Tactical urbanism, bicycle rebellion, Right to the City.

Photographing Early 20th Century Bike Life

There’s truly not a more fascinating way to explore history than through the photograph – for me anyway. Something about the haunting richness of images from the late 19th & early 20th century draws me in, irresistibly. No filmmaker seemingly can pull off the complex period realism of the documentary image, save for maybe Jack Fisk or David Crank. And nobody has compiled a more extensive online collection of these images than Shorpy.com.

From self-portraits, to promotional images, to street photography, these works reveal how common bicycles once were for many classes of people. This is something I’ve always felt strongly about the bike – that it wields to power to enable marginalized communities in ways we’re only just becoming aware of. Knowing this doesn’t hide the signs of racial or gender divides also revealed in the photos selected below, yet it’s encouraging to find such cycling diversity anyway.

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What the Hell was Leon Panetta Doing in Portland?

It’s not every day Portland is graced by the presence of a bonafide war criminal. This week, though, we were in luck. For just one day, one Leon Panetta was in town by invitation of the supposedly progressive Portland State University. If you’re unfamiliar with him, don’t feel bad. I’d rather spend my days not thinking about mass murderers, too.

Leon Edward Panetta was a congressman, serving as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, as well as head of the CIA and Secretary of Defense under the Obama administration.

As head of the CIA, Panetta oversaw the exponential expansion of Obama’s extralegal drone strike program. Nobel laureate and socialist Malala Yousafzai has condemned the lethal program for simply creating more terrorists, having killed over 2,400 people, a great number of which were civilians. More recently, Panetta’s been draping himself in a great many Israeli flags while making threats against Iran.

Presidents-Pakistan

Change we can believe in. Source.

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The Street Art Uprising of Occupy Central’s Umbrella Revolution

You probably haven’t been keeping tabs on Hong Kong’s ‘Umbrella Revolution‘ orchestrated by Occupy Central activists demanding democratic rights to freedom of assembly and the right to open elections. And why would you? There’s been an almost complete media blackout here in the US as the Ebola/ISIS/Dept. of Fear 24/7 “news” cycle does its diligent job of distracting us all.

As in Cairo, Istanbul, London, Kiev, and Ferguson, the people of central Hong Kong are rightfully rousing the rabble, waging a street rebellion against anti-democratic forces – and against HK police obliged with putting down this popular democratic uprising. They are the armed thugs whose job it is to inflict brutality against their own people, ensuring the ‘peace’ and ‘order’ of status quo are not disrupted.

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A Birds-Eye View of How Auto-Addiction Mutilated Urban Neighborhoods

Lately there’s been a flurry of bike/ped/urbanist social media comparing old aerial photos of cities against those same vantage points today. The difference is alarming. Where once compact, connected neighborhoods comprised most of the city space now reside deep freeway scars, endless seas of parking lots, and barren blocks. Be glad the ‘now‘ shots are taken from space – you’re spared the sight of smog.

This didn’t happen overnight. If it had, there would have been mass rioting in the streets to protect peoples’ homes (a few did). Eminent domain was only supposed to be used if it served the public good. Today you’d be hard pressed to find a planner who’d vouch for urban freeways as a ‘good’ at all.

Over the decades of so-called ‘prosperity’ following WWII, auto-centric infrastructure was prized above all other considerations. Hundreds of thousands of homes were wrecking-balled, deep grooves were dug into the Earth. Likely millions of Americans were eventually displaced. The end result honestly makes one want to weep for what we threw away for the sake of the car.

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Raiders of the Lost Arc Logistics

In a world only beginning to suffer the onset of climate change, ocean acidification, desertification of farmland and countless other maladies caused by greenhouse gas induced global warming, it’s hard to find a villain more evil than the fossil fuel industry. When conjuring this evil, we usually think of the heavyweights like Exxon, Shell, British Petroleum. New York City-based heavy crude and LNG exporters Arc Logistics LP are no better.

In proud Orwellian tradition, Arc claims a code of corporate responsibility committed to “conducting business with honesty, integrity, and in accordance with the highest legal and ethical standards [where] officers and other employees must comply with all applicable legal requirements of the United States.”

Arc began operating an oil train export terminal in Northwest Portland in early 2014. No permit was required to begin these operations, as the facility had already been built. Despite this huge legal loophole, Arcs actions are very much out of line with their own corporate code, to say nothing of the crimes against the bioregion they’re committing. As Utah Phillips correctly asserted, “The Earth isn’t dying, it’s being killed. And the killers have names and addresses.”

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Welcome to the Public/Private Partnership Totalitarian Police State

Weeks ago when the initial uprising in Ferguson was not yet an international news story, a white person whom I follow on Twitter declared that ‘Nothing like Ferguson has ever happened before‘. My response was one of bafflement. I asked how one could say such a thing. The dialog that followed was less than constructive, to say the least. No conclusion was forthcoming, yet I can’t seem to get their assertion out of my head.

Obviously Twitter is a terrible place for discourse. Without having the time and space to fully understand their point of view, I’m left to ponder a couple different assumptions listed below in regard to what makes Ferguson unique, having ‘never happened before‘ in the mind of this person.

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A Collection of Creative Cycling Graphic Art

The earliest culture expression of the human race we know of was two-dimensional artwork. Painted or etched in stone, the daily realities of ancient mankind tells a great deal about who we were and where we came from tens of thousands of years before written language evolved.

Seeing representations of ourselves affirms who we are, and why we do what we do. This is no different for those who commute and build community via bikes. I’m slightly biased, but the bicycle makes for pretty rad subject material, art-wise.

In trying to reflect the world of cycling, the collection of images below is about the most representative that can be found on Tumblr within a couple hours.

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