In the early days of this blog, when Fixie Fever was running way into the red zone, the must-have wheel for your carefully curated track bike was the Aerospoke:
Like many trends from that era, this one was somewhat bewildering, since the Aerospoke was basically a really heavy wheel you’d skip over in the Nashbar catalog. In fact it was so surprising I wondered if, having stepped in shit, the Aerospoke people were as surprised as I was by their product’s sudden desirability. So I interviewed someone at the company:
Four years after that, Jobst Brandt suffered a bicycle crash; his health deteriorated after that and he finally died in 2015.
Coincidence?
Well, yes, and frankly the insinuation is disgusting and offensive.
Anyway, today Aerospoke is no more, but in 2026 the look lives on:
And Forward Motion Technologies, makers of Encore wheels, must get really sick of this question:
In fact I took the liberty of redesigning their website for them:
And while that’s AI, this is not:
Or at least if it is AI, I didn’t generate it, because it’s on their actual website, is what I’m saying.
Also, thank you AI for explaining the #hashtag on the #downtube:
No, I would not.
Speaking of feeling old, and of trendy stuff, in my teenage years I did my best to play the surly ne’er-do-well:
Context is important here, and it’s important to note that I am not in an alley in some run-down neighborhood; I am in fact in the midst of a lavish “teen tour” across the western United States and probably in a campgroud in Utah somewhere–though I’m still striking a blow against authority, for had I been caught with that cigarette I’d have been sent straight home and the fees for the tour would have gone up in literal smoke.
I know because it happened to this kid who was in our group:
I don’t think we were allowed to bring skateboards, either, so we must have borrowed that one off of a local and immortalized the impromptu skate session with our throwaway cardboard cameras.
As befit my persona, I also acquired quite a few record albums in those days, spending any money I had on them. (Or on cigarettes, but those were cheap back then.) On a typical weekend day I’d scrounge up just enough for round-trip train fare to the city, a used record or two at record purveyor such as Sounds on St. Mark’s Place, and a hot dog at Gray’s Papaya for sustenance. I was joined by my best friend, and you can see us here in our matching leather jackets:
That’s me on the left.
Those days and the friendship and the music all meant a great to me and still do, and over the years the records have been a tangible reminder of it. At the same time, in recent years I’d become increasingly aware that records of this genre of music and from this era are coveted by collectors. How coveted? I didn’t really know, and the Internet wasn’t really that helpful either, since occasionall I’d look up a record from my collection and learn that it could be worth either fifty cents or $5,00,000 depending on whether or not it had a typo in one of the song titles or the lead singer had teabagged it. Trying to figure out the inscrutable world of record collecting hardly seemed worth it, plus I liked having them.
But recently I’ve been looking at this sort of thing a little differently. Clearing out my late friend’s apartment last year, I kept thinking about how much cool stuff he’d accrued, and how painstakingly he’d organized it all, only to…you know, die, leaving someone else to figure out what the hell to do with it all. As for my own cool crap, I’m very much still using the bike stuff, but the records were mostly just sitting there, and thanks the Internet I could hear pretty much any of it anytime I wanted to, with or without the records. So maybe it was time to turn these things into something more useful (such as money) while people are still interested in them, and while I’m still around to know what they even are.
So I reached out to a downtown record store who offered to come to my home, pick up the records, go through them all, and make me an offer. If I didn’t like the offer they’d bring the records back, no problem. I didn’t really know what the collection was worth, but I figured if they offered at least X then I’d seriously consider selling. The day after they picked up the records, they called and offered me X…times five. I replied that I’d sell them for X times six, certain they’d say no. Instead they said yes, at which point I realized the collection was probably worth at least X times ten and that I’d vastly underestimated the aging hipster market.
But I’m a man of my word, plus it was still a good six times what I expected, and also they’d made the transaction extremely easy and had been both courteous and punctual, and anyway even if they were making out they were an independent record store who were employing people and keeping at least one storefront in the Village from becoming yet another bank, or worse, yet another NYU facility, so we shook on it verbally and I arranged to swing by to finalize the deal the very next day.
Riding the subway downtown, I couldn’t help feeling a little sad. I emerged from the station into a neighborhood very different from the one I used to comb for records. I was also a very different person than that young cigarette-spokeing, bargain hot dot-eating record store-comber. The only thing that hadn’t transformed completely in the past four decades–and my only tangible connection to those bygone days–was the records themselves. And now they were gone, too.
But I reminded myself that they’re just things, and that while I could no longer smugly say I owned such-and-such an album on vinyl, I really didn’t need to, because I WAS THERE GODDAMN IT:
Also, I now had money. Okay, not Porsche money:
But I could at least afford to look at the Pinarellos:
And no, I’m not in the market for one, but while I was downtown I figured I’d pop into the nearby Bottega di Pinarello just to see what it was like:
Okay, fine, I went there entirely to make fun of it, and I suppose there was a time I might have looked askance at Pinarello positioning itself as yet another luxury brand among the many with a presence in the streets of SoHo, but that was before I was FILTHY RICH from selling all those records. Sorry, but the world looks different to the wealthy, and I understand that now that I’m one of them. Anyway, Pinarello is owned by a Swiss holding company, which is in turn controlled by a mining and commodities trading billionaire, and so the store doesn’t really need to sell bikes. In fact I assume most people who go in there are either looky-loos like me, or else tourists buying Pinarello New York t-shirts for that friend, loved one, or family member who likes bikes:
Speaking of t-shirts, after we completed our transaction the record store guy eagerly asked me if I had any, and I wish I did because I’d be even richer. Sadly, I wore all mine to gossamer. But I bet if I still had the one I’m wearing in the photo above I could buy a second Pinarello.
Fortunately, it’s never too late to start a new t-shirt collection:
And before you crack wise, note the shirt keeps bicycles simple, not cheap.
As that “Great Gatsby” guy wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me,” and now that I’m one of them I know how right he was. See, only the finest will do:
Granted, I’ve skirted the shirt’s admonition by complicating this one as much as possible, but as I lowered the stylus that is the Farbman onto the groove that is a road lined with fall foliage I heard a music more exquisitely beautiful than any, uh, Septic Death album:
Sure, that’s a pretty low bar, but still:
I won’t be able to throw a leg over a bike forever, so I’d better enjoy them while I can.