Spinning Music Out Of Nowhere

 Artists and sculptors have been turning bicycle parts into objets d'art since, well, bicycles have been around.  Perhaps the most famous examples are the "bull's head" Pablo Picasso fashioned from handlebars and a saddle, and Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel.

In those, and other works, the parts are ingredients used, like paint or clay, to create forms or evoke images.  Rarely are bike parts used as the means--think the paintbrush, pen or musical instrument-- rather than the materials or medium, for making a work.

Nicolas Bras is a Paris-based musician and tinkerer who evokes his sounds from homemade instruments.  You can see and hear some of them on his "Musiques de Nulle Part" (Music from Nowhere) series on YouTube.  Among them is this "flute" made from a bicycle wheel.

The "music" is made by blowing through a tube onto the randomly-tuned pan flutes attached to the bicycle wheel.  I put quotes around "music" because not everyone would so categorize the sound coming from it.  Bras, however, says he is working on more melodious and complex sounds from his rotary flute.  I don't doubt he's capable of such a thing:  After all, we don't know what came out when Pan, the Greek god of nature (for whom the flute is named), supposedly exhaled into it for the first time.

Ancient Greek images depict shepherds playing it. Perhaps in the future, we will follow the tunes Nicolas Bras spins on his bicycle wheel flute.

To Ease The Shock

Consternation followed his victory.

There weren't any rumors of doping or other cheating.  Nor were any questionable decisions by race officials.

The fact that he was 37 years old--ancient for a European pro cyclist--or that he'd been trying to win that particular race for years didn't get tongues wagging.  Even his palmares, which included a number of wins and high places in one-day races but no such results in multi-day events, wasn't the reason why cycling fans and the media were shocked when he won the Paris-Roubaix.

When Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle ascended the podium in the Roubaix Velodrome on 12 April 1992, no one talked about the course of the annual race--dubbed "L'enfer du nord" (the Hell of the North) for its cobblestones, mud and unpredictable weather-- or his persévérance.  Rather, all of the attention was on his bike--specifically, one part.

At that time, suspension or "telescoping" (as they're called in Britain) front forks were the hot new item on mountain bikes.  Until that day, no one had seen them on road bikes.  

Gibus, as he was called, rode a LeMond road bike equipped with a specially-modified Rock Shox fork.  The funny thing is that, with all due respect to LeMond bikes, the fork was really its only unusual feature.  The rest of the frame was a typical road bike of the time, equipped with standard Campagnolo road components.

What's surprising, to me, is that there weren't more attempts to create suspended road bikes before Gibus rode his.   The great Bernard Hinault won the Tour de France five times and a number of one-day events.  But he refused to ride Paris-Roubaix until 1981 (he won) because the jarring conditions would aggravate his tendinitis, the condition that caused him to withdraw from the cold, rainy 1980 Tour.  He's not the only elite cyclist who couldn't or wouldn't ride P-R because of bone-shaking conditions.

Since then, road bikes have incorporated various forms of  front suspension.  Rear suspension, however, caught on in any major way with professionals because it's difficult to achieve a balance between weight, shock absorption when needed and stiffness when ridden on smooth surfaces.

In April 2018, Specialized applied for a patent describing a system that allows the upper portion of a bike's seat post to move and absorb shock.  To accomplish this, the seat post is clamped much further down the seat tube.  The patent application, approved in October of last year, indicates that a pivot could be placed there and that it might be adjustable to the rider's weight.

According Specialized, the system could make its appearance on, appropriately enough, the company's Roubaix model.  And it might come out next year:  the 30th anniversary of Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle's first Paris-Roubaix win. (He also won the following year.)

I can't say I'm shocked. 

Photo of Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle in 1992 Paris-Roubaix by Graham Watson.  Drawings from Specialized patent application.

She Knew: Self-Care Is Not A Luxury

 Alert:  I will reveal something very personal (yes, even by the standards of this blog) in this post.  

She would be 87 years old today. But she lives on for me, and many other people.

I first encountered Audre Lorde's poetry when I was in college--right about the time the world (as I knew it, anyway) was discovering black artists and lesbians--and colleges were starting to offer courses in Women's Studies (no gender studies or queer studies) and African-American Studies.

That was during the late 1970s.  The way I came to her poems--and her work as a feminist activist--wasn't through class assignments:  She came to read on our campus.  Honestly, I knew nothing about her before then--or, to be fair, many of the poets who gave readings at our college. That, of course, is exactly the reason I went to those readings.

Some I've long since forgotten.  But I knew Audre Lorde would stick with me, even thought I was far from being "out" as a non-heterosexual, non-cisgender person and am about as white as anybody can be.  (According to a DNA test, I am 4 percent African.  Anthropology 101 tells us the human race began in Africa, so that proportion seems like some sort of baseline for everyone.)  Her poems were unlike any I'd heard or read up to that time and, in ways I wouldn't articulate until much later, she showed there were ways one could carry one's self in this world that, up to that point, I hadn't seen.

She's one of those writers that even people who've never read her quote, sometimes without realizing it.  "Poetry is not a luxury." Of course, you're not going to hear that from your parents or most of the people you know when you announce that you're changing your major from Business or Engineering to Creative Writing or English Literature (unless, of course, you tell them the latter is a preparation for teaching or law school). What she meant is that poetry is, in her conception--and mine--an attempt to say what hasn't been said and, as often as not, what others won't say.

I don't know whether she did much cycling.  But these words of hers capture the reason why many of us  ride:

She knew about self-care:  Some of her later activism was motivated by her battle with breast cancer, which claimed her at 58 years old.  Her spirit motivates my riding and writing, which are as much a part of my self-care as visiting my doctor.  

Oh, my doctor is part of the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, of which she was a co-founder.  I go to that doctor because I like him, and on principle:  That he would work for C-L when he probably could make more elsewhere says much about his motivations, of which Audre Lorde would surely approve.