alfred jarry's bike

Look carefully at Duchamp's Bride stripped bare by her batchelors . The work represents uperinteractions among unseen, abstract forces; it is also a machine of suffering. In the top part is what is known as 'the glider'; this is not a glider; it is a bicycle.Duchamp is here referencing Alfred Jarry's Clement Luxe machine purchased in 1896 (we know of course of Duchamp's interest in cycle wheels). Jarry's biographer (Brotchie) by way of some cod algebra assesses Jarry's gear ratio to be 36/9. This ratio will just work. BMX fanatics say it would be like leg pressing 1500 pounds maybe even breaking the chain. Andre Raffray painted the shadow of Duchamp's bicycle wheel onto a wall. He is commenting on Jarry's dream of a fusion between humanity and bicycle mechanics-the shadow reiterates Duchamp's thoughts on such a union-he invites the viewer to spin the wheel: to spin on an upside down unicycle-a more interesting comment than Ballard's 'assassination of Kennedy as a downhill motor race'; look at the detail in Jarry's 'crucifixion as an uphill bicycle race'; instead of crucifixion nails there are 'jiffies' or tyre levers; Jesus even rides lying flat to combat air resistance. How bland by comparison is Ballard's race.
Lance Armstrong should take a leaf out of Jarry's book; before or during a ride he might consume 2 litres of white wine plus a few absinthes followed by coffee and brandy; he called alcohol superfood-the source of all power. Using this as a template Lance can redescribe his endeavours as 'had some great superfood', 'had much better EPO in training this winter', 'check out this synthetic testosterone'.
Lance is the supermale. Jarry would have been. impressed at the range of superfood that Armstrong consumed-far more efficacious than alcohol; 10.000 mile race against a train-no problem

the whole equation

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Brecht, in a letter during the war, describes American soldiers on a train talking to each other;  no country, he says, has made itself familiar as this one, through the cinema. David Thomson develops this simple idea in his discussion of Chinatown; if you live in the US you can't help dropping into some of the dialogue from the film-'well nobody's perfect' and so on. Further, as time goes by, LA themes in the film (exploitation, greed etc) come to look like 'real' LA This is his idea of 'the whole equation'-we see ourselves as if in a film. This notion has obvious appeal for J G Ballard. Does our world view, he wonders, come from Disney or Canterbury Cathedral. Or, he goes on, how would the equation work in Japan or Sweden-psychotic stares or glacial silences?  Or what about the UK? -Passport to Pimlico or Brief Encounter? 

Brecht concludes, re the train episode, that 'maybe the movies don't tell the whole story'. So film and life don't equate? They don't have to: consider Jan Nemec's Late Night Talks with My Mother. There is a connection between this film and Oratorio for Prague  together with The Ferrari Dino Girl  but it is up to us to work out what the equation is or make up our own equation from elements like Skvorevsky, jazz, east european jazz, Boruvka etc.