Back to winter.

Casey and I built this bike a year ago, we both rode our single speeds fanatically all through the cold months. This winter I'll be biking for work, and I look forward to sliding around and feeling the bite of frost on my face in the cold morning air. But I'm a little scared, I won't have the youthful enthusiasm of that first single speed season to keep my spirits up. Read More......

Palais de Tokyo Massacre

click on any of the pics for larger versions


I took these shots 2 years ago and they still startle me. In Paris the world boils over, the commodified contradictions of street and art match up and leave a wrecked plaza and a ghost of a party in their wake.




Splashes of color, dregs of beer bleed into puddles and mix heavily with the ennui of an overcast lonely day. In the best nights the Parisian youth come together and turn this plaza into an anarchist circus, with wild haired girls spinning fire and knotting together over jokes and canteens and shared histories of focused moments. The morning is left to sift through their debris.




But I guess things got a little out of hand this day. The saddened walls know they'll be scrubbed, and other painters with hangovers more slight will take out their revelry on stoic history, on buildings that speak of permanence and wisdom and statues that speak of glory and reason. Neither the institution nor the burning will of the radical triumphs.




Truth is I'm lonely, thats why I'm looking over old photos, anyway. Read More......

Natalie Portman is so damn cool!

My mother shouldn't watch this...



I still want to marry her. Read More......

Miss Kittin

Catbats? Check
Psychedelics? Check
Creepy houses? Check
Rad music? Doublecheck.

Halloween music video found!

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Fixie the Loop!

In some kind of Quixotic delusion I decided to try to ride my fixie over the alpine loop yesterday. I've been meaning to do it all summer, and figured it was now or never. Lindsey accompanied me on her geared bike to act as a counterpoint to my stupidity and to carry the bulk of the tools.


The way we decided to go spanned only 49 miles, and we set off late on wednesday night, sleeping in Sandy. So the actual ride was short, but included two summits: the alpine loop, and the connection into the Highland area that skips the point of the mountain. It looked doable on paper, and we'd done Emigration canyon with the fixie and figured this path was a reasonable goal. I had my normal 46x15 gearing.

It was stupid hard. The first hill was like a joke:
See that brown strip pointing up and out of the right side of the picture? That's the same bloody hill, and it took its sweet time zigging up to the top. Somehow I made it, and rewarded myself with a plummet down the other side into Utah Valley, where an appropriately placed Wendy's supplied me with a delicious delicious frosty.

After a lazy lunch by the mouth of the canyon we headed up. The road got much narrower and more beautiful, with the chilly canyon air making us look forward to the patches of sun. It was the best day for a long ride ever; cloudless, sunny, but cold like ski-sun, keeping you moving. I still stopped, a lot, and grew fairly useless and delirious. My whole body was trying to push that impossible gear, and it just wasn't sustainable for long periods of time. That's about when we saw something a little like this:

And the going got pretty damn slow. My magic phone map stopped getting service, so we just kind of... pedaled. Every 200 yards I would stop, and every mile or so I'd stop and take a nap, it seemed. Lindsey of course was bored as hell, because she's a badass and could have cheerily continued along at that pace for the rest of the weekend. I was dying, but eventually...


We made it! But I really, really don't suggest it more than once. Gears are great, people, I promise. All told, it took us from 9 am to 5:30 pm to go about 30 miles. But it was fun. I didn't have an ounce of energy left, and after the race course down the other side of the loop and dinner with my Dad in Sundance I crashed out at 8:00 for about 12 hours.

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ObamaBike!

As a beautiful segue from the last post, I just learned of this ridiculous/inspiring build from Geekhouse Bikes, a modern track frame builder and a favourite of Casey's.

Behold the Obamabike:





It's a campaign fundraiser that succinctly gives props to the bike-friendly candidate. What a better way to show your support and reduce your carbon footprint than by pushin' this puppy around? Goes great with the Obama Spoke Card

It's also all kinds of wackness. Bid on it on ebay right NOW. Read More......

Campaign Trail '08

Frustrated with being stuck in a McCain state, where the electoral college renders my vote useless, I spent the weekend campaigning for Barack Obama in Grand Junction, Colorado. Colorado's a swing state in the election, so butting my head against the conservative brick wall in a small town was a much more efficient use of my brain cells than wasting them in Utah. Call me sustainable, I guess. Grand Junction is an oil-rich town, where the most common beast of burden is a white Halliburton utility truck and the oil industry creates an artificial housing market boom despite the rest of the country being in a recession. It was a very interesting time to be out knocking on doors for Obama, and the responses indicated that even within this hardcore conservative environment a good chunk of people were ditching the ol' white guy in favor of some new blood.

I had never canvassed before, and was struck by what a lottery it was, and also by how easily people can be persuaded if you unmask a few myths and steer them away from Fox news and into their own decisions through watching the debates and speeches. It is both incredibly unnerving and incredibly rewarding to talk to complete strangers about things you believe in, and people were everything from angry to condescending to interesting to downright thankful to have informed political conversation.

I spent both days in a smattering of retirement communities and rich McMansions in the A.M., and then found myself in poor shanty redneck-havens in the evening. It seems that everyone in Colorado is white and has a ton of yapping dogs, they just get bigger in the poorer neighborhoods. Seriously though, it was profoundly impacting to see the disconnect between the rich and the poor, and hear how differently both classes approached issues. The rich were calling Obama the worst names, saying that he was a terrorist and a socialist and was going to take all their money and give it to the poor, who didn't deserve it. The working poor were either too tired to talk, or concerned that a vote for Obama would mean losing their stable jobs at an oil field. They also tried to equate similarity with say, Sarah Palin as a cause for support. I connected much better with either the very old or the very working class. It was very gratifying to hear how irate and scared the rich people were, and then drive right across town and tell their less wealthy neighbors what I had just heard.

I traipsed across manicured lawns and ramshackle squalor, and everywhere people were concerned and thoughtful. I had the feeling I was the member of a secret society, where people would whisper at their door "I'm for Obama, don't tell my husband!" or tell us not to even bother with the rest of the neighborhood because they were all a bunch of dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeons. At one point Adam and Lindsay, who were campaigning with me, stopped a woman in a rich neighborhood who was worried about showing her support. "Your whole neighborhood is secretly supporting Obama," they said, "Everyone on the block just thinks everyone else is voting for McCain." It was pretty fun stuff.

So many people are getting all tied into this pundit stuff, but so many others are sick of it and just want a good future. Obama's that future, and America owes it to itself and the rest of the world to get this guy in office. Do what you can, folks. Read More......

Sweet 80's Schwinn Catalogs!

The time is almost upon us where we will have totally eclipsed the '80s in terms of fashion sense and style. What better way to celebrate than with the classic, classic ad copy of 1987 bike catalogs? And yes, I do ride the second bike every day. In that unitard as well. All catalogues from Here, they've got a really comprehensive set of Schwinn scans.



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