One of the organizers of Bike Night at the Hammer is Lisa Anne Auerbach a textile artist, photographer and bike advocate. In case you're wondering what it takes to add artistic flair to the textile medium, a good start would knitting a protest sweater featuring not one but eight fetuses.
You've just been served tampon in a tea cup!
The Los Angeles Times has a nice story about Lisa Anne in which she labels Breaking Away as a film that's "super cheesey and kooky" then goes on to give it credit as "the film that spawned a hundred thousand bike people."
Lisa Anne then goes on to explain how she took up riding at the start of the Iraq War "to abstain from the oil dependancy that she saw as the root of Middle Eastern confilcts. She soon discovered she was 'addicted' to riding."
It's funny how the start of the Iraq War coinsides with the start of the fixed gear phenomenon. Talk about one of those things that makes you go hmmm.
However, on her personal blog Lisa describes her affinity for Breaking Away in further detail. Apparently she rememebers watching it in 1979 but but somehow missed seeing it again over the next 20 years until a fateful night in a hotel room:
"Anyhow, I saw Breaking Away again in a hotel in Utah when I was doing a story for a ski magazine ten years ago or so and I was totally jazzed. I'm pretty sure that seeing that film again, sitting on a yucky hotel bed while outside a storm raged, led somehow to the hanging up of my skis and the embrace of my two wheels. Skiing's great, but you have to go somewhere special and have a lot of gear. Biking's something you can do everywhere and it can change your life and you don't usually end up with frostbite. At least in LA, you don't. It's rare to find a movie that has an impact on your life. It's a cheesey, romantic, silly, sweet film, Breaking Away is, but it crept into my consciousness right at the right times."
So, what I think she's trying to say is that it's hard to ski on the streets of Los Angeles. Is that right? I never knew there was a rule that says you if you ski you can't also ride a bike.
You'd think as an artist, Lisa Anne would have been able to conceptualize a way to do both. Couldn't she have knitted a ski rack to her bike?
I might actually stop by the Hammer and check out the scene mainly because I'm intrigued by the idea of an all vegetarian spread. While hipsters and bacon seem to be heading towards a rocky divorce, bacon addiction is not an easy thing to shake and might just have to roll up with my lil' hotdog cart and set up shop if only to try and enicte a brawl between veggies and carnivores.
No comments:
Post a Comment