'CHAI RACERS' IN MUMBAI

Photographer Thierry Vincent (below) spent the past two years in India, documenting the changing motorcycle culture in Mumbai; his show 'Mumbaikers' is currently on view at Tendance Roadster in Paris, a Royal Enfield dealer (what else!) in the Levallois district.  Vincent's photographs offer a glimpse of an emerging world, one which we take for granted in the 'developed' countries - motorcycling as a leisure/lifestyle activity, and not a basic and cheap mode of transportation.

As India explodes into a capitalist powerhouse, a vast middle class has emerged, who have money to spare on our favorite pastime.  Okay, maybe second favorite, but I mean motorcycles of course.  Suddenly, Royal Enfields and other home-grown products (Rajdoot, anyone? - see below. How about an industrial diesel?) are viewed with new eyes, as the raw material for customization and personalization.  The patterns of modification are inspired by English Café Racers and American Customs, both of which are now global currency thanks to television shows, books, and countless photoblogs.

The first Custom builder in India (apparently), Akshai Varde (above), uses mostly Indian powerplants in his specials, entirely hand-built in a small workshop, using the most basic hand tools.  He begins with an idea  -no sketches, no bucks, no CAD programs-  and begins hammering steel sheets with to realize his desired shapes.  The same working methodology is employed to build frames from scratch or modify existing chassis - a true garage artisan.

The small capacity of his engines and obvious nods toward American Customs give an odd impression to eyes raised on Harley- or Triumph-powered creations.  In this, they are reminiscent to late 50s/early 60s Japanese motorcycles, which blended Teutonic angularity with Sci-fi film props...at least to Western observers; they made perfect sense at home. Now of course, a Suzuki Colleda is simply the height of cool.  Will this happen with nascent Indian creations?  Time will tell.

Varde's customers are often Bollywood actors, looking for a little flash, perhaps some badass cred... the popular response to his art has afforded the purchase a new workshop, double the size of his previous garage (pictured above). The newly well-heeled are looking for a status symbol...and I say this with intention, as India has very strict laws against any kind of modifications to a motorcycle.  Thus, all of the machines pictured here are completely illegal: café or chopper, they're literally outlaws.

The prospect of riding an unregisterable machine is daunting to a degree, and all of the 'riding' photos are taken at the crack of dawn, when little attention will be drawn to the bikes; plus, there is less traffic than the usual sardine jam typical of urban Indian roadways, making a photograph possible.  Ultimately, the solution to riding an illegal motorcycle is bribery, but I suspect the new owners are more interested in possessing a unique creation from a celebrated artisan, than feeling the diesel-choked breeze in their hair.

Speaking of diesels...in the 1960s and 80s a spate of industrial single-cylinder diesel engines were produced in India, which have become fodder for custom builders.  These machines are quite slow (80kph tops) but return amazing fuel economy (200+mpg) and stone reliability.  Concerning speed; with the country's incredible population density, there are virtually no roads on which one can ride over 50mph, so a huge, powerful engine is an exercise in futility.  In this context, a chuff-chuff diesel has a kind of slow-motion elegance, especially housed in a 'Captain India' chopper frame!  'Jatu' has ridden this machine with sleeping bag strapped to the rear fender, all across the subcontinent, thousands of kilometers at a stretch, in true 'Easy Rider' style.  Only, slow.

While all of Vincent's photos are interesting, what fascinates me is the seed of Indian-ness emerging from the adopted format of these bikes.  In these last photos, Ashkai Varde's mother, a celebrated painter, has been commissioned to paint a sutra about Hanuman (the monkey god) on a tank for a Bollywood actor.  These shots are a whisper of the Possible - what could be a genuinely native design aesthetic.  Incorporating the incredibly rich visual language of India as source material for innovative motorcycle design is a very exciting prospect indeed.

Many thanks to Thierry Vincent for allowing the use of these lo-res images, my photos of his photos, on The Vintagent.  His actual photographs are beautiful, technically very well done, and for sale!

JEAN-MARIE GUIVARC'H

Jean-Marie Guivarc'h has been sending his sketches and watercolors to The Vintagent for a few years now, which are primarily automotive, but he's a man of broad tastes, and makes evocative sketches of motorcycles as well.  These notebook pages were drawn at the LeMans race circuit last Sunday during the 'Bidon 2 Litres' event, which he explains below.


In the artist's words:
"I'm sending you three drawings of old French motorcycles.
The first is a Dollar 350cc ohv with an Imperial side-car...two famous names in France. [some Americans saw the Dollar 4-cylinder machine at the Art of the Motorcycle exhibit at the Guggenheim]

The second is an FN with a Bernardet side-car; perhaps it is the oldest Bernardet with a very rare body (1925 or 1926), with only two survivors and one in the USA!  The first owner was a sailor...[I know the very sidecar; it was part of the Good Olde Days collection, where I found my 1965 Velocette Thruxton.  We called the Bernardet the 'Captain Nemo' sidecar!  I believe it was hitched to an FN as well?]

The last motorcycle is a Styl'son with a 250cc JAP engine; this bike was bought during the 1970's but was restored in 2000. The owner was in University originally and had no money to restore it back then.

I have made these sketches during the 'Bidon 2 Litres' event, Sunday 25th of April at Le Mans. It is an economy run with only two liters of petrol; of course, the winner has the most economical engine!  It was a great pleasure to meet the owners, to speak with them and to discover these wonderfull motorcycles.

Best regards,
Jean-Marie"


Thanks Jean-Marie!

THE BIG WHEEL

My pal Stacie B. London is among the operators of a Chris Burden sculpture (from 1979) at the Little Tokyo branch ('the Geffen') of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.  Stacie is the exhibition production coordinator, and supervised the sculpture's mechanical renovation. The piece consists of a huge cast iron flywheel from an 1800s coal mine, spun up to high speed by a motorcycle, in this case a 1968 Benelli 250cc, sold here in the US through the Montgomery Ward department store chain as the 'Riverside'.  The Benelli was Burden's own motorcycle from the late 1960s, when he was beginning his art career.  .


Stacie is a vintage motorcycle enthusiast (with a '69 BMW R60US), and enjoys giving the little bike some stick!  Watch the video as she winds the little Benelli up to top gear/top revs, when over 70 mph reads on the speedo; that Big Wheel is moving pretty damn quick.  Note its proximity to her back! After a noisy wind up, the motor is cut and the bike moved away from the madly spinning flywheel; the gigantic mass spins silently for hours...

Chris Burden is a pioneering performance artist/sculptor/bodily harm artist, and probably best known for his shocking pieces of the early 1970s.  In the notorious 'Shoot' from 1971, Burden had himself shot by an assistant with a rifle, at a distance of 15 feet.  In 'Transfixed' from 1974, Burden was crucified onto a Volkswagen beetle (below), which was driven out of a garage on Speedway Avenue in Venice, CA, revved for two minutes, then driven back inside.  His '747' (below) saw him shooting at an airliner near LAX - an act which drew the attention of the FBI.

My favorite and his most canny work by far is 'The Visitation' of 1974, in which it was announced that Burden would perform a piece at the opening of a large group show of California artists in New York.  Anticipating danger and outrage, an excited crowd jammed the gallery space.  Burden sat in the basement, with his wife guarding a locked door.  Only one visitor was allowed inside at a time; when the viewer entered, the door was locked behind.  The assembled spectators grew frenzied in their attempts to see what was happening, crowding at the locked door and breaking windows to the basement in an attempt to get inside.  Of course, Burden sat calmly talking with the 15 or so who actually saw him, while the anticipated drama was provided... by the audience.

If you have an interest in hearing a little noise in MOCA, Stacie rides the Big Wheel on Thursdays 11:30am, 2 & 6pm; other staffers ride the Wheel Monday and Friday, same times, plus Sat/Sun 11:30am & 4pm.

Top photo from The Flog; second pic copyright 2010 by Gretchen LeMaistre, who shoots hilarious portraits... of dogs!

KARLHEINZ WEINBERGER

As befits a story like this, Karlheinz Weinberger was an ordinary worker, never missing a day as an inventory clerk at the Seimens-Albis factory in Zurich, Switzerland; by all accounts, he was extremely unassuming, quiet, kept to himself, and was a loyal employee. But in the evenings and on weekends, this self-taught photographer stalked the hidden 'dark' places of the Swiss psyche, working under the pseudonym 'Jim' as a member of the gay beefcake photography club 'Der Kreis' in the early 1950s. If our story ended there, he would probably be forgotten as just another closeted 'grey man' in squeaky-clean Switzerland.

Around 1958, he insinuated himself into a totally different 'scene' of young rebels and bikers, who squirmed under the thumb of Conformity, and grasped at the crack in the universe which was Elvis Presley, James Dean, rock music, and motorcycles... just like kids in the rest of the world! These youngsters (dubbed 'Halbstark' - half-strong - by Swiss media) grew a flamboyant style, which veered away from an already hardening 'rebel' dress code of blue jeans, t-shirts, and boots. They wore belt buckles the size of hubcaps, with crudely chased images of skulls, Elvis, or just studs, and favored oversize artillery shells, animal skins, and horseshoes as necklaces. They wore cowboy boots with heels rather than engineer's boots. Better still, they tore out the zippers of their blue jeans and replaced them with bolts, chains, or barbed wire!

They shaped a fiercely independent identity and close-knit culture in relative isolation, away from the prying eyes of the international press...after all, how many Swiss rock bands 'broke out' in 1958? The members of these Zurich gangs were 'Nowhere', they knew it, and they made their own life raft.

By the mid-1960s, the Swiss media began to take note of this homegrown oddity, and Karlheinz Weinberger's photographs of the gangs were published for the first time. He carried on, embedded with his friends, documenting their dissolution as the 60s wore into the 70s, and the period's corrosive elements began to take their toll.

In the last 7 years of his life, Weinberger became the subject of much attention and acclaim, and in 1999 a book was published about his work - 'Karlheinz Weinberger' (Andrea Zust Verlag, Binder/Meyer/Jaegi authors); it's now a collector's item, selling for nearly a thousand dollars per copy. He had numerous exhibitions around the world, and his photographs adorn the walls of major museums. Born in 1921, living in obscurity, he died in 2006, a famous artist.

During the 1950s and early 60s, other pioneering artists working with motorcycle gangs as subject matter (Danny Lyon, Kenneth Anger - see my earlier post, etc) knew nothing about each other, but they each produced rich and fascinating bodies of work with very similar themes. Let's call it the Zeitgeist of the 50s, which led these photographers and filmmakers into some interesting territory. A branch of Motorcycling was evolving rapidly, which was self-consciously 'antisocial', and celebrated imagery which was highly charged, threatening, or just plain offensive, mining subterranean or anxiously avoided cultural turf (homoeroticism, fascist symbols, sadomasochistic hardware, blasphemous language). Motorcycles, symbolizing independence, fearlessness, and fun, became the perfect accessory for individuals who just didn't jibe with how they were 'supposed to be', as the rest of society (mostly, their parents!) desperately grasped for a period of normalcy after the horrors of global War and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

While the numbers of 'rebels on motorcycles' were relatively small in the US, Britain, and Europe, their powerful imagery stained the public's perception of Motorcycling for decades. Films about motorcycles during the 50s through 70s almost always featured violent gangs of ignorant thugs, with a few bright exceptions like 'On Any Sunday'. It took the concerted efforts of Soichiro Honda and his advertising team to shine a light back on Motorcycling as a fun pastime, allowing just regular folks to approach 'two wheels' without stigma for the first time since the 1930s.

But damn, those thugs looked cool.

BILL PHELPS

I've been awe-struck by Bill Phelps' photography for years - he evokes something mysterious from motorcycles, and his technique is flawless. He seems to be always telling a story, but there are never enough clues to explain the tale, so the images exist as a fleeting moment in a larger, unknown narrative. He has said of his work, 'If I am truly taken with an idea I'll do whatever it takes to make it come to life.'

Some of the more unusual ideas must have taken some doing! Not all of his work is based around motorcycles; he does incredible portraiture as well, and other genres.

Mark Mederski, curator of the National Motorcycle Museum in Amarosa, Iowa, forwarded the link to Phelps' gallery in New York, in case you'd like an original. I would! Check out his work at the Robin Rice Gallery.

'OGRI' ORIGINAL ART AT AUCTION

I've been a fan of Paul Sample's cartoon character Ogri since spotting him in Bike magazine way back in the early 1980s. The strips were always good fun, with multiple layers of meaning and plot - and my interest was piqued by Ogri riding vintage bikes on occasion.

Sample says, "The first strip cartoon was based on my own experience of driving up the M1 at 90mph on a Rocket Goldstar and wondering what the rattle was. The inspiration for most of the stories comes from riding my bike, talking to people in the pub or things on the news. I am constantly writing down ideas in a book. Most people think Ogri is about biking but it's not, it's about life in general."

My suspicions about Sample being a fan of Old Motorcycles was confirmed by this photograph aboard his Sunbeam S7!

A selection of his original drawings is coming up for sale at Halls Estate Auctions on January 27th. Estimates for an original pen-and-ink strip are £120-180 - affordable original artwork!

KEEP WARM!

Unless you're in Australia, New Zealand, South America, or South Africa, in which case, enjoy your riding season! Those of us north of the equator are struggling with very thick oil...

This Velocette Venom Clubman was photographed in the winter of 1963 by Gerald Grimes, whose father Leslie Grimes was a noted cartoonist, typically depicting motoring or motorcycling vignettes (for the Motor Cycle), and had a regular gig penning political comics for the Star.

Leslie Grimes' illustrations are the visual backbone of the delightful 'The Motor Cycle Book for Boys', published by Illife in 1928. His color paintings in goache and line ink drawings are distinctive and capture the romance of an era. Motor Cycle magazine intended to publish its 'boy's book' annually (it even says so on the cover!), but sadly, there was only one, and now it's difficult to track down.

While intended as a primer and enticement for 'boys', the content makes for good reading, and the illustrations are excellent. The center spread of motorcycle petrol tanks in full color is worth the price of admission, and this image was used as the endpages of some editions of Erwin Tragatsch's book, 'The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Motorcycle', which is available in several editions nowadays.

CHARLES BURKI: NORTONS IN GRAPHITE

By John de Kruif:

"Charles Burki was born in 1909 in Indonesia (a "Nederlands Indie"). From a very young age he combined excellent skills as an illustrator with a strong preference for technical subjects. When he settled in Holland in the middle of the 1930s, motorcycles were his favorite subject. He made many illustrations for the Dutch motorcycle magazine "Motor", like the one below (that must be a Norton M20 and a translation is not required!).



It will not come as a surprise that he spent his earnings on fast motorcycles and in 1935 he bought an M30 International. Used solo for two years it was then hitched to a Steib sidecar; that's his wife Sophia in the chair.

In 1942 Charles was captured by the the Japanese and he spent three years in prison camps in Indonesia and Japan. Miraculously, he first survived when the boat he was travelling on was sunk by a torpedo. Then, on the 9th of august 1945, he survived the blast of the "Fat Man" atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki from a distance of less than 2000 meters.

The drawings below were made in the Fukuoka 14 prison camp in Nagasaki on pieces of scrap paper that he had found. Obviously, they were made from memory [POW artwork and writing have been collected in exhibitions and books such as 'Flywheel' - pd'o].

After the war, Charles continued to make a living drawing illustrations for companies such as Philips, Fokker and DAF, and off course for "Motor" magazine; he died in 1994. Read more in the excellent book 'Charles Burki' (the Artist and His Motorcycles) by Vincent Denters (1997, Thoth...below)."

DERMOT DRAWS STANLEY

Dermot Walshe is a cartoonist of some clear talent, and an enthusiast of early motorcycles and history - clearly a man of excellent inclinations! His blogsite Zoomfrog was the recent host of his hand drawn exploration of Stanley Woods' first Isle of Man experience, racing a Cotton - the start of a long and illustrious career. Dermot's drawing style is as old-school as his content, in the manner of classics like Tin Tin; I love the sepia coloration, just like the photographs and films of the era.
Dermot is hoping for funding to make a full-length animated film out of his story... and let's hope he is successful!

JACKETS, PAINT, AND VINTAGENTS

A reader from Turkey, apparently a graphic artist, sent the photo below, of his homage á Vintagent...I can certainly get behind the motto (it applies to my motorcycles, among other things...), although the Tim Burton characters aren't my cup of tea.

So I suppose it's time I came out of the closet as an artist - I used to paint jackets for my friends, back in the 1980's - here is a selection of my favorites (or at least, the ones I bothered to photograph!). The jackets at top were snapped at the top of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, on Easter Sunday, 1987, at sunrise. The
'Easter ride' was for 10 years a fun and slightly arduous pre-dawn foray to the top of the nearest mountain; usually we left SF at 4am, with flashlights or bicycle lights taped to our handlebars if Joe Lucas weren't cooperating, to freeze in the foggy chill and hopefully catch a glimpse of a weak orange sun before tearing back down the hill for breakfast. That's my 'Velocette' jacket, still performing reliably, although seriously patinated at this point. The skull with mohawk image is stolen from Vivienne Westwood's original from the 'Sex' collection ca.1976; hers was made from chicken bones wired together!

The Panther jacket celebrated Wendy's wondrously slow Model 75, purchased from Hollis Button. Terribly reliable though, and she rode it Everywhere in the late 80's, often catching a retinue of young hopefuls; you would have followed her too...

Denise loved her blue Velocette Venom enough to enlarge the Veloce, Ltd headstock transfer; the 'Naughty Lady' has always been a favorite of the cognoscenti (photo by moto-journalist Andy Saunders, ca. '89).

Guy had these 'drama masks' tattooed on his arm, and wanted it visible when he was riding. Yes that's Wendy, and a very young yours truly, before her little blue Panther.

Lest we not forget the sacred, Bill commissioned a Triskelion with the Manx logo 'quocunque jeceris stabit' ('where you throw me, I stand'). And of course, our model (a hirsute pd'o) sits on a Norton, albeit a Commando Fastback, ca '69, owned by Craig, the white-scarfed Rocker bemusedly occupying the front steps of a decrepit Victorian, in a then-notorious neighborhood, which of course is nowadays Very Expensive...

And occasionally a client with a Job would commission leather-abuse; Joe preferred a leather-clad Rocker supplant winged Mercury on his Vincent logo, although he's probably the only such to hold a caduseus!

It's hard to look tough when your avatar is Tinkerbell...but, Alison was game to follow my exuberant riding on her own bikes, sometimes ending up in a ditch for her efforts! The jacket held up to the scuffs and insults of pavement, but a few damp Australian winters have taken their toll on the leather - fix it Tink!

Victor, the actor, wanted a dramatic logo for his LA gang to follow, so it was Laughing Death with dice spilling from his ghastly jaws... all in good fun.

And no, I haven't done a jacket for a long time, and don't intend to; now it's up to the young Turks, so to speak, to have their turn...






As an addendum - here is what my jacket looks like 20 years later: Scuffed, scarred, faded, abraded, and just about perfect.