June 10, 2008
The Track Bike Enters Its Ironic Phase
Recently spotted on BART was this track bike with an ersatz disc rear wheel. Mismatched wheels have long been a staple of fixie style, particularly when one of the wheels is an expensive piece of racing hardware (extra points for juxtaposing the expensive and the cheap).
Yet this track star thumbs his nose at the prevailing convention, choosing not a $500 racing disc wheel, but electing instead to cover a regular wheel with paper -- and not stopping there, to cover the paper with graffiti-style art. And thus the fixie enters its ironic phase.
In other words, the two sides of San Francisco fixie culture -- a surly DIY aesthetic and the fetishism of conspicuous consumption -- have now bit each other in the ass: homage and mockery can no longer be distinguished.
Or can they? As Fredric Jameson put it in one of the longest questions ever written in English:
The enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism, and beyond it, the “new expressionism”; the moment, in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and “popular” styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and the Stones now standing as the high-modernist moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard, and experimental cinema and video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which more below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and the French nouveau roman and its succession, on the other, along with alarming new kinds of literary criticism based on some new aesthetic of textuality or écriture... the list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and fashion changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?
Photo: Adam Polakoff
P.S. Yes, rajbot, we smell you, ridin' on your scraper bike.
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Does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and fashion changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?
No.
or maybe it's just an homage to scraper bikes, ya smell me?
Adam, Adam, Adam...You would be the one to spot this fixeetrocity.
Still quoting Jameson at fixee kids is missing something, they may drink Jamesion, but they only read Harry Potter and Colette.
Maybe the rider wants to stay celibate. This sort of DIY aesthetic will pretty much guaranteed that you will not get laid. Especially on a powder-blue bike: like, ewww.
If I ever hear a fixie rider *ever* utter the phrase "style over substance" in a derogatory manner over anything, my head will implode.
Back in the day, when only messengers and skinny hipster dudes rode them, fixies make sense since every ounce counts in a hill climb. Now that every wannabe commuter rides one, maybe they should lay off the Doritos and Fosters, or whatever aspirational brands they prefer, and buy some brakes.
BTW thanks for the Jameson citation. It's such a perfect response to so many blog commentaries, I fully intend to cut and paste it, sometimes multiple times, into my future rants.
Bikes are fun.
As a regular bicycle commuter from SoPa to the Embarcadero, I can attest with some certainty that track bike ridership has declined significantly in the last few months. I roll my eyes whenever I see a pseudo-Bohemian, Academy of Culinary Kitchen University student in stove pipe jeans, Chuck Taylors, and Rachel Ray terror scarf pull up beside me on one of those ridiculous mechanisms. I know I'm not the only one. Urban hipsters, being hyper-conformist by their very nature, are quite aware when something is no longer "cool" and drop it post haste. Any attempt to ironize the track bike will only be attempted by the very few who actually understand irony. The rest of the lemmings will immediately converge upon the next hip means of transport. What could that be? And no, it's not mopeds...
I wonder when track bikes will be uncool. I can't wait.
Dear Fredric Jameson,
Would you like a free grammar class?
Yours sincerely,
The English speaking people of the world.
To: TAYM
RE: "SoPa"
You are hereby cited for gratuitous neighborhoodery. Please forward a check in the amount of one (1) DPT parking violation to a downtown business of your choice.
Thx,
The Rest of Us.
I vote for spacehoppers as the new hip transportation
Don't you try to oppress my overinflated property values with your personal nostalgia trip, Generic! Abbreviated pseudo-New York style neighborhood names forever!
Track bikes are uncool, TheCharlie, it's already happened. Just some of their riders don't realize it yet.
As for the idea that fixies ever made sense in San Francisco, I don't see how that's possible. Because "every ounce counts in a hill climb"? Yeah, riding up hills sucks, that's why God invented gears. Jesus. Oh, and it makes perfect sense to ride a bike without brakes when you're screaming up Market (or down Gough). Darwinism, perhaps.
Did you hear about the urban hipster in Santa Cruz who couldn't stop his track bike for lack of breaks, went flying over the handle bars, and died after smashing his face in on a open UPS truck door? I laughed and laughed because I'm callous and cold. Then I felt bad because I'm really not and even though the dead guy was a hipster, it was sad he lost his life and stuff.
I love the brakes on my bike. I also love the gears. I also love when I'm riding home in the evening, I pretty consistently pass the fixies because I can outclimb them on my geared, lightweight mountain bike.