up and down the bike path. Under the pier itself it was concrete, which was sandy and slippery, so the pavement worked better for us.
The main skaters were English freestyle skating champ Don Brown and French freestyle skating champ Pierre Andre' (Senizergues), and often Swedish freestyle skating champ Hans Lingren, along with local freestyle skater Jeremy Ramey. Why were three of the top European freestyle skaters in Huntington Beach? They rode for either Vision or Sims Skateboards (then owned by Vision), located in nearby Costa Mesa. Although he rode for Powell-Peralta, Per Welinder rolled by fairly often as well. At the time, all these freestyle skaters were the low paid demo skaters for the Big Three skate companies, while the vert skaters, like Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi, and Steve Caballero, were making the big money. In the 1990's, the freestyle skaters took over the skate industry, and were sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Skate Illuminati." In about 1989, another top freestyle skater came up, Darryl Grogan, and he came down the pier now and then, as well.
On the BMX freestyle side, the most local rider was Mike Sarrail, a tall guy from the San Gabriel Valley, who was really good at Miami hop hops. He drove over an hour every weekend to session. There was a crew of good amateur riders in the Lakewood area who came by often to bust out their flatland skills. In no particular order they were Nathan Shimizu, Ron Camero, Jeff Cotter, Ron McCoy, Dan Hubbard, and Derek Oriee. Sometimes they brought Tim Cotter, Jeff's little brother, who also rode. Most of those guys were featured in Vision's Freestylin' Fanatics video. The spandex brothers, Chuck and Joe Johnson, showed up once in a while. It wasn't unusual to see Martin Aparijo or Woody Itson show up, the original flatland guys. From the desert, Randy Lawrence moved to H.B. for a while and found work as a bike mechanic, and he joined the locals around 1988-89. Those were the guys there most often in that era. Because the pier was a well known scene, pretty much anybody could just randomly show up and ride or skate. Ed Templeton and Mark Gonzales showed up on a regular basis, along with a whole crew of H. B.'s amateur skaters.
On any given Saturday or Sunday, we'd start showing up around 11:00 am or so, and just start riding or skating. The skaters would get a crowd, and skate for 15-20 minutes, until the police showed up and said the crowd was blocking the bike path. Then they'd stop skating, the crowd of beach going spectators would wander off, and then us BMXers would take over. A crowd would form, usually 100 or so people, maybe 200. At times we'd get 500 or more people watching. We'd take turns busting out our latest and best flatland, for 15-20 minutes. Then the police would roll up, say the crowd was blocking the bike path (which we actually told them not to do), and we'd stop. The crowd would wander off, and then the skaters would get going again. That was our weekend. Week after week, year after year. We'd head off to grab some food or take a leak when needed. We'd talk to girls, or try to. Mostly we just rode and skated in front of crowds from 11:00am or noon until about 7 or 8 pm. That's our weekends played out, unless there was a contest somewhere. I once figured out that I rode in front of at least 140,000 people, 100 or 200 at a time, from 1987 to about 1992, on all those weekends at the pier, from about 1987 to 1992. The same was true of all the other riders and skaters.
Because so many, literally thousands, of random people watched us ride and skate every weekend, we'd often meet people who who said they wanted to put us in a video, a movie, at TV show, or something like that. BMX freestyle was a new thing in the late 1980's, even most Californians hadn't seen it live and in person. Most of the people who wanted to put us in a video or TV show were completely full of shit. But not all of them. The guy behind the Metal MC video wandered up and started talking to Mike one afternoon. Mike explained freestyle, and that there were a lot more riders, jumpers and vert riders, too.
The talk turned into a real project, and the guy rented the empty lot on PCH and Main (where Huntington Surf & Sport stands now), where we often had local AFA contests. Mike told him to contact GT, to rent the Stonehenge, their four sided jump ramp, and we called around to tell riders to show up for the jam. Boom, a fun BMX jam happened, and the guy's crew shot a bunch of footage to make the Metal MC video. It was an all afternoon jam.
In the video above, you see mostly Brian Blyther (in black) jumping, East Coast rider Dennis Langlois (grey jersey), and San Diego thrasher Brand Blanchard landing a 540 on the deck. Also at the jam were NorCal legends Dave Vanderspek and Maurice Meyer, San Diego street rider Eddie Roman, several of the Lakewood crew, pro racer/jumper Rich Bartlett, Craig Grasso, Randy Lawrence, George Smoot, Scott Robinson, and about 30 more riders, myself included. We had this kind of jam a couple of times. This one, and another for a guy who made mass marketed video that sold in places like Kmart. At the time, all day BMX jam sessions with some top riders and no contest were a rare thing, so this and the other Stonehenge ram jam were two really fun events Huntington Beach during the late 80's.
This blog post was inspired by a great photo of Brian Blyther doing an X-up, that Steve Giberson, aka Guy B, shared on Facebook recently.
As of the late summer of 2023, I'm doing a lot of my writing on Substack, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out!
I've tried a whole bunch of blog ideas in the last 15 years. Starting with a terrible taxi driver blog in 2007, I found my voice in 2008-2010 with FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, and then FREESTYLE BMX Tales (original version), both of which I deleted because I was a depressed idiot in 2012. Even when I had one popular blog, sometimes I'd take time off and try other ideas for a while. Altogether, I've tried at least 50 blog ideas, and half of those, or more, are still on the web somewhere.
Crazy California 43 was an idea that I thought had a chance of being a money earning blog. I wrote a bunch of posts, it looked pretty cool, but it wasn't getting near enough views from tourists to make my idea work. Because of my financial situation, I couldn't get out and travel, and shoot photos or videos of the spots I wanted to cover. So I just stopped working on it. Another idea tried.
It's also one of the blogs I lost control of, when three of my Google accounts got mysteriously shutdown one night, for no apparent reason. If I could get into the account, I could cut and paste the whole post to this blog. But I can't. I've been wanting to link it here for a while, so here it is. My best take at the history of Sheep Hills in Costa Mesa.
As of the late summer of 2023, I'm doing a lot of my writing on Substack, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out!
Just about everyone, individuals, businesses, and governments, have way to much debt today, more than ever in history. In this video, Joe fromHeresy FinancialYouTube channel gives a lot of great advice on how to get out of debt, as quickly as possible. This is one of the best things Americans can focus on right now, heading into a major recession.
My best educated guess now is that we see the coming stock crash in September. That will lead to big downturns in asset prices, and the visible stock crash is when most everyday people finally look up and say, "Oh crap, I think we're in a recession." That's when it gets real, for the vast majority of people. That's when home prices begin to drop in more cities, and that's when a lot more layoffs happen, outside the tech world. Again, this is my educated guess, but as you'll read below, I've been writing about this recession for about four years now. It's coming at us, but it's been slow, like a glacier. Slow but sure, but it'll get here.
Some of you, who have been following my blogs for years, know that I've been harping on about this "big recession that's coming," since early 2019, maybe earlier. Why? Because it is a part of some ultra long term, and mid term, cycles that I've been watching, for 30 years. I won't go into all the details, I've written about them many times online (Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now). I've been writing about this for so long because multiple trends and cycles point to a major recession, or possibly a depression, in 2020, or in the years after soon after. That recession will also usher in all kinds of other changes already happening in our world. The main one is that we are still leaving the old, Industrial Age, and still moving into the emerging Information Age. But we're not fully there yet.
Now I know most people have been hearing people talk about a possible recession for a year or more. It's getting old. But there's a big difference between 2023 and 2007, leading into the Great Recession. For one, YouTube is now mainstream, and social media has allowed people to connect more than ever in human history. There are a lot of really intelligent people in macro economics on YouTube, giving their own take on what's happening, and where things are heading. There is also a ton of bad information on YouTube, social media, and across the web, on the chances of a coming recession.
So we have the normal mainstream business media telling people everything is wonderful in the economic world, because that's their job, to keep you happy, in an attempt to keep a recession from happening. So we have far more people available to listen to or watch, on economic issues and business news these days, than ever before. We have the broadest, and best, and worst, information leading up to this recession, of any recession in history. You can do research yourself, and compare different sources, and see what makes sense. That's why this recession feels old already, even though it probably hasn't officially started yet. There's far more information out there, and far more people talking about it, than any other time in history.
This recession tried to happen in late 2018, when the stock markets in the final months of the year. But The Fed lowered interest rates in the following months, to buy some time. Then this recession tried to happen again in early 2020, sparked by the unexpected pandemic that we're all trying to forget. But that was followed by The Fed creating about $6 trillion in new money, basically out of thin air. That's how fiat currencies work... near the end of a long cycle. Yeah, we were all Hood Rich for a while, and a lot of people bought stupid stuff with much of that money from PUA, PPP and other programs. Then, in 2021, the inevitable inflation wave from that huge jump in new money began, and surged upward, and didn't go away. Many months later, The Fed, who created the inflation to begin with, started raising interest rates, faster than ever in history, to fight inflation. Interest sensitive parts of the economy, like real estate, hit the brakes soon after, in the booming areas.
Now I'm a macro economics and futurist geek, and I actually enjoy trying to figure out long term trends. Most of you aren't, I get that. Here's where I see things headed (most likely) in a nutshell. All kinds of economic indicators (yield curve inversions in the bond market, among them, are flashing red. There is a major recession coming, there's not a doubt in my mind of that. We've seen real estate slow down in many places already, interest rates have soared, it's much harder to get loans now, for many businesses and individuals. We've seen tens of thousands of layoffs in the tech sector in recent months? Why have there been so many layoffs in tech? Because those are the smart people. They know something dark is coming, and they laid off people early on, rather than waiting six months or a year, like many other businesses have.
We've been through recessions before, what's the big deal about this one? There are several, much deeper issues happening in society now (see "Dystopia" link above), and this recession (possibly a depression) will dramatically change nearly everyone's lives. There's a lot of change that's going to happen outside the financial world, as well. That's why I think this one is a big deal.
I could ramble on for hours here, but I'll keep it somewhat short and sweet. I think we have about three months before things really hit the visible downward spiral. For most of you out there, getting out of as much debt as you can, is one of the smartest moves right now. If you've kept debt to a minimum, and have a pretty recession proof job, hey, more power to you, carry on. But if you're like most Americans, you probably have a bunch of debt that's gotten harder to pay as interest rates went up. Listen to the video above, it's about 15 minutes. Look at your situation, and see if any of his ideas make sense.
Here are some of my favorite YouTube channels for financial information. If you're interest, check them out, they all have lots of videos, and a ton of information on different aspects of the economic world, personal and business finances, and investing. Check them out if you want, see if they have some info helpful for your situation.
There are no paid links in this post. I don't agree with everything all of these people say, but I've found all of these channels to be pretty solid information, over all, depending what you are interest in.
I've started a new blog, about side gigs, and ideas and info for small businesses. Check it out.
Here's Elizabeth Gilbert talking, and reading excerpts from her book Big Magic, about seven years ago. I just found this book wandering the library stacks a few days ago, and read it over the weekend.
Most of you are somewhat familiar with Elizabeth Gilbert's work, even if you don't know her name immediately. She's a writer who has written several books. Her best known book was the bestseller Eat, Pray, Love. They even made that memoir into a movie, with a pretty talented actress playing the lead role. Years later, trying to cope with everyone wondering if she was afraid to write another book, because she might have her best work behind her, Elizabeth gave one of the best TED Talks of all time. So if she sounds vaguely familiar, that's why you've heard her name before.
My life is basically focused on two things these days, staying alive day to day in a weird set of circumstances, and doing creative work. Mostly, that's blogging and my unusual Sharpie art. If you've been around this, or my others blogs, for a bit, you probably know that I've been writing, and self-publishing, since I put out my first BMX freestyle zine in 1985. I've done a bunch of creative things over the years, none of them have been incredibly financially successful (OK, I was a crew guy on American Gladiators, and that was a hit, but not my project). The real theme of my fairly weird life, over the last 32 years or so, has been overcoming my personal issues, my fears, and coming to grips with being a writer and creative guy at heart.
These same themes are what Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic, is all about. If you do creative work, for fun, as a hobby, or professionally, I recommend giving this book a look. It's now one of the three books about creative work that I would mention to anyone interested. The other two are The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, and The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield.
If you have any interest in creative work, check out the video above, and you'll know whether you want to read the book some day. If not, there will be more Old School BMX stories soon.
As of the late summer of 2023, I'm doing a lot of my writing on Substack, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out!
KCET (an L.A. PBS station) recently did this really cool, one hour documentary on Giant Robot, the Asian pop culture zine turned magazine turned store turned art gallery. I was a huge fan of Giant Robot magazine in the 90's, and into the 2000's. If you ever checked out the magazine, or just like Asian pop culture in any form, check out this doc, it's really interesting.
It all started with this, Johnny Sokko and Giant Robot, the cheesy, yet awesome, TV show, one of the two after school shows I ran home from the bus to watch when I was 5 and 6 years old. the other show, of course, was Speed Racer. Fuck Ultraman. Like a lot of dorky kids, I, too, wanted a Giant Robot that I could call on my wrist communicator to fly in a kick the ass of people I didn't like.
Those goofy shows we loved as little kids leave their mark. Twenty-some years later I saw a magazine called Giant Robot, probably at The Electric Chair, or maybe Vinyl Solution, indie record shops in Huntington Beach. I grabbed it just because of the name, and checked it out. That was issue 3 or 4 I think, filled with all kinds of Asian pop culture stuff I'd never heard of. The Jenny Shimizu interview later on, a stands out in my mind, it was really funny. Jenny was this tiny, butch, lesbian auto mechanic turned supermodel, who said things like"I've seen Claudia Schiffer's ass... like ten times!" When she started modeling, Jenny didn't know how to strut on the fashion show catwalks. Another model told her, "Just pretend you have a quarter between your ass cheeks, and you can't let it drop." The whole interview was crazy stuff like that. There were plenty other interesting interviews, but that one was hilarious.
I learned what rice cookers were from Giant Robot. I learned about Anime and Manga and Princess Mononoke, and the KoGal subculture and real ramen and many other things from Giant Robot. Every issue was packed full of things I never heard of, all facets of Asian and Asian American pop culture and subcultures.
I even bought a repop of Issue #1, the full zine copy, at a zine mini convention in Santa Ana, for $4, a few years later. I may have even given the guys one of my Huevos zines, which I did around that time. I can't remember. The sleeping sumo wrestler photo on the cover of issue #1 is iconic.
Then... at some point, I stopped seeing Giant Robot on magazine racks, and kind of forgot about it. Years later I heard there was a Giant Robot store somewhere in L.A.. But I've never been there. The documentary goes into the whole timeline from initial zine to magazine to the current shop, the GR2 art gallery, and the death of the magazine. This magazine opened up the worlds of Asian pop culture and art to many of us in SoCal, and elsewhere, beginning in the 90's. The people behind it were, and still are, another Creative Scene that pointed a spotlight on a whole bunch of interesting people and ideas most of us would have never seen otherwise. Check out the documentary above.
I have a new blog now, about side hustles, gig jobs, the economy, and making money during the recession, check it out:
