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Bicycle Seats
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Bicycles on the Side of a Train
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Bicycles on the side of a train, West Bengal, India, 1983
Photo by Steve McCurry.
While strolling through Greenwich Village Saturday afternoon…
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Flying Pidgeon
A Flying Pidgeon! This appears to be a PA-06, with the double top tube.
Missing poster for Ai Wei Wei
Poster protesting the detention and arrest of artist Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei was recently arrested and accused of tax evasion. Speaking of his arrest, Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch said, “This is not a crackdown in the classic cycle of tightening and loosening. This is an effort by the government to redraw the lines of permissible expression in China, to restrict the most outspoken advocates of global values.”
Ai Weiwei has previously made artwork out of Chinese bicycles.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Friday, March 25, 2011
A police officer and others with the broken bodies of Triangle fire victims at their feet, look up in shock at workers poised to jump from the upper floors of the burning Asch Building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place.
Because the city morgue was too small to hold the large number of fire victims, the 26th Street pier was converted into a temporary morgue. Thousands gathered there to identify the dead.
At the 26th Street pier morgue, family members and friends walk past numbered coffins and examine the victims’ remains to identify their loved ones.
Net-draped white horses and a flower-laden carriage led a silent mourning procession on April 5, 1911 for the seven unidentified victims of the fire. Leaflets in English, Yiddish and Italian calling for workers to join the final tribute to the fire's victims brought together a parade of 100,000 mourners who walked to the site of the tragedy in unending rain.
Members of the United Hebrew Trades of New York and the Ladies Waist and Dressmakers Union Local 25 at the funeral procession for the seven unidentified fire victims.
Photos from the Kheel Center.
Valentine’s Day
Monday, February 14, 2011
“To ride a bicycle properly is very much like a love affair—chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you can do it and the thing is done; doubt, and for the life of you, you cannot.” —H.G. Wells, Wheels of Chance, 1896
Image from Flickr.
Chinese New Year
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Shanghai, 1991
Beijing, 1982
Beijing, 1984
Beijing, 1987
Tibet, 1990
Hebei, 1988
Photos from The Flowing Great Wall by Wang Wenlan.
Postman Blues
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Postman Blues, written and directed by Sabu, 1997, 110 minutes.
Postman Blues is the story of Sawaki, a mailman who delivers letters on his red bicycle. One day he delivers mail to Noguchi, an old high school buddy turned yakuza, who has just cut off his pinky. Sawaki’s life takes a strange turn when Noguchi’s freshly severed pinky accidentally rolls off the table into his mailbag. This chance encounter leads to a chain of events involving overzealous policemen, a kindhearted hitman, and lots of madcap cycling.
The film is playing at the Japan Society this Friday, January 28, 7:30 PM as part of the series Run, Salaryman, Run! A Retrospective of Sabu’s Film Works.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Martin Luther King, Jr. Arrested. Photo by Charles Moore, 1958.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
—Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963.
Forever Bicycles
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Ai Weiwei's 'Forever Bicycles', 2003, 42 Forever brand bicycles.
In 2003, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei conjoined forty-two Forever brand bicycles into a circular sculpture. Manufactured in Shanghai since 1940, the Forever bicycle was an essential mode of transportation that has become an icon of the postrevolutionary era. Made of heavy steel, these utilitarian bicycles were meant to last forever.
The same cannot be said for Ai Weiwei’s studio in Shanghai, which was demolished Tuesday by Chinese authorities apparently as retribution for his outspoken criticism of government corruption and human rights abuses. He has come to see his conflict with the government as performance art. In November Ai held a farewell party serving a feast of river crab.
Dead Horse Bay aka Bottle Beach
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Dead Horse Bay
From the New York Times:
Dead Horse Bay sits at the western edge of a marshland once dotted by more than two dozen horse-rendering plants, fish oil factories and garbage incinerators. From the 1850′s until the 1930′s, the carcasses of dead horses and other animals from New York City streets were used to manufacture glue, fertilizer and other products at the site. The chopped-up, boiled bones were later dumped into the water. The squalid bay, then accessible only by boat, was reviled for the putrid fumes that hung overhead.
As the car industry grew, horse and buggies — thus horse carcasses — became scarce, and by the 1920s, there was only one rendering plant left.
This area used to be called Barren Island, when it was a separate island in Jamaica Bay. Barren Island was connected to the mainland of Brooklyn when landfill was used in 1926 to create Floyd Bennett Field, New York City’s first airport. Filled with trash by the 1930s, the trash heap was capped, only to have the cap burst in the 1950s and the trash spew forth onto the beach. Since then garbage has been leaking continually onto the beach and into the ocean from Dead Horse Bay.
The beach is accessible by bike, via the greenway on Flatbush Avenue on the way to Fort Tilden, as you pass Floyd Bennett Field but before reaching the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge. The best time to go is at low tide.
Minck soda bottle
You can find old bottles such as this Minck soda bottle, a soda apparently produced in Bushwick up until the 1960s.
Horse bone fragment
Other old bits of garbage can be found, such as this fragment of horse bone for which Dead Horse Bay was named.
View of Marine Parkway Bridge from Dead Horse Bay