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The introduction to this interview describes an alleycat as "daylong series of races and events geared
towards messengers and fixed gear cyclists."
An alleycat is not geared toward fixed gear riders. It has absolutely
NOTHING to do with fixed gears. In fact you would be hard pressed to
find a single fixed gear among the early alley cat racers.
An alleycat is a messenger race in live traffic that roughly mimics a
messenger's job. The type of bike is irrelevant. They key to an
alleycat race is that it requires the racers to think and plan the
quickest route to a series of checkpoints in live urban traffic.
By Kris Udekwu / Graphic by Sarah Hotchkiss
The College Hill Independent (Providence), October 26, 2006
An Interview with R.E.Load Baggage Inc.'s Roland Burns
As evidenced by the popularity of fixed gear and track bicycles on
college campuses, the culture of bike messengers has begun to spread
beyond the cities in which they ride. A messenger's life doesn't
revolve solely around dodging automobiles and dealing with obnoxious
paralegals. An alleycat is a daylong series of races and events geared
towards messengers and fixed gear cyclists and one of the most fun ways
to spend a weekend to boot. Few, if any other sports, allow you to
block off a good portion of a city's downtown area to ride around all
day with friends from cities you rarely see. In that respect, the
alleycat stands alone within its community.
Roland Burns, the "R" in R.E.Load, a custom baggage company geared
towards bike messengers, has been in Philadelphia lending his creative
and technical expertise to bike messengers since 1992. Burns and Ellie
Lum, the "E," were integral in the organization of the North American
Cycle Courier Championships (NACCCs) held in Philadelphia this year.
R.E.Load's bags were awarded as prizes and were a creative and bold
stamp of their involvement in the event. The artistic prowess of the
individually handmade bags is undeniable, so the art exhibits they've
organized and participated in come as no surprise. I got to speak with
Burns about his and R.E.Load's position in this community as it
continues its rise to the public scope.
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT: Can you give me a little bit of a back
story on how you got going with R.E.Load?
BURNS: Basically, I came to Philly. I grew up in New York, I came to
Philly in 1992 and went to school for engineering... I'd been working
in [bike] shops and I got a little tired of that, so I decided to start
messaging... that was around the time I met Ellie, my partner in the
business... I had a bag from another company that wasn't really cutting
it and we decided to see what would happen if we made our own. At first
we were just going to alter that bag and make it more what I wanted,
and then we just decided to make a new bag. And pretty much that was
it. We started making stuff just for ourselves. We each made a bag and
a couple of other messengers saw them and asked us if we would make
ones for them.
INDY: So it just kind of snowballed from there?
BURNS: Yeah. I mean, I attribute a lot of it to Philly being such a
supportive, pretty-small big city. Then we started taking orders here
and there and people would pay for it up front and we'd go and buy the
stuff and then make the bag. It's been a really slow, steady process...
We kept messaging as we needed to and we would cut our hours, but I was
definitely getting burnt out on being a messenger a lot faster than
Ellie was.
INDY: Do either of you guys still mess now or are you guys pretty much
done with that?
BURNS: I quit for good in maybe, like, 2002. It was really early. She
quit shortly after that, but she went for another couple months.
INDY: All the bags are done by hand and they look magnificent. Since
then you guys have just been bringing more and more people to work on
the bags and do the stitching?
BURNS: Until about three years ago, it was really just me and Ellie.
And even after she moved back to the West Coast we went for a while
without getting new people. We would try out a couple new people and
they wouldn't exactly work out. Before that, me and Ellie were going
around and trying to get things locally made by some contractors, so we
were dealing with a company that was sort of like us but made all kinds
of stuff-but the quality just wasn't there. Now we're at the point
where we're starting to just bring in people and train them ourselves,
which is kind of tough, but we're definitely keeping everything in
house.
INDY: You guys also had an art show recently, right?
BURNS: Well we've had several. Actually, in Philly, we used to have
openings in general every month that weren't necessarily bag related.
We have a lot of friends who are artists and R.E.Load itself was in
Space 1026, which is a huge collective gallery, for a couple years and
then when we moved out of there. We moved in with one of the founders
of 1026 who had started a gallery of his own, and we would switch so
that every month one of us would have an opening. We kind of kept this
up for a year or two, but it definitely started to fizzle out in terms
of the quality of the shows.
We've had a couple of shows that deal specifically with bags. We've had
three or four in Philly where we kind of send stuff out to different
artists and they alter it. We send them the pre-made pattern and they
do whatever they want to it and send it back to us, and we make the
whole bag. The most recent show we did was in Seattle, and that was set
up through another gallery. It was mostly a release party for Tom
Sutherland's book and DVD and an existing documentary about New York
messengers that he packaged all together. And the gallery actually got
in touch with us-well, us being Ellie in Seattle-because they wanted to
also tie in more of the cycling and messenger theme, and in that case
we had a whole different bunch of artists who actually told us what
they wanted on their bags in a lot of cases. A lot of them did the
alterations themselves, and some of them just sent us the designs and
all the bags were made in Seattle, with the exception of a few which
were made in Philly. Usually we just have people do alterations to the
bag and we do the stitching on the plain bag that they've either
painted or re-stitched. But, yeah, we try to do a show like that pretty
much every year.
INDY: As far as these races go, you end up seeing the same sponsors and
companies each time, so there's a pretty tight knit community that
exists between you guys, right?
BURNS: Yeah, there is, definitely. People want, ideally, to get
sponsored by some of the companies they believe in, which isn't always
entirely possible. In terms of individual alleycats, I guess people
know in general that if you ask us for stuff, [we'll do it] as long as
it's a race that we believe in... as far as resources go, because we do
get a lot of requests. We don't do any advertising at all, so that's
pretty much our advertising.
INDY: No print advertising at all?
BURNS: I think maybe we've paid for stuff twice, and one place that was
in our own neighborhood here in Philly to try and grease the wheels to
get permits. But, I mean, we just get free press all the time in terms
of reviews and stuff like that. It's just never really made sense for
us. I mean, we've paid for some stuff in zines and stuff like that,
just to help out. But it just doesn't really make sense for us to pay
for advertising that much, number one because it's incredibly expensive
but number two because our stuff kind of advertises itself.
INDY: By word of mouth it seems like it's entirely possible that print
advertising is just completely superfluous.
BURNS: Right, yeah. I mean, you have a website, we have hundreds of
people riding around all over the place with stuff on their backs, and
there's also not really technically publications that deal specifically
with the market that we're trying to reach in most cases.
INDY: Neither ESPN nor any other big sports carriers pick up events
like the NACCCs [North American Cycle Courier Championships]. What are
your feelings on that, on not having that kind of exposure? Does that
maintain the integrity of what you guys do and how you guys feel?
BURNS: It's kind of a grey area right now. I mean, honestly, I think
everybody's very worried about what's going on in terms of exposure of,
I guess, what you could call 'underground' stuff, like alleycats. I can
really only speak for myself personally. It's just really strange...
there are a ton of colleges in Philly, and I ride around and see kids
who are in art school riding around on fixed gears with bags and a lot
of times, the first thing that happens before they even know how to
ride fixed is they'll grab a fixed because it's cool, which is a big
point of contention with some people. Personally I just feel that, as
long as you know how to ride it, that's cool. My only concern is that
because the image is so tied in with what people think of when they
think of messengers, when somebody who can't ride a track bike properly
hits a pedestrian, it's not like a student hits a pedestrian. They see
the fixed gear, they see the bag, and, 'oh, messenger hits pedestrian,
oh track bikes are dangerous,' stuff like that.
I think there are a lot of concerns that are tied in with that, just
the watering down of the culture. But I guess my concern is more how we
are perceived, which is logical, because once something gets to ESPN
that's kind of what they would consider a fringe sport or whatever, and
it does tend to get watered down and lose a lot of the elements of what
makes it so exciting for the people who are already in that scene to
begin with. At the same time you have a lot of people who are racing
and who are incredibly fast and could do well in a lot of other areas.
New York has Team Puma, and Puma sends them around to a lot of
different places to race in track events on the velodrome, like against
established, traditional racing teams. That can't happen without more
exposure. It's a double-edged sword. People will get more recognition,
and there will be more opportunities for people to do things outside of
the standard messenger stuff with more exposure and more sponsorship.
But at the same time you run the huge risk of getting taken advantage
of and having everything watered down.
INDY: You guys still have to be doing pretty well.
BURNS: Yeah, I mean, we definitely do okay. We're lucky enough to be
able to do what we like doing and make enough of a living. I mean,
every day when I come in here I think about the fact that I get to work
with people that I really like. The same reasons that being a messenger
was cool for a while. The freedom is really there in a way that's
pretty awesome. We do okay. And it's weird. When we started it was
obviously mostly messengers and now, out of all the bags we sell,
probably 30 percent or less go to actual messengers. I mean, it hasn't
changed the way that we do anything, really, but we do have to be aware
of this whole other market that's out there. It's a strange thing but
it happens, it happens in music and just about everything. What's
underground is what's cool, and then once people find out about it the
people who were in it and started it kinda get annoyed and move onto
something else. And I think it's just kind of inevitable, but hopefully
we can do things in a way that we still keep control over what's
actually going on.
INDY: What do you think the next step is, if it does in fact get to a
point where it's so supersaturated that it gets kind of hard to look at?
BURNS: I just think things will go a little deeper if it gets to that
point. There'll just be more smaller races and-I mean, the way
everything's already set up for the most part. The biggest draw to
going to races, or an equal draw as for the event itself, is the
community that's been built, which is really tight from city to
city-meeting people who do the same thing and go through the same stuff
as you. For instance, the NACCCs and the Worlds are the one or two
times a year that people get to see their friends who are from another
country who they haven't seen since the last event. I mean, even though
it's tough to tell where [the community] starts and ends with people
who just get a fixed because a fixed will be cool or, you know, get a
messenger bag because they think it'll look rad or whatever, versus the
people that mess or the people that ride because they really like to
ride. It's really blurry where that ends and where that begins, but it
still feels like it's kind of inclusive for all people.
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