I mentioned in my last post that I was rebuilding a bike in the San Francisco Bike Kitchen, and here it is, about a month after I finished it. A Raleigh Record from the ’80s that I got at a garage sale around the corner. It’s got 14 speeds now, and new wheels, derailers, and chain. I cleaned and greased everything else, starting with the bottom bracket. Not exactly a restoration that’s true to the 10-speed tradition, but those extra gears should come in handy on the hills of the bay area. Not that I’ll be riding it; it’s too big for me. But now that it’s out of the basement I have room for a project that’s my size.
In the three weeks it’s been online, my latest story for GOOD magazine, a primer on the best burgeoning bike scenes in North America, has earned a lot of comments. Many readers wrote in other cities as candidates and it would have been nice to include them all. While reporting the story I learned, as at least one commenter noted, that you can go to any city in the U.S. and find a burgeoning bike scene. That’s a wonderful thing.
Everywhere I looked I found community repair shops where people could build and fix bikes at little cost. Every town has formal and informal clubs that organize fun rides and races. And, thanks to rider activism, many cities are planning to expand their networks of bike paths and are considering bike-rental systems like the Velib program in Paris. Or at least they were at the end of last year, before the economy pooped out on us.
I’d guess that the strong showing from these communities is the result of the fairly small number of bikers relative to drivers on the road. When you’re part of just a tiny percentage of all commuters, you feel a sense of camaraderie with your fellow cyclists. At least I always do.
One last thing to say: All that thinking and talking about bikes inspired me to haul one of my old, broken-down bikes out of the basement and into the San Francisco Bike Kitchen, which is full of friendly geniuses who have helped me fix it up from the bottom up.
Sometimes when I interview someone they give me too many good quotes. That’s what happened with artist Susan Danis, when I talked to her for an article in issue 10 of Craft magazine. Here are two that I didn’t manage to use where her enthusiasm and curiosity come through:
“I was going for a walk with my husband the other night and it wasn’t quite dark yet. And I was so happy because I found some dried worms on the sidewalk that I could use.”
“I was hoarding animal horns. Those you have to keep in the freezer for three months in case there are any bugs. My freezer is still filled with horns.”
I also focused on one of her works at the expense of others, such as Lingam, in the photo above. It’s so buried in bells and flowers it’s a wonder it can even stand up. I also couldn’t get into her future projects, which is a shame since I had to leave this quote behind:
“I want to build a crib with a big hairy turd slumped into it. So I’m going do that. I’m not going to try to explain it, but I am going to build it. That’s how it works, that’s the process.”
Enough said.
Sadly, this was also Craft’s last issue in print. But it seems that the crew will continue to run their very active website.
See the red stuff on that rock? That’s a swarm of ladybugs. A few weekends ago some friends and I paid a visit to their winter home on Mount Diablo, near Clayton, California. It was almost scary how many there were. Here’s a closeup.
It seems they live down by the coast in the warm months, then move inland into the mountains when it gets cold. They can’t fly unless it’s warmer than 55 degrees! They also have a life cycle of only four to six weeks, so how do they know to go back to the same place every year? We found them along the Falls Trail loop and it looks like they go to Redwood Regional Park too. One more fun fact: It takes 24 hours for an adult to get its spots.
I like to collect crap, and the best crap is free. Especially when it comes to you by chance and bears the marks of age and use. It’s this extra character that makes the objects heaped up at flea markets and on garbage days so intriguing. Assemblage artist Susan Danis told me that the local junkyard was one of her favorite places on Earth. I can see where she’s coming from. Over my desk I keep the scrap of fabric in this photo, which I cut from a broken lawn chair in the trash outside my building when I lived in Slovakia. Sentimental? Perhaps, but I also like to look at it and wonder what it’s been through. How many bottoms did it endure, and how many spilled bottles of kofola?
The beach is at the top of the list of places to make strange discoveries, and I had the fun of writing a mini-guide to great beachcombing spots on the northern Pacific coast for VIA magazine. It ran with Michael McRae’s story on turning up everything from 17th-century Spanish beeswax to thousands of lost Nike sneakers on the shores of Oregon.
State and national parks tend to have the nicest and most accessible beaches, but you can’t take home much of what you find on them since shells, rocks, and wood are all protected. I think the man-made objects are more interesting anyways: busted fishing tackle, random bottles, stray pieces of scuba gear. On the north coast, it’s popular to look for the glass floats that break free from Japanese fishing nets. They’re tough to snag in Oregon, but from this video it looks like they’re all over Alaska, if you have a plane to get out to remote spots.
The video is slow moving but beautiful. Eagles hang out on the beach, bear prints appear, a dog chases a seal and a fox, and a redhead blushes.
Kinetic artist Matt Jones, who I profiled in Make Vol. 8, turned up this, um, remix of my article on him. I can only assume the authors of this transformation used a program that replaces words with their synonyms to create a copy that is like, and completely unlike, the original. The title of the story that I wrote is the The Secret Life of Death Clouds. The new version calls itself The Abstruse Activity of Afterlife Clouds.
Here’s the first paragraph of the new article:
Matt Jones contemplates activity by architecture affective sculptures that abort to carbon it. A alum apprentice in art at Stanford University, his investigations accept led him, a part of added things, to use an air compressor to breathing a respiratory arrangement ancient from old bike close tubes, and to motorize a carpeting of zip ties abstemious with LEDs to almost a pulsing, acclaim respiring, bristling hide. His goal: to aggravate out the basic aspect that makes the active live.
Debate over which version’s writing is of higher quality will undoubtedly have the comments section hopping for months, so I’ll keep my own judgments to myself. I’ll bet, though, that the magniloquent program behind this recreation would interest Italo Calvino, who stuck a word-counting, genre-analyzing computer into his novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. It’s probably child’s play for Philip Parker, who has turned automated internet searches into hundreds of thousands of books for sale on Amazon, and claims he’s working on software that will generate romance novels.
Map of David de Rothschild’s planned Pacific trip by Emily Cooper for National Geographic Adventure.
When I wrote some practical advice for traveling to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre, I thought it was the most far fetched of the disaster destinations I explored. It was certainly the most far flung, as you have to motor a boat for a week just to get there. And it’s the most boring. There’s little life and almost no wind out there. And no, there aren’t mountains of trash to climb around on. Just the open ocean.
Well, according to this National Geographic Adventure article by Paul Kvinta, David de Rothschild will be making the trip in a catamaran custom-built to float on pontoons of plastic water bottles. Since the boat will have no rudder, he’ll steer using jib sails, and I wonder how that will work with the whole no wind thing. After he hits the floating plastic graveyard he’ll move on to Bikini Atoll to check out the former nuclear test site, then he’ll stop at the island of Tuvalu, which risks getting swamped as sea levels rise in response to global warming. The trip will take four months, and you can follow its progress here.
When I talked to Beverly Parsons, a San Diego charter broker who has been in the industry for almost 40 years, about hiring of boat to visit the Eastern Garbage Patch, she thought it was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. “It would take a really seaworthy person to go there,” she said. “The only kind of people who do that are real adventurers.” In that case, nice job, Kvinta and Adventure, and good luck, de Rothschild.
Breeder hens on Morgan Farm in Oklahoma by Tim Morgan
Alex at Pruned proposes a tour of industrial-scale chicken farms in Maryland. According to the New York Times article that inspired him, the state produces 570 million of the birds a year. Seems their droppings wash out into the Chesapeake Bay, which is becoming increasingly polluted and losing its fisheries. The state has proposed some stricter regulations, which farmers think are a load of crap. They’ll make more work for the farmers and (I’m guessing) make raising chickens more expensive.
Highlights of the trip would include mountains of manure and 500-foot-long coops. I wonder if we could meet any farmers? Or take a cruise on the Bay?
I landed an article on this giant UFO in the pages of MAKE magazine. Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades of Actual Size Artworks built it in Wisconsin with wood from an old dairy barn they transformed into their house. Then they drove all 500 pounds of it to Philadelphia and put it in a tree. It sounds like this was half the fun for them, especially because they got to interact directly with people seeing their work.
Aristotle: It was a beautiful form in sections. When we shipped this thing across the country there were these two half-UFOs on the trailer. Every time we stopped, someone would ask, “Hey what’s that?” Gail usually said, “It’s a flying saucer,” and they’d say, “Oh, obviously.”
Gail: As though that was a perfectly legitimate explanation.
Aristotle: During the installation, the same thing happened. We enjoy that spectacle that the public gets from looking at the artwork and responding to it. And that was particularly evident in the process of moving the thing out there.
Here it is on the trailer:
Another favorite of mine is the Trojan Piggy Bank they installed in Chicago. Unfortunately, it’s not there anymore. I think a tree fell on it.
Last week I guest-taught a lesson on fact checking to a group of journalism students at SF State. I was nervous and overly prepared. But the class was great, mostly because the students and the professor had a lot of questions they wanted answered right away. And partly because we got to watch this video again:
I can’t get tired of it. Not quite ready to build a shrine to Alex Trebek, though.
