America, home of the Cadillac Escalade, has recently seen an upsurge in pedal power. Many influences have contributed to this trend––from fixed gears to expensive gas––but more people are riding more kinds of bicycles than ever before. While the number of “serious” cyclists (that is, cyclist who take themselves seriously) has probably increased somewhat, the real boom has been in casual and practical cycling: people who ride to work, to friend’s houses, and to the grocery store not because they’re trying to burn fat but because it makes sense, saves money, is enjoyable, and, currently at least, is cool.

Since 2007, BikeSnobNYC, a.k.a. Eben Weiss of Brooklyn, has been blogging about this diverse body of cyclists. His first entries parsed the fine degrees of absurdity in Craigslist advertisements for bikes, mostly the trendier models of urban fixed gears. But the blog soon grew into a regular column of satirical comment on the bike industry, cyclists and their often ridiculous styles, and various “indignities” suffered by the author on his rides through New York. Posts, each a crafted essay with images and illustrations, appear Monday through Thursday; a satirical “Fun Quiz” is posted on Friday. The blog form, unimpeded by limitations of space, can be a form of excess, especially an excess of self-involvement; but Weiss keeps it real. The worst he can be accused of is having digressed on a farcical religion involving a lobster god. It’s no surprise that he soon became a columnist for Bicycling Magazine, nor that he now has a book: Bike Snob: Systematically & Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling.

Less insidery than the blog, this cargo-pocket-sized guidebook gives a brief history of cycling, which includes a narrative of a ride along a popular 19th-century route which now, unfortunately, goes from College Point to Far Rockaway, via Jamaica, Queens. Weiss compares different “subsets” of riders: the roadie, the mountain biker, the messenger, the beautiful godzilla (models on Dutch bikes and cell phones), the righteous cyclist, etc., each group evaluated on their idiosyncrasies and their compatibility with other groups. Relative leg hairiness and sock height are considered. On why messengers discourage aspirants to the profession, Weiss, a former messenger, comments:

The mystique of the Messenger depends on people thinking it’s hard, and if people discover that riding around the city all day is actually pretty easy and also a lot of fun they might start running their own errands and the entire house of spoke cards may topple.

BikeSnobNYC

From history and taxonomy, Weiss moves to culture, his critical métier, commenting on American life through the lens of its riders (and drivers). Here, he elaborates his position as a pragmatic traditionalist. Although he reserves the right to let people do what they want as long as they don’t bother him, Mr. Snob thinks many people’s cultural identities are too fungible and that this problem is exemplified by various forms of gentrification. Referring to the trendiness of cycling, he says, “it can be annoying to see something you love used as a fashion statement,” though he admits the trend actually “changes things for the better.” Since cycling has an overall positive effect on society and on other cyclists (the more, the safer), the end result is a positive, no matter how temporarily aggravating to those who were in it from the beginning.

For would-be cyclists, perhaps the most useful portion of the book is the chapter “Why is Everybody Trying to Kill Me?: Fear, and How to Survive on a Bicycle.” The section includes the analysis that drivers feel they have more rights than cyclists because a car is more expensive than a bike, which gives the driver an inflated sense of self-importance. This analysis seems trenchant and happens to be useful for people unaccustomed to riding in traffic since, as he suggests, this knowledge should not make you afraid, necessarily. Self-importance is not murderous, just oblivious. Acknowledging the realities of drivers, of cold hands, of funny looks and other discomforts should make it easier, not harder to get out and ride since difficulties overcome and self-importance dodged feel good, especially when the persecution anxiety is removed.

Bike Snob is an unusual combination of history, criticism, and guidance—there’s even a set of directions for keeping your chain in good shape. It’s easy to see how the blog form yields such a hodgepodge, but it’s hard to pull off without being annoying, especially when writing so often about being annoyed. But Weiss’s book is enjoyable to read in the way that all sincerely comic writing is. His points are aided by a buoyant tone and darting wit. What might be insufferable strikes comic notes in odd and original enough ways that you find yourself laughing. Weiss’s experience and sincerity manage to come through as well. Readers of the blog will find much that is new here: a slightly more grown-up feel, more intention and deliberate usefulness. Cyclists will find many of their thoughts and experiences validated (if they’re not distracted by the corny illustrations). For people interested in starting to ride to work, Mr. Snob (who is actually the opposite of one) offers useful, fundamental advice for surviving, at least mentally, out on the streets.

Related Posts:

• An East Coast Earthquake?!
• Soda Series This Thursday
• Never That Young
• Let’s Take a Walk Together
• Jonathan Lethem: Distance Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

A memoir by a critic for The Onion views a troubled youth through the lens of popular culture

When a memoirist is not a major political or cultural figure, it’s both easy and human to ask why readers should care. At times, our lives seem to fall into narrative lines, to rise and fall in crisis and resolution, to have themes, motifs, and dominant metaphors; other times, the chaos, boredom, or apparent meaninglessness compel us to find and build the story. The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You By Pop Culture, written by Nathan Rabin, film critic of The Onion‘s pop culture arm, The A.V. Club, takes both approaches.

In discussing the relationship between movies, television shows, and pop music, and the struggles of family, education, growing up, relationships, and jobs, The Big Rewind covers events both bright and bleak—Rabin’s work for The Onion, his appearance on an AMC film review show, juxtaposed with his experiences as a foster child, in group homes, in failed relationships—told mostly in comic tones of self-deprecation. At times the memoir seems to move from humiliation to humiliation. But Rabin is not trying to tell an Oprah-worthy story of overcoming adversity—only to make us laugh, understand, and maybe reflect on Ghostface Killah and Godard.

Rabin insists that what has kept him going through the difficult parts of his life is popular culture. Each chapter title is matched with a pop-culture reference—”The Chronic,” “Weekend,” “Don’t Look Back“—and reflects on the relationship between that reference and Rabin’s experiences. The chapter that opens with a reflection on The Chronic, for example, is about Rabin’s experience at Winchester House, a Jewish Children’s Bureau group home where he arrives after his mother’s disappearance, his father’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, and his own suicidal gesture. The residents of the house all have their own stories, and Rabin characterizes his comrades in their own strange, anarchic glory, ending with a paean to their love of hip-hop:

Albums like The Chronic presented a seductive new kind of Horatio Alger story where getting high and uncorking your anger to a dope beat was enough to propel your meteoric rise from ashy to classy. Though the MCs we idolized were blacker, cooler, and more talented than us, we felt like they were expressing our every tangled, ugly emotion.

Though Rabin expertly critiques pop culture for The Onion, here he bends it to the needs of the personal narrative; rather than play disinterested arbiter, he appropriates cultural references in a somewhat circular relation to his life story. He idolizes critics as diverse as Pauline Kael, Greil Marcus, and Roger Ebert, but in The Big Rewind he seems less a critic than a typical American consumer, identifying with pop culture as it is designed to be identified with: to become popular and generate sales.

Ghostface Killah

Reading Rabin’s memoir, I felt a triple sadness. First, that these boys should be forced to live out their adolescence with little sense of family except in each other, subject to the restraints of the child welfare system. Second, that their primary comfort should have been found in buying, with their limited money, a disc’s worth of commodified suffering from another culture thousands of miles away. Third, that the writer did not find a way to comment on this problematic dynamic or analyze the complex personal and cultural forces at work.

Rabin seems desperate that readers understand his life, but unsure of the larger meaning that can be drawn from it. When he does reach for big ideas, he can fall back on cliché. After he gets his girlfriend pregnant, she has an abortion and slips into a depression. The facts are moving and unfair, especially given what both people have been through; however, the words Rabin uses to conclude this episode detract from the power of the story:

I woke up every morning knowing I’d done something I could never undo. I smoked pot every night hoping it would help me forget. It never did. All it did was numb the pain. The abortion united and divided us. We had blood on our hands. We could never go back to where we were before… We could never be kids again.

Sections like these are too abundant—and it’s too bad, because Rabin is capable of funny, crisp, and touching writing; it tends to come in throw-off lines and smaller moments. In an unsentimental chapter in which he visits his biological mother, who has been absent his entire life, Rabin also reconnects with his half-brother Mario: “We eventually headed back to Mario’s place, where he sacked out for an hour. I was left to contemplate the sole piece of literature in his apartment: an old copy of High Times.” Each of these frankly narrated details is filled with a pathos and dark humor that comes naturally to Rabin. The fact that his half-brother takes a nap after reconnecting with his long absent sibling expresses the gulf between them as undeniably as the intellectual marker of their reading material.

Nathan Rabin and I were born within two years of each other and we have had similar pop cultural experiences—he has one of his film-love epiphanies during Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, which I also watched on video at least twelve times. I started reading The Onion while living in Madison, WI, where it started; I even rented movies from a video store where Rabin worked (and from which he was fired). I enjoy his pieces in The Onion A.V. Club, especially “My Year of Flops,” in which he re-reviews commercial and critical failures (a forthcoming book will collect these essays). Still, as close as I might be to his target audience, to me Rabin seems trapped here in a form he can’t use or renew to bring his story to life. The subjective material is limited by cliché; the objective criticism and analysis of pop culture does not go deep enough.

Related Posts:

• Religion vs. Pop Culture
• The Decline Of Hitchens, Again
• A Public Service Announcement
• The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
• THE EDITOR’S DESK: Also, No More Legos