“A Skunk And A Raccoon Walk Into A Park…” – Bike Snob NYC

Further to yesterday’s post, Framework seems to be the Builder of the Moment, because there’s also another review of one over at Escape Collective:

It’s considerably different from the review I mentioned yesterday since unlike the other guy James Huang is able to articulate his thoughts in an articulate, comprehensible fashion. Otherwise, both reviewers are similar in that they fawn over an overwrought process that seems to result in a bicycle the reviewer finds unsatisfactory:

Yes, the Framework’s meticulous construction means you won’t fall victim to the “dreaded ‘ring of death,’” whatever that means:

Yet it’s a (mostly) carbon bicycle that doesn’t seem to be particularly light or aero, and I thought the ability to combine both of those attributes was the whole point of the material–well, that and the ride quality, which doesn’t seem to be there either, since the desert hipster guy yesterday doesn’t like his, and James Huang had the guy build him two frames so far and still isn’t happy:

All this for $7,750 for the frame and sundries.

Of course I understand there’s no reason to be angry at a single guy (a Canadian guy no less) who’s devoted himself to making bicycles the way he wants to make them–and I’m most ceratainly not. He’s not forcing anyone to buy them, he’s not creating some new standard we’ll all be stuck with, and no doubt he’s doing it for the love of both bikes and craft. And who knows? One day maybe he’ll hit on how to make the perfect bike frame.

At the same time, while I’m not angry, I am mystified. What’s going on here? Is it simply that high-performance bikes have become so boring and indistinguishable that the reviewers can no longer even pretend to find them interesting, and yet these same reviewers also remain unwilling to embrace the “old” technology they’ve forsaken and admit they’ve been led astray, and so instead they swoon over this guy who seems to build failure after failure, albeit with incredibly tight tolerances? Like is a bike that doesn’t appear to be terribly well-executed (at least based on two in-depth reviews) worth it because you can “barely slide a piece of paper” in between the headset bearing and the head tube?

I suppose the trouble is that it’s not particularly difficult to build a bike that rides beautifully and is durable. That’s not to say it’s easy, but bike builders have been able to do it reliably and consistently for at least the past 75 years, and it’s why I can pull a battered 40 year-old frame like this out of my closet, throw some spare parts on it, and wind up with a bike that rides as well as anything out there on the road:

But that sort of consistency and reliability is boring, and it’s much more exciting to enter into a long process with someone who’s going to build you a rolling experiment–because yes, it’s nice to feel important.

Speaking of the Faggin, it’s an appropriate bicycle for the spring, because just like the nature with which we’re surrounded it’s been reborn. The flowers are blooming, the trees are blossoming, and the skunks are skunking:

It hissed at me as I passed, which suggests to me I was about a second or two away from getting sprayed:

I also happened to pass a good 15-20 young bikepackers who appeared to be heading out of the city for some sort of expedition–at least I assumed that’s what they were doing, though I suspect people just ride around like that all the time now, and probably just carry pour-over coffee fixings and all the rest of it at all times as a matter of course, in the same way the plastic bike crowd dons skinsuits and helmets with integrated visors to ride for an hour in the park.

My first reaction when I see a group of young, hip bikepackers is to feel fear, because it always looks like some sort of massive and trendy evacuation is underway, and I immediately wonder if maybe they know something I don’t. Like, is Brooklyn under attack? Are all the electric Citi Bikes exploding due to an EMP from North Korea? Is a mushroom tea shortage imminent? (I have no idea if mushroom tea is a thing with people, but I saw a sign for it not too long ago so I hereby declare that it is.) My second reaction is to feel jealousy and resentment, because when I was that age I didn’t have 15-20 friends with cool bikes with whom to ride into the country and prepare pour-over coffee. But then I realize that was all my fault, and that I also rode with large groups of people when I was that age, only instead of chatting and eating and enjoying the scenery I was in a paceline with my nose up the ass of the rider ahead of me. The lesson here is that you make your own fate, and you have nobody else to blame for being a giant loser but yourself.

As I pondered the above, I passed this garment:

Had it fallen from the Voile strap of one of the bikepackers? Would they find themselves later that night shivering at the campsite without it? Should I retrieve it and chase them down? Would they then invite me to join them, allowing me to partake in all the joyous socializing and camaraderie I missed out on in my early adulthood?

“Fuck it,” I decided, and continued on my way, back into Van Cortlandt Park:

Like other parks in the city, in some places Van Cortlandt Park retains the same bucolic charm it had in that bygone era:

Whereas in other places it doesn’t, like when you have to ride under the expressway:

Also like other parks, it can be a little feral around the edges, and people will appropriate out-of-the-way parts of it for their own purposes. Such was recently the case in Kissena Park in Queens, right by the Kissena Velodrome:

I guess somebody tore up a bunch of saplings or something, and word on the street (or at least the Internet) is that it was the so-called “Central Park Raccoons:”

As you might expect from someone who sees groups of young bikepackers and goes into an emotional tailspin, I don’t know the Central Park Raccoons apart from what I’ve seen on the Internet:

It is hard for me to imagine a bunch of young bike people would tear down a bunch of saplings in a park, since this is the same demographic that thinks climate change is going to destroy us, and that feels guilty about killing mushrooms for their mushroom tea. Then again I guess I could imagine them building a tracklocross course in a Dionysian mushroom tea-fueled frenzy and making the kinds of people who volunteer to plant trees in parks angry as a consequence:

Who knows? All I can say for sure is that some kind of Valmont Bike Park type thing at Kissena complete with velodrome, singletrack, dirt jumps, and all the rest of it would be pretty amazing…

…and that’s how I know it’ll never happen.