| « Cory Doctorow and Secondary 'Secondary Screening' Classes | Main | Some Inside Baseball » |
A posse of my San Francisco friends and I braved the chill today for a bike ride in Berkeley Hills, mis-appropriating the BART system (designed to bring commuters from the suburbs to downtown SF's array of cubicle farms) to take us to Rockridge, where all the folks have wonder-tots and fleece jackets.
We stopped for a moment of double espressos and macchiatos and saw a guy pull up a on a beautifully simple blue, fixed gear bike, with a sweet little wooden and metal rack over the front wheel. Dave and I, longtime aficionados of bike pr0n, recognized it immediately as a Momovelo original. Then we (maybe it was Anne) realized it was Kai Matsuda, Mr. Momovelo himself, stopping in for a coffee.
I think he was riding a Gilman Gentleman.
Momovelo sells the city bikes every one should be riding -- simple steel frames with beautiful powder coat finishes unmarred by stickers, mustache or English roadster-style handlebars, gorgeous metal fenders, and lines that make you wonder what-the-hell ever inspired anyone to buy a mountain bike.
If I ever start to make more money or find a $2000 bill on the ground, I'm buying a Milktea (scroll down for pics and note the gold chain).
Momovelo reminds me of my friend Eirik Steinhoff, a brilliant man I befriended back in the days of grad school and who now edits the Chicago Review. One of the first issues he sent me was an amazing compilation of New Polish Writing. I'm not proud to admit it was the first time I'd even read a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, a writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.
Now Matsuda made me think of Eirik for lots of reasons, but perhaps mostly because Eirik once, I think while telling me why there was real justification to my belief that the bicycle is the height of human innovation, described a bicycle as an "x-ray of a machine." Kai builds bikes to those specifications. Eirik thinks thoughts that smart some twenty times a day. Also I think I'd like to watch the two of them have a talk someday, which I'll try to set up if Eirik ever comes to visit.
So after that, we all went riding up Old Tunnel Road, the site of the great Oakland Hills Fire of October 1991. Many residents got reimbursed by both their insurers and the city of Oakland, and some replaced their lovely old Arts and Craft style homes with houses meant to resemble a battleship or serve tribute to John Coltrane (oh, how I lament not having taken a picture of the Saxophone House to include here.) A great telling of the story is in this Harper's story by David Kirp.
We rode round, climbed back up Wildcat Canyon and dropped down to Cactus Taqueria for well-deserved, deep-fried crispy chicken tacos and papaya aguas frescas. They didn't remind me of anything except themselves.
Oh yeah, and the other great thing about a bicycle?
You don't need a license from the state and nobody asks you questions before you get on it.
Posted by Ryan Singel at January 23, 2005 10:22 PM
Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.secondaryscreening.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/102
Too bad Mr. Matsuda has so many frustrated and angry customers (see, for example, under "folding bikes" in Bike Forum at www.bikeforums.net).
Otherwise, he would be very stylish indeed.
Posted by: alex at March 7, 2005 12:44 PM