Clavier Crashes On San Francisco Street

He performed in front of the Bataclan in Paris just after terrorists attacked it in 2015:



And he's played in all sorts of "trouble spots", including war zones, all over the world.

Wherever he's gone, Davide Martello, a.k.a. Klavierkunst, has played the baby grand piano he's brought with him.  

Aside from his playing, what's interesting about him is the way he's transported his instrument--behind a bicycle.

That worked very well for him, even on some rugged terrain.  But neither his bike nor his piano made could navigate one American city's geography.

Ironically, he was on his way to San Francisco's Hyde Street Pier, a more peaceful spot than others in which he's played.  He was "in a hurry" to get there and find a parking spot, he said, when he started riding down Bay Street between Columbus and Leavenworth.  

What he didn't realize, until it was too late, is that particular stretch of Bay Street has a 17.4 percent gradient.  While Martello, his piano and his bike have survived all sorts of attacks and indignities, his brakes were no match for the descent.

He doesn't yet know whether the piano is salvageable.  At least he didn't get hurt:  He jumped off the bike before it crashed.

Together, They Are Better Than Nothing

In October, Anchorage (Alaska) Assembly member Christopher Constant introduced an ordinance that would have required the city's bicycle owners to register their bikes on a free online database, or face fines.  

I've never been to Alaska, so perhaps my perception of its people is a stereotype:  If nothing else, they are rugged individualists.  Somehow I don't think people end up there by following the crowd.

Whatever the truth about them may be, the citizens of The Last Frontier's largest city lived up to my perception when their outcry over the fines forced Constant to withdraw his proposal.

While bike registration isn't a deterrent against theft and certainly doesn't guarantee that a stolen bike will be reunited with its owner, it does make it easier to get the bike back to whoever bought, rides and loves it.  And registering the bike, and keeping a record of the bike's serial number in your own records will make it easier to prove that a bike is yours--especially if it's a common model--if it is recovered.

All of that, of course, assumes that the serial number is still on the bike.  As often as not, if the bike ends up in a "chop shop", the serial number is removed.  The same thing often happens to other stolen items that are re-sold. In Alaska, those items include propane tanks.

Constant--the same assembly member who introduced the failed bike-registration mandate--has just introduced another law that would make it a misdemeanor to remove a serial number from a bicycle or any other merchandise.  It passed unanimously on Tuesday night.

I concur with Austin Quinn-Davidson, another Anchorage Assembly member, who said that this measure won't, by itself, do much to combat theft.  She believes thieves will simply find ways to do their work without tampering with serial numbers.  While the new law is a "first step," the city needs to "come in and get registration up," she said.

She is right, but even the combination of registration and a ban on removing serial numbers will only put a dent in the city's bicycle theft epidemic, just as similar measures in other places would help, if only somewhat.

A Response To The Climate Crisis, 200 Years Ago

What do Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the first mass migration from New England to points south and west, and the draisienne have in common?

Well, they all came to be within a few months of each other, in 1816-17.  The reason for that, though, might surprise you:  Climate change.  Well, sort of.

Yes, that was an issue two centuries ago, though no one saw it as (or called it) that.  All people knew was that in North America and Europe, the weather was unusually cold and the skies preternaturally dark.  

In fact, 1816 is still called "the year without a summer."  In the eastern United States, according to Michael Wysession, "Crops failed, winter rains were freezing, it snowed in summer; there was mass starvation."  As a result, he said, "whole towns in New England actually decided to pack up and leave," causing the migration I mentioned at the beginning of this post.  

Meanwhile, "Europe was also devastated," Wysession added.  The Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri) Earth and Planetary Sciences professor says that, while experiencing "massive flooding", the weather was "cold, bleak and rainy" through much of the Continent--including the shores of Lac Leman, a.k.a. the Lake of Geneva.

That's where 18-year-old Shelley, then known as Mary Godwin (She would later marry the poet Percy Bysse Shelley.) went for a summer vacation with Lord Byron and writer-physician John Polidori.  But when they got there, the weather was cold and the atmosphere gloomy. While holed up in their lakeside lair, they read, aloud, from Fantasmagoriana, a French collection of German horror tales.  

That inspired the writers to a competition to see who could write the best horror story.  Byron, renowned for his poetry, wrote a fragment of a story but abandoned it.  We don't know what Polidori wrote during that Swiss soujourn, but he later used Byron's fragment as the basis for The Vampyre, the first vampire story published in English.  

And the story Godwin came up with became--you guessed it--Frankenstein.

Around the time she was writing it, and Yankees were moving across the frontiers, a fellow in Germany attached two wheels to a wooden frame that was hinged at the front.  The part in front of the hinge included, in addition to the front wheel, the handlebar.  

He called his creation the Laufmaschine.  When it was reproduced in France and England, it was called, respectively, the Draisienne (in honor of its creator, Karl von Drais) and the hobby-horse (for its shape).  It is often seen as the forerunner of the bicycle.

What is almost never mentioned, however, is what motivated von Drais to come up with it:  the same climate crisis that led to the New England exodus and Frankenstein.  When crops fail, humans aren't the only ones who starve and die.  Animals, including oxen and horses, can also fall victim, as they did in 1816-17.  Some that didn't die outright were killed by their owners who couldn't afford to feed them.

So, with all of those animals dead or dying, a new mode of transportation was needed.  Von Drais was trying to provide it.


Because they didn't have electronic communications and 24-hour news cycles in those days, people on each side of the Atlantic didn't realize, until later, that they were experiencing the same conditions unsuited to growing food for humans or animals as folks on the other side of the pond were enduring.  And it wasn't until still later that anyhone realized those catastrophes had a common root:  the colossal volcanic eruption of Indonesia's Mount Tambora in 1815.  Many scientists think it was the largest such explosion in history:  It was heard more than 2000 kilometers away, reduced Tambora's maximum elevation from 4300  to 2850 meters (14,100 to 9300 feet) and spewed enough ash to filter or even block sunlight more than halfway around the world.

The effect was so great that even though the Earth had been warming somewhat for more than a century after the "mini ice age" of the 17th Century, several years of unusually cold weather (including the summer-less 1816) followed.

So, the forerunner of the bicycle was a response, if unwitting, to temporary climate change.  And getting more people to ride bicycles today is one of the best responses we can make to the crisis in climatic change that faces us today.