How I became interested in Creative Scenes

Courtesy of Shannon Gillette, a Boise BMX local who now works for USABMX (BMX sanctioning body), this video is racing at the Fort Boise BMX track, in 1983, I think.  I know it says 1984, but I won a contest to help redesign the track in late 1983, and we rebuilt it for 1984.  This is the old jump set-up, before the re-build.  In any case, this is the spot where the idea of a "scene" that catapults one group ahead of another, first hit me.

On a sunny, brisk, October day in 1982, all the BMX riders from Blue Valley, the unofficial name of our trailer park outside of Boise, packed into my dad's silver Ford van.  With about 8-10 kids and bikes packed in, I drove us all to the Fort Boise BMX track, on the north end of downtown Boise, nestled into the edge of the foothills.  It was the very first BMX bike race, ever, for most of us.  The weekend before, after someone discovered there was a BMX track in Boise, four of us guys and three BMX bikes packed into Scott's mom's Ford Pinto, which was not a hatchback, and went to the race.  Scott, James, and Rocky (I think) raced, while I coached and checked out the scene.  They all came home with trophies, and we told the rest of our trailer park posse about the BMX scene at a real track.  Sure, the track was built inside of an abandoned sewage pond, but we didn't know or care then.  It was REAL BMX. 

Here's the thing, most of our bikes were pieces of crap.  I had a "Kmart special" bike frame, a Sentinal Exploder GX, with some decent parts on it.  James, the fastest among us, had a Huffy frame, the "official" cheap, piece of crap bike of the 1980''s.  But over the summer of 1982, BMX had become our thing in our isolated trailer park, in the desert (technically sagebrush steppe) a few miles outside of town.  Every evening after dinner, as the blazing hot summer temperatures cooled, all of us high school and junior high kids came out and some kind of sport took place.  When I moved there in early June, 1982, it was usually a football, basketball, or whiffle ball game.  Sometimes we just argued and threw rocks at each other (it was a trailer park.)  But often we wound up at these little jumps on the edge of the park, that some motorcycle rider had built a couple of years earlier.

We were White Trash kids, so we were from somewhat dysfunctional families, some more than others, and we joked, argued, talked smack, and continually tried to be better at something than the other guys.  As June turned into July, we began to spend less time playing football, basketball or whiffle ball, and more time out at the BMX jumps.  One kid bought a BMX magazine at the grocery store with hard-earned lawn mowing baby sitting money ($1 an hour and all the government cheese you could eat), and we all read it and got motivated.  We pushed each other, we built our jumps bigger and better, though they were tiny by today's standards, and BMX became our thing. When we broke a stem, or our fork dropout, or our cranks, we bought higher quality ones at Bob's Bikes (and lawn mower repair).  We all ended up with several gold anodized parts on our bikes, because other BMXers didn't like the gold color, and Bob would sell them to us a little cheaper.  We all had stolen bike parts on our bikes as well, some of the time.  We did what we could to keep riding, so we could jump higher than Scott, or do a cross-up better than Brian, or whatever.

By the time we made it to that first race, we were pretty good riders.  We were poor kids, by and large.  OK, my dad was an engineer, we were solid middle class, but my mom habitually over spent, and my parents moved to the trailer park to save money for a year or two so they could buy a house in town.  That plan actually did work.  But day to day, we were broke ass teenagers with no place close to get an after school job.  So we scraped by and built up our bikes... and our riding skills, by riding every day, and continually pushing each other to improve.

A funny thing happened on that race day.  Our Blue Valley trailer park posse, in jeans and T-shirts, with paper plates for number plates, kicked some racing ass.  Sure we were all novices.  But with the small number of riders, we all raced some intermediate racers, most of whom had $400 to $600, dialed in, name brand bikes, fancy leathers (uniforms), and lots of racing experience.  Every one of us, in our first or second races, got first, second, or third.  There were seven official local teams racing that day, and I figured out that, had we been an official BMX team, we would have placed second out of eight.

The Fort Boise locals were no slouches.  Sure, we were in Idaho, but there was a solid BMX racing scene there, and some riders (with well off parents) raced four to six races a week in the area.  They were serious.  They were chasing points standings we knew nothing about.  Yet our trailer park posse smoked many of them on the track... in our first race.

After the post-race jumping session, the best part of racing then, I drove our elated crew back out into the desert, my brainiac side wondering why we managed to place so well.  That was my first inkling in the power of a "scene" of people could have.  As I got into the emerging, brand new offshoot of BMX racing, BMX freestyle, or trick riding, I saw that it was small groups of kids, 3-4-5 or so, in random parts of the U.S., that started and promoted our sport, in different areas.  Scenes.  A couple kids would see a trick show, or buy a magazine, and go out and start learning tricks on their bikes.  As years turned into decades, I realized that these small "creative scenes" were how art scenes, music scenes, high tech scenes, and other creative environments, started.

When I heard about the "Creative Class" concept in a local entertainment weekly in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2009, the concept of scenes was well known to me.  Richard Florida's research into high tech scenes, and why they clustered in certain regions, put a larger framework around what I'd seen happen over 20-some years in BMX freestyle, skateboarding, snowboarding, art, and music.  I learned in his work how these small groups of people, sometimes, turn into major economic engines for their regions.  While they don't have the absurd money making potential of high tech, the action sports I was involved in not only became obscure sports that have gone global, they became worldwide industries.

This morning, I read this article about "Brain Drain," put out by City Lab, who build on Rich Florida's ideas and research.   I know some regions are going to extreme measures to get highly intelligent people into their areas.  I found that out the hard way.  But on my three day bus ride from Virginia to California this week, I saw signs of creative scenes springing up all over.  I came to a city outside L.A. to join a BMX/bike business, but I saw signs of several really cool art scenes in several cities along the way.  I wandered into El Paso's arts district while on a layover, looking for a mini mart to escape the ridiculous bus station food prices.  Charlottesville, Virginia had signs of a cool art scene.  So did a few other cities, which are kind of lost in the haze of the crazy, 72 hour bus experience.

I've come to believe these small "creative scenes,"  not just art and music, but action sports, gaming, crafts, street art/graffiti, food trucks/restaurants, custom cars and motorcycles, and, of course, high tech, are key to our economic future as a nation.  So while I help my old BMX friend, Rich Bartlett, get his online BMX shop off ground and jamming, I'll be writing more on this idea of creative scenes, and how they are important in our weird, chaotic, rapidly changing world.  Much, much more on this area of thinking to come...  Now go create something cool, then make your own scene better. 

Creative Scenes in Today's World

Though this Barbara Walters interview with Guy Laliberte' is about his personal journey, at about 1:56 we hear about the initial creative scene that spawned an pioneering artistic idea that also became a business empire.  Guy says that the street performers of Montreal had this old idea about starting their own circus.  Guy and Gilles St.Croix spearheaded a group of those street performers in the mid-1980's to realize that dream, and Cirque du Soleil was born.  Not only did a couple dozen street performers actually start a circus, they completely redefined what a circus was.  How does that happen?  That is the magic, and the potential, of a really amazing Creative Scene.

So what is a Creative Scene?  We are all familiar with the concept of an "art scene" or a "music scene."  Those are two types of Creative Scenes.  They are a loosely knit group of artists or musicians, and people in roles that support the scene, with talented people that both compete with each other and work together on a variety of creative projects and ideas.

But as a 16-year-old BMX racer in Boise, Idaho, I learned that BMX bike riding also had scenes, and there was a creative aspect to it.  That's when I became interested in the concept of scenes.  I have been a part of many different scenes in my life, BMX/freestyle scenes, art scenes, entrepreneurial scenes, video and TV production scenes, skateboarding scenes, and rock climbing scenes.  Oh, and I worked in the box office and on some of the set-up/teardown crews of Cirque du Soleil's first five tours to Orange County, California.  I worked for Cirque when it was a single touring circus under the big top, one tour after the initial idea.

I came to realize that a small group of motivated people with a similar interest, one that involves some kind of creativity, sometimes turns into huge projects, sports, businesses, and even entire worldwide industries.  I also saw that some scenes were great for the handful of people in them, but never really grew into anything larger.  I became fascinated with Creative Scenes of all kinds.  I wondered why some grow into huge things, and some don't, and what the difference was.

Then, in 2009, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I first heard of the book, The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida.  In that book, he was describing high tech Creative Scenes, and why they tended to spring up in places that already had thriving music and art scenes.  He even described certain cities having a "creative ecosystem," a "scene of scenes."  In professor Florida's book, I began to understand the economic role Creative Scenes played in our Information Age, hyper-connected society.

Huge parts of of country continue to struggle economically, even now, 20 or 30 years after the loss of most of their local factories and high paying manufacturing jobs, and a decade after The Great Recession.  I wondered if finding and nurturing creative scenes could be a legitimate part of rebuilding the depressed areas of the United States.

While I'm beginning to do online and social marketing for an old friend's bike business, to make a living again, this Creative Scenes idea is my main writing focus.  In coming posts I'm going to be sharing a lot of what I've learned about Creative Scenes of all types, why I think some blow up huge, and others just cruise or fade, and other thoughts on this whole concept.  Stay tuned.  So go do something creative between now and the next post on this theme.

How I saw Richard Florida's full Creative Class arc happen... in a city that flew under his (and everyone's) radar

This is Professor Richard Florida, in a 2003 talk in San Diego, promoting his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class.  At the time, he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Pittsburgh was hit incredibly hard by the loss of factory jobs in the 1980's and 1990's. Richard Florida was recruited to Carnegie Mellon, in part, to help Pittsburgh morph into a high tech stronghold to rebuild the economy of the region.

I've started using Twitter a tiny bit recently, and I left a fairly lame comment on Richard Florida's feed ysterday.  As I thought about how his work has helped shape my own thinking on the big picture of our world, I decided it might be a good time to share how I saw his Creative Class Arc actually happen.  So this post is a quick take on that story.

Carnegie Mellon University, as you hear in the talk above, graduated many outstanding computer science and tech people in the 1990's.  But these high caliber tech people were nearly all moving to other cities, joining and building tech companies, and economies, elsewhere.  Professor Florida dove into the research to figure out why.  Several years of research culminated in a new understanding of how the high tech business world operated much differently than the traditional American manufacturing businesses.

In the Industrial Age world, cities tried to schmooze and bribe large corporations to build a factory in their city, and then the workers would move to that city for the jobs created.  That city would grow and become more prosperous.  In his research for The Rise of the Creative Class, one key finding of his was that high tech businesses moved to where the highly skilled people were located (21:20 in this talk).

Why did those tech people live those places (like Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, Austin, NYC, L.A., and Washington'D.C)?  It turned out tech people were (and still are) very creative, and they were attracted to places that already had scenes of highly creative people.  Places with established art scenes, music scenes, and entrepreneurial scenes.  These tended to also be places that were open and tolerant to all kinds of people.  Tech people, especially then, tended to be pretty weird and geeky, and they liked places tolerant of weirdos and the unusual.  I'm grossly simplifying his first book on these themes (there have been three books since), but it will give a sense it.

Basically, REALLY weird, unusual people; artists, musicians, garage inventors, or similar types, find a place they like, and form a small scene.  Word begins to get around, and some slightly less weird people move to the area, also highly creative, and join the scene.  If it's an art scene, other types, like musicians, filmmakers, and others may move to the area, and before long you have a large scene of several different creative scenes.  A "creative ecosystem," as Richard Florida calls them.  The cities with those creative ecosystems, of multiple creative scenes, are the places tech people tended to be attracted to.  Those were the places where the tech companies started up, some hit big, and today's tech hub cities were born. 

"Creative people like to be around other creative people."

-Richard Florida in the speech above

By the time Professor Florida gave this speech in San Diego in 2003, I had lived through the entire arc of his Creative Class concept . I lived through it in a city that managed to fly under Richard Florida's radar, and everyone's, because it wasn't known for high tech, and it was in the shadow of dozens of other cities in the major metro it was a part of.  I saw the entire Creative Class Arc happen in Huntington Beach, California, a little over an hour north of where the talk above took place.

What do I mean by Creative Class Arc?  It's a place where small, highly creative scenes form.  These attract other highly creative people with different talents and dreams.  Someone starts doing something on one cutting edge, and others push the cutting edge in other areas.  A key part of this is some form of media, happening far below the mainstream level, where word of this creative ecosystem spreads in small niches.  Once the scene's location is known in highly creative niche groups, word spreads in larger and larger groups of creatively active people.  The location attracts interest, then visitors, and ultimately residents, who are also actively creative.  The various creative people in the creative scenes bounce ideas, energy, and inspiration itself, off each other.  Creativity, new ideas, new bands, new galleries, new projects, new events grow like a slow crescendo.  That's what I lived through in Huntington Beach, watching as the sleepy, working class surf town grew into a thriving city filled with too damn many Yuppies, including the much sought after tech workers.

Huntington Beach started as Pacific City around 1900, its developers hoped to create the "Atlantic City of the West Coast."  That didn't work.  The little beach town attracted a few lima bean farmers and others who liked living near the ocean.  The developers gave a few blocks of downtown to a Methodist group, tp help it grow, and they took over the area around 11th street.  At one point, around 1908-1915, if you bought a set of encyclopedias, you got a free lot in the downtown area.  Then the city leaders named the city Huntington Beach, sucking up to SoCal railroad magnate Henry Huntington, so he would run a trolley line up from Long Beach, to help bring people to the town.  That railroad line helped.  But the town still didn't grow much.

Then, in 1920, oil was struck in downtown Huntington Beach.  Suddenly it became a boom town.  My research, for a zine I wrote in 2007, showed it was a bit of a Wild West type city, filled with hard working, hard partying wildcatters, oil workers, very likely ladies of the evening, and all of that, in the 1920's and 1930's.

In the 1930's, a music venue called the Golden Bear opened, right by the H.B. Pier.  It became well known, and Hollywood Golden Era actors like Errol Flynn and Cary Grant came down from Hollywood to party in wild Huntington Beach at times.  Before The Golden Bear closed (in the 1970's, I think) many top performers, including Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin played there.  The oil boom seemed to give H.B. a kind of rowdy soul, it attracted adventurous and outsider types from then on.

Because of the oil pumps all over the downtown era, Huntington Beach didn't build up and become as popular as uber wealthy Newport Beach, just to the south, or other beach cities.  Newport is the Beverly Hills of Orange County, that's where the big money has been in Orange County for 100 years or more.  H.B. became the de facto working class beach, the dirty, oil well strewn, beach city.  Rent was fairly cheap, there was decent, thought not great, surf, and there were 8 miles of beach that wasn't developed, unlike the rest of Southern California.

Hawaiian surf pioneer George Freeth (brought to California by Henry Huntington to promote Redondo Beach, in a weird coincidence) gave a "surf riding" demo at the H.B. pier in 1914.  Later, Freeth's younger Waikiki surf buddy, Duke Kahanamoku spent a lot of time in H.B., promoting the sport.  In the 1950's, surfers congregated more and more in Huntington Beach, much to the dismay of civic leaders of the time.  Then the surf music and movies hit big in the 1960's, and Jan and Dean's song, "Surf City," is about Huntington Beach.  The surf culture began to grow.  To this day, the key corners at PCH and Main downtown, house Jack's Surf Shop and Huntington Surf & Sport.  By the time I moved to H.B. in 1987, surfers ran the city, many civic leaders, and business people were surfers.  When the surf was good in the morning, half of the businessmen (and a few women) weren't in the office, they were surfing (aka "Morning Board Meetings").

I was a BMX freestyler, part of the brand new sport of trick riding on 20 inch BMX bikes.  I got laid off at a BMX magazine in Torrance, in December of 1986.  I just didn't fit in with the staff that well, I wasn't punk rock enough, at the time.  I got hired in H.B. by 23-year-old surfer/BMX freestyler/entrepreneur Bob Morales.  He started the American Freestyle Association (AFA), which put on the local and national BMX freestyle contests.  He also started new companies on a regular basis.  To this day, when I hear the word "entrepreneur," Bob is the guy who comes to mind, though I know dozens of them.

As the action sports began to emerge and grow, the surf culture of Huntington Beach attracted skateboarders, BMX racers and freestylers, snowboarders, motocross riders, and later, in the 1990's several early UFC fighters, which spawned the MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) sport and movement.  The surf culture foundation of Huntington Beach blended with the highly entrepreneurial and real estate investor based Southern California culture.  Thinking up a crazy business idea at a bar one night, talking about it while checking out the surf at the donut shop the next morning, and then starting work on it that afternoon, that was a fairly normal thing in 1980's and 1990's Huntington Beach. 

When I moved to H.B., the four blocks of Main Street directly inland from the pier, were run down, had about 4 dive bars, a liquor store, a punk rock themed indie record shop, with milk crates of records on folding tables, a couple surf shops, and some empty store fronts.  There were always a few shady characters hanging out on Main in the shadows.  There were no crowds.  Skateboarders sessioned the P.O. Curb, by the Post office.  The surrounding grid street area, old Pacific City, was mostly small apartment units on little lots, mixed with active oil pumps.  Sixplex, small house, fourplex, oil pump.  That was typical.  Despite being a beach city, in Southern California's 1980's surging real estate market, it was nearly all working class people.  There were also a ton of real estate investors and small time entrepreneurs.

Though "modern surfing" came about around 1900, the 1980's brought the short, Thruster type surfboards, and surfing, as a sport and industry, and particularly surf wear, grew a great deal in popularity and as an industry.

Skateboarding was invented by surfers in Southern California, when the waves were flat, in the late 1950's.  It's initial boom was in 1965-66, again in about 1975-80, and it was booming again in the mid-1980's.  Vertical skating, pool and halfpipe ramps, were the dominant aspect.  But street skating, looking at the urban environment as one big skatepark, began about 1984, and was growing in the late 1980's.  After another industry downturn around 1990, street skating blew up in the mid 1990's, taking over the industry as the Extreme Games, aka the X Games, took action sports to TV viewers worldwide.  Vision Skateboards, one of "The Big 5" skateboard companies in the 1980's, was located in Costa Mesa, CA, just south of inland H.B.  I worked at its video company, Unreel Productions, from 1987-1990, after leaving the AFA.   

The paved area below the Huntington Beach pier was the place to be on the weekends, for me as a BMX freestyler.  There were three freestyle skateboarders from Europe, all sponsored by Vision Skateboards' companies, who spent their days skating there.  Freestyle skaters were the dorks of 1980's skateboarding, doing hard to learn, highly technical tricks, on flat ground.  The three main guys were Pierre Andre from France, Don Brown from the U.K., and Hans Lingren from Sweden.  There was also a BMX freestyler from inland named Mike Sarrail, and myself, every weekend.  Because the H.B. Pier was a "known scene" for skating and BMX freestyle, top pros and amateurs from both sports showed up randomly, every weekend long to session.  Street skating pioneers like Mark Gonzales and Ed Templeton were locals, and Natas Kapas, Per Welinder and BMXers like Marting Aparijo, Woody Itson, and others rode with us regularly.

Pierre ended up getting Etnies shoes going, aimed at making good quality shoes for skateboarding, with a French shoe company.  He took it over, and turned it into a $200 million annual revenue company before the Great Recession (maybe $100-150 million now, last I heard).  The parent company, called Sole Technology, puts out shoe brands Etnies, Emerica, E's, snowboard boot brand 32, and clothing brand Altamont.  Don Brown is the long time vice president of marketing at Sole Tech.  Hans went back to Sweden.  In the late 80's, we would loan each other money to buy a burrito or a Coke.

Mark Gonzales, known as the Godfather of Street Skating, formed a skateboard company, and has shown art in galleries around the world.  Ed Templeton started his own skate company, Toy Machine, was a top street skater for 15 years until breaking his neck (he still skates), and he also, has shown his art worldwide.  Jason Lee, a skating protoge' and teammate of Mark Gonzales, and H.B.local in the 90's, is an accomplished actor now, best known playing Dave in the Chipmunk movies, and Earl in the TV show My Name is Earl. 

BMX racing, basically motocross racing on bicycles with 20 inch wheels, was invented in 1970.  The Godfather of BMX, and co-inventor of it, Scot Breithaupt, started his first track in Long Beach, a dozen miles north of Huntington Beach, in 1970.  Another group started races north of L.A., in the Malibu area about the same time.  They faded a few years later.  Scot kept at it, turned into a hardcore entrepreneur with a bad self-destructive streak.  The company he started as a teen, Scot Enterprises, now SE Bikes, still exists.  BMX racing, on dirt tracks with jumps and berms, grew to a nationwide sport in the 1970's, fading in the late 70's, and growing again in the early 1980's.

A Southern California BMX racer, and highly creative kid, Bob Haro, and a few others, started riding their bikes in skateparks in about 1977.  Bob went on to invent tricks on flat ground, called flatland, and on wedge shaped ramps as well.  He and Bob Morales started doing "trick riding" demos about 1980.  He invented the "quarterpipe" ramp, a portable ramp that allowed a BMXer to do airs, like they did in the skateparks.  Bob Haro was also was a talented cartoonist, and started working for BMX Action magazine.  His trick riding turned into touring "BMX freestyle" trick teams in the early 1980's.  He, and other riders, got photos of tricks in the three BMX magazines, and BMX freestyle grew.  I got into BMX racing in 1982, as a high school kid in Boise, Idaho, and into freestyle in 1983.  I joined the only trick team in Idaho in 1984.  Small BMX freestyle popped up around the U.S., and in the U.K., and freestyle first took off in 1984.  My family moved to San Jose, California in 1985, a year after I graduated high school.  It was also a year after the weird little Macintosh computer came out, and the name Silicon Valley was starting to get thrown around for that area.

I started a BMX freestyle zine in September 1985, met several top pros in the Bay area a month later, and was hired at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in August of 1986.  I got along with the guys there, but didn't really click, and got laid off in December 1986.  A couple months later, the magazines replaced me with a 17-year-old BMX freestyler/skater from the East Coast, a kid named Spike Jonze.  Yes... that Spike Jonze.

BMX freestyle grew exponentially from about 1983-1989, then crashed as mountain biking (BMX for "grownups") became the hot new thing.  Like skateboarding, BMX racing and BMX freestyle all but died in the early 90's recession.  But the riding and skating continued to progress, and another thing happened.  Skateboarders started their own companies, and took over the skateboarding industry, and BMXers took over the BMX industry.  We put the "Fat Bald Men" running BMX, out of business.  One of those bicycle companies, FBM, was named for those Fat Bald Men that ran 80's BMX industry.  These tiny, rider and skater owned companies, were entrenched when ESPN jumped on the bandwagon in 1995, and blew things up globally with mainstream TV coverage.

Pro BMX racer, Huntington Beach local, and crazy jumper, Chris Moeller, started S&M Bikes with a friend, at age 16.  Their bikes kept breaking when they jumped, so the two teens went to the welding shop that made bikes for a few small companies, and got them to build a stronger bike.  Chris bought out his buddy, and turned a $1200 loan from his grandpa in 1990, into two BMX bike companies that likely gross $10 million + in revenues today.  He also pioneered the sport of BMX dirt jumping, pushing the level of riding in the late 1980's and 1990's.  I was his roommate an sidekick in the early 90's, when he ran S&M Bikes out of the garage of a one bedroom apartment in downtown H.B..  He had the bedroom, I had the living room floor, another BMX industry guy had the couch.  Whoever was most sober answered the landline phone and took orders in the morning.  Usually, that was me. 

Now it seems really counter-intuitive that Orange County, California would wind up a hub for snowboarding.  But Tom Sims, arguably the founder of snowboarding, was a SoCal surfer/skateboarder.  People from elsewhere don't realize that you can go skiing or snowboarding an hour and a half outside of L.A., and find world class snow 6-7 hours north in the Mammoth Mountain/Tahoe area. Tom Sims built the first real snowboard in 7th grade shop class in about 1966.  I've held that first snowboard in my hands.  He wanted to "surf on snow."  Another pioneer, Tom Burt on the East Coast, riding a Scurfer toy, also pioneered the sport there, and Burton snowboards came to be.  Tom Sims got snowboarding going in the Tahoe area, and it was grassroots in the late 1980's, when a bunch of SoCal skaters got into it.

Tom Sims' companies, Sims Snowboards and Sims Skateboards, were under the umbrella of Vision Skateboards, housed in Costa Mesa, CA, next door to Huntington Beach.  As skateboarding and BMX were fading around 1990, snowboarding and mountain biking, were gaining steam.  So I was working on their videos, as well.

Back to Huntington Beach.  Because of the people based in and around Huntington Beach in the 1980's, people reading surf, skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX and BMX freestyle magazines were hearing and seeing people in and from Huntington Beach for years.  H.B. was a place they wanted to visit, maybe even live.  It became talent attraction in action, without anyone actually trying to make it happen.  Then, in the late 1980's, consumer video cameras became practical.  Us BMX freestylers, skateboarders, and snowboarders started making our own videos, releasing them as full length VHS tapes in that pre-internet world.  I was one of the first three BMX freestyle rider/producers.  This was a media revolution in our little, action sports worlds.

I later realized something else happened with those videos.  Without trying, us action sports video producers were also promoting our cities, (Huntington Beach in my case) and regions, worldwide.  We made our cities cool to a highly creative group of people worldwide.  This is an aspect of economic development, and the Creative Class concept in action, that no one in academia has touched on, as far as I know.  But Hollywood eventually took note.  We, in action sports, made Huntington Beach, and Orange County, CA, look crazy and fun and cool.  TV shows like The O.C., Arrested Development, Real Housewives of Orange County, Laguna Beach, and others followed several years later, in mainstream TV.  That's the creative core becoming cool to a large creative group, and then the city and region becoming cool, and a place to shoot shows, in the main stream TV industry.  This media element of the Creative Class in action, I think, should be researched at some point.  It's big.

In the early 1990's, snowboarding took off, and a couple of top pros, Damian Sanders and Steve Graham, and a few friends, moved into a house in downtown Huntington Beach.  They also like riding motocross cycles.  They started making videos.  Another friend who moved in with them for a while was Seth Enslow, who wound up bringing motorcycle distance jumping back, becoming a new Evel Knievel almost.  This little crew, another creative scene, made great snowboard videos, helped create freestyle motocross (jumping tricks on MX motorcycles), which became the fastest growing action sport in the 1990's.

Perhaps most important, Damian and his crew started dating strippers, and Damian married a Penthouse Pet named Brandi.  They had a house party one night they called the Pimp N' Ho Ball, as a joke.  Everybody dressed up, got drunk, and got stupid on video.  They put some footage in their snowboard videos.  It turned into a larger event, and eventually, the Pimp N' Ho Ball was a club event for thousands of people paying $50 or more at the door twice a year.  It spawned a bi-weekly nightclub called Club Rubber.  Damian and friend John Huntington turned into such innovative club promoters that Las Vegas came to them and said, "Your bringing this club to Vegas."  Damian and John spend a lot of time in Costa Rica, surfing and counting money, last I heard.

So these snowboarder/motocross riding pranksters turned into legendary club promoters.  Their clubs drew the top action sports athletes of the 1990's, many of whom lived, or spent time, in and around Huntington Beach, California.  Their club, with the coolest, craziest guys in it, also attracted the top strippers and porn stars from Southern California and Las Vegas.  No one in academia wants to hear this, but a lot of L.A. region and Las Vegas strippers, and porn stars, moved to Huntington Beach.  Like it or not economic development people, having a subculture of strippers and porn stars in your city attracts a lot of single tech people.  Just sayin'.  I saw it happen.  Probably a hard sell for civic leaders, but it might make for a really fun research paper for a grad student.

Surfing, in it's modern form, is about 120 years old.  It's a good sized industry.  Surf clothing sells worldwide.  Skateboarding is about 60 years old, has several genres now, and is a worldwide industry.  BMX racing is now an Olympic sport, and BMX freestyle has several genres, and is a fair sized industry, and a worldwide sport.  Snowboarding is about 55 years old.  It is a major draw to the winter Olympics now, saved ski resorts in the 1990's, is another good sized industry, and takes place worldwide, where there are mountains.  Mountain biking is about 40 years old, popular all over the globe, involves millions of bikes sold annually, and has a big tourism aspect to it.  Freestyle motocross (FSMX) is about 20-25 years old, became the fastest growing action sport in the late 1990's, and happens in small scenes around the world.  It's huge in the U.S. and Australia.  MX freeriding, the recreational aspect of FSMX , is another good sized industry.  I didn't mention wakeboarding, free skiiing, kite boarding, BASE jumping, wingsuit flying (one time Huntington Beach resident, and my downstairs neighbor, Troy Hartman, was a pioneer), Boogie boarding, skim boarding, rock climbing,and other action sports.

All of these worldwide sports, and their supporting industries, were created not only by misfits, but by "stupid adrenaline junkies" deemed too stupid to start businesses but everyone else.  In reality, these sports team with highly creative people who also make incredible entrepreneurs.  None of these businesses, not one that I know of, ever took a dime of venture capital.  These entire industries were built on sales and immediate profits, not burning money from angel investors.  These sports, purely by accident, make tens of thousands of videos annually, promoting themselves, their sports, their scenes, but also, their towns, cities and regions.  Whistler, British Columbia, for instance, was promoting summer mountain biking in 1985, and appearing in hit snowboard videos from 1990 on, long before the 2010 Olympics landed there.  While action sports will never have the massive profit and wealth potential of high tech, these athletes are a part of the creative core.  These sports are incredibly entrepreneurial, by their nature.  Part of doing these sports is finding physical courage, getting up when you fall, literally, and persistence, things that transfer to business building. 

So where does the Creative Class part come in?  I didn't really mention high tech.  There was a big Boeing space vehicle oriented plant in Huntington Beach, so there was some tech.  Within an hour commute of Huntington Beach are tens of thousands of high tech jobs, particularly in Irvine.  U.C. Irvine does some cutting edge tech work, tied tosome of those businesses.

What does surfing and other action sports have to do with creativity?  Here's the part the no one in academia has figured out.  In action sports, (surfing, skateboarding, BMX freestyle, snowboarding, wakeboarding, freestyle motocross and others), people go out day after day and try to do something new.  The point of these sports isn't to win competitions, specifically, it's to progress.  We are inventing new moves, tweaking and reshaping old moves, taking known tricks to new environments, and trying to improve and progress ourselves, the sports, and our whole culture of these sports.  It's not just about going bigger, it's about creating new possibilities on the bikes and boards we use.  Like any good artist, action sports people are continually working to progress and invent new things. (Note: I say "we," because I spent 20 years doing these sports day after day, but I'm old and fat at the moment)

Because of this, action sports people are very often artists and graphic designers of some sort, zine publishers, photographers, video camera people and producers, magazine publishers, tinkerers, inventors, event promoters, and entrepreneurs.  In addition, as the early sports of the 1980's (surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX racing and freestyle) began to grow larger, we were immersed in the hardcore punk music and its D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) ethos.  Nobody was making the stuff we wanted, so we started doing it ourselves, whatever it was.  The surf culture gave us H.B./Orange County actions sports kids mentors, of a sort, they made boards, surf clothes, music, and surf movies, their own media before we came along.  The older surfers set an example for us.

Here are some of the people and businesses that emerged and grew as the action sports wave of the 1980's and 1990's growth exploded.  While I was riding my bike every day, learning and inventing new tricks, publishing zines, producing low budget videos, and working as a sidekick to small time entrepreneurs, people around me were creating and growing all these things, and many others.  This was the small creative ecosystem I moved into, that I watched grow exponentially from 1987 to 2007.

Something happened around 2003.  What was it?  Huntington Beach had developed a reputation for fun, cool , crazy, weird people, doing lots of interesting things.  The energy of H.B./Orange County had become known around world in the action sports world, through our self-produced zines, magazines, videos, and later TV shows.  Then, around 2002-2003 the Yuppie hordes, many of them tech people from the Irvine area, students from  U.C. Irvine, and even Hollywood, started moving in.  Rents surged.  Old surfers and deadbeat dads moved to Costa Rica, to drink 50 cent beers and surf all day.  Huntington Beach exploded.  The city is often recognized, by name, nationwide, even worldwide in some circles now.  The creativity of the action sports culture wound up attracting a lot of tech people to live and drink in H.B., and commute to their tech jobs in Orange and L.A. counties.

The four block downtown area now is thriving, with dozens of trendy restaurants, bars, clubs, and boutique shops.  It's a whole different scene now, but still with strong surf and action sports roots, and a statue of Duke Kahanamoku, the "Father of Modern Surfing," and the surf museum downtown.

As Sesame Street used to say, "These are the people in my neighborhood."  These people and groups were part of the world we all lived in, in Huntington Beach, in the 1980's and 1990's.

Huntington Surf and Sport
Jack's Surf Shop
The U.S. Open of Surfing (formerly the OP Pro)
Kanvas by Katin
The Huntington Beach surf - it's a beach break, no point or reefs to enhance it, usually shoulder to head high, the waves in this video are not normal, but they happen at times in the winter.
Rockin' Fig Surf Shop
Robert August - Star of Endless Summer surf movie from 1966.
Van's shoes - Started in 1966, in Orange, about 15 miles inland.
Bob Morales - BMX freestyle, skatepark contest promoter, AFA contest promoter, entrepreneur, BMX Hall of Fame, BMX dad
Quicksilver clothing, Roxy women's clothing
Vision Skateboards
Vision Street Wear
GT BMX bikes  
Tom Sims - Father of snowboarding
Sims Snowboards - Snowshredders (1988)
Slam dancing/slam pits, now usually called Mosh Pits (technically there is a difference between the two), was invented in Huntington Beach about 1983
Duane Peters - Skateboarder, punk rocker, Master of Disaster
T.S.O.L. - True Sounds Of Liberty Legendary H.B. punk band, (lead singer ran for governor (with 180+others) when Arnold won)
Mark Gonzales - Godfather of Street Skateboarding, artist who's shown worldwide
Pierre Andre- Top French freestyle skateboarder, H.B. local, good friend of mine, we couldn't pronounce his last name then, so he ignored it on board graphics.
Pierre Andre Senizergues - Founder Etnies Shoes and later Sole Technology (Etnies, E's,32 boots
Don Brown- Top English freestyle skateboarder, V.P. of Marketing at Sole Technology now
Ed Templeton - early street skater, company owner, artist who's shown worldwide
Hans Lingren - freestyle skater
Daryl Grogan - freestyle skater, Costa Mesa/H.B. local, cinematographer/video producer
Jason Lee - skater, actor
My 1990 self-produced BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend , the 8th of 11 BMX videos I made.
Chris Moeller - pro BMX racer, jumper/street rider, BMX bike company owner, dad to twins
Damian Sanders and Steve Graham - Snowboarders in Exile (1990)
Cuckoo's Nest- Legendary Costa Mesa punk club 
The Vandal's - "Urban Struggle (I Want To Be a Cowboy)" a song written about the rednecks from Zubies, the redneck bar next to the Cuckoo's Nest. (17th & Placentia, Costa Mesa). 
The Offspring - "Jennifer Lost the War" - Band formed in Huntington Beach in 1987, Orange County
punk scene
No Doubt - covering The Vandals "Oi To the World" - from Anaheim, part of O.C. punk/ska scene
Sublime - "April 29th 1992" - (song about L.A. Riots)- Sublime was from Long Beach, part of O.C. area punk/underground scene. (I could smell the smoke from the fires in L.A. in downtown H.B.)
Big Drill Car- "In Green Fields" Costa Mesa band, O.C. punk/underground scene
Rage Against The Machine - "Killing in the Name Of"- They played their first gig in a Huntington Beach living room
Sublime/Gwen Stefani - "I Saw Red"
The Offspring - "Nitro" - 1994, the year they broke big, their low budget video
Social Distortion- "Story of My Life" - One time Huntington Beach resident, long time part of O.C. punk/underground scene, from Fullerton (inland of H.B.)
Seth Enslow- nutcase, guy who brought motorcycle distance jumping back from the lapse after Evel Knievel days
Downtown Huntington Beach in 2016, far from the shady, sketchy, run down Main Street I saw in 1987...
I could add a ton more links... but you get the idea.


I've got a new blog going on, it's about starting and building an art or creative business, or any small business.  You can check it out here:
WPOS Kreative Ideas

Are you down to help rebuild your city? It's time to do it - Richard Florida interview

Richard Florida talks about The New Urban Crisis, that's the title of his latest book, which I have read.  Florida came to prominence in the the economic development/urban planning world with his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class.  He realized the tech world was changing the game in how businesses grew and located while a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the 1990's.  When he did the research, he learned why tech companies clustered in a small number of cities, cities which already had clusters of artists, musicians, and other highly creative people. 

I've read 4 of his 5 books on these topics, listened to his talks dozens of times, and I have one advantage that Richard Florida DOES NOT HAVE.  I've actually lived in a city where I got to watch (and participate in) the entire Creative Class arc actually happen.  I saw Huntington Beach, California go through the arc from sketchy, run-down, beach city, to worldwide renowned, happening creative spot from 1987 to 2007.

But it wasn't high tech that did it in H.B.  It was the rise of the action sports world, of which the Huntington Beach area was a big hub.  I never heard of Richard Florida then, because our region didn't need to rebuild after the collapse of the factory economy.  It wasn't a manufacturing city to start with.  There was, and is, tech in H.B., and a lot nearby, but that's not what the area is known for.  In addition, it's in Orange County, California (where Disneyland is), which always falls in the shadow of Los Angeles, just to the north.   So the Huntington Beach area revival by the Creative Class flew under the radar of Richard Florida himself.

I first heard of Florida in a Yes Weekly! article here in Winston-Salem in 2009.  As soon as I read the article, I read The Rise of the Creative Class.  Since I'd already seen this transition happen in real life, I thought, "Yeah, of course, you get a bunch of creative people together, ambitious ones, and cool shit will happen.  After a while, the city becomes known as a cool place to be."  I saw his concept as the well-researched explanation of what I saw happen in H.B. and other action sports heavy cities (which include Austin, Texas, by the way).

Now, 16 years after his first book, nearly every city has huge issues to work out.  Rural America is flat out dying.  Small towns are struggling and opiate addiction is a bigger issue than all the things people used to talk about.  I've known Richard Florida's work explained a big part of the puzzle in what's happening in society, and why so many people are simply struggling to survive.  This took me down a path of thought which led to realizing how important Creative Scenes of all kinds are to a town, city, or region.  That's where my work is headed.  I have a lot of insights, and practical experience, in that area.

While a lot of Florida's talks get into this info, this particular interview comes across in a way that's much more palatable for local artists, poets, musicians, community organizers, and activists to listen to. 

If you think your city kinda sucks, or even TOTALLY SUCKS, and you want to make it better, listen to this.

Chicago is a dramatic example of what's happening everywhere

You hear it in this clip  at 2:14-
"They can't get no jobs."

What's happening in Chicago is what's happening in cities, large and small, across the United States.  I just ran across this article in The Atlantic, that explains the underlying issues of why people in depressed areas of Chicago can't get the good jobs there, in great depth.

I started this post quite a while ago, but didn't have the time to read the whole article.  I took the time this morning.  This article focuses on the Black communities in the low income parts of Chicago, known mostly for the crazy high murder and crime rates these days.  Meanwhile, downtown and upscale areas of Chicago are booming.  Here's a little background on issues I'm keeping an eye on related to this:

-In the U.S. today, most of the high tech jobs with high incomes are clustered in large, tech hub cities.  The main ones are: Silicon Valley(The San Jose/San Francisco Bay Area), New York City, Seattle, Boston, Austin, Los Angeles/SoCal, Washington D.C., and at a somewhat lower level, some other areas like the the Raleigh Research Triangle here in North Carolina.  Richard Florida's "Creative Class" concept explains this.  In short, "Creative people like to be around other creative people," to quote one big theme of his research.

People here in NC may not like that I put the Raleigh Triangle "at a lower level."  But according to the stats in Florida's latest book, The New Urban Crisis, an overwhelming proportion of the venture capital funding tech start-ups these days goes into downtown San Francisco (not "Silicon Valley" itself) and Manhattan in NYC.  Meanwhile, 1/2 of 1% of today's venture capital funds flows to the Raleigh Research Triangle.  Here's a good article/stats I just found on venture capital in The South.  A quick look for stats showed that roughly $148 billion in venture capital was invested in the U.S. in 2017, and the Raleigh area raised about $772 million in 2017 and 2018 ytd.

-When then professor Richard Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class in 2002, he hoped that his findings would help other large cities, and all the smaller cities, use the ideas to attract the Creative Class people, the highly creative and tech people, who, in turn, attract the major tech companies and start-ups.  In The New Urban Crisis, he writes that just the opposite happened, the high tech industry and other highly creative work has clustered even more.

-Because of this, the "best and brightest" people coming out of college, and the most creative people, have moved to the larger metros and concentrated there.  This has created a brain drain, with a huge chunk of the smartest and most creative people moving away from rural America, small towns, and small cities, to the big metros where most of the high paying jobs are.

-At the same time, in part because of Richard Florida's ideas and the "walkable city" concept popular with major architects and developers, downtowns all over have been redeveloped in the past 15-20 years.  By and large, that's a good thing.  It is attracting the better regional workers and businesses.  The downside is that if businesses and civic leaders focus most of their resources on just a downtown area, of any city, then other parts of the city may lack resources.

-But with that comes the continuing atrophy of rural America.  So we have tons of small towns and cities, and suburbs around many mid-sized cities, with huge heroin and opiate problems, more crime, and a lot of low paying and part time jobs, but relatively few high paying jobs.  Average people in rural and small town America are still struggling, already hit by the loss of good paying factory jobs 10-20-30-40 years ago.

-A lot of business people and civic leaders are well aware of this issue.  No one has figured out a good way to create HUGE numbers of solid, living wage paying jobs, in rural and small town America.  TENS of MILLIONS of living wage jobs are needed.  FAST.  Or, MILLIONS of new small businesses that can hire a few people each.

-What this article goes into, in great depth, is that the same thing is happening in the low income, largely black and minority areas of the large cities that are doing well.  We have tens of millions of young people, who grow up in rural America or in the hood, who are surrounded by few opportunities, and perhaps more importantly, few mentors on how to either find good paying work, or create small businesses of their own.

-At the same time, the vast majority of people (even homeless entrepreneurial goofballs, like me) have access to the internet, and with that, technologies, communications, and platforms that allow people nearly everywhere to interact, do work, and sell products to people across the U.S., and even around the world.  Yet there are no large scale programs teaching people to do this.

The more I watch all this unfolding, and learn new parts of the picture, like in this article, the more I think the only viable answer is turning Americans BACK into small business people and entrepreneurs.  150 years ago, most people were self-employed, we were a nation of farmers and shop keepers.  Our country was founded largely with that mentality.  I think we need to get back to that.  

Check out my art in person, or create a project of your own while here in Winston-Salem at Designs, Vines, and Wines. 



 

The coolest thing I've ever seen in Winston-Salem

To nearly all the people in the world, if you say, "Winston-Salem," people will think of two packs of cigarettes.  Period.  This is one of the problems small and medium sized cities everywhere are dealing with.  In today's Information Age world, cities that build an name for themselves as being interesting and exciting places to be and live, attract the most talented people (aka Richard Florida's "Creative Class"), which attract more talented people.  Those cities are the ones where tech companies tend to set up because that's where the good tech people want to live.

To get to that point, Winston-Salem needs to get past the tobacco-centric past and become an interesting city in the minds of talented young people.  This video that I just stumbled across is the coolest thing I've ever seen associated with Winston-Salem.  Parkour is always fun to watch, and knowing where nearly every place in this video is adds to it.  The video is also well shot and well edited, which really helps.  Now, anyone out there who wants Winston-Salem to flourish in the future, make about 100 more videos of cool stuff like this happening here.

First you make your city known in the minds of college age people around the country, and around the world.  THEN you start getting the talented biotech scientists and engineers to move here to the new Innovation Quarter.  First things first.

The jobs picture right now in 2017

Here's economic development expert Richard Florida on the different groups of workers in today's society.

Why am I so interested in jobs and creating new businesses these days?  Here's why.

The types of workers in 2017 society:

The Creative Class (arts, entertainment, science, management, etc.)  are about 35% of the working population.  As a group, they make over 50% of the wages in the U.S.  Most are doing well.  These are the jobs least likely to be replaced by new technology.

 The manufacturing workers are only about 7% of today's workers.  When you add construction and transportation workers, it rises to about 20% of total workers.  Some make good money, most just make OK money.  Many of these jobs will definitely be replaced by technology in future years.

Agriculture only employs about 1% of workers in the U.S. these days.  Most don't make a lot of money.

Service workers make up about 45% of the current workforce.  Most of these jobs don't pay that well, and many of them leave workers in or near poverty.  Millions of people work two or more of these jobs.  Many of these jobs will also be replaced by new technology in the coming years.  This is where much of the once great American middle class now works.

If we want to keep this country strong, we will need TENS OF MILLIONS of new, good paying jobs in coming years.  The only viable way I see this happening is by millions of people starting their own businesses.