Holy crap! I mean there’s animal cruelty and all, but wow.
Thanks to Rudy for the link.
ADDENDUM: I’m going to band camp for 10 days. It’s in the Mendocino Woodlands where there are no phones and I’m not allowed to drive out and go to the Internet cafe, so enjoy my archives … and believe you me, I’ll have some stories to tell on August 6th.
So apparently with Flickr you have to change the @ to a &# so the link doesn’t break. And then there’s the right-click for the static IP address and … whatever, I already forgot.
Anyway, Pedal Monster. Here’s a very limited visual rundown of the weekend. Also, the years-long standoff with my digital camera is over, and I will now return to using it.
Enjoy.
Moses
the Life-Size Mousetrap
the wiener
welcome to Pedal Monster
ass clown
the Cyclofuge
Reina Terror and the Huffy Toss trophy
Monster stage (featuring Hammer Horror Classics)
bike hump
Gary’s art car
yikes
Murka
she got the bike back. Dejected, he eventually pulled his pants up
this is how it always ends.
Spent all night opening a Flickr account and now I can’t figure out how to post pictures from Pedal Monster this weekend. Yes, finally, pictures. I SAID PICTURES.
I seem to be doing everything right but now I’m going to smash my computer if I don’t walk away. Will try again tonight after the veins in my neck stop popping out.
July 16, 2007
Ace Auto
Yes, I know I’m supposed to talk about Pedal Monster. Yahoo, what a show, and what a weekend, and I’m aware I’d be a tease to hype something up for days on end and then not follow through with some sort of juicy blow-by-blow of the spectacle’s sordid events.
In fact, it’s what I used to do for a living: Be the person who wrote down everything that happened in certain events thrown by the City’s divergent subcultures, to report it back to the attendees so they could re-live things, either because they were too wasted to remember stuff in their brown-outs, or they were elsewhere in the room viewing some other life-altering razzle-dazzle while I was clawing frantically at pad, pen, and camera in front of the other one.
It was madness much of the while, trying to observe the melee I know to be of future-retrospective-style historical significance while participating in it at the same time — eventually participating enough to where I could be convinced that I was not a poser or a hanger-on. Not being the critic who just writes because they can’t do something themselves — but the critic that became the person who did. Eventually, I was swallowed up by the gravitational pull.
These days, I’m confident that I’ve accrued enough punk points to spare some leftovers to hook up any housewife with a one-way ticket to Plasmatics-ville. I have become fully “embedded” — not that I was ever a journalist anyway, as much as a person who got paid to tell people the stuff I liked or hated and why I liked or hated it.
So I always hype these events now, the ones I’m helping throw, and for some reason, I can’t bring myself follow through on the gossip reports in any substantial way. I think the Internet crutch has allowed me to feel spiritually OK about this, as most information will be out there anyway, whether I myself report it or not. With pictures, too. Also, it’s harder to divulge personal and potentially incriminatory tidbits of information about one’s best friends. Now, as a fully active member of Cyclecide — i.e., Patti Hearsted and unable to find any real time to attend events by other artists in the City I know I should be supporting — I don’t really have much to say the day after a show. Or the day after that.
As it stands now, yesterday, on the Day After Pedal Monster, after wrangling money and clipboards and costume changes and happy cycle-freak drunks until dawn, I got my first full night’s sleep and woke up at 4pm. Then I went to the Drunkyard to help strike everything, and cleaned the shaving-cream-and-flour “pie” bits from the yard, and the broken glass from the BB gun shooting range, and the whippet containers and wilted beer cans kicked behind every pallet and 50-gallon drum on our modern-day Sanford and Son fantasy-lot …
Then we crushed the other end of the car under the 2-ton bank safe under the Mousetrap’s 30-foot crane, and then the car still started after that — when we didn’t have any ether so we poured Tic Tac, the national drink of El Salvador, in the carburetor — and we rode it on idle all around Ace’s strangely-clean pavement and then smashed the windshield with sledgehammers and Texas Toothpicks. And then had more Pabst and hot dogs for dinner, naturally. And pushed my own dead-battery car out to the middle of the street so we could jump it with Mark’s car and drive me home to unpack the gypsy tinsel and all the other stuff and put away the Dead Babies’ guest beds and finally take an epsom salt bath.
Just another weekend, really. How am I supposed to be a reporter about that?
I ‘ve been “stripping” for a week.
Making strips of fabric, that is. Cutting cutting cutting. For days on end. The project ended up looking like some clowns got trapped in a shredder, but hopefully in a good way.
“Gypsy tinsel” is what I’ve been calling it. Although that term sounds a little hippie — and I got even more sketched when a housemate last night said I looked like I was making a Maypole … so I’ve also been referring to it “Steven Tyler’s Microphone Safety Third Delineator Tape,” or somesuch word combination.
The intent is to style Cyclecide’s pedal-powered carnival midway to look flittery and junk-circusy. Our usual ride-barricade method of CAUTION tape not only barely delineates the safety areas — it’s also made of flimsy petroleum product, and therefore quite easy for a dumb-head Weasel Knievel to bomb through it on a tallbike and get kicked in the throat by someone on the Ferris Wheel or whichever ride. But who wants to get clotheslined by repurposed denim and subsequently tangled up in a clown-clothes fabric-strip mess? Hopefully nobody.
For the strippy material, I started with some of the discarded clothing from the free box in our house — choosing bright colors and whatnot, and fashioning them into two-or-three-inch-wide, yard-long sections. Also, Rose gave me bags and bags of cuttings left over from her side-project job of making bellydancing skirts to vend at the events and conventions she attends with Ultra Gypsy and the Barbary Coast Shakedown. Plenty of glittery stuff in those bags.
The delineator “rope” on which the tatters are tied is made of the seams of jeans discarded after the Maker Faire clothing swap. So the gypsy tinsel is as strong as a Jay Broemmel weld. Hopefully it’ll look impressive once all the yards and yards AND YARDS of it are installed at Pedal Monster and the photos start rolling in.
I mean, that’s not ALL I’ve been doing to get ready for our big weekend. I’m just proud I found another Cyclecide-style DIY no-cost solution to a potentially expensive problem (i.e. we can’t afford / don’t have room to store a bunch of metal riot-barrier gates, so this will suffice). It’s light, it’s portable, and if you’re a mutant biker throwing impromptu jousts and events, it could seriously cut down on ambulance-calling time.
Rider still assumes all risk, of course.
Yeah, Cyclecide is slammed with Pedal Monster. More on that tomorrow.
For today, enjoy this Kipling poem, written in tribute to Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, who in 1895 led about 600 of his countrymen to an unsuccessful raid on the Boers in southern Africa. Just one day into it, Jameson surrendered, and got shipped back to England to be tried and convicted for failing to listen to the order not to do anything yet until he heard from his superior. The defeat was re-cast as a victory in Britain, and the Boer War soon followed. The British really wanted them diamonds in them mines …
I thought the gender-specific gut-kick at the end of the poem was maybe directed to Kipling’s actual son, and not an imperialist with an unhealthy case of hubris embroiled in an ignominious military failure, but whatevs. The rest of it makes me want to do good stuff and break ugly things and speak at high school graduations … so here it is because I gotta go to the drunkyard to help set up the rides.
kipling was a gangster. just look at that ’stache
“If”
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!
By Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936).
Calling all clowns, tw0-wheeled freaks, thrill junkies, and controlled-chaos idjits … this event is JUST FOR YOU.
June 20, 007
SF to Chino’s
Doyle got tipsy a couple months back when he was in San Francisco and left his colors at Amnesia. The 6′6″neo-lightweight is mostly on the sober train these days and can’t hold his liquor any more, and he likes to dance, and dancing in such a hot place as Amnesia requires a certain amount of disrobing, I guess. Being a member of the Black Label Bike Club and not Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, Doyle could’ve potentially been in big trouble if someone else from Black Label had found his colors that night, and not a Cyclecide clown.
you should see him in a diaper
Most bike club members would agree that anybody who leaves their colors behind somewhere deserves to get f’d with — sweet Jesus, did I just doom myself to misplacing my own vest? — but out of all the mutant bicycle organizations, Black Label’s the one that takes the colors shit real serious. They would’ve made him suffer before they gave them back. We only messed with him a little.
Black Label — our direct ancestors, and the fathers and mothers of the tallbike joust — just held their Chino’s run this past weekend. An annual gathering of the chapters outside Minneapolis, this Bike Club event is nothing like Bike Kill … it’s more like their version of Bohemian Grove. Card-carrying members only. They all meet in Minneapolis and go to Palmer’s and ride bikes to a campground and trade secret handshakes and hold confidential meetings and drink lots of beer. And it was to this event that Katy Bell sent Doyle’s colors, via air mail, to another Bike Club member’s MPLS house. No doubt the Black Label kids verbally abused the crap out of Doyle upon the jacket’s ceremonial return.
Word on the street is that some hardcore Bike Club members would’ve preferred to confiscate Doyle’s colors for a painful amount of time, as this is the second time he’s lost them. They’re also known to drop full members back down to prospect status for certain offenses. Of course, this tough-talk rumor might also be some Black Label-style hardcore lore.
All Cyclecide did was to sew a clown nose on the outside, and to beer-elf the inside with Sharpie, and to smash blobs of white greasepaint in the pockets so when he reached in his pockets he’d get clown makeup all over his fingers and then (hopefully) unknowingly smear white all over his face and clown-elf himself.
That’s okay, right?
They’re not going to kill us, are they?
June 15-18, 007
Bayview, Potrero Hill, the HaightSF
ITEM! The Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo’s annual PEDAL MONSTER has been confirmed!! July 13-15, 2007, at locations throughout San Francisco, expect a mutant bicyclist gathering of epic and idiotic proportions.
Black Label Bike Club (everywhere), Dead Baby Bikes (Seattle), C.H.U.N.K. 666 (Portland / NYC), Rat Patrol (Chicago), Chaingang (San Fernando Valley), Skidmarxxx (lotsa places), Choppercabras (LA), Banana Bike Brigade (St. Louis), Chopaderos (San Diego), Sprockettes (Portland), Cutthroats (Richmond VA) … I’m talkin’ to all yall. Time to buy plane tickets (or ride yer bike) to SAN FRANCYCLE for some ILLEGAL MAYHEM SO DANGEROUS AND MAYHEM-TASTIC I CAN’T EVEN TALK ABOUT IT ON THE PAGES OF THE INTERNETS WITHOUT BEING SUED BY EVERYONE ELSE WHO WON’T HAVE AS KICKASS OF A TIME AS WE WILL.
Ahem.
And if I forgot any mutant bike clubs I’m sure yall won’t hesitate to let me know.
yes, GORGAR the vain and belligerent urine-eating monster will be there. Tremble in your toe-clips
Also.
ITEM! Cyclecide and the Mousetrap and the Disgusting Spectacle all appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel Show as part of his taped segment on the Maker Faire! Takes a while to load the page but it’s worth it. (P.S. CRAP, I HAD NO IDEA THE EEPYBIRD MENTOS AND DIET COKE GUYS WERE THERE. That’s how slammed we are during shows. Who wants to join Cyclecide? We need some interns so we can wander around and look at stuff occasionally.)
So. This past weekend? Naaaa.
I didn’t go to Simone and Dave’s RoboGames/Combots (a.k.a. “Robot Wars” even though we’re not supposed to call it that because of some copyright issue but that’s what they are) — even though I had free passes because last year members of Cyclecide clowned for the robots and their masters in between battles, clattering around in cardboard robot costumes (the boys) and Beer Can Can-Can ™ skirts made of repurposed barley-soda aluminum. And Dannygirl went all the way, painting herself silver and walking around like a robot all day in a silver helmet and go-go skirt. Last year. This year, we were too overextended from all the see above.
A friend in the Vau de Vire Society / Xeno could’ve gotten me into a special Scion show on Alcatraz, in which they opened up a portion of the world-famous prison that had never been seen before, not even on private tours — the porcelain hose-down-the-crazy-prisoners room and the meds room. My friend played a junkied-out inmate trying to get his meds while a hula hooper went off in the background, ostensibly symbolizing his brain on drugs. And shit! The A’z were there. Yadadamean? That song gets stuck in my head about as often as the Trunk Boiz’ Scraper Bike track currently blowing up cyclists’ email lists.
So. The weekend? Naaaaa.
Tora and his rock’n’roll band Tiger Honeypot played “Double Delicious” at ArtSF. The show feted the release of SF author Virgie Tovar’s Destination DD: Adventures of a Breast Fetishist with 40DDs. So that meant breast-themed art, breast-themed food, breast-themed erotica readings, breast-themed history, and local rock’n’roll bands who very probably enjoy breasts and looking at breasts.
(This is the part where my dad, barely able even to listen to the events I’m recounting so far without rolling his eyes, would shake his head and bemusedly mutter: “San Francisco … the Land of Fruits and Nuts.”)
Even though I’m already a fan of Tora’s wife Trinity Cross’s Field Day Fashion brand clothing line, I only just made friends with Tora Thursday night, when riding in the back of the Waaahmbulance with a bunch of goons, going to the noise metal show on some bus somewhere in Potrero hill. I showed him the Urban Cowboy method of staying upright while sitting on the floor in the back of a van that’s speeding through the hills of San Francisco like the chase scene in Bullitt: Lean in the opposite direction your body’s trying to lean, and stretch at least one arm out for leverage. Just like riding a mechanical bull.
See? I went out. Thursday night. Another atypical punk rock slash crusty event, complete with secret meeting spots and repurposed vehicles and oogles sitting around on the sidewalk with 40s in paper sacks. The bus — was it a MUNI bus with a loft built up on the back of it? … whatever it was, it was awesomely ghetto — pulled up and everyone swarmed it. Short attention spans and the threat of a cover charge determined that we didn’t stick around for the bands to set up. Not when Lowtech was appearing at 5lowershop’s monthly jungle night at UndergroundSF for free.
That’s when the magic happened.
It’s always entertaining when a crowd of well-adjusted partygoers befuddles the Asshole In The Room into spinning out early. It reminds me of electrons and protons and neutrons all colliding with each other — the thing with the negative charge gets pushed away with equal force, bounces off something else, which also pushes it away, so it bounces harder…
One of the gals in my party fell victim to this asshole neutron’s masochistic attention-getting ploys.
“STOP GRABBING MY BOOB,” she thundered, standing safe amid a patio full of peaceful people smoking peaceful plants. Asshole neutron then drunkenly boinged over to me. Puffing on a Camel, he glared at her from across the way.
“He was grabbing my ass earlier,” another Amazonian hollered from a corner. Big girl. Brave dude.
He looked at me. I looked at him. I smiled.
“You’re That Guy, aren’t you?,” I asked him. “You just can’t wait to get your head kicked in.”
He smiled back, stubbed out his cigarette, and went inside. Ostensibly in search of other body parts to fondle on the countdown to the ambulance ride.
Sure enough, half an hour later, I was standing again in the same place, and so was he, and some girl’s boyfriend smashed a pint glass upside his head.
And rather than lunge for the smasher, Asshole Neutron acted as if nothing happened. While the boyfriend yelled, and boyfriend’s friends held him back, and the electron tornado swirled and grew, Asshole Neutron’s countenance morphed from surprise to ecstasy.
Fewer things are more surreal than a zombie lurching next to you, strafed and bloody, casually smoking a cigarette with pieces of broken glass pointing out of his face.
I mean yeah, I feel for the guy. I really do. We’ve all been wasted. But seriously? He kinda got off easy. If any of my male friends had been up in the club, they would’ve dragged him outside and used the sidewalk to ground the glass down into his skull.
But this way … it was sort of … poetic. Never have I seen a man be such a willing slave to his own self-loathing. Also: GO TEAM ALCOHOL.
What’s the point in going out for the weekend when the finale already happened on Thursday?
June 6, 007
Michelle and I arrived to Lost Vegas late and underdressed. Despite the rain earlier, the Drunkyard still showed good attendance for its purported last show (sniff), and nearly all comers outfitted themselves in Vegas-worthy garish-wear. Brian Doherty looked handsome as he dealt at the “Crap” table; Belinda the Junkwoman held court behind her Valueless Prizes booth, decked in Santa garb and talking shit.
Lily from the Yard Dogs, who always gives good costume, radiated Nevada / Hollywood cheese — sky-high rich-girl bouffant; piles of gold accessories; bronzer liberally applied; ridiculous white lounge-singer dress. Her lipliner broached her lips’ borders by a mile, while her lipgloss gave her the appearance of just having guzzled bacon grease. In other words: perfect. Later on that night, her amour — one-half of the Wink and Yoni show when he’s not the lead singer of Rube Waddell — would glance at her lovingly from the stage, bedecked in a white suit and plastic lei and terrible wig, plonking out painfully earnest Vegas versions of forgotten radio hits, crooning in his dime-store Elvis vibrato while she blew him kisses. Ah, polyester love.
Kimric Smythe built some new steam-powered thing that served as yet another too-elaborate way to cook hot dogs for the drunks at the Drunkyard (remember Flash and Victoria ironing weenies at the Power Tool Drag Races?). Below the contraption, which every so often spit out little hot dog remnants, Cloe’s intrepid puppy lingered and licked up the spoils from the years-old layer of automotive oil and PCBs and other chemicals on the pavement.
Beside this dog-eat-dog spectacle, the Ramp of Death — over which Otto was to “jump a Harley Davidson … ON FUCKING FIRE” — loomed 9ish feet high and 30ish feet long. All-star pyros like Jim Mason and Steve Valdez and Mark Perez readied the hut they’d built at the base of the ramp, through which Otto was to ride after it’d been set ablaze (and therefore catch fire himself), on his way to the top of the ramp and Valhalla beyond. Where’s he going to land?, I asked several gamblers. Nobody knew.
ramping up. Photo by Scott Beale / laughing squid
Cyclecide had our two-seater Ferris Wheel set up, and of course I gravitated towards it for most of the evening, aiding Linda as she ran the ride and sassed the riders and cheekily turned people away for lack of whiskey to share. Behind us, the Rev. Dr. Howland Owll of the Church of Subgenius officiated short-term wedding ceremonies in a covered trailer which doubled as a chapel. Moses and Spy — who won a precious can of rust from the valueless prizes table, and carried it around all evening like a baby — got married until Wednesday, and Jarico and Linda wed each other (in clown noses) for 24 hours. Just to try it out.
Sparkle Motion, San Francisco’s most “real” dance troupe, showed off their day-glo animal-print thrift-score unitards and performed a synchronized routine to “Eye of the Tiger” — which reminded me (as I’m sure it did many other chicks in the audience) of my own childhood, choreographing steps to Billy Squier with my friends at slumber parties and drawing from the three holy sources of inspiration: cheerleading, Solid Gold, and the Soul Train.
I brought Otto the good-luck charm I’d found on the street at the Love Parade (of all places) months ago: a poster of a bearded, mulleted biker on a Harley that read RIDE FREE TO ETERNAL LIFE with some Bible verses underneath it. “Don’t die, Otto,” I said, “because we need an Otto and because my friend ___ was serious about the blowjob after the show.” (She was.) He stuffed the poster into his sock and smiled.
Then it was time for the finale. In true showman style, Chicken John emceed the crowd into a froth, backed by a full band, three women dressed as Elvis and singing the Otto Von Danger theme song accordingly, and a handful of go-go dancers in sexy nurse uniforms. Before the stunt could begin, the nurses needed to “check” Otto on a gurney on a raised platform behind the stage and the hoopla.
suspiciously like all the other Ramps of Death in our immediate social circle… but much, much taller and stupider. photo by Scott Beale / laughing squid
From the back view, perched on the Cyclecide HQ mezzanine in the rear of the Drunkyard, Moses and Linda and Spy and I saw the magic happen. I won’t give away the secret, for fear of retribution, but I will remind you (as Moses did me) of the televised “disappearance” of the Statue of Liberty — a magic trick in which David Copperfield brought his spectators out to a platform on Ellis Island, showed them the statue, surrounded them in curtains, and orchestrated a glitzy razzle-dazzle hullaballoo … during which time the platform rotated evverrrr sooooo slowwwwly. So when the curtains dropped, the statue had disappeared … because it was just over there behind those other curtains to the side. The audience bought it.
As with any event in this crowd, the vehicle malfunctioned, and Chicken was forced to replace the Harley with a motorized scooter. Ghetto-ass Evil Kneivel shit. “Otto,” now fully “checked,” putt-putted through the crowd and into the cardboard-stuffed wooden hut, which the pyros ignited. Fully ablaze, “Otto” shot from the hut and up the ramp and … split half in two. Half fell onto the asphalt; the other half of “him” got stuck on a nail or something at the top of the jump, and burned quietly while chaos ensumed below. The pyros, now armed with fire extinguishers, put “Otto” out, creating a cloud of white dust through which nobody could see. His red-white-and-blue jumpsuit burned and torn, Otto emerged from the wreckage, victorious.
And I was all scared for nothing.
Rubes. Sometimes I’m one of them. I’m glad, after all I’ve seen, that I can still get conned.
to the victor go the spoils. (and maybe the blowjobs too; i’d rather not imagine it)
May 31, 007
SF
We need an Otto when the shit hits the fan. He’s been in nine wars, he says. He’s seen more bad things than anyone you know. Done more, too.
As Michelle Burke told me the other night while peeling rutabagas — who eats rutabagas? — we are the Land of Broken Toys.
And Otto is one of the most broken. And he will tell you that himself.
Otto is a chain-smoking Viking warrior. A beat-to-shit, impossible-to-kill Marine with a thick veneer of caveman letchiness and excessive talkativity covering a missile-quick mind and an enormous bloody beating heart. He would literally snap someone’s throat if they ever dared hurt one of his friends.
Maybe that’s why I don’t want Otto to die. My own interest in self-preservation.
our Palindrome von Danger, sawing things and not people, which is good
Otto is fond of saying that if he hadn’t met all of us, all the BRC-DPW and the larger community of Burning Vacation-going art freaks in the Bay Area, he would have killed himself a long time ago. He likes to speak in hyperbole, but on this one, I believe him.
Saturday night, at Chicken John’s Lost Vegas at Ace Drunkyard in San Franpsycho, for the finale, Otto von Danger will jump a flaming ramp of death. On fire. Over cars? There are varying reports. I still can’t figure out if Otto will be the one on fire, or if the ramp will be on fire, or if there be a wall of fire through which Otto jumps the Harley. Or if they’ll pour gasoline on the ramp and all over Otto and start playing Black Sabbath and hand him a strike-anywhere match and see what happens.
All I know is I have to be there.
It’s probably just another one of Chicken’s bait-and-switch things, right? Some gag like the Bike Rodeo does in our “five cars on fire” skit? How we build a tiny ramp and douse it in lighter fluid and put five little Matchbox cars on a flaming paper plate in front of it? … Like how Chicken would get everybody in the tent at Cirkus Redickuless and talk up the “Man-Eating Chicken” and then Jarico would come out eating a bucket of chicken … right?
It’s Otto’s birthday today. The party tonight at American Steel might be his last.
But I really hope not. We need an Otto.
—–
P.S. Wheelgunner’s in Iraq right now, I think, so who’s bringing the flamethrowers?
P.S.S. I don’t even want to talk about the possibility that the drunkyard might be closing. Cyclecide has our headquarters there. Really — today, I just can’t think about it. Like Scarlett O’Hara, I’ll think about it tomorrow.
May 12-13, 007
Flora Grubb Gardens, BayviewSF
“It’s so weird to see white people walking around on the street out there,” Linda said on Saturday. “I mean really. We used to be the only ones. It’s like the day we filmed the [soda company name redacted] commercial outside the clubhouse. White kids everywhere. WEIRD.”
She’s right. Here in “Mo’s Alley,” so called by Cyclecide because Moses’ sister rented the lot to put her plants on, it’s a completely different scenario on the block. Before, it was a shithole in the larger shithole of the Bayview. Now it’s the fancy and beautiful Flora Grubb Gardens, with a new Ritual Coffee Roasters inside of it. The pimps who used to park their cars in front of it and yell at their bitches at all hours of the day and night must be bummed. But I’m happy, because the only other coffee near me is up Bernal Hill. Bikes and that hill and a non-caffeinated Dilettante are NOT friends.
This is Mo. ….. Um, yep, I know. I know. (photo by Scott Beale)
Mo’s Alley was a thoroughfare for crack dealers and hookers, right in the shadow of the City’s sewage treatment plant, in the ghetto behind the abominable KFC/Taco Bell combination “restaurant” where the customers scream at the beleaguered staff more often than not. The lot used to be Peninsula Oil, then it was a bus depot, then it was a plain slice of tore-up pavement and asphalt with a couple run-down buildings left over.
Cyclecide HQ, until recently, was located right across the street … and they evicted us and now the combination house and shop and yard still sits empty. Don’t get me started.
Flora Grubb has had Cyclecide’s back for a while now, letting us and the Mousetrap store stuff on her ex-parking lot, pre-construction, in exchange for us keeping an eye on it …. so when she asked us to set up the rides for her opening party this weekend, of course we said YES MA’AM. We brought the Cyclofuge, the Ferris Wheel, the Kiddie Carousel, the Spanking Bike, the Dizzy Toy, and the Whirl ‘n’ Hurl. Scott Beale showed up and took photos.
Anyway, two years ago this Fourth of July, we hosted the first annual PEDAL MONSTER at Mo’s Alley, which kicked ass. Carloads of Dead Baby Bike Club members drove down from Seattle, ditto C.H.U.N.K. 666ers from Portland, and Black Label members from Reno, Nowhere, and the couch at headquarters. The 999 Eyes ov Infinite Dream circus brought their live act and their museum of curiosities, and Replicator and A.P.E. rocked us with some blistering dance-metal (RIP A.P.E.’s drummer, killed on his bike by a hit-and-run driver in Seattle). One dude ate a Madagascar hissing cockroach, a band of trolls and ogres played, many MANY fireworks were shot off, and we built a tiny tallbike for the dwarf chick in the 999 Eyes freakshow. She never can find bikes in her size, much less tallbikes. She was stoked. Of course it got stolen a couple towns down the road.
Bike thieves suck.
To put it mildly, we’ve partied hard at Mo’s Alley. We got kinda misty when we saw what Flora’s done with the place.
Dukey made a clown face for the Dizzy Toy (this pitcher also by Scott Beale)
The Life-Size Mousetrap lived here on the lot for a while, all set up with some Cyclecide rides a couple Octobers ago, when we did a special Critical Mass show and some Halloween gigs. Jarico took the old Edsel from the junkyard and Haggis smashed it into the lot’s chicken-shack looking wooden structure we turned into a bar. Victoria shot out the RV window with her BB gun, and we generally blew a pile of BMXers’ and spandex bikers’ minds.
The Edsel is all that remains. Plopped in a corner of Flora’s new building among potted, carbon-eating creatures that look like they’re from outer space.
It’s a beautiful place to buy plants and get coffee. Yall check it out. Those people are NERDS about plants and coffee.
We’ll be at the Maker Faire next weekend. Classes in “backyard ballistics?” A rumored appearance by SRL? Yeesh. It’s going to be AWESOME.
Also! Linda’s note at Atlas made it into SFist. Gotta love her Mexican hot-headedness. Seriously though, bike thieves suck.
May 9, 007
post-Stagecoach Music Festival
HOME, finally
For two days, I’ve been trying to think of good things to say. So far I’m having trouble recapping the post-Coachella country-music adventures at Stagecoach in a concise and entertaining fashion. Even though WILLIE NELSON IS THE CLOSEST THING TO GOD WALKING THIS EARTH. And this one guy in the Riders in the Sky can do the hambone on his face. That was awesome.
To sum up: Cyclecide wowed hundreds of kids and their parents at Stagecoach, this 20,000+ country music festival in the Mojave Desert. We tried our best to be the scary, dirty, heavy-metal ride-running, funnel-cake-eating, county-fair carnival workers that we ourselves feared and awed in our collective youth. And I think we succeeded. And sold lots of T-shirts.
not as ‘ardcore as dem
I realize if I’m to start this blog thing, not only do I need to learn the daunting technology involved in putting up links and photos too — I’m also supposed to post frequently as hell to prevent losing my audience. But:
1) I’m still overstimulated from 2 months of constant adrenaline rushes… and I’ve got kind of a poor attitude at the moment. I still can’t get over the flies. So many flies everywhere at that god-forsaken hellhole called Artists’ Camping. Flies covering the bus ceiling, flies dotting the tent ceiling, flies in the kitchen, flies in the bathroom. Flies flies flies. I still itch when I think about it. Two epsom salt baths and a shower have yet not been enough.
2) This line of thinking/ranting leads to me not being able to get over how “artists” are treated in general in America. At Coachella, even the opening-opening bands who play right when the gates open get styled way more than we do. Consistently. We’re talking shade, and their own bar, and air-conditioned trailers and ornate communal areas and crafts-service meals and handmade gifts from the promoters … and they’re not even there for one whole day most of the time. They’ve got hotels and whatnot. Us, we could probably be consultants when the U.S. government decides to privatize refugee camps in Darfur.
if only I wasn’t made of piss and vinegar, they’d land this frequently, instead of slightly less
Maybe the promoters assume we’re used to squalor because, well, we ARE used to it … but for an event that rumoredly makes a $23 million dollar profit, you’d think that we artists, providers of ALL the eye-candy on that giant field out there in Indio, could get our own shower trailer, or maybe a sink and a bar of soap. Whether because of cost-cutting or oversight, the promoters saved on portajohn-cleaning fees, and then spent more on the hospital bills for those who got treated for staph infections as a result of blah blah bitch bitch bitch. See? Not funny.
HOWEVER! I’m exceedingly proud that many of my good friends, and good friends once removed, were pretty much solely responsible for the visual entertainment at America’s biggest rock’n’roll festival. GO TEAM ART FAG!
Now. I’m going out to dinner in the misty California night and have someone else make me food and take care of the dishes.
And if there’s a fly in my soup, I’ll just eat it. Whatever.
May 5, 007
Stagecoach Music Festival
Cyclecide DJ / merch booth
None of us saw much music at Coachella. We had no time — and if we did, when we got our nightly second winds, we traveled in a pack, mostly. Saturday night we went as zombies.
I can’t remember if Spider or Doyle was the one to originally call Zombie Night, but then Doyle found this white 3-piece suit in the trash, and it actually fit him, so then we had to. After Cyclecide’s shows got more and more surreal throughout the day, with our collective heatstroke advancing at a steady clip, we re-appropriated the contents of our clown makeup case at dusk, piled on the fake blood, and went out strolling.
Helping run the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, after days and days of hard labor and hiking uphill both ways in the snow with no shoes on etc., it’s immensely relaxing to walk around Coachella like a zombie. Fuck trying to look attractive, fuck rushing to see this or that band, fuck posture — this is how we feel. UhhhUUUHHH.
Everyone invented different “character” zombies and got into it. Doyle was a player zombie, lifting his sunglasses and winking one drippy-bloody eye. Spider leaned more toward office-worker zombie with tie and everything. I played a curly-mustachioed, missing-toothed, undead carny who kept trying to sneak and eat people’s brains when they weren’t looking. Lurching around with drink in hand, stopping in crowded pathways to stare into space with hips jutted out at unruly angles, jump-starting again as people gathered closer to see just what was wrong … Spider even drooled. A lot.
Crowds cut us a wide swath, and gawked and took photos — even as they walked like us, but not on purpose. We all swarmed Buffalo’s Fire Pod piece while it shot off big flames out of its eight-foot petals. We raided the Cut Chemist show in the Do-Lab dome and stunned the hip-hop heads in front. We took a special group ride on the Kinetic Steam Works’ black-and-white carousel. We zombie-ballroom-danced around Johnny Amerika’s Movement piece, too, while it belched fire clouds around us. Talk about a photo ops.
We ignored the Rage Against the Machine reunion and pooh-poohed the RHCPs. (“Remember when the Red Hot Chili Peppers used to be the Red Hot Chili Peppers?,” I kept saying, balefully.) But when Manu Chao took the main stage, all semblance of zombie-ness ceased and we ran toward the front and danced and moshed like 15-year-old punk kids. Then the Cauac Twins’ Tesla coils went off and Jesse Wack and company took over our sound system for an extended drunken jam that actually didn’t sound very bad, and we laid around on the Cyclecide stage on the pink carpet and told stories.
Then when they kicked us out of the field after the crowds had gone, some went back to camp and had another party in front of L.T.’s gorgeous Cyclecide fire barrel she made us. Others drifted off into the night, on their way to do who knows what with who knows whom. I fell asleep at a reasonable hour, but I hear Bjork eventually came back to our camp and partied with us, and someone in Cyclecide actually got to do coke off her tits.
Success. Also: exhaustion.
Next, a report from Stagecoach. Which is going on right now and I’m pretending to DJ in the shade. Hey, three carloads of fresh blood arrived last night and kept us up drinking. Let them do some of the work. Most of us still feel like zombies — just without the makeup now.
May 4, 007
(now it’s the) Stagecoach Music Festival
Artists’ Parking Lot
For whatever reason, the Johnny on the Spot guys did NOT clean the Portajohns in Artists’ Camping after Coachella was over, though they serviced everything else. On Tuesday, as we broke down the rides for our Wednesday gig in Riverside, Laird said he went to try to go pee and couldn’t even see the toilet seat for all the flies swarming on it.
Ever smelled a bank of Portajohns that’s been baking for five days in 104-degree heat?
And would you think it smelled better or worse than post-Coachella DOG PUKE my Bruno tried to eat again after he threw it up and then we left and came back from the Riverside gig? … Apparently he learned the fine art of post-event groundscoring from his mother. He likes to dig through trash and conserve resources, just like me. YOU, OK? I LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOU.
This whole Portajohn / flies / no-showers-for-artists fiasco has caused some health issues. I lost my voice long about Tuesday — whether from carnival-talk or total dehydration or something more ominous I’m still not sure — and so did a lot of other people. Folks who laid on the grass find themselves covered in red and white bumps. Chem trails form Xes above us in the sky on some mornings; on others, not a cloud up in the blue. Water trucks rumble by and planes fly over to spray the grass on the polo fields with Lord knows what chemicals and pesticides. Flies have multiplied exponentially since our arrival.
Now that the powers that be have finally decided to stop making the artists forage for interesting and unlikely places to go #2, as well as to bathe and locate enough electricity to charge our phones, the flies have all dispersed. And swarmed our camps. In the kitchen, in the bus, in my car, all over the dogs and food and people. They’re everywhere. Fly paper doesn’t work because of the new high winds and dust blowing around. The weather might be this way all weekend.
What’s worse, one artist just took a trip to the hospital this morning to treat a staph infection in his eye… which has now got us all washing our hands like Howard Hughes and trying not to panic. That shit’s contagious as hell. We’ve got 4 or 5 days left of this.
Roughing it is fun — but not for this long, in this heat, with this little shade, when someone else is in charge of hygeine. Cyclecide needs to invest in a generator.
no, not that kind of generator. Although it would be nice and I can’t figure out why nobody’s invented one yet
In other news, Monday’s woo-party-party at the Desert Springs hotel pretty much drained anything left in everyone’s batteries. Artists’ groups, friends of, and hangers-on converged on the place, an hour from the site, to celebrate a job well done. Some of the fancy magical Palm Springs spa-waters are located there at the hotel, and we all like to sit around in the many pools after Coachella and swap stories and drink beer and make “clown soup.” (Michelle Burke had to actually request that Cyclecide shower before entering the water — she said she’s seen the combination of greasepaint and dirt in a jacuzzi before, and it wasn’t pretty.)
Turns out that soaking in hot tubs for hours on end isn’t the best thing for sunburned skin on a sensitive Southern girl who’s used to humidity instead of oven-style weather. In addition to no voice, I’ve got a white five-o’clock shadow on my already-red face that makes me look like a burn-victim rodeo clown in reverse. I didn’t mean to jaunt to the Palm Desert in my fancy car for a chemical peel and hot tub soak at a hotel spa, but that’s what happened.
Our Wednesday gig 2 hours away at the barbecue for the UC-Riverside’s end-of-year festivities went off swimmingly. Setup and breakdown in “chilly” 70-80-degree weather. Rides only, no show, 3-hour start to finish with The Well-Behaved Kids (no alcohol or firearms on campus). After that, Conrad’s mom brought us all food (hero!) and we rented three rooms in a hotel and took showers.
SHOWERS, people. Life is good.
Gotta go. Someone’s sound-checking and I’m jumpy to see Willie Nelson … next post I’ll tell a bit about Coachella cuz I think I’m finally decompressed enough.
P.S. I heard George Strait is here camping all weekend — not hotel-ing it like all the other divas. He asked for a horse to ride around, and they gave him one. Champ.
we are delirious.
sitting by a pool at a hotel with air conditioning. For a minute. Going back into the hotness to break down the rides and take them to Riverside to set them up for a show at UCR tomorrow. Then re-breaking them down and re-taking them back to the polo fields in Indio to re-set them up for Stagecoach. Which judging by all the purple wristbands on the 60-year-old vendors and whatnot outside at the hotel pool right now …. it’s going to be Bizarro Coachella.
Two kinds of music next weekend: country and western. I need to go into town to buy a new set of Billy Bob teeth to plump up my accent and bark at the Cyclofuge or whatever ride I’m running this weekend — just to scare the kids. Hopefully I won’t get my ass kicked. I’m from Mississippi though so I’m allowed to talk like that.
But right now all I want to do is take a nap in the shade. Someday I’ll get a whole night’s sleep again.
Overheard in the bar by the pool just now:
“did you find my shorts in your room last night by the way?”
“No but I heard somebody lost their panties.”
“That might be the pair we sold.”
(All this said by a guy who’s got a nametag on his chinese coolie hat that reads “HELLO MY NAME IS GET OUT OF MY FACE”)
OK bye. Swimming
April 28, 007
Coachella Valley Music Festival
ITEM! Ratgirl’s grandpa used to eat meat gravy on his chocolate cake. “It all goes to the same place anyway,” she said he’d say.
The gates have opened and the rubes have flooded in. Seventy thousand people rocked out here yesterday. Seventy thousand surprisingly well-behaved and not-totally-fucked-up-on-drugs people.
Did I mention it’s hot? Up to 104, I heard. The dogs stay chained up in the shade in camp all day while we perform and run the rides, panting panting napping napping. They’re luckier than us.
when dogs hate crowds they bite people. Us, not so much. Well, kind of, sometimes
Some days it feels like a pleasant bizarro version of a death march. Mostly, though, being in the Bike Rodeo rules.
“The flies are gonna miss us,” Bill the Junkman said at camp this morning. Yep, and there’s plenty of flies. Next week they’ll be hanging out like, “Remember Coachella? Man, that was awesome. Those people brought food, and dog shit, and tons of dirty hippies showering in a pond-runoff faucet from the polo field all day…”
The Coachella horizon looks like capitalist Burning Man. Steam engine here, Gorey-esque carousel there, geodesic dome blaring drum’n’bass there, twin Tesla coils shooting off lightning over yonder. Johnny Amerika’s piece fires off in the evening, looking like a mad scientist’s laboratory about to explode any second now for 20 minutes at a time.
In the open field amid the stages and food-court tent oases designed with Asian or Mexican themes, Cyclecide runs the midway all day under the hell-sun. Seventy thousand fresh-faced hipster kids adore our pedal-powered carnival rides. Philip Blaine, the art guy at Goldenvoice, said everyone’s raving about us. I’m sure they’re raving about everyone else’s art too. We party-throwers are becoming a viable industry.
and we look good too. right? Right??
The sideshow was short and sweet yesterday — parade of the bikes, bullfight, tallbike joust, moshpit of recklessness. Doyle jousted Otto and won, and then took a pratfall and lost to Linda on purpose. It was so hot that by the end of that 15 minutes of running around I laid on top of a pile of bikes in the finale and pretended to take a nap, just so I could get horizontal for a minute. Of course a couple people laid on top of me so it wasn’t all that comfortable.
Chicken brought up a half dozen people we hadn’t yet met, who ended up “interning” on our rides yesterday and learning the Way of the Bike Rodeo Clown. They get to be carnies, and I think they’re enjoying it. One dude Esben, a Danish bike fiend who used to be in a circus as a child, can ride the stupid Rudy bike nobody else can ride — two different ways. Rudy built it for the sole purpose of watching people try to ride it and fall down. But Esben can flip it up and sit on the handlebars and work it like it’s a tall unicycle. Should’ve known Chicken would bring a top-notch labor force.
In addition to running things, Jarico’s been toiling on his new sculpture, the Melody Maker — an interactive tower that spins a bunch of contraptions with instruments on them that play when the rider climbs up on a bicycle in the tower and pedals. The Melody Maker is nice to perch in at night — to observe the hoi polloi, the sea of heads rocking out to Peaches or Bjork or DJ Shadow.
It’s hard to want to leave our area and Johnny’s next door, though. It’s kind of like Frogger in the thorougfares — too many people going every which way. Even though we’re hams, most of us are antisocial as well, and slightly too old to run around amid the kids. Plus we just enjoy each other’s company.
And now the gates are open again, and we’re half an hour late, and Katy Bell’s dyeing Big Daddy’s and Laird’s hair clown-blue to match Moses’s. They all shaved parts of their heads clown-style, which is basically pretending to be balding, so they’ve all got fake old-man clown hair. Now they’ve got Esben on his knees with the clippers too — what a good sport — and then they’re all going to rinse in the hose all the hippies are lining up for.
They’re gonna give the hippies blue feet. Neener neener.
April 26, 007
Coachella Valley Music Festival
Artists’ Parking Lot
It’s 4pm. It’s hot. My mechanic, Scruffy, showed up today. He drove Jamie Viada’s carousel down in a truck whose tire wrapped around the axle in a blowout last night. The carousel is part of Kinetic Steam Works, or KSW, the group that built the steam engine.
The steam engine runs the carousel. It also runs the Dingus. The Dingus is an old widowmaker — an electric machine that would punch holes in metal, shear metal, bend metal. According to Scruffy, now it shreds fish, stuffed animals, and bottles of ketchup (catsup?) and mustard. That’s all I know about KSW for now. I’m sure I’ll meet them later tonight.
rock and roll coochie coo
Scruffy and Laird have got the back of Jarico’s bus open, looking at its innards, conferring about its current state. The three of us are drinking water in the shade at camp right now while the rest of Cyclecide puts up the rides on the midway and shops in town. We’re still — still — waiting on Chicken’s bus to arrive with the majority of our crew on board. They broke down last night sometime when the oil filter housing got scraped off and oil spilled everywhere. Or something.
Laird just suggested we climb up on the roof of Jarico’s bus to look for Chicken and company on the road outside. But Scruffy knows all about Chicken’s bus because he drove it for years as a Green Tortoise employee. He says he’ll be able to hear it coming down the road.
Coincidentally, Jarico and company lived at the old Green Tortoise headquarters in the Bayview for a decade before they / we were gentrified out by an overeager landlord who now still pays rent on his own house as it sits empty. The Bayview isn’t gentrified yet. White folks are still afraid of the place.
Anyhoo, it’s final-setup day here at Coachella. All 500 artists are scrambling with their creations, assembling rides and engines, checking audio and video equipment, building impossible geodesic domes, test-flying tiny remote-controlled helicopters, and rehearsing dance routines in the noonday sun on a stage with no wind or shade.
All the rides I know how to set up are at home, and none of the girl-clowns are here yet, so I’ve got no skills to offer but holding it down for the Ladies’ Auxiliary. See, despite Cyclecide’s female half’s reputations — as strong women with few conventional “feminine” tendencies — the fact is, when we’re doing Cyclecide things, at least I for one always end up cooking, cleaning, sewing, and watching the dogs instead of building things and playing with metal.
Whilst preparing sandwiches for the crew back at camp today — which takes quite a longer time to do than it seems it would — I was faced with the conundrum of how to deliver lunch and beers to 10 people on a Swing Bike with no basket or bicycle trailer. And we didn’t have any cold beers or coolers that weren’t full of food. So I came up with a great junkyard Martha Stewart ™ beer cooler:
Take an empty, square 2.5-gallon plastic water jug and cut a 6-inch rectangular hole into the top front of the container. Layer the bottom with ice; place warm beer atop ice. Repeat until full.
So yeah. Waiting on Chicken’s bus. They’re still — still — at Foodsco for just another minute longer, and should be here any second now for the past 2 hours. It’s been a motherscratcher of a time trying to hold this much space in a 500-strong artists’ campground for 23 more people when everybody’s pouring in to be ready for the 11am gates tomorrow. In fact, the neighbor across the way from us is getting downright irate, and even threatened to run over one of our tents with his truck. But I just made friends with the ice guy today on the other side of us. He’s got ice aplenty and he’s willing to share. Things are good.
And so far all crews seem to be acclimating to the extreme heat in a mature fashion by not getting wasted and rendering themselves unable to work the next day.
We’re learning.
It’s been 45 minutes since I started writing this post, and Laird and Scruffy are STILL talking about Jarico’s bus.
Chicken’s bus is here. Scruffy heard its familiar rumble and perked up his ears, like a dog whose master has just pulled into the driveway. Time to rumble with the neighbors over how much space we’re going to take up.
April 25, 007
Coachella Valley Music Festival
Artists’ Parking Lot
Everyone’s in town at the big pre-festival shop. After a good few sunny hours spent unloading the rides and bikes onto Coachella’s midway, we at Cyclecide — half of whom hadn’t slept or eaten — went into Indio for some Denny’s and ice cream and air conditioning. Now the crew’s out at Home Depot and the grocery store, avoiding the heat and stocking up on supplies for the coming weekend.
Lest anybody be mistaken, Big Daddy would like you all to know that there is only one catsup and that is Heinz. All other brands are ketchup and they are an abomination of nature.
I got the easy job: guarding camp to make sure nobody encroached on our space while the town-errands were done. So after some chicken fried steak I dipped into the coffeeshop in Indio, where I caught a ride with a Goldenvoice worker back to the site. (Goldenvoice = the promoter = insanely organized and professional, and they sure do take care of their artists.)
This woman I rode “home” with just finished filming a “fantasy-reality show” called *Pirate Master,* which premieres on May 31 on CBS, in which she and a dozen or so others got to dress up in period-correct pirate gear and sail a real ship around the Dominica Islands in the West Indies for three weeks and search for buried treasure.
I know, huh. Lucky duck.
dis Jupiter. She’s haaaaarrrrrrrd-core
I already lost my parasol, but I found the Internet. The sun is going down and the houseflies won’t let me nap. More rich-guy RVs just pulled into the fenced-in Paul Frank lot (he’s doing all the merch — talk about bucks — but they too are super-nice people). The sound engineers are blasting Gwen Stefani and bland testosterock out of Coachella’s mammoth speaker systems at errant intervals to check the system. And some hippie standing outside his old van across the way from me right now is doing the weirdest version of yoga I’ve ever seen. It looks more like he’s stirring a couple invisible pots, or rocking the earnest lead-singer power-clench while he plays a hair-metal ballad in his mind’s eye.
Half of the SF freak-arts scene is slowly trickling in to set up camp — expertly, efficiently. Everything in its place. We’re all old pros now. Carnies.
(Jarico hates it when people call him a “carny.” He insists he’s a “showman,” and that we’re “showpeople.” I say we’re both — one when we’re performing and the other when we’re loading and unloading. But I digress.)
I’m not even sure who’s playing at this festival. I just hope somebody in the Bike Rodeo remembered to bring the clown makeup.
Chicken’s bus will leave San Francisco shortly. In theory. By sometime tomorrow morning, this area of artists’ camping will be overtaken by clowns.
Time to work all night.
April 25, 007
Coachella Valley Music Festival
Artists’ Parking Lot
Johnny Amerika and Tirzah are working artists living in Los Angeles. That happens a lot down there, apparently — unlike San Francisco, where a way higher percentage of clowns like us do it for the love alone. Something about SF being the world capital of creative leisure, and Hollywood liking special effects and people that can build weird things and work long hours on inconceivable projects.
Johnny inherited the six-joystick control box for his latest contraption after creating it on the job for an … well, an animatronic animal for Mel Gibson’s *Apocalypto.* Amerika and crew will hand off this joystick box to audience members here at Coachella to let them play with the fire and make it sing. (Most of his sculptures, like Doyle’s and Rosanna’s and Micheal Christian’s and all of ours, are interactive.)
One of Tirzah and Johnny’s most impressive projects has been the Trebuchet, built originally in 2006 for a car commercial. For those who don’t know, the difference between a trebuchet and a catapult is that with a catapult, the object is flung with undertension action, the way you think it would be, while a trebuchet flings objects by counterweight. With a trebuchet, weights on the opposite side of the truss (the long straight part) sit on the high side, suspended in the air, and when it’s released, the weights fly downward and under the pivot point and to the back side, flipping the truss and tossing the object (attached by cables or whatever) in an “overhand” style.
There. Now you know.
In the commercial, the trebuchet flung a car. And then on the playa it flung a flaming piano. Now it sits at the Burning Man ranch sculpture garden until the next dirt-rave there Labor Day weekend, where it will be placed at the farthest point behind the Man out in the open playa. Where it will throw an array of crazy shit and hopefully a couple pantsless hippies. BLOWJOB! (cough)
Doyle of Black Label Bike Club is on Johnny’s crew here. The two of them often conceive of big fire-and-engine projects and then call on each other for help. Most recently, Doyle (along with Heather, Big Daddy, and Black Label Ben) created the REGURGITATOR, a simple yet complicated G-force machine that Big Daddy says looks like a big tube with a tire in one end and a pulse jet in the other. The rider leans on a lightly-padded pole and spins around super fast in a circle until their face-skin threatens to pull away from their teeth and off their head completely.
Doylie and the blowuppy thing he and Dirtyfinger helped Mr. Amerika make
In Zagreb last year, where Doyle and crew participated in a show called “Device Art” (run by a Croatian group called Kontejner), Big Daddy rode the ride for a just few seconds too long. His ears began to bleed, and the whites of his eyes turned red with blood too — I mean really red — and he stayed scary-looking like that for over two weeks. Small-town folks in Croatia cut him a wide berth on the street. Many thought he was the Devil. Linda chewed Doyle’s ear off about it, saying if Doyle accidentally almost killed Big Daddy again there’d be hell to pay.
For last year’s festival, Doyle and Heather and Johnny Amerika and Cyclecide’s Paul the Plumber built the SPIDER RIDE, an insane “carnival ride” named after Spider, the Cyclecider who got mowed down on his bicycle by a hit-and-run SUV full of shit-talking meatheads last year. (He still needs a new tooth, by the way, so please kick down on Paypal if you’re a kind soul with deep pockets.)
The Spider Ride is built from a 1965 1600cc Volkswagen air-cooled engine that spins a 52-inch, 28-pitch, wooden handcrafted propeller. This propeller creates enough air to move the one rider on the other side of a 16-foot oil-derrick-looking tower, who’s strapped mid-air into an elementary school chair equipped with a small Chinese valve-less style pulse jet. (The pulse jet, incidentally, also has been re-engineered to double as a bong.) A three-minute ride can accelerate to a force of over 6gs, causing temporary unconsciousness.
Unfortunately, the Spider Ride broke early on last year — the first time they let a ticketholder ride it instead of one of the crew — when the propeller hub casued the propeller itself to detach from the engine and hurl itself into the ground. Redneck engineering, as always. Know this: Despite all the fun-times-having mayhem, danger and bodily harm are ever-present realities within our extended circle of friends. RIDER ASSUMES ALL RISK. Don’t say you didn’t know, and don’t sue us later.
This year, all I can gather about Johnny Amerika’s fire-plumbing thing so far — called “Movement” — is that Doyle and Tirzah and Matt Williams and Conrad (also from BLBC) helped him build it in a month and a half. But that it was conceived of a year ago. And that it will burn 75 gallons of propane each night.
No wonder the rest of the world hates us.
incidentally, on the same real estate, the Cauac Twins be makin’ twin Tesla Coils to lightning up Coachella at night
BUT! Most parts Johnny and Doyle and Tirzah use are crafted almost exclusively from recycled industrial salvage diverted from the waste stream. So put that in your pulse jet and smoke it.
In Cyclecide news, I was the first one here on the grounds last night. Big Daddy and Paul Dingledine arrived at 2:30am and made me drink a beer with them even though I was asleep. Have to do what Dad says. They showed me a picture on Dad’s camera phone of the NASCAR brand tomatoes they saw in Wal-Mart.
Tomatoes. NASCAR brand tomatoes. That’s totally what’s going to happen to Burning Man if John Law lets the name go into the public domain. I think the jury is still out for most everyone as to whether that will be heartbreaking or hilarious.
It’s 9:30am, and the advance-crew Cyclecide bus just (finally) got here — they left SF at at 4:20pm yesterday, making it a 15-hour trip — and we’ve got to unload everything onto the midway before the heat of the day really starts. Apparently there was a small “fire issue” — the exhaust manifold burned a little bit of the fiberglass insulation in the back of the bus. No big deal really.
(P.S. I don’t know how to link to other pages or do anything complicated yet. Sorry. I’ve got a friend coming up to the festival who will hopefully allay my computer retardation in a day or two and then I’ll go back & post photos and link things.)
April 24, 007
The Brewery, Downtown Los Angeles
Nobody’s running around freaking out here at the Umlaut Haus. People have been awake since 9:30, not one soul got drunk last night, and the crew worked smoothly all evening and went to bed around midnight or 1. Aside from all the electrical wiring, Johnny Amerika’s project is finished.
What I’m used to in the days before Coachella is: Swarms of clowns invading the drunkyard, acting hectic and drinking beers and cracking wise and scrambling around like geeked chickens and losing their shit occasionally and packing and re-packing and re-re-packing the bus and the trailer.
or not “packing” at all
Nobody here in Johnny Amerika’s crew in Los Angeles has raised their voice once. Not that we in the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo verbally abuse each other and have shitty times on the road. Nope. We’re a red-nosed family of fools who like to get together to create and float in a heightened atmosphere of surreal, frenetic chaos. We’re 2 DUM 2 DIE.
Hanging out with Cyclecide can be a little much to take. Ask anyone who’s gone on tour with us. Sometimes it drives more squirrelly people to cognitive dissonance. Sometimes violence.
It’s quiet in here. Too quiet. Especially considering how many people live here, and that they all have a really big art show this weekend.
Mr. Amerika, calmly filing down something that’s gonna blow up real good
T-minus 3.5 hours to departure for the Coachella Valley Music Festival in Indio, CA. It’s a three-day camping-trip rock’n’roll blowout of epically organized and awesome proportions. Sure, I’d never go as a ticketholder — like most everyone else I roll with to this thing each year, I’m way too used to working while everyone else plays. To being one of the assholes who’s uncomfortable unless we’re making a spectacle of ourselves.
The show is sold out. Tickets are rumored to be going for $300 — for one day’s attendance — on Ebay. When I add up how much it would cost to get out there to the desert, to camp, to buy waters for $4 all day long inside the gates … well, I wonder why people don’t just go to Thailand instead. Of course, many people probably wonder the same thing about folks who attend the dirt rave in the other desert every year.
Most of the artists in Coachella’s midway are dirt-rave vacationers, after all. We know each other from that Burning Ham thing, and from the larger scene surrounding it. We’re bringing some of that to this. Some PLAYANETICS ™.
The truck will get here to Los Angeles soon. Everything’s already lined up in Tirzah and Johnny Amerika’s shop/garage, right by the roll door, ready to go. People are snacking and chatting quietly, and getting the last of their things together.
No shouting, no wrestling, no drinking at 10am, no last-minute rehearsals, no blaring heavy metal or circus music, no millions of dogs barking and getting in the way.
No herding cats.
This is weird.
this is what they’re makin. dont ask me what it does tho
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – March 29, 2007
CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO plays Coachella AND Stagecoach!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — THE CYCLECIDE CLOWNS ARE COMING… AGAIN.
The only artist to be invited to perform at the Coachella Valley Music Festival for six years running, San Francisco’s HEAVY PEDAL CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO returns to the grand music festival in the desert — and its new country-music twin the following weekend — with some BIKE-COPHONY of its own!
Once again, the most interesting shade on the festival grounds comes in the form of CYCLECIDE’s awesome (and world’s only) traveling PEDAL-POWERED CARNIVAL MIDWAY … participants can and will enjoy the breeze provided by the 12-rider BIKE CAROUSEL, the two-person FLIGHT OF THE BUMBLEBEE, or the mighty, four-swing, pedal-powered CYCLOFUGE. For FREE, ladies and gents. All the rides are free.
Yes, folks, the PSYCHOTIC BIKE RODEO CLOWNS OF CYCLECIDE will show their dirty tutus again this year to pie unsuspecting riders in the face during the brief, thrice-daily sideshow performances featuring our punk rock mariachi band LOS BANOS … to war with coolers full of WATER BALLOONS as gawkers watch their friends fly 20 feet in the air on the world-famous pedal-powered FERRIS WHEEL … to encourage participants to hurt themselv– er, try their luck on our bendy SWING BIKES, the messed-up WRONG-WAY BIKE, the lawn-mowing SUBURBAN INTRUDER … or to JOUST on our infamous TALLBIKES …
and the ROCKET BIKE will BURN DOWN THE DESERT!
Also and furthermore, Cyclecide’s “fearless bleeder” Jarico Reesce conceived of a theme for this year’s art and performance — BIKE-COPHONY — after listening to a bunch of hippies at Coachella banging on a metal sculpture with sticks at all hours of the day for the past two years. “How can we drown that out?,” he asked himself.
The answer: The MELODY MAKER, a brand-new interactive kinetic sculpture that creates music! This MELODY MAKER is made entirely out of pre-cycled urban detritus — and as its six riders pedal at the base of the structure, every revolution will cause windmill-like blades on top of the tower to turn … which causes guitars to strum, percussion instruments to bang, and other instruments such as xylophones and washboards to create a musical BIKE-COPHONY entirely controlled by the contraption’s participants!
And finally, this year, no more Hollywood douchebags will be tolerated on set: CYCLECIDE HEREBY CHALLENGES ANDY DICK TO A TALLBIKE JOUST. The gauntlet has been thrown. We’re just saying. We hate that guy.
SAN FRANCISCO’S HEAVY PEDAL CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO: More drunk clowns. More carnival rides. More franken-bikes. More idiotic skits. More interactive sculpture. More BIKE-COPHONY.
No brakes, no problem. 2 dum 2 die.
BY MAYORAL PROCLAMATION — no, really, we’re not lying, the paperwork’s done and Gavin Newsom said so — THE WEEKEND OF JULY 22-23, 2006 HAS BEEN DECLARED “CYCLECIDE WEEKEND” IN SAN FRANCISCO!!!
No really.
San Francisco’s Heavy Pedal CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO presents: PEDAL MONSTER!
July 21nd – Poker Run, Zeitgeist bar, $5. Arrive at 8pm, ride at 9 SHARP.
July 22, 2-10pm; July 23, 2-8pm – Mission Village Market, 18th and Alabama Streets, San Francisco.
Poker run participation $5, 21 and over. Carnival is all ages; $7-10 sliding scale. RIDER ASSUMES ALL RISK.
San Francisco’s CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO is, as always, 2 DUM 2 DIE — and ready to get hitched at City Hall, regardless of handlebar shininess or headtube length. In the wake of their countless tours across the country, insane and successful hometown shows, myriad television appearances, documentary films, festival headlinings, international fashion magazine modeling spreads (no really), and cultural blah blah and interactivity thus and so on and the “for the Kids” every which way, the Honorable Gavin Newsom and the City of San Francisco do hereby proclaim July 22-23 to be CYCLECIDE WEEKEND.
And in return, Cyclecide is proving its eternal love to the City and to the culture of the bike with a freakish, pedal-and-contraption-centric carnival of stupid and epic proportions. Mutant Bike Clubs from all of the U.S.A. will descend upon San Francisco — from as far away as Seattle, Reno, and New York — to carouse and joust and make out with local hotties. The Cyclecide Bike Rodeo will run around like a chicken with its head geeked off. There will be bands, shows, games, and general cacophony, the likes of which San Francycle has rarely seen. Accept no imitations — CYCLECIDE REMAINS THE WORLD’S ONLY BIKE RODEO AND PEDAL-POWERED CARNIVAL MIDWAY! Even the mayor agrees.
Fri/21:
POKER RUN. Starts at darkish. ZEITGEIST BAR, Duboce and Valencia St.s. Wherein mutant bicycling fans and feisty cyclists are all invited to throw in $5 to participate in a multi-bar POKER GAME involving DRINKING and BICYCLING. There will be prizes and very probably some pie-fighting and light pavement-wrestling
Sat/22-Sun/23:
PEDAL MONSTER Festival takes over the Mission Village Market. (P.S. the market is slated for destruction soon after that. Bye-bye, lovely Mission weekends searching the flea market for thrifty treasures. Sniff.)
Featuring:
-Cyclecide Rides & Sideshow, with Skits, Mutant Bikes, Rodeo Clowns, and punk rock mariachi band Los Banos
-An Only In San Francisco Circus Midway, with Wrong-Way Bike Games, Ornery Clowns Doing Incredibly Stupid Things, and Hot Utra Gypsy Bellydancers Selling Raffle Tickets for Mutant Bikes and Other Prizes.
-Interclub Tallbike Jousting, as seen on TV and in the 2003 film-festival hit documentary Too Dumb To Die — contestants include Neanderthals from out-of-town bike tribes, Doyle the 2005 World Tallbike Jousting Champion, and Gorgar the Vain and Belligerent Urine-Eating Monster
-Pervitadora Records’ Glen Meadmore — the Hot, Horny, and Born-Again Singing Cowboy
-The Life-Size Mousetrap — the Rube Goldberg-inspired creation based on the children’s board game but instead of a net at the end there’s a 2-ton safe that smashes things. With three-a-day performances by sexy mice, cranky blue-collar clowns, and the one-woman-band Esmerelda Strange
The Disgusting Spectacle — a Giant Head Sculpture that Picks its Own Nose with an Equally Giant Pointy-Fingered Hand, Powered by a Human-Sized Hamster Wheel
BMX Ramp Competition and Flatland Expo Presented by First Rule
Kielbasa, the Accordion-Playing Lunch Lady
The Slow Poisoner
The Outlaw Country of Hellbound Glory
Flower Frankenstein / BikiniKat
DJs Toph One, jef leopard, Renessa, & Big Daddy
Emceed by the Reverend David Apocalypse
More acts TBA.
More details at: www.cyclecide.com
Believe it or not, this isn’t a joke… this is an actual transcript. Spider arranged it; I wrote it; Gavin signed it. You can almost smell the hair gel on the parchment.
——–
July 10, 2006
San Francisco, California
MAYOR DECLARES JULY 22-23 TO BE “CYCLECIDE WEEKEND”
July 22-23 is Cyclecide Weekend, by Mayoral Proclamation
——–
In recognition of the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo’s decade-long career promoting artistic exploration, cultural activism, and tireless commitment to the glorification of the bicycle, the Honorable Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco has proclaimed the weekend of July 22-23, 2006 to be “Cyclecide Weekend.”
WHEREAS in 1996, founder Jarico Reesce created the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo in order to vaunt the bicycle as an artistic medium — to modify, to make more surreal, more useful, and/or more entertaining — and Reesce’s vision metamorphosed into a lifelong surrogate family and worldwide cultural institution;
WHEREAS the members of Cyclecide Bike Rodeo provide the planet’s only traveling bicycle-themed sideshow and pedal-powered carnival midway, and whereas they continue to make a substantial contribution to San Francisco’s unbelievably diverse and creative underground arts scene, as well as criss-crossing the country and positioning themselves in the media to represent San Francisco’s renegade do-it-yourself spirit all over the globe;
WHEREAS Cyclecide promotes the virtues of re-use, offhanded environmentalism, and “pre-cycling” by searching out cast-offs that our wonderfully disposable society throws away, and then modifying said cast-offs — both for fun and to provide examples for lessening humanity’s impact on the environment;
WHEREAS the Bike Rodeo makes bike culture entertaining and alluring for both chidren and adults — referencing the bicycle’s history as a source of populist freedom, sublime engineering principles, efficiency, and ongoing role as a worldwide ennabler of change, easy mobility, physical fitness, interactivity with one’s surroundings, and silly entertainment;
WHEREAS Cyclecide consistently and creatively does its part to promote the universal idea that life on Earth is better when adaptability trumps consumption, and when a carefully-fostered atmosphere of interactivity breeds cooperation, understanding, tolerance, and improved quality of life;
WHEREAS Cyclecide Bike Rodeo are not afraid to take risks, even in the face of insurmountable odds, extreme impracticality, and pies to the face — and whereas the Bike Rodeo will continue to put a clown nose on the visage of life, and to bravely and comically embody its motto, “2 DUM 2 DIE”; now
THEREFORE IT BE RESOLVED THAT I Gavin Newsom, Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, do hereby proclaim the weekend of July 22-23, 2006 to be “CYCLECIDE WEEKEND.”
