Discovered the World Naked Bike Ride today, in the July / August 2005 issue of George Street Letters, a magazine put together by Dr. Robert Budde of UNBC here in Prince George. I got the magazine last night and read it from cover to cover, which is odd because I only glance at other magazines and newspapers and get my world news from CBC 1, most days, because the TV coverage is so long-winded and feels untrustworthy somehow. I use the web a lot, but not for news, as a rule, unless it is to check out something I've heard about for more information, like the supposedly banned MTV ad that came past me last week via e-mail. (Interesting ad, but I'm leaning in the direction of hoax, given the dearth of main stream media coverage of such a ban and lack of details available about it on the internet, such as exactly what branch of "the US Government" was responsible for banning the ad and under the jurisdiction of what law, as my brother-in-law pointed out. But I digress.)

This entry is about the World Naked Bike Ride and why I learned about an international phenomenon of interest to me via a local arts and culture newsletter instead of from somewhere else.

The World Naked Bike Ride gave me courage. So much of the news of the world can be summed up with: "Those who have the most want more. Those who 'have not' are either getting so nasty about it that it makes you sick, or else they are dieing quietly in ways that make you numb with grief for humanity." Not so much fun to go and dunk yourself in, voluntarily, at the end of a day's work. People who do things like the World Naked Bike Ride, to protest the values of unthinking consumption, have managed to side step the Great Big Fat Rule that goes something like this: "Take nothing seriously unless it makes you rich, famous or powerful." Naked bikers are advocating a better quality of life through the simple expedient of saying "no" to the barons of industry who keep insisting we cannot be happy without a newer, bigger and better whatever it is we currently have the older, smaller and less snazzy version of at the moment. They are even doing it politely, albeit stark naked. No one has to get brutally murdered. And the pictures make you smile to look at because the naked folks in them look so very human and completely unashamed of it.

Why I encountered my ration of morale lifter via the George Street Letters magazine is also interesting. Viewing myself strictly as a field subject in my own brand of personal, mico-anthropological field work, I think it reflects a preference for reading something written by people I know, that might mention things I have personally experienced, and have something to say that makes me feel like part of a community, instead of staring slack jawed at some far distant citadel of media mega-wallop that offers me the unappetizing choices of either worship from afar, despite increasing doubts about its motives and integrity, or being suckered into the fantasy that glitzy offers to add my bit of input actually constitute meaningful dialogue.

Speaking to smaller audiences may be the inevitable cost of idiosyncratic publishing, whether the medium is a blog like Reality Skimming or a community newsletter like George Street Letters. But damn it all, there's something "real" about it. And it can still connect you up with the global picture, when necessary, like one of a myriad creeks that flow into a thousand different rivers.
posted by Lynda at 09:57   comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments