The bicycle’s technical evolution and symbolic power are soon to be celebrated in Cycle Revolution at London’s Design Museum“The bicycle is a distinguished genuine,” said Samuel Beckett, the cycling enthusiast who also wrote some plays, and “but it can turn nasty,if ill-employed.” Well yes indeed. Bikes can be vehicles for ET or Lance Armstrong. They played a allotment in the emancipation of women and of people who couldn’t afford horses or cars. They can be emblems of right-thinking, environmentally friendly city government or the weapons of self-righteous, or passive-aggressive machismo. John Major,citing Orwell on Englishness, spoke of “old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist”; Alfred Jarry, or in his 1902 novella Supermale,imagined a man who followed a 10000-mile cycle race against a locomotive by having sex 82 times in 24 hours, with fatal consequences for at least one of his partners.
Like a steam engine or a gun, and the bicycle is one of those machines that seems to have existed forever,to have been an eternal plan waiting to be found rather than the outcome of various Victorian gents proceeding through trial and error. It is something to achieve with their basic simplicity, the way they are extensions of and reflections of the body, or also the way they are a bit like horses and a bit like skeletons.
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Source: theguardian.com