What Spines Splain

Sometimes a picture accompanies a post here. Magazines have lots, which would make any website attempting to emulate an e-zine. Readers would've visited Flicker or Pinterest if they wanted eye candy instead of literary art. Unadorned words can satisfy; Academy especially honored script/story writers at last Oscars ceremony. Books don’t have to be read to be collectible or important. Sometimes just bringing them together on a shelf and organizing titles serves a purpose. Minimally, it says something about owner’s interests. Row after row of bike related titles points to a persistent, ubiquitous bicycling culture. However, when you google “bicycling books”, hardly any come up newer than 20 years old even though, in the last few, several have been published beyond ubiquitous gearhead, race and travel titles.

Labann, Bike&Chain Companion Reader (2nd edition, 2016): Spent a month cleaning up book for careless inconsistencies, dead links, and obviated references. Having reviewed, then augmented and updated song list, too, now over 1800 items. Surprises how many links disappear. Youtube if rife with legal squabbles and take downs. Links to own posts were cut when Apple, who hosted original site, discontinued service. Idea that anything posted to internet is indelible isn’t true, rather, web seems sadly unstable. Forget citing e-commerce sites, which change daily. News servers dump old stories, and political platforms shift depending upon who’s in power and what voters complain about. How do you access week-old Facebook posts, what happens to dated Twitter tweets, and who uses Myspace anymore? They even sell a service to erase your presence altogether. At least Wikipedia maintains a page as if a bin or stub, though contents morph over time. Like Labann, other bloggers compile blog entries into books, so maybe some details do endure somewhere.

Another emerging book by Argentinean author Juan Carlos Kreimer, The Bicycle Effect: Cycling as Meditation (Findhorn Press, 2016, 192 pp.), notes the endorphin rush and zen mindfulness that pedaling has to offer, as would anyone who read Labann over last few decades.

Something of interest after seeing recent border crime feature film Sicario is Kimball Taylor’s The Coyote’s Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire (Tin House Books, 2016, 380 pp.). It’s about a smuggler of illegal aliens who makes a million transporting them by bikes, then suddenly disappears leaving thousands littering roadside.

Matt Rendell just dropped The Death of Marco Pantani (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016, 368 pp.), a 10th anniversary reissue to his 2006 original. Did not know until now that Lelio Bonaccorso illustrated and Marco Rizzo scripted a graphic novel entitled Gli ultimi giorni di Marco Pantani (The Last Days of Marco Pantani, 2011) chronicling events that led up to Pantani's death and exploring French journalist Philippe Brunel’s conspiracy theory that he was murdered. Pantani, nicknamed Il Pirata for his bald head, bandana, crowd pleasing bravado, and freewheeling ways, said, “I ride instinctively, responding to the moment. There's chaos in everyday life, and I tune into that chaos.” He often upbraided UCI for focusing on his alleged flaws to the exclusion of others, “Rules, yes, but the same for everyone.”

Emily June Street feminist steampunk novel The Velocipede Races (Microcosm, 2016, 256 pp.) explores forbidden teenage passions in a straitlaced alternate reality.

Pedal Zombies (Microcosm Publishing, 2015) with 13 stories is the third in an annual series of slim feminist sci-fi anthologies edited by Elly Blue along lines of Bikes in Space and Bikes in Space Volume II. Volumes III and IV are already being developed.

Trailing behind, travel entrepreneur Charlie Scott would have you Slowing Down to See the World (House of Anansi Press, 2015, 200 pp.), or at least lots of Canada.

Evan Friss, The Cycling City: Bicycle and Urban America in the 1890’s (Historical Studies in Urban America) (University of Chicago Press, 2015, 288 pp.) tracks an era that envisioned a bicycling utopia. American cities once had a richer bicycling culture than anywhere else in planet’s history, though implementation stalled with the popularity of motor vehicles. Since its invention, bicycle tide has ebbed and flowed with each generation. Car use just continually grew until grandparent, parent, sons and their children were all simultaneously plying ever expanding roadnet, which hardly supports bike-ped choices anymore. Bicyclists can’t really cross 4, 6, 8 lanes safely. Yet residents still debate and vision remains unfulfilled to this day. Each city still needs advocates to point the way.

Chris Day self published an e-book, A Speck On The Map: Riding My Bicycle Across The USA (2015, 582 pp.) on spec of attracting others who eye this perennial excursion across planet’s most extensive network of pavement.

In Peter Joffre Nye's biography The Fast Times of Albert Champion: From Record-Setting Racer to Dashing Tycoon, an Untold Story of Speed, Success, and Betrayal (Prometheus Books, 2014, 60 pp.), subject went from setting record for Paris-Roubaix race to founding Champion Spark Plugs empire.

Aussie counterculture/crime author Kim Westwood had novel The Courier’s New Bicycle (Harper Voyager, 2011, 327 pp.).

“If you ride bikes in baltimore then you a soldia'. I got a fat chain it goes around my bike. The cops are hasslin' me, but not too bad 'cause I'm white! Trash Rules Everything Around Me (T.R.E.A.M.)”— Wingnut Dishwashers Union

Irk on Main

As a human, ashamed to admit the following cretins belong to the same species:

Given his limited reasoning ability, Alex Oliver Rigby may have eaten too many paint chips as a child. A classic case of “blame the victim”, he indicts bicyclists for a traffic fatality in a letter to Daily Echo editors. As usual, courts exonerated motorist who mowed down bicyclist doing nothing wrong but exercising entitlement to be present on pavement.

Another insane commentary, vandal who glues locks doesn’t clear sidewalks of bikes he hates, just exacerbates issue, since cyclists then can’t remove bikes upon which they arrived. Next maybe he’ll steal shoes at a Japanese restaurant because they litter entrance.

No humorist but total jerk, Shane Falco (cowardly alias uses name of quarterback of football film The Replacements) hates bicyclists. The extent to which he excoriates hints at homophobia or jealousy, something cyclists on road see constantly. According to Falco, “Motorists own the road.” Well, of course, that’s false, misconception not borne out by legislation. Depending upon jurisdiction, city's, state's or nation's citizens collectively own roads, though everyone is entitled to use and taxpayers underwrite all costs. Motorists alone don’t come close to paying for road construction and upkeep. Even conservative rag The Atlantic admits they don’t, not by a long shot. Here’s an image of Falco role actor Keanu Reeves, known better for his motorcycle fetish and portrayal of Neo in equally unreal The Matrix, draped over a tyke’s bike.

The Atlantic editors pose an asinine question, Should Distracted Cycling Be Banned? Attentive cyclists already are on over 25% of all bridges, highways and streets. Maybe such self serving inquiries should be banned as propaganda. States can’t stop drivers from texting while slinging tonnage of steel at turnpike speeds. They write all sorts of unenforceable laws, but does that deter behavior or only make legislators feel fuzzily warm and possibly re-electable?

An aesthetic matron in Brooklyn, grassroots coalition Restore Transportation Balance, and Seattle loud mouths War on Cars got skewered for vehemently fighting innocuous activities in a Rachel Dovey article. Who pays for these misguided protests? It’s true, rich conservatives, who can afford the price of premium bikes and time to battle bike lanes past their gated communities, get stereotyped as anti-bicycle villains, yet most congressional votes against were Republican. The vast majority of planet’s billion cyclists consists of middle class and poor, which mirrors population in general. In a focused chart Dave Horton ties bicycles with 4 progressive social movements, reason enough for conservatives to hate them. Schemes to Maintain?

A Guardian article by Peter Walker points out some of their failed logic and obvious flaws. Likewise, another article by Minneapolis advocate Lindsey Wallace. Whether growing plants or planning traffic, you can smother with kindness and starve with neglect. Finding balance and losing hysteria are easy as long as planners don't locate everything on Main Street. Jamming it all together irks everyone.

Half way through the WHO’s Decade of Action on Road Safety, motor fatalities have not significantly abated. Every day on Earth motorists cause 3,400 deaths, over a million victims a year, with on average 35 million serious injuries, no laughing matter, one of world’s worst health hazards, worse than war itself. That’s right, these ignorant fools, impatient morons, probably Trump backers, who urge motorists to buzz cyclists and push them off roads and violate existing laws represent a greedy minority that views United Nations as a failed organization, why progress stalled decades ago and regression erodes everyone’s chances of survival. Last year over a million people joined People for Bikes, a grassroots organization that advocates adding lanes and improving conditions. Shed the Monster?

Bicker Constrain

Candidates had an extra Leap Day, February 29th, to prepare for Super Tuesday’s primary elections. None who are running seem very bike friendly, unlike President Barack Obama and Secretary John Kerry, themselves known to ride. GOP front runner Donald Trump, Koch Brothers, Rob Ford, and such examples of conservative corpulence hate bicycles, cyclists and mamil (middle aged men in lycra). How could they not? Besides betraying their campaign donors, they probably believe they are too big (obese) to pedal humbly. Koch Brothers own the factory that makes lycra out of crude oil. Where’s the love?

Bike culture does not flag America’s decline, rather its recovery in mental and/or physical health and riposte to foreign oil imports, down significantly since Obama took office with ensuing reduction in price/bbl. Despite ridicule of gaping jaws, USA still has by far the biggest GDP on planet, rival to entire European Union collectively. But reliance on petroleum constitutes weakness. As China gradually gives up bicycling, so too has their spectacular economic growth faltered. Correlations are not causalities, but they do suggest connections.

Trump, denounced by party core and endorsed by Ku Klux Klan, is also against freedom of speech; if elected, you’ll have to heed his dictates alone while sued for libel, and watch your rights evaporate. Yet Trump’s “telling it like it is”, whatever that means, definitely appeals to egotistic morons, lazy thinkers, and mental defectives who comprise too much of population, so things definitely can get worse. His reactionary programs imitate Hitler’s, resemble how dictators rise to power, and stage little more than a screaming sideshow. There’s already a wall along Mexican border that criminals have tunneled underneath. Party should have sponsored better candidates, not worse extremists who the dullest voters see right through. An Afro-American, or woman, president offers some semblance of affirmative action, not a spoiled billionaire who's part of the problem. Misguided minds welcome a thug in hopes he’ll wipe slate clean and restore privileges for them, but usually this goes bad and levels arena for everyone but those extraordinarily insulated by money and power. Only the strong survive, not penniless slobs who own guns and waste fuel. Not allowing itself to be goaded by pride, nation needs to address alienated allies, deteriorated bridges and roads, homelessness, joblessness, lopsided budgets, maniacal enemies, mounting waste, overfishing, undrinkable groundwater, and whatnot. Can't democracy constrain bicker over insane trivialities that run real issues off the road? Acting responsibly does not make, but might label, you a “LOSER”.

As a way of addressing air pollution, elected officials in other countries plan to pay commuters to bike to work. Why not? Whether or not they are aware, motorists are already assessed fees for fouling it, but nobody knows were money goes, surely not for cleaner air. This program would only produce measurable results if safe routes were provided and scale skyrocketed. They’d only have to close off motor traffic on a few narrow streets through city (neighborhood residents excluded) to have instant infrastructure. As long as continuous corridors from 8 compass points traverse city, it would cultivate bike choice and limit motor vehicle use, but so would denying/repealing driver licenses, impounding fuming vehicles, and targeting industrial and non-vehicular sources such as burning coal, heating oil, or wood, and leaking CO2, gasoline vapors, methane, and solvents. One flimsy solution is never enough, merely political pretense. Easy to construct a pareto chart and deal with key influences, though leaders don’t seem to understand problem solving methods except smokescreens.

Argument versus counterpoint: Neither satisfies when both promote extremes. Saying whatever leaders want to hear brings rewards and serves self. Serving, albeit begrudgingly, a cause or idea, such as bicycling, in everyone's best interests leaves you obscure and poor. Hard to say whether society prefers bitter bicker or foregone conclusions. Seems there’s room for both in America, from baseball games beginning a new season of commissioner crimes and umpire miscalls to candidates continually waging campaigns that leapfrog over each other daily. As long as contested, populace basically approves a process, despite the fact that game is rigged with ending already preordained, and those in power remain entrenched as puppet masters. Big fish do eat small fry, but shoals of compact piranha can strip sacred cows to bones in minutes.

Bix Demimondaine

How can you not be intrigued by bixi-babes, Liliths from the cycling half-world, suicide tattoo wheel wenches? Demimondaines was what they called girls who accepted bicycles for carnal favors or acted as if marriage meant nothing in pursuit of fun. Before that society cast aspersion with terms concubines, courtesans, odalisques or prostitutes. Then it became “panks” for disciples of Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragettes beaten and raped in their struggle to secure the right to vote. Chippies, femme fatales, flappers, hardboiled Hawksian or modern women followed. These days rap artists reduce women to body parts while vulgar minds label them escorts, feminists, gold diggers, nymphos, porn stars, skanks, and skirts. What of equals, lovers, mothers, partners?

Participatory democracy is a relatively new phenomenon. Only a few men had a chance to vote before suffragism extended it to a few women qualified by age or rank. It’s been one century that the other half of population commenced in Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, and Norway. Though promised, Saudi women are still prohibited; the only other place on earth is Vatican City. Why? Subjugation. Slavery has only been abolished by law, not in uniform practice. Clerics, criminals, dictators and elected officials routinely break laws. People forget the bloodshed and sacrifices forebears endured to obtain rights that, in an instant, can be denied, even eliminated. At NYU, Elizabeth Jose described how bicycling can still emancipate untrammeled womanhood as it did before 1900.

For the first time in U.S. history a woman is running for its presidency against a contumelious misogynist. That alone ought to call entire gender above age to ballot boxes. Suited to serve? Dependency is a human, not primarily female, condition. Trying to remain nonjudgmental and observational, admit lambasting conservatives, dictators, fascists, and nazis who all seek to control and dominate others. Understand it’s the direct result of always being disappointed and never getting heard. Disorganized activities are human and natural since needs vary by individual. You get to control yourself only. To divide for conquerers’ sakes ignores consequential stakes. Enforcing unilateral conformity polarizes populations, results in random losses, and sustains terrorism. Candidates ought to run on experience in office and merit of message. Only one among those running held a cabinet position, negotiated international deals, and once lived in White House. Rest are comparative amateurs.

According to David Byrne, voters live in echo chambers where limited exposure is reinforced by social media, negative opinions are continually fortified, and rational thinking is woefully deselected. To expect everything to fail or go wrong best represents common sense. Must remind you what politically savvy Hunter S Thompson so aptly said, “Anybody who thinks that, 'it doesn't matter who's President,' has never been drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world - or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property - or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons - or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.” Amen.

Creative Demesne

So many are made, not even film critics see every movie. You can find online lists of highly relevant titles, but then you miss independent productions or scenes in others that represent bicycling culture just as well. The more planet’s population grows, the more stories there are to tell. This might make you increasingly selective amidst a vast demesne of what’s expressively creative. Everyone can only stomach so much mayhem, only tolerate cold so often, so turns instead to visual demonstrations of indomitable spirit versus trials both contrived and natural. Working backward from release dates, here are 8 over last decade likely overlooked:

Dark, French, sophisticated comedy Bicycling with Molière (Wanda Films, 2014, dir. Phillippe Le Guay) stars Fabrice Luchini and Lambert Wilson as actors, one trying to lure the misanthropic other out of retirement. Maya Sansa, a bored hotel maid at island’s resort, makes life interesting during offseason.

In American indie comedy Adult World (dir. Scott Coffey, 2013), budding poetess Amy (Emma Roberts) idolizes marginally known but once published Rat Billings (John Cusack). After leaving home, she arrives in Syracuse’s art underground, begins working in a porn shop, and crashes with transvestite Rubia (Armando Riesco). Together on a stolen tandem they remarkably stalk Billings driving home in the snow. Amy is determined to become poet’s protege, but learns that being special is a state of mind and life’s goal is to “fail better” in an Adult World. Positively reviewed, a “smart but wince-inducing satirical comedy” (New York Times) and thoroughly enjoyable, film was barely shown and lost money at box office.

Singletrack High (Pedal Born Films, dirs. Jacob and Isaac Seigel-Boettner, 2012) documents how today’s teen athletes in California gravitate to bicycling, mountain and road, and offers solutions for social awkwardness commonly experienced during high school. View entire hour video.

World documentary With My Own Two Wheels (Pedal Born Films, dirs. Jacob and Isaac Seigel-Boettner, 2011) contrasts the choices made and necessities faced by bicyclists around the globe, and portrays the power of pedaling to improve lives, including “bicitech”, that is, machines made from castoff bicycles that accelerate repetitive tasks for indigenous poor.

Cycling documentary Chasing Legends (dir. Jason Berry, 2010) covers the commitments made by riders who take on challenge of Le Tour de France as seen through eyes of Team Columbia HTC.

German drama Phantomschmerz (Phantom Pain, d. Matthias Emcke, 2009) stars Til Schweiger as an avid cyclist who loses a leg in a hit-and-run only to bounce back. It’s based on life story of Stephen Sumner, who also doubles for Til’s character.

Never mentioned (with good reason) German slasher nasty Blood Trails (aka Gyilkos Hegy, dir. Robert Krause, 2006) about bicycle messenger Rebecca Palmer and her boyfriend Tom Frederic, who go innocently on a mountain biking holiday, only to be stalked by serial killing cop Ben Price, a fellow cyclist with whom she had an accursed fling.