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loosestrifeblog-blog · 7 years

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Ken Avidor’s Bicyclopolis: A Tale of Human-Powered Time-Travel

An old man appears out of the gloom. He leans on his cane, his hairless head in a black stocking cap, his black wool coat zipped to the top to fight the damp cold. Looking like a decrepit longshoreman, he notices you carrying a fancy comic book. . . .

“What’s that you fucking hippie?” Everyone is a “fucking hippie” to him now, his punk attitude pretty much all that is left. It is not an insult; he barely even sees you.

“Ah, I see--Bicyclopolis by Ken Avidor.” A perverse smile crosses his face. “I remember Avidor. He was a sketching maniac, always drawing shit in his little books, but in a world of Boring Old Farts, he at least made things interesting for a while.”

“He was no punk though. That bastard used to like Thor.”

“Weird guy.” He stares at the ground.

“He used to wear a turquoise sports coat.”

“Hey, will you let me borrow that,” he says suddenly looking up, a light in his eyes. “I saw some of this in progress, but the fucker skipped town for Indiana right as he finished it, then I went broke after Trump became president.

“Too much money being spent on entrepreneurial self-help crap for the library to carry it.”

It starts to rain slightly, little radioactive drops. You take pity on the old man, and hand over the copy to him.

“I’m good for it!” he exclaims shaking the book in the air. He crams the book under his coat and disappears into the fog.

**********************

Cut to scene at Philando Castile Center for the Infirm, where the geriatric homeless can hang out if they can claim medical needs.

The old man, smelling vaguely of wet dog, checks in with his PCCI card, shuffles into a “lounge,” grabs a stale donut, removes his coat and hat, and lowers himself gently onto a couch.

He opens the damp copy of Bicyclopolis. Cozy, he reads the whole thing at a leisurely pace, his mind transported back to 2017, the year that Avidor’s book came out and even further back to the days of blogs, trials, and intrigue. He knows that his opinions will never see public print again—he had written a few things back in his day, but his old battles matter little to the mass of disgruntled Millennials and Zers and Deadenders. (He calls them all “fucking hippies” too.) Besides, you couldn’t just post stuff anymore. That ended in the second Trump term.

He raises himself up with his cane, and grabs his stuff. His sleeping left foot tingling, he limps over to the work station kept for techno-geezers like him, the one that will take his ancient thumb drive. He gets the drive from the inside pocket of his coat, blows the lint out of it and plugs it in. It takes him awhile to figure out the archaic Mac operating system, but he gets it finally.

He opens the text editor and puts the damp copy of Bicyclopolis next to him on the table and begins to write, pretending to review the book like it was brand new in 2017, just for kicks doing what he would have done if he had had the chance back then.

**********************

Ken Avidor’s Bicyclopolis: A Tale of Human-Powered Time-Travel is out.

I know Avidor, and he is no Dan Quayle.

For many years he has used his comic art and activism to discuss Ivan Illich, transit cults, environmental issues, bicycling, auto folly among other things. For a time, he even held politicians’ feet to the fire, most notably a notorious 6th district wingbat Minnesota Congress member and a disgraced Minneapolis City Council person.

To the demented proponents of Personal Rapid Transit, he has been a bête noire, relentlessly pointing out their absurdity.

We knew that he had thrown all this into his creative mental blender with chunks of his icy sensibility and some Old Crow and was preparing this pungent frappe of a comic.

And here it is.

Using the conceit of time-travel, Bicyclopolis takes us into a future where the shit show of modern life has broken down, leaving a kind of neo-Middle Ages filtered through an apocalyptic SF movie.

Dan Petosky (not Quayle) goes forward in time using the Velochronitron, a creation of his Uncle Fred (who looks a lot like Stillwater Minnesota activist, Karl Bremer, who passed away in 2013). The device allows one to time travel using a bicycle.

Dan’s path through time leads him briefly into a future Stillwater under siege by “Bachmannite militias.” Fleeing the bombs, Dan goes further into the future to a nightmarish world of an Artic Garbage Gyre, “food” from anaerobic trash dumps, a globe warming out of control, and a post-petroleum lack of energy.

The Atlantic ocean is impassable because of the Gyre and what Bruce Sterling would call Heavy Weather, an ocean riled constantly by brutal storms. Of course, no one is flying since petroleum based fuels are long since gone. Eventually, weather pokes a hole in the Gyre. . . .

In this hell, which includes a bunch of human tendencies now come to awful fruition and the resulting warfare in what we call North America, the residents of Bicyclopolis stand strong preserving a sustainable future in a Illichville-like society that produces its own food and has preserved a level of civilization. Actually it looks pretty good.

The residents of Bicyclopolis, bicyclists, Civil War reenactors--DIYers mostly-- are, of course, hated for it by the warped followers of doomed nostalgia for auto-based culture. My favorite Avidor comic creation, Anger Man, who appeared in the “Roadkill Bill” strip some years back, doesn’t show up (well maybe), but his spirit imbues the crazies opposed to Bicyclopolis’ sane approach to living on the planet.

The narrative is all in all quite bleak, with humanity facing its extinction, but a ray of hope, as fantastic as it is, remains. Dan might even have found love.

Comic art is about far more than the narrative alone, of course, and Avidor’s critique of our folly as a society, indeed as a species, is never far from the action while the artwork shines at times with images that are both disturbing and beautiful.

For Minnesotans, the distraught landscape is easily recognizable—including a destroyed Mall of America. And there are what we now call “Easter Eggs” scattered throughout for global warming, city planning, and transportation nerds, like myself.

Bicyclopolis might seem to some a utopia. That vision might be better thought of as a necessity. Maybe there will be a “techno fix”, but it sure feels that we have arrived at a majorly fucked up world, the new reality.

The particulars will be different of course: one could certainly quibble with this book claiming one’s fears (and dreams) are more precise—it seems to be all the rage—or outrage—to speak like one’s pessimism is the most accurate due to one’s superior life experience and brain power. I’ve been guilty of that myself.

But Ken Avidor’s story provides a thought provoking experience in its own right, one where the Do It Yourself spirit provides a glimmer of hope.

As the suffering hordes of Puerto Rico improvise to make a life out of climate disaster and our country’s moral failure, there are certainly worse things than yearning for something akin to Bicyclopolis, an equitable place that doesn’t crush human spirit, one that doesn’t measure one’s worth by “productivity,” one where human work provides the energy, one where food, good drink, a good tune, and camaraderie are still available.

******************

Stopping there, he sadly writes “The End.”

The irony of going back to a past when it felt like there was a possible future makes him feel enervated but foolish now. The old man saves his work with some struggle, fighting the Robert Moses-like technology with the tenacity of a Jane Jacobs. He gets up, leaning even more heavily on his cane.

The loudspeaker announces that Center will be closing in ten minutes.

He pulls on his smelly coat and cap and goes out the door into the twilight, nodding at the uniformed woman at the door.

“Have a good evening sir,” she says. He smirks.

As the elderly patrons lurch towards the door after him, some delaying as long as they can to avoid the wet chill outside, his thumb drive, still in the old yellowed computer, flashes its green light, illuminating the book still sitting on the table.

#ken avidor #bicyclopolis #graphic novels

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