Bikes in New York

I don't think I've ever written about my bike blog on here before.



I moved to New York at the end of August 2006, and Laura and I walked all over the place every spare moment we had during the weekends. I noticed myself taking lots of pictures of the bikes I saw, so I started a Flickr set for them all. (My initial interest in bikes was prompted by a dream I had had that summer, in which I owned a shiny yellow three speed.)



The posts, predictably, are much more frequent when the weather is nice. This explains why I got excited this past Saturday when I noticed my first bike since New York started to give us a hint of the spring and summer ahead.



It made me think of all the things I'm excited about in the upcoming few months, and it made me remember the time I had searching for a new bike this time last year. I knew very little, and only had an idea of what I thought I wanted. Alex talked about single speeds, Clay sketched a history of frames out, I went to stores and read everything I could. Eventually, I found the perfect, perfect bike, and didn't care if everybody and their best friend in my neighborhood had the exact same one. After months of test riding bikes that felt like I was going to break my neck, this one felt like walking. The rest of the summer was magic.



The bikes I like the most typically give me a craving for a specific food; I don't know if that's a weird manifestation of my mild synaesthesia, or if I just like eating. Here are 2 examples:

This one made me want Hot Tamales -


This one made me want birthday cake -


Anyway. If you like looking at nice bikes, maybe you'll like the blog. If you're a serious bike nerd who takes bikes apart for fun and knows what kind of frame makes what degree turns, maybe you'll be bored ;)

Happy Birthday, Cellar Door!

It's 12.05 AM, and Cellar Door is now FOUR! Lots has happened since January 2006, but I'll spare the details since I've – as you can see – written about it along the way.

I've been documenting my life since I was six; my first diary was a gradient of neons featuring Minnie and Mickey Mouse. I wrote about Cinderella and a blonde boy I had a crush on. Since then, I've kept with it and added about five thousand layers to it all.

In my two years at the VCU Adcenter, I filled seven 8.5 x 11 black, linen-bound sketchbooks with thoughts, ideas, and things I gathered along the way (everything from postcards to Polaroids and candy wrappers). I stopped writing on paper as much when I started this blog, and filled post upon post with the stuff.





I got a little down on my self at the end of 2009 when I looked at my archives and noticed that my frequency of blogging had steadily declined over the years:

2006: 168 posts
2007: 124 posts
2008: 83 posts
2009: 57 posts

I also got a little sad that I was no longer filling books as quickly as I had in school. Had I run out of thoughts? Had my brain stopped racing?



Then I realized that the amount of thinking and documenting hadn't changed, but had been spread across many more platforms over the years. I started taking pictures with everything that could take a picture (even my RAZR for a brief moment in 2006, yikes); I flew onto Twitter in 2007 (I have tiny thoughts all the time and this was finally the perfect place for them); I flew onto Tumblr in late 2008 for my medium thoughts (which were once thrown onto my blog with the rest of them). So really, all of this stuff used to be poured into one place: paper. Then two places: paper and a blog. Now: well, you know where I'm going with this...

4,454 pictures on Flickr
3,899 tweets
676 Tumblr posts

I guess the point I'm getting at is that whatever the platform, the thoughts are flying out as much as they ever were. Thanks for sticking around, guys :] you're inspiring as hell, and only get more so.

year two!

Over the weekend, my blog turned two. I have been thinking about where to go from here. I was pretty set on moving onto a different phase in the form of a Tumblr page because it is my nature to express myself in little bytes moreso than in longer form, which I sometimes feel pressured into with a blog. But then as I was sifting through the past year of entries (to link back to particular ones), I got a little emotional. I don't think I'm ready to stop with Cellar Door yet. Things will probably just continue to be erratic, as always. So, some highlights, yes?



The following seven entries weren't necessarily written between 26 January 2007 and now, but here are the ones that get the most traffic other than my index page (mostly from search keywords):

An advantage of living in a small town - people tend to type "advantages of living in a small town" into searches for this one... I guess it's a topic that people think about right before making some sort of big life transition. [link]

Versadome - maybe not a lot of people have written about this, making my entry higher on searches and therefore clicked on. [link]

Lee Jeans Ads - I think this is because people are perverts and like to Google Terry Richardson. [link]

Naked Party and Russell Coffee - about our "Death of the Marketing Model" party in 2006 and meeting Russell Davies for coffee. [link]

We are the Hollow Men - presumably because the piece Dylan Trees guest-wrote won a "post of the month" award from Russell's blog... also because it's a brilliant piece of writing. [link]

Dasepo Naughty Girls - this one is probably mostly due to perverts as well; the search terms tend to combine the words "schoolgirl," "Korean," "naughty" and "girls" in various ways. This is one of my favorite movies though, so check it out. [link]

Heron the blind pimp - pretty straightforward search here: "heron blind pimp." Either lots of people know about this video he made, or... there is some famous pimp out there somewhere who is blind and also named Heron. [link]

These next three are the ones I think about over and over again a million times:

State schemas - the top top one. It's a phrase I made up; I love talking about them, writing about them and telling other people about them. [link]

Typewritten - this one's about analogue v. digital and taking pleasure in rituals (no not that kind, more like steeping tea in a diffuser and the like). I have been thinking about this a lot lately (I recently bought a record player) and want to write about it again but am not sure where to start. [link]

Taxi Driver - comparing the protagonists of Taxi Driver & Buffalo '66. I was trying to explore an archetype here but didn't get very far. [link]

This one deserves its own paragraph: my food photography project in August. It was a very cool experience even though I wanted to die for most of it. What ended up happening was my friend Jason thought it was neat and wrote about it on Mental Floss. Well, that gave me 700 hits in one day. A couple of months later, his writeup was a side link in a Mental Floss-summarized article on CNN, and I got 500 more! hooray. This thing actually got me a gig submitting my food photos for a new Mental Floss food trivia section, so hooray again! Also I was approached last week about two other photography projects, so you'll be hearing more about these soon.



I apparently did a lot of thinking about music & culture, particularly with electronic music:

France, France, France. Para One - about music exploding in France and how much more fun they seem to have than the image-conscious hipsters of New York. [link]

Remix insanity - self explanatory title, I think. [link]

DJs vs. Socialites as the center of attention - related to the France entry. [link]

San Francisco and the UK - genre (music & fashion) blending? - also self explanatory. [link]

I still feel very attached to the entries I wrote about my Mom and Dad.

And I still want to partake in this neon aerobics flashmob type of thing I wrote in Hallo Berlin.

Was that annoying or unnecessary to read? hm. Of course I also met great friends in the past year through this thing, including Tristan (who gives me awesome little electronic musical toys he makes and teaches me how to say things like "I like gummy bears" in Japanese) and Sanithna (who is designing something lovely for me). Hi guys :)

Thanks for reading, everyone. Yes, even you.