Backwoods Revival: Buy, Buy This Americana Pie

This last weekend, I went to Philadelphia. Philadelphia is a city in Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia they were having a Philly Bike Expo, which is why I went. In Philadelphia they also have a movie theater that shows dirty movies. It was right next to my hotel but I didn't go. Movie theaters that show dirty movies are sticky and I didn't want to get sticky. Also, Pee-Wee Herman got arrested in a movie theater that showed dirty movies and I didn't want to get arrested. Still, I had fun in Philadelphia. You can have fun in Philadelphia without getting sticky or arrested.

My first order of business in Philadelphia was to preside over a BRA (or Book-Related Appearance), which actually took place in a church basement. I liked this, since it gave the proceedings a sort of intimate, Alcoholics Anonymous meeting kind of feel. First, I gave a PowerPoint presentation, and then after waking everybody up I moved on to the "giving away fabulous prizes" portion of the afternoon. Unfortunately, I didn't have any fabulous prizes, so I gave away some crap instead. I concluded the BRA by signing people's books, and in many cases I actually had to wrest the books from their hands while they pleaded with me not to ruin them. In all, I had a great time, though I can't speak for the people who attended. At the very least, I'm pretty certain most of them had a nice nap, and I'm very grateful to all who came, and to Bilenky for inviting me.

In addition to the BRA, I of course visited the Expo itself, which was housed in an armory:

For all my feigned indifference and talk of bike porn-induced cottonmouth, the truth is I'm a bike dork and as such I am as wont to slaver over nice bikes as any other bike dork. At the bike show there was much to slaver over--like the Engins, which I mentioned on Thursday, as well as the work of many other fine builders and craftshumans. There was also stuff to walk briskly by and try not to look at, like the Ukraine Bicycle Project:

I don't know what this was, but I was afraid that if I stopped and asked the next thing I knew I'd be waking up in a cargo plane bound for Kiev.

Plus, the Bike Expo even had "helmet hats:"


As you can see, there were many fine styles, from "flapper:"


To "urban cowpoke:"


The salesperson was a talented huckster, and I'll be goldarned if he didn't almost get my handler into one of these purple Zelda Fitzgerald numbers:

They also had one of their sponsored riders on hand to sign autographs:

Next, we went outside to enjoy some food and beer on the side street that served as the de facto dining area and beer garden. It was also where the "bad kids" were hanging out, loitering in dark clothing and holding a fixed-gear freestyling "sesh:"

They seemed to be enjoying themselves, though as a spectator seeing it without the soundtrack or video editing is kind of like when you see a movie star on the street and think, "Huh, he/she's actually pretty short and dumpy in real life:"

(Fixed-gear freestyler rides bike up one side a pile of wood and down the other side.)

This is emphatically not true of Wallace Shawn, however, who I can assure you in real life is an absolute dreamboat:

He can also do mad barspinzzz for dayzzz, and he totally "schooled" Minnie Pearl in the tricks comp.

But like any bicycle show, sometimes the most interesting bikes are the ones that are parked nearby:


That is one serious cockpit:

It even features what appears to be a top tube-mounted toiletry kit:


For obvious reasons, this bicycle was not locked to the city-issued bike rack right nearby:

Though I did help myself to some antiperspirant and dental floss.

One thing they did not have at the Bike Expo, however, was designer woodsman's tools. You may recall the so-called "Best Made Company," which takes this $60 axe:


And then paints the handle, puts it in a presentation box, and sells it for $180:


Or, they'll sell you an $80 "personal sail," with which you can relive all your running-around-in-your-underwear-and-a-beach-towel childhood superhero fantasies:

(Hapless "hipster" plummets to his death.)

Well, a reader has informed me that the whole designer-tools-for-urbanites-with-soft-hands craze has become so big that one of the "Best Made" people has left in order to launch his own brand:

By the way, don't make the mistake of calling these people "fakerjacks;" what they're actually doing is taking part in "the Americana backwoods revival:"

If ever there was a product that defined a zeitgeist, it was the Best Made axe and the Americana backwoods revival of the last two years. Wherever you turned, it seemed, there was Best Made…in print, in pixels, no matter where you looked, another beautiful Best Made. Last year, however, one of the founders, Graeme Cameron, left to pursue his own vision of a company, brand, and fine cutting instruments. This morning, his Base Camp X opened for business, with a product line of four axes and a very cool Nepali knife.

Probably the best part of this "revival" is that you don't actually have to know how to do anything even remotely backwoodsy in order to be a part of it. Instead, all you've got to do is buy a tool and stare at it:

Best Made was really embraced by the design community and the media and became a bit of a poster child for North American backwoods revival and so-called the Williamsburg lumberjack. What does that say to you about people’s need to be connected to the outdoors or to a more elemental time, if anything?

I think there are a ton of people out there looking to connect with the environment. There is a very real romantic notion that one gets when picturing themselves in a simpler time. Could you make it? Would you have what it takes to actually get it done out there? Whether that is done physically or through a brand…people want a story and they most definitely want honesty. Not everyone can or wants to pick up an axe and head to the back 40, but they might just want to be a part of a brand that represents the ability to do that. I think that products can be a very effective portal/transport device to those places. You might be sitting in your living room in downtown L.A., but that axe on your wall will take you places far outside of the confines of that room…with just a look.

In other words, don't worry: you won't need to actually kill and gut a yak with that Nepalese knife. You will, however, have to ask for it properly:



Rest assured, though, that "Base Camp" guy and his "Best Made" former partner don't just sit around looking at their axes and knives--they're honest-to-goodness real-life woodsmen. In fact, here's a picture of them on one of their recent camping trips:

("You got a purdy axe.")

Not only are they handy, but they also know how to relate to the locals. (Though things did go somewhat awry for them in Turkey when they tried to smuggle out some scimitars.)

Speaking of the Great Outdoors, the third place "Cockie" finisher recently forwarded me some background on his submission:

I'm sure Mr. Boehm will be fielding lucrative job offers from "Americana backwoods revival" companies soon.

Read more »

Pressing Issues: Matters of Miner Importance

I didn't become a bike blogger in order to do "work;" instead, I did it because it seemed like a relaxing way to sit in front of a computer all morning in my underpants. However, even into the most pantsless life a little responsibility must fall, and it is now my responsibility to remind you that I will be giving a presentation at the Philly Bike Expo this Saturday, October 30th, at 2:00pm. That's right in between Yoga For Cyclists (which is much easier than Advanced Autofellatio) and Georgena Terry's presentation (Terry being the inventor of the road bike with the tiny wheel in the front that inadvertently launched a "fixie" trend):

It also, unfortunately, conflicts with the presentation of Drew Guldalian, who happens to build very nice bikes, which I know because my friend has one and I've ridden it:

Given this, as well as the fact that I'm intrinsically not very interesting, I know that I have to work in order to draw people to my presentation. To this end, I will first remind you that the Philly Bike Expo people have a "special" going, wherein you get a copy of my book:

Secondly, I will also tell you that the seminar I've prepared is more than entertaining; it's actually a major opportunity to get in on the "ground floor" of a tremendously exciting business venture. I can't tell you what this venture is, and I also won't confirm or deny that it involves time shares, but I will point out that the weather is quite lovely in Boca Raton at this time of year and just leave it at that. Plus, in addition to all of this, I will be giving out prizes, which will consist mostly of stuff I have lying around at home. For example, if you can believe it, Rapha actually just sent me some of their "performance skincare:"

This was very generous of them, and I'm honestly grateful, but the truth is that I have an aversion to scented unguents, and I could smell this stuff before it even got off the mail truck. (It smelled kind of like the bowls of potpourri they keep by the door in the sorts of shops that sell candles and teapots.) I'm also an avowed "lowbrow" when it comes to chamois cream (if you don't know, chamois cream is the stuff you put on your "lowbrow"), and the local pharmacy serves my crotchal needs just fine. (My motto is: "If it's good enough for a diaper, then it's good enough for my bib shorts.") Also, I once had an accident involving hot embrocation that is too graphic to relate here, and I'm now afraid to get anywhere near the stuff.

So, what this means is that I will award this deluxe Rapha Performance Skincare fun-pak as a prize at my BRA. By the way, it will also come in this Rapha sack, which is perfect for pretentiously storing that spare tubular tire you keep toe-clipped to the underside of the saddle on your Serotta, ostensibly in case of a puncture but in reality merely as a sort of "retro" affectation:

Or you can stuff it full of potpourri and hang it in your closet.

But this isn't the only prize I will dispense. I'll also rummage around and see what else I can find, and these items could include lights from Knog as well as perhaps a t-shirt or two. Moreover, I will attempt to dispense these items in a fashion that is enjoyable to all present. So I hope to see some of you there on Saturday, and I hope you will refrain from pelting me with cheese steaks.

Moving on, in the spirit of "work" and fulfilling responsibilities, it's also time to conclude The First (and Last) Annual BSNYC/RTMS Cockpit of the Year Award, sponsored by Just Coffee Cooperative, who won't listen to me when I tell them they'd make a lot more money if they'd just start exploiting people. Yesterday, you voted on the finalists, and here were the winners when I arbitrarily closed the polls this morning:

I. Best Antler or Animal By-Product

As you can see, "Antlers Sur L'Herbe" won by a comfortable margin:

II: Best Aero

In this race, a conservative gravel-phobic base rallied to make sure that aerobars are used only on the road:

III: Best Multi-Level

(The Sheldon Brown Memorial Biplanar Cockpit Award)

In this emotionally charged race, Jacob's Ladder was the clear favorite:

IV: Best STI

It was a very tight race, but the "Upright" configuration won by a rattly worn 9-speed STI lever top cap:

V: Best Owner "Curated" and Piloted

Also a very close race, in the end "Steering Wheel Guy" flipped "The Kansas Sail" the "bird:"

VI: "Freestyle"

(Anything Goes!)

And finally, in the always sensational "Freestyle" competition, the Terry Gilliamesque network of pneumatic tubes that is the "???" cockpit won decisively:


Thus having established the best-of-breed, it's now time to determine the Best In Show and finally put this contest to bed like a naughty dachshund. Simply vote below for the cockpit you like best, and the number of votes each cockpit receives will determine the first, second, and third place finishers:

This Is It! Who Should Get The "Cockie?"

Antlers Sur L'Herbe

Aero Bars (Road Only)

Jacob's Ladder

Upright STI With PVC

Steering Wheel Guy

???

or View Results

Create your own poll at Flisti.com

Once the voters are in, that will be that, and three very lucky and potentially overstimulated people will receive their "Cockie" coffee.

Speaking of elections, a number of people have informed me that this bloated saddlebag was recently elected the mayor of Toronto:



Sadly, all I can do is offer the people of Toronto my condolences. I was particularly confused by his self-defeating argument that people shouldn't ride bikes because "roads are built for buses, cars, and trucks, not for people on bikes," since if anything it means that the roads need to be upgraded. That's like saying people shouldn't use computers because "our communication infrastructure was built for letters and telegraphs, and not for the Internet." Of course, he does have a sensitive side:

My heart bleeds for ‘em when I hear someone gets killed, but it’s their own fault at the end of the day.

His heart may be bleeding, but I suspect it's due not to the dead cyclists but to his corpulence, and that it has ruptured from the strain of pushing blood through his fat-clogged arteries. Unfortunately for him, "artificial hearts are built for health-minded people with congenital heart defects, not for people who eat all their meals at Tim Hortons."

Meanwhile, speaking of self-contradictory worldviews, a fellow Twitterer has informed me that the "57 Things" guy was on the CBS Evening News recently:



At first I was puzzled as to why a minimalist with a small amount of stuff would need such a big apartment:

But then I remembered that he and his girlfriend actually had a whole lot of stuff--until they broke up, leaving him in a typical "my girlfriend just left me" apartment. Fortunately though he still has a full wardrobe that easily contains at least 57 hangers:

He also still has his bike, which may or may not be a fixie but definitely has the top-mount-lever-only brake lever configuration so conducive to that "out of the saddle, hands on the bar tops" thing that "hipsters" love to do:

Meanwhile, CBS Evening News juxtaposes the incidental minimalism of a guy whose girlfriend just left him with the cluttered apartment of a former sorority sister who desperately clings to her sticker and shoelace collection:


Here she is standing in her closet:

I give it six weeks before she and "57 Things" guy move in together, and six months before she leaves him after a protracted fight about closet space.

They even talk to a professional organizer, whose orderly wood pile is a testament to his abilities:


But who fails to explain how having a bunch of cabinets you don't use is "minimalist:"

Really, it's no different from having a bunch of stickers you don't stick to anything, or a box of shoelaces you don't put in shoes.

By the way, I'd bet my Ironic Orange Julius Bike that the professional organizer with the tidy woodpile owns one of those artisanal axes:


Even though they're hopelessly out of style, since a reader informs me that it's now all about the designer pick axe:


Thanks to that rescue in Chile, urban lumberjacks are out, and "hipster" miners are in.

Read more »

Getting Around: Baby got BRA

This past last weekend, I went to a place called Massachusetts. Massachusetts is a state in the United States of America. The United States of America is sometimes called "Canada's Undercarriage." Massachusetts used to have Ted Kennedy but he died. That was sad. A long time ago Ted Kennedy's car went into the water and he was OK but the lady who was with him died. That was sad. I think the people in Massachusetts must be the nicest people in all of Canada's Undercarriage. Massachusetts has a city called Boston that is the capital of Massachusetts. Here is a park called Fenway Park, where the Boston baseball team plays baseball:

(Fenway Park Stadiumway, home of the Red Colorway Sox)

The reason I went to Boston, of course, was because on Friday evening I partook in a "BRA" (or Book-Related Appearance) at Landry's Bike Shop on Commonwealth Avenue, and the above photo was taken by me on the afternoon ride that preceded this BRA. As you can see, it was precipitating during this ride, which immediately qualified it as an "epic." Alas, the Great Lobster on High had set the nozzle of his celestial spray bottle to "mist," and only a handful of Boston's most epically-inclined riders showed to brave the light drizzle that eventually transitioned to steady rain once the Great Lobster switched to the "spray" setting. However, even in small numbers, this group was intimidating enough to force me to "salmon"--for if you're familiar with the Fenway area you may have noticed that we're going the wrong way.

Here's an over-the-shoulder shot of our hale party fording the mighty Charles River:

And here we are receiving information and historical facts about the area from a gentleman with a beard:

I prefer to receive information from the amply-bearded, for beards are authoritative and lend the wearer's words additional credence and gravitas. In fact, when told something by the smoothly-shaven or naturally hairless, I am usually skeptical and will often seek out a bearded person for corroboration. Anyway, here we are at Boston Common, where apparently you're still technically allowed to bring cattle for grazing. Foolishly, I had just assumed that Boston would not offer much in the way of grazing opportunities, and behind the camera I am kicking myself for leaving my prize Holstein at home.

Also, we saw a giant baby's head:

As you can see, the baby's expression is ambiguous, and we speculated as to whether this baby could accurately be described as "nonplussed." The fact is, without pupils it's difficult to tell. For example, the baby could be nonplussed bordering on aghast:


Or the baby could be feigning innocence:


Or the baby could be contemplating a question before answering it:

Or the baby could just be feeling "kooky:"

I suspect this is precisely the artist's intent, and that he means to evoke the notion that each one of us is a tabula rasa until we are shaped by our experiences--either that, or he just figured it would be pretty sick to make a big baby head, and that it would totally look like an army of giant babies was crawling out of the Earth if you were baked.

Meanwhile, back at Old Man Landry's, the stage was being set for my BRA:

One chair is for me, and the other is for Andrew Steinhouse, who interrogated me in the manner of James Lipton while projecting relevant images behind us. Here is what it looked like from the cockpit:

(The chairs immediately in front of me are vacant due to my spitting problem.)

I greatly enjoyed this BRA, and words are scarcely sufficient to convey my gratitude to Andrew Steinhouse for organizing the ride, MCing the event, and generally "curating" the entire thing with aplomb; Landry's for being gracious hosts; and the people of Boston for enduring both the rain and my tedious ramblings in order to get free pizza and beer. (There was free pizza and beer.) In fact, words are so inadequate that I'm not even going to bother, and instead I'm going to allow Mr. Neil Diamond to express my emotions for me:



The following day, my heart light still glowing with gratitude, I traveled to Gloucester (the Fish Stick Capital of America) in order to enjoy the "cyclo-cross." Here is dramatic video of the race in which I participated (not taken by me), in which you can see another participant invert himself within seconds of the start:

(That's not supposed to happen.)

As for my own performance, I'm not ashamed to say that when it comes to the "cyclo-cross" I put the "can't" in "cantis," and I spent the ensuing 45 minutes on the verge of tears with a giant snot bubble in my nose. Then, I watched the pros. Here's a picture of Ryan Trebon putting his bicycle back between his legs:

Speaking of professional cyclists, this past weekend the World Championship Elite Men's Road Race took place in Australia (New Zealand's Disembodied Goiter), and of course all eyes were on one rider: Dimitry Fofonov, who eventually "foffed" his way into 12th place.


The winner was lactose enthusiast Thor Hushovd, who undoubtedly felt lighter than milk in his post-victory elation. Here, he compares the weight of his World Championship medal to the weight a pint of half-and-half (out of frame) and appears to be quite pleased with the result:

Indeed, unlike that giant baby head, Hushovd's expression is entirely unambiguous. It's also completely free from guilt, unlike many "green" people, as you may have read in that New York Times article to which I linked in Friday's post:

Apparently, like the fondling priest, the "green" often have trouble reconciling their higher ideals with their earthly desires. Consider this person, whose luxurious house in Palm Springs is a source of great consternation:

Does Mr. Freed — who said his wife, Laurie, is not a greenie and did not even recycle when they met — have any green guilt about his own lifestyle, which includes a 350-square-foot apartment in San Francisco and a 2,000-square-foot house in Palm Springs, Calif.?

“Nonstop, every minute, are you kidding?” he said. “Every time I set foot in the car. I drive a hybrid and I bought carbon offsets for it, so technically it’s carbon-neutral, but with carbon offsets you’re trading the carbon reduction of one company for the polluting practices of another. I have a 2-year-old child, a little girl — there’s a lot of guilt around the baby, because its stuff is horribly packaged, designed to be disposable, and there are times we have to do things I wouldn’t do for myself, such as disposable water bottles and these plastic placemats we use when we go to the restaurant. They’re great for germs, but disposable, awful things.”

Perhaps the only thing more irritating than listening to a bunch of minimalists brag about how little they own is listening to a bunch of rich people talk about how they're emotionally tortured by their possessions--and of course "possessions" include babies, which are also a tremendous source of guilt and inconvenience and are even referred to as "it" instead of "he" or "she." I look forward to seeing how this new generation of "its" adjusts to the resentment heaped upon them by their parents, bitter about having been forced to cope with the "awful" world of disposable diapers and distasteful packaging. I imagine they'll wind up looking something like this:

Meet the Bard College Class of 2030.

In any case, perhaps some of these guilty parents should really begin living in harmony with the Earth by living entirely off of it and swaddling their children in animal hides. They can then assuage any remaining guilt by using the rest of the animal to make organic leather saddles and antler cockpits, like this example which was submitted to me for "Cockie" consideration:

Here's another, more sporting example of an antler cockpit:

Though if you do kill an animal, swaddle your child in its hide, use its antlers to "curate" your cockpit, and then eat its meat, just make sure the resulting steaks do not contain any clenbuterol.

Or, if you don't have the stomach for hunting, you can always "curate" a cockpit that burns with the brightness of a thousand suns, like this one that was spotted in Baltimore:

In the event of a blackout, he could easily illuminate a Major League Baseball stadium.

Read more »