Nowtopian

Folding Bikes and Falling Phone Booths

Sitting in VoxPop in Brooklyn, listening to interesting live sound collage of Nader and Seth, friends of Francesca’s from Montreal, sound loops of weird old politician speeches with live guitar and emotional voice-overs… quite quirky and fun… Did my reading earlier to an enthusiastic crowd here, around 20 people in this small space, like many of my venues, but good comments and questions make it SO worthwhile!…. anyway, the tour goes on, having found a tone and style that seems to be leaving something hopeful and encouraging behind as I go on from place to place… still Bluestockings ahead here in NYC before New England and Italy…

During this period in NY it’s Bike Month (now embraced by the city to the chagrin of some local cyclists) which is a direct descendant of BikeSummer, invented in SF in 1999 and a fun month-long festival of bicycling that migrated around to many cities. Not sure if anyone is taking it up this year or if perhaps it has died out. Here in NY though there is a full month of rides and fun. One I caught, serendipitously, was the FoldUp! ride (taking its name from Times Up! and the theme, folding bikes). As usual, social rides like these are just hugely fun. Oddly we had to go single file for long stretches, even though the ride had grown to 105 bikes, bigger than any of the last four years. We went down the West Side Parkway all the way to Battery Park, then looped back to go over the Brooklyn Bridge and right back on the Manhattan Bridge. So it was a lovely day, I had some interesting conversations with an urban planner who commutes in from 92nd to the foot of Manhattan every day, a few recreational riders, a Brazilian, the ride leader, and some other Times Up! pals that I’ve known now for a few years.

At the end of the ride at East 23rd St. Stuyvesant Cove park, we gathered to see demos of folding and unfolding different brands, while all the Bromptons quickly assembled themselves into this funny row:

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Hurtling around NY

Having a lovely time in New York, as always. I really love this city! I brought my folding bike (and guess what? They’re having a Folding Bike ride tomorrow at 2 pm leaving from W. 23rd St., a 10 mile jaunt thru Manhattan and Brooklyn) and I’ve been loving how it handles and that I can bomb through traffic with such New York-native ease… I think I’m wired for this kind of urban chaos, and being able to weave through impossible traffic, avoid impediments (esp. pedestrians, who are impressively aggressive here), crazy drivers, etc., barely pausing at red lights (drivers actually expect bikes to run lights in front them and they often pause for you…!) It’s made me think about the ongoing efforts in SF and everywhere to improve conditions for bicycling and of course I still support that… but somewhere in my mischievous core I actually prefer the utter madness of Manhattan and the total freedom to hurtle and roam anywhere and everywhere, all rules and safety considerations be damned (except to not get hit, of course!)… anyhoo, it’s already been a great visit and still almost a week to go.

I rode from Francesca’s front door in Bed-Stuy to Columbia University on Wednesday, took exactly one hour, riding as fast as i could all out the whole way, mostly up the West Side Parkway, but suffering the imbecility of clogged bike lanes on 6th Ave and 8th Ave first (commonly blocked by police cars shopping for lunch or delivery trucks). It’s about 13-15 miles I think. Here I am on arrival at the front of Columbia (and here’s the podcast of my talk there):

On the way back to Brooklyn, I rode through Central Park, which was spectacular, but I’d also had a more leisurely time in the park the day before. Here’s a shot of the amazing spring weather on the Great Meadow:

Naturally I’m visiting friends and some of them are interviewees in Nowtopia, so I’ve gathered some images that fit the tour. Mark Leger is one of my oldest friends and I rode all the way from Columbia back to outer Bushwick in Brooklyn to see him, and have him give me a tour of nearly a dozen community gardens in his near vicinity. Here are a few shots:

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Nowtopia is for Tortoises!

I had a really good visit to Philadelphia and now I’ve landed with my daughter in New York for the next 9 days. At Wooden Shoe Books in Philly yesterday, on a spectacularly nice spring afternoon (I never would have gone indoors to hear someone speak!) a little over 20 people turned up to jam into the small space and hear my rap. I am happy that I’ll have help in keeping track of questions in the next couple of weeks because as much as I love how great the feedback and questions and comments have been, I just cannot remember much of it after it’s over. But it was really gratifying at Wooden Shoe yesterday.

One thing I do remember is another person asking me about how to get from here to there, or how to kind of leap over the gap between the small-ish activities I’m describing and the big changes the Nowtopian analysis implies. Of course I don’t have a convincing answer for that. It actually flies in the face of my sense of history. I spoke to it at each of my stops and I was pondering this a bit on the train ride from Philly today. If I’m anywhere near right that there’s something new cooking at the base of society, and it might someday recognize itself as movement for the emancipation of all of us from the stupidity of economic logic and a life of pointless, self-defeating work, then it’s not something that will happen quickly.

I use the received idea of ‘revolution’ as a foil, since it’s an idea that generally connotes something quick and dramatic, even cataclysmic, in which suddenly life is completely different. I really don’t believe in such a vision, which strikes me as fundamentally religious. I can imagine revolutionary moments where authorities fall for one reason or another, but if we haven’t been on the path for a good length of time, building trusting relationships and solid communities that can self-manage the complexities of daily life in an open and democratic fashion, it’s most likely that some version of how we live now will re-emerge soon after. The Tortoise approach means we accept that we have to take slow, ponderous, deliberate steps more or less all the time, to get where we’re going, which is a radically different life in all its nuance and detail. It takes radical patience, the calling card of the (politicized) Tortoise…

Anyway, here are a few photos of Philadelphia:

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