What does it mean?!

A tip of the hat to All Hail the Black Market for this gem. It fills me with a mix of feelings – both delight, and a bit of shame for the amount of Dragon Age I’ve been playing lately. Additional thanks to @bighandsome for sending me a parody version.

Feeling nostalgic? You can play The Oregon Trail and plenty of other classic Apple II and IIgs games at virtualapple.org.

In addition to general laziness and procrastination, I feel like there’s a lack of focus. Read into that as you will. Anyways, I had a spare domain name registration available so I decided to start up bicycledistrict.com. It’s another blog but this one’s going to be only about bike stuff.

The Joke Is Up will still remain but will be for everything else which means it’ll probably be primarily about music, design, food, travel, or whatever else I end up writing about. While that clarifies The Bicycle District, that seems to continue a lack of focus on this blog. Maybe so, but let’s try this: Bicycle District = bikes. Joke Is Up = me.

Since I know there’s a lot of folks that care about the previous but not the latter, and a small amount of folks that care about the latter but not the previous separating the two things will hopefully make both blogs better and will lead me to post more often.

1. Fixed off-road is friggin’ awesome.
I went riding with Topanga Creek Bicycles on Sunday morning on an easy-paced 20-mile ramble along the nearby fire roads of Topanga Canyon and Dirt Mulholland. There was nothing really technical, but a fair amount of climbing. One of the bike projects I’d had in mind since… Japan, I guess, was building up a fixed cross bike using a Surly Dingle Cog for both off- and on- road duty. Well, I finally got that bike together and this was its maiden dirt voyage. The bike climbs like a champ. Like a serious mountain goat. So awesome. This was countered, however, by my perhaps over-cautious downhill descents. I was running slicks so I didn’t want to wipe out, and yet while I came close a few times I was able to recover thanks to the feedback from the fixed wheel.

Also, it was an absolutely gorgeous day. I needed that ride if only to get out of the city for a little while. Here’s a crappy iPhone pic. Forgot to bring a real camera.

2. You can remove a front derailleur without breaking the chain.
How did I not discover this until now? The mechanism is so obvious. As a result of this newly acquired knowledge, I spent last night moving derailleurs around between bikes testing different crank/derailleur combinations. It’s something I’d been meaning to do but put off because I thought it was going to be too much trouble.

3. Hooray for downtube shifters!
I had always been more of a bar-end shifter kind of guy, but liked the look of downtube shifters for their simplicity and elegance. Well, the indexing on my bar-end shifters for my main ride had been feeling funny as of late. I think it’s because I had been running my cable housing underneath my entire handlebar length instead of having the cables come out the front as usual. The extra housing length and bends were probably causing too much friction. At any rate, I had a pair of Suntour downtube friction shifters sitting in my parts box so rather than fiddle with the bar-ends I put those on. So pretty. So simple. So pleasant. I’m still a fan of my bar-ends. I’m saving them for one of my next bicycle projects – putting dirt drop handlebars on my mountain bike.

I think the festival was stronger than ever this year for Los Angeles, both in attendance and in the programs screened. There were lots of great films this year including a 1956 Japanese feature called “Keirin Queen” subbed by BFF staff and brought to the U.S. for the first time. A French film, “Le Dernier Voyage of Maryse de Lucas”, a story of two friends riding out to the countryside to spread on of the friend’s mother’s ashes, had Bronwyn literally in tears. And a redubbed parody of “Midnight Ride”, a Banana Republic and Vanity Fair produced short that takes place during a Midnight Ridazz ride, got uproarious cheers from the crowd. “Midnight Ride” has recently been taken down, I’m guessing because of the negative response it was getting throughout the bike community. How’s that for viral marketing gone wrong? The parody was on YouTube, but was removed because of copyright violations.

Other great things that went on were an opening night concert with Deerhunter, a bicycle art show, goldsprints, and a Sunday block party in the Bicycle District.

Here are the photos I posted on my flickr.

Be sure to check the festival out if it’s coming to a town near you.

Timelapse – Los Angeles Wildfire from Dan B. on Vimeo.

Frankie Manning died this morning due to complications with pneumonia. He was one of the grandfathers of Lindy Hop, dancing and acting as de facto choreographer for the famous group Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, and revolutionizing the dance with his unique style and the introduction of the first aerial steps. I know when a lot of people think of swing dancing, they think of people doing crazy flips and tricks. Well, that was all Frankie’s doing.

He danced with Whitey’s until the group disbanded around World War II. In 1947, he started his a new group, the Congaroos, that performed until 1955 at which point Frankie started working for the postal service and was under the radar until the ’80s.

In the early ’80s, Al Minns, another member of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, was teaching lindy hop in dance studio in New York, but he died in 1985. Before passing, he told his students that Frankie Manning was still kicking around New York. Steven Mitchell and Erin Stevens tracked Frankie down and convinced him to come back out of retirement and continue teaching Lindy.

The rest, as they say, is history. Popularity grew, spreading slowly as things did before the internet, and then finally exploded in the late ’90s. While swing dancing now doesn’t have the same popularity it did in the ’90s, it’s definitely matured and stabilized into its own solid subculture and Frankie’s contribution to the dance’s resurrection is undeniable.

Frankie died one month from his 95th birthday and had been dancing and teaching the whole time. I was lucky enough to take a class with him back in December of 2002 and just seeing the joy in his face and his vitality was so inspiring. The Japanese have a word for it – genki – which I’m still not exactly sure how to put into English words but it essentially means healthy hardiness, good spirits, and a cheerful mood. Frankie was totally genki. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the man went on to live until he was 120.

At any rate, here are a few videos to commemorate the man.

This one has pretty crappy audio, but it does a good job of showing Frankie looking genki, as well as Norma Miller, another dancer for Whitey’s who’s still around. I belive this came from Ken Burns’ jazz documentary.

One of my favorite clips of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers dancing to “Cotton Tail” as performed by Duke Ellington. Frankie is the first guy to go out.

And finally one of the most famous swing dancing clips out there from the movie Hellzapoppin. Frankie’s in the overalls.

Rest in peace, and thank you.