cantaloupes. must be. crankpunk had a couple of BMX back in the day but after one too many nutcracker not-too-sweets and one particularly nasty faceplant (aged 12, in front of my longed-for-but-never-to-be sweetheart, Pamela Barber – if you’re out there Freckles, i’m cranking solo, and the scars have almost healed) i gave up altogether. and so my respect and admiration for these guys comes from a memory of pain and works its way up past my muffin-esque overflow to my cerebral cortex,to the spongy area that records all the data – which has great difficulty computing just how in the heck they do this stuff.
the precision, the courage, the sheer rock-blockin’ verve of these two-wheeled artists gets me feeling that what i think i know is nothing. it’s like when you’re presented with an image of an organism magnified a million times and you can only respond with the realisation that the reality that we perceive is in fact the merest sliver of what is actually real. and when i say ‘the merest sliver’, i mean like a grain of sand on 10 kilometer stretch of beach. that’s what i feel when i see Danny McAskill nail a trick. or when the guy at 3:58 on this video does what he does. i know what i can do on a bike, and it’s basically to go pretty fast in a straight line. and i feel pretty damn cool when i bunny hop a train track at 65km/hr with 120 guys around me. and then i see what he can do on a bike and my bunny gets hopped on and stomped on and beaten to a bloody pulp.
and every single human being’s wonder at the massiveness of the universe, at that which we cannot know – for all time, since human time began – enters me. i see this stuff and my lips mouth wow and i’m embarrassed by the feebleness, by the sheer inadequacy, of the response. these riders bend physics. they defy space, time and gravity. you want to see what we can accomplish as a species? do all the cliched stuff – go stare at a Pollock, or a Monet. test drive a lamborghini. walk around Rome in the afternoon or Tokyo or New York at night. go watch Barcelona play Real Madrid at the Camp Nou. wonder at Jordan, Ali and Messi. crank up Beethoven, Hendrix or whatever else floats your aural boat. watch The Outlaw Josey Wales, or Raging Bull, or Encounters at the End of the World. Read Bellow, Shakespeare, Ginsberg. but be sure, too, to watch these dudes flying through the air, and on bicycles, no less.
my word.
this film came from the guys at ride it out
