February 08, 2007
yogurt vs. gasoline
I blogged about the Neistat Brothers way back in the day. But I just checked in on their website again for the first time in a long while and couldn’t resist another shout out. Definitely can’t get enough of their videos, that’s for sure.
Go to neistat.com.
Click on movies.
Choose Yogurt vs. Gasoline (might have to scroll down a bit).
There are many short videos on this “movies” page that are pretty sweet, but this one in particular caught my fancy: I’m a sucker for the bicycle vs. car theme.
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May 12, 2006
ghost bikes
A powerful mix of street art and emotion. Damn if there aren’t a lot of people in NYC doing cool stuff.
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November 08, 2005
biking for change
One of my oldest friends, David Kroodsma a.k.a. “Kroody”, began a year-long bike trip starting in Stanford, CA and ending in Tierra del Fuego. Check out his website/trip log at rideforclimate.com.
Some say he is riding because he likes doing epic things. Others (himself included) argue he is riding to increase awareness of global climate change. He has visited handful of elementary and high school classrooms both in Massachusetts and California and students will be tracking his progress and reading his updates from the road.
He is a wonderful travelogue writer and having spent the last five years in the environmental/outdoorsy/scientific community at Stanford, he has a great grasp of and explains really well the science and politics underpinning climate change. I highly recommend checking in on this site once and a while (link to the rss feed).
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August 10, 2005
The eve of departure
Boston is in the past. The truck is packed, the address changed with the USPS, my credit card and the CIA. Okay, so I didn’t contact the CIA, but I bet they know all the same.
If you see a big yellow truck driving south, wave hello. You’ll know it’s us because of the unique padlock on the back of the truck: a fitting gesture of closure and security, a nod to those in the know as we leave a black ribbon of interstate in our wake.
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May 07, 2005
There goes the neighborhood
Here’s an old (or so I’ve been assured) picture of a proposed highway bypass ramp that would, according to my calculations, be visible from my bedroom window. (For orientation: you can see the Charles River and the BU Bridge crossing it in the lower left-hand corner.) Like any good citizen with a the revolution will not be motorized handlebar sticker on my bike, my first reaction is pure righteous indignation. That said, I’ve been reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this week (to decide if I want to spoil it with the new movie). The first scenes made me feel a bit like Arthur Dent, the bumbling and somewhat charming earthling hero of the book, as his house is prepared for demolition to create a highway bypass. Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what’s so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.We learn soon after Arthur that the Earth is about to be destroyed by an interstellar spaceship for “the building of a hyperspatial express route through our star system”. Leave it to a good sci-fi writer to put things in cosmic perspective.
[pause]
That said, I’d still get my ass in gear to stop a concrete invasion in my ‘hood.
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April 25, 2005
Neistat Brothers
These guys are wild. Artists, pedalers, organizers…check out their array of videos at www.neistat.com or cut to the chase.
“Goldfish” had me wincing and biting my fingernails.
“Bike Thief” was sad, especially for those of us who value our rims.
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April 02, 2005
I blinked
Last night, biking home along the Charles, just after passing underneath the BU Bridge, a obese white woman was standing next to the embankment and her stopped car (tail lights on) was right there along the Storrow 500.
Things happen quickly. A few speed walkers pass me going the opposite direction as I approach, I pull on my brakes a bit, she asks “Can I use your light to look for my phone I just dropped it down the embankment?”, I see a large-ish man get out of the car to my left and start to lumber towards me across the bike path. “No, sorry, I’m running late getting back,” I call out over my shoulder as I lean into my pedals again and distance myself.
My heart was racing, I felt like I had probably just spoiled these people’s night by running away from an innocent situation. People stuck on the side of the road, innocent enough. They need help. I’m the nice biker who goes by and I stick it to them. But I saw something there that I didn’t like. Within moments, the good little disciple of the culture of fear that I am, I was generating headlines about the biker mugged or worse on his evening ride. I started reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book “Blink” the other day. Within the first thiry pages or so, he makes an interesting case for how people are remarkably adept at making split second decisions with just a glance’s worth of visual information. He cites archaeologists and art historians who spot fakes in seconds after curators and their hired teams of validators spend months doing chemical sampling and stylistic evaluation, and describes the example of a researcher who looks at videos of a married couple and can predict with statistically significant accuracy whether the couple will divorce.
Gladwell is good. He’s a New Yorker writer, author of “The Tipping Point” which is being read by all kinds of businessmen, entrepreneurs and network-theory academicians now because it talks about how trends and fads catch on. But, as my dad pointed out, he suffers from an “acutely American disease” — he sees too much the rosy side of things, dwells on the shiny, happy, innocuous examples. In “The Tipping Point” he talks about how the trend of penny-loafers catches on in the Village in NYC, how social revolutions get started. To be fair, he does talk about suicides and smoking as social trends a bit, but briefly. And he doesn’t talk about the sticking power of hatred or anger, and how that can become a trend, despite a wealth of historical examples. I haven’t finished “Blink”, but I wonder if he gets into the negative sides of split-second decisions, instead of dwelling on these leading aristocratic examples of divorce and art.
I chose to speed away from these two people who didn’t look like me, likely screwing them over, and missing an opportunity to spread some good smaritanism because I had fear. This seems to be a definite underbelly to split-second decision making. Do I decide which of my new classmates I am going to befriend in the first five minutes of the first class? As if to caution me away from this reasoning, my rear tire went flat in the next half mile after I passed the couple. Karma?
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