Pinterest is the Bucket for your Bucket List... for guys

Just to prove that Pinterest is not just a women's site for crafts, snacks and D.I.Y. home projects, here's a collection of weird vehicles the site popularized.  One man helicopter?  Hell yeah.

Pinterest, very simply, is an online version of a bulletin board, cork board, or the walls of your cubicle.  It's a place to collect and look at photos of really cool stuff.  

We all have dreams.  We have goals.  We may have a Bucket List of things we want to do, or places we want to go before we kick the bucket.  We also have an internet chock full of billions of photos.  When you sign up for Pinterest, you get a dashboard, like any other online social media platform.  You build "boards," which is a section where you can look at photos from Pinterest itself, and pull others from all over the internet, and collect them.  You can also create your own pins to share with others.  Then you collect photos, or "pins."  

Every time you open the site up, Pinterest shows you a whole bunch of new photos it thinks you might like.  You scroll though, click on the icon on the ones you like, decide which "board" you want to pin it to, and click again.  Though I got into Pinterest to promote and help sell my Sharpie drawings (which it did help, search #sharpiescribblestyle" on Google images, Instagram or Pinterest), I wound up just liking the site.  In the evening, when my brain's usually tired from the stuff I did all day, I love to listen to something online, a podcast or show, and add pins to my Pinterest boards.  For me, it's pleasurable and relaxing.  So I've been doing this just for the hell of it.  I really dig Pinterest.  Here are a few of the boards on the new Block Bikes Pinterest page.

Evel Knievel

Mat Hoffman

Huge Bike Air

Bike memes

There are personal pages, and you can open a business page, which is why I'm writing this blog post today.  Over the last month, as I've been blogging and doing other social media for Rich Bartlett's Block Bikes Online BMX store, I've also been building up a Pinterest page.  I have well over 1,000 photos pinned to the various boards at this point.  And I'm just getting started.  You can check it out here:  Block Bikes Pinterest page, but you need to sign up to see it all.  You can get a good glance without signing up, but need ot sign up to dig into it all.  It takes a few minutes.  No biggie.  Here are a few more of the boards I've made on it:

Dream BMX road trips

Crazy bike bails

Tweak: Leary's and lookbacks

Tabletops

So what is Pinterest good for?  There are several things.  For one, like your cubicle wall or a cork board, it's a cool place to put photos of places you want to visit, or cars, bikes, motorcycles, airplanes or other big purchases you want to get some day.  It's a good place to put visual representations of your goals.  It's a good place to collect photos on any theme or area of interest.  Pinterest is a great place to get inspired, either by the thousands of quotes, or by the art, design, cooking, craft, or DIY projects.  It's a great place to get ideas for most anything you want to do.  You can collect photos of epic cars or motorcycles, hovercrafts, or ice cream sundaes.  On my personal board, I have something like 800+ pins on a board called "Ridiculous desserts."  Hey, that's me.  I also have a board with about 75 pins of pizza, and one called "Cinnamon rolls and pancakes."  I also have over 1,000 photos pinned of Bruce Lee, my first hero as a kid.  A thousand.  Meanwhile, here are a few more boards on the new Block Bikes Pinterest page.

DIY projects for old bike parts

Old school BMX skateparks

Bikes jumping cars

Banana seat bikes

Now, if you have a business, any kind of business, you should have a website, blog, and some social media.  That's simply part of the game these days.  With a business page on Pinterest, you can create your own pins with text and a link to your site tied to the pin.  Pinterest is a good way to drive traffic to your website, blog, or social media, which is a part of what I'm doing right now, with this blog post.  A small part.  There are only about a dozen linked pins of the 1,000+ pins on the page.  Plus the link is on the front on the page, under the title.  If you want to buy a bike from us, you can find the site.  I'm not worried about that. 

As I mentioned up top, I got into Pinterest when I Googled Sharpie art online, an image search, and saw none of my drawings come up.  One big thing I noticed was that about half of the art that did come up in my search was photos from Pinterest.  So I built a Pinterest page, tagged my own art with tags, started using one main hashtag, #sharpiescribblestyle, and my stuff comes up big time now.  If you ask about my art now, I say, search #sharpiescribblestyle.  I don't care if you search on Google images, Instagram, Pinterest, or even Twitter, you WILL find my art.  The problem was that I was starting from below zero financially, and my original drawings didn't sell for enough to make me a living.  I couldn't come up with the capital to jump up to a profitable level. So now I'm telling you business people some tips on using Pinterest, which can drive a bunch (technically, a shitload) of traffic to your sites, and  really build your web presence.  All this while I'm doing the same type of promotion for Block on their Pinterest page.  Here are a few more of the boards where I've collected photos on individual riders.  

Brian Foster

Chris Doyle

Morgan Wade

Corey Martinez

Dakota Roche

There are a handful more.  The guys I picked are kind of random so far.  And I'm just getting started.  Like I said, I just plain LIKE doing stuff on Pinterest.  So I'm going to keep doing this.  It would be cool if you check out the Block Bikes page.  Some of you will, no matter what I say here.  That's cool.  More than that, I want you guys to check out Pinterest itself, because it does have a ton of stuff that's cool for men.  And the more guys that get into it, the better the whole thing gets.  In addition to collecting photos, you can message others, do joint boards, use it to relax, or use it to blast a ton of people to your own business sites and social media.  

Here's my personal Pinterest page, and my biggest board is "Street Art/Urban Murals," which has 2,470 pins.  My second biggest is actually "Action Sports Women."  But there's a bunch of BMX freestyle, art, 1,010 pins of nearly every Bruce Lee photo online, some punk rock, 818 crazy desserts, and a bunch of Mark Twain quotes, among other things.  

   

So that's it.  I think Pinterest is cool for guys.  It will get cooler if a bunch more of you get on it as well.  If not, whatever.  I'm not leaving it, and it will help us sell a ton of shit here at Block Bikes in the coming months and years.  What you do is up to you.  Have a good weekend.

 

 

Freestyle BMX Tales Zines #1 & 2 are available NOW

These are the masters of the two zines.  I'm finishing them up today and tomorrow.  Both are stories from my time riding at The Spot in Redondo Beach, California in 1986.  Each zine is 48 zine pages, which is really fat for a zine.  Once I got writing tales, I wrote over 100 pages of rough drafts, that's why there are two.  I'm finishing laying out Zine #2 right now, and I'll be ready to ship them (plus a homemade sticker pack and maybe some other goodies) by this Thursday, December 27th. 

Get yourself a Christmas present! 
To order your set, Paypal $15 to me at stevenemig13@gmail.com . Postage paid in the continental U.S..  (It's steven with a "v", not steve) add your mailing address, or FB message or email me your address.  Elsewhere in North America, add $5 shiping.  U.K. and Australia orders add $10 shipping.  Every zine will be signed and numbered in order of the orders I receive.

In 1986, during my short stint at Wizard Publications, I was roommates with Gork and Lew, and riding nearly every night with Craig Grasso, Chris Day, R.L. Osborn, Andy Jenkins, and hanging out with McGoo, who brought Ceppie Maes and John "Dizz" Hicks down from time to time.  So those are the guys who feature in some of the stories.  

Most of you remember my blog, Freestyle BMX Tales, which I published over 500 freestyle stories in back in 2009-2012.  Unfortunately, I took it down during a dark time after my dad died in 2012.  I published another version for a while, about 65 posts worth, back in 2015-2017.  But I decided it's time to put some of my tales of the early BMX freestyle days into a hard copy, physical version. 

Zines by their very nature, are collector's items as soon as they're published, and we all know that there's a serious collector's market in BMX these days.  As the publisher, I think $15 is a fair price with that in mind.  Fat, 48 page zines, actually cost a bit to make.  I'm going to limit this to 243 total copies (plus a few promotional media copies, not numbered.) I doubt I'll come anywhere close to selling 243 sets, but that's a big number to cut it off at.

I've been doing zines since 1985, many of you know that.  My first zine landed me the job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, which changed the entire course of my life. I landed, much to my surprise, in the BMX freestyle industry, and led to working with several of the people making freestyle happen back then. 

I really wanted to have these ready to ship before Christmas, but with my current sketchy living situation, and the sheer amount that I wrote for these, I couldn't make it happen.  But I'm squaking it in before Christmas so you can do a little (well deserved) shopping for yourself this afternoon.

Remember, they're signed and numbered, cool guys get lower numbers, so you can show'em off at the next old schooler event in your area.  Hope everyone's stoked on them.

The Ultimate Weekend video story 3: The H Ramp

The part of the video I'm talking about today is the H-Ramp, the mini ramp segment from 2:06 to 4:28.  The main rider is Keith Treanor, in the white T-shirt, and also Alan Valek in the black shorts.   Local Huntington Beach flatlanders Sean Johnson (the black dude) and Andy Mucahy are in there, and I can't remember the name of the guy with the long hair.

Sit down my little childrens, it's time for a lesson in bikin' from way back in the dark ages.  If you just watched the clip of the H-Ramp at the times above, you're probably thinkin,' "That's some really boring mini-ramp riding set to some guitar guy playing elevator music."  OK, fair assessment by today's standards.  But this was waaaaaay back in 1990.  Money was tight, sponsors were largely gone, we burned all our uniforms in a huge bonfire at the last AFA flatland contest.  OK, that last part didn't happen, but it should have.

In 1990, the widepread popularity of flatland was fading, street riding was still growing in leaps and bounds, there were no skateparks in Southern Caliornia (really... NONE), and halfpipes had taken over in place of the quarterpipes of the years before.  Two and a half years earlier, on a back street in in Costa Mesa, CA, a legal battle took place that ultimately changed both skateboarding and BMX forever.  But almost no BMXer knew about it.  But me.

Led by skateboarder Paul Schmitt, a handful of skateboarders rented a house on Towne Street, lodged between Placentia and Monrovia, and 18th and 19th, in the Costa Mesa industrial area.  Schmitt's skate company, Schmitt Stix, was part of the Vision world, and Vision's main building was a couple blocks one way, and the wood shop that built the boards was a couple blocks the other way.  And Unreel Productions, the Vision video company where I worked, was housed in a new, upscale office complex a block from Vision.  The skaters, Paul, John Lucero, and a few others, were close to work, close to their sponsor, and on a chill little street hoping they'd have fairly tolerant neighbors.  So, being skaters, they built a 9 foot tall backyard halfpipe.  Some of the neighbors complained, since there's always some douchebag who hates any noise in every neighborhood.  The city was called, and code enforcement came to check out the ramp.

Now at the time, backyard skateboard ramps were completely unknown to normal people.  Most people had never seen one, and didn't know they existed.  But Paul Schmitt and crew, being smart and pretty industrious, had built a halfpipe that was solid, not dangerous by construction standards, and didn't even qualify as a fire hazard.  Being the only halfpipe anywhere around, attracted skaters from quite a ways for evening sessions.  But, code enforcement, being the nebulous world of obscure city ordinances that it is, found a law that the ramp broke.  You couldn't build anything over six feet high in a Costa Mesa backyard without getting the plans approved by the city.  Paul and the skaters argued their case, and all of us at Vision heard about legal fight day to day.  The Man was keeping good skaters down.

After a lot of back and forth, the skaters simply chopped the top three feet off of their nine foot tall vert ramp.  The six foot ramp was no longer an issue, and the guy who complained the about the noise was told he just had to deal with it.  The skaters began stopping sessions at dusk, and a relative peaceful state was achieved on Towne Street.

But something else happened by accident.  The ramp was suddenly quite a bit under vert, since it was chopped off, which made airs pretty much impossible, but it made a lot of lip and coping tricks more possible.  Paul Schmitt and the skaters of the house, in their battle with the city of Costa Mesa, created the world's first skateboard mini ramp, as seen at 1:12 in this 1987 Schmitt Stix video.  At the time, skaters like Schmitt, Lucero, Mark Gonzales, Gator, John Grigley, and a whole bunch more started skating the Towne Street ramp.  They realized that there was quite a bit to be tried on an undervert ramp, and word got around the skate world.  I heard about this, and saw some video from time to time, because I was the guy who made copies of any video that anyone in the Vision Skateboards world needed.  Mostly a boring job, but I heard about the Towne Street ramp, new pools, new ditches, and other spots sessioned by Vision skaters.  As a hardcore BMX guy, that was a great perk of my job.

But the rest of the BMX world heard none of this.  BMXers built launch ramps, and the early 2-Hip Meet the Street contests, starting in 1988, had small ramps, often like bits of a cut up mini ramp.  But the 4 to 6 foot tall, under vert halfpipe, was a skate only thing for a couple of years.

A few other people started building mini ramps, since they could fly under the radar of local authorities, and since they opened up transition riding to a lot of street skaters.  One of these early mini ramps was the H-Ramp, several miles inland, in Santa Ana.  A dad who was good at building things had a big backyard and a son who liked to skate.  He built two mini ramp halfpipes, 4 or 5 feet tall, side by side.  Then he added a middle section that connected them, with a 3 or 4 foot spine, an idea born in the Powell-Peralta, Bones #3, Animal Chin video.  When asked later about the secret Animal Chin ramp, the Powell skaters said the back to back vert ramps with a spine was actually too gnarly to try most of the ideas they had.  So when Unreel Productions got the job of putting on the biggest skate vert contest ever in 1989, we melded the two ideas, and made a ramp with a vert spine to a mini ramp at the Vision Skate Escape.  It was the first time a lot of skaters ever rode a spine ramp, and set the stage (literally) for some new tricks that weekend.  The Vert/mini spine combo was way more shredable than the huge spine of the Chin ramp, and got the idea of both mini ramps and spine ramps into the skate world.

Meanwhile, in the big backyard in Santa Ana, the two mini ramps with the middle mini-spine connector section made it look like a big letter "H," and it became known as the H-Ramp.  Skaters from far and wide showed up to session there.  The "H" shape lasted for a year or so, and then the ramp got re-configured and rebuilt in a few different ways as time passed.  You can see the H-Ramp a year earlier, with skater Marty "Jinx" Jiminez sessioning it at 50:14 in Vision's Barge at Will (1989).  If you watch Barge at Will, you'll see the mini ramp idea was all over the skate world by 1989, just two years after the Towne Street Ramp, with 10 or more different mini ramps showing up in the video.

Sometime in early 1990, BMXers John Povah and Keith Treanor got wind of the H-Ramp, and got the OK, to start sessioning it on a regular basis.  So why am I going to so much detail about this mini ramp, in a video segment that's alright, but definitely doesn't blow your socks off?  Because the H-Ramp segment in The Ultimate Weekend was the very first time a mini ramp showed up in a BMX video.  Serioiusly, the first one.  Much of the footage in this section was shot on the second time Keith rode there, which is the second time he ever rode an actual mini ramp.  Keith went on to become a mini ramp ruler later on, but this is him just getting used to one.  That's why he seems ot be doing a lot of tailtaps.  This was one of the earliest segments I shot for the video, and I didn't go back to get better footage of Keith there because I knew there were a couple more mini-ramp segments later on.

Making The Ultimate Weekend, I didn't set out to have the first "this" and the first "that."  I just wanted to make a good quality, "professional" video, that showed the actual riding all of us were doing in my Huntington Beach area scene and around Southern California in 1990.  I wanted fresh riding, a lot of different riders and styles, and one rider that was going to session with all these people that the video would seem to follow around.  That rider, who I actually had agree to the idea, was former GT rider Jess Dyrenforth.  He was a good all around rider.  I knew him fairly well, we was pretty well known, and my video was going look like I followed him around to all these sessions in one amazing weekend.  But Jess was getting into Rollerblading really seriously then, and he just kept flaking out on me.  He wasn't being a dick, he was just super busy.  Then I met Keith Treanor and John Povah at the Oceanview jump, and Keith was this hot, new rider, who was hungry as hell, and always had time to ride.  So he became the main guy in the video, and John was there a lot as well.

I have a couple of more memories from the H-Ramp, besides me sucking at riding it, that is.  My boss at Unreel, Don Hoffman, went to shoot some video there for one of our Vision videos.  Don is the guy on the left in this clip, interviewing AFA head, Bob Morales.  It might be the Marty Jiminez footage I linked above when this happened, I'm not sure.  But at the time, the deck on the H-Ramp was eight feet wide on one part, and four feet wide on another.  So Don was shooting with one of Unreel's huge, $50,000, 35 pound Betacam cameras.  He stepped back, thinking the deck was 8 feet wide, but was on the narrow section, and fell off the back of the ramp, which was 5 feet high.  That sounds pretty funny, but he fell backwards, with his eye up to the viewfinder, and the massive 35 pound camera landed on his face.  He did something like $5,000 damage to the camera, and $7,000 damage to his face.  Plus he looked like the elephant man for about a week.  Poor Don.  But he eventually healed, and we all gave him shit about it for a year or so. 

My other memory is one day, probably after I made the video, I was riding the H-Ramp with Keith, John, Jess, and Jess's girlfriend, a chick named Angie Walton.  Angie was riding there on rollerblades, and was about the first woman riding ramps on blades.  Jess was switching, riding his bike a bit, and then the blades.  At one point, we were all tired, and sitting there on the parts of the ramp talking.  Angie was trying to learn some kind of handstand drop-in thing.  She needed someone to hold her legs up in the handstand, as she tried to figure out how to balance so she could actually drop-in from there. I was the closest person, so she asked me. 

So Angie is upside down, in a handstand on the coping, wearing T-shirt and pretty short shorts, I'm holding her legs as she's doing a handstand, and her boyfriend Jess is 20 feet away.  The weird part was that I could see right down her shorts, and she kept directing me to lean her legs a little one way of the other, I'd look down, and be looking down her shorts by accident.  Sure, I'm a guy, and she's was really good looking, but I really was actually trying to be a gentleman about the whole thing, and not stand there staring at her down her shorts.  And Jess was watching, trying to help her figure out these drop-in things while I'm trying to not to look down her shorts.  I'm a dork to start with, and it was just this weird situation that stuck in my mind.  Her underwear was pretty standard issue white women's panties, I couldn't avoid getting a glimpse.  I guess it never occurred to Angie, she just wanted to learn that trick, oblivious to the weird view she had on display from my angle.  So if you stumble across this post Angie, I really was trying not to be a perv that day. 

Angie, by the way, went on to start Daily Bread, the top inline magazine for years, and to start this other little idea with roadie/promoter Kevin Lyman... called the Warped Tour.  Really.  I actually called her up looking for a job on it when I first heard about it.  She didn't know who the fuck I was.  Kevin, was the guy whose crew built the stage for the Vision Skate Escape contest, linked above.  Looking for a clip of Angie skating, I found this interview, which I listened to the first 20 minutes of, it's pretty damn funny.