Creative Scenes: Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation documentary

When it comes to Creative Scenes of people in the United States, there are only a few that rank with Greenwich Village.  Hollywood for movies and TV, New Orleans for jazz, Nashville for country music, maybe Austin these days for music and technical innovation.  Greenwich Village in New York City had a long history of artists, writers, and free thinkers.  This documentary, Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation, focuses on the folk music music scene that formed in the Village in the 1960's, and sparked the singer/songwriter movement, along with much more.  It's narrated by Susan Sarandon.

I was raised as a dorky kid in small towns and rural areas of Ohio.  As a very little kid, the radio provided my music, I remember being 5 or 6 years old and listening to Jim Croce, Three Dog Night, and The Guess Who.  I didn't know who the bands were, I just loved the songs.  It picked what I heard, depending on the station.  My mom had a country station on wherever we lived, so that was the continual soundtrack of the kitchen or living room in our house growing up.  I wasn't a fan of country music, with a few exceptions, like Johnny Cash.  I got my own record player when I was 8, in third grade, and I could play a few of my parents' albums, and my mom's old 45's, mostly older standards.  Neither of my parents were into rock n' roll. 

The first album I remember owning, that I got to pick was John Denver's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2.  Between my mom's country music, and my dad's big band and swing, I became a fan of singer/songwriters, John Denver being the first.  While he wasn't a major part of the scene, he was one of dozens of musicians of that era that made their way through the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene in the 1960's.  

The odd little bit of Manhattan, clustered around Washington Square Park, had been a cloister of all kinds of unusual and creative people for 50 years or more when it began to attract musicians like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and so many more in the early 1960's.  Beginning as folk singers, they were singing songs often written decades before.  This group mingled around Greenwich Village, talking, singing, philosophising, drinking, arguing, sharing ideas, and playing music with each other, as musicians do.  Over the course of a few years, many began to write their own songs.  They inspired each other, and millions more people, directly and indirectly, through their music, and later through the musicians following their lead.  

As a kid in rural Ohio, listening to John Denver and looking out my window at the cow pasture, even I heard of Greenwich Village.  It was one of the only art and music scenes I ever heard about as a Generation X kid in the 1970's.  Now cities everywhere have "arts districts," many far to expensive for emerging artists to live in anymore.  But some are still filled with art.  But back then, in the early and mid 1970's, Greenwich Village was one of the only known "scenes" of creative people those of us across the U.S. ever heard of,  Hollywood, Broadway, Nahsville, and New Orleans being the others.  

This documentary features many of the musicians from that scene tell their own stories of what it was like, and how it evolved while they were a part of it.  In it we hear from Pete Seger, Arlo Guthrie, Happy Traum, David Amram, Richie Havens, Oscar Brand, Judy Collins, Don McClean, Jose' Feliciano, Tom Paxton, Tom Chapin, Carolyn Hester, Buffy Saint-Marie, Steve Earle, Carly Simon, and many more.  The later part of the documentary goes more into the social and political aspects of the late 1960's, and how the folk music movement of the Village influenced the folk rock and mainstream rock music of the late 1960's and 1970's.  This is a great look at an epic period in the timeline of Greenwich Village, and why it was a cultural and creative force in 20th century America

I'm going to be looking into all kinds of Creative Scenes in this blog, going forward.  I've been writing for years about the economic troubles I see us heading into in the coming years, and how I think the 2020's will be a major transformative period in human history.  I believe we are heading out of the final phase of the Industrial Age, and into the still emerging Information Age.  I think Creative Scenes of many different varieties, from groups of musicians to high tech start-ups, and many kinds in between, will be a huge part of the change happening in this decade, and beyond.  To get an idea of what makes great creative scenes, I'll be looking at lots of them, large and small.  Greenwich Village is one of the most influential Creative Scenes in American history, so this is a great place to begin.  

The Power of Creative Scenes of people... BMX racing... Jack London... and the birth of Apple Computers

A couple of guys goofing around in a garage led to a revolution in consumer technology that changed the course of human history.  That is not an understatement.  Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were fascinated by the emerging technology of computers in the early 1970's.  Woz built the Apple 1, and Steve decided they needed to sell them to other hobbyists.  Apple Computers, now Apple, was born in 1975.  What kind of phone do you have?  These two guys were ,arguably, the most influential Creative Scene in history.

"Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara valley... There were great stables... rows of vine-clad servants' cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches."

-Jack London

 From the second paragraph of The Call of the Wild, 1903, describing the Santa Clara valley, the San Jose area of California, in the 1890's, when the Klondike gold rush began

My interest in what I now call Creative Scenes began with my first BMX race, October of 1982, in Boise, Idaho.  About ten of us from the Blue Valley mobile home park piled into my dad's big, silver,  Ford van, to go race the last BMX race of the season.  Three guys raced the week before, after we heard a track actually existed in Boise, and I tagged along to watch and coach.  They all got first or second place in their novice class.  We went back to the trailer park, and got everyone else stoked on the idea. So I talked my dad into borrowing the van the next week. We got there way too early, and rode around a very rudimentary BMX track, which seemed like the coolest thing ever to us.  

We wore faded Levi's and T-shirts, and rode bargain store BMX frames, cobbled together with mismatched, halfway decent components, some stolen.  We got pie plates with a number in marker on it, taped to our handlebars, for numberplates.  The Boise BMX scene was already solid, but not fast growing.  So even in our first or second races, in the novice class, we all raced some intermediates, and novices who had raced for months.  The track gave trophies for 1st through 3rd place.  We all went home with trophies, mostly 1sts and 2nds.  Most of the kids we raced against were on $400 to $600, top-of-the-line BMX bikes, many had full racing leathers and fancy helmets.  We shared a few old, heavy, motorcycle helmets we borrowed from dads in the trailer park.  

All day long we kept hearing kids and parents asking the same question, "Who are all these kids on crappy bikes, and why are they all fast?"  That whole summer, we had been coming out as it cooled down each evening, and riding our BMX bikes, pushing each other to get better.  I later realized we had formed a little BMX scene, completely by accident.  Isolated in the trailer park outside of town, from most of the people we went to school with, and the whole city of Boise, BMX became our thing.  We were high school and junior high kids, and we just kept trying to outdo each other, to race faster, jump higher or farther, and learn new tricks the other guys couldn't do.  By forming a little scene where BMX became our life, we improved faster than many other guys in town, who liked BMX, but also did a bunch of other activities.  We were fairly focused, day after day, and hungry to be good at something. There's not a whole lot of positive reiforcment for kids in most trailer parks. So we showed up at the last race, and beat a bunch of much more experienced racers.  

At first I wondered how that happened.  In time, I figured out we had created a hardcore little BMX scene.  I became fascinated with the scenes in BMX freestyle, and later was a part of several different  scenes as I moved around over the years.  In time I realized these scenes existed in skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, and other action sports.  I also realized they were similar to the art and music scenes that we've all heard of.  Later still, I was a part of a few art scenes, and learned that high tech start-ups, and entrepreneurial scenes also exist.  These are all different forms of Creative Scenes.

So what's a Creative Scene?  My working definition is that it's a group of two or more people who get together on a regular basis, to pursue some creative endeavor.  

The video above, which appears to be a segment of a larger program, starts with Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004.  He leaves the Boston area, home to Harvard, where he went to school, and to MIT.  He moved his fledgling social media busniess to Palo Alto, part of "Silicon Valley," officially the Santa Clara Valley on the south end of the San Francisco Bay.  The area is anchored by San Jose, and a bunch of suburb cities on the west side, heading up into the peninsula leading to San Francisco.  

From the birth of Hewlett-Packard decades before, the area had grown into THE place for cutting edge computer technology work, by 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg took his social media platform there.  From the grape arbors and fruit orchards that Jack London wrote of more than 100 years earlier, the San Jose/Santa Clara Valley area had become a massive scene of many interwoven tech scenes, some influenced by the strong counter culture wirters, hippies, and music scenes, just to the north in San Francisco.  London himself, in his day, was a part of the Carmel writing scene in the early 20th century, not far to the southwest.

It was in this large, originally defense-oriented, high technology region, an area with thousands of engineers and computer scientists, that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were raised.  They grew up in a huge a scene of interwoven high tech, and other Creative Scenes, including the R&D departments of major corporations, computer hobbyists, along with the counter culture, music, and other scenes in nearby San Francisco.  

They not only had an interest in computers and new technology as young kids, but they were surrounded by a culture of many different Creative Scenes, and a big part of the high tech industry.  As Steve Wozniak says, if he hadn't been surrounded by both the engineers and tech people, and his dad's other connections in the industry, his first score of 400 transitiors, and his first homemade computer, would never have happened.  He would have still had the interest in computers, but lacked many of the other factors that led to his and Jobs' success later on.  His story would have been much different.  Being in that area was a big part of what made the Homebrew Club, one of the most legendary high tech Creative Scenes ever, to form.  That was a key part of the story of Apple Computers, and many other early innovators in tech.

Creative Scenes can be as simple and small as two 5-year-olds drawing "cool cars" in the back of a kindergarten class, or two tween girls learning dance moves in the living room off of TikTok or YouTube.  Or Creative Scenes can be as massive as Apple, now a $2.6 trillion company, which is a scene of probably hundreds of smaller Creative Scenes interwoven inside the business.  I'm going to be writing quite a bit on the whole concept of Creative Scenes in the future, and looking at all kinds of them throughout recent history, and maybe farther back, at some point.  

We are now, in late April 2023, at the edge of what I believe will be the worst recessionary period of our lifetimes.  We are now in the "powers-at-be says there won't be a serious recession" part of the timeline, which happens for a few months right before every recession, then things really head down.  Yes, recessions and depressions suck on many levels.  But they are also times of incredible change and innovation.  Recessions are a great time to try out new ideas, because a lot of old, lame ideas come crumbling down, in many parts of society.  Economic down times are when lots of new ideas, movements, businesses, and industries are really needed.  

This is a little look at the general idea of Creative Scenes, which most of us have some knowledge of, but I think will become much more important in the next several years.  There will be much more on this concept coming in this blog, on my Patreon page, and in other my other writing.  Stay tuned...

How long Have I been thinking about Creative Scenes?

This is an article about my Sharpie Scribble Style artwork, in the local Kernersville, NC newspaper, from October of 2016.  As you can see, the idea of Creative Scenes was already on my mind then, six years ago.

I was trying seveal different blogs at the time, this was about 8 months before I started this blog (Steve Emig: The White Bear).  In some of those blogs, I wrote about the concept of  Creative Scenes, and the role they play in innovation, art, action sports, and even economic development.  I even published a blog called How to Make Your Lame City Better.  Really.  

Being stuck in North Carolina for ten years, unable to find ANY "real" job the whole time, I did a lot of thinking.  One big theme was "What would it take for area to NOT SUCK?"  Creative Scenes, inspired by what I had experienced in BMX freestyle and creative jobs (Wizard Publications, the AFA, Vision, TV crews, Cirque du Soleil), and also by Richard Florida's 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, was a big theme for me then.  Winston-Salem's Trade Street art scene actually grew, and was really cool when I left in 2018.  But there just weren't enough people buying art at any serious price to earn money from it.  You couldn't get past a hobby level, unless you sold a ton of art online.  I was selling more than most people, and I lived in a tent most of that time.  That meant a "real" job, and I couldn't get hired for anything there.  Except for about a year of driving a taxi while living in the cab, which was pointless.  

In any case, I've been thinking about Creative Scenes for a long time, and mentioned them to the reporter doing the interview.  
 

Creative Scenes: Simon Sinek on The Wright Brothers being the first to fly

Simon Sinek is probably best known for his book, Find Your Why.*  He's a huge proponent of finding the work in life that really gets your blood pumping, the work that gets you excited, day after day.  Here he is explaining that Orville and Wilbur Wright were underdogs when they made the first airplane flight.

In the last post, I explained my idea of what Creative Scenes are.  They are small groups of people working together towards creative goals.  It can be a group of people working towards separate goals, like a group of writers who all write their own books, but hang out together often, and bounce ideas and push each other to write and progress.  Or it can be a group of people, like Orville and Wilbur Wright, and their friends, who work together towards a common goal.  In this case, manned powered flight, creating a functional heavier than air aircraft.  

Samuel Pierpont Langley was older, had engineering credentials, and had both the Smithsionian Institution and the War Department backing him to create the first true airplane.  But the two bike shop owners from Dayton, Ohio, got their plane to fly first.  Simon Sinek makes the point that why people come together for a project can have a huge effect on whether or not something truly innovative comes out of it.  Great teams, with a common vision and drive, can often succeed where well funded, but less creatively motivated teams may not.  

Orville and Wilbur Wright, and the friends that helped them, were a small creative scene that kept working, failure after failure, until they finally were successful at flying their airplane in 1903.  They changed the course of history, and created the aviation industry that exploded with new innovations throughout the 20th century and beyond.  

*Not a paid link.

Creative Scenes: Where progress comes from

To be fair, this little group is an outlier, one of the most influential creative scenes in human history.  They were much more influential than most Creative Scenes.  But that wasn't apparent in the beginning, which is the point.  The Homebrew Club, including it's best known members Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, created personal computers.  Wozniak and Jobs founded Apple Computers, now Apple, which brought us the Macintosh, iPods, and iPhones, among many other innovations.  A small group of creative people, a "creative scene," can have all kinds of effects, and even change the course of human history.

They were geeks when that was something everyone did not want to be.  But they found themselves fascinated by eletronics, and the emerging technology of computers.  Here's an interview from about 2004, with six early members of the 1975 Homebrew Club, in Menlo Park, California, including Steve Wozniak.  These six geeks from the 1970's, and the others from their scene, changed the lives of nearly every single on earth.  For real.  That's how major of an effect a small creative scene can potentially have.

What is a "Creative Scene?"  My definition of a Creative Scene is a group of two or more people, focused on advancing in some creative endeavor.  Two kids in the back of a 3rd grade class trying to draw better airplanes than each other is a Creative Scene.  A group of artists at a small indie gallery is a Creative Scene.  The kids and staff working on a high school yearbook is a creative scene.  A band, no matter how good or bad, is a creative scene.  The kids riding skateboards, BMX bikes, and yes, even scooters,* at a skatepark, is a creative scene.  Two women making Aunt Agnes' gooseberry jelly and selling it online, is a creative scene.  Travis Patrana and the Nitro Circus lunatics is a Creative Scene.  Todd McFarlane and the original posse that started Image Comics were a creative scene.  Three 9-year-old girls in the front yard making up dance moves, is a Creative Scene.  Amanda Palmer and whomever she's hanging out with at this moment, is a Creative Scene.  One time Old School BMX freestyler Chris Lashua and his Cirque Mechnic is a Creative Scene.  A blog or YouTube channel's creator(s) and their followers, are a creative scene.  CBGB's in the 1970's, and later, was a creative scene.  The group of Montreal street performers that created Cirque du Soleil, was a Creative Scene.  The people riding BMX and mountain bikes at Sheep Hills today, is a creative scene.  Gary Vaynerchuk and the people at VaynerMedia is a creative scene.  Tyler Perry's movie studio in Atlanta is a Creative Scene.  Yuga Labs, a hanfdul of artistic, former punk and hip hop influenced skateboarders and BMXers from Miami, that created the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT's, and the Otherside metaverse, is a Creative Scene.  And yes, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, in their garage, Woz's cubicle, and Steve's bedroom, in 1975, were a Creative Scene... on that birthed Apple.  You get the idea.  

We all have some idea what an art scene or a music scene is.  They are not only the artists or the bands, but the local gallery owners, the patrons who buy pieces of work or go see shows, the local arts organizations that plan the First Friday Art Walk, the local bars and clubs where bands play, and all the people playing roles who support these people and the scenes.  Those are the best known kind of Creative Scenes.  

There are scenes within scenes.  There are better and worse scenes.  Most Creative Scenes don't have any major influence, except to help people become more creative, and learn skills, either creative, ogranizational, or business-wise.  A healthy creative environment, let's say a thriving city's creative community, has dozens, maybe hundreds, of loosely interconnected scenes, with many types of people playing roles in multiple scenes, moving between scenes, and bouncing off of, and inspiring each other.  This type or creative environment separates a city like Austin, Texas from say Detroit, Michigan.  Both have creative scenes, Detroit has been huge force in music from Motown to rock n' roll to early electronic music.  But it's been devastated economically, and continues ot struggle as a city.  Austin is peaking as a Creative Scene city, and currently thriving financially as a major tech hub city, where economic and creative Detroit's heydays were decades ago.  But the cheap cost of living and post apocalyptic scenes of Detroit may set the seeds for more great Creative Scenes in the future.  Time will tell.  

This theme, Creative Scenes, is something I've been learning about since the 1980's, as a BMX freestyler, and ever since, through many creative projects, jobs, and experiences.  I even lived in an indie art gallery once, back in 2005-6.  That's where my Sharpie Scribble Style art technique was born.  

Right now, in late 2022, I believe we are on the cusp of some of the biggest changes in society in modern times, which will take place over several years.  Creative Scenes is where I'm going to focus my energy for the forseeable future.  I've got a lot to say on the subject, so it's time to get to work.  Buckle up, it's gonna be a crazy ride.  

*As an Old School BMX guy, I love to make fun of scooter riders.  And then R Willy came along...  Damn him.

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.

Why I think Creative Scenes are a key to our future

Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, the summer of 1986.  This is the BMX/skate scene where I really started notice how important the actual scene it self was.  Led by visionary BMXer/skater/promoter Dave Vanderspek, he and the other pro riders, like Maurice Meyer, featured here, spent a lot of time helping us up-and-coming riders build our skills.  Thanks to their leadership, we had a place to try new things, invent tricks, and be a part of a group of similar weirdos.  This little clip includes a future BMX Plus magazine editor, Karl Rothe at 4:23, the future graphic artist who changed the entire skateboard industry, Mark McKee at 4:43, and me, a future magazine/newsletter writer and video producer, at 5:07.  Legendary street skating pioneer and Bones Brigade member Tommy Guerrero was also part of this scene. 

What is a Creative Scene?
It's any group of two or more people who get together, throw ideas around, and actually do something creative.  Art scenes.  Music scenes.  BMX scenes.  Skate scenes.  Entrepreneurial scenes.  Tech scenes.  Gaming/coding scenes.  Web design scenes.  Blog/zine scenes.  Craft scenes.  Food truck and local restaurant scenes.  You get the idea.

Why do we need Creative Scenes?
Here's why:
Most of small town/rural America is dying economically.  Here's a great Wall Street Journal article on this issue.  Even in the larger cities that do have high paying tech jobs,the majority of jobs are low paying service industry jobs.  People across the country need tens of MILLIONS of good paying jobs.  There are no large numbers of major companies to create all these jobs today.  The days of the huge factories in every town are gone.  Many of you will have to create your own jobs in many cases.  Creative scenes can turn into small, and sometimes big, businesses.  They can even become entire new industries.

We are in a decades-long transition between the Industrial Age and the Information Age.  The late futurist Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi called this Information-based Age The Third Wave.  That was the title of their 1980 book on the subject.  As we go through this transition, Industrial Age institutions and systems of all kinds are fading, or often just collapsing, and being replaced by entirely new institutions, systems, and infrastructure.  Websites, blogs, and ebooks have largely replaced books, magazines, and newspapers.  Shopping centers and malls are closing down, and being replaced by Amazon, online shops, and UPS trucks delivering goods.  Records and CD's have been replaced by Mp3's and now streaming.  TV is all but dead, and Netflix, You Tube, Roku and live streaming are taking its place.  But schools and colleges are still largely the same.  Our legal system is still largely the same.  Our health care system is still largely the same.  These and other aspects of the Industrial Age will flounder at some point, and be replaced by a new model.

Today's technology and connectivity mean that individuals, almost anywhere, can create all kinds of small businesses and ways to earn a living in this new and ever-changing world.  But tens of millions of people have been left behind, and local Creative Scenes can help bring new skills and ideas and money into areas that are struggling now.   They can also help teach new skills to older workers.

There are 7 million or more "prime working age men" out of work, and not looking for work.  Here's Nicolas Eberstadt, the main researcher into this issue.  This huge group is in addition to the officially unemployed people.  This group rivals the percentage of unemployed people in the Great Depression of the 1930's.  Because our population is much larger now, the actual number is much greater than in the Great Depression.

There are also over 20 million people, not currently incarcerated, who have a felony on their record, which makes finding a high paying, traditional job much harder.  Straight up, if we get most of these people in these two groups doing some kind of legit work, our country becomes much, MUCH stronger in nearly every way.  To do this, we need new ideas, people, and Creative Scenes, to implement these new ideas.  This can and should happen in arts, business, and through new non-profit groups.

The Federal Reserve, and other Central Banks, have complete screwed our financial system worldwide.  Here's former Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs "quant" (super math geek) Nomi Prins explaining this mess.  We're in for another big ass financial collapse like 2008, but probably worse.  So all of the things above will soon have the added pressure of a serious recession weighing them down, as well.

Wahsington D.C. is not going to fix this.  They're somewhere between impotent and just plain retarded at this point.  It's up to us.  Welcome to the DIY economy.  I think small groups of creative people are one of the best ways we can start working on these, and all the other big issues, we have to deal with.  I think Creative Scenes is a big part of the solution to these problems.

But can a handful of artsy fartsy people in some random town REALLY make a difference?
Yes.
I've seen it happen, over and over.  Here are a few examples.

In 1984, a group of Montreal street performers decided to buy a tent and create their own circus.  Things were dicey for several years.  But now, Cirque du Soleil has over 20 permanent and touring shows, a huge facility in Montreal, employs over 4,000 creative people, and brings in around $800 million a year.  Oh, and they put the Ringling Bros. and Barnum Bailey circus out of business.

This is Jason Lee's video part from the 1991 skate video, Blind's Video Days.  The part was directed by a young guy named Spike Jonze, his directorial debut.  The first song in the video ("The Knife Song" by Milk) was sung by Jeff Tremaine.  Spike and Jeff are film directors now, and Jason's an actor.  The gross income of the movies they've all worked on since this video part comes to $3.693 billion.

In 2005, three creative people got together and built a website to give artists and crafters a place to sell their works online.  They gave is a nonsense word as a name, "Etsy."  It was quite literally a small Creative Scene bent on helping people everywhere legitimize and monetize their creative works.  As of the end of 2014, Etsy had 685 employees, 54 million registered users, nearly 20 million of those active, and gross sales on the platform was $1.93 billion.

My point?  Little groups of creative people, morphing into small Creative Scenes, can have big impacts.  In some cases, that includes big businesses and incomes.  These three examples of small Creative Scenes spawning people doing big things and making big bucks, don't even include all the tech company successes we all know that started from a handful of creative people.

This Creative Scenes idea is my main focus these days.  I've been a part of many different Creative Scenes in my life, and I have a lot of experience, thoughts, and ideas on how to enable, nurture, improve, and build Creative Scenes.  Stay tuned here on this blog for a lot more on this subject.

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.

How little Creative Scenes can turn into something BIG

I was a four-year-old kid, in Ohio, in 1970, when a young guy named Scot Breithaupt in California helped invent the sport of Bicycle Motocross Racing, or BMX.  I didn't get into the sport for another 12 years.  But like millions of kids around the world, BMX was a big part of my youth.  BMX riding changed the course of my life, and yet, it didn't even exist when I was born.  How many kids being born today, when technology and life are moving much faster, will spend their lives doing things that don't exist now?

How did a young motocross rider and entrepreneur and a few younger guys start not only a sport, but a lifestyle, that traveled around the globe?  My answer is what I call "Creative Scenes."  What is a creative scene?  It's a group of two or more people, doing something, pretty much anything, creative and encouraging and continually pushing each other to improve.  We're all familiar with the idea of city having a music scene or an art scene.  But every town or city has dozens and dozens, maybe even hundreds of creative scenes.  As I learned in BMX freestyle, the trick riding side of BMX, creative sports, like skateboarding, snowboarding, free skiing and other action sports are creative scenes as well.  The older guys getting together with the classic cars they built, and the younger people in the rusty, home-built, rat rods are also creative scenes.  So are the kids drawing comics during math class in school, and the ladies knitting and gossiping in the fellowship hall at church on a Saturday.  The kids hacking their own versions of video games or creating their own old-style board games (that's a thing now) are also creative scenes.

Every village, town, or city of any size has a bunch of these creative scenes in it.  Some of these scenes, like the 70-something ladies knitting, may never get any bigger than when they start.  That's just fine.  Other groups, like Scot Breithaupt and those first few BMX riders in Long Beach, California, in 1970, grow in popularity and spread rapidly across the world.  What's the difference?

I first noticed this idea when I loaded up my dad's Ford van with all the neighborhood kids and their bikes, in October of 1982, and drove us all to a BMX race.  We were a bunch of grungy kids from a trailer park in the middle of nowhere, outside Boise, Idaho.  We'd been riding our piece of crap bikes and pushing each other all summer long.  When we went to our first race as a group, looking like Factory Team White Trash, we all kicked butt and won trohpies.  Had we been an official team, we would have beat 6 of the 7 established BMX teams that day... in our first race.

How could that happen?  It took me years to answer that question.  The answer is that, in our isolated trailer park in the Idaho desert, we got into BMX, had nothing better to do, so we just naturally pushed and competed with each other.  In doing that, we improved much faster than the riders who were riding just for trophies or points.  We were hungry to be good at something, anything, and to be better than each other.  We had something to prove.

In the 26 years since that first BMX race, I've been a part of many BMX freestyle scenes, skateboard scenes, a few art scenes, magazine staffs, TV production crews, and worked at one of the greatest creative scenes of all time, Cirque Du Soleil.  For those who don't know, Cirque du Soleil started as a group of Montreal street performers.  They now have 21 shows, some permanent, some traveling the globe.  In fact, Guy Laliberte' co-founder of Cirque, has even traveled into space as a tourist.

Scenes very widely, and some perform more social-type functions locally, like a kid's art program, for example.  Some scenes turn into sports or movements, some turn into businesses or entire industries.  Some do all of the above.

What makes a scene grow?  Visionary leaders are a huge part of the picture.  Cheap space to create (art, music, a business) also plays a huge part of the picture.  It's no coincidence that artists and musicians were the first to take over abandoned and empty lofts and factory buildings in the last 30 to 40 years.  It's also no coincidence that the thousands of empty retail buildings and warehouses in today's world will spawn new forms of art, music, sport, technology and business in the next 20 years.

As a guy who's been in dozens of different creative scenes, and also reads thick books on economic development and futurist thinking, I think our future as a country rests to a great degree on the creative scenes forming now and in coming years.

The high tech world, which holds a huge chunk of the high paying jobs in modern society, has clustered in about ten big metro areas in the United States.  Meanwhile, the hundreds of small towns and cities outside those tech hubs are largely struggling.  If we head into another recession soon, which I and several others expect, all those small cities, towns, and rural areas will really be struggling.  I think one of the best things Americans can do is to find those local creative scenes, no matter how weird they seem at the moment, and let them have some cheap space to work, innovate, and build new ideas, sports, games, products, technologies, and industries.

Can this make a difference?  Did you know Fargo, North Dakota is establishing itself as a drone hot spot?  There are a lot of great new ideas for re-energizing lagging areas on the internet these days, this is one of my favorites:


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

What will we do with all those empty buildings?

This still of the thrashed escalator area at Rolling Acres Mall is iconic to many now.  This 2014 clip was an early look at what's now called the Retail Apocalypse.  A quick online search will show a consensus of articles and videos listing thousands of stores that have closed and people expecting about 400 entire shopping malls to close within the next five years.  That's if we DON'T have a recession anytime soon.  On a timeline basis alone, we're due for a recession any time now. 

While thousands of new stores have opened, more than 6,700 retail chain stores have closed in 2017 alone.  There were thousands more in the past few years.  There are a bunch of different reasons for this.  This Bloomberg News article (Nov. 2017) adds crazy amounts of debt to the picture of retail stores losing ground to online sales, and the millennials' penchant for seeking experiences over piles of material goods.  Any way we look at it, there are tens of millions of square feet under roof becoming empty.  That's in addition to all the old factories and warehouses from decades of manufacturing decline. It looks like that this year's closing stores are just the beginning.

I happened to be born just a few miles from Rolling Acres Mall, the one in the clip above, in Akron, Ohio.  I followed my parents around that mall, and many others, as a kid.  This mall has been demolished.  But hundreds more are still standing, and the term "dead mall" is part of our vernacular now.  There's a dead mall, completely empty, fifteen miles from me right now.  I'm sitting in the McDonald's in the parking lot of another mall that's packed right now with Christmas shoppers.  But it's definitely not packed the rest of the year.  The mall behind me is doing better than most.  But two of its anchor department stores are Sears and J.C. Penney's, which are both struggling.  For now, though, it's still alive and kicking. 

My point here is that we have a HUGE amount of buildings of all kinds standing empty in this country.  We have a lot more buildings that will become empty in the coming years.  So...

What are we going to do with all that space?

Here are some of my favorite ideas:

Indoor Skatepark- Van's store/skatepark- Orange, CA- large, two story mall store
Indoor Skatepark with Amazing Art- Iianera, Spain- old church
Art Colony- Santa Fe Art Colony- Los Angeles, CA- old industrial buildings
Indoor Mountain Bike/BMX Park- Ray's MTB- Cleveland, Ohio- 100,000+ sq.ft. factory
Indoor Dirt BMX Park- Burlington Bike Park- Burlington, Washington- warehouse
Indoor (underground) Mountain Bike Park- Louisville Mega Cavern, Louisville, KY- old mine
Indoor Ropes Course/Zip Lines- Lousiville Mega Cavern
Indoor Wood BMX Park- Daniel Dhers Action Sports Complex- Holly Springs, NC- warehouse
BMX/Skateboard/Gymnastics Summer Camp- Woodward East, Woodward, PA- warehouses
Indoor Climbing Gym- Allez Up- Montreal, Quebec, Canada- old sugar silos
Martial Arts Tricking Practice Gym- Various dojos/gyms- warehouse/industrial spaces
Indoor Parkour/Freerunning Course- Unknown location, warehouse
Indoor Slack Line- Somewhere in Canada, eh- dining room
Indoor Snowboard Park- Montana Snow Center- Westerhoven, Netherlands- warehouse
Indie Art Gallery/Performance space- AAA Electra 99- Anaheim, CA- industrial space
Independent Theater- Center Stage Theater- Naperville, IL- warehouse
Public Library- McAllen, TX- old Walmart store
$1000 Movie Stage- Unknown- old barn
Privately Owned Movie Studio- Tyler Perry Studios- Atlanta, GA- decommissioned Army base

The Difference a Good Scene Can Make

The Boise BMX track around the time I started racing.  We called it Fort Boise then, because it was in a drained sewer pond behind the old Fort Boise site.  This little place changed the course of my life. 

I got into BMX in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho in 1982.  There were about 12 junior high and high school guys there, not many girls, and not much to do.  We watched bad TV re-runs all afternoon in the summer, then came out as it cooled off in the early evening.  When I first moved there, we'd get games of wiffle ball, football, or basketball going against each other every evening.  And we'd ride our BMX bikes on some little jumps and berms a forgotten motorcycle rider had made a couple years before.  It was just something for us bored teenagers to do. That's how it started.

As the summer of 1982 progressed, we rode our bikes more, and played traditional games less.  We were just a bunch of punk kids trying to learn a new trick on our bikes and out-do each other.  Our little rivalries grew and faded, and we all started breaking parts on our cheap bikes.  And we started getting better.  BMX became our thing.  I didn't realize it then, but we organically formed a little scene, pushing each other to improve.

We started buying magazines with money made babysitting or mowing lawns.  When one kid bought a magazine, he'd hide it and read the whole thing in one night, sometimes twice.  Then,  he'd bring it out the next day and we'd all flip through it, learning the names of top riders and looking at the tricks in the photos.  As our cheap bikes broke, we bought (some kids stole) better parts.  We all tried to learn a new trick without the others seeing it, we were hyper-competitive with each other, always trying to be the first to pull off a trick or move we saw in a magazine.  Because of that, we progressed fairly quickly.

In those pre-internet days, news traveled at a snails pace, and it took us several months to learn that there was a BMX race track in Boise.  For those of you not familiar, "BMX" is a short version of "bicycle motocross."  One Saturday in October, four of us and three bikes piled into Scott's mom's Ford Pinto.  It wasn't a hatchback, so it was a tight fit.  I left my bike at home, because I was the worst rider in the trailer park at that point.

We went to the track, tried it out, and coached each other on the best lines to take and where to pass other riders.  The three guys who rode, Scott, Brian, and James, all won trophies.  We were hooked.  We headed back to the trailer park like we'd just conquered a foreign land or something.  When the other kids saw our trophies and heard our stories, the plan immediately began for the next race.  Unfortunately, that was the last race of the year.

Early that next Saturday, we piled in my dad's Ford Van, about nine of us, all with bikes, and unleashed our low-budget, but high energy crew on the local BMX scene.  Most of us had "K-Mart Special" bikes with a few upgraded components.  Most of the local kids had bikes that ranged in price from $350 to $600 each.  They had full motocross style leathers as uniforms, we had shabby Levi's and T-shirts.  They had custom number plates, we had paper plates with numbers hand written by the officials taped to our handlebars.  That day, I first saw the difference a tight scene can make.

All day long we heard one phrase over and over from kids and parents; "Where did all these fast kids on piece-of-shit bikes come from?"  It was the first race for most of us, the second race for  those three.  We were not only competitive, but we all went home with trophies, mostly first and second place.  We had everything going against us... except the thing that mattered most that day.  Hunger.  We lived BMX.  That's all we had to cram our teenage anger, frustration, and energy into.  Even before that first race, BMX was our life.  We had something to prove to the world.  We came from a bunch of families that were more dysfunctional than most, and we all had issues.  BMX gave us something to focus on, to be good at, and to begin to progress as a human being, not just a bike rider.

That desire for personal progression shaped the whole course of my life.  I went on to take chances, on my bike and off, that I never dreamed of early on, and that many wouldn't want to try.  I learned, first on a physical level, then on a life level, to get back up every time I fell down.  Or was pushed down.  Or punched in the head (that's for you Scott).   I'm still trying new things and progressing today.  And even now, at 51 years old and really overweight, I still have the urge to ride a bike and keep progressing.

Financially, my life's a mess.  Like many, I got stuck in an industry that  changed drastically due to new technology.  But I'm still going, still at it, and my artwork is starting to open some doors.  Now, 35 years after that summer in Blue Valley Trailer Park, I look at scene of people pushing each other in a totally different way.  Over those three and a half decades, I've learned that much of the progress in the world comes from small groups of people pushing each other to get better.  Scenes.  Art scenes. Music Scenes.  BMX, skateboard, and other action sports scenes.  Entrepreneurial scenes.  High Tech scenes.  These are all loosely connected.  My work I'm doing these days is trying to share the importance of these small scenes, especially creative scenes, how they grow, and to help build better ones. 

What are "Creative Scenes?"

Here's a cool, and fairly new, part of the art and music scene here in Winston-Salem, NC.  The Art Park.  Officially it's called Artivity on the Green.  What was an abandoned lot a couple years back is now a cool looking little park, with murals by local artists on the back wall.  There was a high school aged band playing in the green loops in the back last Friday.  The red towers are meant to harken back to Winston's industrial days, and they spout steam at night, like the smokestacks back in the day. 

In the last post I wrote about how "Creative Scenes" are not only cool things for a city to have, but actually a key part of any town, city, or region's economy in today's world.  Some of you are probably asking:

What's a Creative Scene?

A Creative Scene is two or more people who are into some type of creative work, and who talk, bounce ideas around, compete, collaborate, and ultimately push each other to improve.  People in Creative Scenes usually progress faster than creative people working alone.

A Creative Scene can be two kids in 3rd grade who try to draw comic book characters.  It can be a garage band.  It can be the kids in a skatepark skateboarding and riding bikes.  It can be the artists in a local indie gallery.  It can be a couple of entrepreneurs working on a new idea in the garage or spare bedroom.  It can be a big city's orchestra.  It can be the local theater company.  It can be a world touring band like Metallica playing sold out shows in different countries. 

What every town or city needs to encourage these days is a "scene of Creative Scenes" that interact and mingle with each other.  This is where new ideas, from a local park clean-up campaign, to a new song, to a multi-billion dollar tech company, often start.  Some of these ideas turn into businesses, and even entire new industries.  Other scenes provide a "Creative Ecosystem" that attract talented people from the region, state, or even around the world. 

Creative Scenes in today's economy

I first saw this band play live a year or so after this local TV show performance. Most of the hundreds of millions of people who've heard their music since would be hard pressed to identify them from from this video if their name wasn't there.

People of all ages and all walks of life have an urge to create something.  They start creating.  Our school system, designed 130 years ago to turn kids into compliant factory workers, stamps the creative urge out of most people.  But not all.  Some continue to create, despite the pain and oppression thrown at them from the larger world.  These people usually move out of their oppressive towns and cities and into creative scenes formed earlier by similar people, usually in large cities. 

These little groups of people try new things, bounce ideas off each other, and progress in their crafts.  Ideas are their commodities, and these people create our new pictures, paintings, music, sculptures, buildings, technology, software, games, businesses, sports, pastimes, and a lot of new products.  In today's constantly changing world, these people create the new industries and the new jobs.

Everyone has seen this happen time after time, especially in the high tech world.  Yet, most civic leaders still spend much of their time oppressing their creative people, and propping up the last vestiges of the Industrial Age that haven't collapsed yet.  In doing so, the people running towns, cities, states, and much of the federal government are sewing the seeds of their own financial ruin. 

A handful of large cities comprise most of the economy of the United States, and are literally carrying the rest of the country financially.  Most of our country is struggling.  Even worse, they don't want to admit they're struggling. 

The economic future of EVERY small village, town, city, region or state is in the IDEAS in the heads of the people in that region.  Civic leaders can't FORCE creative scenes into existence.  But they CAN enable, support, and nurture the CREATIVE SCENES they have, and help those people rebuild the cultural and economic future of their region.  If they don't, the MOST CREATIVE PEOPLE in their areas will move to the biggest cities where they can live and work with like-minded people. 

No creative scenes, no economic future for your town, city region, or state.  It's as simple as that these days.  Do you want your region to have future or not?

My work in this world these days is to help people, find, create, build, and nurture their Creative Scenes.  Why are you here?

The band above has sold over 39 million albums since that video was shot.  I know for a fact that has helped the city where they lived most of that time.  I used to live there, too.