Bike Snob Page 9
People debate endlessly about gentrification being a good thing or a bad thing. Pro-gents say that gentrification brings safety, and amenities (if you call high-end clothing boutiques and places that sell truffle oil “amenities”), and increases the value of the neighborhood’s real estate for everybody. Anti-gents say that gentrification raises rents, forces out people with lower incomes, and creates a breeding ground for the ever-growing Nation of Smug Hipsters.
Truth be told, both the pro-gents and the anti-gents make good points. And one thing that’s become an increasingly important part of gentrification, for better or for worse, is the bicycle. The hipster is a particular breed of person, and where there are hipsters, there are bicycles (usually, but not always, fixed-gears). And a hipster on a bicycle can spread gentrification more quickly than a stiff wind can distribute a cloud of ragweed pollen. Yes, hipsters on bicycles can cause entire cities to suffer from the itchy eyes and sneezing of trendiness.
So why is bicycle-borne trendiness so much more virulent than other forms? Well, to understand this, first we must understand the living habits and migratory patterns of the hipster. Hipsters like to live near other hipsters, so at first their presence is quite localized. Traditionally, if limited to public transportation, hipsters will leave their territory to forage for work or to engage in recreation and mating, but they will always return to their territory and will only expand it as far as they can conveniently walk. Hipsters also occasionally embrace certain motorized forms of transport, such as Vespa scooters, vintage mopeds, and café racer—style motorcycles. However, those too keep the hipster localized, as they are seldom reliable. When they are actually running, hipsters opt to travel as far on them as they can, and it’s not worth the forty-five minutes it can sometimes take to kick-start a recalcitrant Triumph Bonneville simply to ride to a bar the next neighborhood over. They can also require considerable expense to maintain. And as far as cars go, those are generally graduation presents, and hipsters usually return those to their parents when they realize they can’t afford to pay their parking tickets.
Another important fact about the hipsters is that kleptoparasitism is an essential component of their survival technique. Kleptoparasitism is when one animal steals another’s prey or nesting materials. Take, for example, the hipster bar, which is usually just a copy of a dive bar and contains decorations taken from actual dive bars, and only differs in that the drink prices all have an extra digit in them. Also, much like the blue jay or the black-headed grosbeak will steal stuff from other birds’ nests, hipsters will forage for discarded or unattended bits of kitsch that they will then bring back to their lofts or renovated tenement apartments. Most significantly, hipsters kleptoparasitize their vintage band T-shirts, haircuts, and tattoos from other types of humans in order to make themselves attractive to other hipsters. With the shants of a mailman, the knuckle tattoos of a prisoner, and the haircut of a young Rod Stewart, the hipster kleptoparasite walks the streets of his habitat like a mating lizard with his throat pouch engorged.
So once the bicycle became trendy, the migratory pattern of the hipster changed. Because the bicycle is by far the simplest and fastest way to cover short distances, cycling hipsters soon explored the often fertile areas surrounding their territory. These were areas that they never noticed on public transportation, or that seemed hopelessly far away by foot. However, what may be half an hour away by foot is only ten minutes away by bicycle, and even the most feeble hipster can ride a bicycle for ten minutes. Emboldened, hipsters discovered new lands and started to settle in territories they had previously dismissed as uninhabitable. They also kleptoparasitized those neighborhoods, adding new style elements to their metaphorical mating pouches. (The hipster with the mailman shants, knuckle tattoos, and mod haircut might complete the ensemble with a hip-hop-style flat brim fitted cap. Or he may forsake the mailman shants for some Lieutenant Dangle short-shorts or some Daisy Dukes.) In a way, the fixed-gear bicycle was the lightning bolt that struck the primordial soup of trendiness from which the latest wave of hipsterdom and gentrification evolved.
Naturally, the fixed-gear bicycle soon became an indispensable part of hipster culture, and because hipsters began to rely upon them more and more in order to travel within their rapidly-expanding territories the bicycle in turn became even trendier and more coveted. The fixed-gear bicycle is as vital to the hipster as the horse is to the cowboy, or the tractor is to the farmer, or the boat is to the fisherman. Furthermore, hipsters also express themselves creatively with their fixed-gears through the dubious art of customization, like Harley-Davidson riders or the lowriders of Southern California. Perhaps most importantly, the fixed-gear bicycle has become an integral part of the socialization and mating customs of the hipster. The bicycle itself is now a throat pouch.
Indeed, the bicycle is the hipster’s best friend. In fact, another way to understand the relationship between them is in the context of regular humans and dogs:
Pedigree Is Important
It’s not enough for some people to just have a dog. Their dog also has to have a story. This might mean it’s an exotic breed, or that they bought it from a famous breeder. Or else, if it’s not a designer dog and it came from a shelter, it has to be something “rugged” or “urban,” like a pit bull. The same goes for bikes. Gentrifiers obsess over the provenance of their bicycles. Either it’s a vintage Italian road racing frame, or a genuine Japanese keirin frame, or maybe even an eighties BMX. Otherwise it’s the bicycle equivalent of a pit bull—a fashionably battered beater bike that looks rugged but actually has a $100 headset and $400 hubs.
Their Use Is Often Divorced from Their Original Purpose
While it’s commonplace to see expensive purebred dogs in cities, it’s rare to see these purebred dogs actually engaged in the activities for which they were bred. It may have taken hundreds of years of breeding to genetically engineer a certain dog to retrieve dead birds from bodies of water, yet it will never have the opportunity to fetch anything more than a Frisbee in a city park. Likewise, a hand-built custom track frame in the city will probably never see the velodrome for which it was built.
They’re Also Used as Part of the Human Mating Process
A typical city dog is neutered and doesn’t have much interest in reproducing. However, that’s not true of its owner, who will use the dog as an integral part of the pickup process. (Humans are the only animals that use other animals to facilitate mating. Have you ever seen a monkey use a squirrel to pick up another monkey?) One of the main reasons people walk around with dogs is so they have an excuse to talk to other people with dogs, or so they can attract attention to themselves due to the impressive pedigree of their dog which has been purpose-bred to rescue wayward hikers from icy crevasses yet spends its entire life shuttling between a 700-square-foot apartment and a 350-square-foot dog run. They even make movies about this, like Must Love Dogs, which I’m afraid to admit I saw, though my excuse is that I was on a plane and there was nothing else to do. Well, bicycles too have become rolling pretenses for human interaction. All you have to do is check out online personals like Craigslist’s “Missed Connections”:
help me find a new bike? - m4w - 24 (w.burg, les, wherevs.)
Reply to: [deleted]
Date: 2009-01-06, 9:42PM EST
so, yeah, my bike was stolen yesterday, my girlfriend dumped me last month, and im bored as shit. the whip was a ‘74 orange peugeot fixie and—heartbroken though i may be—im heading out this weekend to try and find a New Better Half in the same vein…want to come along?
drinks are on me as soon as ive got wheels; hell, we can bring tall boys for the road if the weather’s nice (whiskey, if not)…im thinking this might be a solid opportunity to find a sweet girl who’s into things like bikes, me, being awesome, and so forth.
fyi: swm, ggg, 5’10”, 135, red hair, clean, born to die. hit me up.
Clearly, the hipster’s standing in the community is defined by his or her bicycle-having status. Eith
er hipsters have some cool bike and want other hipsters to notice it, or they need an excuse to talk to other hipsters so they comment on their bike, or they don’t have a bike at all but are acutely aware of this absence so they use it as an opportunity to engage another hipster to help them find one in the hopes it will serve as the pretense for a blossoming love affair, like the plot of a bad romantic comedy.
Anthropomorphism
We’ve all seen a dog wearing a sweater or a T-shirt. Sometimes, this is because the dog simply can’t handle the cold. However, just as often the dog is wearing clothing because its owner is laboring under the sad misapprehension that the dog is human. All you have to do is watch The Dog Whisperer to see that an alarming number of people simply do not know how to treat a dog like a dog. Instead, they defer to their dogs because they project their own feelings onto the dog. They think they’re human. And people do the same thing with bikes. They coddle them and clean them and pamper them and name them and dress them up in top tube pads and buy them little presents. Barf.
Yes, in hipster society, the bike can do everything a dog can do. Though you don’t need to take bikes outside to go to the bathroom.
So Is This Good for Cycling?
It’s hardly surprising that bicycles have become the new dogs. We live in a world in which we’re defined by our purchases. Our choice of pet, bicycle, car, footwear, jeans, and apartment complex is how we tell everybody that we’re people of taste and sophistication. And even though it’s expensive to express ourselves through our purchases, it’s still much easier than expressing ourselves through our words and actions. Sure, you may think you’re a pretty interesting person, but how is anybody else going to know that in a crowded and noisy bar if you don’t have tattoos? You might also think you’re pretty clever, but who’s going to know that if you’re not wearing the right sneakers? After all, it can sometimes take a whole hour to get a sense of someone’s personality by talking to them, while it only takes a fraction of a second to glance at someone’s feet.
It’s this attitude that’s at the heart of gentrification. And while this attitude is as old as the first caveman who made a necklace out of bison’s teeth (I think bison-tooth necklaces are making a comeback in Williamsburg), the sheer degree to which people use products and cultural references to express themselves has reached a bewildering level of sophistication. On a given day, you can decide you like, say, eighties hardcore music. You might have woken up that morning not having ever heard a single hardcore song, but after a few hours of search engine jockeying you’ll know more about it than you would have in a year had you actually been living in the eighties and forced to learn about it by experiencing it firsthand. (Experience is totally overrated.) And by the end of the weekend, you’ll have acquired a period-correct wardrobe and maybe even a tattoo to underscore your newfound authenticity and commitment. There’s not a single brand, style, lifestyle, or art form that isn’t readily accessible, and there’s no limit to the energy people have for uncovering new ones in order to appropriate them for the purposes of self-expression.
The result is “hipster culture,” and for this reason gentrified neighborhoods can often feel like a pop-culture museum. And cycling and its many subsets are but some of the many lifestyles that have been uncovered and appropriated by the forces of gentrification. It can be annoying to see something you love being used as a fashion statement. But at the same time, being annoyed by this sort of thing is as fashionable as dusting off an old lifestyle and appropriating it as your own. Also, in the case of cycling, it’s having a positive effect. When people complain about how trendy cycling has become, the first retort is always, “Well, at least more people are riding.” And it’s true. As I mentioned earlier, the most important thing for the advancement of cycling is for people to be seen on bikes. And that’s definitely happening. Sure, a disproportionate number of them are grown men in teenage girl pants, but that’s not the point. The fact is, they’re out there, and that’s what changes things for the better for all cyclists.
Actually, things have already changed for the better. Sure, here in New York City you can no longer afford to live in gentrified neighborhoods which were cheap only ten years ago, but then again you can also ride your bike to, from, and in them much more easily. The Williamsburg Bridge bike path used to be like crossing a Himalayan rope bridge; now it’s been renovated and it’s a relative pleasure to ride. In fact, the entire city is vastly more bike-friendly than it ever was. This is because more and more people are discovering cycling, and they’re discovering that it’s probably the best way to get around a city.
While constantly strip-mining the popular culture in search of identities to appropriate and products to buy can be bad for the cultural environment, it can also yield a genuinely important discovery. And when the gentrifying hipsters discovered cycling, they hit pay dirt. Because unlike some of the other crap they’ve dredged up, cycling is actually practical. And if the cycling bug needs to be fashion-borne in order to infect the general populace, then I suppose that’s a relatively small price to pay.
LOOK AT ME, I’M ORIGINAL, TOO!
The myth of a “bike culture”
To prepare for a race there is nothing better than a good pheasant, some champagne, and a woman.
—Jacques Anquetil
If you read about cycling, you’ll often see the phrase “bike culture” mentioned. I have to admit, I’ve always been intrigued by the notion of a bike culture. Cycling is a major part of my life. In many ways, it is my life. So the idea that there’s an entire culture out there that I could be a part of always appealed to me. On some level, we all want to have a place where we’re comfortable and can be ourselves. We all want a metaphorical Cheers of the soul, where everybody knows our name.
After all, every alternative culture has a home, and a place where it came into its own. If bike culture has a home, that means that there’s not only a metaphorical Cheers of the soul, but also a more literal Cheers in some bike-friendly city where, no matter what city I’m from, I’ll feel welcomed by my wheeled siblings. Most importantly, I’ll also have that profoundly meaningful feeling that I’m part of something important and larger than myself.
Unfortunately, while I’ve searched intrepidly for bike culture, I haven’t really found it. What I have found are small groups of bike enthusiasts who call themselves the bike culture. And since there is no official governing body of cycling to regulate use of the term, they get away with it in the same way the “famous” pizzeria on the corner doesn’t have to prove it’s actually famous to use the word in its name. This can be misleading. It sucks to think you’re about to eat a slice of delicious “famous” pizza, only to discover it’s just a piece of wet, rubbery stale bread. Likewise, it’s discouraging to want to join the bike culture only to discover it’s a bunch of people with custom messenger bags sitting around in a bar watching videos of their buddy doing tricks. That’s not bike culture; that’s just stale bread. And if I feel this way as an experienced cyclist, it must be extremely frustrating for new cyclists, for whom the world of bikes must seem like a vast inscrutable world of cool.
The truth is, real cultures rarely call themselves cultures, just like famous things rarely call themselves famous. Being famous completely obviates the need to call yourself famous. Tom Cruise knows he’s famous, and we know Tom Cruise is famous. He’s just Tom Cruise, not “Famous Tom Cruise.” People who call themselves famous just wish they were famous, and things that call themselves cultures just wish they were cultures. Here are just a few things often referred to as “cultures” by their enthusiasts:
Sneaker culture
iPhone culture
Tattoo culture
Video game culture
Bike culture
Style culture
Here are things referred to as “cultures” that actually are cultures:
Hopi culture
Arab culture
American culture
Polynesian culture
/>
Buddhist culture
Throat culture
You’ll notice that the first list consists of things you have, and the second list consists of things you are (except for the last thing, which is something you get from a doctor). People in the second list use some of the things in the first list, but the fact that they do doesn’t make them who they are. If you have sneakers, an iPhone, a tattoo, and a video game console, you could be part of American culture, but you’re not necessarily multicultural. Even cultures that view tattoos as sacred are not totally defined by them. Actually being multicultural is a lot more complicated than being into both Nikes and Grand Theft Auto. In America, what people call “culture” is really “style.” That makes the idea of “style culture” especially ridiculous. Style is not culture; it’s the opposite of culture.
Nonetheless, we identify so strongly with our possessions that we’ve surrendered ourselves to them. Our willingness to call a phone a “culture” means our phones now control us. We have to feed them apps and overpriced protective coverings. Our trendy clothing is like sectarian garb. Our “culture” is indeed style.
So what does this mean? Well, it means that if you’re not into style as a lifestyle then when you see the phrase “bike culture” you better get the hell out of there or you’re going to be very disappointed. Sitting on the periphery of a big inside joke and running through a checklist of possessions with people who look exactly like one another is a major turnoff.