Years and years ago, when most of North America was covered by a shallow sea and I had just started out as a messenger in Denver, I received a strange assignment. I was to head immediately to the NEWS4 studios at 10th and Lincoln and contact a certain reporter. There I was fitted with a small video camera and told to go ride around for a bit, messenger style. The footage would be used for a piece on messengers for the evening news.

Well, I'm always one to give the People what they want. I rode around, all right. I sped into the tightest spaces between vehicles, against traffic. I hitched rides on trucks. I zig-zagged improbably at high speed through traffic jams and wayward pedestrians. I packed every ridiculous, heinous messenger move imaginable into that five-minute ride, short of actually smashing someone's windshield with my u-lock. This was the Cam Effect in action: put a video camera on or near a mild-mannered industrialized cyclist and watch him/her turn into a bit of a street banshee. The Cam Effect, I say. Nobody wants to bore the People when the camera's on.

I delivered myself and the sizzling footage back to the studio. As far as I know, they never used it. Can't blame them, of course. Scofflaw messenger action was not then, nor is it now, ready for prime time. However, messenger-style street surfing has become a big hit on the interwebs, aka Satan's Mistress. The videos of Lucas Brunelle, for instance, chronicling the after-work inebriations of veteran messengers going all-out for bragging rights in informal races, have been viewed with slack-jawed wonder (and no small amount of disdain) by cyclists and non-cyclists the world over. I surmise that Brunelle's work has been a factor in the proliferation of hipsters careening around on track bikes with Chrome bags (and helmet cams) in every urban center in America -- the Posenger Revolution. The general public must think the messenger population has exploded in numbers and become particularly reckless in recent years. In fact the number of working messengers continues to dwindle while the population of look-alikes skyrockets, some kind of strange cultural-economic inversion, fueled in part by moving pictures.

My co-worker Rich -- an actual experienced courier, recent engineering grad, and, clearly, talented videographer and film editor -- has just released one of the slickest short films so far in this strange new genre of messengerTV. He calls it Long Line of Cars. The riding is not quite as titillating and terrorizing as the stuff in Brunelle's vids, but there are some eye-openers and flashes of brilliance, and the Cam Effect is there doing its familiar evil delicious work. I must say, I find it quite enjoyable, especially as it features many iconic Denver messengers and landmarks that warm the heart, from RJL's blue envelope to the Repugnant Plaza. (Without giving too much away, I believe the part at the end is Rich exericising some creative license; it is an actual event that he filmed but it is not something that was connected to anything in the video.)

I think/hope we can enjoy watching this kind of free-style street surfing with the understanding that folks generally shouldn't ride like that. It takes a lot of skill and experience to ride helmetcam-stupid like a messenger at 4:59 and get away with it. I believe/hope we can allow ourselves to appreciate a professional carving traffic like a Thanksgiving turkey, at the same time understanding that there are obviously safer ways to ride. This is not the type of riding I advise in my book Art of [Urban] Cycling, people. But Rich does give us a vivid demonstration of why bike messengers provide the fastest means of moving small tangible objects like paper docs from one downtown office to another. Extreme bicycular cycling, just can't beat it for expedited intra-urban transport.

It should be noted, in all seriousness, that Rich is one of the safest riders on the street, messenger or non-messenger -- although that wouldn't be apparent simply from watching this video. But that's just the Cam Effect at work. Enjoy.

Robert

View "Long Line of Cars" [mpg][youtube]