It was probably a good thing that I was in a hurry. Why on a Saturday, you ask? Well, I was running late because I slept late.
I'd volunteered to be on a panel in a discussion at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Silly me. I gave up a ride on one of the best days we're likely to have for a while for the privilege of doing something I'm not crazy about in one of my least favorite places in New York City, if not the world.
Anyway... After I parked Marianela on 35th Street, just off Fifth Avenue, I turned the corner toward the GC-CUNY entrance. About the best thing I can say about GC-CUNY--and the only thing that would ever tempt me to go to school there again--is that there are decent bike racks in front of the building.
On one of them was propped and locked a bike that, for a moment, made me--as Kurt Vonnegut said in Breakfast of Champions--woozy with deja vu. I didn't photograph it, but I found an image of a bike just like it:
It's a Schwinn Continental from 1971 or 1972. I can date it that closely because of the color: Schwinn called it "Sierra brown;" it's sometimes referred to as "root beer brown." The following year, the bike was available in a redder shade of brown. I don't recall what Schwinn's catalogue copy called it.
As you've probably guessed by now, I had the "Sierra" or "root beer" brown Continental. I bought it early in my freshman year of high school for the princely sum of $96. My parents thought it was an absolutely insane amount of money to spend on a bike. Little did they--or I--know what I was getting into!
The so-called "bike boom" of the Seventies was picking up steam then. As I recall, I went to four different local shops that June, around the time school let out. All were sold out and subsequent shipments from Schwinn were already spoken for. None of the shops thought they could have a bike for me before November. So imagine my delight when one shop--Michael's, on Route 35 in Hazlet, NJ (next to a drive-in movie theatre)--got a shipment a month earlier than promised. And, yes, there was one bike on which nobody had dibs. "As long as you don't mind this color," the shop's owner said, a bit condescendingly.
In my high school--and, apparently, most others--most kids got the Continental in a lemon yellow, or the Varsity in a shade of dark bottle green. They were fine colors, but I was taken with the brown: It was more elegant, with a golden-bronze undertone, than the photo in this post depicts. Without hesitation, I plunked down the cash I'd earned from delivering newspapers.
Even though the bike came a month earlier than promised, I had to wait about three months: a near-eternity for a kid entering adolescence. Now that I think of it, I waited almost as long for that Schwinn as I did for at least one custom frame I've ordered!
Schwinn referred to the Varsity and Continental as "lightweight" models, though either one weighed about twice as much as my Mercian road bike, on which I made no effort to save weight. Those Schwinns even weighed about ten pounds more than Marianela weighed when she was new, and she was even a couple of pounds heavier than her competition, which included the Peugeot U08, Raleigh Grand Prix and Motobecane Nobly.
Yes, the Continental was a tank. (So was the Varsity.) I'll bet mine is still out there somewhere. Maybe it's still being ridden. Hey, for all I know, the one I saw today might've been mine!
It pains me to admit this: On a lovely, if rather chilly, fall day, I didn't cycle to work.
I took the train instead. It bought me time, of which I haven't had nearly enough, to look at some students' papers and to review a lesson.
Yes, the colleges were open, even though it's Veteran's Day.
Here's a video of a cycling professor: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5251769227304946424
Tonight, during my ride home from work, I cut through Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. It's most famous as the site of two Worlds' Fairs (The Unisphere was built for the second), the US Open stadium and the setting for parts of Men In Black. Even on a night as chilly and windy as tonight has been, people walk, run, cycle or otherwise transverse the park, and it's heavily patrolled.
Anyway, Marianela, my LeTour, wanted to stop under this tree:
She knows a photo op when she sees one. "Do I look autumnal, or what?" she intones. Yes, she does, even in her battered condition.
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.
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.
