SmartyFella Michael Zack Bike Blog Post from South America

A special thank you to SmartyFella Eric Hamaoui for the previous travel guest post from Europe.

While our indie production team attended the Silicon Valley Bike Summit for part 2 of our Emerging Transportation documentary, our South America bike correspondent gives us another travel narrative. Welcome back, SmartyFella Michael Zack! In honor of National Dog Day, here’s a puppy picture first.

My friend Renee asked me to send some bike photos for her blog.  If only I had a camera there would be so much to send; I see cool bike things daily.

I was once an aspiring photographer, going so far as spending a year at junior college photography school.  But my temperament was very restless at the time; and by the time I had moved my photography equipment into the Washington Heights apartment of an actress who was about to premier her one-woman Broadway bound musical, a Jewish female version of Charles Bukowski’s Bar Fly, my cameras were seeing little use, (although I did capture Lady Bunny at Wigstock, when it was still in Tompkins Square Park), and I was downtown all day expediting building permits for Helen Frankenthaler’s remodel of her Carnegie Hill brownstone, I had lost my creative drive.

New York, it’s often described as the concrete jungle where you see stars in the street, but not in the sky.  I never did meet Helen Frankenthaler, the great Abstract Expressionist, but years later I did walk past her secret unmarked grave on a Bennington College hillside.  She is as abstract in death as in her art, I guess we could say.

However bright my hopes for a new NYC life were burning, with my roommate’s  decade-long gestation about to sparkle off-off-Broadway (the “Plan B” after a lifetime gig on Tina & Tony’s Wedding didn’t pan out, as I always recall when I see it STILL advertised in the NYTimes), I was making my home one day, walking past the carcasses of the cars lining the streets upper Manhattan in random degrees of dismemberment (greasy men where always leaning under the hoods “collecting” parts), I found the apartment door ajar, the place ransacked for anything worth taking, and my one-ticket out of Miss Bar Fly’s apartment stamped.  It was official, I was not going to be a photographer.

Being two middle-class kids making it in the city there was stuff to take, digital alarm clocks, a blender, her luggage, my cameras.  I was blamed for the robbery, because I had brought a trick home the previous week. But I still think it was the building superintendent, because SHE gave him the keys to do something in the apartment that week, too.  But I did put a suspicion over my head (he told me he was a Dr. from New Jersey, but who really knows), and I moved to the unfashionable side of Williamsburg, the Italian side.

I’m a fatalist, so that ended my interest in photography.

Actually, this was 1989 and at that time, all of Williamsburg was unfashionable.  No self-respecting Italians would live there, but I was endlessly fascinated seeing the neighborhood white women rounding up the all the kids in the afternoon, grabbing a baseball bat, and go around marauding through the neighborhood scaring someone (I never did see) out of “nostra” neighborhood. It was kind of like a Mickey Mouse Club for the Misguided. Our African-American friends were always attacked coming to visit us in that neighborhood.

I didn’t miss those cameras, but I really should have photographed those women, now that I think of it.

I have had no camera, since 1989. I do remember in the mid-nineties buying those plastic disposable 35mm cameras though.  I like those.

Coupled to that, I lost my cell phone and have been cell-free since last Carnival Tuesday when I jumped into a cab with a friend to go visit her friend, who runs a bar in front of her house, who took some time during our visit to do lines of coke on the counter.  Counter, not the Bar, I guess you have to wait until after closing to see that.

I’m nervous around coke, I associate it with impending bankruptcy.

I’m nervous enough without coke, so it’s nothing I want to try a 2^nd time. The first time I tried it, a very cool Hep Cat Jazz Bass Player at one of the cooler Michigan State Co-Op Houses shared a line.  My heart beat so fast I thought I was going to die.  I was really concerned, for a minute or two.

I don’t know, the next day my cell phone was gone, I didn’t bother to look for it.  It was a sign of fate.

So I went cell-free.

I hope to buy a tablet some day.

So when Renee told me about her bicycle blog, I immediately wanted to share photos of all the cool bicycling people, the bicycle things I see in Goiânia, Brazil, a city where the 1^st world meets the 5^th, a tropical Dallas where millionaire farmers live in penthouses, where bicycles are great cheap transportation for people and cargo.

 

The way Critical Mass and SF Bike Coalition parties made bicycling an ethnic/gang thing in San Francisco, I can see the same increase here in camaraderie amongst bicyclists, and with our friend riding inside cars.  I can see that happening here.  Sunday Streets is here, too.

Goiânia used to be a motorcycle city, and it still is (as you see lots of people limping around with metal cages with pins drilled into their legs to show it), but more and more people have either cars or bicycles.  I think the percentage of Motorcycles to cars is going down, and motorcycles to bicycles is way down.    Bicycling has exploded in the last 10 years, with so many good bike shops opening.  A front-page newspaper article I saw the other day read (I think, my Portuguese is weak) that by cycling you can save 500 bucks a month, and that is the reason bicycling is becoming practically the only good option a lot of people have. If you have to take 3 or 4 buses to get to work and pay $3.30 each ride, with no free transfer except at terminals, and no monthly discount pass, riding a bike starts to make a lot of sense.  The buses are a private thing, who knows where the money goes.  Brazilians don’t know how anything works, they just know it works badly, so what’re you going to do?  So that’s the way it is; co-incidentally similar to the arrangement Catholics have with The Church, “Who’s to know, who’s to say?”

Folks will transport almost anything on a bicycle here; including a whole family if need be, or it’s Sunday.  Yesterday, I pedaled past a guy carrying tall wood cabinet strapped on the back, vertically. That’s very top heavy.  He looked very proud, “bummer, no camera”, I was thinking to myself, but gave him a Goiano thumbs up,   “bem feito cara”

Groceries are delivered by bicycle; grocery cargo bikes are very cool and I am  saving up for one.

I have been living without a car, doing my daily commuting across the city by bicycle (or by bus when it’s raining) and transporting almost everything on the back of my bike, in orange panniers. People ask me where I get my panniers, ALL THE TIME.

As Renee is a long time friend I first met in MBA class I know she will indulge and appreciate the following. A tip for all you entrepreneurs out there, a word for you Kid – “Panniers”.

I might not have a hot body, but I’ve got some great Panniers, orange and old (like The Donald), and they get a lot of positive attention, and people ask where I got them, and I tell them I think they made it here from Os Estados Unidos.   If I was going to start a bike line, I would start with a great bike bag/pannier. Maybe in denim.  The bike messenger bag will never go out of style. Denim too, for that matter.

This past month, I carried 8 foot lengths of steel rebar to build a stone wall, a 20 kilo bag of dog food, and a golden statue of a woman, on my bike

I love bicycling, riding through the balmy air; but in truth it’s an economic necessity, and it’s also often faster than driving would be, because I weave through traffic, go through red-lights, jump on the sidewalk when need be.

My favorite bike advantage: riding against one-way traffic.

I’m cool because I am a cell-phone free, iWatch free Bicyclist. When I’m out in the city, nobody can F’in call me -to paraphrase Faye Dunaway in Barfly.