Generation X was grew up under the threat of a potential, worldwide, nuclear Holocaust at any time. A holocaust that never happened. Not yet, anyhow. What can I say, it made us a bit jaded.
Generation X, of which I'm one of the older members, was the last generation to be raised in the Industrial Age, when the factories of America were still thriving. By the time we hit our teens, and the first Millennials were being born, the factories were closing down, and we were visibly in the long transition into the emerging Information Age.
By the time the Millennials started hitting their teen years, the internet came along, and democratized communication around the world, in a way that had never happened before in human history. At that time, the earliest Gen Z kids were being born. Gen Z was born into a fully digital world, with Web 2.0 in full effect from childhood, and social media and smartphones coming along in their childhood years. Through all these last few decades, the pace of social and technological change has been steadily increasing. The power brokers of the Industrial Age world have been desperately clinging to what power they could, while the paradigm shifted around them.
There come times when the slow grind of change builds up pressure, and a major, sudden shift happens. An earthquake in society, you might say. A major inflection point.
The pace of changes becomes social inflection points when a great deal of change happens in the mentality of large numbers of people. Or changes in mentality that have already happened make themselves known. It looks like this weekend, June 13th through June 15th, 2025, will be one of those major inflection points in human society in the United States, and perhaps around the world. Pay attention kids, we are all living history this weekend, however things play out. I'm simply calling attention to the importance this weekend will play in society overall. And somehow, it all starts with a Friday the 13th. Crazy.
Here are a few songs to set the mood for what looks to be a pretty crazy weekend, one way or the other.
Blogger's Note- Monday, June 16th, 2025- It turns out that all those AR-15's owned by 2nd Amendment activists have been completely useless in preventing the drive toward authoritarianism in the United States of America.* The push by the American Right away from a constitutional democratic republic, and towards an authoritarian state, continues. Guns are useless in a war of ideas and culture. The NRA is MIA in the fight to preserve democracy. But we all knew that already.
Was this weekend, June 13th-June 15th, 2025 an actual inflection point in the United States, or society as a whole? Time will tell if democracy or authoritarianism wins in the U.S., and elsewhere...
* Just for the record, I am 100% for legal gun ownership. If you own guns, you need to be a responsible gun owner.
Here's the Dig BMX edit of the Rumble in Richmond BMX day O' fun, put on by Steve Crandall and posse. If you like BMX, and you ever get the chance to go to one of Steve Crandall's events, do it. It's as simple as that. Check outRAD Share, and help them out if you can. Bikes to kids who need them.
Have you ever heard about the "Legend of El Dorado," the city in South America that was made entirely of gold? The very first European explorers in the Amazon in the 1500's reported huge cities. When more explorers made it into the Amazon area about 100 years later, those cities couldn't be found. Over centuries, a legend was born that there was a Lost city, built entirely of gold, somewhere in the Amazon basin.
An explorer in the early 1900's, named Percy Fawcett, became obsessed with a lost city in the Amazon he called "Z." A few months ago, I read the book, The Lost City of Z, about Fawcett. On his 8th expedition into the Amazon, looking for the lost city of Z, Fawcett disappeared, in 1925. Dozens of other explorers later went into the Amazon, looking for both Fawcett, and "Z," and disappeared themselves. Fawcett never found the Lost city of Z, but he did report finding earthen mounds, and ancient pottery in places. In reality, he actually did find parts of the "Lost Cities of the Amazon," but they weren't built with stone, with huge temples, like the cities of the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas. Fawcett didn't recognize the earthen mounds and bits of pottery as remains of the cities he was looking for.
But now, partly because of the massive deforestation for cattle ranching, and LIDAR scans showing huge, shaped, earthen mounds under the jungle cover still remaining, there is a lot of evidence that large villages and cities once existed there. More and more signs of these societies are being found on a regular basis.
If you're interested in the lost cities of the Amazon, the 7 minute video above gives a good overview of what has been found. There are many more videos that go into more depth on the subject, as well as interviews and talks with Graham Hancock, who has written a book on this subject.
I'm doing most of my writing on a platform called Substack now, check it out:
Op cord short shorts for guys. Izod ankle socks, yeah, they actually had the little fucking alligators on them. Nike Pegasus running shoes because I sucked at running cross country before I sucked at BMX. The Vuarnets are cool, I found them in a field. This is me as manager of the tiny Boise Fun Spot amusement park, balancing on my Skyway T/A, in the summer of 1985. Yep, a lame freestyler (one of three in Boise then), running racing frame pads while doing balance tricks. Let's face it, it was all downhill after this photo was taken. Photo by Vaughn K., my co-worker at the Fun Spot.
Top Ten Reasons The White Bear Sucks
(One) He looks gay as fuck in that photo from Boise in 1985 (above), he must be a fag. (Actually I'm just a lame straight guy who's been fat, ugly, broke, and had bad teeth for the last 20-25 years, so it's not like women have been beating down my door or anything).
(Two) He had terrible, shaky camera work in this video, although the ending is cool. "Somebody fire that cameraman right now." Heh, heh, heh...
(Three) He spent way too much time writing about trying to do bunnyhop tailwhips in his blog, and never, EVER, pulled one. Bill Nitschke invented that trick, let him enjoy the props for being the first guy to land it.
(Four) He's a loser... anybody who can manage to be homeless for 17 or 18 years must be smoking crack or meth or something. How could anyone not get a job for 17 years? (Actually no alcohol, no drugs, I even kicked my Diet Coke habit a couple of years ago. I do have a serious 7-11 pepperoni pizza habit though, after my years driving a taxi, and then being unable to find any job in NC for ten years, I actually have no work history to even put on a resume' at this point). Either I manage to get a little, one man publishing/content creating business going, or I'll do the work for free. Time will tell which way it ultimately works out.
(Five) He hasn't been able to jump anything at Sheep Hills since about 1992, when The Bowl was still a thing. And he had the audacity to write a "History of Sheep Hills" post on his Substack. What the fuck is a Substack, anyhow?
(Six) He writes like he's still a BMX guy, but he hasn't ridden a bike since like 1995 or something. (Actually I rode nearly every day from June of 1982 until August of 2003. The last trick I learned was nollie 180's on a speed bump, in a parking lot in Garden Grove, across the freeway from the Van's Skatepark and The Block of Orange. I started gaining weight working as a taxi driver in late 2003, got really fat, and haven't ridden hardly at all since, that's true).
(Seven) He's fat, ugly, and he smells bad. I know you're homeless, but damn dude, jump in the ocean once in a while or something.
(Eight) He wroteFREESTYLIN' Mag Tales blog and totally pissed off everyone at Wizard Publications. (Yep, I wrote that blog in 2008-2009 (over 100 posts). Then I wrote the original Freestyle BMX Tales blog from 2009-2012 (over 500 posts). I deleted both of those blogs completely from the internet in the fall of 2012).
(Nine) He actually admits that he used to work in a porn store. He must be a perv. I bet he has sex with goats, aardvarks, and transgender pygmies or something. (Sorry to disappoint everyone, but a little free lesbian porn when I get a motel room keeps me away from the goats, pygmies, and such. I do find aardvarks cute, though, but in a purely platonic way).
(Ten) The guy made like three low-budget BMX videos, waaaaay back when, and they all sucked. And he acts like he's some big Hollywood producer or something. What an arrogant prick! Here's the Steve Emig: The White Bear's Film Festival. You can decide how much they all suck. Feel free to go off on Facebook to make it official.
(Bonus) The guy is 58-years-old, and he still calls himself "The White Bear," a nickname from 1992. Who the fuck does that? He writes blog posts making fun of himself, in the third person. Who does that? Besides, the guy is so damn sarcastic that I can never tell if he's kidding or he's serious. What a fucking kook! He's a fucking NEVER WAS sell out. And he draws pictures of other people's photos and calls it "art." What a loser.
Blogger's note- June 9- 2025- Everything on the list above is a reference to things that have been said to my face, said about me in social media comments, or said behind my back that I heard about later. My life has been really weird for about 25 years now, and I've been plugging through a whole lot of bullshit, sometimes my own, but also a lot that came at me from outside sources. It's a crazy world, shit happens. I'm still plugging away at trying to create pretty cool stuff, to the extent I'm able, every single day. I will continue to do that, as long as I can. In this post, I just decided to address a bit of the mud that's been slung at me, in my usual, sarcastic way.
When not writing self-deprecating posts while Old School BMX events are happening elsewhere, I do most of my writing on Substack these days. It's an online platform designed specifically for writers. To find more reasons to hate me, click the link below:
In 1975, before cell phones, personal computers, the internet, social media, Miami Vice, and most video games, a sort of kinky, weird, post-apocalyptic movie set in 2024 came out. It was called A Boy and His Dog, and starred a young Don Johnson. Working on an unrelated substance post, I just learned that movie was set in 2024. Well... we didn't have World War III, or World War IV. Civilization is still around, we didn't live through the end of the world. But the real world in 2024 was something they couldn't possibly have imagined back in 1975. Which was crazier? A Boy and His Dog or real life 2024? You decide, and let me know on Facebook.
The year 2024 in review by NBC News. I'd say the real 2024 was a hell of a lot crazier than a talking dog helping a guy get laid. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
I'm doing most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out sometime:
I'd like to thank the Sunday afternoon Grateful Dead/jam band show on KPFK radio (90,7 FM in L.A.) for turning me on to this song in the early 2000's. The single best band name and song title combo I've ever heard of. The Ominous Seapods with "Bong Hits and Porn." They seriously do ROCK, by the way.
This blog post it NSFA (Not Safe For Anybody)
You have been warned...
No long ramble. Here are some songs I've heard of that are weird, sometimes funny as well. At least to my warped sense of humor.
Censorship? Pretty much everyone who checks out this list would want to censor some of these songs, but everyone would pick different songs. That's the whole point of free speech. Ponder that for a bit.
I do most of my writing on Substack these days, check it out. But it's not near as funny as these songs.
Dave Van Ronk with "Dink's Song" in the early 1960's.
I just picked up a new book at the library, Talkin' Greenwich Village, by David Browne. It's an incredibly well researched look at the folk singing scene that emerged out of Greenwich Village, in New York City, from the late 1950's, through the 1960's. This scene was full of young singers and guitar players, enamored by the earlier folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, and the folk musician tradition in the U.S. that went back 100 years or more before then. From public singalongs at the fountain in Washington Square Park, these young musicians began to perform the songs they heard from Guthrie, The Kingston Trio, and a whole slew of the folk and blues players of the early 20th century.
By 1957, when the book dives into the scene, the Greenwich Village district in New York City had a history as home to several prominent writers, going back decades. At the time, the small clubs and coffee houses of the Village were where jazz greats like John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk performed in small clubs while in NYC. The coffee shops were the stompin' and reading grounds of the beat poets, Jack Kerouac being the best known to most of us now. The young folk singers began to play gigs at these clubs and coffee houses, which were often hassled by police and city officials, because of neighbors complaining about the noise.
A legendary scene evolved, as more young folk singers were drawn to the scene. They all played music, drank, argued, worked odd jobs, fell in love, broke up, marched in protests, and got followed by the J.Edgar Hoover FBI in some cases. Most of them were on the far Left side of the political spectrum, often socialists and in some cases, actual communists. I'm more interested in the music scene, but the politics of the time was a part of it all.
In the early 1960's, with Village newcomer Bob Dylan being one of the first, they began writing their own folk songs, in addition to singing the classics. Ever heard of Dave Van Ronk? Neither had I. But he was an early and constant part of the scene, and taught several others to play guitar when they showed up on the scene, as well as writing many songs. The book marches through the happenings, and Van Zonk is a major thread in much of it. Browne chronicles the comings, goings, interactions, and key events of the main musicians in this scene, year by year.
I picked up the book for a couple of reasons. As a goofy, young kid in Ohio, I was a fan of guitar playing singer/songwriters. The first album I asked my parents to buy me as a gift (Christmas or birthday, can't remember), was John Denver's Greatest Hits, Volume 2. Our family had moved to a farmhouse outside the tiny burg of Shiloh, Ohio. Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" became my theme song. OK, we didn't actually work the farm, we just rented the house, but I wandered that farm, the creek, and woods every day. I did have to help chase the cows back into the pasture two or three times, when they got out. That was the extent of my actual farm life.
At 8 or 9 years old, I was a fan of bluegrass that I heard on Hee Haw, like Grandpa Jones,Roy Clark, and Glen Campbell. While I didn't like most of the country music coming out of my mom's radio in the kitchen, I did really like the music of Johnny Cash. So acoustic guitars, folk music were my favorites in my grade school years.
The other reason for picking up Talking Greenwich Village is because as a BMX freestyler in the 1980's, I developed an interest in what I call "Creative Scenes." To me, a Creative Scene is any group of people who come together on a regular basis to do something creative. That can range from a couple of skateboarders at a skatepark, to people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak creating Apple Computers in the 1970's. Art, music, creative businesses, action sports, there are creative scenes in all these things. I witnessed the early scenes of the BMX freestyle world, when there were little pockets of riders in different locations, promoting our weird, new, little sport. Since I moved around, and became a part of several different BMX and skateboard scenes, I saw how they helped riders and skaters progress, and how these scenes ultimately influenced many other people, and helped the sports grow and evolve overall. Over several years, I realized there are all kinds of different Creative Scenes, and that most of the progress in society comes from various Creative Scenes that spring up and thrive for a while.
The Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960's was one of the most influential musical scenes in the history of the United States, and that influence continues to ripple outward, in today's young singer/songwriters, like Alice Phoebe Lou, Jenn Fiorentino, and many more, covering the songs they grew up on, and then writing and performing their own. Generations of singer/songwriters in the U.S., and around the world, were influenced and inspired by the 1960's Greenwich Village folk scene.
I'm only about halfway through the book, but it has already turned me on to a whole bunch of singers and musicians I had never heard of. First, here are several of the people who inspired the early Greenwich Village folk music scene, people who were in and around the Village, coming out of the 1950's. Then I've linked a whole bunch of the early musicians that were part of the Village folk music scene in that era. If you have an interest in folk music, Greenwich Village, U.S. music history, or guitar picking, Talkin' Greenwich Village is well worth the read.
Once upon a time, there was this guy named Gerard who lived in Hermosa Beach and ran a small surf video distribution company. Gerard was a kind of shady salesman guy, but he sold A TON of videos for all the independent video surf film producers, so they loved him. He also sold a lot for the bigger companies, like Vision Skateboards and Sims Snowboards. Because he sold so many videos for other people, he would call them up and say, "Hey, I'm making a compilation video, can I use a clip from your new video in it?" They'd always say, "Sure, go for it." He would say as many of his compilation videos as he did their videos, and he made twice as much money per video on the compilation videos. Shady... but it worked out for everyone involved, including me. Gerard hired me to edit and work for him for a while, and he sold 500 copies of my BMX video,The Ultimate Weekend, in the fall of 1990, in the U.S., and a bunch overseas as well.
As skateboarding and snowboarding took off in the late 1980's and early 1990's, Gerard's little distribution company also sold a ton of skateboard and snowboard videos, as well as surf flicks. After I left Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, in 1990, I met Gerard, and wound up editing three videos for him. We did two issues of Skateboarder's Quarterly Video Magazine, and that was nearly three years before411 (skateboard) video magazine came out. I also edited this first issue of Snowboarder's Quarterly.
Most of these video clips are from other people's videos, edited with the mini-interviews Gerard and I did at the Action Sports Retailer trade show in San Diego, in the fall of 1990, as I recall. The Snowboarder's in Exile premier was great. There were maybe 100 to 150 people in the room watching the premier, and nearly every top snowboarder in the world was there. I watched that video probably 100 times over the next few years. In Snowboarder's Quarterly #1, above, you can see our quick interviews with the future 1992 Penthouse Pet of the Year (and Damian Sanders' then girlfriend) Brandy Ledford at 18: 12, and Sims Snowboards team rider Chris Roach at 35:12, among others.
At the beginning, you see ski/snowboard fimmaker Bruce Benedict, and producer Laura Mickelson, my former co-worker at Unreel, talking about their snowboard video, 20 Tricks. Laura Mickelson is now a working artist here in SoCal (which I just found out), as well as a long time video/TV/documentary filmmaker. Damian Sanders, one of the main guys in Snowboarders in Exile, did a ton of snowboarding, some motocross freeriding. He went on to start the Pimp N Ho Ball and the bi-weekly Club Rubber, with business partner Jon Huntington, in Costa Mesa, California, which turned incredibly profitable. Both the night club and the ball got so popular that they moved to Las Vegas. Check out this interview for a deeper look at Damian.
Damian and Brandy lived in Huntington Beach in the early 1990's, and even next door to the P.O.W. BMX House, in Westminster, for a little while. One night in 1992 or so, I was riding my BMX bike down Beach Boulevard in H.B., and got pulled over by the cops, since I didn't have a light on my bike. For some fucking reason, they called for back-up. The second pair of cops walked up, as the first pair was checking my ID. One of them said, "Last night we pulled over some crazy kid right here, driving a hearse, and he had "666" shaved in the back of his head." I said, "You guys pulled over Damian? I saw him and Brandy around downtown H.B. sometimes, and I knew Damian was driving a hearse then. The cops said, "You know that guy?" I said, "Everyone in H.B. knows who he is, that's Damian Sanders, he's one of the best snowboarders in the world." The cop just shook his head. I never actually met Damian, but I'd see him around town over the years, through the 1990's and into the 2000's, when I was a taxi driver and picked up lots of fares from Club Rubber. I think I got another ticket for riding my bike without a light, but I can't remember for sure. I got a few of them back in those days, but usually got off with just a warning.
This morning, I went digging into YouTube looking for Skateboarder's Quarterly #2, which is pretty hard to find. I haven't found it yet, but I ran into this Snowboarder's Quarterly video instead ( Finally found it later, fuckin' algos these days!) I haven't seen this video since probably 1991. I was the cameraman for all the little, in between interview and trade show footage, and I edited this video together, using big blocks from Snowboarders in Exile,20 Tricks, New Kids on the Twock, and a couple other videos that came out at the beginning of the 1990-1991 snowboard season.
The actual Lincoln Navigator promo that I originally put in this post was taken down. So here's some guys driving on a slippery bank with a Navi. Lincoln makes the Navigator and the Aviator, so I had some ideas for other cars in that line. (Since the Trump presidencies have shown us that there are tens of millions of complete fucking morons in this country, this is a parody post people. A joke. Just for entertainment purposes).
Here are some potential ideas for new Lincoln SUV's...
The Lincoln Gator- A affordable, family-centric SUV that comes with a small wet well in the back, and every SUV comes with your very own pet baby alligator. Oh... they're so cute! Watch it grow as the kids grow up. Take it to the park in the summer for picnics! When it gets too big to handle, you can kill it and cook it up, or haul it out to the Everglades to live out its golden years.*
The Lincoln Instigator- A large SUV made for the urban wannabe baller. It comes with 28 inch rims, and a boomin' sound system that randomly shouts insults wherever you go. Get out, act tough, get your ass knocked out, all in the new Lincoln Instigator.
The Lincoln Masturbator- This is a self-driving, classy SUV aimed at the upscale women's market. It has incredibly comfortable seats, plenty of cup holders, five different places to put your cell phone so you can text, a wine glass holder, and outlets in the center console so you can plug in your sex toys. Oh yes! OH YES! This is the SUV the discerning woman NEEDS. Every SUV comes with her choice of one of the latest rabbit vibrators.
* Alligators are wild reptiles, and they will eat you if given half a chance. This post is a joke, in case you haven't figured that out yet.
While Amanda Palmer has been working as a solo artist for years, she teamed up with former Dresden Dolls drummer, Brian Viglione, during the pandemic for this digital show. They're performing a cover of "Science Fiction/Double Feature" from the Rocky Horror Show. No that's not a typo, Rocky Horror was a stage play before it became the Rocky Horror Picture Show movie that most of us know.
The internet. Some people swear it's the best thing that ever happened to human communication. Other people see it as evil, a horrible abomination. Some see it as a mind killing collection of porn, cat videos, and "Liberal" propaganda, promoting terrible things like equality, human rights, and transgender people. They think the internet is ruining society.
The internet and social media are indifferent platforms, not inherently good or evil. Those effects come depending on how we use these communication platforms. One of my many odd jobs was working as a porn store clerk way back in the 1990's. Do you know what the most popular form of porn was (and probably still is)? Transexuals. Or transgender, using today's term. That really surprised me back then. Chicks with dicks, cocks in frocks, hoes with hose, and "summer girls" videos, because some 'r girls and some are not. Those were actual video titles in the 1990's, by the way. In 2023, Porn hub was getting 2 billion views per month. During any given week, tens of millions of people are watching trans porn (mostly Baby Boomers). There's a ton of trans porn because people watch it. And there are a ton of cat videos because people watch them. The 2 million+ cat videos on YouTube have over 26 billion views. People watch tens of millions of cat videos per week, as well.
Trans porn and cat videos are two HUGE categories of content on the internet. But you don't have to watch either of those kinds of videos, and neither do I. I've never been a big fan of either of those, but a lot of people are. A LOT. I used to rent VHS videos to them back in the 1990's. The trans smut fans, that is, not cat videos. Nobody was renting cat videos on VHS back then that I know of. That would have been weird.
The point here is, there are all kinds of things that are popular on the internet, but none of us has to watch those categories.
Personally, I see the internet as the greatest collection of human information ever compiled, in human history (with the possible exception of Atlantis). All of this information and creative work, 181 zettabytes worth (that's 181 trillion gigabytes, kids!), was collected, compiled, created, cataloged, posted, and mashed up, mostly by amateurs, and largely for free. All of that was done in roughly thirty years. The Library of Congress? The Encyclopedia Britannica? Even the legendary lost Library of Alexandria in the ancient world? They don't even begin to compare to the vast array of cool stuff and legit information and creative work available on the internet. Yes, there is a lot of bad information, misinformation, and disinformation, too. But we don't have to watch it.
But the good info and really interesting content is out there. Stop whining about the lame stuff, and look at the good stuff. You don't have to watch trans sex videos or cat videos. You can learn about quantum mechanics, triangle numbers*,(Pythagorus loved these things), the odd ancestry of aardvarks, French Canadian slang, how to start a home cupcake business, and a few billion other things. There has never been a better time to learn more kinds of information in all of human history. But you're sitting on the couch smoking weed and playing GTA5. Lame.
Among all the great content on the interwebs, there is an amazing collection of songs covered by other artists. Here are a bunch of my favorites.
Here's Val Kilmer as Tom Van Allen, who is living as Danny Parker, in the Pooh Bear breakfast scene in the little known movie, The Salton Sea. Danny is trying to get Pooh Bear on tape agreeing to a big drug deal for some crank. But this isn't Pooh Bear's first rodeo. This is an incredibly well made movie, chock full of really memorable characters. You should watch this movie. If you're in recovery from meth, crank, or coke, this movie will probably knock you off the wagon. So people in recovery from hard drugs should probably avoid this movie. Luckily, I'm a pizza addict, drugs aren't my thing, so I can watch this movie with reckless abandon. After you watch The Salton Sea movie, look up the actual place, the Salton Sea, it's story is just as crazy as the movie.
"The greatest words on written page
Only come to life when you're on stage"
-
excerpt from "Actress," a poem I wrote about 1990. I wrote the poem for my sister's best friend, who's been a dedicated actress since a young age. I lost all copies of this poem years ago, and have forgotten the rest of the poem, unfortunately.
I'm really sorry to hear about the death of actor Val Kilmer. He just died at age 65. I'm generally not huge a fan of specific actors, male or female, but some actors would just keep showing up in movies that became my personal favorites. Val Kilmer was one of those.
Of course, the Hollywood press, like in this Entertainment Tonight tribute, reminds everyone of his best known roles, Iceman in Top Gun, Bruce Wayne and Batman in Batman Forever, Jim Morrison in The Doors, and Doc Holiday in Tombstone. All great roles. But none of those roles are why I've been a fan of Val Kilmer's work since the late 1980's.
It's easy to talk shit about actors in general. People say they're all shallow, self-absorbed, and narcissistic. People say actors just want to be movie or TV stars, and live as glamorous prima Donna's. People say that the top actors make way too much money. These things are true for some actors. But then there are the hardcore, devoted actors. They take a writer's characters, described only in words, or maybe simple drawings in some cases. The great actors flesh out and literally become those fictional characters, taking the rest of us on a believable journey, for an hour, two hours, or maybe through a whole TV series. That's a pretty amazing thing to be able to do well. Val Kilmer was one of the greatest at this. Rest in Peace, Mr. Kilmer, in whatever realm the greatest move into after an inspiring journey here on planet Earth.
Here are the main roles that made me a big fan of Val Kilmer's work.
This is definitely not my taste in interior design, but I love her creativity and way of making this place uniquely her own. DIY content creator Mariane Plaisance and her boyfriend live in an old bank building in Montreal, Canada, which she has completely redecorated inside. We have a growing number of commercial buildings now losing money, and many standing vacant or fully abandoned. In addition, there's a major affordability crisis in housing across the U.S., Canada, and some other countries. Is living in a remodeled commercial building an answer to these problems? Maybe.
What would your dream house look like? Think about it for a moment. Where would it be? What color would it be? How many bedrooms and bathrooms would it have? If money was no object, would you have a gigantic mansion on a hilltop? Would it be way out in the country? In the mountains? In the middle of a city where the urban action is? Would you have a home theater?A huge swimming pool? Would you have droids to wait on you? The ultimate open kitchen? A slide? A fire pole between floors? Would your master bedroom be underwater? When it comes to customizing a living space, there have been all kinds of amazing and ridiculous homes built throughout history, particularly for people with more money than they knew what to do with.
Today, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, we are decades into a long transition period in society. The late futurist Alvin Toffler called it The Third Wave, in his 1980 book with that title. He and his wife believed we were leaving the industrial-based society of the last 350 or so years, and moving into an information-based society. He wrote several books explaining how this massive transition in society might play out, as he explains in this interview from 2007.
Forty-five years after Toffler published The Third Wave, I believe we are now reaching the point of peak change in the transition the Tofflers wrote about. In 2025 we have a major housing affordability crisis in the U.S., Canada, and several other countries. Here in the U.S., we also have a major homeless problem that has grown exponentially in the last 20 or 25 years. At the same time, because of the Industrial Age to Information Age transition Toffler wrote about, we have tens of thousands of commercial buildings that are no longer viable for their original purposes. Thousands of these structures, ranging from small houses to entire sports stadiums, have been abandoned. First there were abandoned factories and some warehouses, then came houses in those cities, then retail storefronts in small towns, larger abandoned stores, dead malls, and now a growing number of abandoned older office buildings, in nearly every city in the U.S..
I've been writing about this issue of empty buildings on my Substack site, in a series of pieces called Simulpocalypse. One of my main reasons for writing this series is to dive into this topic is to try and figure out how we could actually put many of these buildings to new, cool, viable uses for today's world.
That's where Mariane, in the video up top, and her renovated bank turned into a work and living space, comes in. This is a great example of how someone turned a vacant commercial building into a cool, funky, whimsical, and YouTube studio and unique home. I think this type of thing can be done in many, many more instances, if we can get through the issues of evaluating a building's current true value, local red tape, outdated zoning laws, and the other things keeping thousands of other under used and vacant buildings from finding new uses for today's world.
Mariane and her boyfriend bought the old bank for about $500,000 U.S. dollars, in Montreal, where the median home price is about $600,000. So they held out, as the price dropped, and made an offer, so they got the property for less than the median price of a home there. The bank has about 3,500 square feet, which I bet is much larger than the average house size. At half a million U.S. dollars, this isn't a super cheap place to live. But it is less than an average house there. Now imagine if you had a somewhat larger building, and had several people sharing it, two or three couples or several single people, each creating their own living space (and work space) in the building. You could bring everyone's living expenses down quite a bit.
I've been writing about "the coming recession" for several years now, since some long term trends suggested this next recession would bring a huge level of change throughout society. Here in the U.S., we have a major housing affordability problem, particularly for Millennials and young Generation Z, just entering their working life. At the same time, we have what I'm now calling the "Simulpocalypse," a growing number of vacant commercial buildings across the U.S..
There are a handful of people living in commercial buildings who have videos here on YouTube. Not many. As this recession deepens, and as commercial real estate continues to tank in retail and office particularly, some people will figure out how to live in some of these spaces. I'm not talking about the large adaptive reuse projects that cost tens of millions of dollars, but average people realizing that if they have a small business of some kind, they can rent an old store front or industrial unit for half as much money as a decent apartment.
Yes, zoning is an issue, but vacant properties getting tagged, vandalized, invaded by drug addicts or other homeless people, and possibly catching fire are other, often bigger issues. There will inevitably be property owners willing to lease to people who run a small business and live in their vacant stores, warehouses, or office buildings, just to get some income. Other people will be desperately trying to get out of buildings, and will take some weird offers to sell these properties. While I don't see this as the biggest answer to housing affordability, I think this is likely to be a quiet trend over the next several years. Time will tell if I'm right about that or not.
Did you check out the video embedded at the top? Mariane is French Canadian, if you haven't figured that out yet by her accent, and her DIY YouTube channel is in French, and it's called 2e peau.Her work as a DIY content creator led both to how the couple could afford to buy this building, and to the nature of her amazing renovations and redecorating of this building. As millions of people struggle to afford decent places to live, will more people start renting or buying commercial building to live in, or create live/work places tapped into today's internet-based business world? I think it's definitely a possibility.
If you read my blog or Substack, you know that I've been living homeless for many years now. So why am I so interested in abandoned commercial buildings? Well, for one, let's just say I've become much more sensitized to today's housing issues, because of my own struggles to make a decent living and find housing, starting with my taxi driving days, about 25 years ago. But there's more to it than that. I've had this weird dream of living in a converted industrial building since I was a kid. It started with a womanizing TV detective when I was about 12-years-old.
At 20:46 in this episode of the 1978 TV show Vegas, we see private eye Dan Tanna drive his classic Ford Thunderbird into his apartment, with a flat tire. This clip leads into a long scene in his "apartment." In the show, Tanna lived in an industrial building out near the Las Vegas airport, and he would drive his car right into the living room. Like pretty much every 1970's private detective on TV, Dan Tanna was a hero every week, and a consummate ladies man, in the James Bond tradition. But it was that cool apartment in the old industrial building that I always thought was the coolest part of the show.
In the 1986 bicycle messenger movie Quicksliver, starring Kevin Bacon, Jack and his ballet dancer girlfriend live in a spacious loft, the quintessential artist's loft. In this corny road bike freestyle/dance scene, he's riding around their apartment, trying to distract his girlfriend from her ballet practice. Yes, it's a stereotypical, 1980's, corny, romantic, movie montage. But this is one really cool loft apartment. By the time Quicksilver came out, I was a hardcore BMX freestyler, and this cool loft built on the dream I had, started by Dan Tanna's industrial building apartment Vegas. The dream of living in a funky, cool, industrial building someday, where I could ride my bike or park my car in my "living room," kept growing in my head. I'll be honest, that dream still exists. I'm probably not the only one who has imagined living in some old industrial building transformed into my own cool, personal live/work space.
My dream actually happened, sort of, back in 2005. I was working as a taxi driver, scraping by week to week, paying about $600 every week to lease my cab, and putting another $300 or more in the gas tank, every week. After paying my expenses, I didn't have enough money to rent a decent room or apartment. So I lived in my taxi, 6 1/2 years total, and took showers at the gym. I got a cheap motel room once a week, usually on Sunday nights, because business was slow. I'd watch a little TV, eat a cheap pizza, and get 10 or 11 hours of good sleep. After working 70-80 hours a week, all seven days, one night of good sleep did wonders.
Another taxi driver, a guy named Richard, had an indie art gallery in an industrial unit in Anaheim, the AAA Electra 99 Art Gallery and Co-op. He made me an offer one day. The deal was that he would let me live in the art gallery during the week, and I would drive his taxi all weekend, from Friday afternoon until early Monday morning. I took the deal. I moved into the gallery, and suddenly had 4 days off. I worked long hours on the weekend, and lived with a mama cat and her six kittens in the gallery Monday through Friday afternoon. It was in that place that I invented my Sharpie Scribble Style of drawing and shading with markers. That drawing technique now provides most of what little income I earn now. I lived in the gallery for 8 or 9 months, then went back to full time driving in the cab, hoping to rent an apartment at some point.
Living in an indie art gallery was pretty damn cool, and jump started my creativity, which was non-existent, for about three years, when I moved in. I became a visual artist in that crazy little gallery. I've now sold over 100 large drawings, in the last ten years. I didn't see that coming when I moved into the gallery, in the late summer of 2005. I didn't have a BMX bike, and I was really out of shape then. So I didn't do any freestyling in my "living room." I didn't have a car then, either. Electra did have a big roll-up door in the back, but the stage was right there, where garage bands played on the weekends. So I couldn't pull my car into the living room.
So in my weird head, the dream of a really cool live/work art studio/gallery/apartment housed in a commercial building still lives on. Personally, I need to sell my drawings for a lot more money to make that happen. But who knows? Maybe someday the dream will come true... again. As for the millions of people looking for a reasonable place to live, I think we will see more people figuring out ways to live in vacant commercial buildings since there are thousands of them sitting vacant or underused across North America. If this idea appeals to you, check out some of the links in this post for further ideas.
I'm doing most of my writing on Substack these days, though I still do a post here on the blog once in a while. Check out the whole Simulpocalypse series on Substack, all about the growing number of struggling and abandoned homes and buildings in the U.S..
I just stumbled across this talk, and Mr. Brooks gives one of the most brutally honest explanations of Western society I have ever heard.
For over 23 years now, I've had a tremendous amount of outside pressure put on my life. I've been unable to make a decent living since the beginning of this century. I had no idea where this pressure was coming from. There were a lot of conservative people coming into my life early on, and a fair amount of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians back in 2002-2006. The "Christian Right" seemed the best name to put on those invisible power brokers who were putting great pressure on my life.
Ultimately, I was pushed out of California, and to North Carolina, where my family had wound up living. I was pushed away from BMX freestyle, the weird little action sport that gave my life meaning. It became apparent that somebody, somewhere wanted me to live my life in a completely different way. Once I got to North Carolina, some people around me were told I had some incredibly high IQ score that no one had ever told me about. That may or may not be true. I still don't know, and I hate the entire idea of IQ scores at this point. It's a test score people, one test on one day, nothing more.
These past 23+ years have pushed me in ways I could have never imagined, and I figured out who I am, and who I am not. While it's still not totally clear, it appears some small group, part of the "educated elite" that Mr. Brooks talks about in the speech above, are the people who have been pushing me in directions I had absolutely no interest in for more than 23 years. I think I was supposed to "realize" in North Carolina that I had wasted my whole life by doing tricks on a "little kid's bike," and that I should go to college, grow up, and become a part of the East Coast establishment. I did not enroll in college in North Carolina. In fact, the exact opposite happened.
After more than 23 years of this bullshit, I have no intention of ever going to college. Not going to college was one of the best decisions I've ever made. I do not want to EVER set foot in the entire state of North Carolina for the rest of my life. I refuse to live in ANY conservative state. I would much rather die in my late 50's or early 60's as a homeless man in California, than to have ANY association with the "educated elite" that Mr. Brooks speaks of in the talk above. I want nothing to do with any of those people, any of their institutions, their religions, or anything else they are a part of.
I would rather die as a penniless homeless man in California that to be a part of their "elite." I want to earn a living here in Southern California as a writer, artist, and hopefully a video producer again, someday. I want to pay rent for my own apartment. I want to work smart and hard, doing projects I'm interested in. I want to go goof around on a BMX bike for an hour or two every evening, after a good day's work. That is success to me. NOTHING else is success to me. The educated elite of the world have nothing to offer me, they have nothing I want. They can't seem to understand this. So I will probably die in the next two or three years as a homeless man. That's fine with me.
Here's one of the many videos on YouTube looking at a handful of the abandoned places across the U.S.. There are literally MILLIONS of vacant houses in this country, and tens of thousands of abandoned commercial buildings, dilapidated factories, vacant stores, dead malls, recently vacant office buildings, and post-apocalyptic looking places in the United States. There are many more around the world.
Simulpocalypse-(SIGH-mole-pock-a-lips) is a word I coined to describe how the United States has a growing number of vacant and abandoned buildings, and post-apocalyptic looking locations, while normal, everyday society goes on simultaneously, as if it isn't happening.
Kids from the 1960's and 1970's, late Baby Boomers and Gen X kids like myself, grew up being told that a worldwide nuclear apocalypse could wipe out civilization at any time. That's a thought that can put a damper on your vision of the future. We saw a growing number of post-apocalyptic TV shows and movies as we grew up, ranging from the original Planet of the Apes movie from 1968, to the early Mad Max movies, and films like Damnation Alley, which featured the coolest RV ever. As kids then, we regularly had drills where we had to get under our school desks, which is what we were supposed to do if a nuclear missile was about to destroy our town. Really. Yes, we realized the school desk wouldn't really help, we would all be blown to smithereens, but no one seemed to care.
Now it's the year 2025, us Gen Xers are middle aged, about 50 years into "the future" of our childhood selves. Guess what, we have never had a full scale, worldwide nuclear apocalypse. That's a good thing. Yet... somehow... we have thousands of places in the U.S. alone that are abandoned, or now look post-apocalyptic. Places like this, and this, and even this. How the hell did that happen?
Why do we have so many post-apocalyptic looking places if we've never had a nuclear apocalypse? Or any apocalypse? Most of these individual locations are now abandoned for financial reasons, and some are abandoned because of environmental events, or a combination of both. Most people don't realize just how many of these places there are. There are over 12 million vacant houses in the U.S. at any given time. That number includes vacation homes, second homes, and houses that are for sale or are short term rentals currently empty. But there are lots of completely abandoned houses as well.
Detroit has over 70,000 abandoned buildings according to Google search results. Flint, Michigan has 24,000 according to Google. Gary, Indiana has over 10,000 abandoned buildings, and Youngstown, Ohio has 740. Gary only has a population of 69,000 people these days, and Youngstown has 60,000 people. These are four cities, all in the Midwest, that were hit exceptionally hard by the factory closings of the late 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's. But not all the abandoned places in the United States are in old, rundown industrial towns and cities in the Midwest and The South. I live in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles. This is high priced real estate in Southern California. There's a recently closed Guitar Center store a couple of blocks from me right now, and an abandoned small office building next to it. That office building has been vacant for a couple of years, or more. There's a dead mall, almost entirely abandoned, a few miles from here. This is really expensive commercial real estate. Even here, in dramatically high priced SoCal, there are plenty of vacant and abandoned buildings. Obviously, the huge areas devastated by the recent Pacific Palisades and Alta Dena fires in this region have added 12,000 more burned buildings to the list.
When I write about the Simulpocalypse, I'm not talking about these recent tragedies, most of which will ultimately be rebuilt. I'm talking about the thousands of other vacant and abandoned factories, dead malls, empty houses, vacant office buildings, and other dilapidated buildings all over our country. There are so many of these places, that Millennials and Gen Z people started exploring and documenting them, a hobby and movement called Urban Exploring or UrbEx.
On my Substack site, where I write in more depth about a variety of subjects, I've started a series of posts about the Simulpocalypse. I'm looking into the different aspects of this phenomenon, coming at the subject from many different angles. Why are these places abandoned? Why is this happening now? What kinds of places have been abandoned? What forces led to all these empty spaces? Are any of these places being re-imagined and rebuilt? If this sounds interesting to you, take a look. The first three posts are up now, and you can check them out at the links below.
