The Upside-Down Schwinn

The Upside-Down Schwinn Continental

Who can say what happened here? I present two possibilities.

A man parks his bicycle at a Venice Boulevard bus stop and leaves it locked to a post. When he returns he finds his wheels are gone. What is he to do?

The bike is old and heavy. Why bother to carry it home? Whoever needed the wheels saw more value in them then he saw in the bike as a whole. It is a solid, steady, American made Schwinn, built at a time when that name was Cadillac. It was, once, a bike to be proud of, a bike to be seen riding and to be riding. And now it is dead and desecrated. It will never again feel the wind. It will never glide or roll. It will stay locked to this post for months, waiting for the City to come and cut the lock and cart it off to a scrap yard. It will stay here waiting for that as he passes by day after day, mourning its loss from the window of the bus. Waiting for the junk man to come. Waiting to be crushed and melted and reformed into something far less graceful.

When he returns he finds that his wheels are gone.

If he returns at all. Maybe it was always his intention to abandon the Schwinn Continental. He leaves it on the street and just walks away. Lets the scavengers take it. Lets the vultures dismember its corpse. Leaves it locked to the post so that it will remind him every day he passes by, of how technology has let him down. He leaves it belly up to be gutted like a deer. Die you miserable piece of crap. Let that be an example to all the other bikes, and to everything else that beguiles us with false promises of freedom.  He leaves the bike a heretic locked in a cage to starve and rot. The upside-down Schwinn is not a loss it’s a victory, it’s a symbol of his frustration with all things mechanical. It’s a Luddite’s trophy buck, a final straw in his battle against technology. This time he is not the fool. This time he shows the machines who’s boss. We made you and we can unmake you. This time he won. The bike is a scapegoat for the all those other things that confound him. The laptop, the smart phone, the blender, the car. The low-tech Schwinn Continental died for the sins of the high-tech world and it will not rise again in three days or in three hundred. But it will rise again. The protean magic of metals guarantees this. It can be melted down and reformed.

Bring me your bicycles, children, bring me old cars. Bring me your bed frames and soda cans. And I will burn them in the pits of hell and render them formless, and I will strip them of impurities, and they will glow with new light in my crucibles of salvation and I will remake them, not in my image, but in your image of me, and deliver them unto you as new beings, ready to serve you once more.

*

I shot this with a Canon T1i using my 10-22mm wide angle lens. It was about 8am and I was walking west on Venice Boulevard in Culver City, just opposite the Museum of Jurassic Technology, when I saw what was left of this bike. I wish I had spent more time photographing it. I took only the one shot. It’s one of those photos that surprises me. My expectations were low. But looking at it now I realize how beautiful it is. I love the symmetry of the image as a whole. Once again my subconscious has captured triangles. Trinities. I love the light on the pedal. I love the sagging chain and the no dumping sign at the curb. All of this accidental. There is no skill involved, no talent. The key to photography, I think, is not to think to all. Let the camera capture what it wants. Surrender to your subconscious and you will be amazed by what it chooses to show you.