Into The Fold On Being And Nothingness

Handing over a bank note is enough to make a bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.

That insight came from none other than Jean-Paul Sartre.  Yesterday, I made a reference to him.  Well, wouldn't you know it?:  Today I came across the above quote, and this photo:


Here he is riding "Le Petit Bi":

This bike has been all but lost to the mists of time or, more precisely, the ashes of World War II.  Andre Jules Marcelin, a French Nobel Laureate (1926) physicist, invented it and received his first patent for it in Luxembourg in October 1939.  The following year, he received patents for it in France and Switzerland.

No one seems to know who manufactured the bike or how many were made.  All that is certain is that only a few exist.  Did the war severely curtail their production?  Or were many destroyed in bombing raids and such?

Professor Marcelin did his research at the Laboratoire de Chimie Physique (Chemical Physics Lab) of the Sorbonne-University of Paris.  He and other Sorbonne scientists held seminars on Monday nights where writers, poets, painters and other artists to speak.  It's possible that Marcelin met Sartre there, as well as Francois Picabia, seen here on a Bi:

Interestingly, that photo and the one of Sartre ended up in a Nazi propaganda magazine called Signal, which tried to show that life was normal for the French people under the German occupation.  

That Marcelin went to the trouble of filing for patents in multiple countries shows that he saw some sort of commercial potential in the Bi.  He even had plans for a foldable tandem and a motorized Bi:

Perhaps most intriguing of Marcelin's designs is the one he patented in 1935, four years before the Bi, for what looks like a foldable recumbent bicycle.

Whatever its history, the Bi did have something of a legacy.  One of the first lightweight folding bicycles, the Bickerton, came out during the 1970s.  The first prototype of it borrowed heavily from Le Petit Bi:

The Bickerton that finally came to market had a significantly different design, most likely because Harry Bickerton (who was an engineer) saw that he couldn't make the bike out of aluminum (as he did to achieve his bike's light weight) if he were to use the Petit Bi design.

So, although Andre Jules Marcelin patented Le Petit Bi, perhaps no one will realize its possession--or, more precisely, it.

Loves "Bicycle Thieves." Hates Cyclists?

Nobody has an unbiased opinion--well, all right, nobody has an unbiased opinion, right?

So let's just say that nobody can be, um, neutral when it comes to Woody Allen.

As repulsed as I was by his affair with, then marriage to, a woman decades younger than he whom he and his ex-wife adopted as a baby, I was--still am--willing to admit that I enjoyed Annie Hall and Manhattan when they came out.  I thought even Hannah and Her Sisters and Stardust Memories were pretty good.  All right, I'll admit that part of the latter film's appeal for me lay in my uncle's bit role in it.

Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix in Irrational  Man

But almost nothing he's done since Hannah has appealed to me.  Irrational Man, which came out last year, was torture to see:  It felt like a murder mystery written the way some self-absorbed sophomore imagines how Jean-Paul Sartre or Soren Kierkegaard might have written it.  Or, perhaps, it's Woody Allen's own idea of how he might have made Dead Poets Society (a favorite of mine) were he up to the task.

I know, I'm not Pauline Kael.  So why am I ranting about a would-be auteur whose time has come and gone in this blog?  Well, I have recently found another thing to further becloud my judgment when it comes to Mr. Allen:  He's anti-bike.  More precisely, he's anti-cyclist.

Woody Allen at the Community Board meeting n which he voiced his opposition to bike lanes on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

He didn't become that way overnight, although it became plain for all to see when he opposed the city's plan to paint a bike lane on East 70th Street--which just happens to be the street on which he lives.  (A little bit of NIMBY, wouldn't you say?) For years, he's been blaming "out of control" cyclists for making the city a worse place.  Why, he even blames them (us:  He thinks all cyclists are "out of control"!) for everything from making the streets more dangerous to--are you ready for this?-- that there is no "graceful" way for any street on the Upper East Side, where he lives, to accomodate bike lanes.

He made his prejudices known at his local community board's hearing in May.  But not everyone who attended that meeting agreed with him.  And, apparently, not the city's Department of Transportation, either:  While they decided not to paint lanes on East 70th and 71st Streets, they are going to put them on East 67th and 68th Streets as well as 77th and 78th, and 84th and 85th, Streets.  Traffic on each of those streets is unidirectional:  eastbound on the even-numbered streets of each pairing, and westbound on the odd-numbered ones.  All of them run from Central Park (at Fifth Avenue) to the East River.

For what it's worth, Allen still says that Bicycle Thieves is still one of his favorite films, but admits that he doesn't have it in him to make anything of its magnitude.

Get Well, Ely!

I was going to write another post about another Lovely Fall Ride.  Today's trek was different from yesterday's LFR in that I didn't leave the confines of the Five Boroughs. In fact, I traversed only two of those boroughs:  the one in which I live--Queens--and neighboring Brooklyn.  All of my ride covered streets that are entirely familiar to me but were accented by the clear mid-October afternoon accented by hints of the impending sunset and the crisp air.

Yes, I could write about today's ride which, while shorter and less varied than yesterday's ride to Connecticut, was still soul-satisfying.  Funny that I should choose such a term given that I wended along the side streets of the Hasidic enclave in the southern end of Williamsburgh.  Wooden booths enclosed balconies and building entrances; tents were erected in lots and alleyways:  I then realized that today is the beginning of Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles.  People gathered inside those booths and tents to commemorate the Exodus; those structures are meant to invoke the gathering of people who, so often, have been dispersed.

But I am not going to talk more about a Jewish observnce, of which I have very limited knowledge and experience.  I also won't talk about my ride because, well, I can do that whenever I want to.  Instead, I want to tell you about someone who's been part of my cycling life over the past three years, even though I've never met him.

We've talked on the phone, exchanged e-mails and responded to each other's post on Facebook.  I made a promise, sort of. to come out his way and ride with him.  And, if he's ever out this way and he has time, we're going to take at least one of the rides I've described in this blog. 

(Once, about a year or so ago, he was here in NYC, but only for two days, and had a commitment with a relative.)

So, aside from his good cheer and inspiration, how else has he affected my cycling life?  Well, he's made some things that are on all of my bikes.  They have become some of my favorite accessories, ever.  And now that they're on my bikes, I can't imagine my bikes without them:  They work so  well for me and the way I ride, and they highlight the beauty of my Mercians.

I am talking, of course, about my Ruth Works bags:  The Brevet bags on the handlebars of Arielle and Tosca, my Mercian Audax and fixed-gear bikes respectively.  The Randonneur bag on Vera, my twin-tube Mercian mixte.  The clutch on the handlebar of Helene, my modern Miss Mercian.  The seat wedges on all of those bikes, and the shopping panniers I use on my commuter.  And a large seat bag I sometimes use, and the panniers he made but which I haven't used yet.

Ely Ruth Rodriguez made all of those bags for me.  After he made those first bags--the Brevets and seat wedges--I fell in love with his work. And those bags just seemed to belong on my Mercians.

Today I found out that he suffered a heart attack while out on a ride.  I don't have a lot of details, but we exchanged e-mails and he says he's resting now.   

I hope he recovers quickly and well.  After all, I want to ride with him and, well, I might ask him to make another bag for me when he's up to it. But most important, he's a nice, engaging person with a family who loves him.