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.

Time to think... in jail

Two weeks ago tomorrow, I managed to get myself arrested for the first time ever in my 51 years on Earth.  I landed in a holding cell once, because of a traffic warrant back in about 1989.  But that's it.  I was homeless when I was arrested, and got into the kind of trouble homeless people tend to get into.  I won't go into any details about that, since the court date is coming up.

I was basically deaf in my left ear due to the half a bug stuck in it that I wrote about in the last post.  So I had a hard time understanding some of the questions I was asked.  When I was offered a phone call, I blanked out, and didn't call anyone.  I wound up spending three days in county jail.

That gave me a lot of time to think about my artwork and writing.  I'm making progress with my artwork, and I'm really stoked on that.  I really want to get a camera so I can start shooting my own photos to make drawings of. 

But my writing and blogging have been bouncing around all over the place.  I'm an amateur futurist at heart, I read big books most people don't read, and listen to a lot of online lectures most people don't listen to.  That gives me a better idea of some of the big problems lurking in our future. 

I'm also a guy who likes to brainstorm ideas and possible solutions for problems we'll have to deal with in the future.  So I've written a bunch of blog posts about things that people in this area could do that I think would help build the art, music, and other creative scenes, and create more jobs.  I use this area as an example of the smaller cities and towns around the country that don't have huge tech companies drawing money and talent into their region. 

But I realized that the people actually running things around here don't want to hear my ideas.  I don't have a PhD in economic development.  I've never taken a single college course.  And, I was homeless all summer, and for several of the last 15 years, even though I was working most of that time.  Nobody in a position of power really wants a homeless guy publishing ideas about the city or town they're running. 

So I've decided to stop writing about this specific area as an example of both good and bad things happening in our world today.  I'm going to focus more on the ideas themselves, and getting my ideas out to the people who are more likely to be open to those ideas. 

As Americans, we have a lot of big challenges to deal with in the coming years.  In addition to issues like climate change, a slow growing economy, and social issues like crime and the growing opioid epidemic, we have the "retail apocalypse" wiping out hundreds of thousands of jobs.  We have 400 malls expected to close in the next few years, along with the 5,000 + stores closed this year alone.  Our country has a recession about once a decade, and it's been 9 years since the Great Recession.  We have major fractures in BOTH major political parties, and yet another "get nothing done" Congress.  We also have a serious study projecting that 47% of all jobs could be taken over by technology in the next 20 years.  The top tech people are really freaked out about that issue, but few others think about it. 

There are a ton of big issues looming, and happening right now.  These are some of the ones I'm thinking about and looking for solutions to.  So I'm going to keep writing about these topics, along with old school BMX, skateboarding, and other stuff I'm interested in.  But I'm not going to talk about the area I now live in, and how it stacks up against this region or that region.  I'll look at these issues as things that are happening many places, and write about ideas any of these areas could think about to deal with future issues as they arise.