WHAT IS IS ABOUT CYCLING AND TATTOOS? WHY IS IT SO POPULAR FOR SINGLE SPEED AND FIXED GEAR CYCLISTS TO MAKE THEIR BODY THEIR OWN TEMPLE FOR ART? DOES IT HAVE TO BE SO? AND IF YES, WHAT IS REALLY THE PURPOSE? I AM JUST CURIOUS AND NOT AT ALL JUDGMENTAL ABOUT IT. I JUST DO NOT SEE THE SAME IN THE FULL-GEAR CYCLIST COMMUNITY WHERE THE SHAVEST AND SMOOTHEST THE SKIN IS, THE BETTER. AND THIS IS WHERE I BEGIN TO WONDER…BUT I AM SURE THERE IS SOME, DEEP, DARK SECRET ABOUT IT ALL!~
There is something about belonging to a team. It’s a feeling of family mixed to camaraderie that is difficult to find anywhere else except with the ones you share the
“falling and rising” of an every-day adventure, lifestyle and lots and lots of kilometers on the road.
And this feeling of unity and comfort it’s even stronger if the team-mates are Italians and the common link among them it’s a “two-wheel full-carbon, 5grams fixie entirely costumed-made in a small city up in the hill(lacking) part of Italy.”
Not to mention how much stronger the team-spirit becomes if they all happen to be in Brooklyn, more precisely in Red Hook, for a Criterium opened only to fixies and they happen to meet a very talkative, Italian photographer. Best combo ever!
See you again on June 8, 2013 for the Navy Yard Criterium and then Milan on October 11, 2013.
Note: The first photo is not a team-mate of Team Iride Modena…but the shot was too good to leave out~!
It seems as if they had been building a wall around my heart and sealed the bricks with cement so that not even a little puff of air can get through. It can’t expand, it can’t contract, it can’t even beat if not for the bare minimum to keep itself alive. I hurt. I pain. I remember. I see the past and I never get to see the future. I live the present, but this week I remember what I can’t no longer feel, what I can’t no longer identify as such. I feel corrupted and deteriorated. I feel we have all lost sense and meanings in what we do and why we do it and for whom and we forget too easily that LOVE it is felt when it is time and not when one wants it to be the time. But we are surrounded by cheap love, love this, love that, love me, not me, love it all, love it full, love it for love sake and go sell your soul if you chose not to love at all. What happened to working for love? What happened to chasing love? What happen to the heart-pain, the leg-shaking sensation and the butterflies in the stomach? Why can’t we keep believing in it as easily as we used to? How difficult is it to be naive and just romantic and go ahead as if your parents never split-up and shattered your child-like idea of perfection and perfect relationship?
What happened to the love fairy-tail you see in movies and the happy endings you are supposed to get after one of you is sick with cancer? This is not cheesy talk, this is not empty romanticism, this is a call for love’s purity to come back in style. This is a way to speak to the masses of you, you, you and you and I who have been in love before and have bathed in the holy waters of the love potion long enough to know that if you had to die today, your better off having felt it than just having pretended. Make believers are out of style and they are also sad more for themselves than for others. Love is all around us, of course, we have it from the smile of the old lady crossing the street with her stroller, to your kid playing in the park and the coming over to you with their muddy clothing to thank you for the wonderful day “at play.” We have it from our family *(in all shape and size and variations), we have it from the life-time friends and from the friends of friends.
There is not only one form of love, there are different shapes, degrees and even intensities, but of one thing I am positive about: The pure love one feels at 20 years old, the one that makes you fly like you are high on a poppy-seeds bagel is not the same as the one you find 10 years later, there is too much more drama behind it all when you are older. Why is that? Why can’t things be simpler in love the more one grow-up? I think it is the only discipline I have played that gets harder the longer you play it. Mystery. Or maybe too strong of a societal influence?…
Happy end of Pesach and beginning of East to you all!
I started racing triathlons when I was 21 after I read “It is not about the bike” by once cyclist legend Lance Amstrong. My career lasted a short while over three years, then I switched to rock climbing and doing yoga and, occasionally running marathons because the restrictions of the city I lived in were too many to enjoy cycliing as much as I could living in the mountains.
But, the love for the two-wheels was engraved in my Italian blood.
My father was a bike enthusiast and would climb up “Tour De France” stages before the actual race, and I followed him around once or twice during the “Giro D`Italia” bike race when Cipollini was still racing. I loved cycling so much that when Pantani died, I went to class with his Yellow Jersey and a red bandana on my head.
Yet, never in my life I had seen what I saw this past Saturday night close to my hood in Brooklyn.
The wildest mini velo-drome fixed gear bike race inside an old, decommissioned church.
When I arrived it was dusk and the “bike parking” line was already forming, the portable brick oven from Roberta’s Pizza *(the best Pizza in all Bushwick) was just about to get warm for the night of baking to come and the red bull drinking had already began.
The count of broken bones was already +1, unfortunately my friend’s boyfriend had just lost control of his fixy at a sharp turn on the mini-drome and felt on his elbow the wrong way. The results: Decomposed fracture of the whole elbow and required cast for 4-6 weeks and possible consequent surgery.
I hadn’t even walked in that one ambulance had already left the premises.
I stood in line for over an hour, tried to take some photos of the piling-up of what are commonly and, maybe even a bit spitefully, known as “hipsters” or maybe simply recognized as “bike-messagers” or “bike-mechanics.”
My eyes wide open with disbelief on the similarities among these “riders” and their “veichles,” as if they has all been fabricated in the same premises.
Yet again their way of riding inside the drome was quiet different and relatively much wilder than I could have ever imagines on a first glance.
But it was quiet the site to see, especially for a bike purist like myself. I do not think I had ever seen a Cinelli fixed gear road racing bike been ridden by a very tall, pro red-bull sponsored bike racer inside a min-drome at 10pm at night before.
More news this weekend from the Red Hook Crit
Check out this video for more info on the event this Sat., March 30 in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Satyricon Ball, New Orleans, February 2010
It has not been easy for me to experiment with color photography. I have been seeing things in black and white since I have started taking photos professionally four years ago. The reason being, I think, because color images are less organic and less pleasing to a simple eye. The more the eye grows, the more it learns to accept colors as not only a challenge, but a breath of fresh air in an, otherwise flatter, environment.
I am on that path now. I still see color tones as disruptive and chaotic, but I also see their additional power. I see their depths and their strengths even in a simple image, which would look stunning in black and white just as much.
I am not quiet sure my fascination with black and white is entirely terminated, but I am welcoming warm color tones in my photos lately especially in a nighty 1920′s-like environment where red feathers, velvet dresses and a colorful roulette table come about and the usual dramatic feel of a black and white image would not be as effective as a colorful one.
Let’s see what happens next…
Strangely so today is a day in which I am reflecting upon the fact that life is indeed really too short to get upset, fight, or worry all the time.
Sunday was my grandfather’s death’s first year anniversary and, although I knew it was going to come bye around the corner sooner or later, it felt like it was yesterday I was sitting by the beach in Los Angeles when I got the phone call with the news of his passing. I did not even cry. I was in shock, but also relieved, because he had suffered enough. It was time for him to be at peace. I remember the last few words he had said to me and my sister on the phone: “Life is short, do not waste it worrying too much, live it, learn from it, love every minute of it.” As cheesy as it sounds, it is so true, so real and so applicable every single day of our lives. He was 87 when he passed away, he lived a full life as a doctor, father and the most caring grandfather one could wish for. This girl dressed-up like an angel on the street of the Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights reminded me of him and of all of my other grandparents who passed away this year and years past who are now my Angels, protecting me from above.
I just wanted to take a second to say thank you all for shaping the person I am today and for continuously looking up for me and my daily happiness. I am feeling your love. I am holding your hands. Forever.
The Before, during and after alley action of a religious Jew caught in the moment of jubilant expression with his golden hat on Kingston Avenue, Crown Heights, Brooklyn on a sunny, Sunday afternoon on the day of Purim, when all can happen…
If you would have asked a few months ago I would have told you marriage was something I saw in the nearest future. I looked up at the perfect relationships around me and believed in the lasting power of love and respect. But things change, thoughts change, attitude toward life changes when something in the values you were passed on, breaks. Nothing is infinite especially the love and respect one promises the other in the holy vowels of matrimony. It is all a big fake joke, which we all seem to want to believe and cherish as the “perfect” pursuit of happiness. When there is no perfection and the only happiness that truly counts is the one inside yourself, which you should find before you get hitched anyhow.
Yes, there is magic to the union of a man and a woman in a sacred promise in front of others and, for some, in front of G-d, but who says it has to be official, and it can’t just be a personal promise within the knowledge of the “fallibility of the human kind?” So that, when it won’t work for the duration of a life-time, like we expect it to be, there is no big regret and no big discontent. But just the realization that “everything flows and everything changes” and so did the love they once profess to one another. Now, my berating attitude toward the meaning of marriage does not in any ways affect my belief in love.
I am just more of a realist than I have ever been before for many reasons, which are not important to share. It is just my understanding, after having photographed a fair share of weddings, especially religious ones, that we can bless the union of two people, we can celebrate them, we can strongly believe in it to work, but we must also acknowledge that life changes and people change, so there is no forever. There is no perfect. There is no fairy-tale endings, although it is nice to believe so. If we could influence a less fake attitude toward a life of empty promises, which comes as a result of believing in the impossible, we could diminish the overall suffering and augment the overall gains.
Let’s think about it not as romantics (which I am known to be), but as math teachers and pysics PhDs…it can work, but again, so meticulously so, we probably won’t like it a bit and we will continue searching for the impossible, the dangerous, the unachievable love of our life because suffering is indeed an emotion we like to feel as much, or maybe even more, than love itself.
