Highly Critical

I took this photograph at the start of the first critical mass ride I went to just a few days before Halloween. (Notice the riders wearing the bee and nerd costumes. Somewhere on the other side of the camera there was a guy dressed up as a cocktail party, or something. He had two bags of wine under his oversized t-shirt, representations of breasts, with holes cut through to offer people beverage through little plastic spouts, where nipples might ordinarily be. I think one breast was white wine and the other was red. He carried an upside-down stack of those tiny, waxy paper cups they use at dentists' offices and offered people cheez-its from a box in his other hand.)

I went to my second critical mass this past Friday. The wikipedia entry for the critical mass ride (I'm just gonna leave out the whole nuclear theory bit) is interesting because it posits the ride as a cultural anthropologist's case study, talking about the growth of the phenomenon across the world's network of city streets, diagramming techniques used to take over the road from car and bus traffic, surmising the bicyclist's intellectual defense of joining forces with other cyclists one night a month to bring cars to a standstill and make people pay attention to alternative transportation.

I was there and it was more like:

#3
stopped before starting
in honor of justin herman
a pool of us, sun-spattered
each with our metal/rubber/plastic other
slow-starting, walk-rolling
day end's light in my eyes
music boxes wail
curtain rises: motion
wobble curve rubber swerve
soft brake soft soft

#2 and a half
it's not a seething organism

hundreds don't move forward in unison:
lay straight on the asphalt, piss
into the highway-lining shrubbery,
a father pulling his son, bmx-ers,
hipster roadsters, racers, jumpers,
boys without helmets, girls with skirts,
anti-bushisms taped under seats,
painted flowers on fenders,
rainbow holograms, shimmering stickers,
beaming points of colored light,
bicycle-built-for-two

#2
no, we are not a seething organism, and
a rider doesn't start yelling
back at a stopped motorist
and slam the driver's car with a u-lock
and that rider's friends don't slash
the motorist's tires, with deft, seething strokes

#1
we ride south,
past potrero hill and alemany market,
where the roads have wideness,
and glide
you know you can dance on a bike?
wiggle your hips back and forth to the beat
as you zoom in front of you
and the tangled chorus around you;
love drips from lips, bells and woops
grip the city, the building-shadows,
fences, corpses of everything not human,
as it all falls behind.