Currently watching: Still We Ride!

Still We Ride! is a fast-paced, angry documentary about the Critical Mass bicycle rides in New York City. Currently, I hate The Man.

Critical Mass calls itself, or some particpant/s call it, "an unorganized coincidence" of bicycler -community get-togethers of as many as 50,000 people that occur in cities throughout the world, typically on the last Friday of every month. The rides are sometimes seen as protests and the participants are sometimes referred to as members of a social movement, but Critical Mass is leaderless and therefore official-missionless. Bikers just know where to be and when and then shitloads of them show-up, standing for whatever they want to stand for, or not standing for anything at all, just out for a ride. This has all been going on monthly since the first ride in 1992 in San Fransisco.

Still We Ride! focuses on the shift in authorities' attitudes about Critical Mass that largely came about on the day of the ride in New York City that fell within the dates of the Republican National Convention in August of 2004. On that day, 264 cyclists were arrested as, according to the film, Critical Mass was cited in some cop handbook as a form of protest to be looking out for. And now, it's basically an all-out war between Critical Mass participants and the cops. The film focuses on the NYPD, but I youtubed "Critical Mass" and found, among many others, this video posted last Friday of a cyclist being thrown off her bike by cops in Minneapolis:



Now, frankly, I've always been a little unsure about bicyclists. I have yet to meet a person regularly uses a bicycle who is not fanatical, or near-fanatical about said usage. I'm being serious. Bicyclists are weird. But I think part of the reason that I'm so judgey about bicyclists is because I can sort of see myself slipping into that weird bicyclist parallel universe, and I'm being defensive. Every once in a while, I borrow my friend Quinn's bike to get places on campus, and I must say, it's thrilling. And it's not just that. Bike-riding is better for the environment than driving, and faster than walking. And Still I Ride!, although it is definitely the product of the fanatical bike-types mentioned above, makes a pretty strong case for the coolness of the bicycling community. There's even footage of a pretty sweet post-ride dance-party that the cops break-up.

My brother Michael does this thing to torture me where he holds his finger really close to my eye, almost touching my eyelashes, but not. And when I start freaking out, he says, "What? I'm not even touching you." I start to push his finger away by head-butting him, and he says, "See, now you're touching me and I don't appreciate that." That's kind of like Critical Mass, I think. The cyclists, even though going into it they know they are going to piss off the authorities, when they get arrested ask, "What? I'm just riding my bike!" It's hilarious.

As the credits of Still I Ride! roll, they show footage of some arrested Critical Mass participants in the back of a paddy-wagon and one of them says, "Well, at least we're not wasting gas! We're car-pooling!"


P.S. Andrew, if you're still reading this, I vaguely remember critical mass as a physics concept? Perhaps you could explain the reference to me?