Andrew Durbin - Mature Themes

Between the wars, Antonio Ducati and sons founded Società Scientifica Radio Brevetti Ducati in Bologna to produce radio parts. Repeatedly bombed and later reformed as a manufacturer of motorized bicycles after the defeat of the Axis, Ducati is recalled by R&B artist Ciara sixty years later in a one piece wrapped in fur, “You are my Ducati,” a motorcycle more theory than vehicle, you whom I ride are my everything. Also, Ciara of F antasy Ride , the never-too-real always glistening at the edge of the sparkly ethos of forward motion she calls “love sex magic,” what she says she’ll “drive her body around.” Middling production of second-rate bikes for a time, yet eventually love sex magic seized in the automatic transmission, the desmodromic valve. Ducati finally distinguished itself by means of speed with the Mach 1, a motorcycle that could travel at 100 mph (its lightweight frame the color of the bill of Ciara’s Atlanta Braves baseball cap), exceptional in its design, now a collector’s item. (It doesn’t ride.) List of objects that appear in the video for Ciara’s “Ride”: a car, a mechanical bull, a chair. The Ducati Multistrada 1200, a bike of such sophistication that it rides like a breeze out of some future world, doesn’t appear in the Ride video, but its presence directs the trajectories of these objects in their collision with Ciara: “All up on your frame, baby say my name.” Everything around her rises to gossipy transcendence. Ducati’s founding mission was to manufacture the radio, a point now echoed in Ciara’s music of objective romance, constitutive in its mysteries, but perhaps only a kind of body glue, like that which secures the one-piece.

Since first listening to Ciara’s “Ride,” her 2010 chart-topper about the reversal of expectation, gender trouble loosened in the declaration that her man is her Ducati, the mobilizing object parked in the garage that begs you, slick with rain, to take him for a spin, I’ve become obsessed with the Italian motorcycle company, specifically their Multistrada 1200. Ciara repurposes the bike as an interpretative tool: You are my Ducati, she sings, converting the male body of her rapidly shifting attention into the mobilizing figure of European racing sports. Where does Ciara want to go? Most likely she wants to leave you behind, lonely in the sunset as she flees with luxury trailing behind her. Her perfectly manicured fingers grip the handlebars. You are my Ducati, utilizing the rhetoric of sex to mechanize her partner into the process of love as engine of speed, you make me want to ride, glassy body exteriorized into a system of gears hieroglyphic in their trippy gorgeousness, building into a complex of metaphors a second life more exhilarating in its imitation of how well, and fast, she dances, than the first — even at the risk that it might circle back to collide with you. The song has really become rather important to me.

Ludacris, in his interlude toward the end of “Ride,” tries his best to retrieve Ciara from her liberating theory by integrating her into a series of confusing sports metaphors that situate the male in the consummate exclusionary field where he might feel most at ease, soft wet grass under the stadium lights: the football game — hurrahed by cheerleaders, the only women on the field. Their presence in the game doesn’t interrupt the play of male athletes, it cheers on the spectacle of their bodies beneath heavy equipment. In football, Ludacris can finally assert himself by forcibly removing Ciara: “I put her out like a light… Call me the Terminator… I gotta put her to bed.” Sports, for Ludacris, reestablishes his active, rather than passive, mobility, patching his name onto Drew Brees’s in order to “score” with a woman. He tries to capture the energy that would exempt him from becoming a Ducati, supercharging the song with his own flittering agency in the third-person: “I throw it in / touch down / he scores.” But together, Ciara and Ludacris are totally out of sync—“you better cc me,” he sings, to which Ciara replies, ignoring his call for office etiquette in order to restore her own wish: “He love the way I ride it. He can’t stand to look away.” But where else might a Ducati look?

She mounts the bike — not quite the Multistrada 1200, not quite Ludacris, but rather a dreamy, pulsing confluence of object relations, a paralyzing network of competitive masculinities, each sinking under the weight of its indebtedness to a rule of social law — luxury epitomized in the exemplary technology of speed, derived from an upper-class music of leisure transported from Italy to New York — suddenly foiled in its power by its own controlling interests. She rides it.

When I listen to Ciara, I think about what it would be like to rent a Ducati and joyride up the West Side Highway, onto 9G, toward upstate at the start of fall. I think about how fast I could go — and at what point up ahead I might permanently lock myself into the moment between ride and accident, the twin poles I imagine a motorcyclist, weaving between cars on the narrow roads of the Catskills, pivots between with a glee that accelerates toward a death indistinguishable from life. As for me, I’m transfixed by the moment speed hits a wall and the totalizing event that both binds and unbinds us to it (what I want to drive my body around), an accident breathtaking in its approach, arrives at last to slow me way the fuck down. Ciara’s dancing speeds up and slows down the known world in its claim on global time, New York’s autumn

splashed against this life

measured out in miles

per hour, to say nothing

of its explication in gallons

of oil. To ride breezily against the backdrop

of huge cost, to endorse its rush as you

fall into it, to drop low like Ciara,

below the adoring skies

of the Hudson Valley

on a Multistrada 1200 the color

of Ludacris’s sunglasses in the Ride video,

tempering agency via a touchdown

at the 2009 Super Bowl

yet smashed into the wall

of Ciara’s poetics of speed

he is hurled toward,

incapable of seeing it

before him. Listening

to Ludacris, I feel flung at her, too,

like we’re riding a Ducati into fall,

and, suddenly, we slam

into the season’s shifting weather

and are released

into the beige, yellow, and red

of autumn, pastels that sunset over us, foundering in a haze at the horizon veering from greenish blue to purple like money burning in your hands.

Later, Ciara and I meet in a semidarkened vacant mall and wander through various shops until we find a somewhat new JCPenney, swept up in creamsicle light. When we enter the department store, it turns out that Ciara and I are together the 10,000th customer and have won a Ducati motorcycle of our choice. It’s a spectacular moment, one christened by confetti as Ciara leans over in her fur to accept the hand of the JCPenney employee who congratulates us. Muzak elaborates the celebratory atmosphere of the empty department store, where no one is celebrating, at the moment of our win. I blush as I realize that here I am, with Ciara, pop star unfixed to a music that would determine her, like really it’s all pretty plastic in its one-size-fits-all quality, and though she’s in love with her beau Future, she’s in love with me, too. The JCPenney manager greets us and leads us to the back lot of the department store, into the cool breeze of a late October night, where there are ten bikes lined up, each glinting in the street light. Ciara selects the Multistrada 1200 and says, “This is the one.”

“I love it,” I tell her. The manager smiles and removes a contract from his suit pocket. He unfolds it and hands it to us. I don’t spend any time reviewing the endless pages of terms and conditions and sign immediately. He hands over the keys and the deed to the Multistrada 1200.