Cycling Shorts: Short Documentaries About Bicycles By Joe Biel

Description

What is bicycle culture? It's what you make of it. Anything can happen: Activists educate the policymakers. Bureaucrats create whimsical public art. Strangers help each other move house by bike. Corporations turn their drive-thrus into bike thrus. Joe Biel's short movies explore all these phenomena and more as he follows the emergence of modern bike culture over the last ten years of riding the streets of US cities and meeting the characters who are making the magic happen. The twenty-eight short documentaries include Martinis in the Bike Lane, One Less Truck, Burgerville's Bike-Thru, Training for Carmageddon, Hunter-Gatherers Never Looked This Good, Disabled Cyclists, Sunday Parkways, Last Train Out of North America, and many more.

Joe Biel is the founder of Microcosm Publishing and the creator of the documentary about the DIY music scene,If It Ain't Cheap, It Ain't Punk. He is the coauthor of 13 Years of Good Luck and the author ofBipedal, By Pedal!; all volumes of the CIA Makes Science Fiction Unexciting series; the Perfect Mix Tape Segue series; andYou Can Work Any Hundred Hours a Week You Want (In Your Underwear)!! He lives in Portland, Oregon.

The films cover mostly serious issues surrounding the safety of bicyclists and pedestrians on the roads with cars. I ride my bike as my mean means of transportation, so seeing other cities' bicycle activities can be interesting. My favorite film is One Less Truck, a documentary about Tom LaBonty who makes cargo bikes. He discusses his craft while you get to watch him make one. It is very fascinating though it is hard to imagine how riding one of them would actually feel. I don't doubt the sincerity of Biel's cycling obsession, however, occasionally the films veer off into self-parody. But that can be amusing even if unintentional. - Maximum Rocknroll