Pete Jordan

I originally knew Pete Jordan as the creator of the zine Dishwasher, which was his thoughts on that absolutely unglamorous and lousy job from the thinking man's point of view. At the time when I started examining the job of being a human guinea pig in the same way, Pete was already a legend among zine writers. My name for this journal Guinea Pig Zero, first saw life as the title for my zine in 1996. Pete's work was both the model and the inspiration for it. Over the years since then we've always stayed in touch and visited each other in several cities.

His first book Dishwasher: One Man's Quest To Wash Dishes In All Fifty States, was about his years in the suds and making the zine. He stopped in Philadelphia (last time I saw him) to promote it at a reading event. But here he is doing the same thing for his second book, In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist. It was a great pleasure to be his host overnight and to introduce him to his listeners.

Among zine writers, Pete is a case of living the dream: he did such a masterful job of it that he was able to set aside mundane work, and now he lives on his writings. The rate of that kind of success is about one in a million.

Anyone who has been to Amsterdam knows that bicycles are as basic to how people move there as are shoes. People instinctively detest cars and even light rail for getting around. It's quite obvious to any visitor. But the Dutch are now happily surprised that it took an American to do a full-on examination of this primary feature of their capital city.

He's a compulsive, natural historian --this alone makes him a soul-mate --and he's also a very disciplined and committed one. Here we heard him describe how the Nazis, occupying the country during WW2, conquered the Dutch in many ways, but they never were able to control or even understand Amsterdammers and their bikes. They repeatedly failed to get the natives to surrender their beloved vehicles. It's like reading the primal myth about the battle between Fascists and Hate on the one side, and Love and Anarchists on the other --but not having the need to use those terms.

What a happy time this was, re-uniting with my old buddy Pete!