(a.k.a. Cyclecide’s Best Party Ever)
(a.k.a. how the hell are we going to top this for Pedal Monster in September)
July 20, 2008
Cyclecide Office Olympics presents: Office Chair Slalom!
I don’t think I’ll ever do a product endorsement (per se) on this site — besides obvious and repeated references to duct tape, Leathermen, and Sharpies — but I’m still fluey and this seems like a good and important thing to tout. Especially if you’d like to start siding with Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping in this holiday season.
If you know your Bay Area freak-lore, you know Wavy Gravy is awesomer than Santa Claus. He counts as one of the original hippies, lived at the Hog Farm, and still to this day walks around San Francisco and Berkeley in a clown nose and a red-and-white-striped ’20s bathing costume, leading a plastic fish around in front of him on a leash.
The Hog Farm were major players in the whole Woodstock shebang at Max Yasgur’s farm, and planned it out pretty well. When asked by the cops how he and his Hog Farm team were going to handle security issues and fights at Woodstock — which they were in charge of — Wavy Gravy replied: “With seltzer bottles and cream pies.”
And if you’ll recall, violence is not one of the things people focus on when reminiscing about the original Woodstock. Ever. Unlike the debacle in ’98 when all these chicks got gang-raped in the pit because security there were either far too lax, overworked, or violent themselves. Since I’m a festival worker and erstwhile clown myself, I think this brilliant clown-gineering of one of the world’s most major concert events is one reason Wavy Gravy is my hero.
The other reason is this: He helped start SEVA, a non-profit organization which helps native Americans and people in “poorer” and more remote places around the world get and learn basic things they need: health care, eye care, education, women’s empowerment, and sustainable community services.
…and maybe if we all looked upon the glory and splendor of the Earth a little more, we’d shop and drive a little less?
So instead of rushing around buying crap that’s eventually going to end up in a landfill or a thrift store, this Holiday season you could buy your loved ones, say, a cataract operation for an old woman in Guatemala or a visit to the doctor for a family of Himalayan children. You could help the people who lived in America centuries before the “modern world” invaded re-up their own communities. You could do other stuff like this, of course, without going through Seva, but I’m just tossing yall a line here.
So happy holidays again, and stay the hell away from the mall. It’s not doing anyone or the planet any favors, and you know that. Let’s do something different from now on.
My longtime friend, the esteemed writer Ian Williams, lives in New York City. When the 9/11 horribility hit, Ian and his wife and sister were some of the people who actually ran towards the towers as they fell — not literally, but almost — and they stepped up during the tragedy to … well, to do a lot of things, but basically to facilitate the emergency workers’ ability to do their jobs in the first days. Cajoling gourmet food from restaurants, finding clean bottled water, helping lost children find their parents, passing out clean T-shirts in rainstorms to people covered in dead-body dust, what have you.
Yeah. Gnarly, as they say here in California.
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Call this number.
Do it now.
(415) 648-4112
I myself left a detailed — yet respectful — message for Satan’s secretary Aleister Crowley about how Tom Cruise has been getting out of control, and how they should probably pick someone else to assume the Number of the Beast now that L. Ron Hubbard is dead.
I was going to add a “Hail Xenu” at the end of the message … but I’m not really sure if the Dark Lord is homies with THAT weirdo.
(Seriously, click on the links up in here. Hours of entertainment.)
October 4, 007
Gerlach, NV
It is with semi-tight shoulders that I report to you that the Black Hole got a yellow on the MOOP map this year.
Yellow. Not green.
We tried. We tried so hard. We cleaned up all the big stuff and put it in the right trailers and boxes and oversaw transpo and then MOOPed our asses off. Busting dunes by hand with a rake. Digging out burn scars. Going over and over the site. Staying later than the other crews each day and using whiskey as a work tool. *burp*
C-Load came out for the weekend to do line sweeps with us. When we found out we were near the Black Hole, we strolled ahead one block to make sure we’d cleared everything. There was nothing there. One cigarette butt, maybe. I didn’t pick up a damn thing and I even full-contact MOOPed the site — crawling on my hands and knees through some newly-formed dunes in chicken pants and a tank top, killing two birds with one stone. Skin exfoliation feels nice.
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The Ladies' Guide to the Apocalypse 