http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb-OGqo9NgQ

they travel the world on their handmade bikes... they share joyness wherever they go... they are all nice guys and musicians so fine... thank you circus dayz for the... cyclowns..!!!

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids....

Crete is super cool about now and we did some real big shows. It was our cd release party for our new cd "Aera Patera" . They also played the Cyclown documentary The show took place at the Stiki Immigrant Center, in old town Hania. They said it was the most people they ever had in the Immigrant Center. We are now on our way to a party for "name day"Adonnis.
Next week we will be bike riding to Rethimno and Iraklio on the other side of the island.We have some contacts and we are looking forward to riding in the sun in Crete.
Athens was great, Riots and Recording !We made the new cd in Athens. Jimmy from Athens found us a great studio, real professional. We just finished mixing it and I think its the best Cyclown cd yet! We decided to name the new cd "Aera Patera" wich is a Greek saying that loosly translates to "anything goes". Jimmy is really the the Athens dood of doods, he gave us such a nice house in Katahacki. Plenty of space and no problem with noise. Even the weekend parties turned out GREAT, Jimmy had rent parties on Friday and Saturday nites, renting the house out for money, at wich time we would  put all our things  in the upstairs room,then we  go out to perform for our weekend shows and sleep in the circus workshop, (thank you Costas). We would then return on Sunday to a clean house with a full, and I mean FULL bar. The party people in Greece never finish all the booze they buy so they leave it all at the house.Therefore thecircus drinks it all !! Love live the Greeks !!

Red  Beans and Rice
Cyclowns

hi there folks!
   You may have heard the news from Athens about the riots - well, its not my fault! The anarchists hold the government hostage - really illogical but impressive. However, it makes me respect the government more than the anarchists in some ways. A boy was shot 3 nights ago by a policeman for something in Athens - he was a 16 year old punk and was speeding or something - and he died and so now every city in greece is experiencing riots from  he local anarchists. On the first night the shops in the centre of Athens were all smashed - banks, tourist cafes, make up shops, fasionable clothes stores .. anything that looks rich so i was fine on my cranky old bike - expensive cars burnt, banks or travel agencies burnt! And the same thing the day before yesterday and last night. I was busking around 7pm and all the shops were shutting early and putting wooden or metal barriers up infront of their windows. I went back to the place where we are staying and there were burning bins everywhere and tear gas in the air - my eyes were pinched and crying and the air was really cruel. Burning plastics and worse than any toxic farts in the closet or long lost moulding socks in the locker! There were several huge demonstrations - the students collected by each university but I came across the communist party demonstatrion. It must have been over 8000 people all walking in lines like a volunteer army. The first 1000 people were all really in file with sticks held by people on the front and sides of the 'toirtoise' and one guy out in front with a megaphone shouting the chants which the host would all repeat like the dead or people repeating mass in church - brain washing is fun!!! Apart from that there was no talking until the more mixed people at the back of the procession arrived. They all carried the same KKE red flags and no home made banners at all. The scene made me uncomfortable and impressed me with a kind of dread. One girl rushed up to me and said - where are you going? Omonia square? Dont go there it's a mess! I guess I stood out because i was in my new red pants, striped boating jacket and had my not very anachist orange pompom on my cap while most most other people on the streets were in black or dark colours. OK, i took the back street and that was where the gas was hanging in the air and burning trash cans were floating across the empty roads! Ormonia square must have been much worse!
    The police were nowhere to be seen - because the rioters really want to fight them and I would be quite scared as a policeman in greece now! The hatred is illogical - the policeman who killed the boy is under trial so justice is being done but they just love rioting and smashing things up. Everyday probably hundreds of kids are killed in road accidents in greece but no-one cares. Nice people, though - generally and they know how to make the sun shine - it is warm and sunny again today - there will be the same mopping up in town until the night falls and then the same or increased chaos - but not for us! we are going sailing to an island near athens on Fred's sailing boat. I was thinking of making a little profit from the times - getting trollies full of bricks to sell - maybe inventing the boomarang brick with an elastic atttachment so it comes back to you.
"Get ya batton - 5euros deposit and you loose it if you come back in more than an hour or it gets smashed! Looks great with a helmet! Roll up roll up, burning bins - youll have one mam - that will be 10 euros, would you like me to ignite it for you - ok youll do it later - very good! The kerosene has already been put in! Coctails coctails - fresh Molotov coctails! Masks, loot sacks, burning sticks - fresh burning sticks!!! roll up roll up!"
No I think i will go sailing!
 Last night channing dressed up like a sheep and i dressed up in a red and white dress and tom in a business suit and gabi took his tall bike and we cycled into town to go looting - gabi wanted new shoes and i was looking for christmas presents and maybe a new guitaraleli. We had to turn back one street because there was too much tear-gas so we went to some other streets but all the owners of the broken shops were waiting in the doorways so we could not loot. One little kiosk was smashed up and we got a comic and some drinks and a broken pair of sunglasses. Basically there was nothing left! Everywhere all the bins were burnt out or destroyed and the big plastic christmas tree in the main square had been burnt and in fact looked much more like a real christmas tree - just no decoration now! There were several banks on fire and we passed the university where several rioters were throwing things at the riot police and the riot police backed away! I was amazed! What a democracy! Well, at least it would suggest that human life is more important here than material things but I dont know what to say really.
  
 

dear friends
 i hope you are all well.
    i am in napoli, in southern italy, under an archway in the entrance to the courtyard of the faculty of oriental studies. To my right is the AM disc jockey - a coffee coloured dude with a gamblers visor that traps the smoke that seeps from his nose and lips when he opens them to imbibe coffee. He has not slept yet - he waits for the sun to rise (around 6am) and then plays really loud music that wakes me up better than a cannon or avalanch. The music is not so cool but at least i am new to Italian rock and there is one song i really like 'te voglio bene Denver' (I really love you Denver) sung in a kiddies voice about Denver the Dinasaur with a Japonese funky backing. The dude's coffee is kept in a little plastic cup covered with tin foil to keep it warm although down here there is no danger of things getting cool quick. After our frozen adventures in northern france we have already discarded our jackets and extra jumpers and are sporting shorts and loose shirts into the early hours - okey, basta with the tropicana-rama.

I am sitting at a desk set up in the courtyard of the said faculty which has been occupied in portest to the Italian governments decision to charge fees for sstudying at university. We had been sleeping in parks and empty train carriages or whereever we could all the way from pisa about a week ago. We arrived in napoli with no accomodation planned and whadyaknow-joe? The building opposite from where we chose to do our show is a huge squated university faculty with students reluctantly drawn into political action (full time political squats are usually less preferable to the park) who opened their arms and their hearts to us ...  for real! We are given free dinner and lunch and if Maga - our lovely interloccutor - spots that we are running out of bread, cereal or sugar she looks quelulous and vows to rush off to get some. We were given so many sweet cakes on the first night of our performance that even Bots was defeated and we offered a free dolce with our cds and then just gave them away to any peasant who wanted to eat cake. The buliding is closed to usual study but several teachers are still teaching in protest to the government - outside in Piazza Santa Domenico under the tall ornate religious monument blackboards and small flocks of chairs are occupied and vacated by students and teachers as if nothing had changed except street dogs wander through class, the students and teachers smoke throughout the lesson and occationally a motorcycle or street cleaning van roar past demanding a small pause in the clarification of Pharsi plural noun endings. A local kid with a bright red football under his arm stands at the back of the invisible class looking on as the bearded (likely atheist and probably communist linguistic teacher) explains the history of Korea pausing to scratch the names of emperors, epochs and barbaric rebel leaders in Korean on the small board and explaining the order of strokes for complicated chinese characters.

In Napoli it takes a lot of effort not to just write about all the hot chicks perched on every bollard and strutting down the cobbled lanes. Gladly, it would be doing the discription of Napoli a big injustice not to talk about the beauty of the place in every way: the wild splendour of the narrow streets full of trash, decrepid houses, expressive mad gestures of wild taxi drivers, fantastic food, drink and icecreams and of course the proud dark haired beauty of the men and women dressed to the pins at all times in total oblivion of the muck and squalor around them. Italian writers who did not dedicate their art to elogies of love must either have been bloodless or guided by some kind of superior vision (like the dude who wrote Pinocchio). What is most arresting about people's appearance is how well they compliment the surroundings - like the legendary tiger burning bright in the jungle, the cormorant perched on a salty wave soaked rock, the quiet field mouse curled in his nest on a tall ear of golden wheat... just so the old Napolitan sitting outside his shop, the young man talking on the phone with his legs crossed as he rides his moped without lights on in the unlit nightly streets, the waiters in bow-ties rushing down the street with a tray full of expressos, ice-cream maids dressed in dark pink pinnifores and matching peaked berrets serving pistacchio, opel, marine, blood red and vermillion ice balls parlours, gypsy children, old ladies, nuns in penguin costumes, Domenican friers in dark curtain like robes wound up with a stretch of rope, priests with stratosphericly thick spectacle lenses etc etc etc.............
Yesterday we played a gig in some other occupied university faculty. It was a pretty wild event but it ended in a breakdance throw down which trickled into a pockets of artistic activity - musicians jamming out,others chatting there, people dancing yonder. Roberto was giving Tom, Gabi and I some breakdance tips and as he spoke he spilt a tiny droplet of water from his bottle. I watched in fascination as he knotted his brows, pulled out a tiny angel white tissue from his pocket and bent down to dap away the tiny little ants puddle of spilt water while apologising in the courtyard which had obviously not been given a decent clean for months if not years.

So this is our current situation, we will probably stay here until the big demonstration on saturday and then head for greece. As it often goes with life on the move, the immediate present is too interesting to recall the recent past, Our journey from Pisa to Napoli was not without a lot of adventure and fun and parties and happy experiences. In Livorno myself (Jimbino vegan), tom and Gabi met up with the cyclowns and did a wild show with local blues musicians in Boccaccione bar (wheelbarrrow bar) and were paid in delicious food and drink, smiles, laughter and things much more memorable than sweaty coins or lifeless bank notes. From there we travelled to Pisa and rocked a party in a squatted church then slept like babies on the banks of the Arno before rocking the handcraft market the next morning with our mixture of breakdance, jazz, blues and circus. From there we took the train to Grossetta at the southern end of Tuscany on sunday night. We rocked the shopping street with our massive high powered show with tom, bots and me as a roaring brass section while Gabi threw himself about the floor and smiled like a rabbit in a sack of carrots. We met
Meschia and Lulu at a pizzeria and Channing turned up as well from someplace. We stuffed ourselves with pizza and then asked at some half empty bar if they needed a band for the night. They had not taken down their haloween decorations from the night before which was a good thing because without the synthetic cobwebs the place would have been far too spanky for us to go near without feeling like  cats on the kitchen table. We were given red wine in big glasses that made you feel elegant just holding them and other local goodies served like offerings to the gods. Maschia sang with a voice as loud as a fireman in hell and as goodly as a gardener in the sunshine and Johney tucked in all the edges with his bass glue and charismatic bright energy. Happy, warm-bellied, light headed, smiling and cracking jokes we cycled out of town to the banks of the river just over the levy where the circus had slept one night 4 long years ago. Tom told us fantastic bedtime stories and before going to sleep i heard johney mumbling to himself
"Sometimes you know when things are really good!"
   the next morning we cycled along hte levy looking for a nice ride after about three hours cycling through mud and along small rocky paths i got 2 punctures trying to find a road south and we all laughed and cycled back to grossetto which took about 20 minutes on the main road. The morning prooved that you dont have to go far to get no-where but who should we meet on our way back to the station to take the train to roma but carlos -the original cyclown who i had not seen for over 4 years! We all travelled to roma, did a huge show in piazza Navona and 8 of us squeezed into a spanish girls bedroom while the others slept in a park. The blinds were pulled down and I paniced in the morning thinking i had missed my rendez vous with johney in the park and jumped up in the pitch black room - the darkness stole my sence of balance and i fell into the wardrope mirror and woke everyone up. luckerly it was morning and not 4 am. we let the sunlight in and had well needed showers then cycled into town and took a train to napoli.
   This is only the barest outline of the adventures, many jokes, enthusiastic wild happy responces we have received and fun we have had. I could have written several more hours about the dancing taxi drivers who bought us spagetti and bread last night, the festive dancing and singing of napolitan traditional music and live music through the night, the wild maestro napolitan bass player and his drunken african band or the football fan who plied us with wine on the train to napoli and every member of the circus are worthy subjects of portraits in words that would be spell binding tales of different peoples struggle along different roads to this common cause: stories full of passion, trouble, revelation, beauty and joy but to write any more would be to miss the tale being told around me as i speak.
    So with the blessings of the camarra, the benediction of the student occupation and the blessings of the sunshine over greece that is calling us I sign off yours truely
   jimbino vegan

travellin' thru thailand - me and you ...
were not even married yet, but this could be our honeymoon.
"isnt your boyfriend coming back soon?"
i sure hope so for your sake - sigh, sigh, swoon.
so let's bike a few K until we hit the highway.
and then we'll stick out our hands and flag down a truck.
'cause your as red as a lobster and im annoyed as fuck!
then we'll get trapped in a beachtown with nothin' but "farong".
we'll play shows until we're sweaty and have to take an "ab-nam"
and i'll say "lets have som-tom, tom!"
and you'll say- "you're buying, cause bot's ran out of baht, hon".
yeah, we're a travellin' bike circus that lost part of it's circus...
they ran home to mommy and some went bezerkus.
whateve's, we got the "girls" now and we're bikin' thru Lao.
im pushing and sweating and you're eating hella cow-neo.
but not for too long- cause soon we're waving "nee-hao!"
searched at the border and they stamp our one month visas.
our magician disappears and then my bike breaks down into pieces.
it's lots of spicy-oily food and loud, curious people.
oh, i'd stay with you thru mongolia dear, but im feelin' kind of feeble.
so now it's a one-man show with a slap-stick-fall-down clown
big red nosed, on his red tall bike he'll go... from town to town.
so keep your chin up dude and don't worry -we'll meet soon again
i had a kick ass "summer" and you're a killer, awesome friend!

These days, global warming seems to be a buzz word. I see the phrase printed in advertisements, preached in the press, and tonight, I saw a major motion picture whose theme was an ice age triggered by the breakup of ice in Antarctica. It is typical of Hollywood to glamorize an issue that needs serious address.

The film was a bit farfetched, of course, following a rich Los Angeles tradition of desensitization and strict avoidance of presenting a solution to the problems of our era. However, I feel that it accurately portrayed the political stance of laissez faire when the fictional vice president reprimanded the hero of the film, a climatologist who "predicted" the catastrophe, resorting to namecalling and boisterously proclaiming that he wanted to see the economy collapse by encouraging the commonfolk to more environmentally friendly lifestyles. Sound familiar? Neither handled the situation too well. The climatologist became nervous and angry, but bravely stuck to his guns and decided that the fate of mankind was more valuable than his career in the government meteorological equivalent of the CIA. Alas, too late for the humans, for the proverbial shitsickle hit the deep freeze fan when New York succombed to a blizzard unlike any seen since the eruption at what’s now Danau Toba decimated the human population, and 99.9 percent of the population north of the Mason-Dixon line perished in the storm, like the mammoths of ancient times.

I see each day a plethora of the panicking populace popping prose about politicians whose pockets are lined with the profits of the petroleum magnates. But what are these worry warts doing to change the situation, to ensure that this generation and those that follow are not plagued by our own selfish mistakes?

In all honesty, we, the Cyclown Circus, feel that most efforts that the majority of the western world are making in order to prevent such catastrophes from occurring, whether they pass tomorrow, in 2012, or in 250 years from now, are minimal at best. Enormous chain supermarkets still bid you farewell with the familiar "paper or plastic" without asking you to consider where those bags are heading afterwards. Why are they still, in this modern era of recognition, gripping to these outdated techniques? For years, each itinerant Cyclown has tried to bring his or her own bags to the market and to encourage others to follow suit. It’s easy to carry a few canvas bags stuffed into one another and fill them up with our rice, our vegetables, our meat, our tofu and our tempe, our soy milk and our bovine milk, and whatever else we need to sustain ourselves and nourish our poor wretched selves yearning to be free. My own mother has brought me up with a selection of small, medium, and large mugs to carry with me to coffee shops in order to minimize the number of paper and plastic cups that litter those ubiquitous landfills and the golf courses that wastefully cover them. But few seem to be catching on.

Traffic continues to worsen. Major cities all over the world appear to be pimples on the verge of a great pop of hydrocarbon pus. Why? Don’t people tire of the traffic jams that retard their commute to their dream jobs at the bank? Can they not cycle to work and realize that, once and for all, their mantra of "I don’t have time" and "I am late" are purposeless? Those poor souls mentioned above seem to always have a problem with time management, whereas I seem to be chronically punctual to every event that I plan. It is a trap that seems to provide some sort of masochistic pleasure to a myriad commuter each morning as they lay on their horns in a fruitless attempt to hurry the bumper to bumper rush up a notch from its salted slug and terrapin triple-amputee crawl.

To those faithful readers, I say act now. Don’t defend yourselves or the lifestyle you lead or led, no matter how "sustainable" you think it to be, but continually ask yourself how you are creating an impact on this earth, in both a positive and negative way. When the positive impact finally outweighs the negative (no Cyclown has yet arrived at that point, but we try…) then encourage others towards your methods. You’ll find that many of these, including cycling, are easy and fun, and keep you healthy. Disable the weightloss industry, disable hollywood, ensure that our televisions are not clogged with such programs as "Celebrity Weightloss Mega Bootcamp Uber Training Facility Incorporated" and get healthy by eating properly and exercising! Cripple the logging industry by eating vegetables so that we can keep the last of the remaining rainforests.

Thanks!