All the world's

Scot McKenzie mesmerizes as KJ in The Aliens

Last week was theater week here at Mondo Blah Blah. I saw Young Robin Hood at the Roundhouse Theater, Bethesda's community theater, on Sunday. Robin Hood was something for the whole family, and not of much interest to me. But I support art in my local community so I can live among actors, directors, lighting technicians, stage hands and theater freaks of all kinds - my kind of neighbors. So I have season tickets and take what they give me. Sometimes art is interesting and sometimes not so much. It wasn’t bad, just predictable family fare, which is not really my thing.

Then it was Malkovich's Les Liaisons Dangereuses on Thursday night which I wrote about on Friday.

Then I saw The Aliens at the Studio Theater on Friday. Of the three, the latter was by far my favorite. Starring Peter O’Connor,  Scot McKenzie and Brian Miskell, all of whom were outstanding. This is tough material and it came across brilliantly. Written by Annie Baker. I will watch for her name.

Though I’ve only seen two plays at the Studio, both have been outstanding and I’ve really enjoyed them. The theaters are really small and intimate and the actors can get right up in your face, which was pretty uncomfortable when we went to see Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. Having a black man sit ten feet in front of me speaking the most eloquent words about racism written in the English language was an intense experience. Theater at its best. The kind that makes you uncomfortable. 

Danger Valmont, Danger!

Go see Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Shakespeare Theater. Directed by John Malkovich who in 1988 took the starring role in the film, this production is in French with English surtitles and despite the possible language barrier is a really entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. If you actually speak French, great; but if not, don't sweat it. You can just concentrate on the naked French ladies.

The cast is young and lovely and Malkovich has managed to portray these characters as a combination of 18th Century dandies with hoop skirts and sword fights, and modern day hipsters in skinny jeans, talking on cell phones, writing letters to each other on iPads. It could have been cheesy, but it's not. It's not the best thing you'll see this year, but it's good. It's fun. It's sexy.

And I promise - you won't see John Malkovich's ass this time.

http://www.welovedc.com/2012/12/07/we-love-arts-les-liaisons-dangereuses/

Polymorphia Schmolymorphia

Listen to this:

 

Penderecki: String Trio

It is a string trio. Not a quartet. That's in part what gives it the spare quality. Perfect for 20th Century modern music. It is by Krzysztof Eugeniusz Penderecki a Polish composer who later taught at Yale. I don't actually car much for this particular version. It's not bad, and the musicians are technically quite proficient, but I think they're making it too melodic, too warm; not sufficiently hard edge.

If you get the chance, find the version by the Janaki String Trio. I saw them perform it at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and they tore that mother apart. Their version is as cold as Warsaw sidewalk, as sharp as razor, as resonant as abandoned factory. Their sound is clear and precise, as the music demands. If you go in for such things, this is a genuine delight.

Caged

Just so you know, I considered leaving this entire post blank in tribute to John Cage. But I didn't. You may wish I had.

The very King of Cages

Triathlete water storage

I've been thinking about the 'umble bottle cage. That most utilitarian accessory that allows a cyclist to affix a container of water or other liquid (usually in "bottle" form) to a bicycle. Though usually mounted to the frame, on the seat tube and/or down tube, cages can also be mounted on the handlebars and for some reason triathletes seem to prefer them behind the saddle, like a couple of Truck nutz dangling behind the rider's buttocks. I guess the skin suit, aero helmet and bars don't look dorky enough. Well, to each their own I suppose.

The reason I have been thinking about cages is that the '86 Fuji came without any, so I found myself in the market. Actually, at first I put on a cage that I had left over from an old bike - I am nothing if not a borderline hoarder. But there was something wrong with the way the "normal" aluminum cage (like the one in the upper left corner of this post) looked with the slender tubes of the Allegro. The oversized aluminum tubes of the bottle cage seemed to compete in bulk with the elegant chromoly of the bike. So I set about to find the perfect bottle cage to complement my vintage (really? '86 is "vintage"? I'm old...) bike.

I had a sense that there was more variety available for modern bikes, since my late model Treks sport a set of carbon fiber cages (the teenage punk-ass sales clerk actually complemented me on using the same cages as Lance, which very nearly cost him the sale) and a plastic pair. And the modern styling of the plastic cages fits the large aluminum tubes of the '02 2000 and the giant carbon tubes of the '11 Madone. But the Fuji called for something different, and hopefully less expensive, since the whole bike cost just a bit more than a fashionable set of carbon fiber cages.

Honoré Barthélémy during 1919 Tour de France

The Fuji is a project bike; a bike I bought very much with the idea of learning bike repair, experimenting with different equipment and exploring alternatives to the way I have been riding for most of my adult life. And as I learned about different styles of non-racing bikes, I fell back to my original attraction, which was long distance cycling. I've long maintained the romantic fantasy of the long distance rider, the randonneur, the iron man on a bicycle crossing the world's most beautiful landscapes. And the aesthetic of this fantasy has something of the Heroic image about it. I imagine myself rolling through the Strade Bianche, all wool jerseys and goggles, drinking from an aluminum bottle with a cork stopper, eating paninni wrapped in wax paper. Of course when I actually rode across Italy it was on a state-of-the-art titanium touring bike there was a van following so I wouldn't be late to the picnic set up by the tour guides or the restaurant for dinner.

VO Retro cage MKII, with tab

Notwithstanding the inevitable disparity between self image and reality, as I built up the Fuji I found myself under the spell of the classic cyclotouring bike, the lure of the Constructeur. Of course the Allegro is never going to be a René Herse or an Alex Singer, no matter what accessories I hang on it, but I nevertheless decided to outfit it with classic, beautifully designed stuff that will continue to look and perform perfectly for the rest of my life. So I went where you go when that's the sort of stuff you want, and I outfitted the bike with the cage that made the most sense; the Velo Orange Retro cage MK II, with tab. It just looks timeless, is super lightweight, both visually and physically and is constructed with an ingenious design featuring a single cleverly bent wire. I have spent way too much time tracing the path of the wire around its complete path, reassuring myself that it is indeed made entirely from a single strand. Just lovely. Somewhere in the Design Museum there is an empty pedestal waiting for one of these.

Celebrate good times, come on!

My name is Norman and I paint lies

Today, in celebration of the fact that the indigenous people of this land failed to comprehend our ancestors' true intention and foolishly kept them alive through the first few winters of the colonization, we will stuff ourselves with the fruits of their mistake. We will gorge ourselves on the genetic abomination that is the modern turkey; the product of a most unnatural selection so horrible as to have almost no precedent save that of the comparison between the proportions of a Barbie® doll and that of an actual woman. Mankind's obsession with outsized breasts seems boundless.

That said, after spending the afternoon stuffing my gullet with truly obscene quantities of food and alcohol, I anticipate falling into my usual post holiday state of bloated self loathing. And like the good descendant of Puritans I am, I anticipate awakening bright and early Friday morning filled with the desire to punish myself for having indulged my wanton animal desires, my gluttonous impulse to pleasure, my decadent hedonism, my godless debauchery. And I plan to symbolically flagellate my body on the saddle of a bicycle; to purify my soul with Cliff's Bars and sports drinks. So I will climb the hill to Forest Glen, then turn around and amble out past Olney and back. Then it'll be time to stuff myself with leftovers and do it all again on Sunday!

I hope your suffering is as exquisite. Happy Thanksgiving.

Safe cycling served up on a plate

WABA's organizational license plate

Well there's a new Bartlemobile and since the old Bartlemobile was crushed like a sardine can, and along with it the now 13 year old Save the Bay license plates, there will be new plates issued by the Old Line State. Of course I could just get the boring old white ones procured for me by the dealership, or I could stick with the Heron and Crab which actually would complement the new car's Dolphin Gray exterior. But, as I am a bike nerd, I have decided to support the Washington Area Bicycling Association (WABA) and sport the organization's Maryland plate. I'm not yet sure where I will fall in the 0001 - 9999 lineup, but the notion of just needing to memorize a 4-digit integer is attractive. The old cerebellum isn't what it used to be and the notion of memorizing UXP-968 isn't nearly as appealing somehow. So we'll see how it goes and at least I'll have the smug satisfaction of knowing I'm bossing other drivers around while motoring.    

On snot

High in fiber, low in fat.

We stood around the parking lot at the Travilah store, a country market at a popular crossroads frequented by cyclists and other passersby. The Bunny nibbled lightly on a pretzel and sipped some water as a bunny will do, while I hoovered up a Cliff's bar that more than anything resembled some large animal's scat, and drained half a Podium Ice bottle's worth of Lipton instant iced tea. The days are getting cold so we are encumbered by tights, jackets and gloves, our movements constrained by layer upon layer of lycra, spandex and wool. Delicate maneuvers are out of the question and it can be a chore just performing the most basic actions necessary to get from Point A to Point B.

As I stood there chatting with my 60 year-old companion, a line of snot traced its way slowly down her lip and I, myself a bit of a mucus monster elected to not mention it. Even when this otherwise tidy woman, a mother and teacher of young children who has no doubt spent countless hours wiping the noses of others, unceremoniously wiped the slug across her face with the sleeve of her jersey, I took no obvious notice, though the event set me to thinking.

---

snot

noun

1.Vulgar . mucus from the nose.

2.Informal . a disrespectful or supercilious person.

Origin: 1350–1400; Middle English;  compare Middle Low German,
Middle Dutch snotte, Old English gesnot, Danish snot

---

Athletic activities, perhaps particularly endurance events, are specifically designed to push the athlete far beyond the comfortable state in which most of us exist most of the time. When we set out to ride a bike a hundred miles or climb a mountain or run a marathon we are intentionally setting a goal that will test our abilities, a challenge at which we may even fail. And for some reason we love it. I guess we hope to learn something about ourselves as we transcend our limits. Or maybe not. I don't know. All I know is that to be a strong cyclist is to at least occasionally find yourself covered with

I had a riding buddy many years ago who was known for hocking snot rockets over his shoulder as he rode. At one point or another, if you rode with him, you would inevitably be the recipient of a sinus shower. And despite numerous attempts to get him to cut it out, he could never shake the habit. Eventually I just resolved to become a better rider and never let myself get stuck behind him. Easier said than done, as he was pretty strong. But eventually prevailed.

Now all of us on the bike have to deal with our nostralular eminations, and I am not trying in any way to imply that I am not just as disgusting as my fellow slime spewers. Though I hope I have at least a little more situational awareness than some. A few years ago I developed my own technique for ridding myself of unwanted nasal phlegm while riding. It's not perfect, but it worked. I would pinch out the snot between thumb and forefinger of my right hand and with a fluid (ha!) motion flick the unmentionable down at roughly a 45° angle toward the ground just off the road's edge. I would then wipe the hand on the left armpit of my jersey. With luck no residual residue would slather my riding companions. A suitable technique though by no means perfect.

Then, while riding from Venice to Florence in the company of  a couple of Aussies, I noticed that one of them kept a wadded up handkerchief tucked into one of the legs of his shorts. Ingenious! A handkerchief! Why didn't I think of that? Probably because throughout most of my cycling life I've been overly influenced by what is 'Pro' and believe me, professional cyclists don't carry hankies. But I'm not a pro cyclist, so I now do and should you ever chance to take my wheel, I assure you, there will be no loogies hocked your way.

They may not mean to, but they do.

Further to yesterday's post:

This Be the Verse
By Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Kind of bleak, but hey, he was British. 

What cost posterity?

It turns out that it costs about $1,800,000 to raise a child, give or take. By my calculation that is the equivalent of about 360 $5,000 bikes.

The Managing Director and I don't have any children, so I put in the requisition today. There was some back and forth on the matter and it was ultimately decided that I am to be allowed 25 $5,000 bicycles so long as our Tuscan villa has room to house them all.

A bike, a baby and a bitch.

And if I buy bikes and an Italian villa, I apparently also won't suffer the lower marital satisfaction and higher depression rates that parents apparently experience. More money, happier marriage, less depression. I guess I'll just have to accept that we will always be one of those sad childless couples having to console ourselves by sleeping late, traveling the world, dining out, going to the theater, you know, just being miserable.

Boom, boom, out go the lights

It's been a bit bumpy lately. Literally. My beloved 1997 Mazda Protege was brutally assaulted by an inattentive driver on the Rock Creek Parkway last week. Now the thing about a 1997 Mazda Protege is that although it would likely have been able to go on functioning for years to come with just minimum annual expenditures, the total monetary value of the car is not worth what it would cost to replace the airbags. So, given that my airbags did in fact deploy when I made impact with the, shall we say dimwit, my insurance company determined that it is time for Bartlebones to get a new car.

Crunch.

Now I wish it were so that I could use this opportunity to re-examine my life choices, reduce my carbon footprint and rearrange things so I used a bike instead of a car. But as it stands, I have yet to figure out how to get rid of my day job which for the time being is halfway around the Circumferential Highway. So, a shopping we will go. 

The dying of the light

There is a red maple in my back yard which right this moment is at the apex of its fall color. As the wan autumn sunlight streams through its leaves at steep angles in the shortening morning and afternoon, the overlapping translucent leaves form a kaleidoscope of iridescent shades of orange and red. Soon the leaves will dry, crinkle and drop into the pond below as the tree goes dormant for the winter. But for a few ephemeral days each year the maple puts on its outrageous, delicate show, one last stretch and a yawn before rolling over and going to sleep.    

A psychedelic Japanese watercolor

Vélo moralitas

Yesterday I droned on and on about how cycling is more than a sport and how, even though the sport of professional cycling is currently mired in an agonizing act of self flagellation, there is redemption through the recognition of the value of the bicycle in leisure and transportation. I believe that. But it’s also true that I am somewhat in morning for the sport I love. I’m not saddened by the realization that the heroes of the sport are cheaters, as may be the case with many of my fellow fans. What makes me sad is that the sport has to endure this punishing mea culpa, this melodrama, this masochistic show of faux humility for the benefit of the same type of hypocritical audience for which every witch hunt is enacted.

USADA discovers doping in the pro peloton.

Though we may find it unfortunate, mere mortals are incapable of performing superhuman feats. Period. Sure, the equipment manufacturers would like you to think that their increasingly stiff bottom brackets can give any weekend suburbanite the ability to dance up the Tourmalet without breaking a sweat; likewise the marketers of training systems and nutrition supplements, the shoes with carbon fiber soles and the wind tunnel tested jerseys. But it’s all bullshit. Anybody who has ever spent any time on a bike knows that performance improvements just don’t come in exponential leaps and bounds. And anybody who can make sense of a graph ought to know that athletes long ago far exceeded the limits of human physiology.

But we Americans are eternal virgins; the descendents of Puritans, endlessly capable of re-growing our moral hymens, of regaining our innocence. We forget that the year before Armstrong started winning we had the Festina affair or that the sport has been riddled with cheating from the very beginning. How do we do it? How do we continue to believe in fairy tales despite all evidence to the contrary? And maybe more importantly, why would we want to? How can we be so naïve?

We have the same problem with so many of our societal problems, it blows my mind and makes me think psychosis is an integral part of the American character. And what should disturb us is that our false belief in moral purity, in Plato’s form of the good, causes actual damage. Our righteous moralizing blinds us to the true flawed nature of our species and as we point our accusatory fingers at the Other, we somehow manage to ignore the horrors right in our own houses. 

If we are able to pretend that people can stop wanting to get stoned, we can just spend ridiculous sums of money putting enormous numbers of non-violent citizens in jail, thereby destroying families and whole communities. Yet global pharmaceutical companies make obscene profits keeping the rest of us drugged up and we don’t seem to have a problem with it as long as insurance covers our antidepressants and boner pills.

And if we can pretend that priests and scout masters and coaches and teachers can stop abusing children, that they are some sort of rare aberration, a extraordinary satanic abomination, instead of admitting that such admittedly abhorrent behavior is well within the bounds of common human behavior and then putting processes and policies in place to actually protect children. 

We substitute a desire to pretend we’re not all perverts of one stripe or another while we let the dangerous ones, the real predators continue to diddle the youth. Why? Because we can’t admit to ourselves that wanting to get blasted and have sex is central to the human experience, but that some of us color outside the lines and we have to keep them within the limits of healthy, non-destructive self expression. Instead, we clap the deviants in irons, pretend that good and evil are absolute and wait to be surprised by the next incident.

I just wish we could be honest about the whole thing, rather than burning down the entire village to eradicate the witches and pretending the purge will make us pure again.

Vélo Versitalis

Riding a bike is many things to many people. It is a professional sport, a form of practical transportation and a leisure activity for millions of people around the world. I guess golf and baseball and ice skating and synchronized swimming all double as both sports and leisure time activities… okay, synchronized swimming is really more akin to conceptual art than sport but, you know, tell that to the Olympic Committee… but to my knowledge they aren’t practical forms of transportation. There are sports that share cycling’s versatility, but I maintain that none quite equals the accessibility of cycling. Take cross-country skiing. I presume for the people of Norway, strapping two boards to your feet grabbing some poles and shuffling forward has long constituted a sensible method for getting from Point A to Point B, but you gotta have snow to ski, which will apparently soon be relegated to isolated parts of Great Britain by global climate change. I guess when the snow stops coming you can always roller ski, but I’m going out on a limb and predict that we will not be seeing large numbers of roller ski commuters on the streets of America’s cities any time soon.

Is that you Uncle Bob? 

Likewise, though bobsledding, kayaking, canoeing, sail boating, hang gliding, wind surfing sail boarding may technically qualify as vehicular transportation, none offers quite utility of the simple bicycle. Where, for instance, can you mount panniers on a luge? 

No leisure / sport / transportation type can match cycling for efficiency and convenience; with the possible exception of motor sports, though the internal combustion engine and even electric engines are dependent on large quantities of fuel, whereas the average trip on a bicycle can typically by fueled by an apple and about 16 ounces of water. 

All of which is by way of saying that in these days in which it seems the professional sport of cycling is hell bent on self destruction, we need to remember that the profession of cycling, the sport of cycling, the industry of cycle racing is but the smallest, least consequential aspect of the bicycle. I am a fan of the sport and am deeply troubled by the devastation currently being wreaked on the sport; a sport about which most Americans will never know anything other than what they are reading in the current headlines. The association most people will derive from the current state of the sport is Cycling = Doping. What a shame.

And more’s the shame because the wounds now being suffered are entirely self inflicted. But I take some comfort in the idea that maybe now that professional cycling has decided to debase and demoralize itself and its fans, now that cycling is seen by the general public as the strict province of degenerates and reprobates, maybe the industry that underwrites it, the manufacturers and the cycling press and the event organizers will take the opportunity to reorient away from their intense focus on super humans performing impossible feats toward regular people having fun on bikes and using them for practical purposes.

No time...

No time for the old in and out, Love. I've just come to read the meter.

Some very extreme nastiness, yes?

Saucy Sandy

Picante Ground Zero

The chile pepper harvest has been accelerated this year by Hurricane Sandy. I usually wait until just a bit later in the year to take the last fruits — usually on the evening before the first real freeze of the season I find myself out picking the last of the green peppers with frozen fingers and steamy breath — but this year I was assured by the National Weather Service that the end was nigh; that Sandy’s fury would descend with darkened skies and howling winds and we would be lucky to survive the deluge even in our snug little brick house; so what chance could my poor tropical capsicum plants have out in the open? Consequently, in an uncharacteristic display of good sense, I harvested peppers before Sandy had a chance to gobble them up.

Habaneros - Yucatan green

So this year there will be lots more green sauce than usual. That should be a nice change from the sweeter sauce I’m used to focusing on. The green keeps that spicy vegetal character, the spicy bell pepper quality. So as we hunkered down over the last two days to wait for the end of the world, at least I had the warming company of some delightful Yucatan sunshine to see me through. I got through a couple of dozen 5 ounce bottles yesterday and hope to put by another couple of dozen in the next few days. Then there’s just labeling, packing and world-wide distribution.