If a columnist in the “Arts & Living” section at the Washington Post can make a great story like this one:
In which David Montgomery writes amazing things like
This is the summer of women on bicycles riding around town free as anything, wearing long dresses or skirts, sandals or even high heels, hair flowing helmet-free, pedaling not-too-hard and sitting upright on their old-school bikes, the kind with front baskets where they put their laptops, and handlebars that curve gently back in a bow shaped like the upper line of someone’s perfectly drawn red lipstick.
They never appear to sweat. They make you think you are in Paris or Rome. No, they make you think you are in a movie about Paris or Rome.
and
What’s happening is, the American conception of the bicycle-as-toy and the bicycle-as-sports-equipment is being infiltrated by the European notion of the bicycle-as-transportation and the Asian notion of the bicycle-as-cargo-hauler.
By comparison, our fashion columnist at the Austin Chronicle, Stephen Moser, writes in his column on June 27:
Speaking of bikes, my heart began to turn to stone as I was stopped at Riverside and Lamar watching a parade of bikes indulging, presumably, in some form of civil disobedience. What that meant was that dozens of clowns on bicycles took up the entire street and brought most traffic to a standstill. After several minutes of obnoxious waving and smiling from the riders, I was ready to pull a Lizzie Grubman and plow right through them and be on my way. But I was hesitant to rack up a lot of hit-and-run charges against me … and then there would be all that damage to my car. The thing is, all the smiling and waving did not make me sympathetic to the scofflaws’ “cause.” It made me think: “Don’t give bikes the right. Give ‘em the finger.”
Then I think it’s pretty clear we need a new fashion writer at the Chronicle.
on Aug 17th, 2008 at 1:44 am
The fashion columnist needs to be sacked. Where is the petition?
Fashion is about fashion and bikes are fashion. Creepy losers in planet-trashing tin-boxes are sooo last century. Just as there are no fashions in steam engines, there are no fashions in cars. Cars are history, admittedly one of the more interesting areas of industrial archaeology, but history nonetheless.
Also, the tone is wrong. If the Critical Mass folk wrote on their blogs about how they don’t ‘set light to tin-boxes, occupants inside is because the fumes from their filthy little vehicles would release toxic poisons into the atmosphere’ people would not be impressed. I don’t see why the fashion columnist is able to say that only tickets and getting the tin-box scratched stopped a massacre of innocents.
It’s time to get that Austin Chronicle fashion columnist singled out and sacked.
on Aug 17th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Unfortunately, there is a trend right now at the larger papers to put non-race related bike articles in the fashion section, as if bikes are like a hand bag or night club trend. I hope they’ll become part of a larger category on sustainable living, but I’m probably expecting too much from the media.