On Friday I went on Critical Mass. I captured some footage on my phone and spent a few hours at weekend editing it. I uploaded it to Vimeo on Sunday evening, and on Monday found the top referrer to the video was a Portuguese language cycling blog.
The blog accompanied the video with a paragraph that meant nothing to me. After I put it into Babel Fish it meant everything to me. I saw the video as akin to a doodle, but the broken English it provoked was brilliant poetry.
I do not know well what it originated this tension. I read some opinions however but that they seem to divergir. In the critical mass it has participants. Each individual integrates it with its proper idea. It is not alone for bicycles, to the times has skates, skids, chairs of wheels and other ways of locomotion human being. They are about people and is the number that makes of the movement its force. It does not have organizadores, does not have gliding scripts. It has joy, celebration, freedom. In more than 300 cities around of the world it happens when sets of ten, hundreds or thousand of ciclistas if congregate to occupy its space in the established streets and to more create a counterpoint to the half ones of urban transport. We are transit.
Gliding scripts! Have you ever heard a more inspiring description of a map? If a map was ever meant to provoke exploration and possibility, then “gliding script” is the first time its name has matched its potential.
I’ve read millions of words of English done “right”. Few of them have been this entertaining or interesting.
