What is a bike messenger?

| cycling, drugs, traffic, work, urbanism

Couple of days ago boingboing ran a post about a SF bike messenger who claims to work while tripping on LSD. Today i finally read the whole text (as opposed to just the short quote on boingboing which focusses on his cycling while tripping experience). Turns out that the his entire rant is rather amusing and that it contains one of the best descriptions of how the bike messenger business works i have ever come across: In big cities, cars are fucking everywhere. It’s a wonder people still buy the…

Emancipation gone wrong

| iran, drugs, travel

After being in Iran for a week one of the biggest dissapointments so far (right after the food, which is the most unimaginative i have come across so far) is the fact that they seem to have banned ghalyun smoking in most places outside of Teheran. If you belive the daily star (which of course would be a foolish thing to do) this is part of the ‘toughest moral crackdown in years’ which is otherwise fairly invisible (at least to my eyes). When we were looking for a tea house to have a smoke in Isf…

Shrinking cities

| drugs, music, rio, urbanism, informal housing, creative commons, conference, cities

I am in Rio right now, which is anything else than a shrinking city. I have no figures ready but i guess there is a table which shows Rio’s growth in the last decades somewhere in Mike Davis’ excellent ‘Planet of Slums‘ which i finished reading just before coming here. Now the lonely planet for Rio mentions that in Rio gas stations are one of the favorite places for party-goers to hang out as they sell beer all-through the night. This particular bit of travelers advice reminded me of one of the…

Please do not punish us we are only doing what others have done before us

| argentina, museum, buenos aires, art, exhibition, drugs

The otherwise excellent MALBA (Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires) is currently showing works of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica in a solo exhibition. One of the elements present in all 5 works on display are photographic representations of cocaine (or to be precise lines of coke laid out on top of photographs of jimi hendrix, jesus, marilyn monroe and the like…). However it seems like the curators of the show had the idea that they were sending out a bit of a mixed message here (o…