Knob Magazine

One of my favorite things about riding a bike is the incredible sense of exceptionalism.  When shoppers in Valley Stream, NY carried out the time honored holiday ritual of trampling someone to death to ring in our culture’s annual, consumer gang-bang of the economy I felt comforted that riding bikes at least preserved my sense of humanity.

God help us when they cover vintage chamois.

Before I could revel in my moral self-satisfaction I came across this article in Rouleur entitled “wrapped“: a 12 page celebration of vintage handlebar tape.  Alongside a series of semi-phallic images the article recaps the bar-tape of yore in what I could only assume is a comprehensive history on the subject.  While this article might be discounted as the result of a slow news-day for a magazine that has an unusually small target market, there is something more telling about it.

Marx wasn’t the first, or the last, to talk about the fetishism of commodities, the odd capitalist phenomenon to fixate on existential value of things instead of there mere utility, but his writing on the topic remains more than relevant.  Probably the most important point is that the our love of things just for being things isn’t necessarily indicative of personal character flaw, but of systemic morality.  The hedge fund managers and the Ked wearing soccer mom who ultimately collapsed Jdimytai Damour’s chest are not bad people, they are merely expressions of our collective consensus that stuff matters…alot.

To expect that cyclists are immune from the same obsessive fixation with stuff is foolish.  However great we might feel about our carbon neutrality or support of our local framebuilders, at the end of the day we still lust for things like hand carved lugs or speed sensitive valving.  We scour the internet for bike porn and look at it with the same longing of a pimple faced 15 year-old:  that some how the thing will accept us and bestow upon us such penultimate pleasure that we might define ourselves by it.

However much we believe we are repudiating the commercialism of the bike industry by focusing on the past, our fixation on the minutae shows how futile such a  task is.  Simply looking backward to older technology doesn’t change our relationship with the thing, it simply redifines it, replacing the frigid senibilities of progress for the fireside comforts of heritage.

When it comes to our relationship with stuff, cyclists are hardly exceptional.