Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

11. Your savage street smarts should tell you not to start or finish your line right in front of your secret hideout. Stop up the end of the tube with a custom-shaped cork or piece of rubber; you should duct-tape the cork into place, because all that paint will apply a lot of pressure. If you feel tricky, add a plumbing valve to the end of the tube?of course there's one made to fit your tubing. If you really want to impress, make a control for it that allows you to stop and start the flow on the fly.

12. Paint the tube black and do something to disguise the bucket. Make it look like a bag of groceries with celery and French rolls sticking out.

13. Use any old paint you can get. Stores have mis-mixed paint for cheap. Many cities maintain an old paint exchange, because it is so expensive to dispose of it. Take out a classified ad asking for paint donations for your art class. If the paint you get isn't brand new, mix it well and filter it through panty hose?otherwise, gummy paint and dried bits will clog your tube immediately.

Since completing the testing and development for the original version of this recipe, we've discovered that one can easily dumpster multi-gallon detergent containers that have a built-in spigot at the foot of one side; these might offer quite a shortcut. Come to think of it, you can get water in similar containers, though those are generally transparent and perhaps less durable.

Low'tech pedestrian re-mix: pierce the bottom and top of a can of paint with a large nail, and?quick!?go for a walk.

The street arrived as a liquid; it was poured and mashed into place. Asphalt may seem solid, but it yields, Hstens, and records. Here, parallel black streaks run past a stophght and into the intersection; it's a recording of tires screeching between some moment of refiex and impact. Someone died here and it was noted with a smudge of rubber?^unless I'm reading it wrong and he just peeled out in a blaze of glory. Over here the asphalt

Account

Painting by Bicycle log

is ripped open by a weed with a tiny flower screaming, "Orange!" There is a splash of windshield in the gutter, and a slick greenish stain; when cars get hurt, they bleed. And just a few feet away^?^thanks to that speed bump, a gallon bucket must have tipped over in the back of a painter's truck. Now a thin triclde of robin's egg blue follows her halfway home forever. We follow, too, until the trail turns to drips and vanishes. "It's a starting point," we think.

Six days later, we are perched proudly on our own writing implements, a little fleet of bicycles carefully designed to leak paint. On a map of Montreal, we have drawn human figures, the ouflines following streets and sidewalks; from the map, we've converted our dravwngs into written directions, and in following these we drip out drawings ten and fifteen kilometers long.

An hour into our second picture, we are overtaken by flashing lights. Oh shit! We double back onto a side road then roll into the safety of a litfle park. Only then do we see that our pursuer was a truck, a truck painting lines! Hearts in our throats, we watch the groaning beast lay down a thick yellow no-passing zone. It is a river beside our trickles of yellow, red, and blue, but we are unabashed. Everyone works at the scale they can afford; tonight, we spare no expense.

Painting by Bicycle

How to Make a Record Player fiom a BicycIc

There are hundreds of ways to make a bicycle into a record player, just as there are hundreds of items that can be turned into record players. For that matter, you can turn just about anything into just about anything else?just think about what they've done with soybeans. Please take this recipe as an example of how to cash in your suspicions of an object's constructed identity.

We made our record player during a thinktank. You can read about thinktanks in this book too. We had quite a time figuring this all out and we wouldn't want to take that opportunity away from you. Also, a step-by-step guide would be absurdly long and boring, not to mention unadventurous to follow. Instead, we will start with the basic concept and move on to a few specific aspects of our design. With the fundamentals in mind, you can get busy on anything wdthin reach.