Trickle of commuters on Telegraph murmuring a stream of cuties on wheels under the freeway rippled a river of hip kids roaring the galleries on 23rd and Tele. First Friday of May, Art Murmur. As usual, the hurtle of smarted up 20-30umptings churled and chortled at me: “Fly fly! Away away.” But this evening whispered stay, stay…for the bicycle parade.
We skipped down the street to 26th, seeking the bike band and the bicycle tailor’s parade. We wandered into the Vessel Gallery, discovering Cyrus Tilton’s sad-kinetic sculptures. My favorite, this seconded by the 6 year old gallerister playing computer games at the front desk, was a unicyclist pedaling a ferris wheel of birdheaded swings, rocking a nest of hungry angry nestlings.
We rippled again into the melee and heard a tuba room-boom-boom-room-boom a trumpet a trombone! An eight piece cycle-marching band mounted their octacycle before the crowd. We joined up for a couple rounds around the Murmuring block and ringadinged the band-cycle through the Rock-Paper-Scissors alley, saluted by a gauntlet of gigantic steampunk bicyles. Stirred by the room-boom, the recently reposing Golden Mean Snail Car shook up, zipped off and the tricycle contraptions rickracked awake. We and the tiger bike followed them across Broadway, to their secret parking lot behind a bricked and colonnaded facade of mermaids and secret fishes.
Gulping back up from steampunk Atlantis, we encountered another room-boom—crisp and digital. The scraper bike kids wheelie-ing flotsam down Broadway. We followed the teeny-choppers, feeling old and square, and made one final return to Murmur central. Room-boom-boom-room-boom and a string of pearlescent notes from a kora strumming and rawhide drumming from the new Senegalese place, Lamtoro. I saw it, the invisible door, outside of which the watchers tapped nodding, in side of which the watchers sat-sitting. I broke delightedly into the wall of song and rhythm, I dashed off my coat and danced in…gushing in with me a string of dancers dancing fighting clapping jumping laughing laughing…
See you next Friday for some real good West African food and my now favoritest band in Oakland.
Flaming Bike 