Skeletons and Muscles?  Is that what S&M stands for now?  That poor dominatrix is out of work, I guess.  Anyhow, pretty cool video, the editing gets a tiny bit annoying, but not too bad.  Dude, the guy who picks up the marble sphere then collapses, that made me cringe. 

Anyhow, we're planning to shoot some original footage today, so that is something to look forward to.

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ACT Jam 2019: Canberra- Australia

Fresh edit that dropped yesterday from Cult Crew at the ACT Jam, which just happened recently in Canberra, Australia.  Decade jump to manual??!!  Daaaayyummm.  Looks the the event was put on by Backbone Bike Shop in Canberra.  Here's their edit of the event:

Toyota BMX Triple Jump Best Trick Jam

Quick edit of a recent best trick jam, not sure exactly when this happened.  About a month ago, I think?  Anyhow, just uploaded this morning by Our BMX.  It's new school egg beater time over a small mountain range called three double jumps.  As an old guy getting back into things, I don't know most newer riders names yet, but I do know it's little Ryder Lawrence who's a decade younger than most of these guys, nearly making a 360 over this huge set at 1:20.  This is four quick minutes of video game trick in real life.  And if you break your frame trying something nearly this ridiculous, you know where to get a new one, right?

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Classic Brian Foster- Holy Fit

While this Bock Bikes Blog is new, I'm an old guy.  My biggest riding days were in the 1980's and 1990's, then I faded when I became a taxi driver.  Whatever era you start riding in, that sets up your perspective of what's good riding, what's cool and what's not.  We tend to carry those perspectives on as we get older.

In the 1980's, when we called it "BMX freestyle," we'd go to contests, and see 40 different people doing tricks that none of us had ever seen before.  Originality was a key factor.  In those days, 15 novice guys would be busting new stuff we'd never seen.  The problem is that, you can only have that scenario at the beginning of a sport.  After a while, the foundational tricks have mostly been invented, and riding usually turns into combining variations, or doing the same tricks bigger, or on different terrain.  Contests, unfortunately, kind of turn into gymnastics.  When I started working at Cirque du Soleil in 1993, I soon realized that any aerial sport, BMX airs, skate airs, freestyle ski jumping, whatever, eventually turns into circus acrobatics.  You have flips, you have spins, and you have flips with spins (corked 360 flips, for example).  Then you have whatever basic maneuvers are allowed by the vehicle itself.  By that I mean, on a bike you have barspins, tailwhips, tabletops, and on a skateboard you have indy airs, methods, judo airs, in addition to flips and spins.

So the high level (big money) contests turn into guys doing the most flips, spins, corked flips, barspins and tailwhips possible.  But style, good old epic style, doesn't score well in a major contest.  It doesn't matter what sport.  But style is what it's really all about.  You learn a trick.  You get a trick dialed, so you can do it every time.  You learn to STOMP that trick.  THEN you do it with style. Hopefully.

So for years now, every time someone on Facebook or YouTube shared the latest video of some rider doing a quintuple barspin, triple backflip, corked out 1440, quadruple tailwhip... or whatever, I would watch a video afterwards that just had good style.  Usually that video was one of my old roommate, Brian Foster.  Most of the time it was this Holy Fit section.  This is just one of those epic edits, oozing with style, that makes you remember why you ride.

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Game of Bike: Kriss Kyle vs. Motorcycle Trials rider

When Rich Bartlett and I started talking about this blog idea a couple weeks ago, I knew I wanted to find things far beyond the typical street or park BMX video section to put in it.  Those are awesome, but in today's media saturated environment, I knew there were a lot of video gems out there, weird, gnarly, unique, and other bicycle related videos and stories, to be found.  This is a great one.

Every BMX rider has played a game of BIKE now and then, like doing trick shots playing HORSE with a basketball.  Wait, why the heck do they call that HORSE anyhow?  Weird.  In the old days of the 1980's, we'd play FREESTYLE, which made for some really long games, especially when we had 5 or 6 riders.  The point is, you all know the game.

Obviously, this one is different, Kriss Kyle leaves his comfort zone, and goes head to head against motorcycle trials rider James Dabill.  I wasn't sure what to expect when I first watched this one.  I also noticed the video is 18 minutes long, and thought it might drag and be boring.  WRONG.

This is one of the coolest BMX videos I've watched in quite a while.  Both riders are totally trying... AND LANDING, stuff totally outside their normal riding skills.  I was hooked right to the end.

It totally reminded me of my own days hanging out at the Huntington Beach Pier in CA, back in the late 80's, riding with skateboarders like Pierre Andre, Don Brown, Ed Templeton, Mark Gonzales, and many more.  I was always up for a game of SKATE on my bike, just because I loved trying skateboard tricks on my bike.  It always gave me new ideas for bike tricks.  I pioneered bike nollies (nosewheelie INTO A BUMP), half-Cabs, and no complys (footplant to 180) back when those things were all considered stupid (mostly because I was about the only guy doing them back then).

My point is, when you play a game of BIKE against a different vehicle, with different tricks and maneuvers possible, it opens your mind to completely new ideas on your bike.  Anyhow, this is a bit long, but a great watch.  Enjoy. 

Go Fast, Pull Up: The Jimmy Levan Story...

I still haven't seen this yet.  I don't have a DVD player at my house, mostly because I don't have a house.  But you probably do.  Jimmy Levan is one crazy cat.  He's funny, he's cool to hang out with, he goes fast, and he goes BIG. This video/book set about his life is available, right now, on DVD or Blu-Ray at the Block Bikes Online Store, right here.  Or you can read this post, and then buy it .

I met Jimmy way back in the dark ages of the early 1990's.  It was 1991, and Chris Moeller, the pro racer, crazy jumper, S&M Bikes owner, tapped me to make the first S&M Bikes video.  Young Jimmy rode for them back then.  On one trip down to Chris' tiny apartment, for a weekend of shooting video, I met these two kids, Jimmy Levan and his friend Barstow.  Barstow probably had a real name, but I never heard it all weekend.  So we crashed on the floor of the long, narrow, "Winnebago" apartment, drank a few beers at night, and went riding and shooting video during the day.  S&M Bikes was run out of a single car garage then, and money was damn near non-existent.  The sessions were fun, cheap, and gritty. But who cares?

We hit a ditch in Westminster, near the infamous P.O.W. House, we rode in the back of Chris' pick-up truck, and we hit the Santa Ana Civic Center, one of our favorite street spots in those days.  Then we hit Magnolia in Huntington Beach, a sometimes soggy trails area in the wetlands by the H.B. power plant.  That whole video, S&M Bikes Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer, had a total budget of about $250, including beer money.  And it looks like it:



It was a fun weekend, and I'm the guy who shot all the footage in this section, which I'm pretty sure is Jimmy Levan's first ever video segment.  That's another reason I need to see this video.  Anyhow, in a taste of things to come, Jimmy jumps the Civic Center pyramid at 2:00 in the clip above, which is about 30 to 35 feet across, off of a really mellow bank.  It takes some serious racer speed to jump that, and Chris Moeller, himself, was the only other person I saw do it back then.  Even as a young buck, Jimmy let us know that he would rack up a bunch of frequent flyer miles on his bike in the years ahead. So enjoy this clip, and click the link below to grab your copy of Go Fast Pull Up.

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It's Friday... B.Y.O.B.

Try new things.  Don't be afraid to try a new bike set-up now and then to mix things up.  I rode brakeless for nearly a year in 1989, when nearly every trick was a brake trick.  I learned half-Cabs and lookback half Cabs during that period, among other things.  If your friends are riding somewhere, Bring Your Own Bike. 

In addition to the alcohol reference, "B.Y.O.B." is the opening song of this 1989 Vision skate video I worked on, Barge at Will.*  The song is by Ohio punk band The Stain.  I always liked that song it just has that street riding kind of energy and attitude.  Yeah, this is a bike blog, but a lot of riders skate some as well.  If that's the case, Bring Your Own Board.  Its Friday, there are sessions to be had.  Who knows, this could be the The Ultimate Weekend.




* If you pause this video at 46:04, you'll see Chris Miller and Ken Park both boardsliding the pool section of Tony Hawk's Fallbrook ramp.  I'm the guy in white sitting on the rail in the background.  -Steve

Got an old BMX bike and some fabrication skills?

It's too late to throw one of these together this weekend.  But there are a lot of weekends coming up.  Ride responsibly.  Set your beer down first so you don't spill it.  This is NOT available at...

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Not beef jerky

Beef jerky is something that keeps a long, long time, and is good to eat on camping trips.  It's also something you should taunt a sasquatch with.  Bjarki, on the other hand, is a new Subrosa am rider who is freakin' amazing.  And you know where to buy a Subrosa, right?

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Let your freak flag fly...

Morgan Wade and Drew Bezanson shredding the woods

As a Has Been industry guy, outside the industry for several years, I caught bits of riding on TV, You Tube, and the occasional BMX DVD.  Morgan Wade has been a favorite guy I liked to watch for many years now.  This video is simple in many ways, but just stepped up everything huge and progressed riding.

Then a quite a while after watching this video for the first time, I came across this old photo, which I think is from 1904.  In 1904 there were no chrome-moly frames, no Bell Moto 4 helmets, no Red Bull to pay to build the ramps, and no emergency rooms if things went bad.  How crazy was this guy, that it took a rider of the caliber of Morgan Wade, 105 to 110 years later, to repeat this trick?

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It's all about having fun on bikes... First 2-Hip Meet the Street in 1988

It's funny how things work out.  This contest was in the spring of 1988, behind a shopping center, in Santee, California.  The location was chosen because it was one of Dave Voelker's favorite street riding spots.  Nearly every major rider was there, and many of us every day California BMX freestylers, industry people, and street riders, as well.  NorCal Curb Dog and street pioneer Dave Vanderspek, BMX Action trick team entrepreneur and 1988 "Old School" rider, R.L. Osborn, mid-80's street legend Eddie Roman were all there.  Then a new breed took the day, San Diego local  Dave Voelker, and English bloke Craig Campbell blew everyone's minds.  BMX riding completely changed because of this contest. Street riding, as a genre of bike riding, exploded that day.

Street riding, on BMX bikes and mountain bikes is world wide today, there are contests, highly paid pros, and high caliber videos.  But more than anything, there are just a lot of people out there, all around the world, having fun on their bikes in all kinds of different ways.  And that's what it's all about.

I'm rode to this contest in the back of a VW bus, driven by Unreel Productions cameraman Pat Wallace.  He shot this footage.  I later edited this clip for the 1988 2-Hip video, the very first 2-Hip video, put out by Haro pro freestyler, trick team owner, and contest promoter, Ron Wilkerson.  At 3:07 you see me ghost ride my bike into the wall.  I wasn't used to riding that big of a lip into a wall, and couldn't do a decent wall ride that day.  Then at 3:13 you see pro racer, hardcore jumper, vert and street rider, Rich Bartlett bust a cool line over the box jump.  Rich does a big wall ride earlier, and then tries to pull down the big General banner from the wall later.  This new blog, the Block Bikes Blog, is the product of Rich and me connecting and working together again after 31 years.

Rich has been hardcore in the bike industry this whole time.  He owns Block Bikes, an actual bricks and mortar shop, in Lancaster, CA, north of L.A..  He put out the Block Bikes brand, he's been riding hard all these years, and rides road bikes, MTB's, and BMX still.

As for myself (Steve Emig), I've worked in the BMX and skateboard industry, then got into TV production, and then burned out in 1995.  I went off on my weird philosophical journey to figure life out.  I read hundreds of books, and worked lame jobs, like being a furniture mover.  As a philosophical type,  I, of course, became a taxi driver.  There's nothing like dealing with crazy drunk people nightly to put life in perspective.  Then I became homeless as that industry collapsed because of new technology.  I began blogging, worked to figure out how to be a functional writer in today's world, and wound up a blogging Sharpie artist somehow.

So Rich and I connected online recently, started throwing ideas around, and I'll now be doing this blog and some online marketing and social media work for Block Bikes Online Shop, as it grows.  We're both really stoked on this, it seems like a great fit, and we want to help keep BMXers, and everyone who rides bikes of some kind, hyped on riding itself.

For those of you who follow my personal blog, I'll keep it going, sharing my Sharpie art, and tossing out my ideas on the economy, the importance of small business in America these days, and stuff like that   It will have an old BMX story now and then, still.  But I'll be sharing a lot of my old school stories in this blog, as well as covering many other aspects of bike riding.  This is all being brought to you by Block Bikes online store, so it'll help if you all click over and buy 8 or 9 bikes right now.  Buy them for the whole neighborhood, get them kids away from Fortnite.  Get the kids back outside and riding.

Stay tuned, there's a lot more coming...

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