Saturday, November 24, 2007

Monday, November 19, 2007

BICAS, Tucson AZ

The Bicycle Kitchen in L.A. (www.bicyclekitchen.com) has been a sort of second home to me since moving to L.A., where I first built a bike 2 weeks after arriving. It moved from the Eco Village to a store front, and has always been such and amazing and impressive space, there was nothing like this in Melbourne, which subsequently meant I never had the tools or the knowledge to fix my own bicycle. Arriving in Tucson numerous people told me about BICAS, but I never quite pictured what they were telling me


The entrance into BICAS


Some of the floats from previous parades


The 'classroom'


The main workshop space


Some of the bicycle frames and parts to be built up


More bikes...


Art-space/store


One of the many stencils outside, and my favourite

A-House dos

So after returning from a summer in Europe and the deserts of Southern Arizona, school pulled me back in and suggested it wasnt a good idea that I move to Tijuana for no apparent reason, and perhaps they were right. Thankfully after a few weeks of couch surfing, apartment minding, and traveling with my mama who was finally able to visit after 3 years, I was able to move to Boyle Heights with my now long-term housing sidekick. A fast-becoming good friend has owned a house in B.H. for some time now, but after years of pack-ratting and not repairing the 100+ years old house, has decided to make it more of a communal space. For now its the three of us, but more will move in as time progresses. Hopefully we will also see the return of Food Not Bombs to the backyard, a house full of bikes, and stupidly loud metal shows complete with scale-model church burning, but as you can see this might take some time...





The outside of the house, the city council has complained and suggested we fix it real soon



The top of the stair case with some missing walls...



Matt's room that we have both been sleeping in. This is when it was half emptied, and before we evicted the pigeons and solved the mosquito infestation problem...





The bathroom...pigeons now evicted and shower installed, but not much else



My room! It now has walls and a roof, but still work to be done

Photos of the kitchen, 3 rooms I didnt know existed, and scary torture-scene bathroom downstairs to come...