Bicycle Kitchen
The Bicycle Kitchen/La Bicicocina is a non-profit, volunteer-run bicycle repair
and educational space dedicated to improving the lives of Angelinos using the
bicycle as its tool. We offer what no other bike shop can offer in the greater
Los Angeles area: a space for all bicyclists to repair or build their
bicycles from donated and recycled parts, to meet other cyclists, enrich their
lives through bicycle awareness and find new outlets for bicycle culture.
Bicycle Kitchen is represented in Civic Matters by:
Jimmy Lizama and Kelly Marie Martin
Jimmy Lizama, AKA "El Jimmy"
Born: November 1974, that's 31 years!
Place: Los Angeles County Hospital, Boyle Heights, California
I am a 1st-generation Honduran-American raised in and around Downtown Los Angeles, Pico-Union, Koreatown and East Hollywood. While living in Los Angeles, which has been 95 percent of my life, my home has never been more than 6 miles from my place of birth. I am also one of a handful of Angelinos who has never owned a car, though I have had a license to drive in the past.
Currently I live with my partner in an intentional community called the Los Angeles Eco Village (LAEV). I have been part of this community for 5 years and strive to become even more involved with this part of my life. I am the founder of the Bicycle Kitchen/La Bici Cocina, a non-profit volunteer-based community bicycle repair and bicycle culture center, now located in East Hollywood, formerly located in a gutted-out single apartment at the LAEV. It is the aspiration of all the founders and volunteers at the Bicycle Kitchen to improve the quality of life in Los Angeles through instituting the bicycle as a commonplace form of transportation, recreation and expression.
As I (and all others at the Kitchen) am not paid for my involvement there, I earn a living as a Service of Process Bicycle Messenger in Downtown L.A.. I have been a messenger for 7 years and have traveled through several parts of the world to compete in bicycle messenger competitions. Capoeira, a brazilian martial art, has most recently found me exploring spiritual connections in my consciousness in fashions I don't believe I have encountered before.
It has been through my involvement in these diverse communities that I arrive at my convictions: I love Los Angeles, I love bicycles, I love sustainable and just practices. In all I do -- as an Eco Villager, a Kitchen volunteer, messenger, domestic partner, capoerista -- I look to these communities and their individuals for guidance. Their dynamic philosophies, their radiant energy and their deep vision of the future in L.A. and in the world propel me in my bike path through life and develop my growth as a strong leader when called upon to be one.
Kelly Marie Martin
Kelly Marie Martin is a sound artist and musician who, for the past ten years has been composing original songs with David Jones under a variety of monikers. They have scored original soundtracks for video artist, Michele O'Marah , and for her last work Peacehead, a three-channel video, Kelly did the sound design. For many years she has also been a bicycling advocate and through connections at Critical Mass discovered the Bicycle Kitchen/La Bicicocina, a community bike workshop. In 2003, she co-founded Bicycle Bitchen there, a space by and for ladies to come and work on bikes in a community of ladies who love bicycles. Becoming involved in this space has brought her activity full circle back to her roots as a DIY feminist ‘zine maker and stimulated interest in connections between community and cultural production that are more organic, fluid and relative to the people involved.