Blazing Saddles

We here at SPRFLS would like to recognize the good people at Verde for introducing the 500th Pivotal seat "design" of 2008. (UGP alone released 347 of them.) Verde's oh-so-clever Timber seat will go perfectly with the station wagon your parents had in 1979, or the limited Mosh parts you sold on eBay back in 2005.


Recent research indicates that there are now 438.6 BMX seats for every BMX bike in the world, and even Warren Buffet is buying Velo stock. So if you don't have at least three or four seats of your own, you're simply not pulling your weight. You should be swapping your seat out daily to match your t-shirt and sneakers and replacing each of them every three weeks whether you need to or not.

But if you're one of those slackers who only owns one seat, maybe it's not your fault. Maybe there aren't any designs you like yet. So we're here to help. Here's five more seat print concepts we fully expect to see sooner rather than later:

1. Bart Simpson (Pivotal only). Not too hard to figure out how the figure would line up.
2. Stripped print. Get the trendy LITEWAIT look without having to actually tear off your cover and padding!
3. Paris Hilton's face. This also should probably be Pivotal only, for obvious reasons.
4. Kerry King armband. It doesn't get more metal than that. Bonus points if the seat has real six-inch spikes sticking out of it. (Like you sit down anyway.)
5. UCI World Champion stripes. We'd love to see SDG do one of these for Jamie Bestwick in recognition of his winning the last 317 vert comps.
   
6. Just pick the latest ridiculous Nikes off of Hypebeast and copy them. (Please do a better job than this, though.)

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Holy weird. It's 4 a.m. Eastern, and the movie Shadow Conspiracy just came on TNT. Charlie Sheen! Donald Sutherland! Linda Hamilton! Sam Waterston as the President! Ben Gazarra as the Vice President! Alistair Whitton as...oh, I'm just kidding. Well, not about the movie being on. We'll see how long I can take it.

No Limit Soldiers

This seat has never really appealed to me. The whole all-over print streetwear aesthetic just strikes me as being tired, and aimed at a group that I've never been a part of. I'm not so hot on the automatic weapons motif, either. Which isn't even necessarily about being outside the demographic—I know plenty of people (riders and not) younger than I am who never got into the whole hypebeast mentality either. However, seeing that this is the second version of this seat—in four different colorways, no less—someone out there must like it. Nope, stuff like this is just a symptom of something bigger.

BMX bicycles, frames and parts are marketed more like streetwear than they are bicycles. It makes sense, of course: a) companies need to actually sell things to stay in business, b) if people only replaced parts when they broke or there were distinctly better options available, everyone would go out of business, and c) BMX definitely has a long-established tendency to go with style over substance. Hence "limited edition" parts and colorways, heinous all-over print seats and the $2,000 Mirraco (which, um, isn't even identical to Dave's actual bike).

Whatever works, I guess. The economy is headed for disaster, prices for raw materials are going through the roof, and I'm sure there are countless companies struggling to just stay afloat. Maybe limited products help them survive. Lifetime warranties don't make things any easier—if you can buy one fork or pair of bars that will be replaced in perpetuity, you'd need a damn good reason to ever buy another set. Gotta give people a reason to buy something new. And if you believe some of what was said in yesterday's marathon comments, things will only get worse. Prices will go up (high-end BMX frames are absurdly cheap when compared to those for any other discipline), and soon everything in BMX might be limited edition. (Of course everything is limited in the literal sense—I don't think there's an infinite amount of any bike parts out there, except for maybe Primo Walls.)

There is no easy answer, and I'm not foolish enough to think I can present one. But focusing on limited edition stuff just seems to make things hard for the retailer and the consumer. If you're the retailer, you need to stock untold colors and risk taking a hit if one doesn't take off. And if you're the consumer, you're stepping on a merry-go-round that never stops. What's this week's new is next week's old, and if you want to stay ahead of the curve, you have to move fast and spend a lot. Which is why I feel, generally speaking, it's best to take the advice of John Cutter:

Always bet on black.

Putting the "X" in BMX

You know you're in trouble when there's news of a 'new' bike on both RideBMX and Hypebeast. If a bike appears on Hypebeast, you can automatically assume the following: a) it's a collaboration of some sort, b) it's going to be 'limited edition' in this case, less than 500) and c) the whole is going to cost more than the sum of its parts. Probably a lot more. (Hypebeast really did their homework on the project, too: "DC Shoe and SE Bikes will once again join hands to release a new Bike called the Quadangle." Just shoot me.)

Meet the DC x SE Quadangle 24. (The "x" is really important amongst streetwear/hypebeast types. Without that, they'd need to knock off a couple hundred bucks off the retail price. But DC? Do hypebeasts wear DC? In fact, who DOES wear DC?)


This is a bike that never was. There was a looptail Quadangle, but never a 24. Not an official one, anyway. (There was a "skunkworks" Quad cruiser knockoff a couple years ago, but it wasn't an SE product.) SE Racing was the brainchild of Scot Breithaupt (the SE stands for "Scot Enterprises"), an early BMX brand that brought us the Landing Gear fork and the "PK Ripper" as well as the Quadangle, the Floval Flyer 24" and the OM Flyer 26". Seminal BMX products all. It's now a division of Fuji that sells cheap cookie-cutter single-speed flatbar roadbikes by the metric ton.

What they're selling here is nostalgia. Well, pseudo nostalgia. And shockingly, I have a couple of problems with it.

1) Why not go all-out and make the 24" Quad with a 1" threaded headset and a quill stem? Was it that important to make it race-worthy? It's a collaboration, for God's sake. People are just going to buy them in order to re-sell them on eBay, or stash them in their attic for 25 years to pay for their kid's college education. I'm sure a few of them will be ridden, but not by people who will care whether it has an Aheadset or not.

2) This could be 1)a, I suppose, but the v-brake ruins the whole bike, IMO. Doesn't anyone make calipers anymore?

3) Flat black? Great for a modern street bike, not so much for a retro project. The frameset—baby blue with a brown fork—is much better. Those are classic SE colors. Do the complete in those colors with chrome rims, bars, cranks and seatpost—and a camo padset—and you'd have something. Oh well, at least they got the skinwalls right. (Also, a retro-style number plate would have added a HUGE space for more branding. Fail.)

4) Actually, the whole parts kit just looks booty. Sweet generic Taiwanese stuff, fellas. Way to make things special.

5) It would have been nice if the collaboration was with Vans, who actually sponsored SE riders back in the day, rather than DC, who remains primarily a skate shoe company. Vans would have brought a better historical perspective to the project, I'd think (and they probably wouldn't have spelled Stu Thomsen's name wrong on the official history page). But I shouldn't be so critical. At least DC stepped to the plate (this is their second collaboration with SE following last year's looptail PK retro). I guess Vans is too busy courting other, more appropriate partners like geriatric British metal bands and obscure Japanese streetwear brands.

Oh well. Anything that gets hipsters off fixed gears is a good thing, I suppose.

Friday Quiz

1. This shirt was designed by:


a) Ralph Steadman for "Fear and Loathing in Wal*Mart"

b) Christian Slater for "Gleaming The Cube"

c) a streetwear company in 1996

d) a surfwear company in 1988

e) a BMX company last week



2. Superstar only made 35 of these stems. Why?


a) that's how many people run topload stems in 2008

b) that's how many people in the US have heard of Superstar

c) it's easier to sell a generic product when you call it "limited edition"

d) they ran out of green dye after making a dozen too many Easter eggs

e) they needed to use the lathe to cut Pivotal seatposts in half



3. This ACS stem was designed in the early '90s. It failed spectacularly because:


a) BMX discovered the Aheadset

b) it wasn't designed by George French

c) the cutting-edge design failed to account for handlebar use

d) you couldn't run it inverted

e) they never actually produced it, it was just an elaborate April Fool's joke




4. These wooden BSD sprockets were produced for the following reason:


a) oak is way lighter than 6061 or 7075

b) wooden sprockets and chains don't harm pool coping

c) to upstage Mosh's woodgrain products

d) as trophies for an event

e) because destroying Earth's natural habitat and making it unsuitable for human life is the only way we're ever going to get rid of Kenan Harkin and Rick Thorne




5. Snafu's new 34.1 ounce UL Race Forks have huge cutouts in the dropouts. Why?


a) weight savings

b) a space for a proprietary safety washer

c) welding is hard

d) to embarass the smaller holes in the Pitchfork XLT

e) McGoo missed his old Redline

Bike Check 1, 2

By their very nature I don't like bike checks much. (I know, I know, you're shocked.) All you need to do is look at the latest Rob Wise one on the Ride site to see why. His bike is more or less a rolling Volume/Demolition catalog (there are all of six parts that come from other companies—and that includes the chain and the headset). No real surprises. And given that Rob was on MirraCo less than two months ago, it's not like he's had much time to develop an affinity for any particular parts . You could put him on a $250 complete and he'd still kill it.

That's not to say that I've always felt this way, or that all bike checks are useless. I still remember a Joe Rich one from 2000 where he admitted to still running 45/16 because he said "a $250 hub? I'm happy with what I've got." To which I said: "Joe Rich would have to pay retail for a cassette hub?" But that's neither here nor there. I also have distinct memories of an RL Osborn one in BMX Action back in the '80s where he talked about removing the dustcap from the non-drive side of his coasterbrake hub and having the arm welded to the cone for better performance. Something like that. Of course he also had a "No Bozos" sticker on the back of his number plate. (Later, RL went on to have the worst bike check in recorded history where he claimed to be riding a box-stock Bully. The fact that Bully was his newest venture probably had nothing to do with it. Then again, even that might not have been as embarassing as this.)

Judging from several BMX messageboards out there (and bike websites in general—we're not the only ones), however, the humble bike check is appreciated by many. One in particular contains page after page of pristine bikes, by which future internet BMX historians will be able to determine that riders in the year 2008 loved $35 Kevlar-beaded tires, hated seatposts, and spent more time photographing their bikes than riding them.

I can't help but think the bikecheck is a first cousin to the ever-popular "what did you wear today?" streetwear messageboard thread, as they both predominantly involve young males showing off to one another. (They also both involve a lot of amazement over people being able to match primary colors. Yeah, wow, I could do that in first grade.) I've dubbed this the "gay peacock" theory. Because in nature it always seems like it's the guy who's showing off. But hell, they don't do it to each other. And at least the peacocks do it to get laid.


All that said, every once in a while there is a bike check that forces me to reconsider all of my crotchety preconceptions. One that makes me say "damn, maybe bike checks aren't so bad after all." This is one of those bike checks. I am in utter awe.

(Although there are still unanswered questions. Like, who rides this beast? Why were those massive headtube gussets necessary? If you're going to ride a 45-pound Solid, why not run pegs—given the Dirt Monsters, is it some sort of an end of the world TRAILS bike? And is that Shadow Slim seat someone's idea of a sick joke?)

Friday Quiz: Standard Edition

Apparently the guys from Zeal Distribution in the UK made a trip to Iowa to tour Standard's new in-house production facilities. They posted photos and a little recap of the trip here. Standard's frames used to be manufactured by Waterford Precision Cycles in Wisconsin, which is recognized as one of the finest framebuilders in the world. Of course Waterford's road and mountain frames retail for a lot more than $400, so it's probably more cost-effective for Standard to make their own frames and forks. They're undoubtedly excited about this new chapter in their history. Maybe a little TOO excited.


1.
Standard's prototype race fork features stylistically sculpted dropouts that incorporate the Standard logo. When you look at them, what do you see?

a) Company pride

b) Fine worksmanship

c) Substantial weight savings

d) A pair of stained glass windows

e) An enormous lawsuit waiting to happen


2.
Standard's new frame dropout also has their logo all over it. Fourteen of them. Obviously someone in Iowa loves their new CNC machine. (It will be highly disappointing if their new frames aren't covered in exactly 63 logos.) The question is, how many of these new dropouts would be required to make one old STA dropout?

a) 2

b) 4

c) 10

d) 27

e) 63


3.
The in thing to do these days is to hang your newest frame like a prize bass in order to show how unbelievably light it is. (The fact that Standard is making a lighter frame in-house than any that Waterford made for them is awesome, and by awesome I mean completely terrifying.) From what I gather, this is a prototype of Rick Moliterno's signature frame, which he's seen holding in another photo. One has to wonder what it will be called:

a) LTA

b) Lighty

c) Boss 4.19

d) Eleanor

e) Suck It, Moeller

This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse

It's hard work being this late to the streetwear party. What's next? An all-over print hoodie? Collaboration tees with The Shadow Conspiracy and Hell On Earth? Poverty selvage denim?

And I absolutely detest the term 'limited edition.' The only two things that aren't limited, to the best of my knowledge, are space and time. Although in this case, Dan's and New Era should have made these hats really, really limited. A half-dozen or so would have done the trick.