wheels

practice flying (via the uganda skateboard union)

Yann Gross

We thought we’d post this beautiful Yann Gross photo we stumbled on a while ago as an inspiring image unto itself, to ‘Practice Flying’. Then we decided to look into the story behind it.

We discovered that it is from a series of photographs Gross made about a hand-built skateboard park in Uganda. So smitten were the penniless kids of Kitintale with skateboarding that they figured out a way to build a rudimentary park themselves. Their passion for skateboarding has transformed their rough lives. Now the skateboard park is in need of repair so Gross made this video, telling the story and hoping to raise money (which you can do here).

It has many lovely moments, a lot of joy, great music and a huge amount of resourcefulness and inspiration. read more…

07.19.11 | comments (1) | in community, kids, leaping + flying, outside, paths + processes, people, projects + play, sightings, wheels |

using your car to speak your heart

signs painted on car 'stop killing' love

Holton Rower

Holton Rower, whose Tall Painting got over 2,000,000 hits on YouTube (so far), sent us this photo of a car he spotted on the road. It is painted with strong, heart-felt messages that go WAY beyond the bumper sticker…easy enough to do, though it takes a kind of out-there courage. (It somehow reminds us of the Eleanor Roosevelt quote scrawled on a bathroom wall and our guerilla poetry post.)

What would your message(s) be?

Thanks a million, Holton!

‘window box’ car bumper

Matt Sumell* emailed us his swell car bumper improvisation and the story behind it:

…back in my college days I drove a Hyundai hatchback with a home-made wooden rear bumper. I graduated with an English and Environmental Science Degree, which prepared me for nothing at the time, so I took a job in the local Home Depot garden department. It was there that I got the idea for the window-box addition to my wooden bumper.

…at first I went with my favorites, Gerber Daisies. Then I planted wildflower seeds. I’d drive around, occasionally being ridiculed for my eccentric car. But every now and then, someone would pull up next to me on the highway, beep the horn and mouth “thank you.” It was pretty great.

It’s a take on guerilla gardening we hadn’t though of, with just the right combo of gift and surprise.

*Matt Sumell is a writer whose short stories have been published in Electric Literature, Noon, and elsewhere. Thanks Matt!

guerilla florist bella meyer: “flowers as natural art supplies”

thinking about structures from the inside out

cars as paint brushes and other guerrilla activities

leaving secret (or surprise) presents

06.20.11 | comments (4) | in community, outside, paths + processes, people, road warrior, wheels |

cool bike tape (another selby find)

Todd Selby

We love artist Thomas Jeppe‘s wonderfully taped bike, via The Selby. The tape is not just a cool visual, it adds cushioning to the handlebars. We went looking for this snazzy handlebar tape at found a trove of close matches – Splash Ribbon – made by Cinelli, whose tapes get very high ratings. Possibilities include vivid stripes, neon and leather. Our favorite: this zebra print one: read more…

05.10.11 | comments | in copy this!, materials, outside, people, resources, stores, wheels |

vietnam’s culture of improvisation via charlie allenson (happy birthday charlie!!!)

Charlie Allenson

Our friend Charlie Allenson had a big birthday a few days ago, and we had big plans to give him a shout out that day and find ourselves, THE DAY AFTER, having been swept away by..everything. Damn. Charlie’s at the jazz festival in New Orleans so we thought we’d publish some of the very cool photos he sent us when he was in Vietnam recently. They are right up our alley of totally, seriously, charmingly improvised LIFE that seems to happen everywhere there, like the floating villages of Ha Long Bay. This house, above, appears to be floating on oil drums and styrefoam block. There is no supermarket; a market boat makes regultrips to each floating house.

Charlie leads workshops in adaptive thinking, so he’s got an eye for just that. We especially like read more…

05.04.11 | comments (2) | in buildings, cheap + great, outside, road warrior, services, sightings, travel, wheels |

possibility in the realm of vespa

Brilliant Interiors

…nuff said!

via Brilliant Interiors

04.18.11 | comments | in outside, sightings, wheels |

simultaneity of saturn and a pottery bowl

We recommend turning off the sound and playing both videos at the same time. We came upon them when we were reading blogs the other morning, and were blown away by this kismet-ish reminder of simultaneity.

skateistan: skateboarding as antidote (to war, poverty, sadness…)

This stunning video is well worth the riveting 9 minutes it takes to watch it, even (or especially) in the midst of a busy day. Part of Sundance’s short film program, it is a moving, beautifully filmed documentary about Skateistan, Afghanistan’s first co-educational skateboarding school, created by Oliver Percovich to help kids dealing with a life of war, poverty and destruction, “to build kids’ confidence…and give them a voice.”

Says Fazilla, a 12-year-old girl living in Kabul:

I work in the street and sell chewing gum. Life is hard for me personally because my family is poor, sometimes we can’t afford enough eat. At Skateistan, I dont feel that my surroundings are ruined, I feel as though I’m in a nice place.

Skateboarding totally changes the view. Such a simple brilliant idea.

This piece in the New York Times tells the story.

via BoingBoing

01.25.11 | comments (3) | in community, identity, inspiration, inspiration blogs + sites, video, wheels |

danny macaskill’s joy ride

Here’s a video treat for this lazy day after Thanksgiving…

via Kottke

11.26.10 | comments (2) | in outside, road warrior, video, wheels |

danny macaskill’s bike lesson (setbacks + difficulties + perseverance = mastery)

Sofia Rower alerted us to this astonishing video by Danny MacAskill, which goes way beyond his technical brilliance. We love the first minute best: a glimpse of the setbacks and difficulties that come with achieving this kind of mastery…A big reminder of what it often takes to be able to LEAP! with ease and push the envelope.

Thanks Sofia!

11.04.10 | comments (2) | in paths + processes, people, principles, road warrior, video, wheels |

how to haul stuff on a bike shanghai-style

Alain Delorme

While in Shanghai a year or so ago, photographer Alain Delorme became fascinated by the extraordinary loads carried by migrants on their bicycles and other rigged vehicles: ”piles of stacked ‘made in china’ products which form unusual sculptures…loads of tires, water containers, office chairs, flowers…”

The images are amazing, though we find the title Manufactured Totems and accompanying text a bit overwrought…

For us, these are images of crazy everyday ingenuity…(plus balance, innate and strange gifts for architecture and engineering, gumption and bungee cords)… read more…

09.09.10 | comments (1) | in art, how-to, road warrior, sightings, tools, wheels, why not? |

twitter in dire straits

Leigh Fazzina was lost in a 300-acre Connecticut wood, racing downhill on her mountain bike looking for the main road, when her front wheel hit a tree root. She flew over the handlebars and slammed into the ground, to find herself bloodied and unable to walk…and panicking. She tried screaming and calling for help on her cellphone but couldn’t connect. Then she tried Twitter, the social networking site, hoping that one of her 1000 followers might see her tweet:

“I’ve had a serious injury and NEED Help! Can someone please call Winding Trails in Farmington, CT tell them I’m stuck bike crash in woods.”

At least half a dozen people, many of them strangers, responded; the Farmington Fire Department got calls from California, Chicago and New York. A few minutes after sending her tweet, an EMS team found her.

Twitter, so often maligned for being a frivolous time-waster, proved to be an unexpectedly useful emergency tool; tweets, and text messages, will often go through in areas with spotty cell phone coverage, like state parks. Fazzina seems to have broken new ground in her improvised solution; there are no records of Twitter being used to call an ambulance before.

It reminds us though of other potent ways Twitter has been used by people in dire straits to connect, like the heart-rending tweets that came out of Iran during its recent revolution, when text messaging and phone service was cut off by the government…

PS: The amateur mini-triathlon cyclist thankfully had no serious injuries, just bad scrapes and bruises. She is grateful she didn’t have to spend the night in the woods.

via USA Today via BoingBoing

08.12.10 | comments | in community, copy this!, family + friends, outside, resources, road warrior, strategies, wheels |

cars as paint brushes and other guerrilla activities

We are big fans of guerrilla activities of all sorts, from the making of art and theater to gardening and marketing. So we loved stumbling on this picture of a striking guerrilla action that took place in Berlin recently: While cars were stopped for green lights, a group of cyclists dumped 13 gallons of colored paint in large puddles onto the street in Berlin’s busy Rosenthaler Platz. As the cars drove through the puddles, their tires inadvertently became brushes to spread the paint, creating a constellation of colored lines. (The artworks’ masterminds posted signs nearby explaining that the paint wasn’t harmful and would wash off with water.) Like the best guerrilla actions, this one shakes up habitual thinking and seeing (and hence maybe living) in positive ways. read more…

05.26.10 | comments (3) | in art, community, projects + play, sightings, strategies, wheels |

cool material: rubber paint (+ oscar diaz’ strap bag)

[Photo removed by request of Oscar Diaz. You can check photos out on Design Boom and on Diaz' website.]

The very resourceful designer Oscar Diaz, who once made gorgeous utensils out of plastic bottles, devised a huge shopping tote called “Glueline” made out of a web of ordinary strapping material secured with rubber paint. We think the bag is beautiful though a bit flawed, since little things can fall through if they’re not held in plastic bags. But rubber paint is crazy inspired!!! We googled “rubber paint” right away to see if is something we could use at home. And we can. Here’s the thrilling description from Blurt It:

“Rubber paint is a durable, creamy, brushable layer of paint… It sticks on to the surface like a sticky, thick layer of gummy paint, but then when it dries; it has a nice level finish. It has an average hiding ability, but it can hide in one coat if it is thickly applied. It has a good bonding capacity. Rubber paint is versatile and sticks to such materials as wax paper and plastics. It leaves the existing flexibility of the wax paper or plastic bag intact.”

It’s basically the stuff Nina Saltman recommended when we asked her how Pascal Anson made his red-tipped silverware: Plasti Dip, used by carpenters to add a rubber coating to their tool handles. Just imagine… read more…

04.07.10 | comments (2) | in copy this!, identity, outside, reimagine, road warrior, wheels |

(easter) eggs as blank canvas

Anders Adermark via Flickr*

We read that the decorating of Easter eggs came about in the 13th century, when the church prohibited eating of eggs during Holy Week. They couldn’t stop chickens from laying however.

How to identify those “Holy Week” eggs after the fact? Paint em’!

Soon the eggs, which were already an ancient symbol of new life emerging, became a symbol of the Easter.

It’s not too late to decorate an egg or two. You can do it the usual way by submerging hard-boiled eggs in a bowl of vinegary colored dye. But we’re wondering why not view an egg shell as a blank canvas, and draw or paint right on it? (Be sure to hard boil the eggs first).

Here are some pictures and resources, including read more…

04.01.10 | comments (2) | in copy this!, family + friends, inspiration blogs + sites, resources, strategies, wheels, why not? |

wheels

practice flying (via the uganda skateboard union)

using your car to speak your heart

‘window box’ car bumper

cool bike tape (another selby find)

vietnam’s culture of improvisation via charlie allenson (happy birthday charlie!!!)

possibility in the realm of vespa

simultaneity of saturn and a pottery bowl

skateistan: skateboarding as antidote (to war, poverty, sadness…)

danny macaskill’s joy ride

danny macaskill’s bike lesson (setbacks + difficulties + perseverance = mastery)

how to haul stuff on a bike shanghai-style

twitter in dire straits

cars as paint brushes and other guerrilla activities

cool material: rubber paint (+ oscar diaz’ strap bag)

(easter) eggs as blank canvas

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