Finally, all my weird ideas in one blog...

This clip is from the first video I ever edited, called 2-Hip: The '88 Adventure.  It's the contest season video for Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip King of Vert and this first Meet the Street contest.  Later it became known as 2-Hip BHIP, which is what it's called on You Tube now. 

In the spring of 1988, BMX freestyle pro rider and contest promoter, Ron Wilkerson, decided to put on a bike street contest.  Nor Cal legend Dave Vanderspek put one on a while earlier, but there was no media coverage and a lot of us never heard about it.  But that afternoon, behind a shopping center in Santee, California, a bunch of BMX freestylers and dirt jumpers came together to see what could be done with "street" obstacles.  We'd all been doing this kind of riding on our own for years.  But that afternoon most of the best riders in the world came together to push ourselves and each other.  The BMX freestyle scene of Southern California was trying something new.  What happened behind that shopping center that afternoon changed bike riding forever.  That wasn't the goal, just a cool effect of the day.  I'm proud to say I was there.  I'm the dork ghost riding my bike into the wall.  Much of what happened that day we'd never seen before. 

This is the underlying theme of this blog.  When you get a bunch of creative people together, when you form a scene, cool things start to happen.  Street riding is now a fun activity in both the BMX and mountain biking world, it's a competitive sport, and an industry that has spread around the globe. 

Creative scenes of all types have become a driving force in our economy.  Creative people are not just creating high tech stuff like social media sites, smart phones, and apps, they're creating new styles of art, crafts, music, sports... AND BUSINESSES, AND JOBS.  This is a key part of the 21st century economy that the big business world is largely ignoring (except for tech).  While Washington D.C. and Wall Street fight over how to TRY to bring back millions of manufacturing jobs, it's up to us, YOU AND ME, to create our own jobs. Are you up for that?

I've spent my life in a series of different kinds of scenes, many of them creative, some not.  I've read hundreds of books on related subjects that most people find boring.  In addition to being a writer/blogger/artist, and an old school BMX, skateboard, and TV production industry guy, I'm also a futurist/big picture/macroeconomics geek.  Basically, that means I'm a geek even among the geeks.  I'm OK with that.  My actions sports background and experience in creative scenes has merged with my intellectual geek side, and I realize I need to share what I've learned about creating, nurturing, and building creative scenes.  Sound boring?  It can be when you talk about it.  But making creative scenes is a blast when you actually do it, like we all did in the video above.  It's time to make a scene... YOUR SCENE.