Things I've Learned from Yoga Helpful for Bike Posture

To assume that anyone has as bad posture as me when doing anything would probably stretch the truth too far, but after an accident a year ago last September I had to relearn how to walk (apparently I've been walking with the wrong part of my foot, giving me duck walk generally), and as a result I wanted to share a few thoughts that might help other people understand better how to arrange one's body while on a bike, particularly in the conscious ways that yoga activates components of your body.

1) Abdominals and core are the seat of balance and weight:

If you're like me, you ride, or have rode, your bike putting equal weight on your ass (into your seat) and on your arms (particularly, your shoulders) making contact with the handlebars. You may be like me, in the panicky way I ride sometimes, and grip the handlebars too hard because of a secret fear that something will happen to yank them from your hands and you will go tumbling into some dangerous scenario.

Spending so much energy and strength on arm stability and load-bearing is counterproductive and sets you up for some nice carpal-tunnel/tennis elbow action that I currently have going on with my body. 

Try and hold your handlebars as lightly as possible and get padded gloves--they reduce the amount of impact your hand and wrists take. If your bike is tuned up, most likely the way you balance on your seat can help determine the direction of your ride almost as much as the steering, so focus on pulling your core into your center (when you can pop up and off the seat easily without thinking about it means that you've effectively pulled your core toward center) for better overall balance and control of your bike. 

Use your abs by to pull your weight over your pedals as you pedal standing up while climbing hills--again to get more pressure off of your arms. The added weight will make pedaling up hills easier too. The same applies when going downhill where you are most prone to brake hard. Use your abdominals to push your weight backwards over your seat so you don't need to bear weight and brake with the same part of your body.

Riding where the road is relatively flat, push your chest foward when pedaling to help keep your abs activated and to pull strain out of your lower and midback. Flatten your abdominals against your spine as you do this to reinforce the "puffed chest." Your upper torso can get a little fucked up from bicycling and needing to stabilize the bike and learning how to do the downward dog posture correctly can help you build an awareness of how working your abdominals, chest, and legs appropriately can help keep you balanced and reduce the wear and tear on your joints.

2) Some decent hardware can help

In an effort to reduce the load bearing role of your arms I prefer using bullhorn bars or short handlebars. Drop bars are not ideal in this regard. Moreover, with drop bars, if I want to sit upright in my bicycle seat, I tend to find the placement of brakes on drop bars to fairly awkward.

Making sure your brake cables are sufficiently tightened (this can often be done manually without tools, with a small tightening mechanism on the brakes themselves), that the pads are not thoroughly worn out, and the rubber isn't too old or stiff similarly produces reduced wrist crunching, which can prevent the later suck if you have any job that requires manual hand activities such as typing.

Using toe clip pedals or clipless pedals emphasize the correct part of your foot with which to pedal--the ball of your foot. One thing that long time bicycle commuters, bike messengers and the like will complain of is their knees are shot. To reduce strain on your knees it's crucial that you pedal through the ball of your foot. Getting the right kind of pedal can help you accomplish this.

Even you're pedaling with the correct half of your foot its easy to neglect using the ball. This is why I try to emphasize a loose flex of the foot as you pedal (from yoga)

It's also worth making sure you check your tires regularly and clean your chain regularly both will reduce the shock of impact your body will take from riding and reduce the force required from pedaling, making it easier on your knees. 

3) And since we're discussing knees so much...

It's worth noticing where your knees go as you ride. It's much better that when you pedal your knees are running parallel rather than splayed out in opposite directions. Again this can wear out parts of your legs and knees in a corrosive way.

4) Hips...

Can also get really fucked from riding. I have some of the tightest, and therefore least flexible hips from years or riding. It's a good idea to learn how to do some stretches for these as they can really ache as you get older. 

I recommend doing a modified pigeon pose while sitting at your desk after a commute. Here is what half-pigeon looks like:

Here is a video of a German woman telling you how to do pigeon pose:

Doing this at your desk operates on the same principle where you stack one ankle on the knee of the other leg (which is perpundicular to the floor). All the while flexing your foot you should press the knee of the raise leg toward the floor in order to begin opening your hips. Don't force your knee down but gradually increase the pressure you use in a gentle manner.

(Concluding caveat: And yes, I am appropriating a highly commodified version of an ancient practice while stripping it of its deeper religious significance such that I expend stress, knock out various knots and aches in my body, and then cry quietly to myself while I lay in corpse pose the end)

Guatemala, Guatebuena, Guatemaya 2

(Again, title stolen from a Edelberto Torres-Rivas article)

The night we returned from Chichicastenago J and I had a little talk about how much time we were spending travelling, how exhausting it was, and how neither of us was spending enough time relaxing by the lake. We made some preliminary plans to skip climbing the Volcano San Pedro the next day and committed instead to explore San Pedro and sit by the beach. Unfortunately after hitting the communal dinner and having a several carafe's of wine I took a bet from the twenty-something Canadian stoner across the table that J and I were going to climb San Pedro with him. My hubris at this moment, in spite of my agreement with my boyfriend, can partially be attributed to the alcohol which at times tends to bring out the braggart-y masculinist part of me that needs to prove things to others and always win arguments. 

Apparently this Quebecois youth had made contact with a lancha pilot at the dock who had offered to sell him marijuana and also take him, along with whoever else, up San Pedro for a fee (much like many of the tour companies offered on Lago Atitlan). We assented although the incredibly-prolix stoner kid did not speak any spanish so I had to handle the call to this informal tour guide, who on the phone seemed pretty stoned himself. At the time is seemed like a fun idea, but as the evening progressed another moment of panic set in for me and J as our minds quickly turned to Guatemala's dispersed and systematically violent history (paramilitaries, death squads, 200,000 dead et al.) and we began to freak out a little bit. Moreover, another friend from Portland a hilarious punk woman, W, had sent us a very cryptic e-mail just before canceling the rest of her trip in Guatemala on account of being sick closing with the words "My friend Jenna says don't climb San Pedro." Since our tour books were like 5 years old they told us to get tourist police escorts when climbing San Pedro because it was often a place where bandits preyed on tourists. The cryptic last line from W (what the fuck did they see to say that?) and the suggestion of banditry again sent me reeling for a bit. 

J with his indomitable will-power refused to believe any such thing after freaking out for a few minutes. I, on the other hand, spent the night wide wake trying to imagine every possible scenario and how I could extricate us with a little bit of fast-talking. The morning came and I hit the moment when I surpassed the fear. The guide showed up and I interrogated him on his credentials. I think our skepticism shook him a bit, but he handed us off twice to two other affiliated tour guides (apparently he was scheduled to pilot a lancha) the last of which was named Pancho or "'Cis" (short for Francisco), who ended up being the friendliest and most good humored tour guides I have ever encountered. He didn't speak any English but at this point J was feeling pretty confident about what he understood and had me ask questions, but was able to translate an impressive amount of Spanish. The altitude and thin oxygen managed to quiet the oppressively-loquacious Canadian to whom I had suggested, earlier in the day, that he inhabited the fortuitous life of someone out of a narcocorrido as his stories featured an universally recognition of him as a seasoned weed connoisseur and thus he was shown massive stashes of "gourmet" mota everywhere he went. 

This left me and 'Cis to have long conversations about his Mayan heritage, the culture of Lago Atitlan, the poetry he enjoyed reading, and what he thought of the United States which were fascinating. The climb was beautiful and at the top (view seen above) we munched egg and roasted veggie sandwiches, basking in the sun, and semi-napping. No bandits to be found and in reality we didn't even need a guide as the trail was clearly marked and tourist police were posted a various points in the climb. 'Cis invited us back to his family's home in San Pedro where they treated us to hot chocolate that had been wrapped in orange leaves. His home very much reminded me of my childhood home in Mexico City with the corrugated aluminum roof and hand plastered concrete walls. 

We said farewell to the incessantly talkative Canadian heading off to our hotel in San Pedro, Mikaso. This was probably one of the more expensive hotels we stayed at (amounting to I believe 700 quetzales that night plus breakfast for 2 people), but at the same time seemed worth it precisely because we were exhausted by the climb and needed a good hard rest and a clean shower. After a shower we wandered around San Pedro getting a mediocre meal at some expat bar with the word "Buddha" somewhere in the name (clearly expats from  1990s America). After wandering San Pedro proper looking for a cash machine observing the market, the church, and the basket ball court (the 1954 occupation of Guatemala by the United States fostered this one cultural export) we returned to the shore area (colonized by ex-patriots from Norway, the United States, Germany, Britain, and of course, as with any space of natural beauty in Latin America, Spanish hippies) to have amazing drinks (blended pineapple with cardamon and rum, and some sort of green and fresh ginger + another alcohol) at this little possibly Canadian-expat and his Chapin (what Guatemalan's colloquially call themselves) boyfriend's restaurante called La Ventana Azul, a place I hands down recommend if you ever go to Lago Atitlan. 

Peaceful sleep and chill morning later J and I returned to Panajachel, the transit center of the lake, to catch a shuttle to Monterrico on the Pacific Coast. Here began the the trip's slump. I had insisted that we see the black, volcanic sand beaches of Guatemala, J wanted some beach time, and I thought it would be good to hit a space of Guatemala sans-tourists (it seems that often Mexicans and Central Americans spend time on the beach during the Christmas and New Years holiday). One onerous stupidity in my planning is for some reason I had thought that the travel to Monterrico would be an hour from Atitlan. This I discovered was not the case and shuttle took about 3 1/2 hours to get to the destination, on a fairly poor stretch of highway along the Pacific where the only traffic control mechanism were endless, unevenly built topes (speed bumps). We arrived to our expat owned hotel, this time a Norwegian man, with a much younger Guatemalan wife, and rushed to the beach for the last few hours of sun before the New Years' Eve festivities began. The beach and sunset to be sure were beautiful were it not for a mess of Middle Class Guatemalan's shit-talking us from afar, I wasn't clear on why. 

Rocky evening continued as we scoured the town for somewhere to eat, passing cholos in low riders, and families finally deciding on an expensive non-buffet-style buffet where we were not allowed to grab extra-beans despite not consuming any of the meats they offered. After a few drinks and the crawling experience of mosquitos chomping away at our bodies, coming off of the mangrove swamp the surround the beach, we parked ourselves closer to the ocean watching the stars come out. As midnight approached we retreated to a bar for a bucket of beers and watched the NYE pyrotechnics as it seemed every beach town on the Pacific Coast was lighting up their own vernacular fireworks display which was amazing in a way no orchestrated 4th of July fireworks show seems to achieve in the United States. This may have been the highlight of the visit to Monterrico. 

The next day we meandered around looking for a good beach spot and I realized the fundamental issue that emerges when you seek to avoid tourists altogether and you yourself are a tourist: people constantly give you looks the communicate "what the fuck are you doing here?" That coupled with the fact that J is rather muscular, large, Anglo in hair and eye color with a military style cut he probably looked like some Special Operations Forces trainer or at the very least a semi-imperialist gringo in look generated a significant amount of attention for J as we cruised around buying waters and snacks, something he found a little unnerving. We did find a nice relatively empty scrap of beach and watched Guatemalans sort of lay in the shallows like beached whales (culturally out hotel owner reminded us, it is not common for Guatemalan parents to teach their children to swim. One semi-irritating element that plagued us throughout the visit was the ladino families' enjoyment of endlessly driving all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes up and down the beach. 

Later in the day after looking for another meal and releasing some baby sea turtles from a nearby sea turtle sanctuary (what Monterrico is famous for really) we settled back at the hotel, already we could tell that 1 day was just about enough to take in Monterrico, and laid around under the mosquito net on our bed looking through our photos, when J realized that he was having sort of reaction to the hotel food: shitting his brains out as well as vomiting. The hotel which surrounded a modest pool filled with screaming children, with loudspeakers blasting salsa, and neighbors in the adjoining room having very loud sex amounted to J's nightmare evening. I medicated J to get his fever down, asked the hotel owner to turn down the music, and we managed to get some sleep eagerly awaiting the shuttle that would take us off to Antigua for J's last day in Guatemala. After breakfast I promptly shat my pants and had to quickly shower so that we might make our shuttle on time and get out of Monterrico. I should say to tourists that Monterrico is much more of a place for families and not really one of the more important places to visit in Guatemala.

Antigua, a more standard tourist destination, was only a few hours away by shuttle and the cooler mountain air helped us shake off the unnerving elements of our visit to Monterrico. It is  colonial city, the former capital of Guatemala until earthquake wrecked significant components of the city's infrastructure, producing some really gorgeous ruins of former convents, monasteries, and a cathedral. In contrast to the humid, dub-step-drenched, bustle of Monterrico, Antigua Guatemala was a more peaceful hum of tourists, locals, and minor traffic on cobblestones. When compared to the life of the average Guatemalan Antigua appears to be a sort of middle class refuge in the mountains, which clearly has advantages of being fairly clean, I suppose it's safe (?), a few "apparent" 'mos walking around, but it also has the drawback of sheltering its residents (who are mostly ladino, i.e. mixed indigenous and Spanish/European) from the increasingly impoverished conditions of most of Guatemala that is at least 50% indigenous Maya (I've heard tell that the residents of Antigua work in Guatemala City and live in Antigua). We managed to see the most significant landmarks of Antigua on foot in about 8 hours, get some coffee, and have a really pleasant, altogether inauthentic, meal of paninis and Chilean wine in a garden restaurant that lost power halfway through our dinner. 


Early the next morning J had to shuttle it to the Guatemala City airport in order to return to work. I had the advantage of hanging out in Antigua that morning perusing the market there, having some excellent coffee (most Guatemalan coffee is harvested for export, not much roasting goes on in the country) and finishing Asturias' El Señor Presidente. My friend, B, had e-mailed me earlier that she would return to Guatemala city early that day and I should meet her at her home in Zone 2. I caught another camioneta back to Guatemala city and then a cab through to B's apartment. B's apartment was a typical Latin American construction with a great deal of internal windows to seal off or to better circulate air. I was still feeling physically ill so we didn't do anything particularly challenging: we checked out the anthropological museum I had missed my first time around, ate vegetable lo mein and fried rice at one of Guatemala city's numerous Chinese restaurants, hit a Guatemalan thrift store (where all the thrift store clothes that don't sell in the United States go), bought a few books in Spanish on the subject of my dissertation, chatted a great deal, and watched the entire first season of Game of Thrones. Along our walks I got to check out the graffiti and public postering projects of HIJOS Guatemala a public memory project to address the coerced amnesia about the civil war, the disappearances that remain unsolved, and to some degree to maintain the legacy of militancy and revolutionary spirit of the demilitarized, destroyed guerrilla organizations. Here is one example that is upside down because I can't figure out how to rotate images on this blog (translates roughly as "Military Service, Cerebral/Mental Death"):

It was actually very cool to hang out in the city with B, it remapped the space for me and B's ease of moving throughout the central zones (no longer sexually harassed because she was with a man) made it a pleasure even if my guts did not agree. Visiting Guatemala was an amazing way to get a better sense of the cultural texture of some of the region even if I spend a significant amount of time in tourist destinations. At the very least my Spanish was very good toward the end. I think another trip is in order in the future to get a better handle on peoples, politics, and the organization of the society now that another military leader is in power.

Guatemala, Guatebuena, Guatemaya 1

(Title stolen from an article by Edelberto Torres-Rivas you can find here.)


I've been meaning to post some details of my 10 day trip to Guatemala here, but the increasing stress from dissertation elements and long distance relationship, coupled with a sense that blogs are decreasingly useful mediums for communicating has delayed me significantly. 


Guatemala is a beautiful country with a systematically violent but also profoundly, richly political history. It is, by way of military, solidarity, and refugee discourses, a place think about somewhat in my dissertation. The motivations for going were therefore mixed. My boyfriend gets paid vacation time every year and he wanted a jaunt somewhere to help me at least "inhabit" the subject of my dissertation somewhat, even if that means I would be there having drinks and chilling by a giant, beautiful lake while reading about genocide. My friend B is also in Guatemala City (the capital) doing fieldwork for her anthropology PhD, so we had a potential person with who we could visit.


Because my bf doesn't have any free time in his job that demands he work 12 hour days, I did much of the planning on my own, consulting travel guides, friends, and also various internet review sites. Roughly sketched out the trip involved flying into Guatemala City, heading immediately out to Tikal, coming back to Guatemala City and shooting West toward Lago Atitlan for several days, hitting the Pacific Coast by way of Monterrico, spending a day and night in Antigua, back to Guate to see B. All compacted unrealistically into very little time.


Arrival in Guatemala City:


Pittsburgh is freezing during the Winter and it is also bleak, so banking off of clouds to see an overwhelmingly green landscape and warmth was a rather welcome sight. I had basically left us six hours to check out Anthropological Museums and eat in Guatemala City before catching a late night bus (on Linea Dorada) to Tikal. My plan was to get to a museum, stash our bags at the coat check, immerse ourselves in the anthropological material of the museum and then plan our next move, to hit a coffee or dinner, check el centro. We arrived the day after Christmas and I hadn't realized that the museums would be closed for a week for the holiday. We asked our cab driver to take us to another museum, which was also closed. Since we were near the center of town anyway we had him drop us off there so we could at least wander around and get some coffee or street food. I was at this point a little overtaken by panic, I foolishly internalize things like Guatemala's 200,000 genocide and the torture of thousands more as some sign that we too would be targeted and murdered, as obvious tourists. As irrational as I knew these feelings were, I couldn't quite keep my fear under control for the first hour or so in the city. 


We managed to find a decent coffee shop and we wandered around the plaza which was lovely, strung with lights, vendors selling elotes, etc., a cathedral with a few minor nondescript monuments to the genocide, and well kept flowers. Avenida 6a running down from the center of the plaza has been closed off to automobile traffic producing a very pleasant pedestrian avenue where we familiarized ourselves with the various iterations of the faux hawk popular amongst the nations young men. We managed to find a vegetarian restaurant at the end of the avenue where we munched on odd, but not altogether bad veggie variations of guatemalan traditional foods like tamales (in this nation wrapped in banana leaves rather than corn husks, as in Mexico). We split some overpriced beers and caught our overnight bus. (Incidentally Guatemalan beers aren't very good, as with other Latin American nations lagers are the preferred form, but the Gallos and Mozas were not particularly tasty.)


The bus was packed and the bus ticketing agent giggled at my gigantic internet print out tickets. Linea Dorada operates what seems comparable to Greyhound buses in the United States with semi-reclining seats and powerful aire acondicionado. I managed to not sleep very well and the bf snuck our arms around each other beneath our blanket (note to the homos: Guatemala is not a tolerant nation for homosexual peoples, it's best to travel on the DL if you can, although it is much more common for heterosexual men to touch other men and put their arms around friends or loved ones in public more than in the United States).


Tikal:

In order to visit Tikal National Park, an archeological treasure of an ancient Mayan city sitting at the edge of the jungle, you first fly or bus into Flores, a small island town where you either obtain a bus to the site or enjoin a tour company to get you to the site and guide you through was is a very confusing set of paths where tourists lose their way annually. After working on some miscommunication with our tour company we managed to get a bus over to the site, and checked around for guides who spoke English, so that my boyfriend (J from here on out) could also understand the tour. The tour lasted three hours and the site was beautiful, massive and impressive temples rising out of the jungle, ancient Maya stelae, and the odor of copal (a pine sap incense) which seemed to permeate much of Guatemala or at least infected my senses for the duration of the trip.


For the remaining evening hours in Flores, J and I snuck into an alley to throw on swim trunks and we hit the lake surrounding Flores during at sunset. The lake is pleasantly cool, but warm enough that one could spend some time there. Our dinner was fine, a little overpriced and not as good as breakfast. My favorite meal in Guatemala tended to be breakfast tipico, which consists of two eggs, black beans, toast, chirmol (a non-spicy tomato onion sauce), and fried plantains. This breakfast is to be found everywhere in Guatemala for cheap in even the smallest comedores. 


Toward Lago Atitlan:


We caught another overnight bus back to Guatemala City that night, arriving a half hour shy of 6am. Our guidebooks were fairly old, 2007 I believe was the most recent one we had between us, and we had plans to catch a camioneta to Panajachel, a city along Lago Atitlan, that morning from a particular site in Zone 1 Guatemala City. Our cab driver suggested that our books were wrong and the camionetas (or "chicken buses" as they are called by Anglos) picked up somewhere in Zone 8. Again I was confronted with a moment of First World panic (or maybe Mexican?--kidnapping is a national industry there) as I imagined another scenario in which we would again be robbed and murdered. We arrived and were told we need to catch a bus to a midpoint in Encuentros where we could catch a bus to Solola and onto Panajachel. Taking camionetas I think is a definitive experience for anyone visiting the country for the first time. These are former American school buses that are tricked out with bright colors, chrome plating, and have sound systems blasting reggeaton. Our driver looked like he was 19, his assistant 14, as they throttled up mountains at 90 mphs. 

As we travelled through the rainy landscape we were treated to another Guatemala's surprising features: a wandering evangelical Protestant Preacher. For the course of an hour we were force fed a stream-of-consciousness sermon about finding Jesus amidst family tragedy and several songs. One feature of the counterinsurgency wars in Central America has been the increasing presence and power of evangelical Christianity both as a corrective to Vatican 2s enabling of liberation theology (a significant element of revolutions in Guatemala and El Salvador) and to defuse political energies elsewhere than resistance to the mandates of the landed oligarchy and the army. After switching buses twice at a fairly efficient rate (both buses were waiting to pick up passengers and almost immediately left after we boarded) we arrived at a sunbaked Panajachel. After getting our bearings, consuming coffee and breakfast, we loaded onto a lancha headed for a hotel I had arranged for us in the small village of Jaibalito. Lanchas are the cheapest way to get around the lake towns as the lake is surrounded by forested volcanos. Typically you load onto a lancha with 15-20 other passangers making stops at villages and towns along the way. Atitlan has to be one of the most beautiful natural locations I have ever been so riding in the lancha was a rather amazing way to see the bright blue of the lake and the life surrounding the water.

Set in a beautifully manicured garden the hotel (called Vulcano Lodge) was a set of bungalows a bit off from the lake, and as soon as we arrived was the first time we had significant time to relax since the trip began. J and I snuck over to a neighboring hotel's patio/dock and spent the afternoon basking the beautiful surroundings, swimming, and reading, my recommended book of the trip El Presidente by Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel-Asturias (which depicts the abjection and experience of living in the surveillance culture of a military dictatorship). As relaxing and restorative as the time at the lake was the way our hotel was set amidst a rather impoverished looking village with little in terms of public plumbing and not apparent school or medical services within reach (perhaps there is a hospital nearby)? It was a good reminder of the deeply inequitable and exploitative economic situation upon which the tourist economy sits in Guatemala (and also the degree to which the United States has been responsible for destroying its conduits for unrest about the inequality, as in overthrowing the first president to enforce a land reform). 


The hotel offered a family-style meal with other residents and seeing no other options for eating dinner we joined what appeared to be several incredibly boring MidWestern American and their Canadian equivalents for dinner. The food was relatively good, even for two vegetarians, and with the dull families we agreed to share a shuttle the next day to visit Chichicastenago, a mountain town famous for it's large markets vending "indigenous" textiles, pottery, and other goods as well as for a still very active syncretic Maya-Catholic culture. We arrived relatively early to Chichicastenago so the longer we paced the streets, the more narrow they became as vendors divided the streets with proliferating stalls. Many of the textiles, for which Guatemala is famous, were clearly made in factory contexts and not really the handicrafts one might expect, which is not surprising but it didn't stop the vendors from haggling with you complaining about the lack of value "mi trabajo" was receiving. We bought a few really nice pieces, but as the streets became more claustrophobic the process of haggling made me incredibly anxious; anxious because of an awareness of my position as someone coming from the core of the world economy and all the privileges it affords me arguing for a better price against someone with less prospects, in all probability a shorter lifespan, in a language I failed to maintain because it was easier to learn English than to try and maintain any semblance of my culture in the overwhelmingly homogenous MidWest of the US. More tension emerged later, J had suggested we try and find some decent street food which seemed in short supply in the streets we were exploring. On finding on stall we purchased some small tortillas and warm black beans, seeing not much else for vegetarians to consume. A potentially homeless man shoved himself next to us asking for money and a few tortillas, which spurred a fight between me and J over why I let said dude paw the food we had only just begun to eat. After a fight and a long session of lesbian-style processing we decided that despite the very cool tapestry we bought and getting a chance to see the interior of its Maya-Catholic church (reeking of copal incense) Chichi should have been a 3 hour trip, not one lasting the whole of a day.

5 Tips for Queer Boys

From Yossimar Reyes's Tumblr:

Para Calificar, Jams

2nd Accident, Hateful Insurance Companies

After being hit by a car earlier this summer I was still resolved to commute around Pittsburgh once the fog of the concussion lifted and I had the opportunity to adjust and build up a spare bicycle I had purchased from a friend a year before. 


Needless to say the accident before made me much more careful of how I conduct myself on the road, the risks I'm willing to take, and the attention I pay to others on the road. 


On one such careful commutes to school from my home I was sitting at a red light in a very busy intersection (actually approximately 2 blocks from the previous accident) and preparing to cross. This red light is particular because it is on a very busy road that is also between two university campuses. In order to allow pedestrians the ability to cross said road without having the potential threat of being struck by a turning vehicle the pedestrian walk sign lights up 10 seconds before the green light for vehicles headed in the same direction. 


At one such moment, sitting at the red light, I looked at each light in turn making sure all reds were illuminated as with the pedestrian light. I saw no vehicles in the intersection. I started pedaling into the intersection. I hear the roar of acceleration coming from my left turning just in time to see a red Suburban slamming into me and the tanned, chubby, blonde-hair ringed face of the driver staring down at me as she attempted to brake. She failed to run me over, and I looked up at her weepy face and yelled, "not another time this fucking year!" I limped to the corner dragging my bent (steel frame bicycle) behind me.


The driver parked and ran up to me weeping and shrieking to see if I was ok. Other drivers and bicyclists stopped and circled around checking on me, calling the police, and helping get the driver's insurance information. The Pittsburgh police did their usual bang up job by insisting that they were not going to write a report, nor were they going to issue the driver a citation for running the red light and hitting me. They were instead much more interested on whether or not the driver who was helping me was properly respecting their authority. (This is no shock as the Pittsburgh police are known to have a hefty history of violating resident's constitutional rights) 


The driver continued to hyperventilate and since I didn't detect immediately any broken bones and any real emergency, I was surprisingly lucky, I limped to my office to call the driver's insurance company and start the claim process. During the call I notice my left ankle swelling more and more, turning blue. The student health center determined that I had no significant bone breaking, mostly soft tissue damage, and eventually an injured tendon. 


Although I know I probably could have sued this woman's insurance company I didn't really have the time and emotional energy to get into a legal battle. So I gave the insurance company my statement expecting at least some sort of minimal recompense besides the medical costs associated with the accident. That was a semi-delusional attitude, as I later learned, moreover, NEVER GIVE AN INSURANCE COMPANY A STATEMENT IF YOU EXPECT THEM TO GIVE YOU A DECENT RECOMPENSE FOR THE SHIT YOU GO THROUGH, OR DESTROYED PROPERTY. First, speak with a lawyer, that is if you are certain you are not at fault. 


The insurance company gave me the run around offering me at the end around $500 for future medical costs, and for my destroyed bike because the frame was older. Little did they know or care was that the frame was a very sturdy 30 year-old frame which I had augmented with newer parts. I had to argue with them and suggested a much higher amount of a few thousand dollars. After hearing my objections they tacked on another couple of hundred dollars which frustrated me, and I started to object to which the agent, replied by insulting me. She insisted, "I know you got in another accident earlier this year and this makes me wonder..." Because I didn't want to hear the bullshit insurance company logic that dictated this incredibly soft-voiced, soprano midwestern woman I suggested that I would seek legal action and then hung up. I was in a rage for hours following that interaction, the notion that I would just liberally ride my bicycle in the way of cars only to wheedle money out of insurance companies had to be the largest deposit of feces I had ever been asked to ingest. Why the fuck, I thought, as a PhD student just recovered from a concussion would I ever risk my brain like that again? For a few hundred bucks? That is insane.


In the end I gave in. I have a prospectus to write, mounds of grading, and at the time a controversial argument to write for a panic inducing bilingual conference. I took the money so that I could eventually get a new bicycle and get on with my life and not endure anymore of the insults leveled at me by this woman, who for a second, almost got me to question my recollection of the collision itself. Fuck insurance companies. 


(Part 2, coming shortly, discusses the uselessness of university administrators in cases like these).

This Made My Sunday, I Believe It Previews a New Album for Las Vaderramas?

Tracks that Occupy the Space of Dread Leading Up to Prospectus Draft Submission

The first is a track by Chavela Vargas, a lesbian caught up in the heady days of México's revolutionaries and vanguards. Reconfiguring the traditional, torch-song ranchera songs, with some queer flavor. For a brief period she had an affair with Frida Kahlo.


Chavela vargas - la llorona by laodameia





Death Grips. I tend to think that more often than not rock/punk/hip hop intersections don't always work out for the best. I think a good example of this might be Mad Decent World's podcast that set punk and hardcore anthems in a kind of hip hop ambience as podcast/mixtape which doesn't completely fit with the irruptive qualities of punk/hardcore, at least in places. This does an interesting merger by not always trying to balance elements to give each their due, but rather in cases merely channeling a punk angry affect, in other cases chanting more than rapping to reduce the dissonance between the two elements. Download this full album free at the Death Grips website.

Stay+ (formerly Christian AIDS, but had to change the name after a cease and desist order from Christian Aid the NGO). This track is double reminiscent of both 1980s era New Order-like melancholy, '90s dance pop, but is also an indirect tribute to the intensely driven, urgent, and anti-establishment activism of ACT-UP in the 1990s (an organization I have a lot of respect for) in response to the accelerating AIDS crisis to which the Reagan administration turned a blind eye (in the end killing thousands just in New York City). Download some of their material here.





In my endless pursuit of musical material that appeals to my punk/metal interests that nonetheless is something I can read, write, or study to, I recently stumbled upon this beautiful video by Kerretta.





Sunglitters have incredibly chill tracks perfect for a panic-stricken summer:





Also, Cayos, supply me with some tracks to lower the blood pressure:



IceAge, some atypical Danish teens, producing a post-punk fuzz ridden track that instills occasional desire to start dancing


Iceage - New Brigade from iceage on Vimeo.

Fuji - Connoisseur

I am seriously considering purchasing this bike. It's chromoly steel, which I value in the rough terrain of Pittsburgh's warped and battered roads. It also beats the Soma "Smoothie" I was thinking about getting in terms of price.

One thing is certain--waiting for the bus and sitting in traffic for an hour once a day is not a pastime I prefer and would be better spent at the pool or reading for my dissertation prospectus.

@ Nashbar, for half regular price.

Jean-Luc Godard's Commercial for Schick

A central figure in France's mid-20th century Nouvelle Vague film movement, Jean-Luc Godard made a commercial for Schick. This would seem a break with Godard's relatively overt anti-capitalist politics, in films such as La Chinoise, wherein French Students under the auspices of Maoism form a revolutionary cell and begin carrying out assassinations.

Nicholas Rombes writes about it over at the Rumpus in his Art Film Roundup:

Schick was owned by ultra-Conservative, capitalist extraordinaire Patrick Frawley. Does this matter, that Godard made a commercial to help sell products for a company whose profits supported political causes antithetical to his own? We are all complicit in these hypocrisies, small and large, as we use and consume objects each day whose sources in the global matrix are often obscure. If Godard made the commercial to help fund his more radical projects (perhaps Tout va bien, the following year?) then do the two projects cancel each other out? Is there some sort of ledger to keep track? Is it okay to denounce the enemy, and then collaborate with the enemy, as long as you can come up with some sort of intellectual rationalization for your actions?

Here at Filmmaker, Zach Wigon writes about Godard and the role of the socially-engaged director. His lede:

Jean-Luc Godard was a guest at the University of Southern California in 1968, discussing his work on a panel with King Vidor, Roger Corman, Peter Bogdanovich and Sam Fuller. This was at the close of a cinematic decade that Godard had owned; now, breaking with his previous work, he was becoming more political and less accessible. One of the discussion’s most telling moments came toward the end, when an audience member asked, “Monsieur Godard, are you more interested in making films or making social commentary?” Godard coolly replied, “I see no difference between the two.”



I think the discussion from Inpursuitofsilence blog has a few interesting points to make on the commercial:

As is Godard’s seductive way, the subject of the mini-scenario is a gorgeous young couple. In this case, a man and woman rising from bed in the morning light, already deep into a noisy spat, which is compounded by loud shifting electroacoustical broadcaster and music tracks. The fight gets noisier and the din gets uglier as they proceed, in tandem, into the bathroom. And then, at a certain point, the man picks up the bottle of aftershave, pops the lid and — abracadabra! — the broadcasts vanish; the fight ends; there’s a second or two of silence, before the woman expresses her appreciation of the scent. She takes the bottle, smells, and the commercial closes with soft, wet kisses.

It’s amusing, effective — and weirdly evocative of where we are now as a culture. If we have the means, we buy our quiet, if not quite in the form of a geni in a bottle of aftershave, in “quiet products” that can shave a handful of decibels off the noise of vacuum cleaners, dishwashers and the like for considerably more money than their rattling, roaring rank and file appliance-cousins cost. We purchase spa sessions and soundproofing technology and other miracles of padding, muffling, filtering and muting — the velvet, noise-cancelling armor that the affluent don to charge the world, or to flee the chase. But what about everyone else? All those people who lack resources (educational as well as financial) to perform their own sonic schick trick?

A car collided with my bicycle and me

Everyone I know who commutes by bicycle long term has had some kind of accident. These accidents might be minor, as in breaking one's finger defending oneself against an opening car door, or, major, as in brain swelling resulting from a collision with a motorcycle. I myself avoided getting hit for my seven years until May 26th, hours before the birthday barbecue I had planned for myself.

I was pressured by my boss to attend a "grading-calibration" with other graduate instructors to discuss how best to mark papers and give appropriate feedback. After a pretty big fight with my boyfriend, I rode with an irritated and distracted mind. I flew down the hill toward the parking garage, entered the garage at an uphill angle, slowing me down significantly. I started making my way back to a point at which I would turn left and then head to my office. But my memory is blank but for the brief moment of the collision, where I see the driver's beige Mazda hit me from the side as I collide with the hood of the car, and then another blank space.

I came to sitting on the curb as a police officer attempted to gather information from me. The collision between my head the pavement had split my helmet, and the front fork of my bicycle was badly dented. I was walking and that was a good sign. Nonetheless an ambulance hustled me to the hospital; all the while making phone calls to see if previously-mentioned boyfriend could meet me at the hospital and alerting my boss that I wouldn't make it to the session. At that point I felt, not so much confused--I felt relatively lucid--but caught up in the ridiculousness of the scenario. I persisted in asking the doctors who stitched me up and the care-providers who cleaned off my wounds questions like, "Is it true that human mouths are ten times dirtier than dog mouths?" I think at that point the whole thing seemed so surreal for me.

After some tests and about twenty minutes of CAT scans it was confirmed that I had escaped with only three deep abrasions on my face and a minor concussion. The doctors decided that I should stay overnight so that they might monitor my concussion. Luckily, the trauma clinic room I inhabited for the night I shared with an older gentleman who had recently undergone surgery for his hernia. This man proceeded to spend all night watching Fox News loudly, tossing and turning in bed, complaining, and demanding room temperature ginger-ale for his ailing stomach. My boyfriend was terribly concerned and kept threatening to get the driver, a Chinese national, deported. But after washing off the blood and stank in my morning hospital shower I was free to go (incidentally, the hospital stay, x-rays, ambulance, etc. totally around $33,000 for those of you who want to argue that market mechanisms keep healthcare costs down).

Returning to find my bike I discovered the frame to be fucked (on consultation with a local shop) apparently it buckled from the collision. Because the frame is aluminum it is useless to repair as any hammering back into shape would produce a weaker frame. Moreover, the police report after much bureaucratic hassle indicates that there were no witnesses and the driver claiming he was driving 10 mph (downhill?!) and I on the other hand was going "quite fast." After discussing the matter with a lawyer he suggested that the case didn't look good precisely because it would be my speculations against the driver's word. This was rather disappointing to me precisely because I am now without my central means of transportation. Moreover, how could I have a concussion from colliding with someone driving 10 mphs? That has to be a lie!

More irritating, perhaps, is the fact that the concussion for about 2 weeks made it difficult to concentrate on anything for more than an hour seriously inhibiting my ability to work on my dissertation.

WEAR A DAMN HELMET! I don't give a fuck if it messes up your coiffure!

I gave up drinking for a 4th month stint once...

...just to prove to myself that I could do it. I have to say the experience was refreshing, and sobering in the best of ways. It helped me reconsider my priorities, and how those corrolated with my behavior. But I noticed a strange craving for ice-cream creeping up in me those 4 months that hasn't completely gone away. This video represents that new and disturbing craving:

Shaving ambivalence

On and On and On and On

Rubber Stamps I Wish I Had When Grading Student Papers

I'm not in love with McSwenney's the way most people seem to be these days, but this entry is consonant with a lot of the feelings I have about marking papers in general.

Rubber Stamps
I Wish I Had
for Grading
Freshman
Composition
Papers.

BY KATHERINE PERRY

- - - -

1. RUN-ON

2. DANGLING MODIFIER

3. WTF?

4. TRANSITION?

5. I CAN'T TELL IF YOU'RE REALLY BAD AT THIS OR JUST NOT TRYING AND AM THEREFORE UNABLE TO MAKE CONCRETE STATEMENTS ABOUT YOUR ESSAY AT THIS TIME.

6. "ESCALADE" IS A KIND OF VEHICLE; DO YOU MEAN "ESCALATE"?

7. THIS IS AN INTERESTING OVERVIEW OF YOUR TAKE ON ZOMBIES/VAMPIRES/LEGALIZATION OF MARIJUANA, BUT IT HAS LITTLE TO DO WITH THE ASSIGNMENT. PLEASE GO OVER THE HANDOUT AND LET ME KNOW IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS. I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT DESPITE THE FACT YOU WERE TEXTING FRANTICALLY UNDER THE TABLE AND MAKING LEWD GESTURES WHEN I EXPLAINED SAID HANDOUT IN CLASS TELLS ME IT'S A WASTE OF MY TIME TO READ OR THINK ABOUT YOUR ESSAY AT ALL (LET ALONE FOR HALF AN HOUR ON A SATURDAY NIGHT ON WHICH YOU ARE CERTAINLY HAVING MORE FUN THAN I AM), I HAVE GONE AHEAD AND MADE CAREFUL COMMENTS ANYWAY, WHICH MAKES ME HATE MYSELF A LITTLE, WHICH YOU WILL SEE REFLECTED IN YOUR PARTICIPATION GRADE AT THE END OF THE TERM.

8. THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID.

Voces De Cambio

An interesting vernacular visual/literacy project:

"Voces de Cambio (Voices of Change) is an extraordinary after-school program for teenage girls in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Since 2006 the program has used writing and still photography to help teenage girls explore issues such as discrimination, gender equality, youth leadership, and civic engagement."



(Another instance of the NGO-ification of empowerment politics?)

2010 Review Part 1

One of my graduate school friends labelled the 2009-2010 complex as "one of the worst years of our lives." So, because I haven't posted in sometime, and want to find some positives from this year, I will do my best to keep some positives in mind as I proceed, to compile some bests.

Best Tracks of 2010, for me:

Kanye has always been an interesting producer, but here he's becoming a much better songwriter. Also Nicki Minaj's portion of the track makes it to my mind. The psychotic killer vs. the profit motivated gangster cold blooded killer I think is an interesting variation for pop-hip hop



Justin Pearson's musical career shaped my personal aesthetic and sensibility probably more than it should have in the last few years of the 20th and the first few years of the 21st centuries. That said, this turn toward the more danceable and slightly more gay in these two tracks is just what the doctor order (although the quasi-hawk not so much):





I already posted this, but I love British lesbian art music.



Not really one for the ages, but a motivator for right at the end of the semester:



A like songs that occasionally make you feel like your life will or should be over in whatever way. Here is one the years most important with a stunning queer video (sometimes verges on a parody of itself I'll admit. As in, why are those women playing tennis with a liver?):



Kylesa, I will always love Male/female dueling vocals. Spiral Shadow is a fantastic new album:



The lyrics are trite and the video is a little overblown, but I really love this track, and Kelis' lesbic style here:




Best Continuing/ Resurgent Musical Trend:

Homocore!!

Brontez Purnell of, being a black gay man of note in the San Francisco punk scene has his own band:



Homo Black Flag cover band with appropriate American Modeling Guild Video:



Last.fm recommended this to me and they were absolutely correct:

It Does Get Worse

Beyond Gay Placation. Toward Queer Liberation

Reteaching Gender and Sexuality from Sid Jordan on Vimeo.

Costumes, Halloween and Otherwise

In order to engage in Halloween in a genuine way I have to come up with a costume idea that really engages me in some kind of persona that I either inhabit for the night, or at least some sort of mythology that makes the repeated narration of just who I am "supposed to be" throughout the night remains worth the effort. Last year I didn't do much an essentially recycled a footballer outfit I found in a dumpster, along with a football jersey I found at the thriftstore with the words "Far East" emblazoned on the front (yeah, Edward Said, I'm looking at you), and some smudges of gold to add a little homosexual pizzaz.

This year I selected "El Barbie," or Edgar Valdez Villareal, to be my assumed persona for Halloween.





El Barbie, was so nicknamed for his blonde hair and green eyes, an anomaly amongst the Mexican-American community from which he originated. After some success in high school football he went on to sell drugs and crossed the border, quickly climbing the ladder of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel in Mexico. Eventually he became the kingpin of said cartel and he was known for the torture and decapitation of his victims in the cartel wars with the Zeta cartel.

Personally I'm a little fascinated by the informal market interchanges of the drug cartels in Latin America and how often they are tied directly by a customer base to the United States, or by the internecine combat perpetuated by the proxy wars and Cold War policies of the United State, as in Colombia's FARC. His national origin makes him more interesting still, much like other Latino notables, e.g. the president of the Dominican Republic grew up mostly in the Bronx.

Anyway, I based my costume off of the outfit from his capture video, which isn't that remarkable admittedly. I added a great deal of dried blood and gore bits (achieved by gluing fake-blood soaked cotton balls with rubber-cement) to my arms and fists as if I had been beating and decapitating all day, as well as a few tactically placed blood smears as if I had made casual attempts to wipe my hands clean. The key with this was to make it not look like I was to be some attempted suicide, I achieved this by outlining my knuckles with much blood and gore and making my right arm appear to be more caked with blood and gore.

Unfortunately my attempt to spray my hair blonde with the cheap costume paint yellow made my hair much greener than blonde, a disappointment, but given how good my arms looked, I didn't mind.

I attended a graduate student party for my department that evening and was received with not much fanfare, and the rather irritating effect of having one of my friends follow me around and introduce me to others as an abortion doctor, alack!

Anyway, next Halloween I plan on being much more proactive. After a discussion with my roommate who wanted to play of the sorority girl tendency to make all Halloween costumes sexy + ________ (as in "sexy zombie," "sexy lady-bug," "sexy crack whore"), we decided to do similar but more hilarious versions of the theme such ideas like sexy raincloud, sexy roadkill, sexy orange traffic cone.

Still I kind of want something a little more dramatic + the element of sexy, so I've been considering being a Minotaur inspired by Picasso's own: