This is one of the absolute best pieces of bicycle poster art I've yet come across. You have to be a true hardman to cross - no wonder the Flemings dominate the field without ruth. Eric de Vlaeminck, Roger de Vlaeminck, Sven Nys, moet ik er meer zeggen?

John Olsen, The Bicycle Boys Rejoice

In a certain sense, one can mark the beginning of the end of Euro-Australian painting's provincialism with the Whitechapel Art Gallery's exhibition, "Recent Australian Painting", June-July 1961. While this exhibition lacked the art-historical importance of, say, the 1925 Exhibition Internationale des Arts Décoratif et Industriels Modernes, it was a solid beginning. The introduction to the exhibition's catalog was written by the then semi-famous Robert Hughes, with a foreword by Sir Kenneth Clark.

Among the better-known Australian painters is John Olsen. His painting, The Bicycle Boys Rejoice, seems fitting for Esthetecyclist. Unfortunately, the painting's whereabouts are now unclear, and the best image I could get was a scan of the black and white reproduction. Here's what Robert Hughes wrote about it in his 1970 masterpiece, The Art of Australia, pg.262:

"He had his first exhibition in 1955, and his first significant paintings, the Bicycle Boys, were painted a few months later. In these half-lyrical, half-ironical paintings of racing cyclists, several later trends in Olsen's work appear for the first time. The gawky angular gestures may be a legacy from Passmore [his mentor], but the spidery line, which rambles and jerks across a gay surface of ochre and white, has an immediacy and wit foreign to Passmore's work: this is the beginning of Olsen's linearism. (Do these puppets, perched on their rickety wire mounts, have some ironic reference to that favourite hero-image of the Renaissance, the equestrian figure?) The forms are written on to the canvas, almost cursively - a breakaway from Olsen's Cézannist training under Passmore. Figure and machine, imbued with life by the action of this nervous line, are united in one metamorphic image."

Indeed, unity of figure and machine.

Image: Robert Hughes, The Art of Australia

Il Campionissimo

A right thigh to make Michelangelo weep. Or Eddy. Not that Eddy's crying. He's not; he's just been burying the peloton seventeen minutes behind him and he's feeling a bit knackered, is all.

Classical Modernism

Antique Greek sculpture, with its disturbing polished surface and equiproportial musculature is reflected in the simple, deep marble legs of this track racer. Formally speaking, the juxtaposition of two diagonals (legs, bicycles - locker, chairs, borders, helper) that his outstretched legs achieve makes us happy. Hopper is known for his unidealogical paintings, so one tries to avoid reading his works too symbolically. That said, it is probably no accident that the legs and machines are alone together in the direction they point. There he sits, centered at the intersection of diagonals, the man about to prove his mettle.

Cycle-Track

"For cyclists of another category the Cape Town Municipality now constructed, at the junction of the Main and Portswood Roads, the Green Point Cycle Track, which was opened in October, 1897. A stone's throw away, near Boundary Road, there lived a young Green Point man, then in his twenties, whose spare time was given over almost entirely to cycling. This was Jack Rose, and no story of cycling in South Africa would be complete without reference to the World Amateur Record set up by Jack Rose at the Green Point Cycle Track in 1899, when he covered just under 30 miles in one hour. In 1900 he improved on this record by covering over 30 miles. This, it is believed, was the fastest speed hitherto attained on land other than by a locomotive. Shortly after achieving his record Jack Rose - Col. J.G. Rose, as he is known today - was caught up in the Boer War and, enthusiastic cyclist that he was, he formed the Cape Colony Cyclist Corps. In the First World War, after serving in South West Africa and on General Smuts' staff in East Africa, he was awarded the D.S.O. and the Croix de Guerre. In the Second World War, once again on General Smuts' staff, he was largely responsible for the organization of Transport during the South African campaigns 'up North'." Marischal Murray, Under Lion's Head, pg. 81.

The Parliamentary Chamber

The constitutional monarchy as it has grown for seven hundred years in Great Britain has given us one of the greatest achievements of simple design, the parliamentary chamber. It is simple: 180º of a circle set against the width of a rectangle. An early, and for America politically important realization of this is the House of Burgesses in Virginia (above), first convened in 1619. It is functional simplicity combined with an above all dutiful reverence for the job to be carried out; despite a penchant for such idiotic pastimes as the fox hunt or finding blue blood in their families, Virginia's gentry have traditionally done a more honorable job in governing than their counterparts in the House of Lords.

Elitism

"For of course I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the esthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it's an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails, or someone tying a Bimini hitch that won't slip. I don't think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn't matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. ... I hate populist kitsch, no matter how much the demos loves it. To me, it is a form of manufactured tyranny." Robert Hughes, Things I Didn't Learn, pg. 31.

My concurrence with Hughesie's statement is so utterly total, that I feel imboldened to discuss two aspects of the cycling life that have everything to do with skill: bottom brackets and rigid mountain bikes.

Daniel Rebour's drawing above shows the insides of an old style bottom bracket. When I first began wrenching in a bike shop, cartridge bottom brackets were still relatively new. Nowadays they're par for the course, and admittedly they're pretty damn good for the price. But there is something a bit vulgar about them, about their disposability, for you could always service old-school bb's for a long time, and about their ease of installation. Old style bottom brackets required skill. One had to be able to overhaul them properly, lovingly wiping out all the nasty old grease, replacing the ball bearings, checking the cups and cones for pits. Then came the skill of the proper adjustment, finding that sweet spot, to say nothing of being able to get an Italian-thread fixed cup to keep its adjustment. And beyond the skill involved, who doesn't miss the old SunTour greaseguard bb's? Butter, sheer butter.

Now, allow me to veer away from matters mechanical, and on to issues of technical skill. The suspension fork, while totally here to stay and used by many of my very fast friends whom I respect, is a bit lame. The grace and years of muscle memory that a well-executed singletrack ride on a rigid bike display put to shame any ride on a comparable front suspension bike. Full suspension is even worse, unless you're really doing hardcore slalom races. Learning to let the bike roll, letting go, carving through the corners, and swooping in on drops you'd normally not dream of, these are the abilities of the true cycling elitist.

Image: Le monde de Daniel Rebour, 1950-1976

Feininger und die Erfindung des Rads

Lyonel Feininger was obsessed with trains and other contraptions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. It is no wonder then that he made this cubist painting of bicycles. The bicycle is, after all, a nineteenth-century design. What is more, it is a nineteenth-century design which is scarcely made better by contemporary technologies. Carbon-fiber might well feel like a dream, but it's unpleasant on the eye, and it doesn't wear well. V-brakes, once the object of so much cranky mechanic-derision, are a wonder of simplicity and power (and very little change in canti design), whilst disc brakes are just silly. Otherwise, it's all just little tinkering here and there: gimmicks on the shifters, the revelation of the splined-drive crank (wonderful, but not a fundamental change), and rapid-rise. The bicycle is, in fact, unimprovable.

Australian Painting

"The sudden appearance of an Australian school of painting is one of these blessed events which help free the arts from the grip of historical determinism. We now take it almost for granted. But less then fifteen years ago, when I told my friends in England that Australia was about to add something entirely fresh to contemporary painting, they thought I was out of my mind. And when they asked me to account for it, of course I couldn't. I could only mumble something about the light, and the dead white trees and the feeling of an Australian myth.

Unlike other remote landscapes in the new worlds, Australia makes one want to paint. But what a long time it took before anyone could paint it as it is, and not like an aerated Daubigny. There are some beautiful green valleys in Australia, but they don't go far; and as long as they were the subject of Australian painting, it didn't go far either. But when painters began to look at the harsh, lonely, inhospitable substance of their country, they could relate it to the heroic qualities of their people. The heroes of the sagas and ancient epics are harsher, more cunning and less sentimental than the heroes of the Westerns; and the un-glossy Western of Australian history became a myth while some of the survivors were still alive. So in Australian landscape painting, as in all great landscape painting, the scenery is not painted for its own sake, but as the background of a legend and a reflection of human values." Kenneth Clark, foreword, Recent Australian Painting, Whitechapel Gallery, London, June-July 1961. Funny then, that it took Westerners till '61 to figure out how to paint the country, and that 38,000 years before man set foot in North America, and 48,000 years before European man seemed human, Aborigines moved into terra australis and introduced their own truly unique painterly works.

A Football Match at Rondebosch

Otto Landsberg painted this quaint scene of South African rugby footballers in 1860, and its nineteenth-century flavor in dress and manner have a certain appeal. Just as in the early days of baseball and cycling, their athletic kit is both functional and handsome.

This scrum seems also a good starting point to quote the great polymath Joseph Bronowski, a man lauded by the likes of that most wonderful of thinkers, Carl Sagan:

"Every human action goes back in some part to our animal origins; we should be cold and lonely creatures if we were cut off from that blood-stream of life. ... Yet such differences [between man and the other animals] are secondary by comparison with the overriding difference, which is that the athlete is an adult whose behaviour is not driven by his immediate environment, as animal actions are. In themselves, his actions make no practical sense at all; they are an exercise that is not directed to the present. The athlete's mind is fixed ahead of him, building up his skill; and he vaults his imagination into the future." The Ascent of Man, pg. 36.

Image: Alexander, Lucy & Evelyn Cohen, 150 South African Paintings

Draperie Mouillée

This is known in classical sculpture as the "draped nude". In the words of Kenneth Clark: "This device was used from archaic times onward, the earliest sculptors seeming to recognize how drapery may render a form both more mysterious and more comprehensible. The section of a limb as it swells and subsides may be delineated precisely or left to the imagination; parts of the body that are plastically satisfying can be emphasized, those less interesting can be concealed; and awkward transitions can be made smooth by the flow of line." The Nude, pg. 119.

Poster Art II

The penny-farthing's almost risibly large front wheel embodies the essence of bicycle racing, for the only way to make the bicycle any faster was to enlarge the front wheel. Even way back in the olden days cyclers were hot to outpace one another.

Hughesie Does Away with Koons et alii

"For nearly a quarter of a century, late-modernist art teaching (especially in America) has increasingly succumbed to the fiction that the values of the so-called academy - meaning, in essence, the transmission of disciplined skills based on drawing from the live model and the natural motif - were hostile to 'creativity'. This fiction enabled Americans to ignore the inconvenient fact that virtually all artists who created and extended the modernist enterprise between 1890 and 1950, Beckmann no less than Picasso, Miró and de Kooning as well as Degas and Matisse, were formed by the atelier system and could no more have done without the particular skills it inculcated than an aircraft can fly without an airstrip. The philosophical beauty of Mondrian's squares and grids begins with the empirical beauty of his apple trees. Whereas thanks to America's tedious obsession with the therapeutic, its art schools in the 1960s and 1970s tended to become crèches, whose aim was less to transmit the difficult skills of painting and sculpture than to produce 'fulfilled' personalities. At this no one could fail." Nothing If Not Critical, intro.

The Corinthian Helmet

Kenneth Clarke says, "If one wants a symbol of Atlantic man, as opposed to Mediterranean man, a symbol to set against the Greek temple, then it must be the Viking ship. The Greek temple is solid, static, crystalline. The Viking ship is light, mobile, bouyant, floating like a water lily." To this I would add the revelation of the Corinthian helmet, such an elegant expression of form and function. Few of the products of modern-day homo artifex achieve the same beautiful functionality, execpt for the bicycle.

Shifting

There seems to me something entirely genteel about the measured descent of the hand from the bars on down to the downtube to shift. There's also a certain grace in the mastery of friction shifting: no loud clacks from the shifter, no annoying click-click-click of the derailleur trying to change gears when the cable tension is off. It's all fluidity, sheer fluid articulation. True, they're probably not good for high-level racing, but I don't race anymore, so that's all by the way.

Beyond the skill and grace of well-executed friction shifting, be it bar-end or downtube shifters, one of its benefits is that it discourages overshifting. When I settle in to a time trial, I might shift around a bit, looking for the right gear for the day, and unless there're hills involved, I don't really shift much at all after that. My efforts go instead into finding the right rhythm, into finding a quiet place and just keeping the pedals turning over, no matter how much my stomach is cramping or how much my legs burn. And I most certainly do not need ten cogs in back to do it. Eight is just fine, and were seven not so out-of-date, I would have happily stuck with that. And were I a real powerhouse, I'd have a 48-44 up front with a six speed (12-20) in the back.


And as regards mountain biking, one cannot ignore the excellence of topmounts. RapidFire works fine, but it's a woeful mechanism to service, that is, it is from a design perspective nowhere near as simple and efficient as thumb shifters. Nor is GripShift. I have two impressions of GripShift: being annoyed whenever I had to change the cable on a customer's bike, and that I would never want my hand directly next to the shifter like that. Thank gods I still have a pair of SunTour XC Pros, XC Experts and Deore DX in my bag of components.

The thing is, since I'm (again) the only one amongst my riding friends who rides friction, I have noticed something about their shifting. Oftentimes, when shifting with Ergo or STI, its abruptness leaves the rider either pedaling too fast for a second or having to get out of the saddle for a second. But with friction, since you cannot shift that lightning-fast, you have a short, meditative moment in which you anticipate the shift, and adjust your cadence accordingly. When done right, you can execute an overall graceful ride. But again, I am fully aware that I am the odd man out here.

The good news is, Rivendell has refabbed the SunTour retrofriction mechanism in their Silver shifters, and they are a fine, handsome shifter indeed. The downtube or barcon shifter is, in summary, esthetically pleasing from a mechanical as well as a ride-composition (grace) point of view.

Image: Le monde de Daniel Rebour, 1950-1976

Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner

Of all the sports films out there, Werner Herzog's Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner (The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner) is one of the best. Only the cycling films of Jørgen Leth exceed it, and Ken Burns' Baseball comes in a close second, though his style is too different, too documentarian to bare comparison with Herzog's work. Leth and Herzog are far more poetic in the truths they seek to illuminate, whilst Burns is the master of the textured and well-spun yarn.

Beyond its cinematic virtues, its subject matter is in utter harmony with Esthetecyclist: an athlete who loves his sport, a sculptor who loves his craft ~ an athlete-esthete. And the coolest thing is, Steiner now lives in Sweden and works as a gardener. C'est parfait, ça!

Athlete-Citizen

Ancient Greek athletics comprised most of what we see in modern Track & Field. All of the disciplines represented there grew out of martial necessity; indeed, what else could the javelin, shot put, discus and hammer throw be for besides the decimation of one's enemy? Of course, running hurdles and pole vaulting have everything to do with the dodgy business of negotiating the rocky terrain of Greece, and running, well, in a time when modes of conveyance were rather limited, running has its own rather obvious merits. And finally, boxing and wrestling have obvious battle origins (pankration was a combination of the two whose only rules were no gouging and no biting - a common opening move was to break your opponent's finger).


In reflecting on the athletic life of the ancient Greeks, what is so striking is that they even pursued an athletic life at all. Athletics as we know them now started as early twentieth century novelties. True, games were played - baseball, cricket, la crosse, tennis - but the single-minded pursuit of athletic perfection was relatively unknown until about a hundred years ago. The Greeks, however, were passionate about physical as well as mental perfection. Their training was totally organic, to be sure, in the buff ~ lifting heavy stones in fluid arcs that engage all the muscles, sprinting, wrestling. There seemed no break in the continuum of athletic cultivation and the exigencies of daily life. One was abstracted from the other, and one served to maintain the other. According to Socrates: "No citizen has any right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is part of his profession as a citizen to keep himself in good condition, ready to serve the state at a moment's notice. The instinct of self-preservation demands it likewise: for how helpless is the state of the ill-trained youth in war or danger! Finally, what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and the strength of which his body is capable!" [italics mine].

And so it ultimately is with cycling. The bicycle is, as far as modes of conveyance are concerned, imperfectible; its basic design hasn't changed in 130 years. Practically speaking, it is the best way of getting from one place to another, and athletically speaking, it is unsurpassed in its manifold physical benefits. And if you take Socrates' admonition to heart, you realize that it is, in a certain sense, every person's duty to contribute to society at large, and by giving up your car and using a bicycle, you are doing just that. Noise and air pollution are reduced, and the landscape is beautified with the very presence of a human being in athletic form. I can think of no better contribution in this day and age.

The Tintoretto of Kansas City

"The scheme of his bulging figures - usually worked out in advance through three-dimensional clay models - was based on the linea serpentinata, the twisting line, of sixteenth-century Mannerism. From Michelangelo, and from other Mannerist sources like Luca Cambiaso's block figures and El Greco's posturing saints, Benton assembled a kind of "kinetic" composition in which nothing is at rest, everything strains and heaves against everything else. This incessant surge and flow would have large effects on his pupil, Jackson Pollack, but in Benton's own paintings it mainly produced rhetoric. His ideas about "bulge and hollow", the rhythmical distortion of bone and muscular structure, made his human figures look strangely overdetermined, like lanky dummies with cartoon faces. Benton's trains lean forward like Walt Disney's as they steam along; the very clouds in his landscapes flex their biceps." Robert Hughes, American Visions, p. 444-5.

"He was trying to be, as it were, Tintoretto in Kansas. He was using 16th, 17th century strategies for a 20th century country, and using the dynamisms of high art in order to present a common message to common people. The distance was, I think, too great." Arthur Danto, Ken Burns Thomas Hart Benton.

"To me, there isn't any energy in those paintings of America today. It's a kind of cartoon version of what America was at that time. I remember something of what American city life was like in the Thirties, it bore absolutely no relation to Benton's vision of it." Hilton Kramer, Ken Burns Thomas Hart Benton


"Well, that's pure kitsch. Persephone is pure kitsch. I mean, it's like the girly pictures that used to appear in Esquire of an earlier period. That certainly has to be one of his very worst paintings." Hilton Kramer, Ken Burns Thomas Hart Benton.

"Persephone. Persephone is just a glorious and wonderful painting. She's one of the great works of American pornography. She invites you to have all sorts of emotions in front of her that you're not supposed to have in front of works of art, and that denies you the ability to fulfill. It's just a kind of great experience to walk into some stuffy old art gallery and all of a sudden come into contact with that lady. Besides which, there's this wonderful old lech peering around the corner at her." Karal Ann Marling, Ken Burns Thomas Hart Benton.

"I think his autobiography is a really splendidly written memoir, and what I particularly admire about it are these very short, tough sentences. I mean, every sentence is really like a kind of bullseye. I think that Benton really, you know, missed his vocation. He should have been a writer rather than a painter." Hilton Kramer, Ken Burns Thomas Hart Benton.

Hubs

In the Europe of the Middle Ages the image of the wheel of fortune was favored by illuminators of manuscripts, for it expressed so perfectly the principle of being at the hub of experience. On the rim of the wheel, depending on where you are attached, you are either enjoying fortune, going down, being in misfortune, or coming up, but at the hub, you are still. In modern America, where we are constantly pursuing some goal or seeking more comfort, one sees with shocking clarity that the majority of us are attached to the rim of the wheel. The hub is where it's at.

This clever medieval metaphor of course leads me to bicycle hubs. There's so much to like in a bicycle hub. They're shiny and happily shaped ~ well-designed. True, trying to order a cone and dust cap is oftentimes nigh on impossible, and amid cries for standardization, the resuscitation of an otherwise perfectly fine, older hub is deemed impracticable. Woeful? Yes. But still, once in a while, a nice pair of hubs are rescued and built up. While the flanges of a brand-new hub are oh-so pretty and shiny and one feels a tinge of regret when first lacing them up, lacing over already-dented flanges and seeing a fine wheel come out of it brings a satisfaction of its own. The bitchinest beater wheels in the world are made this way.


Image: Le monde de Daniel Rebour, 1950-1976

Poster Art Vyf

Here in Minneapolis we have one velodrome, which is ever on the verge of being closed. In the Bay Area, where I will shortly be moving to, there is one velodrome in San Jose. But in Melbourne, Australia, there are seven! Seven bloody velodromes! When I finish this Ph.D., I'm looking for jobs in Victoria.

Karl-Marx-Allée

Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Vallotton, Pissarro, Vuillard, Daumier all managed to escape the onslaught of modernism unscathed. Others such as Rodchenko, Malevich, and El Lissitzky, all Soviets, seemed to maneuver rather well through modernity's increasingly complex and daunting landscape. And where architects such as Le Corbusier and later, Frank Gehry, failed horribly - Le Corbusier, through his anti-humanism, Gehry, through his vapid reliance on stock forms - some Soviet architects of the Stalinist school seemed to create a beautiful melding of modern and classical. Obviously, to anyone with an ounce of humanity, the name Stalin should wrench the gut in orgasms of disgust, yet when one casts an esthetic glance at the Kino International, the Kosmos Kino, the Palac Kultury i Nauki in Warsaw, one cannot help but feel that an opportunity was lost, an opportunity to create something beautiful out of this cacophony of industry, with Art Déco's affirmation of the new and Neo-Classicism's embrace of the tried-and-true. The Karl-Marx-Allee is one such accomplishment.

The Kosmos Kino is located on the Karl-Marx-Allee, and I made sure to walk by it every day when I stayed in Berlin for a time. It's nothing special, but there is a certain charm about it. It doesn't exude the positively maroon communism of the Kino International (right), it just sits there one-storily, a fixture on one of the greatest feats of urban planning in the twentieth century. Whatever else may have come out of International Communism, Stalinist structures in Riga, Warsaw, Moscow, and Berlin all put Le Corbusier's projects in Manhattan to shame, and somehow, just somehow, they find a place next to the bicycle as one of the only worthwhile products of the Industrial Revolution.

Wheels I

The bicycle wheel is in and of itself a wonderful thing. Beyond the marvel of skill, of which the properly-built wheel is a manifestation, the wheel is a circle, the symbolic importance of which is well-known to all students of psychology, religion, and art. Carl Jung says: "The most powerful religious symbol is the circle. It is one of the great primordial images of mankind. In considering the symbol of the circle, we are analyzing the self."

Though it seems retrograde and contrarian, the esthetic pleasure of a chrome, narrow-guage hub laced onto a chrome rim with chrome spokes is one of the beauties of the bicycle. Their formal realization and glistening polish warm the cockles of my cycling heart.

Beyond the handsomeness of a shiny wheel, the 32-spoke wheel is formally perfect. Any experienced mechanic can lift one up and tell right away how many spokes there are. How? The symmetry of the parallel spokes going up and down - spoke pairs on a 36-spoke wheel have more the shape of a peace symbol.

I enjoy these wheels so much that I recently built up some mid-90's Deore DX hubs as my mountain bike wheels. Not only was the overhauling of the hubs themselves a pleasure (I have, of course, as a mechanic, overhauled countless hubs that have given me no pleasure at all; but then again, they weren't mine.), but building my own wheels myself is tremendously rewarding. Every cyclist should build his own set of wheels at least once. There is a connective meditation that takes place when you lace it up, and besides, you haven't lived until you've tried rounding a wheel during a build.

Image: patentpending.blogs.com

Wheels II

Australian Aboriginal art is almost entirely lacking the "sophistication" of modern art, being as it is essentially spiritual, as all art used to be. To some, this may seem either troglodytic or totally lacking any higher basis. I would beg to differ. "But in either case it would certainly seem that when an essentially cerebral emphasis preponderates in the schooling of the young, as it does in our highly literate society, an alarming incidence of serious failure is to be expected in the difficult passage of the critical threshold from the system of sentiments proper to infancy to that of the responsibilities of the hour-and that, consequently, any attempt to interpret the symbolism of archaic man on the basis of contemporary thought and feeling must be extremely dangerous." Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, pg. 92.

From: Crumlin, Rosemary & Anthony Knight, Aboriginal Art and Spirituality

Energy

"Energy is eternal delight; and from the earliest times human beings have tried to imprison it in some durable hieroglyphic. It is perhaps the first of all the subjects of art. But the astonishing representations of energy in prehistoric painting are concerned with animals. There are no men on the walls at Altamira, only a few wretched puppets at Lascaux; and even on such evolved works as the Vaphio cups the men are insignificant compared to the stupendous bulls. These early artists considered the human body, that forked radish, that defenseless starfish, a poor vehicle for the expression of energy, compared to the muscle-rippling bull and the streamlined antelope. Once more it was the Greeks, by their idealization of
man, who turned the human body into an incarnation of energy, to us the most satisfying of all, for although it can never attain the uninhibited physical flow of the animal, its movements concern us more closely. Through art we can relive them in our own bodies, and achieve thereby that enhanced vitality which all thinkers on art, from Goethe to Berenson, have recognized as one of the chief sources of aesthetic pleasure." Kenneth Clark, The Nude, pg. 233.

Contre la montre

In cycling you are humbled, grounded in your surroundings, pushed to physical limits, and given a clean canvas to create on. Graceful shifting, well-chosen lines, and smooth pedaling all bring you in accord with the world. It is a civilizing act. As Jørgen Leth says about Ole Ritter in Stjernerne og vandbærerne: "Here there is only the man and his machine. Here strength, psyche, and style are expressed in the most simple way. ... Yes, he knows himself. He is no machine. He is absorbed in his race as if it were a work of art. ... And he knows the feeling of euphoria, when the wheels start humming, when limits and contours are erased and the fluid thrust is just right. Energy. But, above all, energy under control, the allocation of energy. The ribbon of flat road. The afternoon sun. The front wheel. Hands. Stomach. Breathing. The maximum. ... He is totally involved in a marvelous, integrated effort. ... Just like in a dream. This fluid, gliding thrust of the revolutions equating time and distance. Exertion released from the force of gravity. Energy like a classic symbol. Pain as an icon. A professional's generosity. His evaluation of his own powers. His concept of honor. His sense of duty. His experience. The calculated risks. The significance of the individual effort in a larger perspective. But also the sense of well-being when the machine runs smoothly for the man. When all calculations merge into the ultimate exertion."

And there is no civilization without an outpouring of constructive energy.

Self-Propulsion

Thomas Eakins' John Biglin in a Single Scull, 1874, is a masterpiece. Our rower is placed directly in the middle of the canvas, body and boat forming the triangle so common in classic portraiture. The horizon meets his concentrated brow, and his arm and oar echo the equilateral triangle of man and vessel with an isosceles. Beyond Eakins' formal mastery, his efforts to render reflections are borne out wonderfully in this piece, about which Robert Hughes states, "...the arrowing interweave of reflections below the boat, containing the colors of the varnished hull, Biglin's white singlet, his skin, and his red sweat-bandanna, seem to have the beauty of undeniable fact-a fact, however, which we cannot test for ourselves, but induced to take on trust." American Visions, pg. 291.

Beyond the esthetics of this artwork, its subject matter is rowing, as with cycling, an act of self-propulsion. How many other modes of conveyance are there in which you are engine as well as freight? Skating, perhaps, but only if you're in the Netherlands and it's wintertime and the canals actually freeze over, which they have not done in the last ten years in any appreciable way (right, The Skater (Portrait of William Grant), Gilbert Stuart, 1782). Rollerblading is nice, though not in the winter, where cross-country skiing is great (The usefulness of skiing is to be seen in the awesome Finnish decimation of platoon after platoon of Russian invaders during WWII). But cross-country skiing is limited to winter, which only works for half the year in certain snowy countries. And so we are left with the bicycle, useful all year round.

One can never feel any sense of accomplishment in an automobile; when you go fast in a car, you're just a slob depressing the gas pedal, but in a scull, on a bike or on skis or skates, it's all you. And of that, you can feel super duper proud indeed.

Images: Robert Hughes, American Visions

Bicycle Racing

There are roughly 190 countries in the world, and in the majority of them, soccer is king. Baseball and Football rule in America, Cricket rules in India, Pakistan, and the West Indies, and Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are all co-addicted to both Cricket and Rugby. But in Belgium, yes, in Belgium, Bicycle Racing is Imperator Cæsar.

Europeans wax eloquent about Soccer's philosophical underpinnings, Baseball fans go headlong into historical analyses, and Cricket fans will do a bit of both, and we Cycling fans? Well, we have a few points of our own.

Beyond consisting of arguably the hands-down hardest-working athletes out there, in its essence cycle racing is totally organic. By that I mean: it is only natural to go fast on a bike. Its entire raison d'être is to propel someone faster than walking-speed. From this comes the propensity to go ever faster, and what is more natural than to give your riding buddy "the look", and either pour it on each other or sprint to the street sign?

Some sports are contrived (I don't mean that in the pejorative sense at all), and are limited in where they can be played: only baseball and cycling can be done just about anywhere, as long as you have the wherewithal. No matter how much derny exhaust goes in your face.

Composition

According to Joyce, epiphany is when one views an artwork and sees the whole, in which, through the relationship of part to part, parts to whole, whole to frame, a fortunate rhythm is struck, and the beholder says "Ah." This happens in cycling too, and not only on special or exceptional rides.

The composition of such a ride (work of art) is itself a whole of relationships, part to part, parts to whole, the rhythm, the rhythm, the rhythm. Sometimes the fluid thrust is just right, and one soars almost effortlessly. This lack of visible effort is one of the elements of gracefulness. Graceful transitions in art, the meeting of torso and hips in sculpture, for example, exist in cycling too. Carrying oneself through a corner, knowing when to quit pedaling and to lay it over, gently carving through, and then unnoticeably sending the right amount of energy into the pedals again, is grace in resumption, in motion.

Equally important is the well-timed shift that allows power to be sublimated, to be beautified. Not here the raw violence of sheer power, but rather the divinity of power under control, harnessed into something beyond the everyday. In this the rider is the deity, the cycle the vessel.

Above all, the well-chosen line is, as in the fine arts, the sign of mastery. Simply doing something so integral so competently brings a welling-up of satisfaction. In some way, the line seems to reveal itself. Like most discoveries, it's a matter of seeing that which is right in front of your face.

On such happy (and here I mean happy in the eighteenth century sense) rides, everything contributes to a whole, harmonic articulation ~ the fluid thrust, the corners, the shifting, the line. Rides like these usually result in ecstatic laughter or blissful exhaustion.

A Conclusion

In From Dawn to Decadence Jacques Barzun writes: "To the modern lover of books, the product of the press is an object that arouses deep feelings, and looking at Dürer's charcoal drawing of hands holding a book, one likes to think the artist felt the same attachment. The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form." (61).

The repetition of triangles, the balance of the two wheels, the formal echo achieved by the circles in the chainwheels, the cassette, and the dropbars is all, just as Barzun says, perfection. Like the shark. They are, after all, pure, Greek forms - the circle, the triangle. They give rise to a simplicity of design, something that differentiates the traditional bicycle from those monocauque carbon fiber beasts. Esthetically speaking, they are highly developed indeed.


The cycle shown above is a Marinoni. It was posted as being for sale on Minneapolis' craigslist last fall, and I've been drooling over it ever since (It'd be the last word in class at the velodrome). For those who have seen the excellent Québécois flick Deux Secondes, I think the old Italian mechanic character is based on the actual Marinoni, who lives in the best city in North America, Montréal. Two summers ago I got a Marinoni, a proper road bike without any vulgar plastic on it, just metal. It had recently been repainted by Chris Kvale, a nice orange with yellow lug-fills. The fork is chrome, with orange and yellow fills in the M on the crown. What a bike! All metal, all handsome, all functional, and all smart. Blue cloth handlebar tape completed the composition. But here, just look at these maple leaves! Tabarnacle!



As seemingly extreme as it is, I cannot help feeling that the act of driving a car, especially so if done alone, is an act of self-debasement, self-absorption to be sure. You're nothing but a slave in a car. And to be pitied. The owning of a car is nothing to feel proud of or to center one's self-image around, though many rubes in this country do. Contrariwise, one can feel good about one's cycle, in so far as it inables you to excel as far as your endurance, skill, experience, and energy will take you. A most meritocratic invention if I ever saw one.

What's more, the landscape is beautified when people cycle. Dizgusting exhaust and noise are replaced by the charming, muted click-click of the drivetrain. The repellent outline of the automobile is traded for the bicycle-gestalt. What a wonderful thing indeed.

Wyścig Dookoła Polski

It's good to see Poland getting more attention in the world of cycle racing. The Peace Race is now professional, being formerly restricted to amateurs, who, by the way, were true hardmen for having even finished the week of punishment. And now that the Tour de Pologne is part of the ProTour, we can look forward to much more from Rzeczpospolita Polska.

Poster Art IX

If you're gonna ride sew-ups, Clément are the way to go. Not that Vittorias are the lesser, because they are not, but how can you not like a company that employed such indulgent Art Nouveau nudes as this one?

Notes to Self for Urban Cyclists

1) Do not pick fights with people driving cars. No matter how right one feels, no matter how cro-magnon, ego-driven and violent people usually get when driving, if you go into battle with a car, you will lose. *Tons* of steel will always mash 23 lbs. of it.

2) Do not run red lights when there are a lot of cars around. If there's almost nobody around and it won't impede anyone anyway, I run stop signs and red lights, which I think is fair. (Cars don't understand what a loss of momentum means, because they just depress the gas pedal and blunder on down the street. But for bikers, it means breaking, losing your rhythm, starting up again, sometimes in a hard gear because you were really cooking up to the intersection [possibly bad behavior], ergo it's a right royal pain) Point is, violating traffic laws rather noticeably fuels their petty hatred, and is therefore best avoided.


3) Do not ride around in the city on a fixed gear with track bars and no brakes unless you are an experienced cyclist, e basta!

4) Wear a helmet. Yes, most helmets look stupid, and that's why I suggest bmx or skate helmets reminiscent of pre-'33 German motorcycle helmets. I think Pro-Tec makes a fine helmet.

5) Do not ride on roads heavily trafficked by automobiles. Sometimes it is unavoidable, but most of the time there is another perfectly open street just one or two blocks over. This is safer for the biker and limits interaction with autos.

6) Use the bike lanes properly. The more that people use them appropriately, the more leverage we have to get more lanes and take the roads away from car drivers. Hopefully we'll start seeing whole city streets dedicated to cyclists.

7) Don't egg on car drivers by riding in the middle of the road. We all need to be reasonable and ride as far over to the side as is safe for us bikers.

'96 Breezer Lightning

The 1996 Breezer Lightning is a beautiful bike. Was a beautiful bike? No, is. Even though it is practically impossible to source, the Lightning is an amazing bike. The pearly richness of the white on black, the classy little B's on the fork blades, and the Ritchey spec'ing all contribute to the overall composition. This bike just wants to be ridden.

Chinatown

I am borderline obsessed by the films of Roman Polanski, mainly by Chinatown, and secondarily by The Tenant (best darkened cinema make-out scene ever) and Rosemary's Baby. Polanski is a master of keeping you unnerved by minor things, by use of compromising camera angles, embarrassing near-misses by main characters, and direction of his actors that is sometimes downright weird. But it all works, for he is the consummate film director.

"OK, go home, but in case you're interested, your husband was murdered. Somebody's been dumping thousands of tons of water from the city's reservoirs and we're supposed to be in the middle of a drought. He found out about it and he was killed. There's a waterlogged drunk in the morgue, involuntary manslaughter if anybody wants to take the trouble - which they don't. It seems like half the city is trying to cover it all up, which is fine by me. But Mrs. Mulwray, I goddamned near lost my nose. And I like it. I like breathing through it. And I still think that you're hiding something."

Polanski says this is one of his favorite scenes, and it's easy to see why: Jack and Faye are in profile, depth of field is fully exploited with Jack delivering the lines above whilst action in the background adds to the tension of their exchange. Sheer brilliance. As is this simple profile tracking shot of J.J. Gittes snooping on Hollis Mulwray.

And of course Polanski's casting is beyond reproach. Whoever has seen John Huston, amazing film director that he is, in the role of Noah Cross and not felt the menace he projects (especially in the scene below), must be nigh on dead.

I wish I could tie this post somehow into bikes, but I can't. I just love Chinatown.

images: screenmusings.org

The Academical Village

"Jefferson's greatest architectural achievement was his 'academical village', the University of Virginia (1822-26), in Charlottesville. Here, he hoped that the elite necessary to Virignian democracy would be trained. We are apt to be hypocritical about elites today. We pretend mediocrity is democratic. Jefferson knew better. He was against the idea of an artificial aristocracy of birth, but passionately for the fostering of a 'natural aristocracy' of talent and virtue, without which democracy could not survive. Hence his concern with education. But he wanted that education to be secular, not religious - as the earlier Puritan foundations and schools in Massachusetts had been. His university would be dedicated, he said, to 'the illimitable freedom of the human mind,' without any input from religion. A pure expression of the Enlightenment." Robert Hughes, American Visions

What is more, Edgar Allen Poe was housed for a spell in room #13 of the West Range of Jefferson's Village.

650b wheels

Even though it's more akin to running the gauntlet than anything else, I do like riding in the city. Usually I ride the Marinoni road bike, though the '93 XO-1 used to be the main steed. I found those 26"ers nice right outta the gates, but they maxed out really fast. You just can't ever get up to a good, Aldag-like power cruise on 'em. Ah, turn then to the 700cs - smooth and luxurious but sluggish; better for motoring on a nice 20k time trial.

So I can see the appeal of the 650b. Something right inbetween the 700c and 26" would in fact be perfectly-suited to the urban ride where you never get up to a good cruising speed and where there's a lot of stopping and starting. 650b wheels would provide the right acceleration as well as smooth handling whilst cruising. Ideal, no?



But so impractical. With so much incompatibility in the bike world already, why more?