Helmetcam

helmetcam test from Jamie Boud on Vimeo.

The Clichés are True

Photo courtesy of Wade Schields

When the loosely organized local vintage motorcycle community, of which I am a loosely organized member, got word that the critically acclaimed British documentary “TT3D: Closer to the Edge” about the infamous Isle of Man Tourist Trophy motorcycle races was going to have a short run at a Manhattan movie theater, the group made plans to see it. When, for some reason, the theater pulled the movie from its schedule, Corinna, who runs the weekly moto-themed movie night Cine Meccanica at Otto’s Shrunken Head, took it upon herself to make it happen anyway, DIY style.

After sorting out the logistics, Corinna sent an email confirming that the movie would be shown at Matchless, a motorcycle-friendly bar in Brooklyn that has a projector and screen and often shows motorcycle races on Monday nights.

I arranged to meet my friend Wade for dinner ahead of time. Wade, like me, is underemployed at the moment and dinner at 5 o’clock wasn’t a problem for either of us. Although Matchless is a couple of miles from my apartment, it lies directly in the path of my local bus route. The bus schedule being as it is — for entertainment purposes only — makes it impossible to predict how long a ride will take. Twenty minutes? An hour? I gave myself a little extra time, but the ride was quick and I was early. Wade, however, came from Manhattan and after a few connections, had to walk a few blocks from the subway. He was soggy and wet, shook off the rain and took a seat.

Wade is a photographer and he hired me to assist on a recent photo shoot. It was an admittedly boring tabletop shoot for a cosmetics company but he was happy to have the work, and was hoping to get more of it. So was I.

“Thanks again for hiring me to assist,” I said. “You really didn’t need two assistants.”

After the shoot, Wade’s other assistant, Kiritin, told me she was glad I was there to keep her from falling asleep. But, of course, if I hadn’t been there, she would’ve had more to do.

“I think I actually did need two assistants,” said Wade. “We ran late even as it was.”

“True,” I said. “Either way, I was happy to have the work. Things are starting to feel desperate. I wish I had something I could sell on ebay.”

“It’s barely worth it,” said Wade. Wade has an impressive collection of vintage motorcycles — four BSAs and a Triumph– along with a variety of spare parts to go with them. Although he’s determined not to sell any of the bikes, he’s been cleaning gas tanks, wheels, carburetors, etc, and putting them up for auction. “By the time you clean, photograph and ship everything, it’s hardly worth the trouble.” In addition to motorcycles, he also collects fine art photography and he told me about some signed prints he recently sold on ebay for half of what they’re worth.

We had a couple of beers and ate some food, then got our check and prepared to leave. “Shit,” I said, pulling out an insufficient wad of bills from my wallet, “Speaking of low funds, I’m a little short.”

“I can cover it if you want to go find an ATM. I’ll meet you at the bar.”

Photo courtesy of Wade Schields

The rain was coming down hard and by the time I got cash at an outdoor machine and walked to the bar, I was soaked. A couple of guys followed me inside, carrying motorcycle helmets. “Not a very nice night for riding,” said Wade, nodding toward the guys.

“Not a very nice night for walking, either,” I said, shaking out my hat.

For the most part, the people featured in the move are from the UK and their accents made them difficult to understand, but with the added din of the bar, it became nearly impossible. “They should have turned on the closed captioning,” I said. Regardless, despite the noise and the distractions of people bumping into me from all sides, ordering beer and food and asking, “Where’s the toilet?” the movie was — in movie-critic parlance — spellbinding. It really was.

Tourist Trophy motorcycle racing at the Isle of Man began in 1907 and since then, there have been over 240 deaths. The movie focuses on the 2010 season and, statistics being what they are, it’s not surprising that a racer dies in one of the 2010 races. The racer’s surviving wife is philosophical about it and, at one point, says something like, although it’s a cliché, it’s true that people can die any day at any minute from any number of things. It’s something you hear people say all the time, “Hey you can get killed just walking down the street.” Point being to do what you love and live life to the fullest.

After the movie, I called Deborah to tell her I was on my way home. “Just waiting for the bus,” I said.

The bus was nearly empty when it arrived and it didn’t make many stops. By the time we hit Driggs Avenue and Broadway, I was the only passenger. The bus idled at the intersection for a long time. Siren lights lit up the busses foggy windows. The bus driver got off the bus. I walked to the front of the bus and poked my head out the door to see what was happening. The intersection was cordoned off with police tape.

When the bus driver returned, I asked him, “What’s the story? Are we going to be moving soon?”

“The police marking off the ground with chalk,” he said in broken Polish. “Like a…a…a…fatality.”

The driver gave me some alternate bus options, all of which involved multiple transfers. I was still a mile and a half from home but I decided to walk. Standing at the corner of the intersection, I could’t see much. A garbage truck, a few police cars, siren lights reflecting on the slick pavement, rain catching the light of the street lamps. I didn’t see an ambulance, I didn’t see any chalk.

The cold rain got under my collar and began to trickle down my back. I pulled my coat’s zipper tight around my neck and walked home. Within minutes I was utterly drenched, but I didn’t mind. I was going home to a warm bed, a hot cup of tea, and a wife who loves me. I was alive.

Deborah sent me a link to a story she found the next day with details of the accident.Katharine Yun, NYU Grad, Struck And Killed By Sanitation Truck In Williamsburg

You can get killed just crossing the street.

Vintage Nationals

No, that picture isn’t of me. Not even close. After arriving home with a broken shoulder from Flat-track racing school, Deborah wasn’t keen on allowing me to pursue the venture any further. She didn’t want me riding a motorcycle at all, and racing? “No way!” But yesterday I convinced her to come with me to watch a few friends race at an upstate speedway.

After seeing the riders all headed in the same direction, wearing heavily padded gear, with an ambulance parked a few yards from the track, she began to soften her staunch anti-racing stance. And once the little kids took to the track, some of them as young as six years old, she melted all together.

“Oh my god, so cute!”

“It looks like so much fun!” she said.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” I said. “It’s just a bunch of guys having fun on old bikes. No one is out to hurt anybody.”

“You should do it,” she said.

My plan was working.

It was the last race of the season, however, so Deborah still has a few months to change her mind again. Well see.

We arrived at lunchtime. Deborah ordered some french fries and, as she paid, the guy behind the counter asked if she was with The Discovery Channel. “No,” she laughed, not sure why he was asking.

We were there to watch my friends Hugh (owner of Sixth Street Specials) and Fumi (a mechanic there) race. As it turned out, a crew from The Discovery Channel was there to watch them, too. The crew was filming for the latest season of a show called “Cafe Racer.” Hugh and Fumi appeared in the show’s first season, but since I don’t have cable, I still haven’t seen it.

The show documents Hugh and Fumi (as well as a few other builders) build a cafe racer from a collection of rusty old parts. Although a cafe racer is a completely different style of motorcycle from the dented up flat-track bikes Hugh and Fumi were riding that day, I guess the show wanted some “color” and tagged along to get some footage for the show.

“Fumi’s good,” Deborah said to Fumi’s girlfriend, who stood next to us during the racing. “He’s beat, like, every one he’s been racing against today, right?”

Fumi’s girlfriend shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “He has so many trophies, I don’t know what any of them are for, I only know that there’s no more room in the apartment for all of them.”

We didn’t stay all day — didn’t stay to see the final races, anyway — and we made our way through the pit to say our goodbyes.

Hugh was busy talking to a guy who had ridden from New York City — roughly 90 miles — on a custom built chopper with a bio diesel engine. It was the furthest he’d taken it since getting it running. Hugh asked him how the ride was.

“It was a little chilly this morning,” he said. “And, um…well…the whole thing vibrates…A LOT.”

“Getting out before the blood and guts, eh?” said Hugh when he saw we were leaving. “Did you ride up on yer bike?”

“No, we drove.”

“Very civilized, very civilized. We did, too, of course,” he said, thumbing over his shoulder at a van full of oily rags and tools. “Take care of yourself. Come racing next time.”

Another guy who was there racing for the Sixth Street Specials team said we were smart to head back. “That’s the worst part about racing here. By the end of the day, you’re whipped. You have to load up all your gear and then fight all that traffic. It’s a-whole other race to get back. The human race…the rat race.”

I told him Deborah was hoping to find a little roadside diner, and asked if he could recommend something good nearby.

“No,” he said. “I really can’t. If you find something, everyone would love to hear about it. I always wind up just eating the crappy food here, hot dogs and stuff.”

As it was, we didn’t find any quaint places to eat and, honestly, after a couple hours plodding along in leaf-peeper traffic, a crappy hotdog sounded pretty good to me.

Okay, enough writing, time to start scrounging around for race bike parts…

Go Save your TOMODACHI

Fumi, motorcycle mechanic extraordinaire at Sixth Street Specials and all around nice guy, is still accepting donations for the “Go Save Your Tomodachi Project” — a Japanese earthquake relief effort. A $20 dollar donation gets you this sweet T-Shirt designed by Fumi’s girlfriend. See the project’s facebook page for details.

Maybe She’s Born With It

“Where’s the third bike? Where’s the third bike?” was all I kept hearing at 6 in the morning on Saturday.

My motorcycle had another modeling gig over the weekend. The call time was 6AM outside an East Village bar.

“Ah, the East Village at dawn,” I said when I first rolled up. “Just like the old days.”

“Except in the old days you’d be heading home to bed about now.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And from the looks of some of the characters I passed on the way over here, that particular schedule hasn’t got out of style.”

When Donald from Creative Film Cars first called me for the job, and described a 1967 Bonneville TT Special that was also being used in the shoot, I knew immediately who it belonged to.

“Wait,” I said. “Is that Wade’s bike?”

“Yeah, you know Wade?”

“Sure I know Wade. Will he be at the shoot?”

“Yes,”

I’ve been on enough production sets to know how deathly boring they can be, so I was happy to hear Wade would be there to hang with. Not to mention that there’s strength in numbers, and if things turned ugly, there’d be someone else on my side. Ugly? What could possibly turn ugly on a make-up commercial? Well, Donald had somehow convinced us to allow our bikes to be ridden by stunt riders.

“Stunt riders?” I said when he first floated the idea.”That’s just a term, right? I mean, my bike is 43 years old, I hope no one is expecting to ride loopdy-loops at the push of a button.”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Donald reassured me. “And it was made very clear that the riders need to be experienced, and preferably familiar with the quirks of vintage British bikes in particular. If it looks like the riders don’t know what they are doing, no one is going to ride anything.”

Easy enough to say, but when the the typical giant blob of a commercial production starts gurgling, churning and rolling in the direction it wants to move, it can be pretty hard to stop.

Wade arrived just a minute before I did — which is to say about two minutes before the French accents started barking: “Where’s the third bike, where’s the third bike.”

“It’s coming,” Donald said, while quietly calling the third member of our group, Julia, who was supposed to be there with a black 1969 Bonneville, but who had apparently lost track of the early hours.

“Oh shit! I’m on my way,” she said and I have to admit that once she’s in gear the girl moves fast. Ten minutes later, she was there.

With the bikes all lined up and ready to roll, we were ready to wait. And wait some more.

I don’t recall signing a confidentiality agreement so I suppose I’m free to talk about the shoot, however, since even after two solid days on set, I still can’t make heads or tails of the concept, there’s not much to tell. All I know is that whatever “story” there might have been, involved big wigs, angel wings, falling air conditioners, pinball machines, ridiculously long eyelashes, and motorcycles. Not necessarily in that order.

“Are you familiar with vintage British bikes?” Donald asked the first stunt rider to arrive.

“I ride bikes,” she said, dismissively, adjusting the chinstrap of her helmet which barely fit over her wig.

Not exactly the most encouraging response, but the production blob was already on the move. Once it was decided who was riding what, we each gave the rider of our respective bikes a briefing. I went over the starting ritual with my rider, pointed out the reversed foot controls, warned her that she’d probably need to grab a hold of more brake than she was used to, and let her have a go at kicking it over. She had a unique jabbing technique with the kickstart that wasn’t getting the job done at first, but eventually she was able to get it going. Once it started she revved it so hard I thought the whole thing would explode. But no, only the tachometer did. “It’s better if you don’t rev it so hard,” I said, but I guess she didn’t hear me over all the revving.

“Okay, let’s go,” said one of the twenty people standing around.

“Wait,” a woman asked me. “Can we borrow your jacket?”

Apparently the stylist had enough sense to realize my beat up old leather was better than the silly thing one of the girls was wearing which looked like it had been purchased in the junior department of TJ MAXX but in reality was probably worth a few grand.

“Super,” said the director. “Sew-PAIR”

We tagged along in a people mover, while the girls rode from the East Village to the Queensboro Bridge, followed by a Mini Cooper convertible with a camera mounted to it’s hood, and a cameraman standing on the passenger seat. A police escort did little to calm our nerves as the girls weaved in and out of sight. “Bike down, bike down,” we heard over the radio.

Two of us in the people mover said, “Shit,” while the other said, “Fuck.”

But “Bike down” only meant one of the bikes had stalled.It was Wade’s, and once he got it started, we were on our way again. Back and forth over the Queensboro Bridge several times and we could all breath a sigh of relief.

Wade, Julia and I rode our bikes back to the first location in the East Village, riding a little more aggressively than we otherwise might in an attempt to regain some of the mojo that had been rubbed off by the French film crew.

We hung around the set doing nothing as the entire production kicked into overtime. It wasn’t until the sun began to go down that we were told of a third location on the banks of the East River in Williamsburg.

I missed the exact hour that it happened, but at some point the overtime caused my bike to officially pay for itself. That is, the gig had covered the bike’s initial purchase price — not including the myriad bits that have been fixed or replaced over the years.

Hurry up and wait as the cliché goes. We stood around, taking pictures of our own bikes while waiting for thirty or more crew members to hose down the parking lot, set up a variety of reflectors, wheel a bunch of sandbags around, and lengthen the model’s eyelashes.

Around eight o’clock, I was the first to be released. “Okay, you can go. Did you get the call time for tomorrow?”

“No, what is it?” I asked, foolishly thinking that the 12 hour turn around rule didn’t just apply to the crew members, but to us non-union schlubs as well.

“Five AM.”

“I’ll be there.”

The next day was another long one and we spent most of it sitting on a variety of stoops, shooting the shit, while passing tourists interrupted our conversation with things like, “What are they shooting here anyway?”

“A makeup commercial.”

“A commercial, meh. I thought I was going to get to see George Cloony or something.”

We weren’t called into action until the afternoon when they wanted to shoot one of the stunt girls pulling away from the curb. They wanted Julia’s bike, the most badass of the lot, but when they began shooting from the low curbside angle, directly in front of the motorcycle’s exhaust pipes, it was too much for the director’s delicate sensibilities and they requested my bike instead, decidedly tamer.

My bike can take a little time to get warmed up, but there was no time for that. “Come on, come on, let’s go.”

“What’s wrong, the bike doesn’t work? Will it go?”

“It’ll go,” I said, while trying to kick it over while at the same time trying to move it into position. But it didn’t go.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s wrong with it is that fifty people are crowded around me saying, ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’”

When I finally had it running, I handed it over to the stunt rider who, dressed in a tiny black leather mini skirt, proceeded to immediately burn her leg on the high exhaust pipes.

“Oh shit,” I said. “Are you okay? I really should’ve warned you about that.”

“It’s okay,” she grimaced. “There’s a reason people don’t ride motorcycles in mini skirts.”

True enough.

“Okay, we use the other bike.”

By the time I saw the stunt rider again, the burn on her leg had formed a nice, juicy blister.

“These people,” she said, “They want the look of the old bikes, but they don’t want everything that goes along with it.”

I’d write more, but I forgot how much time blogging takes.

Get in The Van

Jason bought a used van over the summer. Actually, to say it’s used is a bit of an understatement. It’s a rusty old thing that whistles, rattles and jerks in a haze of exhaust as it careens down the highway with a blur of asphalt rushing past the rusted out holes in the floor. The van has been heavily customized by the previous owner. And I don’t mean customized in the waterbed and shag rug sort of way, but rather customized in a purely utilitarian, who-gives-a-fuck what it looks like sort of way. Apparently it began its life as a commercial vehicle, but in order for a van to be used as a personal vehicle, it’s legally required to have windows on all four sides. To conform to the law, the previous owner simply sawed through the sheet metal on the side of the van, riveted a piece of plexiglass over the hole and sealed the edges with caulk that looks like old cake frosting. Various mystery wires snake through the walls and along the floor. The one leading to the bare bulb and chain socket screwed to the side of the rear wall is the only one with any apparent use. The windows and walls are plastered with stickers and decals, Harley Davidson wings on the back windows, Jets stickers on the front.

There used to be a CB radio attached to the ceiling, but it was stolen recently. “But they left the microphone. It’s in there,” said Jason, pointing to the glove compartment. “They also stole my EZ Pass and the rearview mirror. The EZ-Pass is useless as soon as I report it stolen, the rearview mirror is worth, what? Maybe five bucks? The CB radio can’t be worth much, and they only took half of it.”

“Oh well, there’s no accounting for the eclectic tastes of a crackhead.”

A few short weeks after Jason first got the van, he stopped by a Pep Boys to buy some oil or something. One of the employees who was working in the garage adjacent to the store stopped Jason on his way out and offered to buy the van from him on the spot. I think he may have asked Jason how well it ran, though it didn’t really matter since he didn’t want it to drive, he wanted to live in it. It turned out that the guy lived in a smaller van behind the shop and was looking for a bigger place. Although he offered more than Jason paid for it, Jason had just bought it, and wasn’t quite ready to part with it. I suggested that he could’ve compromised and offered to rent it to the guy — “Say, 50 bucks a month or something — as long as he’s willing to be driven around town now and then, and that he’s willing help out when you need a hand moving furniture or something. Yo dude, wake up, we need to pick up some motorcycle parts from Rosko.”

Hauling around motorcycles and motorcycle parts is the primary reason Jason bought the van and Jason did in fact pick up a part from our friend Rosko recently. When Jason pulled up outside of Rosko’s garage, Rosko took one look and said, “Hey Jason, when did you get a creepy-guy van?”

“What do you mean creepy guy van?” said Jason, “It has windows.”

I pictured Jason rolling up again, this time with his 50 dollar-a-month tenant:

“Hey Jason, when did you get a creepy guy?”

In any case, it was in this van that Jason picked up Deborah and me for an out of town excursion to Harriman State Park on Saturday.

I could write about the hike, about the beautiful weather, the clean air and sunshine, about how good it felt to be outside, away from the cramped oppression of the dirty ol’ town we call home, but instead, i’ll just post this picture, which sums it up nicely: