On a quiet evening in Seattle, we thought we would take a leisurely stroll around Greenlake; Seattle's urban oasis, where Seattlites go to run, walk, yoga-cize, bike and show off on disco-rollerskates.
There is a 3 mile path that goes around the lake and it makes a nice route for urban athletes to train. Most of the cyclists are families and recreational riders who just want to do a few loops around the lake on a summer's evening.
As we rounded the southern end of the lake, a commotion of bicycles bounced down the path like tsunami of gears and chains. The pack of cycles enveloped the entire trail.
Seeing so many bikes at one time, I naturally took out my phone to capture the event.
It was only then that I noticed that several of the riders were riding in the buff. They were buck naked. Even the jaybirds were blushing.
In an earlier post I made the connection between counter-culture and cycling in America, where, in opposition to the auto-centric lifestyle adopted by most Americans, and in response to a built environment originally conceived exclusively for cars, many urban riders make a point to thumb their noses and give the finger to the automobile lifestyle.
Since before Lady Godiva, nudity and protest have been linked in a long passionate embrace. I think this is especially so in America where there is the historical friction between puritanical ideals and radical liberalism; a conflict that has dogged the USA since the days of Thomas Jefferson.
Where else would the human body, an instrument possessed by every person on earth and limited to two basic configurations of varying similarity, be used so overwhelmingly for its ability to invoke the intense reactions of shock and awe? Still, it is a lot like religion... it doesn't work unless you choose to buy into the program and seek to be motivated by the actors. It is not going to shock and offend unless people wish to be shocked and offended by it.
It reminds me a little bit of immature art students in college who would resort to explicit nudity as a short-cut to imagined poignancy, in which case it is not the viewer who is shocked by the display, but rather the imagination of the artist who harbors those feelings and projects them onto an imagined audience in a similar vein as Marcel Duchamp's deconstructionist joke, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, a piece in which the actors depicted in the work are physically separated on different panes of glass and therefore the masturbating bachelors are not being turned on by the bride, but rather by their own imaginations as they can not possibly occupy the same space as their object and thus Duchamp expresses that the emotion we feel for others is actually our own subjectivity projected outward, thus turning ourselves on rather than being turned on by others. It shows the actor's own perceptions [and insecurities]. I remember very clearly in college when a group of lesbians decided to go down to the mall and grope, kiss and flash senior citizens in an attempt to be normalized by society. Riiiiiight..... huh!
In this case at Greenlake, nudity was somehow being used to draw attention to cycling, but in fact it may detract from the message. I found it odd that a few months ago there was an attempt to do the same type of protest in Taiwan. I have no idea how the event went off.
I wonder how many hits this post will get. Everyone is a total perv whether they'll admit it or not.
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