Burn a Bowl for Guy Debord...

On the Passage of a Single Person Through a Brief Unity of Time:

It's the birthday of the founding father of the Situationist Internationale, champion of dérive and détournement, staunch and unapologetic enemy of the Spectacle, director of the provocative Hurlements en Faveur de Sade, impetus behind the Paris Revolt of May, '68, accidental progenitor of punk rock, and lover of all things alcoholic.

Guy Ernest Debord would have turned 76 on this day, had he not removed himself from an increasingly artificial and artless world some 13 years ago with a single squeeze of the trigger, simultaneously perfecting and concluding his lifelong efforts to disappear.

Guy Debord, whose early work Mémoires had sandpaper covers, so that its removal and replacement on the bookshelf would gradually erase the titles of other works surrounding it.

"The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of "lonely crowds." The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely."
—The Society of the Spectacle, 1967

An obituary for Debord can be found here.

Taste Spin...

"Droolworthy!"

Finally finished the build on my Salsa Casseroll last night. The hold-up? Finding the tires I wanted without further breaking the bank.

Since the narrowest Vittoria Randonneur (a current favorite) offering is a 700x28, and since I need a narrower tire for the Velocity Aerohead rims, and because I'm hung up on Vittoria ever since I had a set (and still do) on my 90s Bianchi Eros, I ended up cheaping out with some Vittoria Zaffiros, 700x25. At less than $12 a pop on sale at Performance, and with pretty good reviews online, the miser in me figured what the hell.

First impressions are that this baby is smoooooth! Part of this, of course, is the Phil hubs and bottom bracket, but the other piece is the frame itself. It's surprisingly stiff and responsive, very solid-feeling, but with a faint shadow of twitchiness, exaggerated, I'm guessing, by my inexperience with track-style bars—Soma's Major Taylors, to be specific. And...it's light! Well, compared to my Cross-Check, anyway.

And although past experience would suggest that I should have ordered a smaller size frame (the Casseroll is said to run about 2cm larger than the given frame-size), the 57 seems to fit me fine, at least during the short spin I took on it. In fact, I had to slide the saddle back a wee bit to dial in the cockpit. Speaking of which, I still need to determine where the stem works best, hence the uncut steerer tube and ridiculous quantity of spacers. Perhaps this weekend will provide me with the opportunity, if the weather cooperates.

Currently running a 49:18, since an 18T Soma cog is what was in the parts bin. It's not as steep a gear as I'd like, but it'll do until the 16T cog I've ordered for the flip (or is it flop?) side arrives. For a comprehensive spec sheet, go here.

Rating: 5/5 Forks, Spoons, and Knives.

Bon appétit!

Beer Bucket and Beyond: A Review of the Banjo Brothers Commuter Backpack...

UPDATE, May 9, 2008: I'm in contact with Mike from Banjo Brothers, who has offered to replace the bag free of charge with a larger model. According to Mike, the drybags have been redesigned to be more robust, so the problems I experienced should now be addressed.
UPDATE, April 30, 2008: In the five or so months that I've used this bag, the inner "drybag" described below has begun to crack around the top edges and has developed a quarter-sized hole in the side and a two-inch split along one seam. Also, the webbing on one of the shouder straps has begun to fray substantially where it contacts the cinch buckle, threatening to dump the whole works one day without warning. In the interest of full disclosure: I did use the pack daily for those four months, and on occasion I carried some relatively heavy loads; however, none of them contained sharp objects or anything that I would expect to cause a puncture.

On April 9 and again on April 13 (2008), I tried contacting Banjo Brothers by email to see what my warranty options were. To date, I've received no reply. It's clear, in retrospect, that the cost-savings with this pack come at the expense of quality. Sadly, I cannot recommend this pack based on my experience, both with the bag and with what I can only perceive as a lack of customer service. Your experience may vary. Read on...


The first thing that struck me upon opening the Banjo Brothers Commuter Backpack is the color of the interior: white.

Bleached-bone white. Ass-of-Casper white. White, white, white.

Why white? If you've ever dug around in a backpack at night for a coveted object, sans light, you know the answer already: a dark interior turns the pack into a black hole, swallowing your junk like a toothless maw and sending it deep into duodenal recesses from which it doesn't return until the light of day. So, white is good here.

The next thing I noticed is that this white interior is actually a removable drysack, tacked inside the "ballistic nylon" pack shell by conservative use of a hook-and-loop closure system. The drysack achieves dryness in part with a rolltop and cinch-buckle design. Now, drysacks keep water out, hence their name. The alcoholic Einstein in me, however, was thinking about things from a different angle, quickly staggering across the closely-spaced cobblestones of drunken deduction to arrive at a dazzling conclusion: a waterproof bag is also a watertight container. Ipso-fucking-facto: this drybag, filled with quality beer and some ice, would make for a highly portable, dripless cooler. And look, it's even shaped properly for the job: rectangular, wide, deep, and pleated, like a grocery bag. Dimensions for a medium Commuter Backpack come out to 17" tall by 12" wide by 8" deep, yielding 1500 cubic inches of dead air in all.

But wait, there's more. Load the bag with ice and a six-pack or two, place your dainties and some foodstuff in separate drybags (separate drybags not included) and place them on top, roll the whole thing closed, and you're ready to hit your next punk bike enduro, seedy assignation in the park, or uptown social event in style. No more worries that some dollar-store degenerate will sneakily pilch your last Old Rasputin from the community fridge or unmarked cooler, eschewing his own crass contribution (a Straubs, perhaps, or some other watery domestic), which goes as untouched as a warm specimen cup, assuming he even bothered to bring one.

Okay, so it's a portable cooler, anything else? Glad you asked.

The Good:

The Commuter Backpack sits low on the back like a messenger bag, making those furtive, over-the-shoulder glances at the shapely backsides of passing cyclists a snap. This arrangement also contributes to a low center of gravity, permitting better balance as you flee from the local saw-bellied constable, who has just turned a blind eye from speeding motorists to watch you roll cautiously through a stop.

The pack is lightly cushioned with three low-profile strips of padding—one on either side and a shorter one down the middle. Just enough to do the job for soft cargo, but a little under-equipped for hard or heavy items. Speaking of cush, the shoulder straps are nice and wide and anatomically sculpted to preclude the dreaded cheese-slicer effect, provided you don't overstuff the pack. There is a removable waist belt that pivots on snap-links at either side—no more fucking around trying to straighten out the straps before buckling. Don't like waist belts? Unclip it and toss it—the pack rides well without it, settling in nicely against the lumbars and staying there. There's also a sliding chest strap to stabilize the pack and hold down your groodies, if ya got 'em.

The pack is black on the outside. The plus here requires no explanation beyond the obvious: black is eternally cool—hell, it's the color of the river Cocytus, for Pan's sake. Banjo Brothers gets around the obvious drawback (nighttime invisibility) by running twin racing-stripe reflectors down the "quarter-panel contact zone", so that the cellphone holding, Starbucks slurping, Suburban cowboy or urban Explorer who might otherwise perforate your sigmoid flexure with his two-and-a-half-ton motorized scalpel has absolutely no conscionable excuse for doing so. Along these lines, Banjo Brothers saw fit to also include a blinker-light loop for extra confidence at night.

The pack is voluminous. It could easily hold two stacked six-packs and a bomber or two, with room for a couple layers and a fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich on top. It also holds my 15-inch Powerbook and padded cover with room to spare. Nice.

The pack is capped with a waterproof storm flap that buckles closed, making for twofold protection against the watery elements and tidying up the look of the whole works. The flap extends almost all the way down the pack to cover the outside compartments (some zippered, some hooked-and-looped) where a cellphone or wallet, small tools, and a pump ride nicely and remain exceedingly accessible. Of course, the flap coverage diminishes as you fill the pack, no getting around that.

The pack has drainage holes in the shell so that any water finding its way between the shell and the drysack exits quickly through a few grommets. There is a loop at the top from which to hang the pack—ideal for making room at the local pub for that special person who will come to realize her or his mistake more fully with each passing drink.

The pack is rugged, having come through my recent mano a mano with a DC cab as unscathed as my own bag of bones, save for a few minor mars on the racing-stripe reflectors. Ballistic nylon, indeed.

The pack is curiously devoid of garrish logos, settling for an understated, almost invisible tag (à la a Levi's pocket label) halfway down the side of the storm flap. No rolling billboard with this baby—my blinker light has more ad copy!

The Bad or Marginally Ugly:

The Commuter Backpack is a bit on the heavy side, owing, no doubt, to the dual (drysack and shell) design and the use of burly materials throughout. In real use, this typically goes unnoticed, and dry haulables can be worth their weight in gold. Wet underwear not only sucks, it chafes! On sunny days, remove the drysack to lose some chub.

The pack has no internal pockets, making cargo subdivision within impossible. Fortunately, most small items will fit in the aforementioned external compartments: a roomy zippered area behind a smaller closable pocket and three...uh...penholder slots (penholder slots?...and three?...WTF?...wasted space, methinks). And there's no key lanyard. Why pack makers forget this helpful feature is beyond me; I like the warm and fuzzy feeling I get when I stagger from the pub knowing my keys are going with me.

The pack sports an external pocket on the left side intended for a small u-lock. However, the lamentable absence of any closure system earns it a rating of Functionally Dubious at best. A snap in the center would have gone a long way toward inspiring confidence. As it is, I can't imagine what I'd trust to this open pouch unattended, so I think this feature missed the mark.¹

Bottom Line:

An excellent pack, overall. Well-designed, with only a paltry snag here or there to snivel over. Definately a good deal for the money; 80 clams for a waterproof bag is hard to beat. I'd buy it again, although as rugged as it is, I don't think it'll come to that.

1. After closer inspection, it seems that two water bottles might fit nicely in this pocket...or perhaps two cans of Dale's Pale Ale. However, the absence of an elasticized edge still makes this storage space a bit of a dice toss.

Hit and Stun...

...or Miracle on 18th Street. Take your pick.

Left The Reef in Adams Morgan some time after one this morning. At the bike rack out front, I bid farewell to Gwadzilla, who had accompanied me there after the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA) holiday party (more about which later) for a bite and one more beer. We hopped on our bikes. Joel headed north up 18th Street. I took the southerly direction.

The early morning air was cool and moist, and the rain that had stalked the skies all the previous day had given up and gone to bed long ago. The pallid clouds adrift overhead gave no hint of the snowstorm that was promised for the weekend ahead. Traffic seemed heavy for this time of day, but not unusually so for the area, sedans and SUVs on my left shaking the pavement like a herd of elephants as they rumbled by, mere inches from my elbow. My pack felt heavy, too, owing to a camera and u-lock nestled in a raincoat within, among other, lighter items. The six of Mendocino Brewing Company's Imperial IPA I carried earlier was long gone, the empties huddling in a recycling can on the third floor of the WABA office several blocks southwest on Connecticut Avenue. I got on with the business of getting my tired ass through the next ten miles to my home across the Potomac.

At the corner of 18th Street and New Hampshire Avenue, just a few blocks down from Adams Morgan proper, I blew through the red in a sort of tunnel-vision trance, barely glancing left and right as I entered the intersection, and never breaking cadence. I noticed the glaring headlights maybe half a second before the cab t-boned me, its grill slamming into my left flank like a breaching ram, knocking the bike out from under me, and sending me skidding across the damp pavement like a crash-test dummy, clear of the area of impact.

Seems the oblique angle that New Hampshire Avenue makes as it feeds into 18th Street had joined authorial forces with the aforementioned beer in a plot to place their hapless (and irremediably complacent) protagonist squarely and irresolutely in the path of Doom, said Doom taking as its avatar the conflation of an Indian cabbie and the two-ton traveling tin encasing him.

In a flash I was up to move body and bike out of the road lest this play take on a grisly second act. Then I approached the hackie, who had somehow stopped short of running me over, and politely explained to him through a fogged and half-opened window that this mishap was entirely my fault. He was pretty shaken up by the ordeal, as were some pedestrians on the corner who asked me if I was okay. I was. I smiled at them, chagrined, and assured them that all my pieces were in place and still functional. I then mentioned that perhaps I'd had enough to drink for the night and the morning. I had.

I checked my bike for damage, and—Hephaestus be praised!—it had suffered nothing more than a flesh wound on the handlebar, the cork tape ruptured and rent and sprouting from an elbow bend like an unruly cowlick. My own elbow had a matching gash, as did the sleeve of my jacket. I spun both wheels, looking for wobbles, but they were as sound and solid as on the day I built them. Even my lights were still shining, the headlamp throwing a proud cone of white through the shadows, the red blinker on the saddle pack pulsing like a tiny robotic heart. Hell, my water bottle was still snugged down in its rack. I threw a leg over the saddle, anxious to escape interrogation by a curious constable who might chance upon the scene, and took off again, rolling down 18th with an eye open for M Street and any cross-flowing traffic.

Seconds later, I burst into maniacal laughter, feeling invincible and almost proud of how I'd come through this brush with mortality unscathed. A strange sense of levity overtook me, a delirious confidence that bordered on arrogance, transcendental and wholly out of place amid the grime and gunk of the city streets. I had—mindlessly, recklessly, foolishly, and sans helmet—pitted flesh and bone against iron and steel, outmatched and undersized and utterly unprepared, and come away with a draw. I had skirted if not death, then serious bodily injury. And it felt good!

In my euphoria, I rode past M Street and was forced to make a mid-block u-turn to come back up to it. I resolved then to pay closer attention to my surroundings, to where I was in relation to the impatient juggernauts crowding me to the curbside, and the miles dissolved behind me like so much fog in the early morning sun.

Was it good karma that I could ride away from this collision as if it hadn't happened? Or bad karma that it happened at all?

It doesn't matter, really. It's good to be alive.

Baking a Casseroll...

Introducing my nouvelle petite reine.¹ Well, her torso, really.

A spicy Salsa Casseroll, size 57 cm, that is dreaming of rolling suburban byways and city alleys with a fix on. First impressions are that this is a well-constructed, well-finished frame. I believe it's about a pound lighter than my Cross-Check (both 4130 chromoly)—not much of a weight savings, but at $280 for frame and fork, I couldn't pass it up. Ginger Beer is the color. Stainless-steel, semi-horizontal dropouts. Elegant. Hell, I'd even go so far as to say "classy", though in a meretricious way: a versatile strumpet with a sense of fashion, not yet jaded by nights spent trolling the seedy streets of DC.

I installed the headset the other night using my homemade headset press (HHP), aka "the warranty voider". Both cups went in like a dream, straight and smooth and...transposed. Zounds! Seems that in a single-beer induced fog, I'd installed the bottom cup in the top of the head tube and the top cup in the bottom. Nice.

When I mentioned this oversight to Butch, he suggested I leave it for style points, citing as a precedent the ofttimes flamboyent rickyd's deliberate such transposition some time ago. But anyone who knows me would see right through that ruse. Butch then turned me on to a homemade headset remover (HHR) constructed from a foot-and-a-half section of 3/8" diameter copper plumbing pipe, quartered on the business end with a hacksaw to form flaring tines, and capped on the other end where the pounding takes place.

A quick trip to the LHS (Local Hardware Store), a little handyman action, and I soon had a new tool on the cheap to add to the arsenal. Like the HHP, the HHR tackled the task with pugilistic aplomb, wresting each cup from its steely burrow with a few quick taps of a stout hammer. Double-checked that I had the cups properly placed, and back in they went. I drove the fork race home using a section of PVC tubing as a slide-hammer, and viola!—the job was done.

Without further adieu, I include a list of ingredients:

• Phil Wood front and rear high-flange track hubs, 32 hole (polished silver)


• Velocity Aerohead rims (silver)


• DT Swiss Competition Double Butted (14/15 guage) spokes (silver)


• Vittoria Randonneur tires, 700c x 28mm


• Surly track cog, 17T


• Sugino 75 cranks, 49T (silver)


• Crank Brothers Eggbeaters Quattro SL pedals (silver/black)


• Chris King headset (silver)


• Soma Fabrications "Major Taylor" track bar w/ (black) track grips


• Thomson Elite stem and seatpost (silver)


• Salsa Lip-Lock seatpost collar (black)


• Selle Italia (dick-friendly) SLK saddle


• Phil Wood bottom bracket (108.5)


• Tektro R538 Long Reach front brake caliper (silver)


• Paul Component Engineering E-Lever front brake lever (silver/black)


• KMC Kool chain

Since I built up the wheelset before deciding on a frame, I had to order a Phil conversion kit to stretch the 120mm (track) width rear hub to a 130, the Casseroll's spacing. Currently awaiting the arrival of this kit and the uber-pricey Phil bottom bracket. It'll be a few days before this baby gets a taste of the tarmac.Disembodied bling...

"Warranty Voiders" I and II...

1. La petite reine ("the little queen") is a French term of endearment for the magical, mystical transportation-device-cum-carnival-ride object most commonly referred to in English as "bicycle".

Rollin' Snowmen...

Nothing like a snow day to bring out the not-so-much-hardcore bike commuters as those who simply like to have fun. Even when the snow is little more than a dusting.

Ran into shivasteve on my ride into work yesterday along the Custis Trail, both of us running fixed as usual (the only way to ride snow). Three or four miles later another rider—the first we'd seen—appeared ahead in the distance, a dark sliver that slowly separated itself from the ghostly white landscape all around us. A few pedalstrokes later, and the rider's identity was apparent. It was Butch, smiling like a truant and weaving his way through the slick chum of snow that coated the trail. True to form, he was riding the same skinny treadless tires he runs every day, and doing fine on 'em.

We stopped to shoot the proverbial shit (and a few pix), three fixed-gear riders who "get it" without "it" having to go through the usual thought channels. Motorists dread the threat of snow; cyclists (some) dream of it. A nice snowfall is like a gateway to youth, a chance to roll back the years and have fun, the kind of fun that defies analysis, resists assay, and thrusts a finger in the face of wrinkled maturity, all the while leering like a lecher.

It's these kinds of random encounters, along with the simple joy of metabolically powered travel, that make bike commuting so damn much fun. I was late, shivasteve on time, and Butch a bit early, it seemed. I wondered about the likelihood of such a convergence; I've been commuting by bike every weekday for almost a year and a half now, and it hadn't happened once before in all that time. (I don't mean to imply that the odds of such a meeting are astronomically low, but they are sufficiently slim to suggest something else—be it kismet or cosmic—is at work behind the scenes here¹. Something beyond mere chance. And beyond the realm of our blunted senses to absorb. I think it should remain there, just out of reach, invisible to telescope and microscope alike. I dig the unfathomable precisely because it resists understanding. It's what makes life interesting. The end of speculation, that stillborn time when everything is known, nailed down, pinned to a specimen pad, forced through a filter, torn apart and hastily reassembled, echoed in endless schemata, and rendered instantly accessible, means the death of mystery and intrigue, two qualities that let each of us define the world—our own world—any way we wish.)

Shivasteve and I bade farewell to Butch and continued on along the same slippery path to our respective dungeons. We passed only two other cyclists; their opposing attitudes presented a quick study in contrasts: a chick trundling over the Humpback Bridge who flashed a snow-white smile that added points to her already attractive countenance and ballsy demeanor, and a guy carefully escorting his bike across the 14th Street Bridge, his steps hesitant, his face a mask of dejection, as if he'd been caught unaware in a spat between Lady Nature and Mother Earth.

Here's to the first snow of the winter.

1. The annotated copy of Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece (a superlative that falls far short of adequate when referring to this novel) Lolita points out to the less-than-supernaturally-astute reader places in the text where the author's presence can be perceived, where Nabokov—sometimes playfully, sometimes malevolently—intrudes in the plot, where "the mask slips". Characters know things they cannot possibly know otherwise, there are shared behavioral traits—parallel proclivities—among the protagonist and antagonist that stretch coincidence to a silky filament, and numerical recurrences crop up at a rate pushing well past the boundaries of believability, of possibility even. And yet, in the "real" world, such phenomena occur more often than we sometimes realize, prompting the rhetorical "what are the chances?" query when we do take notice. Not talking about god here, but a strange mix of fate and chance and nature, with a pinch of the preternatural tossed in after the boil, and garnished, finally, with a wilted sprig of will. May the enigmatic forever remain.
"It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow."
— Vladimir Nabokov