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Saturday, August 27, 2016
Build Your Scene... Build Your City... Build Your Economy
A couple thoughts on the title of this blog: 1) I grew up in a series of small towns and cities in Ohio, New Mexico, and Idaho. In those cities and others like them, there are lots of young people who have big dreams and who really think their city sucks. So that's where the title came from. 2) In this blog and "Lame part 2" I'm exploring a bunch of related ideas that I eventually want to distill down into an actual book. I have no idea what the title of the book will end up being, so I figured I'd give this "rough draft" blog a really stupid name that I know I won't use for the book.
Above we have a clip of former top French freestyle skateboarder Pierre Andre' Senizergues, better known now as the founder of Sole Technology. Of all my friends who have started companies, Pierre Andre' and Don Brown are the ones I'm most proud of. Not only great business guys, but all around good dudes. Sole Technology puts out Etnies and E's skateboard shoes, 32 brand snowboard boots, and clothing as well. What I want you to take away from this clip is that Sole Tech's huge headquarters, the hundreds of people they employ now, the Lake Forest skatepark they built, and all those solar panels that now give them free electricity, all that started with a single skateboarder, in a small skate scene in France. Thirty-some years later it's a huge global company making great products and working to reduce their carbon footprint in the process. This is a great example of what a small local scene can turn into over the years.
This blog is not about any one city or town, it's about the hundreds of small towns and cities in the U.S. (and the world) that are being left behind as we transition into an information-based/creative economy. These two blogs are basically a rough draft for a book idea that I'm working out in real time.
Who is this blog I'm writing for?
Young creative people- To all the artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, action sports, and tech people in their teens and 20's, this will show you why you should not only do your creative work, but why you should put in a little extra effort to build your scene as well.
Older creative people- This will remind you of the scenes you've been a part of, and hopefully inspire you to find and nurture the scenes in your area now.
Business and civic leaders- Yes... I know, I know, you don't think your city is lame, but it can probably use improvements in the areas of creativity and job creation. I want you folks to start looking at your combined creative scenes as an industry, and a place for potential job growth. Many creative groups will never turn into businesses, but even so, your "creative ecosystem" can help attract talented people, including entrepreneurs and start-ups, to your city or region.
What is the basic idea of this blog?
Every town or city is filled with lots of people filled with creative ideas which could enhance that area. In the Industrial Age, these people were told to shut up and keep their ideas to themselves. But we're not in the Industrial Age anymore. Tapping into the latent creativity of their people is one of the best things a town or city can do now.
Politicians aren't going to turn the economy around and create the millions of high paying jobs that are needed. We, the average people, need to start doing that ourselves. Finding an nurturing a region's creative scenes is absolutely critical in the 21st century economic world.
Small groups of people with common interests naturally come together and form scenes. Many scenes will always stay a casual group of hobbyists. But some scenes turn into businesses and, in rare cases, entire new industries. These scenes will be some of the primary job creators of the 21st century.
Anyone, of any age, anywhere, can start a scene.
I'm approaching this not as another blog, but as an interactive book that I'm self-publishing, free to anyone, in blog form to start out. My goal is to turn it into an e-book and real, live old-fashioned paperback book by the end of 2016.
This blog is about scenes. That word has many connotations to different people. If you're a parent, when you go to a restaurant, you don't want your kids to make a scene. If your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse gets trashed at your office Christmas party, you don't want them to make a scene. In this book, I'm referring to another type of scene.
If someone tells you their city has a good art scene or music scene, you know what they're talking about. You have a frame of reference for what those scenes entail. There must be some good local bands, playing original music, local clubs to play at, and probably a local newspaper or blog covering the scene. But there are many kinds of creative scenes, from people building huge things out of Legos, to open source programmers, to You Tube comics, to creative "sports" like skateboarding, snowboarding or BMX stunts. These scenes intertwine with each other forming scenes of scenes, which tend to attract even more creative scenes.
I've spent much of my adult life in a series of creative scenes, and I've met amazing people along the way. In this book I'll share some of my personal stories. But the real point of this is to educate people about what scenes can grow into. At a time when millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to other countries or replaced by robots, times are hard for millions of Americans. Many small towns and cities have been devastated by these economic hits over the last four decades. Using some recent figures, I estimated that at least 20.3 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed in 2016. The number may be much higher. Civic leaders across the country and around the globe are struggling to attract companies to create local jobs, preferably good-paying jobs. But it's not working that well in many areas.
Meanwhile, entirely new industries have sprung up in the same 40 years, employing tens of thousands of people. I'm not just talking about technology. While tech in many forms has changed, and continues to change, our world, a lot of other creative scenes, and industries, are often overlooked. They're not just overlooked by the business world at large, they're overlooked by towns and cities trying to get their citizens back to work.
Let's look at a few statistics to give you an idea of how different industries compare:
-The U.S. auto industry had a great year in 2015, selling 17.5 million cars and light trucks. Sales are estimated at "about $570 billion." -WSJ.com, 1/5/2016
-Motorcycling, in all its facets in the U.S., was estimated to be a $42 billion annual business. If you ad in the "ripple effects" of all the traveling, manufacturing, service, and tourism , plus wages for all of those, that number jumps to $102 billion... annually. -L.A. Times, 2/6/2013
-Total all time sales for all Harry Potter books, movies, DVD's comes to $24.8 billion. Books sales make up $7.2 billion of that, and movies account for another $7.7 billion. - staticbrain.com
-Total U.S. video game sales in 2015 were $23.5 billion, up 5% from 2014. - fortune.com, 2/16/2016
-The U.S. gun industry has total U.S. sales of $13.5 billion a year, with a profit of $1.5 billion. -CNBC.com, 10/2/2015
-Amusement parks, including water parks and similar attractions, were "expected" to have total sales of $13.4 billion in 2013, a 2.8% increase from 2012. - Bloomberg
-Total U.S. movie box office sales were over $11 billion in 2015. Star Wars: The Force Awakens grossed $936 million in box office sales itself.- boxofficemojo.com Yes, if you're keeping track at home, that means video games made more than double what movies did last year.
-The NFL brought in $7.24 billion in the 2014-15 season. That's $226.4 million per team. -sbnation.com, 7/20/2015
-Bicycle sales in the U.S. totaled $6.2 billion in 2015, and there are 4,089 bike shops across the country and 99% of bikes are made in Taiwan or China. -statista.com
-The surf and skateboard industries topped $6 billion in annual sales in 2012. -San Diego Tribune, 6/10/2013.
-The NBA brought in combined league revenue of $4.8 billion in the 2013-14 season. -statista.com
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-The John Madden Football video game series brought in a total of over $4 billion as of 2013. -money.cnn.com, 9/5/2013
-Theater ticket sales on Broadway in NYC totaled $1.3 billion in 2015. -statista.com
-The Top Ten NASCAR teams brought in a combined revenue of $1 billion in 2015, and each team is worth an average of $148 million. -Forbes.com, 2/17/2016
-From 1999 to 2009, the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video games series earned $1 billion, making it one of the top video games of all time. It's still selling today. -Forbes.com, 9/30/2015
-Cirque du Soleil, the revolutionary French Canadian circus, had estimated annual revenue of $810 million in 2010. They employ over 4,000 people from 40 countries and have a 338,000 square foot headquarters in Montreal. -wikipedia.org
-Personal drone sales in the world was estimated to be $552 million globally in 2014. There are predictions it will grow to $1 billion annually by 2022. -grandviewresearch.com
-The U.S. snowboarding industry brought in over $406 million in sales in 2015. -statisticbrain.com
-As I write this (8/27/2016) the Pokemon Go game, released less than 8 weeks ago, has become an international phenomenon, and is earning an estimated $1,906, 840 a day right now. -thinkgaming.com
To paraphrase former president Richard Nixon, "a billion here, a billion there... it starts to add up after a while."
Yes, I realize these numbers are from several different years and time periods, and there's a lot of apples and oranges. In the action sports world, for example, there are a lot of privately owned companies, and good stats are hard to come by. So what's my point?
My point is that the entire Harry Potter industry came from the ideas of one woman who was "on the dole" when she first started writing it down. Video games are still thought of as "kids stuff" by most civic and local business leaders, many of which don't realize the industry is now twice as big as movies. The surf, skate, snowboard, and BMX worlds are still seen as a bunch of losers in many parts of the country, including where I live now. The income Broadway theaters make totally surprised me when I looked it up. Tony Hawk was a skinny skater kid whose biggest dream in the early 1980's was to get a photo in the skate magazines and maybe have a backyard ramp. Cirque du Soleil started in 1984 when a bunch of street performers thought, "Hey... you think we could start a new kind of circus?"
All of these industries emerged from scenes of people, highly creative people. My point is that you never know what a small group of creative people who form a scene will lead to. Do you think Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's parents wanted to hear about their crazy little machine when it was time to take the garbage out? Probably not. But they did pretty well for themselves later on.
If you're a local or regional civic or business leader reading this, ask yourself, is playing golf with guys from a large corporation the best way to bring new jobs and growth to your area? Or should you take a closer look at the creative scenes you already have in your area, and see if helping them might be worthy of a bit of your time and effort.
If you're a creative person of any kind reading this, go ahead and tweet about how I'm only focused on money and business and not the true spirit of creative expression. Then think about the other creative people in your area and how to create a scene, rather than just random people doing their work here and there. The rest of this blog is for you.
There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now. Personally, I'm creating my own job. Check out my blog about that process, Create Your Own Dang Job.
So... How's Life?
As a guy who does much less cool Sharpie art myself, I had to throw a Jessie Armand clip in here. It's an old saying, "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." It sure looks like Jessie enjoys his work.
"I wish this was a fun city." -Wake Forest University student in my taxi in 2012, talking about Winston-Salem, NC
So... how's life? Isn't it great to wake up in the morning, excited about the day's events? After a good night's sleep you look forward to the challenges and excitement of your job. It hardly feels like work because you enjoy it so much. Even better, you live in a vibrant, fun city with great art, music, and sports scenes. Your city has lots of good, interesting, well-paying jobs available to move on to, should yours get boring. Life is pretty dang good, isn't it?
How many sarcastic comments did you make to yourself while reading that last paragraph? Let's face it, most people's lives don't even come close to what I just described. After the incredibly slow recovery after The Great Recession of 2008, millions and millions of people are working hard just to scrape by. Kids, church, sports, and other activities seem to take every extra minute and every extra dime they have. Then when they do have a bit of free time, the go do the same thing they've done a thousand other times, whether it's go to the local bar, take the kids to the park, or maybe a canoeing trip down a local river. For the vast majority of people, pure, unadulterated fun is pretty low on the "to do" list.
Yet there are people out there who really enjoy what they do. They truly love the place they live. It offers them places to be alone and places to be with family and friends. There are new experiences to be had and new areas to explore. There are people who truly love their town or city or region. Are you one of those people? Probably not. It's likely you don't think your town or city is completely lame, like the title of this blog. But you feel you're missing out by living where you do. Sound familiar?
I grew up in a series of small towns in Ohio as a kid, then spent a year living in Carlsbad, New Mexico, then went to high school in Boise, Idaho. Although I really liked all the outdoor activities in Boise, I still felt there was an exciting world out there that I was missing. I can't count the number of kids I met growing up who dreamed of escaping their boring small towns.
It's not that small towns and cities are bad. It's just that they often don't have the scenes people are really interested in. A part of why I'm writing this is to let you know that it's possible to create cool and interesting scenes anywhere. They may not be very big, but you can usually find one or two people with similar interests to get things started. You may still move on to a bigger city at some point, but learning to build a good creative scene where you are can have all kinds of perks. It may even turn into a career... the kind of career that finds you waking up excited about the day ahead. It actually happens to some people. I know firsthand, it has happened to me.
Yes, there are millions of boring jobs out there. When you're young, you often have to work whatever job you can find to make a little money and gain experience. But you don't have to work one of those boring jobs your whole life. You can work towards something more rewarding. You may even make your town or city a better place by building your own creative scene of some kind. So... again... how's life? Do you have any ideas bubbling up in your mind right now?
Thoughts on the college student I quoted from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. For a city of a little over 200,000, Winston has a really good, cohesive art scene, centered on Trade Street, downtown. The music scene isn't bad either. The bar, restaurant, and coffee shop scene has grown quite a bit over the last 20 years in the downtown area, with help from civic leaders. What the student in my taxi thought was missing was different social scenes to explore. After talking to her, we concluded that if there were late night buses to take college students to and from Winston to the other two cites nearby, Greensboro and Highpoint, it would allow the thousands of college students to meet people outside their city. That's really not a very big thing to accomplish to make the city much more attractive to college students and young adults.
There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now. Personally, I'm creating my own job. Check out my blog about this process, Create Your Own Dang Job.
A Funny Thing Happened On Break One Day...
Here's a montage of photos of Ron Wilkerson, pro freestyler, trick team owner, contest promoter, bike company owner, all around amazing dude.
It was a sunny fall day in a parking lot next to a medium sized industrial building in Torrance, California. The year was 1986. I was standing outside the small door with three of my co-workers, Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, and Craig "Gork" Barrette. I can't remember what we were talking about. I was probably snacking on a Coke and a blueberry muffin off the lunch truck. The four of us were the editorial staff of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.
We heard a motorcycle coming up the street, then saw it turn into the parking lot and roll right up to us. At the helm of road bike was Haro pro freestyler Ron Wilkerson. That was our first surprise, because he lived in Leucadia, about an hour and a half south. That's a long ride on Southern California's crazy freeways. Even crazier, there was what appeared to be a blond, 13-year-old kid on the back of the motorcycle. We looked at each other in amazement, first wondering what Ron was doing giving a ride to a junior high kid, and then wondering what kind of crazy fool would sit on the back of a motorcycle with Ron in control. Ron was well known for being pretty crazy, on and off his bike.
He turned off the motorcycle and said, "Hey guys." Then he pointed to the kid on the back, "This is Spike... Spike Jonze. He jumped in the van and went on tour with us." That was the first time the four of us met Spike, who was actually 17 at the time, but looked younger. The name immediately rang a bell with Lew. We went inside and Lew led us into the conference room where a bunch of photos were laid out. FREESTYLIN' had a reader photo contest that we had just judged. Spike sent in a black and white, 8" X 10" someone had taken of him. He was doing an air, about four feet out, on a backyard ramp on his bike. Spike had taken markers and hand-colored the photo, giving it a totally unique look. He had won a prize for most original or something. Spike was a BMXer/skater kid from the Rockville, Maryland area, the East Coast hot spot for BMX freestyle then. We talked for a bit, then got back to work as Ron and Spike headed back South.
If you're not familiar with the name Spike Jonze, let me tell you about a few of the things he's done since. After I got laid off from the magazines a couple months later, Spike was ultimately hired to fill the spot. I didn't really click with those guys well, but Spike fit right in. He became a well known photographer for the magazines. Andy, Lew, Spike, and another later hire there, Jeff Tremaine, started a boy's lifestyle magazine after the BMX magazines shut down. Spike went on to produce and direct some low-budget videos for World Skateboards. Before long, he began directing music videos, including the Beastie Boys "Sabotage" video and Weezer's "Buddy Holly," which he won an MTV award for. He co-founded the skateboard company Girl. He went on to direct the feature films, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Yeah, somehow he directed Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep in his second feature film.
Then the World Industries crew was making these crazy home videos of goofy and dangerous stunts. Spike and Jeff Tremaine morphed those into the Jackass TV series and then the Jackass movie series. Spike was executive director, and appeared in the movies. Whether you love 'em or hate 'em, the Jackass movies were huge. What most people don't realize is that the main three Jackass movies are three of the most profitable movies in the history of film making. If you look on mentalfloss.com at the list of the 20 most profitable movies of all time, you won't see Jackass. But you should. With a return on investment of roughly 1280%, it should be #14 on the list, after Beauty and the Beast and before The King's Speech. Really. It's a well kept secret in Hollywood that the vast majority of movies actually lose money. That's why they always tell the "box office gross" of each movie, but never whether it was actually profitable or not. The three main Jackass movies together cost about $36.5 million to make, and then grossed $254, 270, 880. Oh... and they were three of the funniest movies of all time.
Making those three crazy movies could easily brand a director for life as not being a legit drama director. But Spike went on to direct the adaptation of the classic children's book, Where The Wild Things Are and later Her, which was nominated for four Academy Awards. Spike won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Her, as well.
When average people think of a sport like BMX freestyle, or "bike stunts" as it's known today, they don't think of those crazy riders as being particularly creative. But much like some other action sports, BMX freestyle and skateboarding require loads of creativity as well as physical skills. Spike never seemed that much more creative that the rest of the guys in those sports, what seemed to set him apart was that he had the personality, and the balls to simply act on his ideas. Most people have the ideas and let them drift away.
Now let's go back to that day in the magazine parking lot in 1986. That little publishing company, Wizard Publications, was a small, but highly creative scene. The owner, Bob Osborn was a fireman when he started the first magazine. Seriously, a fireman. His son, R.L. got into BMX in the 70's, and Bob, or "Oz" as we all knew him, started shooting photos of the races. Then his daughter Windy started shooting photos as well. Both were, and still are, great photographers. What brought the five of us together in the parking lot that day was BMX bike riding. Andy was an BMX racer, art student, and skateboarder in Wyoming. He won a bike in a contest in BMX Action, and wrote a cool thank you note to Oz. Oz liked that little note so much, that he called Andy up to be the editor when he started FREESTYLIN' magazine.
Gork made a name for himself with the Gork Trick Team in Sacramento, featuring the one-of-a-kind-rider John "Dizz" Hicks. Gork drifted back to BMX racing, and answered the call when a new editor was needed at BMX Action. Lew took some stationary someone had given him as a gift, and started writing to Andy at FREESTYLIN', talking about underground bands, freestyle, and skateboarding. He was the obvious pick when Andy needed an assistant editor.
Ron Wilkerson started freestyling while living in San Francisco, then moved to Southern California when he got sponsored by Haro Bikes, named for Bob Haro, who invented the whole sport.
As for me, I started BMX racing and then freestyling while in high school in Boise, Idaho. A year after graduating, my family moved to San Jose, California. I started a Xerox zine about BMX freestyle, as a way to meet the great riders in the San Francisco Bay Area. I became part of the Golden Gate Park scene, best known for pros like Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, and Hugo Gonzales. My zine was ranked top in the U.S. by FREESTYLIN' in early '86. When a job as editorial assistant opened up, I got the call.
We'd all been plucked from obscurity because of our interest in BMX and freestyle, and the freestyle scenes we became a part of. Again, getting involved in a weird, but highly creative little sport brought us all together on that fateful day in Torrance, and led us all to many amazing adventures since. Though not as amazing as Spike's adventures. He very well might be an alien.
Here's a short, but great, interview with the guy I met on break that day in 1986...
There are at least 20 million Americans that can't find a good paying job right now. Personally, I'm creating my own job. Check out the process in my new main blog, Create Your Own Dang Job.
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