The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power (Paperback)

His stuff on messengering is excellent when he sticks to the nuts and bolts "how to" stuff of negotiating traffic, battling cold weather, dealing with a cranky bicycle, the camaraderie of messengers, and especially in describing the "flow." His explanation of how bike messengers can get into the "flow," and see how traffic, pedestrians, and lights, will play out blocks ahead, is the best representation I've come across, and is the best defense possible for why bike messengers
>ride so seemingly crazy. His comparison of the differences in sensory input between bike rider and car driver is striking in its simplicity and impact. His descriptions of riding the streets of Chicago at top speeds are vivid, cinematic, and a section on a wee hours messenger race through deserted streets is intense.

Culley is much less interesting when he starts trying to explain why messengering is so noble, and he veers off into outbursts against officer "suit" types as he tries to expound on the nobility of work that makes you sweat and bleed. Indeed, one of the central contradictions (and thus weaknesses) of the book is that while Culley is busy railing against the corporate world and smirking about how his messenger takings are comparable money to that of salaried office drones, he fails to fully acknowledge that he's just another part of the corporate machine, delivering blueprints and contracts from one corporation to another. It's a rather inconvenient paradox in Culley's existence, one that he is obviously too smart not to recognize, but rather prefers to ignore, hoping that the reader will allow him to have it both ways.

When Culley writes about the American obsession with cars and their negative impact on communities, he becomes rather more formal and earnest. He gives a quite readable account of the rise of the automobile and its stranglehold on transportation planning since WWII. While none
>of this is new or particularly insightful, he does make a convincing plea for greater attention to and respect for bicyclists. As with much of the book, his attempt to portray the bike messenger as organically linked to the oppressive beast that is the city is romantically overblown and borderline parody. However, it's hard not to get swept up in some of his dreaming about car-free cities, and equally hard not to get angry at local governments who lack the imagination to relinquish at least some portion of the road to cyclists--or at least protect them.

In the end, the books loses 1 star for the editor's failure to reign in the worst excesses of Travis's writing and for not providing a map of Chicago. It loses another star for failing to address the central contradiction of bike messenger life: counterculture, free spirit image vs. corporate errand boy reality.

To Culley conventional commuting "Cyclecraft" seems a bit sad. To him the standard conventions give advice on cycling enslaved, teaching cyclists to adapt, with skill, to the world as it is. Culley is part slave, part gladiator, promoting cycling with attitude. Part of me is impressed - though I find his writing less centred than his cycling, perhaps accessorised in ways he'd regard as anathema on a bicycle. I read this book for its intelligent thinking and to satisfy curiosity about how the city looks to a certain kind of cyclist. On both scores - though cycling with a completely different skills, mental set and physiology, I empathise with Culley's reflections. There are maxims about cities - over and underground - time, speed and space and the blight of autodependency but Cully's prose never quite justifies the rapture of some critics. That sounds churlish. To say I like this book because of its quality as a paean to cycling in the city would be to patronise someone for whom cycling - though virtuoso - is a means to ambitious artistic ends.

Cully's book reveals to the unaware - like me - that somewhere out there are the cycling equivalents of the heroes and heroines of the film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". I'm not talking about the acrobats of the BMX tribe who, though brilliant, don't mix with hard-core traffic on city streets. I am intrigued that there might be men and women able to do with a bicycle what the actors are shown doing with a variety of weapons in a film that speaks over and above cult to a wider audience. That film is brilliantly directed. Its stars are fine actors and, only after that, people who fight on screen.

Culley writes but perhaps first of all he's a grand master of urban cycling. He tells us of riders who can sit on their bicycles in one spot, arms off the frame for over 10 minutes; of minimalist, practically nude, cycles; of riding in extreme weather conditions and at speeds faster than other urban city traffic, and acts of split second judgement that take on the magical quality of impossible road stunts without the protection of a steel cage or the push of an internal combustion engine.

Part of me says there's an urban cycling saga based on Cully's book waiting to be filmed - a screen success featuring in breathtaking immediacy the attitudes and skills he celebrates "The Immortal Class". The film would be rightly deplored by us civic cyclists, but when did following city ordinances make a good picture? People aren't supposed to roam the streets with the kit of a ninja warrior, but they do on film. I could see high drama and pictorial wonder in a movie featuring human powered vehicles with super-human potential doing astounding things amid trucks and cars. Cully has written the context if not the screen play. Of course it would exaggerate. Cyclists would fly. It would be as visually hyperbolic as the best cinematic car chases. It would make sustainability sexy. And because it would still look mundane without talent and charisma, they'd have to put the film-world's finest onto courier stripped bicycles and set them loose with a plot and a brilliant director trying to recover on film that old advice of the angry parent "Go play in traffic!" That might have been a better title for this book - or the film. I look to see Travis Hugh Cully in the billing.

Culley has the ability to write electric prose that will actually make you sweat as you read his book. His descriptions of whizzing through traffic, rushing to make drop offs, are the best parts of The Immortal Class. It gives a detailed gritty picture of what life is like trying to scrape by in inner city Chicago.

His anti-car views become more and more the focus as the book goes on. He presents a very interesting perspective, not exactly a vantage point, and chances are that the average reader won't agree with very much of what he says. His view on cars and how they have changed the landscape of the average American city is fun to read, but does get a bit old after awhile and the reader will probably find himself wanting Culley to get back to the bikes.

Naturally, people who write memoirs are narcissists, by virtue of the fact that they are assuming others are willing to sit down and spend hours reading about their lives. They want your sympathy, and it seems that they constantly try to make their lives seem to be as bad as possible. Culley doesn't go through too much time moping or whining about how things were which makes the book tolerable. He says honestly that he was never an easy kid, and generally spends more time describing his condition than begging for the reader to feel sorry for him.

Personally, I can not imagine a better book being written about bike messengers. I read this book cover to cover in one sitting without so much as looking up. The messengers' struggle with cars begins to take on epic proportions, literally matters of life and death. Yet, even as Culley goes wildly over the top, I was persuaded to stay with him, if for no other reason than because I was having a blast.