Captain Stag, erotic communist's prick
Oct. 22nd, 2004 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusCars may be made by fewer and fewer -- and bigger and bigger -- companies worldwide, and those companies may be taking fewer and fewer risks with their design and naming strategies. But just about anyone can set up as a bicycle manufacturer, and make a zero emission vehicle with a zany name redolent of communism and sex. That's because bicycles are redolent of communism and sex. They're erotic as hell, and they're the future.
Bicycles come in all shapes and sizes and have the oddest names. Sure, I told you that I was driving a car called a Daihatsu Naked in Japan this summer, but as a bicycle rider I could have been having so much more fun riding a Captain Stag, an Erotic, a Communist or a Sprick. Like my new album 'Otto Spooky', or like the Shinto religion of Japan, bicycles have some earthy sexiness about them. They make everything they touch -- your body, the environment through which they pass -- better, healthier, greener. They're diverse, divergent, egalitarian, pluralistic, good for you, sexy.
On your bicycle you're rushing along at a comfortable yet exciting 25kph, and it feels like you're flying through the air. If you're in Tokyo or Berlin -- bicycle-friendly cities -- you're safe on the sidewalk or in a dedicated bicycle lane, and there are many other cyclists all around, a democratic mass. Two wheels good. As you pedal (and pedalling a bicycle, like walking and fucking but unlike driving a car, is a rhythmic activity, a pumping motion with a rising trot and its own systolic-diastolic interval) you're listening to your iPod. Track two of 'Otto Spooky' is coming up to the chorus:
Gaelic runes and harvest moons
Shinto dogs at the phallic symbol
Mustard seed and dandelion
A time to live, a time to die
Meet me in the waving leaves
The question mark in the scarecrow summer
Meet me out by the lemon trees
Pull me down, and pump me dry
'Ah,' you think, 'I must remember to pump up the tires soon! Gotta keep 'em hard...'
The green bicycle at the top right of my photo is a classic British Moulton (there is still a British bicycle industry, although British cars are for the most part a thing of the past) in the studio of graphic designer James Goggin, who is at this moment finishing two sleeves (the US and UK sleeves are quite different) for 'Otto Spooky'.
The photo below that is a glimpse of cultural commentator Reyner Banham pedalling his Moulton through the streets of London in the 1960s. I haven't shown you the whole photo -- which is superb, Banham with his full beard looks quite the groovy, cranky boffin as he pedals along -- because we're using this photo half-toned inside the CD sleeve, under the transparent panel behind the (crash hat hazard yellow) CD itself, and I want to keep it under wraps for the time being. But it's worth saying that Banham -- who wrote a great deal, in his book about Los Angeles, about cars at their most flamboyant, and yet remained, himself, flamboyantly bicycle-oriented to the end of his days -- has become, in a way, the personification, totem or mascot of Otto Spooky. It's 'Otto Spooky as played by Reyner Banham'. Reyner is right there on the sleeve. And 'the historian of the immediate future' is riding a Moulton.
Bicycles come in all shapes and sizes and have the oddest names. Sure, I told you that I was driving a car called a Daihatsu Naked in Japan this summer, but as a bicycle rider I could have been having so much more fun riding a Captain Stag, an Erotic, a Communist or a Sprick. Like my new album 'Otto Spooky', or like the Shinto religion of Japan, bicycles have some earthy sexiness about them. They make everything they touch -- your body, the environment through which they pass -- better, healthier, greener. They're diverse, divergent, egalitarian, pluralistic, good for you, sexy.
On your bicycle you're rushing along at a comfortable yet exciting 25kph, and it feels like you're flying through the air. If you're in Tokyo or Berlin -- bicycle-friendly cities -- you're safe on the sidewalk or in a dedicated bicycle lane, and there are many other cyclists all around, a democratic mass. Two wheels good. As you pedal (and pedalling a bicycle, like walking and fucking but unlike driving a car, is a rhythmic activity, a pumping motion with a rising trot and its own systolic-diastolic interval) you're listening to your iPod. Track two of 'Otto Spooky' is coming up to the chorus:
Gaelic runes and harvest moons
Shinto dogs at the phallic symbol
Mustard seed and dandelion
A time to live, a time to die
Meet me in the waving leaves
The question mark in the scarecrow summer
Meet me out by the lemon trees
Pull me down, and pump me dry
'Ah,' you think, 'I must remember to pump up the tires soon! Gotta keep 'em hard...'
The green bicycle at the top right of my photo is a classic British Moulton (there is still a British bicycle industry, although British cars are for the most part a thing of the past) in the studio of graphic designer James Goggin, who is at this moment finishing two sleeves (the US and UK sleeves are quite different) for 'Otto Spooky'.
The photo below that is a glimpse of cultural commentator Reyner Banham pedalling his Moulton through the streets of London in the 1960s. I haven't shown you the whole photo -- which is superb, Banham with his full beard looks quite the groovy, cranky boffin as he pedals along -- because we're using this photo half-toned inside the CD sleeve, under the transparent panel behind the (crash hat hazard yellow) CD itself, and I want to keep it under wraps for the time being. But it's worth saying that Banham -- who wrote a great deal, in his book about Los Angeles, about cars at their most flamboyant, and yet remained, himself, flamboyantly bicycle-oriented to the end of his days -- has become, in a way, the personification, totem or mascot of Otto Spooky. It's 'Otto Spooky as played by Reyner Banham'. Reyner is right there on the sleeve. And 'the historian of the immediate future' is riding a Moulton.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-22 01:08 am (UTC)http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/calex2.html
I have to say I've found some conservative ideas creeping into Eno's interviews of late. For instance, in relation to the Long Now project, he's been talking about the beams in Oxford chapels having their replacements planned hundreds of years in advance. And he's talking about church bell music as something that no creator makes, no composer composes. Systems music. It really is a short jump from this interest in process, community and continuity to a reactionary stance in which creators and innovators are discredited. It's a fine line we all walk when we champion folk design.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-22 01:20 am (UTC)I vaguely recall that Eno is a friend of Paul Allen, who financed that Mausoleum of Rock, the Experience Music Project.
The "Long Now" Clock just seems like another Mausoleum. Wouldn't be surprising if it shows up on a future Pink Floyd Album.
But we can tolerate a little ambiguity/diversity in Eno's (or Alexander's) opinions and choice of friends?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-23 12:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-22 08:51 am (UTC)However, it could be noted that Bowie has also claimed he was primarily interested in process over results.