When "Aspirational" Just Isn't Enough

I’m not sure why we bothered with the bicycle shop, except we were three young guys on a Sunday afternoon, bored with football and ready for a change of scenery. The only other open shop was the ice cream joint down the street, and we’d already had our fill. So we slouched in to see the high priced tubular finery.

A customer wearing bizarre, skin-tight clothes was paying an older man who was similarly attired. He wheeled his bicycle out the door, and took off. Then it was just the four of us, in a tiny shop with shiny new bicycles hanging from the ceiling. “Can I help you boys?”

Hm. British.

“Yeah. Why are your bikes so expensive?”

“Well,” said he, “these bicycles might cost a little more than what you’re accustomed to paying, but there are some appreciable differences between these models and the ones you’re riding.”

“Such as?” I can’t remember which of my friends said those magic words, but they opened up an entire afternoon to a tutorial on the finer pleasures of purchasing and riding a refined set of wheels. Chromoly frames; double-butted tubing; alloy rims; side-pull brakes, versus the gimpier center-pull ... am I missing anything? Oh yeah: the clothes. Sweat-wicking, less wind-resistance and whatnot. Sneakers vs. cycling shoes, the difference between hitting a sponge ball vs. hitting a cricket ... erm, baseball.

For the middle-aged gent who was lecturing us, this was simply the well-trod method of introducing three lads to a potential “Life Sport” (the lingo of the day). For three guys on the cusp of 20, this was stuff — cool, shiny, new stuff. Within a week, my friends were riding a couple of flashy, deceptively fragile-looking bicycles. I opted for a used motorcycle, but eventually traded that in for the mountain bike.

Having been informed that my current bike is cruising toward an expensive breakdown, and having been assured by my daughters that lengthy rides are soon to come, I’m slouching back to the bicycle store. My, how things have changed. My old bike, which cost nearly a grand 20 years ago, is a heavy monster compared to what’s currently on offer. And forget side-pull, center-pull, and them new-fangled cantilever brakes of mine: disc brakes are all the rage, apparently.

As with stereo stuff, I’m now disinclined to indulge a salesmen or do much by way of product research. My first impulse, when informed of my bicycle’s dire state, was to visit the Costco website to see if they didn’t have something I mightn’t pick up on my next shopping trip. I discovered, to my surprise, that Costco is selling Cadillacs.


Yep: Cadillac bicycles.

I chuckled, and moved on to the next site. Then, on second thought, I took another look. After all, it’s not like General Motors is actually manufacturing the bicycle — they’re just branding someone else’s work. The 20 year old geek within me woke up and wondered: What sort of frame are we talking about? And who supplies the components?


On closer inspection, the Cadillac bicycles appear to be reasonable “mid-list” bikes: they're being compared to the Schwinn bikes of old (the original “Cadillac of bicycles“), and that’s no small compliment: Schwinn bikes were sturdy, conservatively constructed bicycles that most people could buy and ride to the end of their days. Cadillac offers a similar package, with carbon frames and decent componentry that is priced in line with brand-name bikes offering similar fare.

So, is there a Cadillac in my future? Not likely. Frankly, the brand is a sharp disincentive. I live in a small town, and I’m not keen on being the guy whose car is a Toyota and whose bicycle is a Cadillac.

On some level, a Cadillac brand bicycle is counter-intuitive, particularly in contrast with, say, the Hummer bicycle. If you're the sort to buy a yellow H2 (or whatever number they've reached these days), you’re likely the sort to think a matching bicycle on the roof rack is a good thing. But even an off-road cyclist could be forgiven for being reassured by the brand. HumVees are (ostensibly) off-road vehicles; you needn’t own the car to be persuaded of the bicycle’s off-road merits. Which gets me wondering: who, exactly, was the Cadillac bicycle meant to appeal to?

Best guess: Cadillac SUV customers. If they get a thousand-dollar bike thrown in with the new Escalade, well, bonus! Except most Escalade customers are likely to turn their noses up at any bike that sells for a measly grand. So we’re left with GM assembly-line workers who can buy the bike at cost, or Costco customers caught in the throes of (as marketers like to say) an aspirational impulse.

No thanks. Unless Cadillac undercuts its immediate competition (Trek, Fisher, etc.) and drops another $300-$400 off its price tag, I believe I’ll go brave the bicycle salesmen instead.

Post-script: this guy points out that Cadillac bicycles are built by the same people who manufacture the Tonka and My Little Pony bicycles you find at Sears. “My Little Pony“ — now there's a brand I'd love to ride around this town!

Bon Voyage, Searchie!

Ms. LaFemme departs for the cultivated wilds of Central Europe. Godspeed to you and your pranksters, Searchie. And be sure to post a few photos of your non-Polski Fiat (complete, I hope, with the psychedelic mission statement: "Furthur").

The Best of Bonds, The Worst of Bonds

I see the James Bond movies are finally being sold individually. The monster packages were never a temptation for me -- life's too short and money's too tight for a boxed set that includes Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, George Lazenby and Pierce Brosnan. If there'd been a Sean Connery set, I might have reached for the plastic. Maybe.

I haven't bought any of them, yet, but if they're cheap enough I expect there may be one or two future Amazon orders that get a little Bond padding in order to score the free shipping. My inclination is to get the very best and the very worst Bond movie from my childhood Bonds, Connery and Moore. The best Connery Bond is, without question, From Russia With Love. Worst? Hmm. Diamonds Are Forever is pretty limpid, and themesong aside I've never really been a fan of Goldfinger (my favorite Goldfinger line actually comes from MAD Magazine, referring to Oddjob's statue-decapitating hat: "That's nothing. You should see what he does with his underwear.") But I'd say the movie that qualifies as most endearingly awful is You Only Live Twice. The towering Connery, being made up to look like a Japanese peasant fisherman, or posing as an industrial chemist and ordering barrels of monosodium glutimate ... rich, rich material that. And all this is just a lead-up to Donald Pleasance.

Roger Moore -- now there's a horse of a different colour. Nearly all of them were stinkers, but there are several that really stand out: A View To A Kill, Moonraker, The Spy Who Loved Me ... all bad, but in a boring way. Live And Let Die is closer to the classically bad ideal, but I think the film that tops it is The Man With The Golden Gun, which achieves a giddy surreality with its sumo wrestlers, little person villains and phony third nipples.

Best Moore? How about For Your Eyes Only (if only for the poster)?

My Bicycle

There she is: my 1987 Fisher Hoo-koo-e-koo.*



It's a wonder she's lasted 20 years. In the summer of 1988, after a full year of riding her the way a mountain bike is meant to be ridden, I decided the proper thing to do was give her a complete overhaul. I was unemployed, I'd read Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I figured, “How hard could this be?” I purchased a few specialty tools, then spent an afternoon taking her apart. Four hours later, the pieces were neatly arranged on my apartment floor, and I was carefully cleaning every last ballbearing with an old toothbrush dipped in kerosene.

Four hours after that, she was reassembled ... sort of. Everything was where it belonged, but it wasn't quite fitting together the way it should, particularly in the bottom bracket. I wasn't able to fully reinstall the two cups that held the bearings and crank axle — I experienced a great deal more resistance putting them back in than I had removing them. So I called my local bicycle shop and asked if they had any advice. “Better wheel her in,” said the gear-head.

I did, and explained the situation all over again to the guy who met me at the door. He listened to me without interrupting. When I was done, he cleared his throat and said, “Well, for starters, you've put the cups in the wrong mounts. If you reefed on 'em hard enough, you've probably stripped the threads in your bottom bracket.”

D'oh!

And that's been my history with this lovely bike: I'm a gentle rider who reserves his most abusive treatment for those down-times in the shop.

Two more photos, highlighting some of my accessories. Note the Kellogg's Rooster reflector — a bitter inspiration of covetousness for my daughters:



Still, my younger daughter saw fit to award me this nifty handlebar decoration three years ago:



With the arrival of spring, I decided it was time to replace my brake shoes. I purchased two pairs, came home and dismantled the brakes. Midway through reassembly, I realized I'd lost track of what went where. I collected everything, threw it into the trunk of our car and headed back to the shop — 20 years older, and none the wiser.

*I couldn't tell you what the name means, except that it was “borrowed” from Indian history, specifically a tribe that resided in Northern California.

Bicycle Helmets

I came across the receipt for my bicycle. Hard to believe, but it's 20 years old. Coincidentally, so is my helmet.



If I listened to the gear-heads at the local bicycle shop, I'd have replaced my helmet fifteen years ago, and I'd have done it twice more in the interim. I'm skeptical about helmet safety claims, though. A friend of mine was killed on his bicycle, and he was wearing a helmet. Still, I make a point of wearing one whenever I ride: the only traffic accident I suffered on my bicycle happened the day I decided I didn't feel like wearing a helmet. Besides, I want to be a good example to my kids, who are required by law to wear one.

Anyway, my old helmet's perch was getting shakier and shakier as the foam became ever more compact, so I finally dropped $30 on a new helmet. It looks like this:



First impression: holy cow, my head is cold!! It seems ventilation science has made mighty strides in the last 20 years. Take another look at my old helmet. Boy, could that piece of Tupperware ever trap in the heat.

It also made me look like an incredible dork. The only "dork factor" my new helmet provides is by contrast. Here we have a sleek, new helmet sitting atop a not-so-sleek, not-so-new rider. Ah well. When it comes to aesthetics, I didn't care when I bought the first helmet and I'm not going to start caring now.

The gear-heads wagged their finger at my helmet, but pointedly admired the longevity of my bike. Tomorrow I'll post a picture of my vehicle of choice, and maybe do a little reminiscing.

"Writin'" Books

Earlier this month I came back from the post office and tore open my Amazon package to find: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and Narrative Design by Madison Smartt Bell. Ah, just in the nick of time! I’ve been working on The Novel. And I’ve stopped having fun.

I read Pressfield first. It’s a slender book, similar in build (if not substance) to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Chapters can be as long as three pages. More likely they’ll be shorter. To wit, here’s one entitled What I Know, in its entirety:

There’s a secret real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

Such sentiments have a very limited currency with me, alas: I simply don’t find sitting down that difficult. I sat down five times to write this blog entry. I took five separate stabs at it, too. In those five attempts I wrote a pile of words that shall remain blessedly unseen by others, so I think I can say with some authority that sitting down and writing isn’t the difficulty for me. Writing something worthy of posting, however, has been a bit of a trick lately.

Pressfield has written some books I very much enjoy: Gates of Fire and Tides of War are terrifically compelling historical novels. The man is no stranger to research, but unlike other novelists who’ve tried their hand at historical fiction, Pressfield makes a keen distinction between the baby and the bathwater, and if these two novels are the norm for him, he consistently delivers the former to his readers.

The War of Art, however, does not deal with issues of discernment, nor does it mean to; it is a motivational piece. The copy I have has been blessed by Jay McInerney and (hello!) Robert McKee, and Esquire magazine calls it, “A vital gem ... a kick in the ass.” Though Pressfield dutifully addresses the writer as “she” in one chapter, then “he” in the next, I suspect men are more likely to buy it.

There must be writers who respond well to a kick in the ass. Me? Not so much. I wish I'd found a copy in a bookstore and perused it before buying. The book can be read from cover to cover in less than an hour, and to my eyes it’s not that far removed from The Artist’s Way — which I’ve read and followed, by the way, and find modestly helpful. But since I’ve raised the specter of The Artist’s Way, here’s a question that niggles at me: what is it about Hollywood that gets writers talkin' religion when they talk craft? Do they have baskets of money that verbally prompt these people to use language that's, well, just a tad flaky?

Julia Cameron and Steven Pressfield wax philosophic-lite when they reach out to uncork their would-be proteges. Reading them both, I get a little itchy and scratchy: “Hm. Sounds vaguely pagan,” I’ll think after reading Cameron (“Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity”). Or, “Oh, that there's Pantheism,” after reading Pressfield (“Everything that is, is God in one form or another”). Feel free to attribute my distancing to the well-honed knee-jerk reaction of an orthodox acolyte. But let me just state for the record: nothing raises my hackles faster than a Christian artist invoking God this, Jesus that and the Holy Spirit over all. Neo-Pagans can inspire my curiosity, and as for Pantheism I'll admit that most days leave me wondering if that’s not really The Way It Is. But when it comes to artistic instruction, I'd prefer it if my teachers considered me an atheist. Hard to say why that is, exactly; I guess religious talk of any sort is freighted with considerable proprietary emotion. Call this Resistance if you must, but is there any reason why we can’t avoid altogether the topic of religion when we’re figuring out how best to flex the artistic impulse?

Getting back to Resistance — I spent four years resisting Resistance: sitting down, turning on the computer and typing my way to the next stage in my novel. Most of that was not "happy" time, and once my first working draft was finished I vowed to leave it alone until I discovered some way to enjoy myself, dammit. I publicly read a selection from the first draft recently, and the generous response I received encouraged me to pick it up again. So I did. And I stopped having fun. Just what, exactly, is my problem?

Here’s Madison Smartt Bell:

Anyone who’s ever grappled with a longer narrative, something approaching the length of a novel, say, will have discovered (quite painfully, perhaps) that sheer intuition won’t carry the project all the way through ... Some writers can tolerate a very high level of detailed advance planning for a long work without losing their own interest and sense of discovery in actually writing it. Others are so differently constituted that they cannot tolerate any abstract advance planning at all and must proceed through novels as intuitively as they would through short stories (with the result that they suffer more and have to write a lot more drafts).

BINGO!! Yes, that was, and still is, me: limping along on my Achilles' heel, sheer intuition. Michael Ondaatje claims to work in this mode, and I suspect Jim Harrison is of similar temperament. But if I’m going to take another worthy stab at this project of mine, some planning and coloring within the lines is desperately in order.

At this point it might be reasonable of me to finally break down and purchase one or two books from Writer’s Digest. So far I’ve avoided them, not out of snobbery but of fiscal thrift: the few I’ve browsed through struck me as articles padded into book-length form. Thankfully, there are hosts of worthy articles available on the web. And, even more impressive, there’s a true professional who, on her blog, offers her own advice from considerable personal experience: Lynne Viehl. "36 novels in five genres"!? I'm paying attention, and I'm taking notes. Here Ms. Viehl provides 10 links of varying potential (I'll pass on the freeware, but the articles are certainly worth consideration). And here's an excellent interview with Ms. Viehl by the sadly-no-longer-blogging Mad Max Perkins. One nice exchange: Q: "I have to say: of all the people who responded to my 'Call to Authors,' questionnaire, your story struck me as the most upbeat. You seemed not to have met the same level of disappointment and frustration that a lot of the other authors spoke about. Were you sugar-coating?" A: "I've had my disappointments, but not many, and they made me work harder. I didn't know anything about the industry and I never met another writer until after I was published, so that may have something to do with it. My only expectation was simply to see my name on the cover of a book, and I've done that twenty-six times in five years."

Between Viehl’s professional picks and Bell’s articulate observations (mastering a blues scale on guitar is terrific decompression advice for anyone, by the way) my joy has returned, as has my energy for the project. And that’s how it shall remain ... (*cough*) God willing.

Paging Mr. T.

Could someone explain to me what just happened at Terry Teachout's website? Where, in all of this, is Mr. T?