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!

Deep in the Heart of Bavarian Staten Island

Three weeks ago or so, when Irene was just a hot breeze swirling around the Bahamas, Laura and I had an overlapping free weekday. Usually, we would head straight for Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge, to see lots of birds amidst not so many people as on a weekend. This year, however, the unseasonable torrents of August rain and an administrative / budgetary snafu have left the East Pond, where the water level is normally manipulated to maximize its attractiveness to migrating waders, far too full for any self-respecting shorebird to pause there. "What do you say we explore the oyster-baron mansions of Staten Island?" proposed Laura.

"The what?" The murky, industrial waterfront surrounding Staten Island includes graveyards of rusting tugboats, miles of petroleum storage tanks and semi-submerged, expired ferries. But one hundred and more years ago, these now dubious waters teemed with oysters, and great fortunes were made harvesting them and serving them in the oyster bars of Manhattan and beyond. What's more, Laura informed me, a few of the grand residences of the oyster oligarchs might still be standing along Staten Island's northwest shore, enjoying a harborfront view of Manhattan.

It now costs $13 to cross the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which is close enough to the ticket price at MOMA that we were determined to savor every moment on the "borough of parks."

The nouveau-riche have always been fond of reviving the Greeks, and apparently the oyster magnates were no different. Now abandoned, the front yard wooly and overgrown, this titan is just waiting for a little bit of love and elbow-grease. One suspects it comes with a fascinating midden of oyster shells somewhere out back.

The wrought iron-fences, the closest one can approach, are more art nouveau than nouveau riche. They're very nice, and I'm frankly surprised no enterprising recycler-looters have never made off with them.

Right next door, there is no house left at all, only competing wrought iron gates complete with the presumed initials of an oyster magnate in the style of a champagne bottle label, demonstrating a certain consistency in the dominant Staten Island aesthetic over the years.

We followed the shore south and west, around the channel of the Arthur kill. There seemed to be no further evidence of the splendid oyster epoch. Suddenly we stumbled into a corner of Bavaria, not far from New Jersey, and providentially just in time for lunch. Almost across the street from a shady and overgrown graveyard filled with headstones of first generation immigrants from the old country, we found Killmeyer's.

Except for the ATM sign and the slot-mounted air-conditioner one would swear one was in any of countless villages in the surrounds of Munich.

We made for the tented biergarten in the back yard, empty of people on this weekday noon, but crowded with plastic Wal-mart patio furniture. A dirndled waitress, somewhat surprised to see us, soon brought us the list of spezialitäten. A blackboard on the wall listed an impressive array of deutsche brews. Traitors to the south, we ordered refreshing tankards of Gaffel Kolsch, a beer so delicious that it inspires in me the hope of one day visiting Cologne.

Latkes, and spaetzle mit wienerschnitzel. The latter seemed perhaps to have been breaded and frozen somewhere back in the old country, but we weren't really there for the food. Apparently on weekends Killmeyer's features their own local oompah band.

After this unexpected transatlantic adventure, we wended our slightly blurry way back to Brooklyn, where we regaled our good friend and favorite saloonkeeper St. John Frizell with our tales of intrepid outerborough exploration. "OMG!," he said, "You've discovered Killmeyer's. I love that place. Did you see the bar? It was built by itinerant Czech carpenters. Apparently they just traveled around stopping into places and offering to build authentic Praguian furnishings. Isn't it spectacular?" Absolutely, we agreed at once, and made on the spot a vague plan someday to return together, and polka.

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In the Hood

Nairobi has more than its fair share of slums, including Kibera, said to be Africa's largest. One imagines that worldwide only Asian megalopolises like Jakarta, Dhaka or Mumbai can compete in terms of sheer acreage of shantytown. Life is grim here, with up to a dozen family members packed into a single dirt-walled shed. Open rivulets of sewage stream down narrow trails between rows of houses. When it rains these turn into foul raging rivers of mud and filth, eroding away the base of the houses. An utter lack of security and civil services mean most people are afraid to venture out at night for the dangerous trek to the latrines. Such toilet blocks, where there are any, can be hundreds of yards from the house, and serve hundreds of families, but getting to one in the dark invites rape and abuse. The result is the notorious "flying toilet": urgent nocturnal movements are deposited into plastic bags which are then flung randomly over the corrugated tin rooftops at dawn. The price of staple starches, like maize and cassava flour, has more than doubled in recent years. But life, commerce and community still manage to cling on. Vendors line the wider mud avenues selling vegetables, charcoal and chapatis, and music booms out of the rum shops, including, at the top of the last photograph here, the "Obama Busaa Club".

Laboring on Labor Day

 

I spent this morning, labor day, filming in Nairobi with the wonderful and inspirational Rebecca Lolosoli, pioneer founder of Umoja, the all women's Samburu village. It's apparently a sort of Amazonian women's power move, established as a retreat from the endemic abuse and wife-beating of traditional Samburu society. Male relatives are allowed to visit the village, briefly, but on the whole the Umojians are doing just fine without us men. 

Photo courtesy David Smoler

I laughed, I cried, I soiled my garment...

Via boingboing

Together, we can rebuild Red Hook!

08/28/2011 Hurricane Irene

Waiting for Irene on Saturday, 1PM

This morning you could feel her for the first time, the air thick, wet, gray and heavy. Gone was the surreal, disconnected feeling attending yesterday's balmy blue skies and glorious regiments of perfect white clouds. Hurricane? Yesterday calamity seemed impossible, although there was not a single parking spot to be had at Lowe's, and the checkout lines at the Pathmark supermarket snaked back into aisles denuded of pasta. The sheets of plywood screwed down tight over the doors and windows intensify the silence of the streets. It rains from time to time with quick, fierce downbursts that quickly fade into a drippy calm, as if we are already feeling a kind of cyclonic, circular churning of the oblong Irene, still 400 miles away. Down the block, I hear the whine of circular saws.

Waiting for Irene

The homestead is in Zone "A", which describes the lowcountry areas of the city most vulnerable to flooding. I would estimate that the floor of my basement is within inches of mean high tide. Another way of putting this would be to describe Irene as payback for the dozens of times over the last 9 years that I have gleefully described my house as being within a couple of blocks walk of New York harbor. One does not have to go downhill more than a few inches to take that stroll. Currently buying guns, bottled water and canoes. Don't forget us out here in the swamps, FEMA.

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.

Rick Perry for President? UPDATED

Obersturmführernkadet Ricardo Perry in full-on patriotic purple turtleneck Texas A 'n' M swashbuckler mode, photo via nedslist. This image alone is enough to get me charged up about the Obama reelection campaign.

UPDATE: In response to the above, jumping on the Obama bandwagon, an anonymous friend sends the following photo of Michele Bachmann corndogging her way around the Iowa State fair. Not surprisingly it seems already to have gone viral.

The Wall Burners of Camden

  

The Manhattan subways have been all but graffiti-clean for close on two decades, at least the rolling stock. (Cars that are painted in the dead-of-night are immediately removed from service until cleaned). In my rugged youth, I quite liked the chaos of riding in a subway car whose contours, doors, maps, seats, warning signs and windows were buried under a miasma of tags, inch-wide marker strokes and spray-painted curiosities. The dense lattice of indecipherable texts were their own advertisement; the ensemble announced that you were living on the edge, in an overwhelmed city, a place at once vibrant and out-of-control. This was New York in the 1980s, a place far scarier than today's city, but more alive, more thrilling and unpredictable. (I'm aware that this is the classic lament of any middle-aged person throughout history, that their formative decade of entrance into adulthood was the most vibrant, and raw, but who would disagree that today's clean and shiny subway cars are but the tiniest indicator of the ongoing sanitizing of our city?)

In the 1980s the most adept graffitists came out of the ghettos and into the galleries. Guys who in the middle of the night risked german shepherds, barbed wire and prison time in their quest for the fleeting glory of seeing their name ride by on a train found themselves suddenly invited to fly to Amsterdam and sip white wine with museum curators. Op-editorialists argued about whether graffiti was art or plague, as if it couldn't be both. Meanwhile the MTA spent more and more dollars trying to keep the trains clean. They tried space-age coatings, attack dogs, advanced stainless-steel treatments and multiple rings of perimeter fencing around the train yards, until the resting subway fleet was as well-protected as Riker's Island. (If you were caught after getting through all the defenses of the former you then became eligible to try and escape from the latter).

The graffiti-eradication budgets ballooned. Slowly the vast resources of the transit system prevailed. The immediate and rigorous quarantine of "infected" subway cars and the MTA's gigantic buffing machines destroyed countless masterpieces before they ever rolled down the line and into the public eye. But simultaneous with the cleansing of the trains, graffiti was going international; youth inspired by the 1970s New York legends were painting on walls, bridges, overpasses, storefronts and derelict vehicles from Romania to Australia.

 "Mecro"

"Above-ground" graffiti was never as interesting to me as the full-car canvases that once rolled through the tunnels of New York, and I rather lost interest in the phenomenon. As an art-form, graffiti has the most in common with Chinese calligraphy. Marking a clean line with a spray can demands the same combination of precision, speed, and commitment that underpin the zen master's slash of camel hair brush on paper. In both, tentativeness is the greatest weakness the artist can show. In both, the form and shape of the letters eclipse their meaning. The motion of the artist's hand is implicit, and supreme, in the finished work. Graffiti is all about this motion, and it is about the fame of the letter. To use a train as a canvas was first to put the motion into the letter, and then to put the letter in motion, to send word of one's existence and talent from the margins to the heart of the city. Without the train, without the awe and surprise of standing on a midtown platform as the subway pulled in, bringing the revelation that every square-inch of its surface had been carefully, masterfully, coherently, freshly and lovingly painted, graffiti literally lost its dynamism.

 "Empty"

But sometimes I'm still awed. Around the country and the world, well-known to "writers," are walls comparatively free of the buffer and the white-washer. These graffiti walls of fame can have long lives. Sometimes they develop in collusion with the authorities. If given a remote corner of industrial wasteland to paint as they wish, the thinking goes, the graffitists will be less likely to vandalize the bank downtown. In other places, authority is simply overwhelmed, as New York was in the 1970s. There is more to worry about than paint, and less to worry with. Camden, NJ, is a place like that.

Graffiti removal cannot be high on the list of priorities for the government of that small city. I spent a couple of days in Camden last week with my friend Camilo José Vergara. He has been regularly visiting for some thirty years, photographing the fortunes and misfortunes of this little-known but staggeringly blighted place. Once a thriving blue-collar appendix of Philadelphia, the city has lost the vast majority of its once-diverse industrial base, half its population, most of its tax revenue, its reputation and its pride. The landscape will be familiar to anyone who has seen "The Wire," or watched Baltimore go past the windows of the Amtrak. Weedy vacant lots are punctuated by countless empty, doorless buildings with jagged holes and blown-out double-pane windows; boarded up storefronts, the plywood that was long ago nailed there to prevent egress now itself ancient and weathered and warped and curling away from the facades; enormous factories, burned to the ground, with melted and rusted i-beams curling skyward from perilous mountains of brick rubble. Prostitution and drug-dealing seem to be the most thriving and visible of the few remaining commercial ventures.

"Joker"

Here, among auto scrapyards and vacant lots, Camilo guided me to an epic "wall of fame," a place graffiti artists from all over the tristate area, and perhaps beyond, have been coming for years, to paint and repaint hundreds of yards of cinderblock wall. Few people likely see this work besides other artists; it is a kind of constantly evolving collective scrapbook of wall-art, as impressive in scope and scale as anything a major museum could find the outdoor space to present.

Camilo José Vergara photographing The Great Escape.

"The Great Escape," detail. As Camilo put it, here a Peter-pan like figure rides rocket-like crayons up into outer space, as if metaphorically managing to get out of Camden.

 "Distinct," I think

 

A rabid, evil bleach-bottle, rushing to eradicate the graf.

A goose-stepping buffing squad, here to erase all the hard work.