A beautiful piece named “Bicicletas” (Bicycles) by Chilean guitarist and composer Horacio Salinas. From the album Música para cine Vol. 1 (Music for Cinema Vol. 1).
Category: Cycling and Music, Cinema, Art
A very beautiful photo by the German-American portrait and documentary photographer Evelyn Hofer (January 21, 1922 – November 2, 2009): Girl with Bicycle, Dublin, 1966.
“Le Ride” is a cycling documentary, which follows two cyclists, Phil Keoghan (also the director of the film) and his friend Ben Cornell as they attempt to recreate the original route of the 1928 Tour de France. Averaging 240 km a day for 26 days, Phil and Ben traverse both the unforgiving mountains of the Pyrenees and the Alps, on original vintage steel racing bikes with no gears and marginal brakes.
This is the story of the last record attempt of Giuliano Calore, a racing cyclist, world champion of extreme cycling, holder of 13 records, and won 98 medals. He was born in Padova (north-east Italy) in 1938. The movie is titled “48 Tornanti di Notte” (48 Hairpin Bends at Night) tells about his most impressive challenge so far: descending from the Stelvio Pass – at an altitude of 2758 m – at night, with all of its 48 hairpin turns, on a bike with no handlebars or brakes, illuminated only by a torch and moonlight.
Famous Turkish Jazz musician and keen cyclist Yahya Dai (a friend of mine) composed a song for the Tour de France 2014 winner Vincenzo Nibali and performed it with his daughter Damla. Enjoy.
Today’s historic photo of the day: well, it’s actually not a photo of a cyclist, just a photo of a magazine – 11 August 1960 edition of “The Adventures of Tintin”. “Il Campionissimo” Fausto Coppi was on the cover of the magazine.
Fausto Coppi was not alive when the magazine was published.
Today’s historic photo of the day: Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali smoking cigars in “Totò al Giro d’Italia” (Totò in Giro d’Italia), a 1948 Italian comedy film directed by Mario Mattoli and starring Totò.
Another cycling-related song. This time, from Tom Waits: Broken bicycles. A very, very beautiful, romantic, and sad song. From the 1982 album named “One from the Heart”, a soundtrack album of Tom Waits’ compositions for the Francis Ford Coppola film of the same name.
I always liked the songs, movies, and music videos about bicycles, or those using bicycles as visual materials. Folon (meaning “in the past”) is a beautiful song from Malian artist Salif Keita. According to Wikipedia, Keita is unique not only because of his reputation as the “Golden Voice of Africa” but because he has albinism and is a direct descendant of the founder of the Mali Empire, Sundiata Keita.
Here is the music video of that beautiful song, enjoy.
“Au Vélodrome”, also known as “At the Cycle-Race Track” and “Le cycliste”, is a painting by the French painter Jean Metzinger. According to the art historian Erasmus Weddigen, it illustrates the final meters of the Paris-Roubaix monumental classic and portrays its 1912 winner Charles Crupelandt (1886-1955).
The painting was acquired by Peggy Guggenheim in 1945 and is now permanently on view in her museum in Venice; Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Jean Metzinger (June 24, 1883- November 3, 1956) was a major 20th-century French painter, writer, critic, poet, and sensitive and intelligent theoretician. Along with Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Albert Gleizes, developed the art style known as Cubism.