Petite Madeleine

Celebrated Bike-to-Work Day by parsing paving to revisit "scenes of the crimes", locations Labann once schooled or worked before pandemic decimated placements. What once seemed so important and sustained livelihood surprisingly appeared about as remembered, maybe less outstanding and worse for weather. One can go home and revel in past, but it just steals from present. Memorial Day promotes happy plans for summer and hollow ceremonies without dolor. Lifelong selfless service to society earns no honor.

Remarkable how in Remembrance of Things Past (aka In Search of Lost Time, 1913–1927, seven volumes celebrating center of its centenary) Marcel Proust found truth in a small tea soaked morsel of petite madeleine. Moreover, much has been made of how a galaxy exists in a grain, and Prout’s observations about what you consciously expect to recollect versus what you involuntarily picture again. Has to do with how incredible, indelible or ineffable an impression becomes. Bicyclist/painter/sculptor Marie Nordlinger (upon whom some argue character Albertine was based in part) became a warm light in Marcel’s luminous but truncated life (51 years, d. 1922) during which this asthmatic bisexual perfected the art of reflection, and wrote 20th Century’s most influential novel. “Marie delighted in riding a bicycle, and it was the image of ‘the girl with the bicycle’ that sparked Proust’s conception of Albertine, a character who dominates Remembrance of Things Past,” in particular volume La Fugitive, 1925.

There’s a book inside every doer/reader/thinker/traveler. Some skilled psychologist might decipher why an author focuses on certain facts, not others. Bias and prejudices blind the willfully delusional from seeing reality as it is. Only the most assiduous and perceptive bother to gather and weigh all sides of any argument, and who has any right to expect otherwise? Any miscreant in social media who sees world as losers or victors will kill you over a minor disagreement.

In court, whoever narrates convincingly and succinctly wins. Deep dives and empty filibusters only succeed in blocking congressional resolutions and maintaining status quo; on street, sincere blather scatters audiences. Fame follows decisive, divisive, feckless, and senseless who steal spotlight, ignores selfless servants or true talent. Journalists say they trust the inherent value of truth in an information age, but you can never tell if what they report is reliable. Not as if there are not hundreds of unsolved mysteries: alien invasion, cryptozoology, supernaturalism. Misfortune of suddenly learning the truth drives even normal men mad.

Seldom, if ever, endorse or rate books. In fact, you can find something interesting in every one even though otherwise a pedestrian waste of your time. Because humans are social animals, they’re best entertained by congregating en masse and selecting suitable individuals with whom to commune. While books expand potential for embracing many tribe members, multiple barriers and perfidious distribution limit readers. Every year dozens of new titles invoke bicycling, but they usually repeat old tropes. B&C, begun long before latest boom, likes to choose among them to review those with a new take on riding a bike.

Marc Augé, In praise of the bicycle (Reaktion Books, Limited, 2019, 96 pp.), translated from French Éloge de la bicyclette, Editions Payot & Rivages, 2008), is an anthropologist’s extrapolation of current trends into a dynamic tomorrow using bicycles to humanize “non-places”, a term Augé famously coined. “Riding a bike in a way gives us back our child's soul and restores both the ability to play and an awareness of the real. It is thus similar to a sort of refresher (like a booster vaccination), but also to continuing education for learning again about freedom and clarity, and as a result, perhaps, about something that resembles happiness... A return to utopia, a return to what is real — they are the same. Get on your bike to improve everyone's life! Cycling is a humanism.”

Paul Fournel, Need for the Bike, (Pursuit, 2019, 224 pp.), derived from Allan Stoekl’s English translation from French (Bison, 2012) of critically lauded Besoin de vélo (Seuil, 2002, 235 pp.), covers personal insights, joys and pains based on articles Fournel contributed to Rouler magazine from 2006 onward. Latest edition was made cheaper and shorter by deleting original illustrations and publishing as a paperback. Must admit that a daily 3 mile walk as an hour’s constitutional will always be improved if you bike 15 miles instead.

Jorge Zepeda Patterson, The black jersey: a novel (Random House, 2019, 312 pp.) portrays French-Colombian domestique Marc, who belongs to an elite Tour de France team led by American star and best friend Steve, favored to win. Then someone machinates a series of deadly accidents. Marc agrees to help gendarmes investigate, but as suspects disappear, main suspects become Marc and Steve. As the finish line approaches, Marc must decide what he's willing to risk for friendship, justice or podium position. With rampant doping, world’s most prestigious contest is rife with jealousies, mayhem, and sabotage, so why not murder?

Yona Zeldis McDonough, The Bicycle Spy (self, 2020) follows young villager Marcel, who delivers bread from his parents' bakery by bike and hopes one day to race in the Tour de France, suspended since 1940 when German occupation began. Checkpoints and interrogations teach Marcel there are worse things than a canceled race. Marcel wonders whether he can help his friend's family when they come under scrutiny, but it would involve passing along secrets through risky rides. Filthy fascists, Hoover's spies, McCarthy's witch hunters, Nixon's army, Reagan's union busters, and Trump's neocons: Hardly any distinction among these enemies of community.   

Biological researcher and outdoor naturalist Sara Dykman, Bicycling with Butterflies (Workman Publishing, 2020, 280 pp.) became world’s first to bike alongside and study monarch butterflies throughout a complete migration. She assembled a bike from used parts, attached panniers made from recycled buckets, packed bare essentials, and rode alone on a 3 country, 9-month, 10,000 mile roundtrip. Not just about mucking in fens for flutter-by eggs, she shares her passion with ardent stewards, citizen scientists, eager schoolchildren, high-rise tenants, interested farmers, skeptical loungers, and unimpressed officials.

Jools Walker, blogger and Brit bicyclist Lady Velo, mentioned before pandemic for Back in the Frame: How to get back on your bike, whatever life throws at you (Little Brown Book Group, 2019, 368 pp.), followed up with a reedited paperback sounding pleasanter Back in the Frame: Cycling belonging and finding joy on a bike (Sphere, 2021, 384 pp.), her personal memoire of an all-in-one child tricyclist, preteen BMXer, and renewed roadie who has come of age and still likes bikes. Happily, she now finds herself being interviewed by BBC about cycling culture and giving talks at women’s cycling events. Pedaling by wheel, even casually, is a near panacea and potent tonic for arthritis, cardiovascular ailments, depression, isolation and other maladies caused by a sedentary stay-at-home lifestyle. Bikes are also convenient for hanging your emotional baggage from and studying what's really going on.

In June of 2019 author and pastor Neil Tomba mounted a bike in Santa Monica, CA, and a month later arrived in Annapolis, MD. His goal was twice a day to initiate a conversation with strangers and instill hope among them in Jesus’s teachings. How could that go wrong? Due out next month as a result is The Listening Road: One Man's Ride Across America to Start Conversations About God (Thomas Nelson, 2021, 316 pp.). He’s convinced that people ought to spend time listening to one another, despite differences in creed, intelligence, race, or social status. Every troll says the same thing, only it's you paying attention to them along a one-way street.

Anti-doping activist and multiple medalist James Hibbard retired from road cycling, studied postgraduate philosophy, and wrote a meditation on the sport. Just out this June, The Art of Cycling (Quercus, 2021, 320pp.) shares his journey from racing ruthlessly to regaining passion for pedaling, and shows how cycling can shed new light on classic questions of purpose and selfhood. Cycling’s counterintuitive lessons can be applied to most areas of life and do undermine what’s typically thought of as intellectual in a society driven towards abstract, detached, and virtual dehumanization by an obsession with progress. But wasn’t it a slew of innovations with lowly bicycles (still ongoing) that inspired aerospace and automotive arrogance behind global problems? Without bicycles there would never have been a Nazi blitzkrieg. But you can’t blame invention of weapons with their misuse in mass murders.

Vélo Humain

With filing deadline postponed by pandemic, Tax Day arrived along with Bike-to-Work Week. Observed by viewing an energy alternative documentary, Planet of the Humans (Jeff Gibbs, dir., 2020), which stares down environmental issues and suggests Earth’s salvation rests in realigning lifestyles. “The path to change comes from awareness... Infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide... We must take control of our environmental movement and our future from billionaires and their permanent war on planet earth.” Good luck with that! If COVID taught anything, it’s that people aren’t easily cajoled to act on their own behalf, never mind community’s or planet’s. Following a year of furlough or work from home, drivers’ abilities and attention atrophied, bicycling risks were exacerbated, earnings diminished, and wealth inequality expanded.

Those who profited from technology caused problems, yet they remain convinced there are technological solutions into which they’ve heavily invested. Trying to eliminate fossil fuels and look carbon guiltless, they’ve created industries with equivalent toxic or tragic aftermaths, for example, burning biomass, which clearcuts life-giving forests for fuel, or solar panels, which combine rare earth materials out of devastating strip mines and defy recycling once failed after only a few years of use, even before mine land has been reclaimed. Power companies install innovations to justify rate hikes that they force users to pay. You’d think burning or gasifying garbage might work, or fusion reactors with no radioactive waste, but where’s the profit in it? It’s a complex issue made intractable by greedy capitalists and needy do-nothings.

Funny that Gibbs never mentions bicycling; even student protestors shown had sense to ride to rallies. Average cost of car ownership has risen in 2021 to $9,282/year, thousands more in 1st year, then gradually decreasing to half by 10th as costs, except insurance and maintenance, decline. An average of 13,500 miles are driven annually. This estimates about 70 cents/mile, not taking into account related cancer/crash deaths, shared cleanup costs, what’s consumed to afford this luxury, wars waged, and world destruction. According to industry analysts and confirmed personally, bicycling cost only 4 cents/mile with practically no environmental or geopolitical detriment. Paved roads are not even necessary, if you own an MTB, though do improve pedaling efficiency. Too many Americans prefer death, debt, and Dukes of Hazzard, although once popular NASCAR attendance had already dwindled before personal distancing seemed prudent.

Woke tree-huggers gravitate to new electric and hybrid vehicles and lambaste gas guzzlers, gross polluters, and pub crawlers. An honest statement aligned with nature can be made by riding bicycles and thumbing nose at busses, cars and trains. Beyond just Bike Month and for months at a clip, performing bands including Shake Your Peace, The Ditty Bops, The Ginger Ninjas, and This Bike is a Pipe Bomb used to ride by bikes between gigs all over North America. Bodies congregating and cooperating can even form a human bicycle side show act.

“Focusing on an individual’s carbon footprint is a useful mechanism that diverts attention away from the worldwide impact of global warming. Anti-global-warming PR often means deflecting global warming by re-locating the issue onto side issues. It prefers to blame global warming on individuals rather than corporate behaviour... Such campaigns blame those who highlight the impact of global warming by focusing on the messenger... Forbes magazine once suggested that [climate activist who crossed North Atlantic on a sailboat in winter to speak before UN] Greta Thunberg’s lifestyle may be one reason for global warming.” Norman Simms & Thomas Klikauer, May 20, 2021

Convincing his NYC family, Colin Beavan vowed to be No Impact Man (Justin Schein, dir., 2008) for a year by personally not contributing carbon exhaust from flying or motoring, coffee imbibing, conditioned air, disposable diapers, elevator rides, excess consumption, imported or take out foods, new purchases, paper trash, plastic packaging, refrigeration, subway use, taxi hops, television watching, toilet paper, and water toxins from detergents. For anyone to follow, they’d have to live his at-home author vegetarian lifestyle. For actual zero impact, you must also avoid work that consumes electricity. fuel or materials; compost food and human wastes; only ingest medicines you grow on windowsills; plant trees to offset carbon you exhale; self propel to farms to shop (shipping each menu ingredient averages 1,500 miles); sit at home in the dark; and skip as many meals as possible. Would miss cooked food and hot water. If everyone did only one, world would indeed be better off. But it’s Al Gore hypocrisy all over, profit driven drivel that says, Do as I say, not as I do.” After his Thoreau inspired trial, sole thing that stuck with Beavan was bicycling, since it proved the most economical and effective urban choice.

For 1 minute and 11 seconds in magic realism film 2:22 (Paul Currie, dir., 2017), multimodal commuter Dylan Branson (Michiel Huisman) rides his bike from his business district apartment to Grand Central Station to board a subway to his job as a JFK air traffic controller. As a bicyclist dodging midtown traffic, patterns come naturally to him, a skill that makes him great at what he does. One day at 2:22 PM, he’s suddenly stunned by universe crushing down upon him, and nearly causes an airline crash, which results in his suspension. This gives him days to explore a bizarre relationship with Sarah (Teresa Palmer), a repeating pattern of things that go boom at 2:22 P.M., and series of events based on fates of residents 30 years ago superimposed upon their current lives.

When Katja Şekerci (Diane Kruger) leaves her Kurdish husband and son at his office, she cautions a woman who’s leaving a brand new bike out front in Hamburg’s Turkish quarter that she ought to lock it up. In the Fade, aka Aus dem Nichts (Out of Nowhere, Fatih Akin, dir., 2017, German with subtitles) tells Katja’s story in the aftermath of this Neo-Nazi bike bomb, loosely based on events of 2004 Cologne. When courts are unable to convict couple responsible despite her testimony, Katja hunts down these terrorists.

Blood Road (Nicholas Schrunk, dir., 2017) tracks endurance mountain biker Rebecca Rusch and native guide Huyen Nguyen who pedaled 1,200 miles of Ho Chi Minh Trail to reach crash site and resting place of Rebecca's dad, a U.S. Air Force F-4 pilot who was killed when shot down over Laos 5 decades earlier during Viet Nam War. This documentary was nominated for or won a slew of film festival awards, though critics groaned that her emotional closure mattered more than permanent damage Nixon’s carpet bombing did in locations she visited. To their credit, filmmakers teamed with Nobel Laureate NGO nonprofit Mines Advisory Group to help de-mine along border and save innocent lives. Sick conservative tactics during 1960's made a lifelong impression on Labann.

Return to Earth (Colin Jones, Darren McCullough, Darcy Wittenburg, dirs., 2019) presents a joint Shimano and Trek vision of big air over Moab single track and Oahu volcanic moguls featuring star MTB riders.

In Brit rom-com Finding Your Feet (Richard Loncraine, dir., 2018), Lady Sandra Abbott (Imelda Staunton, known as draconian Hogwarts headmistress Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) takes umbrage at husband’s secret sex affair. She decamps to sister Bif’s (Celia Imrie) housing project flat. Bif admonishes her, “It’s one thing being scared of dying, Sondra. It’s a whole different matter being scared of living.” She begins to drop her defenses and open herself to new experiences, like riding a London Boris Bike.

Ami-Ami, aka (Girl)Friend (Victor Saint Macary, dir., 2018) has Vincent (William Lebghil) move in with best friend Nefeli (Margot Bancilhon) and swear off romantic love. Then Vincent meets Julie, which he fears will complicate his open lifestyle with Nefeli riding Vélib' bikes daily around Paris along with ninety-thousand other residents and visitors.

While getting fresh air and sunshine in great outdoors at Rim of the World (Joseph McGinty Nichol, dir., 2019) camp, four awkward kids band together against an invasion of dinosaur space aliens. They’re getting around fine by BMX, but when they receive a key that could save world, they trade bikes for a GTO to traverse last 70 miles to JPL in Pasadena.

Entrepreneur stooge pair Manu (Grégoire Ludig) and Jean-Gab (David Marsais), previously mentioned as stars of La folle histoire de Max et Léon, team again to pull a heist in sun drenched South of France. After stealing a car, they discover a fly the size of a dog in its trunk. Instead of releasing it sensibly, they insanely decide to forego heist and train “Dominique” to rob banks, like a drone with Mandibles (Quentin Dupieux, dir., 2020), thereby hoping to become comparatively rich. Mayhem and mistaken identity find them shacking up with zany villainess Agnes (Adèle Exarchopoulos), where Manu races off on a unicorn lemon squeezer.

The Half of It (Alice Wu, dir., 2020) portrays enterprising teen cyclist Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis), who writes essays for other high school students. Lovestruck jock Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer) approaches her to write a letter from him to lovely Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire). Ellie doesn't expect to become his friend, or to fall for Aster. Sure, the girl geek rides a bike; maybe she knows more than all her peers.

PBS documentary Blood Sugar Rising (David Alvarado, dir., 2020) asks, “Why isn’t there a war on diabetes?” Nearly 450 million humans, including 35 million Americans (10%), diagnosed with either Type I (5% of total) and Type II diabetes (95%) face crippling strokes, extremity amputations, fatal seizures, heart attacks, and organ transplants at a collective cost of $350 billion per year. Alvarado covers blood monitoring, dietary changes, and expensive operations, but neglects root causes in sedentary lifestyles enabled by automotive convenience and other seated activities supplanting self propulsion. Ask yourself, “Why aren’t more people going everywhere by bike?”

Hallmark whodunit A Beautiful Place to Die: A Martha's Vineyard Mystery (Mark Jean, dir., 2020) depicts detective Jeff Jackson (Jesse Metcalfe), who was forced into early retirement after taking a bullet in his spine, returned to bike infested island life, that is, until a body washes up and his crime solving creed is challenged. MVPD neglects to compensate him after risking paralysis by battling suspects and solving case.