San Jose Bike Party was back in action on Friday with a Robot themed ride.

Photos by Metro photographer Darrell Nance.

South Bay bicyclists showed off wild style Friday night for the monthly San Jose Bike Party ride, this time with a jungle theme.

Metro photographer Alex Stover captured these wildlife shots.

It’s going to be a bike weekend. No, not thumpy Harleys, or top-end monsters from Japan or Italy, this weekend is dedicated to the humble, yet ever exciting, bicycle.

It’s all about that simple, two-wheeled machine that pedaled humanity into the Industrial Revolution and beyond. The child of gun manufacturing and sewing machine technology, the bicycle has evolved to represent affluence, self-reliance, fringe culture, the status quo, balance, injury, the cutting edge of technology, and the unsurpassed quality of yesteryear. Its symbolism is really a grab bag of whatever you want it to be. There are so many iterations of the machine, it’s as permutable as our own DNA; and luckily, most permutations are successful and fun to ride.

The action starts at our hilly neighbor to the north at San Francisco’s Justin Herman Plaza. Red Bull hosting a throw-down for the best fixie acrobats around at its Ride + Style Event. Supposedly, they will be doing “tricks” on bicycles that are “fixed-gear,” and some say the event will be, “mad sick,” so you might want to bring some Airborne.

Later that night, San Jose Bike party is joining forces with East Bay Bike Party, San Francisco Bike Party and the Midnight Ridazz for what is being touted as a “Hella Big” Bike Party. The action starts at the Lake Merrit BART station at 7:30. Once you get back home, take a nap, not too long though, because the Bike Clinic will set up shop at San Pedro Square market at noon on Sunday.

On Sunday, back at San Jose’s San Pedro Square Market, the Bike to Work Day Bike Clinic will help you get your “whip” into shape for the May 10^th event. The Bike Clinic will provide multiple workshops to help you along if the inevitable happens on your way to/from work. Expert riders will help you with everything from helmet sizing to wheel repair. There will also be a demonstration on how to properly lock bikes. This may seem rudimentary, but far too many cyclists exit work to find their wheels and seat missing. Mechanics will be on hand to answer some more exciting questions as well.

San Jose Bike Party’s “Sharks” ride didn’t help the team stay in the NHL playoffs, but the weather couldn’t have been better for the monthly ride.

MetroActive photographer Christine Kelly put the rubber to the road to catch the action.

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To say that the Bay Rising Tour is “environmentally conscious” would be a laughable understatement. It is in fact completely human-powered, with San Francisco bands Rupa & the April Fishes and Shake Your Peace biking 200 miles to play 11 shows around the Bay Area over 10 days. They will be carrying with them their own stage, as well as a unique sound system that will be powered at each show by volunteers who pedal to create electricity. The tour starts tomorrow and comes to the San Jose Bike Party Friday.

Singer-songwriter Rupa Marya of Rupa & the April Fishes said they were inspired to put the tour together after years of international touring left her wanting to make a local connection.

“We’ve been going around the world so much in the last four years, I was feeling like ‘how much do I know my own Bay Area?’” says Marya, a Mountain View native. “How can I put that energy and curiosity and joy into my own neighborhood?”

Toward that end, she had been doing things like traveling Bay Area backroads and visiting missions around Northern California, starting to ask a lot of questions about local landmarks, ecosystems and communities. At an Occupy SF show, she met Paul Freedman, co-founder of Rock the Bike, who came up with the bicycle-powered concert system. She told him she wanted to so something local, and soon she was working on the Bay Rising Tour.

“It’s exciting because you can know an area from driving, but you don’t really know it unless you walk it or bike it,” she says.

She’s under no illusions about how hard it will be to pull off—“we’re going to be exhausted,” she admits—but the tour fits well into her view that activism begins in one’s own backyard, reaching out to individuals and communities around her in a time of economic and social collapse on a mass scale.

“We’re living in a time of emergency. Our role as artists is to do something that reminds us of our creative capacity,” she says.

After the band finishes the tour, they’ll be releasing the title track of their upcoming album Build on May 1, in honor of strikers around the world. The album will be released in September.

“It’s in the can,” says Marya. “I’m really excited about how it sounds.”

The Bay Rising Tour comes to the San Jose Bike Party on Friday, April 20 at 8pm. For location and route details, go to sjbikeparty.org.