I'm Not A Purist, But...

I've seen trust-fund kids wearing Mao and Che T-shirts--which, when you think about them, are a bit oxymoronic.  Perhaps that's not as much a contradiction as having or pursuing tenure while professing Marxism.  (I guess my ex's family, who escaped from Castro, still influences me after all!)  And some genius thought that a song about the apocalypse was just the thing to sell cars.  I love the song (and most others by the artist who wrote and sang it); I just thought it was odd to hear in a VW commercial.


So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to see a porteur-style rack on the front of a "hipster fixie."  I wish I could've taken a photo of it.  But almost as soon as I saw it, the bike's owner unlocked it and bolted down Broadway.  Even if I'd had enough time to take a photo, I wouldn't have been able to take a very good photo, as I didn't have my camera with me.  


But it was quite the sight:  all neon colors, except for the flat black rack on the front.


I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.  Some "hipster fixies" are actually used for transportation, and even to haul stuff, although they're not the best bikes for the purpose.  And, within a certain segment of the population, it's hip to have a porteur rack.  Still, the combination doesn't seem right.


Mind you, I am  not a purist, at least not about most things.  When I realized how silly and futile it is to preserve racial purity, which is a fiction anyway, I lost whatever desire I had to uphold homogeneity.  


All right, I'll admit to being a purist about a few things.  I still don't think that pineapple belongs on pizza or chocolate chips in bagels.  (Actually, that's the New Yorker in me.)  And, all other things being equal, I'd rather mount merrie olde English Brooks saddles and hang equally merrie-olde Carradice bags on my even-more-merrie-olde-English Mercian frames.  But if you looked at my bikes, you'd see that, even though they have lugged steel frames, they're not entirely "retro," which is something I've never tried to make my bikes.


Still, I'm trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a hipster fixie with a porteur rack.

Bike Porn and Stuff I See From My Bike

I know that some cyclists' blogs include "bike porn."  I don't know that mine does.  If I have any kind of porn in this blog, I'd say that it's of land- and sea-scapes, skylines and people who may or may not have known that I photographed them.  


Perhaps the following photo doesn't qualify as any of the kinds of porn I've described.  But I did take some sort of perverse pleasure in taking it:

Aside from the actual or non-porn, there are things I see.  I'm trying not to turn this blog into Stuff I See When I'm Riding My Bike, but it may be going that way in spite of my efforts.  Here's an example of the genre, specifically something I saw yesterday:

To take a photo of this car without the light pole in it, I would have had to risk being flattened by the traffic.  I want to be skinnier than I am now, but that's not the way I had in mind.


At first glance, I thought I was looking at a Renault that had been left on a radiator.  Or, at least the front had been left there.  I rather liked the color--a shade of orange rather like a dusty vermilion.

Now, what the car was doing in front of a service station in Glendale, Queens, I'll never know.  I know that there are Polish and Albanian communities nearby, but not very many Romanians, as far as I know.  (Where are there very many Romanians outside of Romania?)  Even if Queens were full of emigres from Bucharest, I doubt there are very many who would have taken the trouble--or had the means--to bring a Dacia from their native land.


I did some quick research (translation:  I read a Wikipedia page) and learned that Dacia was founded during the 1960's with assistance from Renault.  Hmm...Romania gave France one of its best twentieth-century playwrights (Eugene Ionesco) and the French started their auto industry.  Who got the better of that trade?


Anyway, Dacia are still making cars.  In a not-too-surprising twist of fate, Renault bought the company.  The French automaker saw a growing market in the former Communist-bloc countries, and believed that Romania would make a good base of operations for their incursions into that market.  (Renault also makes cars in Turkey, among other places.)  


Now, while I'm out riding my bike and filling my brain with stuff that I'll turn into pointless ruminations, other people are slaving away over hot grills.

I've mentioned these guys on other posts in this and my other blog.  They make a chicken-and-rice platter to die for.  I'm not the only one who feels that way:  Once again, they won the "Vendy" award:

All I can say is that in the majority of the world, and through the majority of history, art is and has been utilitarian.

Cycling The November Sky

Here's what makes a November sky different from its October counterpart--or, for that matter, what we think of as a "fall" or "autumn" sky, or what stretches above and in front of us at any other time of year. The clouds are exactly that--clouds.  Even as they shift across the sky and reveal patches of blue backlit by the sun, like a skylight in a Romanesque cathedral, they fill the sky in layers, to the point that they seem to become the sky itself, and to define not only the light, but the wind and chill that come from it.


However, there is absolutely no threat of rain, or any other kind of precipitation.  One can feel just as confident of cycling under this sky as among Shakespeare's "darling buds of May" and not having one's skin moistened by anything that wasn't within his or her own body.  (Whether or how much one sweats depends, of course, on one's conditioning and the strenuousness of the ride.  Mine today wasn't very. )  The best thing about cycling under these conditions, at least to me, is that the light is nothing more or less than that:  it's not the glaring sunlight that taxes light eyes and fair skins (like mine) and it's not diffuse or "painterly," as much as I appreciate and even enjoy that sort of illumination.


This is the sort of light that makes the things--like foliage--that were described with "fall" as prefixes attached to them in October become autumnal in the truest sense of that word.

This may seem odd to some of you, but I find none of this depressing.  In fact, I quite enjoy it.   Now I'm going to sound like exactly the Europhile (or, more specifically, Francophile) snob some of the people with whom I grew up suspected me of being, or having become.  I think that autumnality or autumnalness (OK, if Sarah Palin can compare herself to Shakespeare, surely you can indulge me in this!)  is not much respected, much less valued or celebrated, in American culture.  I suppose it has to do with the notion that this country is supposed to be a place where one can start over and re-invent one's self, and its attendant value of youthfulness and novelty.  The mature sexuality of French or Italian women or the ironic sense of the English--or, for that matter, the ability to accept life on its own terms while questioning one's self that seems to be part of a Germanic way of seeing--is not valued in the same way in America as that of youthful effusiveness and ebullience.


The quality of autumnalness I'm describing is what you might see in western New England if you get off Route 7, or if you take the back roads of the Adirondacks or the routes departmentales of the Vosges.  I have done all of those things, on my bicycle; perhaps having done them in my youth shaped, in some way, my attitudes about cycling and much else in my life.


Will it lead me to be like this couple?:

They say that in the spring a young man's fancy turns to love.  As if I would know about such things!  But at this time of year, an older man's and, ahem, woman's fancies turn to...wait, do they have fancies?   And if they do, will they be realized under this sky?:

I suspect that some of mine will be.  However, I am sure that I will continue to encounter them, as I did today, from my trusty steed for all seasons: