Gwadzilla's Worst Nightmare...1

...comes to life.

Introducing Azonic's latest helmet offering, the Surround Sound, a brain bucket that comes prewired to get busy with your MP3 player. Azonic's site claims that the integrated speaker system "doesn’t restrict outside noise", but I have to believe that depends on user volume preference.

To be fair, the helmet is of the BMX variety and isn't the sort of thing you typically see on the heads of cyclists cruising the city streets (excepting some elements of the messenger crowd, of course), where full employment of all of the senses is, arguably, a little more critical. Still, I think a better (and more imaginative) name might have been Hear No Evil.²

Judging by the model on the site, this thing scores big with rad little hottie punk-poseurs of the Avril Lavigne genus. Huh. You'd think the danger of riding helmetless would hold greater attraction.

1 Mount Pleasant's own answer to the Cardiff Giant often posts about the plugged in, tuned-out people he meets on the bike and the dangers they pose to themselves and others around them.

2 Full Disclosure: I often ride jacked into a Shuffle. And there are times when I can be found in a state of mild inebriation whilst behind the bars (the handlebars, that is!). Finally, there are even occasions when I pedal under the distracting influence of powerful emotions and what I consider to be profound thoughts. End true confessions.

More Bars In More Places...

Okay, managed to plant my ass in Boulder Cee-Oh for a little more than four days over this past weekend. Wow!

[Let me just get this out of the way: didn't take a bike; the trip was just too compressed and last minute and, with SSWC07 about to get underway in Scotland for me and a few other lucky individuals, I just didn't feel like dealing with the complications of packing, shipping, and reassembling my Inbred. Yeah, I know, silly me, but there will be a return trip. From what I saw of the trails and terrain, and knowing that there wasn't much time for acclimatization, it would have been a strange mixture of pleasure and pain anyway.]

First, no newsflash here, but Boulder is a beautiful town. Nestled up against the Flat Irons to the west, it's awash in brewpubs and adrift in bike culture. Seriously, there are almost as many bike parking racks in this town as there are car parking meters, or "organic" and "fair trade" and "free range" and "eco-cycle" stickers plastered on the windows and doors of all the great eateries. And bike shops abound, sprouting from the concrete at intersections, rubbing shoulders with the aforementioned brewpubs and the occasional coffee shop. Yeah, it's a biking town, one that puts DC and its suburbs to the level of shame normally reserved for unrepentent pederasts. And bar rides? Yep, Boulder's got 'em. Thursday evening, ran smack dab into a group of about 25 or so cyclists dressed in freaky attire and riding freakier bikes—choppers, trikes, fixies, full-sussies, tall boys, singles speeds, you name it—sounding bike horns and bells and cheering madly at onlookers and motorists alike, as dusk settled in around their pulsing bike lights with all the certainty of a post-binge hangover. Beautiful sight, these kindred spirits claiming a little pavement for the evening on a two-wheeled dérive of sorts.

On the topic of beer, offerings from Left Hand were as ubiquitous there as Budweiser and Miller Lite are in the District, and no self-respecting drinking establishment was without a Fat Tire tap handle and neon cruiser logo prominently displayed. The first place I hit was Mountain Sun, a quaint, informal, psychedelic den of iniquity favored by bleary-eyed college students and stubble-jawed drifters alike, and whose owners have an overbearing penchant for Greatful Dead memorabilia, which clung to the walls like lichen in a cave. Good food and a great array of beers, including their own tasty and creative renditions and others from Stone, Left Hand, Breckenridge, and New Belgium, to name a few. I went with their Illusion Dweller IPA...very good, though with a surprisingly (given the closeness of the West Coast) dry finish.

Now a thing or two about thin, dry air and elevation and acclimatization and flatlanders from the east: hop off the plane in Denver, make your way to Boulder, drink two beers, and half an hour later your organs feel like they've turned to sand. I'm talking serious dehydration and thirst, the kind that has you upending a gallon of spring water before you've even paid the cashier for it. Okay, until acclimatization takes place, dessication is a real concern for freshly-expatriated beer drinkers. Next up: three beers in CO equals five beers in DC. Seems that thin, dry air makes "getting there" a little easier, since you're already a bit lightheaded. In no time flat and with your wallet still fat, you find yourself unexpectedly and prematurely "pissed," as the English say. Nice, sure, but I suggest drinking the water along with the beer as a sort of pre-emptive strike. Your liver and kidneys will thank you for it.

Okay, so what fun thing did I do? Well, for kicks of a slightly more sober nature, I ended up summitting two peaks, a 13er (South Arapahoe) and a 14er (Quandary). I had been warned several times about the importance of acclimatization and the perils of altitude sickness. The rule for acclimatization, as I understand it, is one day for every one thousand feet of elevation you plan to tackle. Because I was in CO for only four days, lying idle while my lungs adapted to the thin air wasn't an option if I wanted to partake of the grandeur bursting through the horizon all around me and do something I hadn't done before.

So I went hiking, and was rewarded with some of the most beatiful views my eyes have ever had the pleasure of drinking in. And though I saw one lady sitting uncomfortably just off the crumbled rock trail above the treeline on Quandary, wracked with altitude sickness*, her face knotted in anguish "like a devil's, sick of sin" (as Wilfred Owen so eloquently framed it**), I suffered little more than an occasional shortness of breath, despite a rather strong and fast pace up and down both mountains. That, and raw blisters on the achilles area of both ankles—my own stupidity and poor planning led me to break in a new pair of boots on South Arapahoe. Unfortunately, they tried to do the same to my feet. But the damage was minimal and all but forgotten in the post-summit euphoria I felt on a balcony overlooking the ski resort in Breckenridge at its namesake brewery, a cold 471 Small Batch IPA in my hand and the ghost-prints of fantastic panoramas floating around in my head. Next time I'll experience the beauty (and, no doubt, pain) from the vantage point of a bike saddle.


















*Information on altitude sickness can be found here.

**See Dulce et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen, 1917, first published in 1920.

Down a Beer and Eat a Button for Aldous...

It's the birthday of Brave New World author. poet, and mescalin(e) dabbler, Aldous Huxley, whose personal experiments with peyote served as the basis for his short book The Doors of Perception (whose title, it is said, influenced a young Jim Morrison in the naming of his band). It is an apt time to reread Brave New World...

"Maybe this world is another planet's hell."

Beauty and the Beast...

Catalina (Butch and Angie's girl) and I, July 4th post-dirt-ride-at-the-'Shed, pre-fireworks-display party, Frederick, Maryland.

Four-way split: Gueuze Cuvée René...yeah, baby.

Down a Beer for Bertrand...

It's the birthday of British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and social critic Bertrand Russell, author of Why I Am Not A Christian and In Praise of Idleness, among myriad other interesting works.

Here's a particularly apt quote, given that today is Bike to Work Day:

"Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves."

And another, particularly apt all the time in the land of bilk and money:

"It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. "

And while you're toasting Mr. Russell, raise a glass to all those fine human beings who decided to depart from convention today and take their metabolically-powered vehicles, despite the looming threat of rain. À votre santé!

Nous Sommes du Soleil...

Another reason (beyond the exceptional taste) to give the lineup from Anderson Valley Brewing Company a try: seems the Boonville, California brewery has wrangled ol' Sol into rolling up his fiery sleeves to help with the brewing process. Every little bit helps.

Let's hope this is the start of a western trend that, like so many others, rolls eastward across the country, traversing the throngs of neoconservative craniums along the way.

On a similar note, check this out, stolen from this guy (not sure about his carbon footprint, but his carbon-fiber one has gotta be huge).

Feeling that peddling around everywhere isn't doing enough for the planet or your conscience? Wandering about with some free space in your cerebrum that hasn't been polluted by cop-culture dramas and formulaic sitcoms on teevee? I suggest checking out this vanguard local organization. Then decide whether the cost of a mere three-pints-plus-tip at your local pub is worth the opportunity to help change the planet in positive ways.

It's getting late. Ride your bike already.

Mug Shot...

Yeah, shameless self-promotion. But hey, the image came out great, despite my neophyte status with Illustrator (of course, it helps to start with pen and ink). Gotta hand it to Cafepress.com for making a one-off possible at a relatively affordable price. Image transfer is spot-on, mug is solid and capacious (15 ounces!), and the artwork is one of a kind, for what it's worth. And yes, that's coffee in the mug in the pic, though it seems to hold beer quite nicely, too.

Speaking of which, also available here is a pretty husky, 22 ounce beer stein sporting gold trim, for those of you who prefer downers to uppers. If you rode it, own it, at cost. Remember, when my oeuvre is hanging in the National Gallery of Art overlaying the Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein pieces (hell, this mug would be the perfect accessory to Duchamp's Fountain, n'est ce pas?), you won't be able to afford me, and I sure as hell ain't giving you a price break then, even if you're cute and charming. It'd be beneath me, and I ain't stoopin'. You've been warned.

Whaam!—indeed.

(Just got back from my first team meeting at The Bicycle Escape in Frederick—more about which soon.)

"Art is a form. A form is something that does not exactly have a history, but a destiny. Art had a destiny. Today, art has fallen into value, and unfortunately at a time when values have suffered. Values: aesthetic value, commercial value...values can be negotiated, bought and sold, exchanged. Forms, as forms, cannot be exchanged for something else, they can only be exchanged among themselves, and the aesthetic illusion comes at that price. For example, in abstraction, when the object is deconstructed, when the world and reality are deconstructed, there is still a way to exchange the object in itself symbolically. But abstraction later became merely a pseudo-analytical procedure for decomposing reality, not deconstructing it. Something has fallen apart, perhaps through the sole effect of repetition."
—Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art

Into the Arms of Mother Night...

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
1922 - 2007

Internecine irony: I quote Baudrillard and express concern about the charge left on his lifetime battery. Less than five months later he takes a dirt bath. I quote Vonnegut only ten days ago. Now he's gone.

Who's next, Vaneigem?

Keyboard of Death.

Suddenly there are a handful of people I'd love to quote right now whom I'd otherwise prefer to ignore...

"Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia."

Toasting Tristan...

Raise a frosty glass...today is the birthday of Romanian poet and founding father of Dada, Tristan Tzara. Or is it the 16th?...no matter, consensus is overrated. And anyway, two weeks is long enough to go between beers.

Or so I've heard.

"We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than anything else. But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this quantity of life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting. Dada knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with subtle, perfidious methods, Dada introduces it into daily life. And vice versa. In art, Dada reduces everything to an initial simplicity, growing always more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind of creation and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic reduced to a personal minimum, while literature in its view should be primarily intended for the individual who makes it. Words have a weight of their own and lend themselves to abstract construction. The absurd has no terrors for me, for from a more exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd to me. Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond between disparate acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work; the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework of words and sentiments."
— Lecture on Dada, 1922

"Dying Is Pointless..."

"...you have to know how to disappear."

Jean Baudrillard has disappeared, leaving a very real hole in the flimsy fabric of hyper-reality, one that won't soon be filled, if ever.

Now it's off to the "dead ghetto."

Damn.

"Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void."

Hope this was more prescience than jinx.

Reading Raoul...

Hey you, the guy (or girl) languidly dreaming about changing the world simply by riding his bicycle every now and then, how about putting down the remote, getting off your fat, lazy, winter-swollen ass and using your finger (any one, your choice) to turn off the glass teat*, and (understanding that it's asking way too fucking much to suggest that you actually BUY THE BOOK) heading over to nothingness.org (brilliant name, that) to read (that's right, expose your mind to something alien: theta brain waves) Raoul Vaneigem's excellent take on creating a meaningful existence that recognizes the imperative gravity of space-time lived experience, The Revolution of Everday Life".

What the fuck does that mean?...click on the link, FFS!

Oh, got there, did you? And now your back, in a proverbial and utterly urbane flash. What's that? Topic too profound? Decided it wasn't for you? You want—no, need—to just turn off your mind and relax after a tough day at work designing rockets, to not think (oh, the agony!)? To simply be "entertained" by watching some bullshit Tarantino flick—where "creative" acts of violence substitute for plot and represent high art, the target of innumerable theses in an ever increasingly absurd world where the quantifiable reigns supreme over the qualitative—that came to your door in a little red envelope—bingo!—like magic (but not the magic, the one that was all but eradicated by the Age of Enlightenment, with its monomaniacal pursuit of rationalism and objectivity and its intransigent persecution of all things mysterious—in effect, its efforts to nail to the floor once and for all the very feet of God)? Or maybe a tribute to cop culture that makes you feel tough and proud and devoid of the need to do violence yourself, like the popular, pustular television drama "24"?

Fine. Help yourself (feel the irony?). All the world's a stage: take your seat. As the French say, "retour à la normale." Back to the herd.

End of alcohol-induced rant.

"Psychophysiologist Thomas Mulholland found that after just 30 seconds of watching television the brain begins to produce alpha waves, which indicates torpid (almost comatose) [slow] rates of activity. Alpha brain waves are associated with unfocused, overly receptive states of consciousness. A high frequency alpha waves [sic] does not occur normally when the eyes are open. In fact, Mulholland’s research implies that watching television is neurologically analogous to staring at a blank wall."
Wes Moore, Television: Opiate of the Masses

"To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects."
—Raoul Vaneigem

"Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom? "
—Raoul Vaneigem

"Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things."
—Jean Baudrillard

*Harlan Ellison's term, respectfully pinched for this post.

Selling, But Not Selling Out...

Okay, shameless self-promotion without the profit. Art for art's sake. Whatever.

Tee shirts featuring the 2007 Punk Bike Enduro image (Iggy Pop w/ Biker Babe) are now available at my "store" on CafePress. There are two styles of shirts for chix and one for dix. All are white. All are made in the USA. What this last bit really means is that to make this tee shirt, no child of asian descent was interrupted while gnawing off a limb to escape the manacle binding him/her—in accordance with the unassailable rules of globalization and its noble race to the bottom—to an aging Singer. That's meaningful.

Oh yeah, the reason the word store appears above in " " (besides the obvious): I make nothing from the sale of these shirts. The prices reflect the same amount—and not one kopek more—that Cafepress would charge me if I were to buy one myself, which I just did, size L (kiss me, I'm a non-fucking-profit). That's meaningful too, at least to me.

Full disclosure: If you're not familiar with CafePress, it costs me nothing to "sell" these shirts, either. And anyway, given the small audience for which this item may have an appeal, any profit from sales likely wouldn't even cover my tab for one night at the local pub. So, there you have it.

Also, I have not yet seen the final product in the flesh, so to speak. However, if you zoom the image at CafePress, it looks like all the details (e.g., skull-filled background) will show up nicely on the shirts. At the risk of beating this all to death, I'll post a pic when mine arrives.

Personally Famous...

Ah, fame at last. Never imagined it could feel so edifying.

Wait, that's not the word; so, uh...so... pedestrian. Yeah, that's it.

Seems one chap who rode in the recent Single Speed Punk Bike Enduro appreciated the years of sweat equity (and strict asceticism normally reserved for trappist monks) that it took to raise my drawing talents to their material apogee, as represented in my latest artistic reification seen at right (with a dash of pink) and here.

So he approached me to ask for the rights, which I shamelessly granted. The result is shown in the pic above, artfully cropped to preserve his anonymity. Immortalized through the magic of the old school iron-on transfer—a DIY one-off job that seems to have turned out quite well—the image now adorns a canvas à trois dimensions in this world, having narrowly escaped the simulated, absolute zero confines of cyberspace. Nice work!

Did I say immortalized? I meant briefly rescued from shameful obscurity (damn 13¢ words!). The bane of iron-ons, of course, is their tendency to eventually peel away from the fabric like an old scab—hence their near annihilation beneath the bootheel of more technologically advanced processes such as dye sublimation and screenprinting.

But the iron-on's strength lies in its immediacy (as Hakim Bey uses the word), in the fact that it can be created at home with only a modest investment of time and equipment—the same intangible quality that makes all DIY projects ennobling. And its ephemeral nature offers another advantage, at least in this case: if it does self-destruct, it will probably happen before the tell-tale year included in the design renders it passé. Heaven—and all Hell's minions—forbid!

(The iron-on is sort of the fixed gear of the fashion world...long live the iron-on!)

Again, nice job, my friend.

Speaking of the Enduro, here's the GPS data for the ride, flagrantly stolen from Big John of Empathy Test fame. (Hmm, I recall a couple of miles that didn't seem to make the graph—then again, the lines I usually pick can't exactly be called straight.)

Tip One Back for Jack...

...born this very day in 1922. Died right on time. A fellow Pisces (and that's where the similarities end), poet, drinker (okay, I lied before), and literary icon.

Words like scimitars to topple the giant, Ennui...

You don't know
what I'm all about
like killing cops
and reading Kerouac
— Jawbreaker, Boxcar

A Ban for All Ages...

Ian Mackaye testifying last month against a proposed all-age ban for some DC establishments. A clear case of policymakers attempting to blame the victim. It would be nice if this video went on a little longer to get Councilman Jim Graham's response, but alas.

Some background information can be found here.

Ian on Nike's rapacious and illegal appropriation of a certain Minor Threat cover image.

Catharsis...

When the chrysalis splits, when the warmth and familiarity and routine comfort give way suddenly, unexpectedly, and something brand new and yet faintly familiar begins (again) like a slow dawning that floods your torpid being with the blood of gods, well, sometimes it only takes a few lucid minutes—the sun streaming in unbidden on your worried mind between swatches of dark clouds, the bracing cold piercing your exiled body like a billion icy needles on a moonlit walk to the metro station—to realize that the insular place you were in was a little thing called hell, and heaven is simply that feeling of freedom you'd somehow managed to forget while wrapping the tawdry trappings again and again like a tourniquet around your crude form until they almost felt like folded wings...

...almost.

Myths and Multiforms...

"To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explained only by those willing to take risks. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way — not his way. We favour the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth… "

— Mark Rothko (w/ Adolph Gottlieb), Abstract Expressionist Manifesto

Some Rothko works are currently on exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Hop on the bike and culture yourself. Take someone you love along with you.

(Reminds me, I need to get to work designing the next Bootlegger's Bliss logo; got a nice concept in the hopper...)