Where We Stand: Don't Let The Door Hit You on the Way Out

Further to yesterday's post, in which I bloviated about loud music, I found myself trapped in one of those seemingly endless nostalgia-fueled Internet searches. Proust may have had his madeleine, but now we have YouTube, and anyone who remembers the days when you actually had to venture to unseemly neighborhoods and smell unsavory things in order to hear "countercultural" music can never quite get over the novelty of simply punching it up on a home computing device. It's like someone who's been rescued from the desert turning the faucet on and off simply because he can.

Of course, anyone who's ever been trapped in an endless nostalgia-fueled underground music Internet search also knows just how dangerous this can be. Sadly I forgot this, but it wasn't long before I remembered, because in relatively short order I was watching one of the aging members of the anti-establishment band Crass demonstrating a composting toilet in the nude:

(To avoid back injury, when building a composting toilet, always lift with your penis.)

I should have known this would happen, since physics dictates that if you spend enough time around any counterculture it's only a matter of time before someone will wind up naked and building a composting toilet. It's sort of like how, if you place an infinite number of monkeys in a room with an infinite number of typewriters, one of them will type up "Hamlet"--or start pleasuring himself and flinging his own feces, I forget which. In any case, all of these are signs that it's probably time for you to avert your eyes and move along.

But how can we simply move along and avert our eyes from injustice, and inequality, and corruption in the "system?" Sure, Crass may be more concerned with the subtleties of responsible and sustainable fecal management now, but thousands of others are still taking to the streets:

I haven't visited the demonstrations myself recently. This is partially because I've been "busy" (lots of YouTube videos to watch don't you know), and partially because, despite having visited twice already, I didn't see a single naked person building a compost toilet. Therefore, I'm beginning to think I should cash in all my chips now before I see what cannot be unseen. Then again, it probably doesn't matter. After all, the house always wins, and even if never go back I'll probably turn on the TV in a couple of days and see a group of dedicated and handy Occupy Wall Streeters fabricating a mighty Throne of Smugness, their hammers falling in unison and their pendulous "pants yabbies" swaying in the autumn breeze.

Nevertheless, I continue to be interested in the protests from a cultural standpoint--if only because, in this, the Age of Meh, it's refreshing to see people actively voice dissatisfaction and dissent instead of debating which coffee house in gentrified Brooklyn tamps its espresso more evenly:



Or else just throwing a "total shit fit," depending on how you look at it.

Speaking of dissatisfaction, if you ride a bicycle for transportation pretty much anywhere in the world besides maybe Amsterdam and Copenhagen then it's a feeling with which you're intimately familiar. As it happens, Jack Thurston of The Bike Show alerted me to a compelling article which endeavors to explain why. Among the many interesting points it raised was this one:

When I posted my Cycling is dangerous post here, a commenter told me that by writing this phrase, I was likely to get cycling banned – the same old thinking. I had to reply that, well, perhaps he hadn't noticed, but cycling is banned already in the UK – has been for years. Its 1% modal share of journeys shows it has been banned more effectively than could ever have been achieved by legislation. As I told him, he government bans travelling at more than 70 mph on motorways, and at more than 30 mph is towns, but most motorists do these things. The government bans narcotic drugs, but more than 1% of people take them. The government bans tax evasion, but lots of people engage in that. People do not stop doing things because they are banned from doing them legally, they stop doing things because those things are made very unpleasant and inconvenient – which is what has happened with cycling.

Here in Canada's chamois (and Canada itself I'd imagine) we certainly do make cycling very unpleasant and very inconvenient. Who among us has not had an experience like this (via Streetsblog)?

The officer asks me what happened, and specified that he wanted to know which way I was riding. I felt like from the get go he was trying to find something that I was doing wrong, like riding the wrong way on a one way street…which was not the case.

I explained that I was riding my bike, and that a car service passenger opened their door into me. The officer proceeded to tell me that I was at fault. Since the car wasn’t moving he would treat it like I ran into the car.

Yes, riding a bike may not actually be illegal, but is more or less unsanctioned, and therefore you undertake the activity at your own risk. (In this sense, I suppose you could call it "ab-legal.") Most importantly, mind the cars when you're on your bike, since it would be a shame if any of them were to get scratched. And if you insist on riding a bike anyway, make sure you do so like Arnold Schwarzenegger, as in this Vanity Fair profile which was forwarded to me by a reader:

California Iron Man

A t seven o’clock one summer morning I pedaled a $5,000 titanium-frame mountain bike rented in anxiety the previous evening down the Santa Monica beach road to the corner where Arnold Schwarzenegger had asked me to meet him. He turned up right on time, driving a black Cadillac S.U.V. with a handful of crappy old jalopy bikes racked to the back. I wore the closest I could find to actual bicycle gear; he wore a green fleece, shorts, and soft beige slipper-like shoes that suggested both a surprising indifference to his own appearance and a security in his own manhood. His hair was still vaguely in a shape left by a pillow, and his eyelids drooped, though he swore he’d been up for an hour and a half reading newspapers. After reading the newspapers, this is what the former governor of California often does: rides his bike for cardio, then hits the weight room.

He hauls a bike off the back of the car, hops on, and takes off down an already busy Ocean Avenue. He wears no bike helmet, runs red lights, and rips past do not enter signs without seeming to notice them and up one-way streets the wrong way. When he wants to cross three lanes of fast traffic he doesn’t so much as glance over his shoulder but just sticks out his hand and follows it, assuming that whatever is behind him will stop. His bike has at least 10 speeds, but he has just 2: zero and pedaling as fast as he can. Inside half a mile he’s moving fast enough that wind-induced tears course down his cheeks.

Who needs bike lanes anyway? That's what Cadillac SUVs are for.

I suppose then this is why some cyclists pine for the kinder and gentler times (whether real or imagined) that the "Tweed Run" purports to embody--a ride which, as I also mentioned yesterday, is coming to New York. I plan to crush the ride, too, since while everybody else is wearing "plus fours," I'll be wearing "plus fives:"

The cycle suit tailored by Russell Howarth is designed for the urban cyclist. Using the Urban Check tweed design which is from the reflective LumatwillTM range. This tweed has the added benenfit of Teflon coating, which prevents the tweed soaking up water if one gets caught in a shower. The design includes specially cut cycling plus 5s which button up the sides, and a very clever action back to allow one to bend over down over the handbars when pedaling hard.

My victory is all but assured--unless someone shows up with those new Campagnolo "plus sixes." Then I'm screwed.

I'll also be blasting some brutally heavy "tweed metal:"



Just as long as I can figure out a way to mount my TweedPod to my handlebars, that is:

I'll probably use jute twine, which is the tweed equivalent of duct tape.

Of course, the real problem with getting into the tweed scene is the high cost of entry, since a bespoke cycling suit complete with Campagnolo Plus Seven Ergo Bloomers can cost thousands of dollars. So until someone starts a tweed version of Nashbar, if you want an entry-level "Tweed Run" outfit you've got to visit the golfing mail order shops:

Really "feeling" those "colorways."

Lastly, yesterday I also mentioned that I'd like to see a Cockpit Run, and in the spirit of creativity I'm pleased to announce that homemade fairings (like this one forwarded to me by a reader) would of course be welcome:


As would hand-"curated" awnings, like this one spotted by another reader in Ft. Lauderdale:


Note also the bicycle's superior "portaging" ability:


Store-bought cockpits like "Back-Up Barz" would not be acceptable, though--nor would "The Octagon," as forwarded by yet another reader:

On the other hand, adapting something like this for the same purpose would win you an award:

I'm not sure how you'd do it, though you could probably figure something out with jute twine.

Wednesday's Child: Full of Whoah

Is there a finer time than early autumn to go about your business by bicycle in New York City? I don't think so. You can keep the sunburn, perspiration, and "swamp crotch" of summer. Fie on winter, with its ice, and its snow, and its crunchy road salt, and its beards filled with frozen mucus. Even spring is ruined by its "bike to work" days and "bike months" and legions of wobbly fair-weather cyclists extricating their mechanically unsound bicycles from the recesses of their co-op bike rooms for the first time since the previous year's "bike month."

Autumn, however, is just right, and it was on a particularly lovely late afternoon yesterday that I took to my Scattante to run some errands. "How lovely," I thought to myself as I rode along an unobstructed bike lane--until I saw a "bike salmon" pedaling towards me. Nothing ruins a pleasant ride like a salmon in the bike lane. It's like a busboy's crusty booger falling into your gazpacho just as you're reaching for your spoon. (The crucial difference being that you can't fish the salmon out and flick it at your dining partner for laughs.) As the scruffy-faced salmon approached, I glowered at him, but as he drew closer I realized he looked familiar. It took me a few moments, but I finally placed him: it was Hollywood acting person Jake Gyllenhaal.

At least, I'm pretty sure it was Jake Gyllenhaal, though I suppose it also could have been his sister Maggie Gyllenhaal with a three-day beard. It's hard to know for sure, since he wasn't riding a road bike, and he wasn't wearing The Rapha:


And if it was him (though I'm fairly certain it was), there's no telling whether or not he recognized me as the current owner of his pie plate:

Either way, the entire incident was highly traumatic, and I resented the intrusion upon my right-of-way.

Speaking of resentment, like everything else it tends to refine itself over time. For example, at this point in my life I tend to resent highly specific things: celebrity bike salmon; boogers in my gazpacho; the convoluted ordering process at Starbucks; and so forth. However, when I was much younger my resentment was decidedly more scattershot. In those days, things I resented included but were in no means limited to: school; authority; life; homework; having to wake up; and the grievous social injustice which was having to wear pants.

Of course, in resenting those things as a young person I was by no means unique. In fact, as a young person it was my job to resent those things. I was also not unique in enjoying music that both stoked and pandered to my adolescent sense of resentment. This music consisted mostly of wild bashing and screaming sounds, though at the time the differences between one type of wild bashing and screaming and another type of wild bashing and screaming were enough to start fistfights at nightclubs. If pressed, the typical wild bashing and screaming fan in those days probably couldn't tell you the difference between the IRA and the IRS, but he could expound on the differences between Wild Bashing And Screaming Band X and Wild Bashing And Screaming Band Y until you eventually just started feeling bad for him.

Anyway, I am now (at least chronologically) an adult, and like many adults who shared my tastes when they were younger, I have two sets of feelings when it comes to wild bashing and screaming music. On one hand, it was very important to me then, and I still have a great deal of affection and nostalgia for it. On the other hand, I also think almost all of it is comically stupid. In fact, I remember almost exactly the moment when I started feeling that way. It was during college--that heady time when the influence of the "Wednesday Weed" mingles with reading about intellectual stuff such as Freud and psychoanalysis. I was probably under the influence of both of these things, at which point I put on whatever album by whatever wild bashing and screaming band I favored at the time. Then I had the unsettling revelation that I was basically listening to the musical equivalent of a protracted scatalogical temper tantrum in which an out-of-control child is screaming while twirling a soiled diaper over his head. (Or, to put it more simply, a "total shitfit.")

From then on, the spell was broken. No longer could I put on a bashing and screaming record and feel that little thrill you get when you're giving the middle finger to society. Instead, I just heard someone trying to sound scary while refusing to clean his room, and quite frankly, it was embarrassing.

This is not to say I hold such music in contempt. Far from it. It's crucial to have a type of music that flails wildly against decency and good taste so you can hold in front of you like a shield of unbearable noise while you search for who you are and go through the often confusing and painful process of forming your own identity and set of opinions. For that reason, I still keep and protect my old records--for better or worse, they were my social intermediaries. Somehow though, to write about this music in an "intellectual" manner in a highbrow periodical seems only highly pretentious, but also to undermine the spirit of the music itself. Most of all, though, it's completely ridiculous, which is why I was simultaneously amused and disgusted by this Sasha Frere-Jones article on "black metal" in the New Yorker:

In reading this, I was amazed by two things: 1) this form of music has not advanced creatively or aesthetically by a single millimeter in almost 30 years; and 2) a man in his 50s who is writing a book on Michael Jackson actually sits around listening to "black metal," presumably while quaffing a $50 bottle of wine, and then writes things like this:

...Nathan Weaver sings in a strangled tone that is somewhere between the high, almost avian sound that Liturgy’s Hunt-Hendrix makes and the classic black-metal growl of a traditional Norwegian black-metal singer like Immortal’s Abbath Doom Occulta, as on 1992’s “The Call of the Wintermoon.”

Whereas once people wrote endless variations on the word "brutal" in fanzines and talked about how Wild Bashing and Screaming Band X made them want to smash stuff, now Frere-Jones writes this:

I kept thinking of Janet Cardiff ’s 2001 installation “The Forty-Part Motet,” currently playing at MOMA PS1.

Then again, I suppose this is the treatment wild bashing and screaming music wants now. Awhile back Klaus from Cycling Inquisition sent me this interview with one of the bands Frere-Jones writes about:

This, then, is the spirit of the times. Formulaic music from the 1980s evokes not rage but comparisons to exhibitions at MOMA. Mayonnaise is sold in boutiques. Pretty much everything qualifies as a "culture," and the members of a "culture" celebrate when someone appropriates their "culture" and sells it back to them. We live in a strange age of intellectual political correctness, where everything is brilliant and nothing is crap, and all creative expression no matter how derivative warrants the same degree of sycophantic fawning.

Speaking of dressing up everything, the Forces of Tweed have reminded me that it's almost time for New York City's own "Tweed Run:"

Furthermore, they were kind enough to invite me:

We're drawing close to the big day itself, and I was hoping we could count on seeing yourself dressed up to the nines in some stylish tweed plus fours, with perhaps a flat cap and some hefty facial hair (real or fake) for the occasion?

I had no idea what "plus fours" were, so I looked them up:

Plus fours are breeches or trousers that extend 4 inches (10 cm) below the knee (and thus four inches longer than traditional knickerbockers, hence the name). As they allow more freedom of movement than knickerbockers, they have been traditionally associated with sporting attire from the 1860s and onward, and are particularly associated with golf.[1]



Inasmuch as I don't own any plus fours, have little interest in obtaining any plus fours, and don't really understand what's so exciting about riding a bicycle in plus fours, I'm probably not an ideal Tweed Run candidate. I'd also probably be unable to help "recreate the spirit of a bygone era:"

The Tweed Run is a group bicycle ride through the centre of London, in which the cyclists are expected to dress in traditional British cycling attire, particularly tweed plus four suits. Any bicycle is acceptable on the Tweed Run, but classic vintage bicycles are encouraged. Some effort to recreate the spirit of a bygone era is always appreciated.[1]

I'm not sure what this actually means, but I'm guessing it involves either not having a full suite of inoculations and thus being susceptible to polio, or else giving small children lumps of coal and then kicking them in the face.

Personally, I'd be far more interested in a "Cockpit Run," which would be a ride consisting entirely of bikes with crazy cockpits. Some effort to recreate the spirit of a Rube Goldberg machine is always appreciated, and this bike, forwarded to me by a reader, would of course be more than welcome:


Really, the only problem with a Cockpit Run would be that it wouldn't get very far, since all the wacky cockpits would get tangled almost immediately. In this sense, it would be more of a "clump" than a "run."