Me and Eddy (Updated)

A few weeks back, superstar portrait photographer and honorary* member of the Brooklyn Pinarello User's Group, Wolfgang Wesener, dropped me an email with a hot tip. The greatest cyclist in the history of the sport was shortly to venture out from his lair in Belgium on a rare visit to New York.

Known for obvious reasons as "the cannibal," Eddy Merckx won the Tour de France five times, a total since eclipsed, but in his era he dominated the sport more completely than any rider before or since. He held the one-hour record and triumphed in innumerable classics, including the savage Paris-Roubaix, which he won three times. He is a legend, at the top of any list of the most famous Belgians in history. There is a subway station in Brussels named after him. The man walks the streets of Flanders like a living god.

Did I want to come along and drink free beer and meet the monster-legend? Certainly! The event was a press-tivity celebrating the fifty years of Bicycling Magazine, held incongruously at the Classic Car Club on lower Hudson St. To accommodate the guests, the Car Club had emptied their showroom onto the surrounding streets; the sidewalks outside were strewn with Aston Martins and Porsches.

Inside, they had wine, and cheese, and some of the latest carbon-fiber bicycles manufactured under the Merckx imprimatur. While these feather-weight ugly ducklings are all the rage, it should be pointed out that Merckx himself rode in an era when men were men and bikes were made of steel.

The event logo is inspired: a view of Eddy's posterior, with the man looking back at you over his shoulder. It's a reminder to the many, feebler, one-time followers that the best they could manage was to approach the back end of greatness.

I was focused on the cheese platter, but Wesener had an ulterior motive. He hoped to convince Merckx, or Merckx's people, or Merckx's patrons at Bicycling, to schedule a sitting for a portrait. While I gobbled canapés and helped myself to pair after pair of the complimentary bicycling socks on offer at the door, Wolfgang schmoozed. He has photographed flamboyant denizens of the Manhattan nightlife demi-monde of the 1980s, patrician vintners of the grape-clad hills of Tuscany, and innumerable superstars of the crank and cog, the stage and screen. A few choice names of former subjects, a list varied gently depending on the context, are enough to serve as an impressive resumé. Within moments he was back, breathless. Merckx was due to fly back to Belgium early the next morning, but at the end of the party he might spare a few minutes. There was only one problem. Wesener hadn't anticipated being able to photograph at the very event. All his gear was 30 blocks north, in his apartment. Would I consent to stick around and keep an eye on Merckx, while he went to collect it? I looked around cautiously, trying to ascertain whether they were still serving hors d'oeuvres. "Sure," I said, spying a tray of saté'd chicken skewers, "Why not?"

Baron Merckx and Wolfgang Wesener discuss the finer points of cycling strategy.

And so, without quite intending to do so, I had volunteered to be a photographic assistant for the evening. A short round-trip taxicab later Wesener returned, and I was helping set up lights, run power cords and sit for test portraits. Suddenly, it felt like a day at the office. It was all remarkably like preparing to film an interview, when the sound person is invariably asked to sit in the "hot seat" and give the cameraman something to focus on. As if we don't have our own work to do.

"The Cannibal," graciously autographing.

The installation complete, the evening became a waiting game. There is a certain amount of suspense to these affairs, for despite the lavish promises of the minions, the possibility always exists that the celebrity subject will feel overwhelmed by the end of the evening, put upon, hungry for the fine dinner he has been promised. Imperious or petulant, the coddled star may simply announce that he or she has had quite enough of signing cocktail napkins and making banal cocktail chitchat with the teeming masses. Then with a rush the handlers converge, and the whole posse swishes out the door and into the waiting limo and are gone, leaving you forlornly toying with dials on your now impotent, subjectless camera.

But Mr. Merckx is a gentleman. He endured for much of his life the searing burn of lactic acid in his oxygen-starved muscles as he demolished the cycling opposition; such men are not daunted by the social indignities of arranged public appearances. He came and took his seat. I held the reflector. Wesener snapped away, burning quickly through a couple of rolls of film. Film, real film. With just an exposure or two left to go he urged me insert myself into the frame, for a souvenir moment with Eddy.

A few days later, the film developed, Wesener called.
"You're very lucky, Mr. Fleming."
"Why is that?"
"The best picture of Eddy is the one with you in it!"

The next week, a print arrived in the mail.

For those of you who are unaware of it, my name, Fleming, was one widely given to impoverished Belgians (the Flemish) who fled Flanders and emigrated to Ireland seeking greener pastures, possibly as early as the 11th century. "Oh, here comes another boat-load of Flemings," the Irish would remark, when on slow days they enjoyed going down to the harbor to watch the ships unload. As this image makes clear, the passing centuries have done nothing to erase the winning, world-dominating DNA of we flatlanders. The shared intensity of gaze, the identical noses, the parallel angles, the commitment to victory at all costs. Me and Eddy.

Final image courtesy of WoWe


*Manhattan residents are only eligible to be "honorary" members. 


UPDATE 10/3/2011:

Wesener is not just some dilettante on a Pinarello. While my rides around Prospect Park this summer have been mainly about lowering my cholesterol and getting regular aerobic exercise, WW was in serious training for L'Eroica, the Tuscan cycling marathon held yesterday in the wine country of Chianti. (This explains, perhaps, why on our rides together I was desperately trying to hang on to his rear wheel). Today, in an email, he's written a sort of haikuish summary of the savage ride, much of it held on the unpaved roads that wind through the hills of Tuscany:


it was dark when we started and dark
when we finished
i did the 205 km (details later)
the dirt roads (50% of the race)
were hell (and nearly destroyed me)
it's so exhausting that after a while
you aren't aware of the incredibly
beautiful landscape anymore.

Eh, Congratulations, Paisan!

Reading: Need for the Bike by Paul Fournel

There is nothing about Paul Fournel's meditative little volume on his lifelong addiction to bicycles that smacks of avant-garde literature. Reading it, I was reminded of an episode from my college days in which a bunch of us, fanatical devotees of experimental cinema, attended the premiere screening of an eminent vanguardist's new work. The film proved to be a remarkably normal documentary about the filmmaker's other passion. I think it was on the restoration of wooden toy train sets or dancing nutcrackers, or something along those lines (but I've forgotten, just as I've forgotten his name). It was a perfectly beautiful and simple documentary, but I was so desperate to locate deep metaphorical and formal subversions of the genre between its frames that I scarcely appreciated it.

But I've aged, and mellowed. I read Need for the Bike with pleasure, neither looking for nor noticing even one example of Oulippian technique. For Fournel is, according to Wikipedia, the president and also the "Provisionally Definitive Secretary" of Oulipo, a French group of mathematically interested writers who set up rigid constraints and then attempt to write literature within them. For instance, from the Wiki:

"S+7, sometimes called N+7 

Replace every noun in a text with the noun seven entries after it in a dictionary. For example, "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago..." (from Moby-Dick) becomes "Call me islander. Some yeggs ago...". Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs."

 
Only the French could turn Mad Libs, the mildly amusing children's word replacement game booklets we used to fill out on long pre-teen car rides, into an avant-garde literary movement. But the sense one gets from Fournel's book about cycling is that in describing the many roads he's taken on his bicycle, he's also meditating on the road not taken. Deep into this short book of short chapters he writes "for a long time I wondered why I wasn't a racer." He then answers his own musing: "the objective reasons are many: I had 'better things' to do, and at the age when one tries to become a racer, I had set off on other adventures."

Wherever he has been, whatever he has been doing, Fournel has always had a bicycle to turn to, for exercise, escape, meandering, socializing. "I've only owned beautiful bikes," he writes. "I prefer rigid but supple steel, which isn't really so heavy...." Fournel writes about crashing, about the absurd tan that results from thousands of miles cycled in shorts, jersey and ankle socks. He writes of scaling the most notorious mountain roads made famous by the savageries of the Tour de France, and the sense of ownership of the landscape that comes from pedaling urgently through it. Before they even get on their bikes he knows from the look of his companion's legs what sort of a ride they will have together, how much competitive potential is there. He fondly describes the state of permanent, dull ache the rider feels in his calves and quads for the duration of the cycling season. The bike is his barometer of all things: "I know that if I succomb to depression, it will start with a breakdown in my thighs. It will start with cycling sluggishness, and the rest will follow."

This, you may have gathered, is not a book for everyone. If hearing the word "Campagnolo" doesn't trigger a flutter of acquisitive adrenaline at your temples, if you're uninterested in having a peek at the cutouts in my bottom bracket, if you find nothing romantic about a velodrome, or don't even know what one is, if you object to spandex shorts, if your legs aren't sore and you're scarless, if you've never heard of the Paris-Roubaix, you may not find this book as charming as I do.

They're Breeding!

Faithful antarcticiana readers may recall an item from last fall celebrating the original bicycles manufactured by Giovanni Pinarello and the cult-like dedication with which certain cycling nerds perpetuate his legend. Earlier this week a second meeting of the Brooklyn Pinarello Society convened in Prospect Park for a few blistering laps, generating the envy of the poor, misguided trendoids who have replaced the timeless elegance of Italian steel with one of those absurd carbon-fiber monstrosities that now passes for the "state of the art" in road bikes.

I tre Pinarelli. I believe you are looking at 148 years of combined cycling wisdom in the image above. And I'm not talking about the bicycles, which probably have about 75 years between them. Portrait of the musqueteros courtesy of champion shutterbug Wolfgang Wesener, left. In the middle, in the ominous glasses, our man from ATLAS.

The day was not without its purple hearts, as yours truly suffered a head-on collision with a tentative and indecisive fourteen year-old girl who weaved back and forth down the hill on a mountain bike directly into our churning peloton. I was inches off of the back of Wesener's wheel, enjoying the draft, and I didn't even see the threat coming until the moment before impact. Although I was bloodied, and the girl suffered a very fat lip and enormous embarrassment, the precision steel of Treviso came through unscathed. Without even so much as a wobbly wheel I managed a further six laps before leaving the park in search of a winery.

A real museum piece

For your cycling pleasure, here is the Vietnamese edition of the Flying Pigeon. It is identical in all structural and mechanical aspects to the bike I rode across Cuba, except that this version has a more modern system of brakes and levers. The fact that in Vietnam this is a certified Viet Cong relic, given its own two square meters of red carpet and a plinth, whereas in Cuba hundreds of thousands of these are still on the road today, tells you much about the countries' two very different strategies for dealing with their post-Soviet growing pains.

The bicycle is on display in the museum at the site of the "Peace Bridge" over the Ben Hai river, the official dividing line between North and South Vietnam, at the center of the DMZ, the poorly-named "Demilitarized Zone." In this context the metaphorical importance of the bicycle is obvious. The centerpiece of the one room museum is a diorama of struggling, pajama-clad villagers raising battered AK-47s and triumphantly charging a phalanx of Imperialist Running Dog tanks and helicopters. The authentic, humble, cast-iron, one-speed Chinese bicycle serves the same role as would a pair of sandals made from an old tire. It represents the modesty of the tools at the disposal of the North Vietnamese and the dire limitations of their resources, which they nonetheless overcame with their perseverance and dedication, despite the tremendous odds against them.

I Gemelli Pinarello / The Pinarello Twins

Thanks to the recent weekend visit of heartbroken ex-Brooklynite AK718, who flew all the way from Munich to sample the hand-pulled noodles at Xian Famous Foods and cover the grand opening of my photography exhibit at Sunny's for the international media, I had the good fortune to reconnect with another member of the original German club-crawling posse, Mr. Wolfgang Wesener, portrait photographer extraordinaire, a man who sensibly fled New York twenty years ago, in 1990, just when it was getting boring around here. Now he's back, after moving for a couple of decades to the north of Italy to raise a family, produce olive oil and take pictures of vintners, and it's as if time has stood still; he's still sporting a wardrobe straight from Avenue A circa 1985.

Although he shared many memories from his time away, during which thousands of portraits were snapped, one of the highlights, at least in my estimation, was described in Wesener's modest admission that, why yes, he had indeed photographed Giovanni Pinarello, the patriarch of the Pinarello clan, one of the foremost names in bicycle manufacture. The Don, so it might be said, of Classic Italian Steel. "And I've just come from New Jersey," exclaimed Wesener, "where I purchased, from a man I found on Craigslist, my very own Pinarello, from the 1980s! I can hardly wait to tell Giovanni!"

"Nao e posivel!" I said, or something along those lines. I waved my hands in the air with Tuscan excitement. "Guarda!" "Anch'io!" and so forth, I went on, meaning: No way! I have one too. The exact same size!

Wesener's portraits are made in black and white, so while you cannot appreciate in this picture that his Pinarello is a fetching and rare eggplant purple, while mine is fire-engine red, it is obvious that our immediate resolution to go riding together actually resulted in our going riding together, this very morning.

Photo: Wolfgang Wesener

Tour de France, part deux

If you have not read the previous post, you may wish to do so now, lest you be left bewildered by your abrupt arrival in mid-narrative.

Chapter Three

After the flurry of emails leading up to my final, embarrassed suggestion that she seek other transportation, I didn't hear back from Traci Macnamara that day. It was as if she had finally realized that the whole offer had been nothing more than a fever dream, a transatlantic hoax. I sheepishly wondered whether I would ever again see or hear from that poor woman whose time I had wasted, while she was stranded, lame, in Paris. I imagined she thought I had made the entire story up, for obscure and perverse reasons of my own.

The next day, to my surprise, I found in my inbox the continuation of our correspondence. "Unbelievable, mission accomplished! I have your yellow velo and a new kryptonite lock." (Velo means "bicycle" in French. As Steve Martin once said, "those French people have a different word for everything!")

The bicycle, saved, or at least salvaged? It seemed impossible, or at best, unlikely. I wrote back at once: "Please ring me tomorrow. This is a story I want to hear."

When Macnamara called, she explained that she was holding yet another bag of frozen peas hard against her inflamed achilles tendon. Her long and arduous trudging about the far-flung quartiers of Paris, while attempting to solve the bicycle conundrum, had caused a relapse. Nonetheless, she was effervescent.

The day before, she had made her way to the Avenue de Suffren and, with the help of a Google streetview snapshot I had sent her, easily located the building. I had suggested that it was a large and crowded complex, and that even without the passcode it would be easy enough to gain access to the courtyard by opportunistically gliding in on the coattails of a resident. But Traci soon discovered that this notion was simply another one of my optimistic fabrications. She lurked and lingered about on the street in front of the locked doorway to no avail, until, perhaps, passersby began to look at her strangely and wonder what sort of sordid business she was up to. It was as mortifying as it was unproductive.

courtesy: Google Streetview

Already, imagining the raised eyebrows and the leers that might have been directed her way, we could forgive Macnamara had she abandoned the whole enterprise and gone hobbling back to her hotel. But I had described the courtyard, in which the bicycle might or might not still exist, as being a full city block long, and backing onto a sort of an alley. Instead of going home and sulking, she limped down to the corner and along the side street, looking for the service access to the back of the building. After jumping over a waist-high retaining wall, she found herself with her nose pressed up against the bars securing the courtyard, mere inches from the bike rack. "And there it was," she said. "I saw it right away."  (I believe she added that "The bicycle looked like it was painted by Jackson Pollack, with a bad hangover." Or words to that effect. I didn't record the conversation, so that might not be verbatim.) The bicycle was directly in front of her, elusive and unobtainable behind the bars.

Realizing that she needed a plan of attack, Macnamara set out in search of two tools that her scouting had revealed were necessary: a pump for the visibly flat tires, and something to cut a lock off with. Many disappointments were in store. The Avenue de Suffren, which divides the 7th from the 15th Arrondissement, is a rather toney address. Imagine lurching along Park Avenue in the neighborhood of 70th street. with a gimp leg, trying to borrow a hacksaw and a bike pump from the doormen there, and you will get some idea of what Traci was up against. There is a boulangerie on Suffren where the woman behind the counter looks over the tops of her eyeglasses with a disdainful sneer, as if to suggest that Americans are not fit to eat the baguettes that she bakes. On the corner, at the epicerie, blemishless fruits are piled in immaculate pyramids by fastidious Tunisians. There are no sordid corners in this hood. It is not the kind of place where a wink and the offer of a few francs in return for the short-term loan of a pair of bolt-cutters will be met with the knowing smile of approval of an underworld collaborator.

Seething with frustration, her ankle throbbing, Traci refused to lose focus. Instead of the criminal route, she determined to triumph with smiles, and perhaps even some feminine wiles. Plan B was to arrive at the front door, ring the bell, and explain her predicament to the concierge, who might, if he believed her story, be happy to see a surplus bicycle removed, never again to take up space on the bike rack of which he was the steward. With any luck the more friendly, flirty sort of concierge (if there is such a thing to be found in Paris) might even offer up a demonstration of his manly French bolt-cutting prowess. There was also the risk that she might be sent away, having accomplished nothing except the alerting of the building's guardian to her designs on one of its bicycles. She had to exercise caution, for nothing less than Wordsworth's legacy was at stake.

There is a uniform worn by workingmen all across Europe, a sort of coverall, in royal blue. German carpenters wear it, as do Swedish auto-mechanics, Spanish plasterers and French maintenance men. In front of the doorway Traci wanted opened was just such a workingman, all but blocking the entrance as he sucked on a Gauloise and chattered on a téléfone portable. He was clearly taking a break from some sort of task within the premises. Perhaps he himself was the concierge. Macnamara approached, trying out a few polite French trivialities. The man refused to come unglued from his cellphone, but he turned, punched in the code, and gestured toward the door with gallic dismissiveness. She was in!

Chapter Four

It was unbearable. She was now standing over the bicycle, touching it, and admiring the patina of its comparatively recent repainting. But she was no closer, really, to victory. Three years ago, I had purchased the most inexpensive lock I could find, five euros worth of cable. With the key permanently lost, that lock was now the only thing preventing Macnamara from continuing her glorious journey down the Loire valley. She tugged at it, and peeled back the plastic tubing that protects the cable from rust. It might have been a cheap lock, but it had done its work for three years already, and it wasn't done yet.

But neither was Macnamara. She is, after all, as close as one can come to being from Antarctica, a place where people survive the long dark winters by gnawing on frozen seal blubber and eating penguin sushi. Traci had dressed fetchingly for her trek to the 15ieme Arrondissement, in order better to manipulate hapless, besotted concierges, but inside her clutch she had a weapon. She took it out now. It was a petite and delicate Swiss Army knife, but one with a saw attachment. Looking about her to see if she was observed, she attacked the lock with the three-inch blade, like a prisoner on Alcatraz trying to remove a cinderblock with a smuggled spoon. If you lived there, and had been home that day, you might have spied out the window a woman in a dress, with an inflamed ankle, bent over a bicycle and savagely hacking away.

Those Swiss don't only make watches. Under the pressure of the serrated steel, first one strand of wire gave way, and then another. Soon Traci found her rhythm. Look around, saw feverishly, pause. Repeat. FWANG! Finally, the lock gave way. Macnamara smiled. Looking around calmly, she pulled the bike away from the rack, pressed the button to unlock the back door, and pushed out into the alley.

I'm expecting a postcard from Switzerland, any day now.

The bicycle, reclaimed, relocked and loaded

Macnamara, heading South, like Shackleton

Next stop, Chamonix

All photographs: Anne Aghion

A Bicycle in every Port, Part One (REDACTED)

Chapter One

People, and by that I mean primarily men, sure are funny about their vehicles. Perhaps the cherishing of vintage cars and the fetishization of motorcycles is a kind of evolutionary relic left over from the gratitude, grain, and soothing words we once lavished on our horses. Personally, I have a comparable fond spot in my memory for almost all the bicycles with which I have ever had an intimate relationship. There was my first ten-speed, the pale green Fuji on which I learned to race, purchased with months of salted-away allowance. The classic Italian steel Pinarello I ride now is bright red, like the convertible sportscar of a man in a profound midlife crisis. It is the bicycle I drooled over in my teenage years but couldn't dream of affording. Slowest by far, but no less cherished, is the one-speed Flying Pigeon I rode across Cuba, from Trinidad to Santiago, through weeks of unremitting headwind. Leaving it with a family at the end of the journey was heart-wrenching. I tried to make them promise they would care for it as I had, and allow me to come back, for visits.

But bicycles come and go. In New York the old saying is that you never really own a bicycle, you only rent it, until it is stolen and you are forced to return to the bike shop to "rent" another one. As a lover of bicycles, what shocks me more is how often they die of abandonment and neglect. The world's cities are full of mangled tubular corpses permanently affixed to lamposts and no-parking signs. Countless mouldering, rubber-rotted, dust-crusted orphans are left rusting in basements, storage rooms and courtyards just because their owners can't fit them in the moving van or be bothered to fix that flat.

I've only just noticed that the Eiffel Tower looks like a giant vuvuzela, set down on its business end

I found one like this three years ago in Paris, a once-stately Dutch city-bike, forlorn and forgotten and coated with ochre dust. Both tires were completely flat, the rubber cracked and brittle. I disapprove of theft, of course, but bicycles are a bit like pets; when they have clearly been abandoned by their owners, what crime can there be in washing them off, showing them some love, and taking them for a walk? Keeping in mind the Paris spirit of 1968, perhaps the same year this antique had been manufactured, I liberated her.

Encore une pauvre abandonée dans les tristes ruelles de Paris

Under all the dust, my Dutch was a satiny black, a classic tuxedoed beauty. Little can go wrong with these stolid, one-speed cruisers, and in no time at all, after a petit investment in a new set of whitewall tires and a few drops of oil, I was gleefully pedaling her through the rues and avenues of the left bank. I bought a lock, the cheapest I could find. The bike gave me weeks of faultless transport. When I left Paris, I gave it to my niece, Sophia, hoping to introduce her to the joys of urban cycling. I tried to make her promise to care for it as I had, and allow me to come back, for visits.

My niece's building made no accommodation for bicycles, so we locked the bike across the street in the courtyard of another apartment building where my parents had briefly rented; we knew the key-code for the front door, and imagined that no one would be the wiser if we parked it there temporarily. In any case I was sure that once Sophia got the hang of it she would soon be riding to school, and to cafés, cherishing it and generally getting such good use out of it that it wouldn't need a permanent home. That was three years ago.

Two years ago, I asked Sophia, via trans-atlantic skype, if she was taking good care of my baby. Was she riding it a lot? Caressing it, polishing the brake calipers and whispering sweet nothings in its ear? Feeding it the occasional sugar cube? Things got a bit quiet at the other end of the internet. "Well, I did paint it, one afternoon," she said, finally. I took a deep breath, and said nothing. "Yeah," she went on. "My friends and I spray-painted it yellow. It looks kind of cool." I said goodbye, exhaled, and closed my laptop. Horrors and sacrilege! The mere thought of it was unbearable. How dare she? I tried to continue my New York life as usual, but I was living a poisoned quotidian existence of bitter denial. Eventually, after months of struggle, during which I undoubtedly drank too much and snapped angrily at my loved ones, I managed at last to put the whole sordid business out of my mind. Picking up the shattered pieces of my broken avuncular dreams, I moved on.

Quel horreur. If I wanted a taxicab, I would stand in the street with my hand out.

Chapter Two

Last week I got an email from an antarctican acquaintance, my friend Traci Macnamara. She used to wish us good morning on the Motorola radio from MacMurdo Operations, when Anne Aghion, Sylvestre Guidi and I were camped in the remote wilds of the Friis Hills. Every day at 6AM it was obligatory to put a call in to "MacOps" to announce that all were healthy and accounted for, and often Macnamara was on the other end of that call. We kept vaguely in touch, and from time to time since leaving Antarctica I have checked in on her blog. In northern hemisphere life Macnamara is an accomplished writer and adventurer. Unless she is making it all up, she is the sort of woman who lives for months on end in a tent in a remote Rocky Mountain encampment, goes solo off-piste skiing deep into the wilderness, and pulls her way up vertical cliff-faces in the French Alps with her fingertips. I knew that for her latest little jaunt she was planning on "fast-packing" her way across Europe, retracing Wordsworth's journey from England to Switzerland on foot. Whereas for most people going to Antarctica is the adventure of a lifetime, for Traci it's just a day job.

I was flattered when Macnamara referenced my book in her email. It's the story of an overweight and out-of-shape slog across Cuba, and for those of you who haven't read it, I don't think I'm spoiling anything by telling you that I fell lame with a blown knee after four days of hiking. Ultimately I procured the bicycle I mention above. "Here I am in Paris, thinking of you," wrote Macnamara. "After 7 days of near heat stroke in the wheat fields of northern France, I developed tendonitis in my left ankle. I'm sitting here with a bag of frozen peas on my leg, dreaming of finding a bike over the weekend so that I can continue this warped journey in some manner...."

Suddenly, memories of my beloved Parisian ride came rushing back. For all I knew my niece had by now completely dismantled the bicycle and sold the parts on eBay in order to buy Gauloises, but at this stage, I couldn't bear to ask. I was thinking only of the bike and how it could still be saved from the terrible death of neglect. "I have a bicycle you might be able to use," I wrote back to Traci, somewhat optimistically. "It is locked up in a courtyard on Avenue Suffren, a few hundred yards from the Eiffel tower." I had only vague hopes that this was still true. "I imagine it would need new tires and a good going over by a bike shop." This last bit, although perhaps an understatement, seemed less of a stretch. "Let me know if you are interested."

To my embarrassment, she wrote back almost immediately: "Seriously???? I'm absolutely interested!!" It seemed I would have now to reveal what we might politely call the vagueness and uncertainly surrounding my offer. Namely, the probability that the bicycle had long ago been removed by a fastidious concierge and carted off to the dump. By coincidence, my sister, the mother of my nefarious, spraycan-wielding niece, was stopping by for lunch that very afternoon. I wrote Traci that I would ask for any and all details, and explained that I hadn't actually seen the poor beast myself for almost three years.

I really only needed two things in order to save face. One was the key code to get into the courtyard, and the other was the key to unlock the bicycle. No sooner had she sat down at my luncheon table than I made my poor sister call her daughter. The news was not good. My ingrate niece had no memory of the key code and had not visited the poor and affection-starved bicycle in at least a year and a half, since doing a "very, very ghetto job" of painting it. Her keychain, containing the key to the bike lock, had been pickpocketed from her only a few months ago, while she was sitting in a bar, guzzling kir and smoking Gitanes. It was hard for me to complain about the loss of my key once my sister informed me that as a result of the same crime she had been forced to replace her own apartment's front door lock to the tune of €1600. I gathered that Sophia is unlikely to receive any more allowance until her eightieth birthday, but this was but a small consolation.

"Bad news," I wrote to Traci. "Nobody knows nothing. No code, no key, no clue. Take my advice, forget I ever even mentioned it, and have a look on eBay.fr for something used and reasonable. Sorry to have gotten your hopes up."

To be continued...

Traci Macnamara, soothing her disappointment, and her tendonitis, with a frozen bag of organic peas.

All photographs: Theo Cremona

For Part Two of this cliffhanger, click HERE

I would look good on one of these in Brooklyn (updated)

Room for improvement: Eucalyptus suicide scooter, Rwanda

The always excellent Afrigadget is a blog devoted to African ingenuity and invention that has posted about many spectacular creations made from abandoned parts and scrap most northern-hemisphere dwellers would doubtless chuck in the trash. They have a post up now combining two of my passions, bicycling, and bamboo, with a link to this project, which pairs the sustainable (and in many places in Africa, free) plant resource with cutting edge bicycle design.

In Rwanda bicycles are used for transporting almost anything that can conceivably be loaded onto them, and being able to manufacture one out of the weeds growing in the gully would be most helpful



These gents doubtless dropped off a load of cargo in Kigali and are headed back up the mountain the easy way


UPDATE:
I've been hanging around over at Atlas HQ most of the week, repairing the world's most beautiful pasta machine, about which more later. (What this really means is that I have been watching Joseph lathe, mill, weld, buff, sand and polish a part I needed to replace on the world's most beautiful pasta machine, but if you come over to dinner and are subjected to my long, explanatory lecture about the pasta machine, its glories, and the long struggle to restore its functionality, I will most likely by then have convinced myself that I did all the work and therefore take all the credit.) Today when I turned up Joseph had a book to show me that his ex-employee Matthew had rescued from the dumpster at Cooper-Hewitt, Matthew's new employer. He had then thoughtfully brought it by as a gift. Turning at random the pages of what looks to be a most interesting and informative look at bicycles and their physics, I stumbled on this page, concerned with alternative bicycle frame materials. It seemed too grand a coincidence to ignore. (Click the image to load it in a readable size)

Scan courtesy of Atlas; permission neither requested of nor granted by the publisher. Please do contact us if you feel the use of this reproduction here is not in your best interest.