Bike Culture

Bike Kill

Bike Kill is annual Tall and Mutant Bike event organized and hosted by members of the Black Label Bike Club. The event is held in Brooklyn at the end of October and features bike jousting, debouchery and destruction.  Similar bike gangs from across the country are usually in attendence.

Recommended by Tod Seelie

Black Label Bike Club

The Black Label Bike Club is an international freak/mutant bicycle organization specializing in tall bikes and choppers.

Started in 1992 by Jacob Houle and Per Hanson as the "Hard Times Bike Club" in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the club has grown to include a chapter in New York, Reno, Austin and a Nomad Chapter loosely based out of New Orleans known as "Nowhere".

The Black Label Bike Club are one of the main contributors to the rise of the tall bike culture and are credited with being the first "outlaw bicycle club", as well as the originators of tall bike jousting.

Recommended by Tod Seelie

Critical Mass

Critical Mass is a bicycling event typically held on the last Friday of every month in over 300 cities around the world.

Much of the media's preception of Critical Mass rides have often highlighted the group's protest activities,  and while the ride was originally founded with the idea of drawing attention to how unfriendly the city was to bicyclists, the participants have insisted that these events should be viewed as "celebrations" and spontaneous gatherings, and not as protests or organized demonstrations.

Recommended by Tod Seelie

Ducati Monster

The Monster is a motorcycle designed by Miguel Angel Galluzzi and has been produced by Ducati Motor Holding in Bologna, Italy since 1993. It is of the naked bike style, which is characterized by a sport bike with a fully exposed engine and frame. In 2005, Monster sales accounted for over half of Ducati's worldwide sales. Ducati motorcycles are best-known for their L-twin Desmodromic valve engines (also known as a 90° V-Twin) and tubular steel trellis chassis, both features designed by the late Fabio Taglioni (1920–2001).

Recommended by Johnny Iuzzini

Ducati ST4

The ST series were Italian sport touring motorcycles made by Ducati between 1998 and 2007. The models included (in order of release) the ST2, ST4, ST4s, ST3, ST3s.

Recommended by Johnny Iuzzini

Josh Hadar

After Josh Hadar left his first career as a documentary cameraman he entered the nightclub business by reforming and restoring the original Studio 54.  This didn't make him happy either so he eventually sold his shares and took a cheap welding class. Shortly after, he created his first bike and his obsession took off from there.

Today, Josh has become sort of a George Barris-like character, whose custom built bikes are collected by a cult following around the world.

Bike Builder

Luigi Colani Designer

"Whenever we talk about biodesign we should simply bear in mind just how amazingly superior a spider’s web is to any load-bearing structure man has made – and then derive from this insight that we should look to the superiority of nature for the solutions. If we want to tackle a new task in the studio, then it’s best to go outside first and look at what millenia-old answers there may already be to the problem." Luigi Colani

Recommended by Josh Hadar

S. Clay Wilson

S. Clay Wilson is an American underground cartoonist and central figure in the underground comix movement. Wilson is known for aggressively violent and sexually explicit panoramas of "lowlife," often depicting the wild escapades of pirates and bikers.

He was an early contributor to Zap Comix, and Wilson's artistic audacity has been cited by R. Crumb as a liberating source of inspiration for Crumb's own work.

Recommended by Spain Rodriguez

Tod Seelie

Tod Seelie is a prolific photographer who's spent the last decade documenting Brooklyn’s underground band and bike culture.

Photographer

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