What a beautiful place. Endless tropical beaches by
the coast, endless Wisconsin inland. It's kind of
shocking that the place is still so rural. They say
it's because it's so far from everywhere- four hour's
flight from Australia. I am truly at the ends of the
earth.

Learning about Maori history, I can imagine what a
paradise it must have been. No poisonous things, no
predators, just birds. This island was covered with
Kauri trees, as big as a redwood. With the tall ferns
and giant crickets you can see how this is an old, old
continent, older than the dinosaurs.

Out in the boondocks the Maori seem to be doing all
the same shit jobs that blacks and mexicans do back
home. New Zealand has a very progressive reparations
policy but it's not like anybody's going to give up
their house. The town near the festival was very
poor, reminding me of run-down small farming towns in
America.

Basically the area's tourism guy paid the Kiwi Burn a
grant to have the festival in this sheep paddock by a
dam. So 200 yahoos from all around the world, most of
them US Burners, show up and put on neon fur and dance
all around and spin fire. Our camp was "Caravanas De
Los Muertos" a kind of mexican/trailer trash mix. I
built little shade structures and a temple out of
wood, worked the gate a little, and acted as muscle
when a few old creepy guys crossed the line with the
young girls. There was a lake so somebody brought a
pirate ship. Most of the participants were old hippie
swinger types and LA trance divorcee hot moms who are
rediscovering their youth. It's cool to see someone
be themselves but it's sad that it took them so long
that they're called "Mutton Dressed As Lamb" down
here. Mostly older folks could afford to come this
far. They're all nice but there's a hint of
desperation about the good times, like gottahavefun
while the clock is ticking.

On the big night we invited all the locals and I got
to meet some maori with facial moko (tattoos). They
seemed like any farmer I'd meet in Illinois. Who
knows what they thought of us weirdos- not a very
precise selection of American culture. But everybody
digs the fact that you can't charge for anything at
Burning Man, so the bars are free. One of them gave
us the tip-off that three kids from the local Mongrel
Mob gang were there. We watched them go around and
case our camps. Then we introduced ourselves, got
them beer, lit them a joint, and told them we had 20
eyes on them so they might as well just enjoy the
party and be our friends. So they did.

When it came time to set off the man the yahoos "in
charge" poured a bunch of gas on it, so when they shot
it with a roman candle it didn't burn but simply
exploded, sending flaming 2x4s into the crowd.
Miraculously only one guy was hurt, a scotsman from
Edinburgh who was whanged in the leg just below his
kiltline. He got lots of attention from the girls so
everything was cool. You can look up the video on
Youtube by searching for "Kiwiboom".

Afterwards we cleaned up and I headed to a house out
in an isolated beach area. It has a nice swimming
hole and a waterfall. I think I'll sit out my trip
here.

Check out my pictures at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/68651928@N00/
posted by Johnny on 16.3.08 |

My weekly schedule goes like this: During the week, I
wake up and ride over to the Rat's Nest (someone's
garage). I chop bikes, usually working on three
projects at once, until dark. Usually someone calls
and says they're cooking dinner for everybody. About
once a week there's an excuse to go out to the pub.

On Friday we drive up into the mountains to work on
the site. More bridge and table building, milling
timber, and the occasional welding job. I found a guy
with a blacksmith's forge and made a brand for the
festival. We're making so much stuff out of wood from
the fire. Some of the treetrunks have been left at
bar height and we'll cut slabs of raw pine and make
bartops out of them.

The animals have a regular cycle, too. Early in the
morning the Cockatoos get up, scream a lot, and fly
around all day screaming and running errands. Around
dusk they come close and pick a spot to do the
evening's socializing. Usually it's the picnic area
(lots of fruit rinds and dropped treats to find) or a
big dead tree. Then they hang out, argue, neck, and
squawk. At night they fly off to whereever they
sleep.

The kangaroos are diurnal, so they're up around dawn
and dusk, sleeping in the bushes during the heat of
the day. They don't have natural predators so they're
only vaguely cautious of us. They can always run away
faster than anything else, anyway. This makes them
very indifferent to humans. So they graze everywhere.


In the morning the magpies sing their morning song,
which is very beautiful. At night the kookaburras
start their oo-oo-oo-AHHHH-AHHHH calls (as you've
heard sampled at the beginning of Morris Day and the
Time's "Jungle Love"). There's also a duck pair that
stays in the pond at night and wanders the grass
foraging during the day.

I'm beginning to know the particular animals. Two
females have very young joeys, they all live up on the
mountain and come down to graze. The joeys are more
chicken, at the first sight of danger they leap into
the pouch and let mom handle it. There's an old,
grey-nosed female that leads a family around. She's
grouchy and doesn't like people. If she decides to
move somewhere else, the others listen. Kangaroos can
also practice suspended gestation, so they can have up
to four offspring (one in each stage of pregnancy)
that they can freeze until conditions are good. The
7-year drought has just broken so there are young roos
everywhere.

One of the Cockies comes down and hangs out by the
porch each night. I named him Rocky the Cocky. I'm
trying to get him to say "Rat Patrol!" I think I need
more bribes. They're incredibly intelligent- one
night we squawked at them with the megaphone, and they
sent two big males over to yell at us and flash their
rills, then they all scarpered.

It's amazing how much this festival is green-crazy.
They plant a tree for every ticket sold. There's all
kinds of priveleges for biking to the festival. You
can purchase a carbon offset for your impact from
attending. The toilets are composting. All the
contractors are local, and they've even gotten a
generator rental company to invalidate their
warranties by running biodiesel in the gennies- as it
happens it makes them run better.

Australia is already suffering from global warming.
The hole in the ozone layer is strongly apparent. You
can't be unprotected in the sun for more than a few
minutes. As a result Australians have a national
vitamin D deficiency because everyone's afraid of the
cancerous rays of the sun. Also, the rise in ocean
temperature is causing the Great Barrier Reef to die.
Whole stretches of it are bone white and devoid of
life.

Back in Canberra, things are quiet. They planned the
city so that you feel like you're in the bush all the
time. It's all federal money coming to support this
tiny city so there's an excess of infrastructure. The
streets and blocks look like they were plopped down in
raw bush, you don't see any other cars or people (just
the occasional public bus), the water pressure is
great, everything is overgrown with vegetation because
the drought has broken. Commercial shops are hidden
inside complexes behind trees so you never see, say, a
gas station or a quickie mart. It's actually very
sterile: Each neighborhood has a series of shops at
the center, where the bank and post and Woolworth's is
along with a few pubs and chinese restaurants. The
result is, no matter what neighborhood you're in,
everything's in the same place. The people ride their
bikes with their little helmets and give each other
hugs for hello and nobody has tattoos or speeds and
everybody uses the green-friendly dish detergent and
they looooove folksy singer-songwriters. This is
perfect paradise: Very creepy. I miss the piss in
the streets, crazy people, bums, gunshots, traffic
noise, sirens. I saw a guy with a scab the other day
and I was so happy! Turns out he was a skater.

Of course, that's just Canberra. A public servant
town. I got a taste of another type of Australian,
the Bogan, when the Summer Naturals car show came to
town (motto: "Burnouts, Beer, and Boobs"). These are
your equivalent of the American, mulleted, doofwad
trailer trash and/or suburban X-box Jock: Drunk,
oafish, monosyllabic, and hostile. We had a blast
riding around and getting yelled at. Most of them
yelled "Guhhhhhh-aaaaahhh-yaaaaa-maaaaaayyyy" which is
the drunken contraction of "Good on ya, mate!" (a
compliment). But we also got a bunch of comments as
cheerful and supportive as "Why don't you cunts go
catch AIDS!". Classy.

Nancy Porker's dad is a true Australian, though: What
they call a Cocky. Can fix anything, is tough as
nails, cusses a lot. The first night I arrived up on
the mountain he was shooting at a "that damn cormorant
who's after my trout!" with his shotgun. I met a
couple of other of these types- think Mick Dundee with
too much sun, the Aussie hat, a vest, no shoes, at the
pub- and finally felt at home. They actually came up
to me and said, "Are you a metalworker?" and the
ensuing conversation lasted all night. One of them is
a retired Vietnam Colonel, they play bluegrass, and
they're really into the U.S. Civil war. Real good ole
boys.

And you should see the Utes! (Utility trucks). Huge
roo bars like bulldozer blades, some hacked on
homemade bed, and snorkels so you can drive
underwater. Of course there's a few of what they call
"Urban Assault Mums" with their SUVs but most of these
guys NEED that stuff on their car. I'm seriously
thinking that a great vacation would be to load a
welder and a few spare parts onto a Land Rover and
just set out into the bush for a few months.

One thing that's really struck me here is the invasive
species. Australia is such an old continent, that's
been evolving separately for so long, that everything
looks different. The Eukalyps look different than
regular deciduous trees. The mammals are all
marsupial, not placental. Everything we have, they
have a marsupial version of: Rats, foxes, bats,
flying squirrels. So when you see an invasive
species, like a rabbit, they really stick out. They
have a big problem with rabbits and foxes. Not to
mention feral cats. There's a guy going around buying
up huge tracks of bush, fencing them off, and killing
all the invasive species inside. His philosophy is
that the environment of Australia, with its droughts
and forest fires, will eventually kill off the
invaders and so the natural genetic bank needs to be
preserved. It's true, too: The place seems like
paradise but you've got to picture a continent the
size of the U.S. with the combined freshwater of the
Missouri- not the Mississippi- river. We're just
getting into "fire season", and bushfires are
essential to Eukalyp germination. The kangaroos have
evolved to survive fires: They instinctively run AT
the fireline, and jump through it to where it's burnt
out.

I went with some guys on a bamboo harvesting trip. We
drove out into the bush and camped overnight. There
was a big patch of bamboo there that had been planted
by settlers and was now bigger than a football field.
It was hard, hot work. The guy who is going to use
the bamboo for structures at the festival would select
his pole and cut it with a chainsaw, then we'd knock
all the branches off and drag it back to a pile. When
it got too much we'd jump in the river. No crocs this
far south, they say. I'm far enough south that there
aren't any koalas, playtpuses, or crocs, but there are
plenty of kangaroos, wallabys, wombats, and endless
parrots.
posted by Johnny on 8.3.08 |

One of the founders of RPOZ has a dad named Mick, and
it was Mick's dream 20 years ago to create a ski
resort and bobsled track in the mountains outside of
Canberra. So Dan aka Nancy Porker grew up in this
mountain resort, skiing and riding the bobsled. Later
he added some ziplines and a waterslide for the
summer.

Nancy Porker and Limp Jimmy founded the RPOZ, being
the tinkering types, and a few years later embarked on
a dream of their own: To create a music and arts
festival using the amazing location that Mick had
built. This is why they brought me to Australia: to
bring a bike element to the festival.

The location is absolutely gorgeous. It's a mountain
range, but the trees are all eukalyptus or ash. The
place is infested with kangaroos and now and then
you'll see the endangered black-tailed rock wallabee,
sort of their version of the mountain goat. There is
a flock of 30 or so cockatoos that live on the site
and they have a lot of character to say the least.
Seeing these intelligent, social birds in their
natural habitat makes me sad to think of the ones in
cages. Most of the other birds are parrots as well,
except for the kookaburra, a relative of the
kingfisher whose cry you'll recognize from any jungle
movie.

The Rat Patrol here is small but innovative. I see
lots of creativity, although it seems to be
concentrated in certain areas, like unique suspension
techniques. Canberra is a planned city like D.C. or
Brasilia, and it has lots of greenways, bike paths,
and has never had a traffic jam. The club itself is
extremely positive and caring. I doubt the city would
ever support a much larger club, so it's like a little
family.

Oh- and they all have zipties on the top of their
helmets. At first I just thought they were weird.
Turns out that the magpies get really REALLY
aggressive when they have young. They swoop down and
peck you with their 3-inch beaks, taking out a chunk
of ear. They never come from the front, it's either
from behind or from the sun. So to fool them you
either put eyes on the back of your helmet, or zip
ties to make them misjudge the height. Schoolchildren
walk home from school with paper plates rubber-banded
to the back of their head, with faces drawn on.
Adults walk around waving a big stick in a circle in
the air. If you don't know the cause it seems really
bizarre.

Let me say this about Australia: We in the U.S. live
in a 2nd-world nation. In the last 50 years places
like Europe and Oz have been spending their money on
infrastructure, education, mass transit, city
planning, and preserving the environment. We've just
been spending it on war, while we allow sprawl to turn
our towns in to ugly, endless stretches of strip malls
and check-cashing places. It makes me really sad to
see what we could be if we cared. Unemployment and
illiteracy is low, there are no homeless, jobs are
relaxed, holidays are frequent, drivers are curteous,
healthcare is cheap, crime is rare. As depressing as
it is to think of America, it does give me hope that
things can be done right.

I've been chopping bikes like mad during the week and
then heading up into the mountains to do logging work
and sitework on the weekends. I'm getting pretty good
with the backhoe and sawmill, and driving dumptrucks
and landrovers from the wrong side. My first bike
project is a set of pedal-powered bumper cars, that
should be a hit at the festival. It's odd to see ads
for this festival in other festival's programs, with
me listed among the attractions: "Art Installation
Residency by Johnny Payphone (US Burning Man
Festival)".

Australia's dollar is so valuable because of an
industrial boom, and so welders and metal polishers
are on the "desired occupations" list. This means I
may be able to get a work visa. While the currency is
about equal, its effective value is double ours, so a
case of beer costs $36 and the minimum wage is $12.
If I get work in town I can make about $36/hr, if I go
out west they pay welders $100k/year. Given that I
will probably return next year to work Corinbank again
(and am helping the Cyclecide Circus to book a 2009
Australia tour), it would be nice to spend my winters
in Australia where it is summer and make a bunch of
money to last me through until the U.S. festival
season.

As you read this you should also follow along on my
flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/68651928@N00/sets/72157603652896200/

New pictures will be uploaded regularly and I'll keep
sending these updates along with them.
posted by Johnny on 16.2.08 |

The invention of the shipping container has changed the world. Previously ships were unloaded by stevedores bit-by-bit: Casks of wine, crates of goods, etc etc. Now a universal container can be loaded onto ship, train, or truck with relative ease. This has resulted in such phenomena as a) Garments in the Garment District of NYC can be made cheaper in China and shipped there than they can be made down the block, and b) containers washing off of ships and then onto shore, so (for example) 30,000 hockey gloves wash up on the coast of Oregon.

Supercontainer shipping is the most efficient form of transportation in the world. Every now and then I'll get some causehead environment-weenie saying to me "You're using fossil fuels to ship bikes to Africa, maaan!". The thing is, the carbon footprint of a single container from the U.S. to Africa is equivalent to YOUR exhaling carbon dioxide for two weeks. That's how efficient these ships are. I tell the weenies, "If you'd like to reduce your own carbon footprint, just kill yourself and I'll ship you to Africa- it will produce less carbon than you are by living."

Add to this the extreme imbalance of trade from the developing world to the consuming world. This means containers pile up in the U.S., so shipping them back is drastically reduced in price. This creates an interesting problem whereby it is more expensive to ship a container across the U.S. than it is to ship one from the U.S. to Africa.

I ran up against this problem recently while trying to get bikes off the Nevada Ranch that Burning Man LLC owns. This year the hippies left 1500 bikes in the desert. We gave some to the Kiwanis and some to the Paiute Indian tribe, but we still have a big pile of them. BM asked me to get rid of them. I obtained a quote:


$4290 / 20' - ocean frt Oakland to Tema, Ghana
$6235 / 40' - ocean frt

$6056.25 - trucking for 2 roundtrips if you need cntr dropped OR
$3093.75 - trucking for live load, with 1 hr free for loading. It would
be additional $65 / hr thereafter


What this means is that a forty-foot container full of bikes costs $6235 to ship from Oakland to Ghana. Not bad. It'll take six months- the boat will go to Japan, then Hong Kong, then India, etc etc- but it'll get there for about $12 a bike (500 in a container). But shipping the container from Reno to Oakland will cost $6000! "Live load" means the teamster sits there and waits while we load the container. Even so, we're talking $3100.

That's roughly $10/mile for the 300 miles Reno to Oakland, and $0.78/mile for the 7600 miles from Oakland to Ghana! And I'm talking as the crow flies, not actual miles! That ship's gonna go around Cape Horn.

Ten times as cheap. Talk about economy of scale.
posted by Johnny on 18.1.08 |

"Giving your baby to a gay couple" is the new "getting an abortion"


I'm all for pro-choice, but damn, that's fucking cool as shit.

Considering that there's very little stigma attached to being an unwed mother these days

and considering that gays want babies so bad they're shipping them in from China

and considering that just about every girl I know has had an abortion

...can we see more pregnant girls please?
posted by Johnny on 19.10.07 |

Traveling

Things are pretty uprooted in my life. After almost three years, Pot'n'Rox is dead. Good times and bad times, but memory only retains the good. I lived there longer than anywhere else except my parents'. I packed my stuff into Greg's attic and hit the road, maybe for six months.

BIKE the film asked me to go to a festival in Hereford, England, where they're showing the movie. I can't make it because of Toasted Dude but a whirlaway film tour to Europe would have been fun.

Right now I'm in Ohio for my sister's big American wedding (not everybody could make it to Dublin last new year's). I think she's just having a party, no ceremony. But tons of my kin are here. Good to see distant family and be called "Jon-Richard".

Next, to Nashville, a week with the chapter there. The best chapter of the Rat Patrol except Chicago! Then it's out west to Toasted Dude for six months.

Then, big news! RPOZ has written me into a grant to bring me to Australia for Corinbank, their own little music and arts festival. I'm going to run a bike club boot camp. I'll spend three months down unda starting in December, sadly missing the Chicago winter. During that time someone else is flying me to New Zealand to start a Rat Patrol in Auckland. It will be March before I'm back in Chicago for good. Wow, traveling till St. Ratrick's day. I'll be back in town for Ratification in early October, though.

It's been a time for reflection for me, as a recent trip to Arkansas has me quitting the drink and making some changes. Nothing like lonely nights on the road to make you think about things.
posted by Johnny on 27.7.07 |

www.bike-films.com

Be Inclusive Kill Exclusivity

"Two filmmakers infiltrate a secretive, vegan,
virulently anti-capitalist bicycle gang, made up of
punks and anarchists, who engage in drunken
medieval-style jousts while riding self-customized
six-foot-tall bicycles called mutant bikes. Yes, this
is a documentary. Hyper-masculine, subversive and
ultra-cool."

See the trailer:

http://www.bike-films.com/trailer.html

The filmmakers have been very eager to assist the Rat
Patrol in our efforts to send a member to Patriensa
Ghana where Danny Danger and I lived and worked. They
have donated merchandise which you can obtain at West
Town Bikes. Embroidered tallbike hats and shirts with
bikes and beer (see pictures at the website store)
Proceeds will go to the Ghana project.

If you buy a DVD online, select "Chicago- Rat Patrol"
as your affiliate and part of your purchase price will
go to our project.

Soon we will screen this movie at West Town with some
Ghanaian snacks, and pass the hat. We're about
halfway to our fundraising goal. Thanks to those
who've already donated in person or at our "A Tazing
For Africa" charity event. Maybe there can be more
tazing at future fundraisers.

See the project:

www.patriensa.com

www.rat-patrol.org/Infestations/Africa.html

Fondly,

-Johnny
posted by Johnny on 9.6.07 |

I was asked by Steampunk Magazine to write an instructional article on pennyfakething construction. See it here:

Steampunk Magazine

issue #2, page 34
posted by Johnny on 30.5.07 |

Chicago public radio covered the Guerilla Floatilla, I got a mention. listen to it here. Also, the first segment was an excellent story about the Chicago Flood, you should listen to it too.
posted by Johnny on 14.4.07 |

Butler Street Foundry

I have tried to share the environmental setting of my own Chicago-based steampunk lifestyle in my posts about the steam workshop of my Employer, Bubbly Dynamics, and the general steampunk setting of Chicago:

http://www.brassgoggles.co.uk/bg-forum/index.php?topic=258.0
http://www.brassgoggles.co.uk/bg-forum/index.php?topic=961.0
http://www.brassgoggles.co.uk/bg-forum/index.php?topic=295.0

Here is another place I like to hang around, in Bridgeport.  A Steampunk contraptionist often finds oneself in need of various metal goods cast, cut, forged, or punched.  For this I go to the Butler Street Foundry.

Butler Street Foundry was established in 1891.  After WWII, iron pouring was ceased due to new environmental regulations and the foundry turned to ironworking.  A few years back the third-generation owner retired and sold the business to a man who had been blacksmithing there for 10 years.  The new owner opened up the sealed pattern shop and we have been restoring the old machinery and setting the shop back up.  Local art students come and cast aluminum and brass, while the owner is trying to bring this 120 year old business into the artistic/restoration/renovation scene.  The coal-fired forge is used to do custom iron when the work can be found.  The owner is very interested in preserving vintage metalworking methods, however, it is very hard to find anyone under 50 who is into this stuff.  My role here is thus that of an apprentice, learning everything I possibly can.



Here is the main floor, where 50-ft beams are broken.  Never has the difference between mass and weight been so apparent than when a giant i-beam is swinging from the overhead crane, weightless but not massless.



Originally all power tools were fed via flatbelt from overhead, with a central steam engine providing the power.  Now only these few pulleys remain as a reminder of how fortunate we are to have outlets everywhere.





The Blacksmith's Shop

While I enjoy watching pours, my own interest is in the area of blacksmithing.














Flatbelt Triphammers

Butler still uses three of its original triphammers, all Little Giants.  As you can see they have been converted to electricity:

25lbs

50lbs

100lbs- a real floorshaker


Here you can see the very same tools in use back in the day.  Check out the overhead belts and the fact that a horse is patiently awaiting its shoes.



See a video of the 50-lb in use.  Watch your fingers!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe-rIpx8W3Y

Here are some very fine handmade tools, approximately 100 years old.  The craftsmanship is incredible.




The Pattern Shop

The foundry used to employ woodworkers to make the original boiler parts and gears that would then be cast in steel.  Some of the woodworking here is incredible.  The walls are stacked with these wooden originals- flues, manholes, pulleys, gears, flagpole bases, pretty much anything needed.  I've even found the originals for parts they cast for their own machinery, still in use out on the floor.  What a lost art!







Wow, the old night watchman's clock!  He would have had to use keys hanging around the property to prove he made his rounds, and his supervisor would retrieve a little punched slip of paper from within the clock.

Gas Hit-n-miss Engines

A hit-n-miss is a wonderful engine.  It only has one piston, and that piston only fires when it needs to.  So rather than the chugachuga of a four-cylinder engine, its one piston is fired when the flywheel slows to a certain speed and you just hear a POPF! now and then.  These are gasoline fueled, and some hit'n'misses even used mason jars as fuel tanks.  They provide power via a flatbelt PTO.

Hit'n'miss sawmill:



A smaller stationary engine:





Here you see the centrifugal clutch.  The spinning motion keeps the little fobs extended.  When the speed slows and the fobs drop, the piston (at right) is fired.

Butler Street is a wonderful part of Chicago industrial history!








posted by Johnny on 4.4.07 |

I've had fifteen bike punks staying at my house all week. They came from as far as Portland starting Friday and have been drinking up a storm. On Wednesday, we went on a ride that ended at one of the large bascule-trunnion bridges that Chicago is so famous for. Well, I say the ride "ended" there- but only because "the broken leg hides in the last caper".

Bascule-trunnion bridges use a pit system, where the bridge's large concrete counterweight sinks down below the level of the river. This allows a five-story bridge to be lifed with a 100 hp motor. Because of the way the bridge lifts, when the bridge goes up all the litter on it rains down into the pit. The pit beneath this bridge was full of 100 years of garbage and whatever sewage from the river had spilled over in high waters:



To get under this bridge you had to shimmy down a foot-wide ledge and swing around a large spiked gate designed to keep you out. Somehow, one of our guys ("J") managed to make it despite the fact that he was (unknown to us) very, very intoxicated. As the group climbed out over the girders beneath the bridge, J suddenly disappeared from view and fell into the darkness below. The drop was about two stories. Somebody shined a flashlight down there and saw him laying twisted on his back, sinking in the icy garbage water.

I ran down the stairs to the pit. J was in there laying on a large slab of ice in about four inches of water- the whole pit had frozen over, then begun to melt and was separated from the sides. As I stepped out onto the slab it tilted and began to sink. The smell was awful- it was just like the garbage compactor scene in Star Wars. When I reached him, I tried to help him but he began to clutch at me and drag me down as a drowning person does. We wrestled in the icy garbage water and I stopped trying to help him out and just dragged him out by one arm. I couldn't touch bottom except on the slab.

We carried him as far as the ledge but he would have to walk the rest of the way. He was sleepy and fading from being in the ice water. We yelled and screamed at him to get up. Eventually he did and somehow we managed to swing him around the gate, grabbing only the bricks for our purchase.

I happened to have a cargo bike and I carried him and his bike home. We changed his clothes and stayed up with him until we were sure he wasn't concussed. We didn't think he had a broken leg because he wasn't screaming. But the next morning he went to the hospital and they found a broken ankle and vertebrae.

It wasn't really until the next day that I realized how close he'd come to dying, or how close I came by going in there. If the weather had been a little cooler, he'd have bashed himself to death against a solid ice slab. If the weather had been warmer he'd have broken through the ice when he fell. Needless to say the incident has left me a little shaken.
posted by Johnny on 17.3.07 |

Kasey has been my homeskillet since 3rd grade. We grew up in a college town without much for kids to do except explore the steam tunnels and blow stuff up down in the creek. I lived in Oxford, Ohio for 14 years, age 9-24, high school and college. After college he and I spent an amazing summer getting drunk, grilling out, boating, and chasing girls. Then I moved to Chicago and he kept kept doing it for TWELVE YEARS. He turned 30 this weekend- still living in the same beer-sign apartment as he was when he was 18, still drinking at the same college bars where the furniture is bolted down, only now he has a party bus and a ski boat and makes his own wine and so on. He and his friends are the target market of Maxim Magazine. You know, the kind of guys who think that there's one single trick that will get all women to sleep with them, and it's got to be a pressure point on the wrist or something you do with your eyes or something. Little too much spiked hair and suit-jackets, big watches, those kind of guys.

Drunk from the RIP Anna Nicole ride in Chicago, I took the 3AM greyhound to Ohio. At noon Friday we piled into a Hummer SUV. Not exactly the classiest of conveyances. It was like a bus in there, except there was neon and a karaoke machine (my first time in a Limo). We brought tons of top shelf liqour and the 15 of us (including his 90-year-old grandma, pimpin in the Hummah granny!) to his work to surprise him. Turns out he'd been bitching and whining all week: "Everybody's droppin the ball on my birthday!" "oh, we'll just have a little shindig at my house" says mom. "I've had 29 birthdays in this house, I want to GO SOMEWHERE!" whines Kasey. At his work they had a shitty little heres-your-cake birthday party for him. SURPRISE! What a great idea. If you ever want to surprise someone, first get their work to throw them a shitty heres-your-cake "surprise" party, just to make them feel like crap and also account for any whispers and slipups that the victim might have heard.

The limo pulls up and he almost shits himself. Out pours a crowd of friends from all over. We pile back in and head down to Cincinnati (or, "the 'nati" as the local chamber of commerce encourages you to say in their cheesy bulletin board campaign).

At this point I begin a process that will leave me very sick: For some reason, I start drinking all different kinds of liquor. I think it was because people were handing me drinks. Gin, vodka, whiskey, etc etc. I will continue to consume this rainbow of fruit flavors from noon until 3 AM. Despite this massive bender of booze, the most embarrassing thing I do all night is "dance like Justin Timberlake". Fool, I TAUGHT him his moves!

Kasey makes the limo stop at Costcos and proceeds to buy $1000 worth of digital cameras. He will then use them all night and return them the following Monday.

First stop: Target world. These tipsy bozos walk into a shooting range and, for $5 gun rental and $8 range fee, they are handed FUCKING GUNS AND BULLETS. You can imagine the looks they were getting from the local redneck NRA types. I shot a .45 Dirty Harry revolver, a Smith and Wesson 9mm (looks like a glock), and a .38 snubnose Saturday Night Special revolver. Having only ever shot with varmit rifles, I found blasting off rounds with a semiauto handgun to be very, very satisfying. The one Iraq vet amongst us did not participate, I can only imagine why. The dudes (and dudes they were indeed) of course go for the most showy guns- a shotgun, a magnum, and this HUGE 50 caliber revolver. I left the range when they started off with the big guns, and you can imagine why- these noodle-armed newbies trying to fire a hand cannon and actually hitting the ceiling with the gun when they pull the trigger and it flies upwards in their hands.

Next stop- a german beer house in lovely Newport, Kentucky. One dude orders a Budweiser- what the hell do you think those big copper tanks are for? They make this big deal about some dobblebock that they can only serve us two mugs of, OOOOOH I surely can't handle A LITER of dobbelbock! Fried pickles were good though. Why, oh why did I start with liquor and then switch to dark beer before getting back into the limo for more liquor?

Next stop: Dave and Buster's. Then back home to the local upscale townie bar. I see lots of old folks I haven't seen in donkey's years. Then we go to, of all places, The Dirty Dirty (First Run), which is the last-chance nasty booty-bar for the school. This is where I perform alleged Timberlakian dance moves. When the bar closes down Kasey slips into a well-worn routine like putting on an old baseball glove: He hits on women and, if rejected, begs for a ride home. Needless to say we got the ride home.

The next morning, I feel like Death took a crap on my soul. I start puking so hard my eyes go red, blood blisters break all over my face, that kind of porcelain god prayer that I left behind in that town. Fortunately, a man does not do this nightly for 12 years without being a pro. Kasey hands me an antinausea/antivomiting suppository and a rubber glove. Damn, the guy's prepared. I keister it and an hour later I'm eating fucking chicken wings and drinking a beer. I gotta get some of that stuff.
posted by Johnny on 19.2.07 |

From Dublin To The West Midlands

Stayed in a manor house. Drank some funky cider. Checking out the windey alleys. Rode a bike around looking at graffiti. Hung out with one of the Dubliners in the bar where they got their start. Drank some smokey whiskey. Each day my hangover is met with a traditional Irish breakfast of congealed pig's blood, sheep kidney, and breakfast fish. Found a railbike in an old pub that is just like the one I'm restoring. All the buses are tallbuses here. Headed up into the mountains to visit an ancient monastery and did some gravestone rubbings. Don't see what all the fighting is about- Ireland seems like a red-headed England to me.


New Years in Dublin was a non-event. The only people in the pub who noticed midnight were Americans. You know, running into Americans in Europe was ghastly. No wonder everybody hates us. Note to Americans: Do NOT sing "No Nay Never" if the only words to it you know are "No Nay Never No More" again and again.

There was much more excitement about the last rugby game at the nearby stadium. P.S. Irish kids are little punkasses (literally screaming with laughter and falling down at the sight of my mustache), but I think American ones are too.

I visited the National Museum of Transport. I took the train to the end of the line and the walked up a country lane. Pretty soon I was passing through the outer wall of a castle. A sign said, "Private property- no tresspassing- except museum visitors". I kept walking. Half of the castle was falling down and the other half was occupied- I could see a dude in there reading in his study. I went around back where there were three huuuuge barns, each one packed to the brim with buses, trolleys, fire engines, and military equipment. You literally had to squeeze sideways to walk around in there. A woman was reading the paper in the ticket booth. She didn't notice me. I said, "good morning!" and she said, "Oh, I don't work here, I'm just reading the paper. Put your admission on the counter." It was awesome, but the government isn't really interested in supporting that kind of stuff. Basically they said old dudes come in and work on whatever bus was in service when they were young.

Stacee also dragged me to the National Gallery, and I really appreciate that she did. Got my culture on. I didn't see Bono there looking at a painting of himself like my sister did.

I was really having a great time with all the different forms of public transporation- double-decker bus, ferry, light rail, interurban rail. We parted ways with my family and took off across the Irish sea on a very large ferry (the kind that has bars and restaurants inside). It landed in Wales and we took a train along the misty Welsh coast down to Ross-on-Wye.
posted by Johnny on 2.2.07 |

Interested parties may enjoy my research article on the origins of freakbiking. Who was the first freakbiker? Fucking Eddie Munster, that's who.
posted by Johnny on 2.12.06 |

One of my friends got his girlfriend pregnant. What did they do in the old days when someone got in trouble? Went to some back-alley doctor to fix it, I guess. Even the concept of outlawing abortion didn't really exist until the 1920s, when our agrarian-based economy needed lots of farm hands and it was first outlawed. Up until that point the start of life was always considered to be the quickening. I still think it should be the quickening- if you take care of it beforehand, you're eliminating a potential person, and if you wait until after you're murdering an actual person. It's worked for us for centuries, why change it? Provide adequate birth control and education and you'll eliminate the need for abortion, anyway. But you never hear that from conservatives.

What my buddy's girlfriend did was order some ulcer medication from the internet that causes miscarriage in 80% of users. I guess that's what the kids are doing these days, when they get in trouble. It just really made me sad to hear that, to think that abortion has become easy and cheap thanks to corporate products and their side effects.
posted by Johnny on 17.10.06 |

Toasted Dude, part II
First off, let me say that there is no way I could accurately portray this event in mere words. You can browse pictures all day and all night and start to get an inkling but you still would be blown away if you saw it in person. Just think of it this way: 40,000 party people show up in an environment where there are very few rules. What happens? The answer is, everything. Any impression you have about this being a hippie event or a raver event or a survival event is wrong. There's 40,000 people there! That means that many, many sections of party society are represented. Besides hippies and ravers, there's the mad scientists who are only interested in a place where their creations are legal. There's the middle-age swingin' couples who hate wearing clothes. There's the club gays and their 24-hour sex fest. There's the dread-necks and their crazy brand of mountain man hippieness. There's the tank girls and the goths and the rivetheads and the oonce-oonce types. There's the bike club types and the radical marching band types and the ren-fest types. There's kinksters and bay-area artists and dumb rich kids looking for a good time. I met one guy who found out about the event because he was just out in the desert one day and saw something on the horizon. I met crazy military types just back from Afghanistan and weird-beard wasteoid types who coulda been juggalos. If you're one of those people who bitches about it but never went (like I was) then I'll tell you a secret: There's a huge party going on behind your back.

So who's not there? Well, anybody poor. The cost of getting there and surviving is so high that basically any nonpriveleged section of society is not represented. This event was whiter than a John Mayer concert. So the hip-hop party people weren't really there, and neither were the crusties and the punks (except those working for DPW which really isn't that many, there were 90 of us after the event so maybe a couple hundred total). There also weren't any religious types or any prudes or anybody trying to hold back the tide of sin and indulgence. Everyone you met was positive and supporting, every comment was an encouraging one, and you were welcome to walk up to any individual and start a conversation. Everybody was your friend.

It was odd seeing all this from the position of the inside. DPW jokes about the hippies like vampires view humans, as a sort of cattle that supports them. But it's friendly because they all know if it weren't for the rich hippies it couldn't happen. Still, a large amount of entertainment for DPW was making fun of the attendees. I think this attitude might be encouraged by the fact that everyone there was such a lightweight puss that DPW parts the crowd like The Warriors walking into a Care Bears bar. The only people that came close were the Death Guild types, and those fruity goths have a little too much eyeliner on if you ask me. Time and time again people told me that my dress and bike make me fit right in, and when I told them I had no idea and didn't change anything they said, "Welcome home". As cheesy as that sentiment is, I really felt it: Like Black Rock City is the place where all us freaks are from.

Before the event began, I liked to walk around and talk to anybody I saw working on anything cool. After the event begins there's a thousand people asking stupid questions so this becomes a little more difficult. Also, when it comes to gifts of booze and food, there's sort of a cascading expectation where new arrivals are expected to give to people who had been there longer. The attendees seemed to be in awe of DPW because they spend so much time out there, but come on it was rough but not THAT rough. Still, that just added to the element of feeling like the VIP at the party. Not to mention having access to places the public can't go and watching the higher-ups run the party from the inside. I think I would have had an entirely different impression had I merely attended. I might have even been more critical of the mass consumption and waste.

That's actually a common critique, that this is some event for the rich and it's all about consumption. That's certainly true, but by the end I understood it more: Most of these people spend the whole year trying to make the world a better place. As a reward, they get one week. Why not give them that? What's so bad about this party versus four hundred other parties with 100 attendees, happening all over in every city? It gives us hope and reminds us of the ideal society that we're working towards. It makes us believe it can happen.

So, anyway, in walking around I found the Kinetic Steamworks guys and their steam traction engine. That was it, I knew what I was going to do with my time. Every day after work I'd rush over to their camp and they'd be just getting up and going and I'd try to help as much as I could without getting in the way. I would rather haul firewood for a steam engine than go to some massive orgy of sex and drugs anyway. Probably the most helpful I ever became was just standing there answering the stupid questions: "Is that real?" "Is that really a tractor?" "Did you make that?" But I learned a lot and was tremendously inspired.

Actually there was a huge steampunk presence this year. Never Was had their victorian house on wheels and their weird steam-cart thing from The Makers. There was even a steampunk bar. The traction engine was there to run a carousel and a sauna, as well as pull a tender around and give rides. They had installed a locomotive whistle that sounded great, and whenever I heard it I'd bust over there on my chopper and run forward escort keeping the drunken hippies from getting run over. I'll tell you right now that my favorite moment of the whole week was just cruising around with these guys. They'd installed some propane torches to light the thing up and (thankfully) they made you take off your blinkies and neon and put on pants if you wanted to ride on it. So they'd have a tender full of folks and the whole thing was lit only by flame and it just looked so out of place and so, so, SO MUCH like my dreams.


posted by Johnny on 19.9.06 |

Toasted Dude
Last October I was contacted by the LLC of a large annual party... let's just call it the "Toasted Dude" festival. It turns out they have a major bicycle problem. Forty thousand partiers show up in the desert and leave behind about a thousand bikes. Last year the LLC paid $2000 in dumpster disposal fees to get rid of those bikes. The LLC being somewhat environmentally inclined, this bothered them, and so they brought me out this year to deal with the problem (some background: This party has 40,000 attendees who pay $300 each, it operates on a $7 million annual budget, and it has a staff who work year-round to throw the party. In 2003 the payroll budget for the five owners of the LLC was $400,000, plus considering the monetary investment it takes to spend a week in the desert you can forget all preconception that this is some dirty hippie Rainbow Gathering. This is a spectacle of mass consumption for the wealthy, but it's damn fun).

When I arrived in Reno I just rode around asking for the house with all the bikes in the yard. Noone was home at the Black Label house so I immediately got to work on the Toasted Dude yellow bike program. The test program fixed up 40 bikes and took them to the party for participants to use, and the Black Label Bike Club has been handed the responsibility of being the bike crew. I wrenched bikes all day but when the residents got home I learned that my ride to the desert had already left. So we threw my chopper and another pile of yellow bikes in the truck and headed out there.

It was late and dark when we hit the salt flats. We actually went in the wrong direction and one of the beefed-up border patrols was on us in maybe three minutes. Man, those guys are buffs! They must live all year to wait for that one week when they have an excuse to use their night vision and radar and all that stuff. But they're good guys, so they helped us out.

The gate was pandemonium, even a week before the party. I can't imagine how many weasels, mooches, and sneaky scammers try to come and talk their way in- these guys were hardasses and I understand why. They gave us trouble for about five minutes when, by an amazing stroke of luck, up walked none other than THE woman who runs Toasted Dude. She recognized me from B.I.K.E. and handed me a $400 ticket, just like that, and in we went.

Even this far before the event there were probably 5000 or more people there setting up. Since my job didn't start until afterwards, I was put on the Shade Crew, which just goes around erecting shade structures for city functions. It was hot work but the pace was lax, we were kept plied with beer and smokey treats, fed out of a commissary, and the Department of Public Works's fleet of vehicles is comprised of all kinds of flame-throwing Mad Max stuff so in the end this was my favorite part- riding around in the desert on Mad Max assault vehicles BEFORE all the oonce-oonce types got there.

At the time, however, I had no idea what was to come.


posted by Johnny on 19.9.06 |

Getting onto the California Zephyr, I glimpsed the fancy-pants car that the Amtrak brass get to ride in. A guy told me the board of directors was in town. Neat car, wish all trains had balconies on the back like they used to.

I sat next to a railfan with a scanner, that was fun. He works on a tourist railway up in Michigan. He told me two things: 1) The "train robbery" tours used to be marketed to schoolkids, but schools don't have any money anymore so they market it to the Red Hat Ladies. The Red Hats get really rowdy; an 85-year-old woman once flashed the Sheriff. And 2) Jeffrey Dahmer's death was a hit put out by a drug dealer whose nephew Dahmer ate. The murderer was a lifer with cancer and 6 months left to live whose family got all set up from it.

A dude on the train asked me if I knew his sister Crystal. You know, that white bitch? No, I replied, I most certainly do not associate with people like her.

Then in Denver some federal agents came on the train with a sniffin' dog. The dog went nuts over the guy four seats in front of me. They opened his bag to find about 30 needles and some pill bottles... "oh, maybe he's diabetic" I thought. Then they turned over a shirt and underneath it was a chrome and pearl .357 magnum pistol. Needless to say they took him away. Can you imagine if somebody had a gun like that on a plane? I'd never make it to Reno.

Arrived in town and rode around a bit; eventually I saw a guy wearing MC colors that said "Reno Vagas". I figured he'd either know the Black Labels or he'd kick my ass. Turned out his brother was one.

I headed to the 100-year-old cowboy bar where they were said to hang out. A drunk old lady told me, "People like to listen to loud music so they can't hear the sound of their heart breaking". The bar was also an SRO and the clientele was all from upstairs. The owner offered me a bed, something I hadn't seen in a while, so I took it.
posted by Johnny on 24.8.06 |

Someone came into my house and stole $120 out of the place where we hide the rent money. We can't lock the doors because my roommate kicked the back door in. On the 1st, we put the money in a box in a drawer so when the landlord comes through on the 4th or so we can give it to him even if all of us aren't home. Here's the suspicious thing: There was $275 in there, and they only took $120. Seems like a stranger/burglar would take it all. Seems like $120 is the amount you take if either a) you know the victim and don't want to screw them over entirely, or b) you need $120 (which, by the way, is the exact retail price of a Playstation Portable, which every kid in my neighborhood wants).

The loss of the money isn't going to ruin me. But it always feels like such an invasion. Our house has a serious security problem but that problem is going away soon, thank god. I can't believe we live in the ghetto, there are no fewer than FIVE bullet holes in the front of the building, and we can't even lock our fucking door. It took a year to get bars over the window, and when that happened my roommate couldn't break the window to break in (a popular solution to being locked out at our house) and he didn't want to have to go around to the front door, so blammo. The folks downstairs let a lot of bums live there- I mean a LOT- and that means unlocked gates and strangers about.

Suspects:

-the downstairs neighbor's kid, who is sometimes in our house uninvited when we come home. I don't want to suspect him because he seems like a good kid but it also seems so obvious. Prime Suspect #1
-one of the hoodlums who the kid brings with him into our house when we're not home (this is who stole Eric's digital camera). Prime Suspect #2
-one of the bums squatting downstairs (hasn't that girl ever heard the term "squat matress"?). Ninety percent of traveling kids are awesome, the other 10% are super-duper shitty. We had a whole mess of the shitty variety staying here a while back, but now there's too many to keep track of. Prime Suspect #3
-one of the Rats who is always trying to rip us off anyway? Nah, they're chiselers, not outright thieves. They use deceit, mooching, and nibbling. Secondary suspects.
-the heavily addicted former roommate who knows where the money is kept and was in the house recently? Seems unlikely. He's such a functional drunk that I can't see him needing money. Included here because the new roomie hasn't paid out his deposit yet, so there could be some basis there for theft, I've lived with boozehounds before and know how they think when they're desperate. Secondary suspect.

...of course, there's nothing I can do about it, but suck it up. That's the worst part about injustice.
posted by Johnny on 9.8.06 |

This week has been extremely intense. I have to get it all down but I can't possibly remember the details.

On Wednesday I went to the Museum of Science and Industry to repair the catapults at the Da Vinci exhibit. It was pretty fun. They're a little more complex than a real trebuchet, because the public has to be able to use them again and again. Oish I'm glad I'm not the lead on that project because the prospect of making seige machinery that doesn't kill anybody seems like something I'd fail. Then again my metalworking skills are growing by leaps and bounds, learning every day. I realized that I hadn't applied for a job in two years- people call me instead. It's a good place to be. I've worked at the museum twice now, it's good to build a relationship with them.

On Thursday I helped a guy move his 1800-s era printing press. And desk after desk full of letters. He found out I used to work on Fiery and flipped out, begged me to come work for him, wants me to apprentice as a typesetter. I must admit that the idea of wearing a visor and sleeve garters while I set type is alluring, but still, I know there's some printing student somewhere who would give their left eye to be able to work on this machine and do old-fashionedy typesetting. If you know that person have them email me. The guy is desperate because who cares about that old stuff anymore? At any rate my destiny is Steam Locomotive Mechanic, and the same thing happened when I went to that locomotive barn- the old guys were like "you CARE about this stuff AND you are a metalworker?!?!?!?! Get to work!" and they put me right to work. So now my plan is to head out to Union on the weekends to help with the steam engines. They have a process whereby you can become an assistant fireman, a fireman, assistant engineer, then engineer. When I'm old, I feel that steam restorers will be in high demand because everybody who does it now is over 60.

Thursday night I found out that my buddy is buying the clock tower slash water tower at Damen and Pershing. I am SO going to live there.

Redmoon asked for all of my time, but they pay less than the other metalworking I do, so I'm torn. Redmoon is always more fun- this time it's pedal-powered cranes they want. Meanwhile this corporation is bringing me out west to handle their bicycle problem. I'm learning a lot about international shipping and material handling. Meanwhile this guy wants me to be an apprentice typesetter. I'm going to help him out with his monthly big push because it pays very well. Meanwhile I don't have any time to go down to the blacksmith's shop these days, which is too bad. I should start taking a day off work to do that. I'm realizing that money lets you do bigger things. If I can preserve my simple lifestyle while increasing my income I'll have lots of money to play around with. Oish I'll have to pay taxes this year, that's not an appealing prospect. When you work don't think about how the first hour of each work day will go to taxes which will go to the military. That's a depressing thought.

Went to the Pirates of the Kornfield. It was a drunken blast as you can imagine. Folks came from Champaign, Missouri, and Arkansas. The first night we actually pulled van seats out into the front yard of a trailer in a trailer court and drank Old Milwaukee. Some guys from the court brought their storebought choppers by and we went for a ride down to the rail depot. There was a sweet rail go-kart there, I wish I could have ridden it. I loved getting back to the trailer court, reminds me of good times from my childhood.

We actually made the race at 7 AM (because folks were just still up drinking) but three blocks in we were distracted by an awesome dumpster. So we didn't make the sixty miles, shucky darn. Saturday night was all about the bonfire and the grillout and the skinny dipping. Amazingly some bikes got jumped off the pier into the water, never saw that coming. Jared let me ride his motorcycle, it's a 900cc which is too big and too fast, but all of my muscle memory came back and I could ride it just like that. Why oh why did I ever sell mine? I must obtain another. It was wayyyyy too fun. I'll wait until the winter when nobody wants to buy one. Then I can fix it up all winter and next summer I'll be good to go. My electric motorcycle project will still continue, because that's something that can be snuck onto bike paths. But man I saw a rat chopper motorcycle that changed my life. Before I'd only seen cherry fancy storebought choppers (booooring) and ratty ass crap choppers (cool). But this was the sweetest, cherryest, most postapocalyptic rat chopper I'd ever seen. He used a wrench for the shifter lever and every bolt was a spike. It was the combination of simple means with handsome results that really stunned me. Once I get my steamcycle going I'll have to remember what I learned. Watch out, Crabfu, I'm comin' for ya!
posted by Johnny on 18.7.06 |

Puma and Adidas have been fighting to get their corporate claws into the mutant bike scene. Adidas approached Zoobomb and was turned down (they got an agent instead, a troubling if fiscally wise act), but Puma has approached the whole thing more obliquely.

First they released "Fixed Gear 101", a booklet featuring tattooed messengers demonstrating how you too can walk your $1500 fixie from the coffee shop to the bar. Obviously the fixie scene is far larger, prevalent, and wealthy than the bike club scene, so it was coolhunted first. This booklet was written by Vice and distributed in the magazine. You can find it online but I'm not going to link to it.

Cheryl Mann's documentary Bike Gangs of New York was also produced by Puma. It features CHUNK and BLBC NY as well as a bmx kids gang, a puerto rican cruiser gang where the leader is the grandma, and a hipster glam girl gang. There was also a glossy coffee table book that was then given a spread in Juxtapoz.

Here's how a marketing magazine (as part of their "Understanding Youth 2006" conference) described it:

Perhaps Fletcher's greatest coup in terms of winning over a difficult audience was her ability to round up Toronto-area bike couriers, leveraging a global Puma initiative to engage couriers by producing the mini-doc The Bike Gangs of New York. "They're very anti-establishment. The key to our success was that we didn't try to talk their language, we didn't try to 'dirty ourselves up,'" Fletcher says. "We just said: 'We're Puma, we respect what you do'...we didn't try to over-promise anything." She and her team did some digging to find out favoured courier haunts, and invited them to a Toronto screening of the doc, where they received free Puma gear. Over 250 couriers showed up. "Bike couriers really personify the essence of the Puma brand - they're the ultimate urban athletes.

Their next project is a "Guide to Urban Cyclng". It features a few different cities, and Chicago is one. Vice called to ask Rat Patrol to be in it.

Now, Vice is absolutely horrible. They chose that for brevity over "new young republican's guide to making fun of chinks, niggers, fags, and retards". This new, soulless, rightist, rich whitebread point of view that you know everybody involved with hates all their friends and their friends hate them. The Vice target market is the new compassionless conservative- every richie prep Heather from high school who went through an alternative phase in college but soon found that they could be the popular kids again with just an ironic mustache and cocaine bought with daddy's money. There was no way I would wipe with this magazine, much less appear in it.

I asked if they'd read the recent village voice article (which also declined to participate in). They said they had. I said "Vice and Puma represent things that we exist to fight. Brooklyn Industries should serve as an example of what happens to a company that tries to exploit our life. Please deliver a message to the executives at Vice and Puma that they may kiss my ass."

I knew that in spurning Vice that they would try and make me pay for it, after all, I was totally friends with that one girl in 8th grade but next year her bangs were higher and she and her friends made fun of me. I know how the cool kids work.

This issue comes with the "Vice Guide To Chicago" which is basically a mini-magazine of them focusing their Onion-wannabe wit on our town. Most of the disses seem to be based around the fact that we aren't paying attention to what is hip in New York (including them), so it comes across like we're in the car having a great conversation about friendship but there's a bum at the intersection who offers spiteful commentary rather than a window wash and he keeps knocking on the window as if the reason we're ignoring him is that we can't hear.

On the Gold Star:

This place used to be all right till it got invaded by Chicago bike weirdos. Does every city have these? Manic Panic'd gutter kids who love disgusting canned beer and build those retarded "Why be normal?" junk bikes on which to spread stupidity across the city? It's like Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome, but they're all "fighting" George Bush instead of Tina Turner.



On the Handlebar:

Brunch's secret weapon. Never a line. Average eats, but enough to get you back on your feet and back to making mistakes. Warning: May contain trace elements of bike weirdo.

They obviously got a mid-level hipster to write this stuff, but they totally didn't know who Liz Armstrong (minus 2000 hipster points) was and so they just come across like they went to all the places that Real World Chicago hung out at. The weird thing is that Gold Star is a messenger bar, maybe you'll see a chopper there once a month but it's hardly "invaded". I think the problem is that we "bike weirdos" don't go to bars or restaurants (we drink on railroad trestles) so they had to lump us in with the Campy-hat crowd in order to work in a zing, which the Presta-valve types probably resent as much as us. But come on, ripping on us because we're anti-Bush is like accusing us of being against a punch in the neck, these days. And we're "stupid". The least they could have done was mock us for working with ghetto kids or our overseas charity work in Africa.
posted by Johnny on 24.6.06 |

Dear Diary,

I went to Joanna's art show at the South Union Arts Center. It's in a rundown church. It was nice, the people were all very art-hipster but they were kind to me. Lots of screened posters and Joanna's photography is very powerful. One little fat kid was holding up one of his raps about how much his dad sucked and how Eminem is a better father figure to him. Her photography is always about the Polish and Mexican communities outside of the Chicago mainstream, which is really the real population of this city along with black folk. Sure, it's Chads out to Ashland, Hipsters out to Kedzie, but from there on out its Polish and Mexican folks, that's the real Chicago.

Friday night there was a prom, and I wanted to go because Eric Lab Rat was being strict about the dress code and nobody ever has dressup parties and actually holds people to it. But everyone there was dressed to the tee. Misha and McD have been flirt-fighting for WEEKS and I wish they would just DO IT and stop being so Saved By The Bell but anyway she dragged him moaning and groaning there, he put on his zoot suit, he was so classy. I found myself wondering why we just didn't dress like that all the time.

I didn't have a date and it turns out Iris didn't either, I shoulda asked her to be my date. She had a dress that showed off her decollatage (not her boobs), and women just don't know how to rock the decollatage these days. I wanted to slow dance (to make up for the fact that in my actual school days I was too shy to ask anyone) but the DJ just played oom-chicka-oom music. Oh well.

There was a big punch bowl and everybody was pouring stuff in it (even sake) so I couldn't have any. The Rat Patrol was rollin DEEP that night. Apparently we left before the guy started waving his gun around. That's good.

I left at midnight to go to Exit with Chryssy and Rae. Chryssy's been sad lately because the boy she was after left her for a young dumb suicide girl. Sheesh, they're becoming like the modern-day blonde-cheerleaders. It's owned by Playboy, you know. I guess the guy was really smitten with Chryssy but this other girl was a suicide girl so oh well. That Chryssy's such an amazing woman, she deserves a good man. But every guy she finds has SOME issue that keeps her from being happy.

That club was weird. It was like the horrifying vision of what would be if you took everything about our life and commodified it into a place where you could go and folks would be wearing, say, store-bought jewelry chains instead of actual old chains, fancy vintage retro tattoos instead of actual tattoos, $40 Alley replica work shirts instead of actual mechanic's shirts. The only motorcycle out front was a BMW. The dance floor was full of hot rocker babes and loser dweebs in black metal shirts. I got no problem with you being a greasy-haired hesher dude, that's fine, but I'm sorry guy once you start wearing a pony-tail you're no longer metal. Everytime I go out with Chryssy I'm struck by how much Industrial culture allows weiners a framework in which they could be cool. I just wish they'd celebrate their nerdiness rather than trying to pose like a baddass or give up and just wear jeans and a ponytail. Jeans, ponytail, and a black Misfits T-shirt does not a psychobilly make.
posted by Johnny on 21.5.06 |

Something got me thinking about global average income. So I looked it up. According to Global Rich List, it's around $5000/year. That surprised me, actually, I thought it would be lower. But this means:

• Globviously, for every person who makes more than $5k a year, there is someone who makes less.



• If the average salary in America is $36k. That's hugely skewed upwards by The L Curve. So basically there are many people in the U.S. who are living at third-world levels of poverty. Shame on us. And we're talking income, not wealth.
  
  
• If you make more than $5k a year, you are getting more than your fair share. Every I-pod and SUV is bathed in the blood of those who were killed and exploited to maintain systems of slavery and economic rape in the developing world in order to support the consumerist bubble that is the pre-collapse U.S. economy we're in. Why is this admired in our society? Seems like the more a person steals from his neighbors, the more he should be shunned. Ah, but if you make sure to steal from people far away, it's admirable?
  
  
• On a side note, I have come to believe that the maximum size of a fair community is around 1000 members. Beyond that you can't personally know the person you're stealing from. I've heard stories from kibbutz residents about hoarding in a commune, even when it wasn't neccessary. I feel like there is an innate human instinct that says "protect and hoard for the WE, hate and steal from the THEY". This would explain the duality of loving/hating that exists in every human being and you can see its effects everywhere from sports fans to churchgoers. Thus I'd say my political orientation is in favor of autonomous communities smaller than 1000 that exist as units within a free-trade system. Globviously something would have to be in place to prevent cheating and war.
  
  
• Is it easier or harder to be poor in a richer country? Well, I mean, in this country, the only first world nation without nationalized health care etc. I don't know the answer because the benefits of this country can be subtle. When I lived in Ghana there was certainly much less opportunity for economic mobility. But it was easier to get food and tedious work. Here in America there's less personal freedom and lots of systems in place that basically make it expensive just to be here. A small example would be: In order to fish for dinner I would need a fishing license. In Chicago it's actually illegal (but rarely enforced) to reuse or recycle waste food from the dumpster. What this means is that there are laws that say this food MUST be wasted by law. Isn't that odd?
  
  
• For a few years I have been working full-time, without pay, on charitable activities of various sorts but centering around getting bicycles out of the waste stream and into the hands of folks who need them. I throw myself into this with a passion; it is my life. I could live on $400/month. Why is it so hard to make a living doing this? There's always grant money but that system is distasteful to me, at any rate, people within the system don't like the look of me and discriminate against me daily (I'm not whining, it's not nearly what a black person endures). I'm used to it, I choose to look this way. But what I *don't* choose is to be unable to work within the system. I just can't. It's not made for or by people like me. I tried. I look at people my age with jobs and homes with envy, not with spite. I wish I could be a buckle-downer. I can't.



• Whatever happened to the patron system? Seems like SOME eccentric millionaire would be willing to drop $400 a month to put, say, a couple of bikes a day into the hands of poor kids. People pay that much for pet accupuncture.



• On a related note, every time someone gets arrested at a protest there's a scramble for food for the jail support and all of us are digging around for a few dumpster bagels (and later, for clothes for court). Seems like there would be a lot of bo-bos who wouldn't neccessarily be out there getting arrested but who would be willing to clean out their pantries for (as in last night's case) a Logan Square local arrested for protesting a Nazi demonstration. Maybe there needs to be a connection made.



• There are 5,174,540,750 people poorer than me.

posted by Johnny on 5.5.06 |

Rat Patrol article in the May/June issue of Punk Planet. Mom, are you buying all of these? Somebody has to lay the foundation for the Johnny Payphone Presidential Library.

When I was a teenager I wrote Bronson Pinchot (Perfect Stranger's 'Balki') and found that his mother handles all his press and fan mail. I wonder if I could convince my mom to be my agent.
posted by Johnny on 3.5.06 |

I'm sooo broke right now but I feel like the richest person on earth. Opportunity is all around me.

Redmoon's two planned river events fell through, which is disappointing. Still, I hope to get on the build team starting in May for their next show.

I visited the Experimental Station, a building that once housed the Blackstone Bicycle Works and was the inspiration for my own kid's bike club. It burned down 5 years ago but they rebuilt it (despite extreme pressure to sell to developers) and best of all they built it with re-used materials, like old beams from barns and stuff. It's beautiful. They do Community Supported Agriculture (where a bunch of city folks get together and support a farmer for a year in exchange for seasonal produce), a bread co-op, and more including the kids program.


My anonymous benefactor has given the go-ahead to start planning for receiving 500 bikes and funds to ship them. This will involve some travel out west (which is exciting in itself) but more importantly will get another shipment to the Ghana project. I'd like to return but am conflicted, another Rat deserves to go too.

Work at the Foundry has cooled since I am forbidden to do ironworking. However a new blacksmith came in and I am learning a lot. Blacksmithing really appeals to me, I think it's the fact that it's physical and undelicate.

Now if I could only figure out a way to pay rent with all this work...
posted by Johnny on 28.4.06 |

The most impressive act of human hubris visible from the top of the Sky Factory is the Shipping & Sanitary canal. What a piece of art. You can see how it works: A 28-mile-long ditch on the surface of a sphere changes the drainage of 44000 square miles. Frankly I'm surprised it hasn't happened naturally. We never really think about the fact that we're sitting on top of a continental ridge, and if the Grand Calumet hadn't flooded and diverted in 1804 then Chicago would be just the second-shortest portage from the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Mississippi and would probably be no bigger than Green Bay WI today (where you can enter the Fox and then portage from the Lower Fox to the Wisconsin River).

The day they opened that channel the river flowed blue, the only time in history. "Look at the river, it's as blue as the sky!" someone said. It must have been great to flush all our poo to St. Louis until we got sued by the other cities that sit on Lake Michigan for stealing their shoreline. Now we can only drain as much as the U.S. Supreme Court lets us.

Chicago is actually a hotbed of hydrological engineering. There's the I&M canal, the reversing of Stoney Creek, the Calumet Feeder Canal, the Cal-Sag channel, the reversing of the Little Calumet, not to mention the Deep Tunnel. And yet not an island in sight. Oh, there's Goose Island, that election-bid gimmick made by the first mayor; there's the intake cribs that are guarded by the Coast Guard. But what we sorely lack is a place that can only be reached by boat.

..and so we content ourselves with places on the mainland that can only be reached by boat. Some places on the river (like in slips) are incredibly quiet and natural- you look around, you see herons and trees, you don't see buildings. It's like a secret park. I find myself drawn to rail corridors and the river, because there lie the places that cannot be easily reached. Once you train yourself to look for the right convergence of street and impassable geographic feature, you find these places all over the place. Sure, they attract coyotes, but that's not too much of a problem. I'd like to spend this summer exploring the north branch up to where it goes back into the lake, and then turn my attention to the south side. Now I just need to perfect my amphibious bikeboat...
posted by Johnny on 13.4.06 |

Whattaya know? I was mentioned in the current issue of Dirt Rag Mag, too.
posted by Johnny on 8.4.06 |

I declined to interview for this article:

Hipsters: If you try and sell the tallbike image you will get acid thrown on you.

...and, by my silence, seem to have sidestepped a heated controversy amongst those who were mentioned. They are all my friends, I know everyone mentioned personally except I haven't met Darko face-to-face and who gives a crap about the bloggers.

Meanwhile Dirt Rag Magazine mentioned me in their review of B.I.K.E..
posted by Johnny on 25.3.06 |

Yesterday I was the unwitting subject of a Fark.com photoshop contest. Check it out.






posted by Johnny on 26.2.06 |

Through a fortuitous coincidence, I've met a guy at the Butler Street Foundry who wants more creativity involved with his shop. We've worked out a bartering arrangement- he's teaching me about blacksmithing and in exchange I help him with special projects (a public access show is in the works, and I've restored some of his old furniture, stuff like that). Sorta like an "artist in residence" except I don't reside. He loves the wacky bikes me and Marty make.

Butler Street is an historic Chicago institution. Check out some pictures:






posted by Johnny on 25.2.06 |

posted by Johnny on 19.2.06 |

Traveled to Chopper Mecca (Portland). Went on a Chunk ride and marveled at the legendary bikes rotting in Megulon's yard, rode Sproing. Zoobombed on the death pixie and had the crap scared out of me, rode down a 4-lane highway down the mountain with no brakes. Crawled through lava tunnels at the base of a volcano with my brother and my sweetie. Lived in a treehouse. Visited the Brooklyn Roundhouse and cried when I saw Engine #4449. The crazy old machinists let me sit in the engineer's chair and pull levers for them while they tracked down a steam leak. Met old friends for the first time at the Clownhouse. Goofed around on a submarine and in giant kegs of unknown purpose. Love Portland. Would move there but I can't stand lefties.

Eventually I'll have some pictures from there and from New Orleans.
posted by Johnny on 6.2.06 |

I'm on the Gulf Coast cleaning up after Katrina. My grandparents didn't get hit as bad by Katrina as they did by Ivan. Ivan was just as bad as Katrina, of course, but the levee break made it so much worse for New Orleans. Ivan was the one that made them evaluate the levees and conclude "they won't hold". Wanna read something creepy? Check out the October 2004 issue of National Geographic, their article about how New Orleans is going to be underwater the next time a big hurricane hits.

Still, all the attention on New Orleans is little consolation for the folks down here, who have had everything destroyed again after it just got destroyed last year. I'm cutting down branches that have barely healed from when I cut them off higher last year. This town is pretty much wiped off the map. Last time it was debris everywhere, now its the remains of reconstruction projects scattered everywhere. My cousin Frank says that the aftermath of the hurricane, the chaos and lawlessness, was the strangest experience of his life. A tree went through the house next to his and its gone now. For a while there gasoline was really hard to get. A lot of the roads are open again but I'm still having trouble getting to New Orleans. The City of New Orleans is running but not the Sunset Limited from Mobile.

Tragedies can be measured by the number of people they affect, but for any given victim the disaster is the same. It's so frustrating that our culture is one of rushing to aid anybody who is held up by the media as a poor poor victim, but when it comes to legislation to help some unseen sufferer (things like welfare, health care, rehab) we don't want to lift a finger or raise those taxes a cent.

Biloxi is gone. Wiped off the map. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. On the bus was someone who knew the town better, and they'd say "there's where so-and-so casino used to be" and then we'd drive a mile and they'd say "and there's where it is now, on the other side of the road". In Gulf Shores the destruction was kinda here and there, we'd say "the storm got Fat Tuesday's but not the Pink Pony". In Biloxi there were just foundations and debris.

A few families had pulled campers onto their old land. One of them, defiant, living in a post-distaster wasteland with no law and no utilities, was flying the skull and crossbones.

New Orleans
What can I say? Plenty of pictures show the destruction but they can't convey the emptiness, the quiet. I ride through neighborhood after neighborhood and encounter only contractors and MP in Humvees. The occasional family cleaning out their house in somber silence. Everyone says hello, happy to see another human being. My host was overjoyed today because she saw some kids riding bikes.

Each house has a waterline on it. One of the worst parts about a flood I remember from losing my stuff to one is that everything you owned is still there, it's just ruined. So you have to haul it all out and you're reminded of each and every thing that you lost.

Everything is covered in toxic mud. Spraypaint on each house lists the number of dead. "Three dead dogs chained to logs in backyard, one angry cat". I rode through a field and was hit by the thick smell of something large and long-dead. I couldn't stick around to see what it was.

The worst part is that we did this. We built in low-lying areas, we created the atmospheric conditions that cause the storms, we elected the administration that turns a blind eye to the disaster and diverts the resources to the war. On the bus over here I heard someone say "I can't believe George Bush is trying to make Iraq look like this, when he could be spending that money cleaning up this town".
posted by Johnny on 2.1.06 |

I'm on the Gulf Coast cleaning up after Katrina. My grandparents didn't get hit as bad by Katrina as they did by Ivan. Ivan was just as bad as Katrina, of course, but the levee break made it so much worse for New Orleans. Ivan was the one that made them evaluate the levees and conclude "they won't hold". Wanna read something creepy? Check out the October 2004 issue of National Geographic, their article about how New Orleans is going to be underwater the next time a big hurricane hits.

Still, all the attention on New Orleans is little consolation for the folks down here, who have had everything destroyed again after it just got destroyed last year. I'm cutting down branches that have barely healed from when I cut them off higher last year. This town is pretty much wiped off the map. Last time it was debris everywhere, now its the remains of reconstruction projects scattered everywhere. My cousin Frank says that the aftermath of the hurricane, the chaos and lawlessness, was the strangest experience of his life. A tree went through the house next to his and its gone now. For a while there gasoline was really hard to get. A lot of the roads are open again but I'm still having trouble getting to New Orleans. The City of New Orleans is running but not the Sunset Limited from Mobile.

Tragedies can be measured by the number of people they affect, but for any given victim the disaster is the same. It's so frustrating that our culture is one of rushing to aid anybody who is held up by the media as a poor poor victim, but when it comes to legislation to help some unseen sufferer (things like welfare, health care, rehab) we don't want to lift a finger or raise those taxes a cent.
posted by Johnny on 30.12.05 |

Took an extended trip to the northeast. The trip out was all Amish and Juggalos and made me yearn to stop in every town and explore the abandoned warehouses. Boston's roads are really rough and I fell off my rattyfarthing a lot. Was proud to see that Porno Squad is developing quite a distinct building style. Went on a SCUL ride, what a blast! Experienced the usual feelings of "this bike club is awesome, glad it's not mine". I got a "Pigpen Is My Copilot" patch, turns out her overdose was an accident, feeling very mad at heroin these days.

Made it to NYC despite my bike being held back for 12 hours. Luckily they had a spare and we rode from Penn Station to Brooklyn, feeling like The Warriors.

The Black Label scavenger hunt included lots of points for stupid tattoos, and then they never did tally up the points. Whoops! One of the stops was the Empty Vessel, an ole boat somebody is fixing up as a multi-use space. One of the teams managed to find snow and pelt us with snowballs.

They say L.B. is dead but others say its a rumor. How can you tell if a traveler turns up missing?

The bike kill was out of control.

Doing a lot of thinking about being a grownup and getting involved in more permanent projects. The stuff we saw in NYC was amazing and the result of a lot of hard work. I'm also figuring out that the role of the adult amidst crazy young punks is often to suffer foolishness silently and try and provide an example. In the past I've always lashed out. Yet when I watch the way that people who have it more together than I tolerate me, I realize sometimes you just have to let idjits be idjits.
posted by Johnny on 6.11.05 |

Time Out Chicago did a piece about the various bike clubs in Chicago. Click on the pictures for big scans of the pages on the Rat Patrol and the Human Television Network.
posted by Johnny on 13.10.05 |

I went to this vintage video game exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry. It was like mecca... I got to play Space Wars (on a Vectrex, no less...) They had one of each home console ever released, set up to play, so I got to play the japanese precursor to the NES with STREET FIGHTER ONE! Remember wondering why you only saw II? They had a dig-dug cabinet just like mine but it was PRISTINE...

They had old-school games like Adventure all the way up to modern stuff. It was all kids under 12 except me and this old dude with a ponytail and he was playing asteroids and I was playing missle command and we just looked at each other like "yeeeeahhhhhh". You know those kids were cleaning up on Dance Dance Revolution but I went over to the Atari section and I was fuckin' SCHOOLIN those kids at games like "Freeway"... I was all "OH YEAH BITCH! YOU THINK YOU'RE HOT WITH YER PLAYBOX AND YER X-STATION BUT IT'S 1983 NOW, MUTHAFUCKAAAAAAAAA!"
posted by Johnny on 2.10.05 |

Here's "Settin' a Tramp On Fire", written by J. Payphone and M. 23 and performed by J. Payphone and A. Schorsch IV, with A. Schorsch IV on the banjo.

Settin' A Tramp On Firef
posted by Johnny on 29.8.05 |

I was standing on the sidewalk at Clark & Belmont when I was "discovered" by these ad types doing a spec shoot for Cheer Dark. They asked me to pose for some photographs- 50's style with the bottle- and gave me $60 for my troubles. Hilarious! Cheer Dark is for goths and punks, keeps your blacks as black as your soul. A great bit of co-option because even countercultures do chores- it's kinda sweet. It's only a spec shoot, to pitch to Cheer, but I could end up on a billboard. That would be rich!

Also standing on the corner (this time at North and Damen) some kids came up to me and asked if they could take my picture. No problem, happens all the time. But afterwards we were talking and they were asking where I lived and suddenly they're like "wait a second... you're NOT the lead singer for The Used?"

Went down to Pilsen for the fourth, and so many fireworks were being set off that the streets were ankle-deep with red paper. Somebody bought some marshmallows for our ears. Then we went inside and checked out this woman's personal zoo, with bats and raccoons and squirrel-monkeys and parrots and some kind of large carnivorous bird. Got to spend a lot of time playing with a serval, what a beautiful animal (and huge!) Then we retired to the abandoned convent and checked out the hearse and vintage firetrucks and ate some raspberries from the secret garden and schemed to convert one of the fire trucks to an ice-cream truck.
posted by Johnny on 10.7.05 |

I'm getting pretty sick of being harrassed by the cops. More specifically, I'm sick of kissing ass and pretending to be scared just so I can avoid getting beaten for harmless and legal activities. They come down on us about three or four times a week, and it's always for that modern day crime: enjoying oneself for free. We've been harrassed for playing banjo and singing "this land is your land" on the streetcorner ("this ain't no concert hall"), for dancing in a public park (resulting in an open container ticket given to a Rat who was picking up other people's garbage, including beer cans), and in rich neighborhoods the whiteys are just terrified of everything so they call the cops on us and make up stories about us breaking windows or whatever. It's always the same: They lecture us, we act respectful, they let us go. It just wears me down, all this ass-kissing and apologizing for doing what? Being on the street. And here I'm spending all my free time with neighborhood kids and trying to make my community a better place, I'm no hood or criminal, I'm riding with anti-gang groups and being a model citizen who just happens to look different.

Today a cruiser swerved over into the bike lane, almost crushing me. When I yelled "bike lane! bike lane!" he pulled me over. I said, "You almost crushed me!" and he threatened, "now I have a chance to do it again." Then he yelled at me for a while about how cops can break the law anytime they want, they don't have to run the lights.

Some guy drove by and yelled, "Let 'im ride, man!" and that must have reminded him that he was being watched, because he let me go. Same thing happened when a cop ran a red light and almost creamed Al (another Rat), the cop yelled for a while but in the end he was wrong. But when they almost ran over Aurora (yet another Rat), she spat on the cruiser and they beat the shit out of her. It was an undercover car, she just thought it was some maniac trying to kill her. Even with this incident today, I was just responding as I do to any drunken maniac asshole driver who can't stay in their lane... I didn't realize at first they were cops.

Man, there's a dangerous gang in town, and they wear blue.@
posted by Johnny on 1.7.05 |

Got a girlfriend and she's the bomb.

Rode on the St. Chino's run; 150 tallbikers and a few choppers riding the 35-mile trip from Minneapolis to the banks of the St. Croix to camp out for the weekend.

Built a drumkit bike to add a full drum set to a marching band.

Been working like crazy on the lagoon-set spectacle at work, building lots of floating churches etc.

Met up at the scrapyard with a guy who ships medical equipment to Cuba. He's looking for a bike-ambulance builder, I was riding my sidecar bike. Alliance formed.

Explored a warehouse guarded by two roosters and they kicked the shit out of me.

Friend died of an overdose. Cried. Sewed in her honor..
posted by Johnny on 28.6.05 |

I went on the World Naked Bike Ride. I didn't really want to (bicycles and nudity is just a weird combination) but I felt obligated out of political responsibility. Plus, after being naked in a paper with a circulation of 250,000 I felt I'd lost my trump card anyway.

I reckon there were about 350 nekkid people there. The creepy-old-dude factor was pretty low, but you could tell there were some nudist types who were like "sure I'll ride a bike if I can be nekkid" rather than the other way around. At the start a woman was nursing her baby in the park, and I thought it was a great symbol of why we were doing it. The fact that it's illegal to be yourself, to show your body, is outrageous.

The cops cracked down, tried to net us in, grabbed everyone they could. It made me so mad, to think of all the harmful things that are legal (like driving an SUV to perpetuate oil addiction and therefore war, building a corporate box store to run all the local shops out of business, or even selling shitty burgers and breeding a nation of obese sick people) and here the cops are kicking the shit out of naked old men and naked young women... like this is a threat. It was after 9pm, we were riding through all the bar districts, and this was a non-sexual ride... not a single person in the community disapproved. Everybody loved it. Even most cops! They were taking pictures! But that one precinct just decided that hundreds of nekkid people is a dangerous thing, and violence must be employed. What a sick, fucked-up world.
posted by Johnny on 12.6.05 |

I biked the length of Lake Shore Drive. Rode my triple-high tallbike downtown at 5 AM and then joined 20,000 other cyclists in a ride down to the Museum at 57th, then up to Evanston, then back downtown. It was beautiful. Quiet, clean, and fun... I wish it could be that way all the way.

If you tried to put an 8-lane highway through central park, you'd get laughed out of town. Yet they pulled it off on our park. And traffic is still shitty. Take it away, traffic will still be shitty. This is the trap that city planners fall into, from Chicago down to my little Ohio hometown... traffic problems will expand to meet capacity, so the only way to reduce them is to make it WORSE to drive (so people are forced to consider other options).

Every fourth street in Chicago is extra-wide, because the city planners thought noone should have to walk more than two blocks to catch a trolley. Then GM bought up the trolley lines and replaced them with busses. Now the CTA is shutting down, basically boning the poor.

---

In other news, the cops have done their "spring sweep", arresting gang leaders and leaving the jobs open for whoever fights their way into it. This also has a tendency to destabilize borders. Automatic weaponfire in my neighborhood every night. We creep home through the alleys (out of line-of-sight) and keep each other informed when the war's popped off. It's only four blocks to Western and then you're safe, you're in yuppieland. Fallujah, West Town, it's all the same... a world where the rich keep the poor in grinding poverty and that desperation begets violence. Every time you shop at Wal-mart, that's another machine gun blast outside my window.
posted by Johnny on 30.5.05 |

On Sunday I woke up and worked on Pinky for a while then went to a shoot for Time Out Chicago. They were nice and accommodating, willing to photograph us in the alley eating garbage and drinking whiskey. Then we rode back and visited the Virgin Mary of the Underpass and there were like 150 people there, we watched a Christian-fight break out when some guy suggested folks should be worshipping Jesus insead of stains in underpasses. Then we got some more whiskey and went to the Trashcastle. I went in the house there and found 200 keys and a bunch of video tapes about castles and two mexican guys who were squatting there. Then we went to the Fred Burkhart Underground, in its last week of existence.
posted by Johnny on 30.4.05 |

I'm a hundredaire!

I found $180 twice this week.

The first time was when I was flipping through my neighbor's bookshelf, and there on page 127 was a bookmark improvised from his girlfriend's paycheck, dated 10/29/05. It was still good. Found money!

The second was from cracking a payphone. I got it out of an old bar. It had sat dead on the wall so long that it was chock full, from years of drunks going up to it and inserting a quarter before they realized that the phone was so dead it couldn't even return change.

We got it off the wall by putting a railroad spike behind it and pounding it with a sledgehammer.

After that it took me about 2 months to get in. Probably 6-8 hours of work overall, but that's only because of the peculiarities of this particular payphone...

You see, payphones have a lock on the front, but that's really a decoy. Picking it or drilling it will get you nowhere. The real lock is on the side, there's a little t-bar that goes in and turns a knob and that unlocks the six huge flanges that keep the front of the phone locked on- and basically make the payphone sledgehammer-proof.

So I fashioned a little t-bar and turned the knob, then drilled out the lock and got the top section off. But as for the coin box, someone had tried to break in with a crowbar and had bent the shit out of the flanges. So the t-bar wouldn't turn (and of course the idiots were unsuccessful, as they were pounding away at the dummy lock).

After grinding out the area around the t-bar knob, I was able to find a chisel that fit right in there. But when I turned it with a wrench, it would slide up and out of the groove. Thus I needed some way to apply downward pressure to something that spins.

I asked Gareth, a master of sneakery, what to do, and he came up with this solution: Drill a hole in a board to seat the chisel. Clamp down with two c-clamps. Then turn the chisel with a wrench.

As we were trying to set this up, the payphone fell on the floor, and $180 in quarters spilled out. The little slide that put the quarters in the box had come off and out the money came.

The final total was $181.08. I'm trying to figure out some way to spread this wealth with those who lived in said abandoned bar, unaware that there was almost $200 hanging on their wall. The best I can come up with is a novelty giant bottle of whiskey, seeing as I don't know where to get any absinthe. I want to have one of those parties where you all take a drink/drug/wear leis/etc etc. Any suggestions on how to blow about $50-75 (I need to pay rent too) on some ridiculous waste for a party??
posted by Johnny on 21.4.05 |

Many things happened on St. Ratrick's Day 2005! Click on each event to see pictures and a story!

Parade

in which beer was guzzled from the Shrine of the Unknown Catholic Schoolgirl and a bonfire was rolled down 18th street

Rat Ride

in which C.H.V.N.K. 666 was treated to the sight of the Rat Patrol guzzling syrup from the trash

Build Days

in which two lovely young ladies caught fire and several pixies were readied for execution

Death Derby

in which a dragon, a cyborg, and a superhero entered a fountain from which only one returned

TV Smash

in which several televisions were made to pay for their crimes
posted by Johnny on 4.4.05 |

Here's an advance pic of the Death Derby: Three superheroes on pixies enter the ring and the last one who can ride their bikes wins. Cap'n Stay-n-School beat El Poncho Dragono and Sauce 612 to retain his brass belt buckle.


posted by Johnny on 25.3.05 |

X-man and I are best buds. Even though he's dyslexic, alcoholic, and homeless, he manages to put out a great public-access cable show of his exploits, which often include exploits with yours truly. He loves to point the camera at me because I'll spout propaganda at the drop of a hat... or yell incoherently, depending on my sobriety. And I don't see X-man when I'm sober very often.

Here's some pictures from a recent party. It was going well- X-man and I didn't seem to mind that we were the only ones left besides a yawning host couple- but X-man had cooked up some homemade hooch and gone on a 3-day bender. Problem was, he drank the rotten fruit and the sediment and got real sick. Here I am trying to get him off the floor.







posted by Johnny on 9.3.05 |

Acquired a payphone.
Got an 80-year-old dude on a chopper.
Started working at a puppet theater.

The parakeets are spreading along the boulevard system.
posted by Johnny on 23.2.05 |

posted by Johnny on 16.2.05 |

JohnnyPayphone@yahoo.com