As I slouch slowly toward my new Portland life (so far I’ve only managed to put my waterproof Gore pants into a large bag and “visualize” driving for three days), I can already feel a kind of kinship with the bike culture there. It’s pretty creepy.
Case in point, my first annual Most Absurd German Bike Award (MAGBA), which I intend to award occasionally, considering the endless supply of candidates who seem to be constantly vying for this award. I’d fully expected this to come down to a pair of German automobile manufacturers’ “innovative” bicycle designs. This would make perfect sense for me, as I’ve featured the Porsche bikes already, and my deranged rambling usually focuses on the sad and tragic intersection of bicycles and corporations.
But today I find myself suddenly and inexplicably compelled to swerve way off course and include in the finals a German hippie bike dude’s useless DIY art bike project. Yes, my attention this morning is drawn as much to part-time devil for a clutch manufacturer and full-time weird old dude, Didi Senft’s homemade “Rake Bike” as it is to this ridiculous BMW mountain bike.
Which of these is the Most Absurd German Bike? It’s a classic battle: the little guy, hell-bent on creating a bike so profoundly stupid that even he himself will not be able to fully understand why it exists; versus a giant corporation, obsessed with efficiency, performance, and innovation, creating a bicycle so comically outdated as to become its own kind of performance art.
In considering the sheer absurdity of both bikes, I have to give the win to BMW on this one. It was close, but BMW scored major points for creating a near perfect replica of something Specialized would have built in the late ’90s. Didi brought some game, no doubt. It’s not every day you see a bike that could disembowel both its rider and dozens of shocked onlookers. But any time you’re dealing with bicycles built for art’s sake, the details matter, and it’s the little details of the BMW that stand out.
That classic 1-1/8″ head tube alone might have secured the win, but combined with the over-the-top aluminum hydroformed main frame and (apparently mandatory on cheesy automaker bikes) Crank Bros. wheels, the BMW really pulls away. As if for good measure, BMW phoned in every aspect of this frame design to a “close your eyes and pick from the catalog” Taiwanese factory, but chose to make a big deal about the stem design, which looks ghastly. They also wisely chose to opt for a piece-of-shit Kalloy seatpost and, clear mark of a champion, interrupted seat tube with pierced intersection/trailing top tube nub.
When you think about it, Didi merely made a bike out of rakes. BMW, however, has created a bold counterpoint to the resurrected German Bauhaus art movement, creating a bicycle that proves rationality is way overrated, and that mass production really is the polar opposite of artistic self-expression. Seen in that light, this gloss black, hydroformed homage to early suspension design is up there with Warhol’s soup cans, which I hear Didi Senft is welding together and hand-painting into an enormous pedal-able likeness of Marilyn Monroe.
Touché, Clutch Devil. See you next month.