Fabio Wibmer in the snow

Ninja drop from a helicopter onto a snowy mountain... and that's just the start.  I saw this on YouTube a couple days ago, and was blown away.  Then it came across Facebook, and I shared it.  But that's just a really short clip.  Here's the full thing.  A little goofy with the snow cops, but freakin' amazing.

All us BMXers from northern places, Boise, Idaho, in my case, spent the winters jonesin' to ride.  I once had pictures of me doing kicked out cross ups off a two foot high jump made of snow in sub zero weather.  We also used to clear off a patch of ice on the Blue Valley trailer park pond, then ride across the snow, and do flat track-style, one foot down slides across the shear ice.  It was a blast.

Mountain bike visionary Fabio Wibmer takes snow riding to an ridiculous level in this video.  Enjoy.

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

A video for businesses and civic leaders who hate the internet, social media, and obscure bloggers who have more pageviews than their websites

If you have a business, you're in competition with every other business AND media company.  If you have a city and want to create jobs or new businesses, you are in competition with every city and town around the world.  That's the nature of our connected 21st century world.  Here's something else you may not think of, YOU are a media company.  Your business IS a media company.  Everyone can connect to most of the world with your smart phone, tablet, or laptop.  That has changed the game in a big way.

If you don't learn to make use of your "media company," your business, town, or city will suffer.  If you don't actively "create content" (text, audio, video), on a regular basis, and distribute in multiple channels, then you're already losing.  If you don't purposely connect with people; your co-workers, customers, perspective residents, and others, on a continual basis, then your are setting the stage for your own demise, and that of your business or city.  This is one huge reason why much of rural and small town America is struggling and having a hard time finding the numbers of well paying jobs they need. They simply haven't been properly introduced to these ideas.

This interview is about four years old, which is fairly ancient in a tech enabled age.  But, as I've learned in a big way this past week, there are a lot of people who are operating on older concepts and ideas, leftovers from the Industrial Age, and haven't dived into this world yet.  This video is a great introduction to the ideas of how today's world actually works.  If you want to be successful at anything in the next 20 years, you need to learn this stuff.  It's as simple as that.

Seth Godin has one of the oldest and best known blogs in the world.  He's also an entrepreneur and author of many books about internet marketing and how today's technology changes the business and social world.

Mitch Joel was a co-founder of a digital marketing agency (new form of old school ad agencies), and has a background in the rock music and music magazine industries.  He also is a longtime podcaster.

These guys get  how business actually works after all this technology has changed the underlying way we connect with other people, who we can connect with, and who we can earn money working for.  The game has changed.  It's as simple as that.  That's why a person like me, currently living in a tent, can walk to a place with wifi, buy a drink, and write a blog that gets more views than most any website in my city.  You don't learn this stuff in college.  You learn it by self-educating, reading, listening, and watching the things online that talk about the technical aspects, and the strategy behind these technologies and techniques.  Enjoy.

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

Damn camera guy in the way...

I'd like to thank Ken Paul for this photo he shot and apparently just found again.  That's Old School Canadian rider Rob Dodds in the air.  He says it probably a warm up air, maybe a 540.  Considering this is from 1989 at Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, that's a big 540, if that's what it is.  The reason I'm thanking them for finding this is because I'm the cameraman in the foreground.  I joke a lot these days about "my life in the background" in the 80's, because my assorted BMX/skate industry jobs landed me in the background of a bunch of photos.  Another funny thing is that when Windy Osborn shot the first few photos of me as a new editorial assistant at Wizard Publications, I was drinking a can of Coke, and she shot it with a fisheye lens, so the bottom of the can pretty much hid my face.  Other photos, taken soon after, were shot so my face always ended up being covered or hid because I was turned away.  It was a running joke at Wizard and then with other photographers for a while.  If you took a photo of me, you couldn't show my face.  So here's another photo like that. Too funny.  Just for the record, only one camera has broken when someone took a photo of my face.  Seriously, they were taking photos of the crew  for our security passes when I worked on a Cirque du Soleil tour.  After taking taking my photo, the camera broke, and they had to find another one.

On my end, I worked at Unreel Productions, the Vision video company, from December 1987  through 1988, and I was basically a a production assistant, what they call a PA in the TV industry.  My main job was dubbing copies of tapes of one thing or another for people throughout the Vision empire of companies.  But I did a little bit of everything, like running errands, picking up supplies, manning the phones at lunch, training the receptionists, and everything nobody else wanted to do.  I knew I had job security,though, because I was the only one who knew how to change the toilet paper roll in the front bathroom at the office.  So they couldn't fire me.

Sometime in late '88 or early '89, Pat Wallace, the staff cameraman, moved on to another job, and I became the new cameraman.  It sounds really cool, but mostly I did my same job, and then went out on video shoots once in a while.  The cool part was getting sent to every 2-Hip King of Vert and Meet the Street contest in 1989.  Since I was the token BMX guy in a crew of older surfer guys, it was great to travel to those on the Vision dime.  In those days, we used pro quality Sony Betacam video cameras that weighed 35 pounds and cost $50,000 each.  That's not a typo.  Broadcast quality cameras were crazy expensive in the late 80's.

The Kitchener contest was the first I traveled to as cameraman, and I had to rent an Ikegami Betacam, and then make sure I actually knew how to work it, once in Canada.  I traveled with a very attractive woman from the Vision promotions office, whose name I can't remember now.  That's probably good, because I was really a dork then, and probably made an ass out of myself around her. Like when we got to the hotel and I realized I hadn't booked a room.  I thought she handled that stuff as the promotions person.  I asked if I could crash on the floor of her room.  She was a seasoned traveler, a real road warrior who had worked for the NFL, and said something like, "No fucking way, you're sleeping the rental car if they're out of rooms."  I managed to luck out, there were empty rooms so I got one.  I guess March isn't a big tourist month in Ontario.

In typical BMX fashion, I ran into Rob Dodds while shooting the practice session that evening.  That's probably when the photo above was taken.

I met Rob and a whole host of other Canadianfreestylers when I went with my Idaho teammate Jay Bickel and family to a contest at Whistler, British Columbia 3 or 4 years earlier.  Since we were all there for a week in Whistler, we rode all day, sessioning with Eddie Fiola and Chris Lashua, who were taking a break from the GT Brittania Tour.  We all got to know each other pretty well during that week.  When I talked to Rob at this contest, he was looking for a room to crash in, having traveled from Western Canada.  I had a big couch in my room, and offered it up.

As luck would have it, the room beside us was the weekend home to Dennis McCoy, Steve Swope and Mat Hoffman.  Like every contest, we were wandering around talking and hanging out that night in different rooms.  The talk of the weekend was some Canadian guy named nicknamed the Terminator, and rumor was that he had learned some kind of backflip trick.  This was before the flip fakie and flair were even considered possible, even by Mat.  Some people said he was going to do an abubaca to backflip, some said a backflip fakie.  Sure, those don't seem so crazy today, but this was 1989, before all those young backflip triple whipper guys of today's scene were even born.  When it came to the am finals, the Terminator tried some kind of abubaca thing, leaned back, and just took a hard slam.  There was a big let down to the 300 or so of us in that gymnasium.  It was like the whole weekend of hype fizzled out like a dud bottle rocket.

Several of  the big name riders were trying to huck a 900.  Mike Dominguez had come agonizingly close at the final Enchanted Ramp contest in 1988, and he said held landed a couple on his own ramp, but never got video of them.  So the world hadn't seen one yet.  Several guys tried, and young Mat Hoffman hucked an attempt and, like Mike D., just barely missed landing it.

So he tried another one.  I was on the opposite deck, banging elbows with John Ker and the other photographers.  I had the only professional quality betacam in the room.  Mat's Skyway teammate, Eddie Roman, had his S-VHS camera on the ground.  Someone else had a camera on the deck where Mat was spinning.  This was the olden days kids, cell phones didn't exist (to poor people), and there were actually more bike riders there than cameras.  On the second attempt, Mat carved across the ramp and landed the first BMX 900 air in a contest.  And the first 900 air in ANY action sport in a contest.  We instantly forgot about the Terminator guy.

When we got back to the room, Rob and I cleaned up and were headed to the hotel diner to go eat, and ran into Dennis and Swope coming out their door.  They were also heading to eat.  We asked where Mat was.  Steve Swope said, "Look through the peephole."  Some how, the peephole in their hotel door got knocked out, so we could look in.  Mat was sitting there two feet from the TV, with a camera plugged into it.  He was watching the 900 over, and over, and over.  I guess he was analyzing it or figuring out just how he got it to work that time.  Dennis rolled is eyes, "He's been doing that for an hour, just watching it over and over."  So we all went in, watched it a few times, and then dragged Mat from the TV and we all went to eat.

On the walk there, Rob was talking to Mat about this crazy trick he'd been trying, a no-handed 540.  That was another impossible sounding trick at that time.  Rob said they would come around, but the bars would always drift away and he couldn't land one.  So Mat and Rob got into a serious vert rider discussion on how it might be possible to land a no-handed 540.

Guess what trick Mat debuted at the next contest at Woodward?

Thanks Ken for sharing the photo, and Rob for sharing it with me and adding to the legend that you can't show my face in a BMX photo.  Heh, heh, heh.

Here's the clip of Mat's 900 from Eddie Roman and another camera guy.  In the first shot, I'm on the opposite deck, just to the right of Mat during his warm-up air.  I was wearing the never fashionable Vision Street Wear black and white "cow pants that day.  Eddie Roman is the guy you hear doing commentary while shooting from the ground.

Below is what's available from my footage shot that day.  There was a lot of great riding going down.  This is from 2-Hip: Ride Like a Man, a video Eddie Roman edited.  That's Eddie and friends talking in the back ground.  Mat's 900 is at 14:43, at the end of this clip.  Epic weekend.



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

Chicago is a dramatic example of what's happening everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



 

The escape from homlessness... California Dreamin'?

In early 2008, singer/songwriter extraordinaire, Kerry Getz, managed to get three members of the legendary Wrecking Crew and some friends to perform in the Anaheim, Marriott lobby.  Why?  It was during the huge NAMM music trade show.  I was siting on a couch next to Jerry Cole's wife and her friend, watching this performance live, fifteen feet away.  That was an epic experience.  A decade later, I've been doing some California dreamin'.

About ten months ago, I came here to this city in Central North Carolina to focus on turning my artwork and writing into a small business.  It's been sketchy as hell, months in a tent, a colder winter than usual here, but I'm now making a little bit of money consistently.  It's time to start looking ahead to trying to get out of the tent and into a room of some sort.  In my situation, the next step is usually a "cheap" motel where I can rent a room by the month.  In reality, "cheap" motels are anything but cheap.  No deposits, no credit check, that part's good.  But the cheapest one here is $740 a month.  The cheapest with wifi is $800 a month.  I MIGHT be able to rent a room in a house for $450 to $600 a month.  But thee are very few of those.

Just on a lark, I pulled up Craigslist for Orange County, California.  There are a lot of rooms for $500 to $700 a month.  Not in the hood, either, I know that area, they're in decent locations.  I literally could put a roof over my head in Orange County, California for the same amount of money that I could here in the Triad area of NC.  Except, there is 1,000 times more opportunity to make money out there.

On the bus back to the area where I "live," it dawned on me that I don't have a fucking single reason to stay in North Carolina at this point.  OK, I have one good friend I hang out with.  My family is here, but I rarely see them.  There's a cool art scene here, but that's it.

I'm trapped here until mid June, when I have a court date from my trespassing arrest.  I could wind up with some other kind of punishment for my actions.  I'm not sure how things work here.  But after that, there's literally not a fucking reason to stay here.  Hmmmmmmm...

Decisions, decisions.  I'll think it over as I spend another night in a tent during another Carolina thunderstorm. 

Update:  I managed to get a room that night and miss that particular thunderstorm.  Still not sure about the future, though...

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

Kevin Smith: Reanimated (NSFW!!!)

I can't remember how I heard of the movie Clerks,  I was a clerk in a couple of downtown Huntington Beach videos stores around then, and I took home movies to watch almost every day.  That's probably when I found it.  I remember it seemed a little slow and boring in parts, but I loved the sarcastic dialogue and the roller hockey on the roof scene.  When I worked at the Boise Fun Spot right out of high school, I used to climb up on the roof and have my friends take pictures of me on my freestyle bike doing tricks up there, so I could relate to that.

My biggest takeaway from Clerks was, "Holy shit, you're allowed to make movies like this?"  I'd made a bunch of bike and skate videos at that point, but a movie?  I mean what would it take to make an actual movie that people watched?  A couple years later I found out what it took was being named Spike Jonze, one of the many super creative guys from the bike/skate world.

I was three movies into his work when I actually realized that Silent Bob was the writer, producer, director of the movies.  I've been a fan of Kevin Smith this whole time.  Yes, I may go to some form of Hell for watching his movies, or at least have to smoke a turd in purgatory or something, but I dig people who can make you laugh.  I think that's one of the best things humans can do for other humans.

A couple years ago, I stumbled across his talks or whatever you want to call them.  He's freakin' hilarious when he talks about his life and the crazy stuff he's seen happen.  So, like a whole bunch of weird people, I was really bummed to hear he had a massive heart attack recently, and was stoked to hear he pulled through it.  This is the first clip I've seen of him since.  He's lost 32 pounds, and looks a lot thinner.  Hey fucker, I've lost 60 on the homeless diet,* I'm kickin' your ass there buddy.  But I started a lot fatter than Kevin, so he's got me on the total weight thing. Great to see him in good spirits, probably baked, and funny as ever.  Hope this guy keep making weird people like me laugh for a long time.  Here's some of the funny clips of him you may not have seen before.

 Kevin on working with Bruce Wyllis

Kevin on Prince

Kevin on protesting his own movie

Kevin talks dirty to a hard of hearing, old dog with cancer.

An Evening With Kevin Smith with Spanish subtitles (por que'?)

Somebody tell Kevin that hemp seeds actually clean crap out of your arteries.  Really, scientific study from either USC or UCLA proved it about 15 years ago. 

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

Yes, most cities' panhandling ordinances are unconstitutional

In this news report from WFMY News 2 in Greensboro (NC), our local news anchors report that Greensboro is planning to change its panhandling ordinance put into effect about 6 or 7 years ago.  As a former (and at the moment, again a) homeless person, and the guy who published the world's premiere panhandling blog then (seriously), I knew these ordinances were unconstitutional.  Groups like the ACLU and homeless advocates all knew the ordinances, that were passed in the wave of a PR campaign across the country, were unconstitutional.  But they were passed because every city wants to get rid of its poor and homeless people, or at least keep them out of sight.  The ordinances lasted this long, because someone has to actually fight an ordinance, and have the resources and legal expertise to fight it to the Supreme Court.  Most  homeless and poor people, obviously, don't have the resources to do that.

I'll be the first to admit that panhandling is a big issue in pretty mush every city of size.  Homelessness and panhandling will continue to be an issue forever, these are inherent problems in a "civilized" society.  We simply don't have the social will to  truly address all of the underlying issues to solve these problems.  But,  we are totally capable of dramatically reducing poverty, homelessness, and panhandling until only a handful of people fall into those categories.

Creating good paying jobs, MILLIONS of them nationwide, is one of best ways to address the underlying issues.  It's also one of the biggest challenges the United States will face in the next 20 years or so.  This happens to be the big issue I'm focusing my reasonably smart brain on.  I believe that if we can make a huge number of good, truly living wage jobs and businesses happen, that it will help solve a whole range of other social and economic issues as well.

Keep checking this blog for more of my thoughts and ideas on this subject.

Here's a good article on why court decisions back in 2015, ARE FINALLY being heeded in this area and others.  The reality is, a large number of city leaders simply don't believe in the rule of law being fairly applied to all people.  We all have our biases and prejudices.  Freedom of speech is a foundation of our Bill of Rights, but some people, for a whole host of reasons, continually want to limit or even eliminate it.  When the freedom of speech goes, so does the United States of America. 

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