Can I Have Your Autograph? What You're Really Paying For

(Cruelly denied Copenhagen-style footrests, New York City cyclists must stay upright manually.)

Further to yesterday's post, a number of people confirmed that the hawk I saw was in fact a so-called Red-tailed hawk. One of those people was the proprietor of the Urban Hawks blog, which I discovered when a reader posted it in the comments, and he tells me there are about 30 pairs of them living in the city. Also, another commenter recently posted a link to this item, which proves that on the spectrum of urban hawk encounters mine was actually quite mild.

In any case, while I love nature I have no intention of turning this into a naturalist blog, and so even though I witnessed a cheetah felling a gazelle on 6th Avenue this morning I will spare you the tedious details and vividly bloody photographs. Instead, I will share with you a photo of something that is even more common in New York City than hawk-maulings, which is graffiti:

People have widely-ranging feelings about graffiti: some feel it's a legitimate art form, and others feel it's an act of vandalism. I veer towards the latter, and I generally consider it an irritating form of visual spam. This particular piece of graffiti vexed me because it is the logo of the Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, a band who had their heyday back in the mid-1980s, and I couldn't help wondering who applied it and why. If it's someone who is a diehard DRI fan from "back in the day," then they've got to be pushing 40 by now and as such are way too old to be running around spray-painting band logos on trucks. Otherwise, it could be a young person who's recently discovered the rebellious music of the 80s, which is equally disappointing since it means the new generation of anti-establishment malcontents are not forming their own bands and creating their own logos and are living in the past instead of tearing it down. Really, the only two theories I could come up with that didn't bother me were: 1) the guy who owns the truck just really likes DRI; or 2) the truck is actually the DRI tour bus.

Speaking of pushing 40 and spray-painting stuff, frequent readers of this blog may know that I'm less than impressed with the work of "artist" Mike Giant, who tends to either copy the album art of bands from the DRI era, or appropriate the styles of Latin gangsters, or else paint things like this:

While I find most graffiti irritating, I don't find it all equally irritating, and I also believe it has at times been genuinely daring, subversive, and exciting. (Like 30 years ago in New York City, for example.) However, like any style-driven movement, much of its impact depends on its historical context and your perspective, and as we enter 2010 the act of writing your own name in big colorful bubble letters just seems a bit silly to me. As an act of personal expression, "writing your name really cool" is the sort of thing you engage in just after you outgrow drawing space cars with crayons and just before you start sprouting your first pubic hairs.

Of course, this is only my opinion, and it's only worth what you're paying to read this post. The truth is, if enough people out there like to see people writing their names really cool then that's what matters. And there's no doubt that they do. In fact, many people buy products simply based on who wrote their name on it and how, which is also called "branding." On Tuesday, I mentioned how bicycle companies try to use "branding" to create "icons." One example like this is the Specialized Langster City Editions, which are supposed to be special because of their decals. Here's one for sale on Craigslist:


Specialized Langster LONDON as new. Super sweet transportation - $700 (Tribeca Manhattan)
Date: 2010-01-20, 5:49PM EST
Reply to: [deleted]

As new size large. Simple sexy serious bike. Modified handlebar and brakes added. Carbon fiber fork and carbon fiber seat post. Free tune ups for 6 months.

FREE DELIVERY IN MANHATTAN
Keep in mind this is brand new and $1100+ in the store with the current options. Also this version was only made in 2008-2009 and now is a collectors item.

Balistic speeds are possible.

Asking $700 cash. See more bikes at our site http://www.spcarbon.com

An ad with a slogan as catchy as "Balistic speeds are possible" is clearly not the work of your average independent amateur Craigslist seller. No, this is clearly the product of a professional free classifieds retailer. By the way, you may think "balistic" is misspelled, but I'm guessing the seller wisely engineered it to be knuckle-tattoo compatible:

Get your own knuckles at the knuckle tattoo gun.

(speeds are)

Get your own knuckles at the knuckle tattoo gun.

Intrigued by the seller's savvy, I followed the URL contained in the post, which led me to the home of an operation called "SP Carbon Bicycles." I guess the "SP" stands for "spaceship," because it said "Tell them your riding a Spaceship™" at the bottom of the page. Here's what a Spaceship looks like:

If you're as impressed as I am, here's how you too can start a Craigslist bicycle company. First, get some of those unbranded crabon frames from Taiwan on eBay for a few hundred bucks:

Then, get a bunch of Specialized decals:


And lop off the "ecialized:"


Next, apply your decal, supplement with a smattering of mail-order components, and voila, your Spaceship is ready to launch:

(We have ripoff liftoff!)

Of course, when you buy a "real" Specialized you're getting a lot more, since you're paying a bunch of people to "write a name really cool" and integrate it much more neatly with the rest of the bike. Essentially, though, both companies are doing the same thing--branding. One's just much better at it than the other. You're paying a little for the smoothness of the ride, and a lot for the smoothness of the logo.