Pornography of the Bicycle

As the organizer and curator of last night’s film festival, “The Pornography of the Bicycle,” Reverend Phil put it (I paraphrase), bicycles and pornography are fucking hot for each other. Who among us hasn’t fetishized his or her bicycle in a romantic if not sexual way?

Umm…people? (And the crickets go “crick-crick, crick-crick.)

Well, I have, anyway (when I first got the Rambouillet, Jen used to call it my “French mistress,” and complain that I once looked at her the way I looked at it.)

And so have lots of other cycling perverts, if last night’s collection of films is any indication.

The program comprised 28 (I’m told) different short films (as long as about 10 minutes, as short as about 5 seconds) related to bicycles, bicycling, sex, bicycle sex, and the sensual thrills of gravity-powered vehicles, including bikes, in-line skates, and homemade illegal soapbox derby racers. By and large, they were pretty good, and I say this even though I’m a total sucker for any movie with even a passing connection to cycling.

Plus, they were all linked cleverly by theme, including, for instance, “Payback” in which we were reminded (via graphic illustration of some guy’s hospitalization after a devastating bike wreck) that bicycles can fuck you, too (and not just the other way around),

My favorite piece, I think, was a superbly-rendered mock interview with a phony academic professor who was arguing that bicycle pornography objectified the bicycle and so should be, if not banned, at least frowned upon. He did a great riff on rejecting the terms “bicycle” and “bicycle rider” in favor of the less hegemonic “cycle” and “cyclist,” that had me in stitches, in part because it hit a bit close to home.

I also really liked some of the less explicit pieces (and there were a few that were squirmingly hardcore), especially one that strung together a number of clips of large groups of cyclists riding in mass; that was hot.