BikeSketch: Life's a Beach

jueves, 25 de agosto de 2011

Life's a Beach

24.8.11

Paradise at the yoga retreat of June and Libby. After some delays with my storage locker, I finally arrived by bicycle to Stacy's temporary residence, some 50 km south of Tokyo, where she has been living in the guesthouse of her friends June and Libby's yoga retreat. Liby is an Australian-born freckle-faced potter and she lives with her Japanese husband adonis, who is a yoga instructer. The two of them built on their property a yoga studio for June's practice and it is here I've spent the last couple of nights sleeping on a fouton matress. I am awaken early each morning by Stacy, who is also a Yoga instructor, accompanied by June, on their dialy yoga ritual. Instead of yoga, which I have no patience for, I chose instead to meditate on a sketch of their portrait.

My afternoons are spent cycling the twin beach communities of Akiya and Kamakura with Stacey. The city has commissioned artists to design their respective sewage caps. It is my intention to document each one by means of rubbings with conti on ricepaper; this is a prototype.

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What?

BikeSketch is a diary and travelogue from bike tour and combines three passions: biking, drawing, and more recently, writing. It is my hope that others might find my observations, musings and general yarn spinning even mildly amusing and perhaps it will inspire YOU to ride a bike and draw more.

Two Years Too Late: A tour of Southern Louisiana on the 2nd Anniversary of the BP Oil Spill (2012)

Two years after the BP Oil Spill and New Orleans has much returned to "normal". There is so far no sign that demonstrations will occur with the same verve as the preceding year. BP has released an enormous ad campaign proselytizing a Gulf reborn - healed and ready for business! Is it really possible that the biodiverse ecosystem of Southern Louisiana could have already recovered from such a monumental catastrophe? Two Years Too Late is an investigative bike tour of those regions most affected by the BP Oil Spill. I'm joined for this trip by filmmaker Wiley Rogers, with whom this collaborative effort will produce, in addition to the blog, a documentary film.

Our route is as follows: Leaving Downtown New Orleans, via the Canal Street Ferry, we cross the Mississippi River at it's widest and deepest bend; From historic Algiers Point, once an entrepôt of the American slave trade, we follow the West Bank bike path on the River's levy some 28 miles to Luling; Old Spanish Trail takes us to Des Allemands - the German Coast and Catfish capital of Louisiana!; Through the sugar fields of Raceland and into the micro-metropolis of Houma; Enter the bayous of the Houma Indians via Grand Caillou Rd - that strip of road surrounded by water; From Dulac to the "end of the world" Cocodrie; Little Caillou Rd to Montegut; Up and around to Pointe Aux Chenes - a forgotten hamlet and bygone Indian fishing community; Bourg Larose Hwy to Hwy 1/Bayou Rd: Galliano and Golden Meadow, all the way to Grand Isle. With the return to New Orleans, it's roughly 350 miles.

Japan: From Fukushima to Hiroshima (2011)

Before my arrival in Japan, I had little experience with the nuclear debate; but once on the ground, I soon came to find the dialogue so far reaching and in such a state of urgency that a Japanese energy revolution appears imminent. My Bike tour in Japan has manifested into a journalistic investigation of sorts, in which I explore the Japanese experience living with nuclear disaster.

My route is as follows: Starting out of Tokyo, to the iconic Mt. Fuji in Yamanashi prefecture; through the fruit and bread basket of Nakano, to Matsumoto, the childhood home of NY-based artist Yoyoi Kusama; continuing to the small town of Obuse, which was the final work place of Japan's most famous Ukyo-e artist, Hokusai; through the Japanese Alps and making a stop in the hot spring town of Kusatsu of Gunma; to the Ancient temple capital of Nikko of Tochigi; on to Aizuwakamatsu, the historic capital of Fukushima; Yonezawa of Yamagata, that famous beef capital second only to Kobe; Sendai of Miyagi, which is the hub of the volunteer rebuilding effort; and in Fukushima prefecture I made stops in Soma, Minamisoma (Fukushima's ground zero) Iatate (where radioactive plutonium was recently discovered), Fukushima City and Koriyama; From Tokyo I followed for some time the historic route of Japan's most famous itinerant poet, Basho, south to Kamakura of Kanagawa; along the cape of Shizuoka prefecture; a ferry took me to Ise of Mie prefecture; a beautiful and remote Route 166 to Nara; a riverside bike trail to Kyoto; on to the futuristic city of Osaka; a ferry ride to the Island of Shikoku, where I landed in Tokushima; continuing to Takamatsu of Kagawa, where the famous sculptor Isamu Noguchi had a studio; then Imabari of Ehime; a bike trail nearly 70 km, traverses countless bridges, which connect the many islands separating Shikoku from Honshu, where I arrived at my final destination in the city of Hiroshima; an approximate total of 2300 km (1400 miles).

Why?

Bike

I prefer to travel by bike because it feels good, not because I'm an environmental activists. After the initial investment, riding a bike is free and riding a bike provides access to remote locations that are often inaccessible by other traditional modes of transportation. Riding a bike places the traveler in the natural world to experience the climate and terrain in ways that aren't possible tucked away safely behind the windshield of an automobile, bus, or train. Also the human interactions that results from travel by bike is unparalleled by other modes of transportation. Most people think traveling long distance by bike is fucking queer! and it is this very reaction that results in the most interesting interactions with people from the communities in which one travels. Furthermore, cars are noisy, they smell bad, and I for one suffer from motion sickness when travel by car. But most of all biking is fun!

Sketch

Visual representation is the most important and ubiquitous form of communication, especially on the world wide web, yet sketching is perhaps the most undervalued of visual media, especially in story telling. Before the invention of the camera, the ability to accurately transcribe the visual world was a highly valued skill and artists were employed in the recording of history and science. Today photographs and videos have come to dominate visual media in such a way that the studio artist has been relegated to the realm of fine art. When I meet people in my travels and explain that I don't have a camera and that I chose instead to visually document my adventures by sketching, they are flabbergasted. I am an anachronism to these people. But, when I share my sketch book with people I meet on the road they become genuinely excited. In my human interactions, my bicycle often acts as an ice breaker and my sketchbook the groundwork for new friendships. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, drawing, like writing, is cathartic. Sketching can be an emotional outlet, as well as a form of meditation and it is an exercise in perception that encourages conscious reflection of the world around us.

Who?

San Dasha

. That

's m
e. I was born and blue bred in the NYC suburbs in a picturesque little town that bored me so that shortly after my fifteenth birthday I ran away from home. From those first days
of parental freedom, I fell in love with traveling. After a brief stint on the streets of Manhattan, I
decided to embark on my first countrywide tour from NYC to San Francisco by means of
hitchhiking. I hav
n't stop traveling since, but it
wasn't until a decade later, after hurricane Katrina destroyed my adopted home
of New Orleans, that I embarked on my first bicycle tour of the Pacific Northwest in the
United States. From that day forth, the bicycle has remained my preferred mode of transport.

Throughout my life, I have sketched as a cathartic exercise and in childhood,
as a means of dealing with the trials and tribulations of coming of age, I often locked
myself in my room for hours sketching fantastic images, usually to be thrown away upon
completion. Despite brief stints in art schools and leagues around the country and a lifetime
of sketching, I am not an accomplished artist. I have only sold a couple of pieces and I have
given away almost every finished work of art
I have ever made. Neither am I an accomplished cycler, never have I won a bicycle race, nor have I even entered one for that matter. To add to my
list of professional disappointments, I am an unpublished writer. Yet despite these
failings, I love to bike, to sketch, and to write and BikeSketch plays host to these passions
.

jueves, 25 de agosto de 2011

Life's a Beach

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