This past weekend I was watching Woody Allen’s 1998 film “Celebrity” when I noticed something:
Yep, that’s right, it’s a Softride:
And thanks to the cinematography of Sven Nykvist it’s undoubtedly the most artfully shot Softride in cycling history…with this one a close second:
Not only that, but this marks the first, last, and only time a Softride has been employed by a director of Allen’s magnitude as a symbol in a feature film:
Basically, it’s a physical manifestation of the Kenneth Branagh character’s contemptible spinelessness:
This is easily the most poignant and evocative use of the bicycle-as-metaphor in film history, and it’s far more subtle than what we’d see seven years later in “The 40 Year-Old Virgin:”
In that film of course the bicycle was a symbol of being neutered and a huge dork, until later in the movie when Catherine Keener a gifts him a full-suspension Trek, and the bike becomes a metaphor for virility:
Meanwhile, it seems like just yesterday that the New York Times was lamenting over how slower e-bikes meant that riders could no longer enjoy the “texture of the road vibrating up their arms” and other body parts:
I mean hey, why shouldn’t the rest of us have to dodge pop rock band frontmen with lousy bike handling skills, right?
But now well-to-do people in Marin are getting hurt, and that’s no laughing matter:
The article is basically about how these things are just electric motorcycles and they suck, which most of us knew already, though I did find this thought-provoking:
Mittelstaedt, now a lean and energetic 77, and some fellow senior cyclists formed a nonprofit organization called E-Bike Access to advocate electric mountain bikes on Mount Tam. Mittelstaedt says that many of the arguments against e-mountain bikes are the same ones originally used against conventional bicycles: that they cause erosion and scare wildlife and hikers. “But then they’ll usually say: ‘E-bikes are even worse. And even if you just allow the legitimate Class 1 ones, the next wave is going to be kids on their throttle devices.’”
As much as I enjoy off-road bicycling, when I look at what the mountain bike has become I think we probably should have banned them from all trails completely when we had the chance–or at the very least we should have banned bikes with any sort of suspension. But we didn’t, and now we’re getting what we deserve:
Now you can tear up the forest!
Jeez, just get a unicycle already:
What a putz.