Our Surly Steamrolling friend Jeff shot us this article yesterday as it went live on one of his near & dear creative-minded consumer sites, Selectism. Goodmorning Technology just announced the newest piece to their “Bikes and Stuff Around Them” project – the bike porteur bars & basket.
I have been on a huge basket and fender kick this spring, yet I prefer riding my Reminton track bike around town – so this definitely catches my eye. The bar and basket integration solution fits the aesthetic quality that most track-bike riders adorn, smooth lines, tight geometry and lots of shiny bits. As the Selectism article does, I question the structural integrity and also the size. Removing the weight from the fork mounts and placing it all on the stem and headset could prove problematic when hauling around multiple bottles of Pinot or cans of PBR. As for the size, exactly how many bottles or cans could one stack?
I appreciate the integration of the bar into the basket, while Joshua seems to think that with a set of Velo Orange Belleville Porteur bars, a few yards of 4130 aircraft tubing and the flame from our oxy-acetaline torch he could do better – and that folks, is why I love him. As I was finishing the past sentance, I heard something pop a few feet behind my head – well worth this quick photo:
Joshua just snapped an arm off the shop vice pulling a stuck crank arm off of our pal Joe’s new, used Peugeot project. Cameo in the back! Brek.One has also been spending a lot of time in the shop – he’s getting ready to buy a Lexus (with a bike rack!) and drop his first major mixtape, so look out.
In the book, The Creative Habit, written by Twyla Tharp, there is an entire chapter on Where’s Your “Pencil”? The question refers to our American Express, Don’t Leave Home Without It, tools that fuel our creativity. In our everyday lives, there exists a metaphorical pencil, which is the necessary puzzle piece that drives our creative hustles.
Every time I visit OPEN, Joshua’s hands are perpetually covered in bike grease. When I see him, we dance through our customary social greeting which habitually begins with him saying, “Sorry man, my hands are dirty…” — followed by a hand slap that tightens into a tug-of-war style embrace, which leads into a shoulder-to-shoulder connect for the finish.
The fact that Joshua’s hands are always grimy is comforting to me. His greasy hands are symbolic of Joshua’s creative passion for what he and Zack, both, hope to bring to the familial and collaborative space they have created with OPEN.
For Joshua’s hands, gloved in filth, hardened and sometimes scarred from a day spent repairing and building bikes, the grease represents his pencil and is the one tool that feeds [your] creativity and is so essential that without it [you] feel naked and unprepared (Tharp, The Creative Habit).
What is the pencil for your creative habit? For me, quite literally, it is a pencil. True to my hustle, it is called the perfect pencil. As a writer, my pencil helps capture the world around me through finished narratives, or by sharing the fractured elements of stories without a voice.
Where’s your pencil? What creative spark to your habit will it bring to keep your fire burning? I suspect that once you discover the tool, the only thing left to pursue is your passion. Like Joshua, with his hands perpetually covered in bike grease, this is one habit you will never have a need to apologize.
The other day another videographer pal of ours, Eric Tollar, came by and filmed us building a Luggernaut single-speed for the good ol’ sales floor. We had a few sticking points during the build, such as misplaced tools and over-caffinated shakey hands, but nothing we couldn’t overcome. This metallic black lugged beauty came together with carefully chosen parts, all from Traitor.
We enjoy the experience of bring a beautiful kinetic machine into being from a box of parts, and it always makes us a bit teary-eyed when a friend leaves the shop with a new ride. Nothing to do but build another!
This weekend is insanely busy with gallery openings, music and nice weather riding for everyone. The weekend starts off with one of the greatest gallery closings of the year, which involves FREE ART.
Flat Black Industries hung a show on April 19, highlighting a plethora of local street artists – some you know, some you don’t. The closing reception kicks off tomorrow at 8pm and all of the work is up for grabs – like this Evoker piece. Yes, its FREE – however, since nothing is really free, I’m not posting the location, so you’ve got to figure it out on your own! Along with the art school student trampling, there will be music and breakdancing – we might send James to cut-a-rug, pop-lock or whatever the kids are calling it these days.
Saturday night should be just as fun, even if the art isn’t free. Local superstar artist and stencil maniac, Kenji Nakayama has curated a show at LAB-Boston titled Abstract & Decay, which focuses on paintings of decaying industrial landscapes. If you enjoy riding around the dry docks, airport or any vacant big-box retail suburban strip mall – this is the spring show you didn’t know you wanted to see. Artists include Jessica Hess, Anna Trzaska, Rahul Shah, and Katie Hovland. If you are afraid to cross the threshold from the sidewalk into 113 Brighton Ave for the show, atleast enjoy LAB’s freshly painted windows, done by the above mentioned Kenji, Evoker and another local, Enamel Kingdom. Abstract & Decay gets wild at 7pm at LAB-Boston, 113 Brighton Avenue ( & Harvard Ave) in Allston. I’m really digging the LOCAL love that has been spreading; art, bikes, music, etc – Boston is coming together. Oh, don’t forget to ride your bike there!
We open the doors every day knowing that a diverse collection of folks will descend the nine steps into our shop. We’ve come to expect weekly visits from our pal David, a fine barber in Harvard Square, our quirky neighbor Weimar, a Brazilian beauty-supply repair technician or the bargain-hunting Joe, who is possibly one of the most enthusiastic guys in Union. David brings us stories of his weekend adventures, maybe a bite to eat and always a pile of encouragement. It is common that Weimar pokes his head in around 10pm as he leaves, offering some witty comment about never leaving the shop – his choppy English and happy-go-lucky style always leave us grinning and shaking our heads. Joe, who we’ve come to know over the past two weeks, tends to dart through the door and share his junk-yard, Craigslist, yard sale or on-the-corner finds, all of which seem to leave us impressed. Joe has also officially become our unofficial used bicycle hunter – you should see some of the stuff he’s pointed us to. In between the visits from our friends, we fix flats and do tune-ups for the neighborhood folk, hustle cool product from all over the globe, and occasionally venture out to grab a quick bite at Machuu Pichuu (best chicken in the city) or flirt with the baristas at Bloc 11.
I have no real point, except to say that we’re thrilled with the energy the shop is attracting, both to us and to the surrounding community. I was sent this image earlier, found on the Wooster Collective, I enjoy when the simplest of creative concepts bring the most perspective to my day and in this case it happens to be cycling related. Every Turn of The Wheel is a Revolution, found on a side-street in Belfast:
There was a time when wizened economists held court in the parliment houses and ivory towers and envisioned a world ripe with possibility. The vast verdant forests, the broad rivers, uncharted lands; these were the raw-stuffs of fortunes and industries yet to come. Built capital was the limiting factor for this pregnant growth- social and natural capital was abundant.
I hope I’m not stating the painfully obvious by suggesting that the world has changed dramatically. We find ourselves in the midst of a dense human-made infrastructure- millions of miles of interstate highways, countless billions of tons of carefully shaped ferroconcrete structures, and extremely concentrated and socially stratified human populations- the (recently accelerated) urbanization of our civilization means that, in the contemporary situation, it is now precisely social and natural capital that are the limiting factors to economic development.
If there is anything that the “Great Economic Slowdown” has taught us, it is that top-down and international business and financial models only serve to fall longer and spread farther when they fail. We look now for ways to build our local communities from within, be it locally farmed greens at the market, used books from the corner seller, or pints from the city brewery down at the bar in the Square.
The methods by which we, denizens of these recent megolithic people-piles, move around our own communally made density play an important role in the cybernetics (in the original sense: the language and design of control) of cities. This effect on this control on our everyday lives, the vectors and future of our communites, and the less tangible element of our individual experiences is inherently tied to a sense of economic vitality, and unfortunately the measure of our economic health has been, since what seems like forever, been tied to this outmoded measure of infinite (and thus impossible) voracious growth. We stand at a crossroads- we can reevaluate ourselves as social actors, rethink our cities, remake our habits. In this way- bicycles can be revolutionary instruments, or not. In this way- bike shops can be revolutionary points of social (inter)action, or not.
OPEN strives to be more than just another business doing the same thing and hawking the same stuff as everyone else. We attempt to source as much as possible locally, and if not immediately local, made by companies committed to fair labor practices. From hand-crafted steel straight out of Allston to LA-made cycling cut denim, OPEN strive to support small community-owned businesses and connect craftspeople, producers, and users on a real and human scale. This isn’t some silly boutique concept- this is about building culture and creating sustainable relationships, communities, and cities.
Taking this one step further: contemporary popular belief holds that custom bicycles are for the moneyed and trend-seeking. We beg to differ: riding a bike made by someone who lives down the street from you isn’t a new concept, and it’s not terribly expensive compared to buying off-the-shelf once the hidden costs of globalized consumption are taken into account. Being able to interact in the process of designing and building a bicycle made expressly for for your body, riding style and habits affords a much richer user-producer experience that picking something out of a catalog, and the resulting machine is something that the rider will treasure forever.
This week, we’ll be interviewing three local framebuilders and showcasing their individual talents and visions here on the OPEN blog. We support local builders because they are the future of Boston cycling- we invite you all to share with us the wealth and history of their art and craft. Together, we believe, we can create a unique, vital and enduring local bike culture. Stay tuned- at the very least, we’ll have close-up pictures documenting the growth and development of Marty Walsh’s moustache.
