The slow "No" Act I Scene 2: Meeting the Producers

PREVIOUSLY ON THE SLOW “NO”

“DON’T SELL THE FILM RIGHTS TO ANYONE ELSE BEFORE TALKING TO ME.”

“HONESTLY MARK, I CAN’T SEE IT AS A FEATURE.”

Jay Leno, Jorge Lorenzo, and Ben Spies at Leno’s garage, 2010.

The reason I had to be back in SoCal was to coordinate a Yamaha MotoGP event held at Jay Leno’s garage in the runup to the USGP at Laguna Seca. My wife came with, and we met Grant and the producer–a guy I’ll call Mike Kravitz–at some nondescript restaurant in Burbank.

Before the food had even arrived Kravitz said, “I can think of about five reasons why your story won’t make it as a Hollywood film.”

I don’t remember what they were. I was probably making notes; I keep all my old notebooks so I guess I could reconstruct the conversation. But I do remember my response.

[I had just finished writing a screenplay based on the true story of the British Army’s motorcycle racing team from the Nazis; I’d already been through the mental exercise of adapting a true story in order to make it viable as a mass-market studio picture. This means doing things like adding a love interest, and changing the story arc and if necessary adding or deleting events and characters to conform to Hollywood’s hidebound three-act structure in which specific plot points occur at specific points in the script.–MG]

“I agree that the true story as told in Riding Man or shown in One Man’s Island isn’t Hollywood material,” I said. “But we’ve already ordered food and are going to sit here for at least an hour. So let me tell you some things that happened to me on the Isle of Man that I left out of the book; some things that happened on the Isle of Man but to other people, not me; and things that happened to me in racing and life before or after the period covered in Riding Man.”

As lunch arrived and we ate, I explained that although I’d barely mentioned lupus in Riding Man, I’d actually been very ill that year. Not only did I feel like shit, the drugs I needed in order to move normally on the motorcycle would dramatically increase the severity of all but the most minor crashes. Subsequently, I went into a complete remission that while not quite a miracle, was very rare. (My rheumatologist actually got a little teary when he told me, “Don’t come back unless you get sick again.”)

I described a post-IoM love interest that could easily be transposed to The Island and told a few mostly true stories about racing misadventures and near misses that had happened to me before or since my TT. They concurred those plot elements would all be fair game for a story that was “true” by Hollywood standards.

Towards the end of lunch, I asked what was in it for me. Years earlier, when I’d wasted a bunch of time helping Dan Strough with his screenplay, I had imagined that the principal benefit would be the promotion of book sales. Kravitz told me that the the guy whose book and life rights had formed the basis of his last (and only) film had received a fee approaching the mid-six figures. I tried not to choke on my last bite of BLT.

We agreed that after I returned to Kansas City, I’d write a short synopsis of a film incorporating some of those elements. I promised to get it to them within a month.

“If I’m going to sell this film,” Kravitz said as we stood to leave, “I’ll sell it by Thanksgiving.”

For the next ten years Thanksgiving always reminded me that I should have asked, “What year?”

Next: The Synopsis

The slow “No” Act I Scene 1: “Honestly Mark, I can’t see it as a feature.”

I finished writing Riding Man in 2006. In a slightly different world, my agent would have sold it to some heavyweight trade publisher where the story would have been shaped by a professional editor. That would have made it better and with a marketing push it might have been a success in the vein of Into the Wild.

PREVIOUSLY ON THE SLOW “NO”

“DON’T SELL THE FILM RIGHTS TO ANYONE ELSE BEFORE TALKING TO ME.”

That was not to be; by then I’d already decided to write it for a narrow audience of people who loved motorcycles & racing, and publish it myself. That said, I still wanted it to look as if Simon & Schuster had produced it. Luckily I had one degree of separation from a brilliant graphic designer & typesetter, Christine Spindler, and two degrees of separation from a top tier commercial artist who loved motorcycles, named Doug Fraser. I gave them complete creative control with the result that–as they’d say on the Isle of Man–my book looked the business.

Art by Doug Fraser, graphic design by Christine Spindler. In the early 2000s there was still a stigma to self-publishing, but at least my book didn’t look self-published.

The first print run of 2,000 copies arrived in early 2007. I distributed review copies to other motorcycle journalists, and built a website to promote it. I sold a few dozen copies through small specialist distributors and listed it on Amazon, where it quickly racked up positive reviews.

Although there were other ways to acquire a copy, most people bought Riding Man directly from me. Every day I walked to the post office in Cardiff, California with a little stack of padded envelopes. Those first readers usually had an email address for me, and everyone had my return postal address; I got really gratifying feedback.

Peter Riddihough had an analogous experience with his documentary, One Man’s Island. His film got a rapturous reception at the Calgary International Film Festival (that was my old home town in Canada.) But he too ended up producing and self-distributing the DVD. So neither of us reached the wide audience we’d hoped for but at least we earned both the author’s and publisher’s share of revenues.

It took years for me to sell down the first 2,000 copies. Quitting my job, moving to the IoM, racing in the TT, writing Riding Man & interacting readers had been emotionally and creatively satisfying in many ways, but it was a financial disaster. By 2010 it was obvious that I needed to move past the whole I-rode-in-the-TT-and-wrote-a-book-about-it thing.

I divorced and remarried a woman I was sure was The One; we moved from SoCal to Kansas City; I tried to resurrect my ad career and I wrote a screenplay of my own, which was based on the British Army motorcycle racing team’s escape from Nazi territory (WWII was declared while they were competing in the 1939 ISDT in Salzburg.)

In the spring of 2010 Peter Riddihough phoned to say that he’d just received a cold call from some guy in Hollywood. The caller, Peter told me, wanted to know if I’d sold the feature film rights to my story.

“I don’t think so, but ask him yourself.” Peter recounted. His call was a heads up; he had given the stranger my number.

Within an hour, I got a call from a guy I’ll call... hmm... Thad Grant.

Grant had been a TV producer and currently worked in a part of the film business that I did not even know existed–at a company that cut together film trailers (I thought that the director and editor of a feature film would cut the trailer for their movie as a sort of final step, but it’s a completely separate niche with specialized directors and editors who use with the studio’s footage.)

Grant had yet to produce a feature but like most people in Los Angeles, he wanted to. The company he worked for sublet an office to a guy who was a producer–that guy had made one successful biopic and was looking to follow it up with another inspiring true-life story. Grant was not particularly friends with the producer; they were just two guys who occasionally bumped into each other in the parking garage under the building.

Grant told me that he’d seen One Man’s Island and read Riding Man; he thought my story might capture that producer’s imagination. Would I mind, he asked, if he pitched Riding Man?

“Of course not,” I told him. As it happened, I had a trip scheduled to California on motorcycle business. “Let’s do lunch,” I suggested in what I imagined was a good imitation of a writer who was routinely pestered by movie producers.

A date was made, and I called Peter Riddihough back with the news. At this point we’d only seen each other a couple of times since he left the IoM after the 2002 TT, but we’d been through so much together that he was one of my most trusted friends.

“This guy thinks he can turn Riding Man into a feature film,” I told him.

“I have to be honest Mark,” Peter said. “I just can’t see it as a feature.”  

“Well,” I admitted, “that makes two of us.”

Next: Meeting the Producers

The slow “No” Cold Open: “Don’t sell the film rights to anyone else before talking to me."

In the early 2000s, I quit a career in advertising, sold everything I owned, and moved to the Isle of Man. My goal was to qualify for and race in the TT, and to write a book about it. I raced in two TT classes in 2002. My account of those races was published as an extended, two-part series called Island Man that appeared in Motorcyclist magazine later that year. A film-maker friend from the ad business, Peter Riddihough, came to the IoM and made a documentary film of my experience there. That film, One Man’s Island, was released in 2004. My Motorcyclist series was expanded into a memoir, Riding Man, that was published in 2007 and re-released in 2011.

A lap of the TT course has nowhere near as many twists and turns as the process of turning a true story into a Hollywood movie. Riding Man spent 10+ years in development hell I am now ready to say it ain’t ever gonna’ be resurrected. Writing this account — and be warned there will surely be many installments — is my way of coming to terms with a process that cost me countless hours and, quite possibly, a marriage.

If you’re reading this, you probably already know everything that happened to me over there. But until now I’ve written little about the decade Riding Man spent in Hollywood’s “Development Hell”

For a guy who was probably the least naturally talented and most cowardly TT racer, my time on the IsIe of Man was pretty extensively documented. But few people know that the story had a life of its own–so there’s a whole story about the story. Most of that meta-story is about Riding Man’s improbable and frustrating decade in development hell as a feature film. But the prequel to that Hollywood story goes back to 2006, even before the book was published.

The truth is that although I put everything I had on the line to race in the TT, it was not a crazy financial decision. I started pitching Riding Man in 1999 and pretty quickly signed with a decent East Coast literary agent who loved the idea.

“I sell 75% of the books that I take on,” he told me. “And my authors’ average advance is $140,000.” I tried to play it cool but in my mind I was multiplying $140k by 0.75 and coming up with $105,000 as an expectation 

Spoiler: He never did get me a publisher. He tried; acquisitions editors at all the major trade publishers rejected it in glowing terms. Usually they praised the writing but wondered whether there were enough motorcycle racing fans and did they read? Presumably they would have rejected The Perfect Storm because there are only a few commercial fishermen left and they probably don’t read, either. (Zac Kurylyk, you’re obviously excepted from this rule!)

My agent pitched it to progressively less impressive imprints while pressuring me to make the story more dramatic and accessible to a broader audience. In the end he decided to retire and thus released me from my contract. I decided that rather than dumb Riding Man down, I’d write it for the members of my tribe: motorcyclists, racers, people who loved the TT.

This takes us to McKinney, Texas some time in 2006 if I recall correctly. (I spent a few months in Texas; long story but not germane.) I’d already been hired and fired at Motorcyclist, and was writing for Road Racer X. Somehow Chris Jonnum, my editor at RRX, spoke to a filmmaker who said that he was in the process of writing a screenplay about the TT. Jonnum gave that guy my number and said, “You have to talk to Mark Gardiner; he raced in it and is just finishing up a book about it.” 

(MG Note: Since even frivolous lawsuits are worth avoiding, I’ll give that filmmaker a different name. Hmm… how about “Dan Strough”?)

I remember getting the first of many phone calls and emails from Strough, who introduced himself and asked if I had some time to talk about the Isle of Man and the TT. Of course I did. At this point, I figured I was talking to some guy who had a day job as a waiter. One thing that I warned him about was that the film rights to the TT had been tied up by a company called Greenlight Productions. Greenlight had been a real pain in Peter Riddihough’s ass.

“Oh, I’m not worried,” Strough told me. “It’ll be a fifty-million-dollar picture. Film rights will be the studio’s problem.”

I was, like, “Oh--kaay.”

After a long, long time on the phone I suggested that for efficiency’s sake I’d send Strough a working draft of Riding Man because most of his questions were answered in the text. Looking back on it now, I can say in his limited defense that he was the only filmmaker who I’m sure read it from start to finish. The next time we spoke, he told me that he loved certain scenes from the book.

“Don’t sell the film rights to anyone else before talking to me,” he said. At that point I really couldn’t translate Filmese into English, so I thought he meant that later, he might be interested in buying the film rights. That was promising, because at that time, my only source of income was freelance writing for motorcycle publishers who, except for RRX, paid neither well nor promptly. Every month it was a huge challenge just to keep a balance available on any one of several credit cards. Over the next few years came to learn that in Filmese, “Don’t sell the film rights to anyone else before talking to me,” wasn’t a statement implying intent, it was a question: “Has anyone else sniffed around your story?”

Strough called and emailed often as he worked out his story; checking to see if what he’d written had been accurate so far. I made many suggestions. This amounted to me burning zero/dollars/per hours talking to, emailing, and generally assisting a guy who lived in New York but kept a motorcycle in California “so he could ride in the winter.”

More and more, I felt my experience being mined for someone else’s benefit; it would be easy to avoid plagiarizing me, and thus obviate the need to ever pay me anything. In hindsight, a smarter/more confrontational person would have said, “Why don’t you pay me an hourly consulting fee, that will be deducted from my option fee later?” But I’m not that guy and anyway, the fastest way to find out if a stranger plans to screw you over is to pretend that you can’t see it coming; if you confront them, they’ll work harder to hide that fact. Learning it later is always worse.

Me being me, I just stopped returning his calls and emails. This decision was made easier after renting a film he’d written and directed, which starred the ingénue du jour and an Academy Award winner. I hated it. I wasn’t alone. Roger Ebert described it as having an “Idiot Plot”. In other circumstances I might’ve given him the benefit of the doubt and assumed the director had messed up a good script, but he’d both written and directed it.

Eventually Strough sent me a finished draft of his Isle of Man script to read. I never opened it. I put him out of my mind and focused on finishing Riding Man and publishing it myself.

Since then I’ve learned to speak pretty fluent Filmese. “I love your work, you’re a genius,” means, “Who are you, again?” In Hollywood, the way people express sincerity is not with words (or as I would learn later, even written and signed contracts.) Only checks matter.

Ironically at that time in my life if Strough had said, “I’ll give you $5,000 for the film rights,” I would happily have signed them over.

Our paths were destined to cross again years later. He was still trying to get funding but by that point a big production company had optioned Riding Man. As far as Hollywood was concerned, the island was only big enough for one feature.

But I’m getting way, way ahead of myself.

NEXT: “Honestly Mark, I can’t see it as a feature.”

What comes between a motorcycle journalist and his jeans? In my case, Bohn.

Nose to the grindstone, as ever…

Over the last 20 years or so, I can’t tell you how many riders have told me they’re jealous of my job. Often, I feel they’re right to envy me. Admittedly I’m paid like a roadie, but motorcycle companies treat me like a rock star. (A year ago, Triumph flew me to the Canary Islands to ride the new Rocket 3. What kind of hotel did they put us up in? Put it this way: One of the other guests was Xi Jinping, the President of China.)

As fun as it is, the job’s dangerous. That group ride turned into an informal but demented Canary Island TT on open roads, as journos passed cars in unsafe gaps at 100 miles an hour just to keep the ride leaders in sight. (I’m not kidding; Triumph’s in the habit of hiring actual TT riders as ride leaders.)

Even innocuous-seeming tracking shots done at slow speed are often made following a photo car down some mountain road with a photographer motioning “come closer” when you’re 18” from the bumper. All of which, of course, is done jet-lagged, on roads you’ve never seen, on a bike you’ve never ridden, on new tires.

Every photo pass to get a shot like this begins and ends with u-turns that are often sketchy AF.

 One thing a lot of readers probably don’t realize is that on many assignments, the publications motojournalists supply have specific instructions about the gear we should wear, too. That’s not a problem if we’re track-testing a crotch rocket; they want us to wear full race gear that provides the best available protection. But often if it’s retro bike or a naked, the “photo-appropriate” gear they supply is jeans and a jacket.

Friends in this job have been maimed, and every year at least one journalist from whom I have at most two degrees of separation is killed. knowing that, and after years racing and testing, I feel naked in anything less than full leather or Roadcrafter-grade outerwear. Even motorcycle-specific jeans with some Kevlar and armor—fine for a ride to the coffee shop—don’t offer enough protection for aggressive riding, if you plan to survive doing it until you reach retirement age.

Anyone who was watching TV in the ’80s remembers a scandalously young (even then) Brooke Shields turning to camera and asking, “Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins?” then breathily answering... “Nothing.”

 Brooke wasn’t a motorcycle journalist.

A few years ago, a riding buddy of mine (not a journo, just a pal who often rode quite aggressively in jeans and a leather jacket—an outfit that seemed marginal at best to me) showed me his Bohn Body Armor.

 I was, like, Damn where has that product been all my life. And the next time I did photo passes in a pair of jeans, I longed for a Bohn underlayer and its absence made me feel even more naked.

So I finally got my hands on – and my body into – Bohn armor. It was a revelation. I got a shirt and pants that are light, breathable, move with my body, and provide an extra layer of armor at all the likely points of contact. It’s not cheap, but besides the obvious benefit of protection in a crash, it actually makes crashes less likely because on a motorcycle, confidence makes you better. Fear of crashing makes you tense, and tension’s the enemy of good riding.

This ancient Vanson Manx jacket has served on many vintage/retro shoots. A few years ago I abandoned open-face lids (even for slow-speed work) and was happy to find this Bell Bullitt which—although my friends tease me for my hipster helmet—gave me a cool open-faced look with vastly better protection. I say “gave” in the past tense because it failed to make its last luggage transfer, and was never seen again after its last air voyage.

 My in-person motorcycle journalism work was largely wiped out by the pandemic, although I’ve been wearing a Bohn underlayer on personal rides. One of my pandemic projects was learning to Rollerblade, and I wore it under jeans and a jacket while doing that, too!

 The best motorcycle protective gear is not cheap, and that goes for your base layer. But I can’t recommend Bohn Body Armor highly enough*.

 *This, by the way, is not a paid endorsement.

A Week on the 'Wire

“I could lose my license on this thing!”

After all these years writing about motorcycles, I admit that it’s been a long time since I’ve been preoccupied with that thought. But the Livewire’s seamless thrust is a uniquely addictive motorcycle rush.

One of the many nice touches on this well thought-out motorcycle is that the mirrors provide a crystal-clear view of the traffic behind you – and if you’re riding it at all aggressively, all of the traffic’s behind you. The mirrors make it easy to look for cops back there, who would presumably be provoked by a near-silent motorcycle suddenly disappearing in front of them. Every time I really whacked the throttle open, I recalled the scene from Star Wars when Han Solo finally got the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive to work.

Charge it quickly, or charge it cheaply. Pick one.

This is not a test

When I moved to Milwaukee last summer, Harley-Davidson’s PR boss Paul James welcomed me by offering the loan of a Livewire. I checked to see if Common Tread wanted test, but that site had already covered the bike pretty thoroughly and I think Editor Lance knew that he had a great, in-depth Livewire-vs-Zero SR/S comparo coming from Jake Bright. My only other client these days is the New York Times, and it had recently run an EV-moto story, so there was no appetite there, either. I reported back to Paul James, with the sad news that I couldn’t place a Livewire story.

“It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “You should still ride it.”

Getting something for nothing always feels weird to me, but I’m glad that I accepted a week on the ’wire, because I learned a lot that I hadn’t picked up in short tests of EVs from Zero, Brammo, and indeed the first-gen Livewire that I rode during its carefully managed press intro in Manhattan.

That said, this isn’t a test of the bike. I’m not going to catalog components; I didn’t systematically explore any of its limits; I won’t place it in context of competing models. Rather it’s a compilation of admittedly-conflicting impressions of the most compelling motorcycle I’ve ridden in years.

When I picked it up at H-D’s historic Juneau Avenue headquarters, the parking lot was empty. The brand may be anchored in notions of ’Murica and freedom, but it is taking a decidedly blue-state view of Covid safety; everyone’s working from home. Paul gave me the briefest overview of the starting procedure and ride modes; the UI thankfully proved intuitive enough that I was able to just figure it out later on my own (that’s not always the case!)

He told me that the company wasn’t really worried about sales figures for an admittedly expensive ($30k!) halo model, and that I should expect lots of questions about it. Sure enough, at least once a day someone rolled down their window at a stoplight to ask, “Is that electric?” At that point I was pretty much compelled to leave the line mimicking Ricky Gadsen, .

I’m getting ahead of myself. My very first impression of the Livewire was that it is a terrific piece of styling. It manages to “look like a Harley” despite being absolutely nothing like any previous Harley. It’s modern but that alloy cowling over the motor (if that’s what’s down there) projects a cool steampunk vibe.

My second impression came when I lifted it off the sidestand. It’s heavy, and a lot of that battery weight is carried fairly high up.

Pardon the moto-journalist’s cliché: As soon as you get rolling , those 530 pounds are immaterial. The combination of riding position and steering geometry made me wonder why Harley-Davidson doesn’t offer this riding experience on a gasoline-powered motorcycle. (Of course when they offered something close to it in the form of the Sportster XR1200x, no one bought it!)

Imagine a Harley you’d happily take to track day. The battery-saving 115 mph “governor” notwithstanding, most riders would be faster on the ’wire than on many lighter and nominally more sporting motorcycles. Although I didn’t take it to the track, I did find myself seeking out places where I could really practice fundamental skills. Near my house there’s a very low-traffic cul-de-sac where I sometimes go and turn circles, left and right, at gradually increasing speeds. I practice looking far into the turn and picking up the throttle on my ICE motorcycle. The motor controller on the ’wire is dialed right in, enabling a super-smooth pickup from a closed “throttle” and very smooth inputs when leaned over.

Riding an EV motorcycle is as much about what you give up as what you gain – you give up clutching and shifting, and give up most of the sound. What I realized was that as instinctive as shifting is, and as much as I have grown accustomed to using intake and engine sound as a speed reference, those things still suck away bandwidth that, otherwise, can go towards hitting your marks and managing body position in performance riding, or just monitoring traffic in more mundane situations.

On the topic of sound... When H-D showed those first Livewire prototypes back in 2014, I was critical of the decision to mount the motor longitudinally. That necessitated a 90° bevel drive between the motor and the belt final drive. Few other EV motorcycles use any kind of gearing, so it seemed like unnecessary weight and complexity and a small source of friction that served only to marginally cut battery life. I guessed that it was a concession to some old-school engineers at The Motor Company who just insisted that there be some gears, somewhere on any motorcycle. I have to admit though, that I like the gear whine it produces, especially at higher speeds. (Although the motor itself operates nearly silently, the tires and belt drive also produce noticeable dBs.)

Harley-Davidson loves its potato-potato idle. The Livewire gets a pulse

The Livewire makes no sound at all at “idle”. That’s a bit of a problem because it’s easy to forget that it’s powered up. A reflexive twist of the right grip can shunt it forward. H-D somehow programmed in a barely perceptible “heartbeat” when it’s armed but motionless.

I’m guessing, but the heartbeat feels like a super-short positive and negative power pulse to the motor, just enough to bump it 1° forward and back at about 1 herz. It’s subtle but definitely there; the first time I took Lisa on it as a passenger she asked, “Are you doing that?” Much cooler, IMO, than potato-potato, and the kind of class touch that might make some people think the ’wire’s worth $10k more than a top-of-the-line Zero.

Sorry, I could not resist taking a picture with this sign.

Charging and range anxiety

I’ll flatter myself and claim that I was one of the very first journalists to really cover electric motorcycles. I talked Bike magazine (UK) into reviewing Zero as a real motorcycle back in about 2008, and covered both Brammo and Mission extensively in print and online, long before most motojournos took them seriously. That said, I’ve rarely ridden one for longer than a single charge; range anxiety and charging hassles were not a thing for me until I lived with the Livewire for a week.

Around town, I never experienced anything resembling range anxiety. For a while, just to see about extending battery range, I switched out of ‘Sport’ mode, but riding a Livewire in range mode is like having a platonic relationship with a porn star; it might be fun just to take her out and be seen with her, but it misses the point.

However, on the weekend, Lisa suggested a ride out to Holy Hill, the site of a Catholic basilica in, as the name suggests, a hilly area where there are some nice curvy (albeit often crowded) roads. Holy Hill’s about 30 freeway miles from where we live, and I was quite aware of the battery gauge’s noticeable drop on the way out there. I was careful to turn back for home while it showed half remaining.

The Livewire has an onboard charger, in the sense that there’s a small charger under the seat that you can plug in to a regular 110v socket. As I understand it, this system works at Level 1 only; you can plug a Livewire into a Level 2 (220v) charger but it won’t charge any faster. That seems like a flaw. My garage has one outlet, but it’s not grounded. The ’wire’s charger would light up when plugged into that outlet, but it runs some kind of diagnostic check as soon as it's plugged in, and it refused to charge on that circuit. I had to charge it by running a super-duty extension cord from my house.

LiveWire owners get 500 kWh of free charging on the Electrify America network, and 2-years free charging at many H-D dealerships that have installed ChargePoint fast chargers. But for the sake of simulating “ownership” I decided to try DC fast-charging, the way you would if you were partway through a long trip and needed juice wherever you could get it.

I spotted an EVgo network charger at a local supermarket. I downloaded an app, and signed up for a simple pay-as-you-go plan. That was easy enough, but the ’wire’s dash told me that it would take 39 minutes to top up the battery from about half-charge. In the end, EVgo dinged me almost $15 for about $1 worth of kWh at Milwaukee’s going rate.

That means that using EVgo electricity was much faster but exponentially more expensive than slow-charging at home. Fast-charging per-mile costs are far higher than the cost of fuel for a conventional motorcycle. And of course, a fill of gasoline’s faster still, and far more convenient for everyone but Mother Nature.

Last but not least, H-D recommends limiting DC fast charging to about ¼ of all charging, in order to maximize the lifespan of the battery. All of this relates to the common rejoinder one hears, after praising an electric motorcycle: “I’m waiting a few years until batteries are smaller/lighter/last twice as long.” The truth is, in all the conversations I’ve had with engineers and scientists working on EV batteries, no one I’ve interviewed has predicted a date by which energy density will double.

We’ve made big improvements in power density – the rate at which you can extract power, and put it back in – but as fast charging infrastructure seems to have standardized on <500V and <125 amps I will go out on a limb and say that for the foreseeable future, electric motorcycles will hit a ceiling of about 100 mile range, at which point you’ll need about an hour to fully recharge.

Even “fast” charging takes long enough that you’re always going to need to kill some time. Adding chips and coffee to this “fill” brought the total to close to $20, for which I got about $1 worth of electricity.

Negatives

I realize that I’m literally half the size of many Harley-Davidson riders, but the Livewire came much too stiffly sprung for the combination of my bony ass and Wisconsin’s roads. Even after I took all the preload out of the shock spring, and took a couple of clicks of compression damping out, and put Lisa on the back, there was no detectable compliance from the shock.

The sidestand has some special Harleyesque locking mechanism. You kick it out but then as the bike settles onto it, it shifts in a way that always made me think I hadn’t fully extended the stand, and it was about to flop over on its side. It never did, of course, and I don’t doubt that unique pivot’s actually better than regular sidestands; I’m just sayin’ that I never got used to it and don’t like it.

Last but not least… Another thing that I never got used to was the effort required to push that sucker around in the garage. Not only is it heavy, there’s a lot of rolling resistance when it’s turned off. I assume that’s because it’s basically a direct drive; there’s no clutch or “neutral” so any time the rear wheel is turning, it’s turning that bevel drive and the motor, too.

Giving motorcycles back is not usually that hard

In the end I felt that I’d need a secure garage with better charging capability to make an EV work for me. I’d also have to live in a place where there are nice roads right outside my garage. (To be fair, if I could afford a $30k motorcycle, I probably would be living in better riding country.)

That said, giving the Livewire back was hard. With a (much) softer shock it would be a fantastic city bike. It was super-fun to ride, very resolved as a design and engineering exercise, and the stares, questions, and thumbs-ups made me feel like a rock star.

From Thanksgiving, 2012

Everything’s changed for me since I wrote this eight years ago. But somehow of all the Thanksgivings before and since, this is the one that sticks in my mind.

The way to support this kind of writing is by buying a book. If you know a motorcyclist who reads — and yes, some do — please consider buying that person one of my books for Christmas.

A couple of weeks ago, on one of the many perfect fall days we've had this year in Kansas City, I went out on my usual bicycle training ride. The ride wasn't a huge deal; on my single-speed, out of my loft and over into the West Bottoms then up the 12th Street viaduct, through downtown, past River Market and down into the East Bottoms, and back. Basically, it was up and over the biggest hills I could find around my house; an hour and a bit in which I try to make up with quality what I lack in quantity.

Most of the route passed through largely un-, or at least under-used warehouse districts, and the roads, as usual, were pretty empty. The Kansas and Missouri rivers meet here, hence the 'Bottoms' in those neighborhood names, but I only occasionally caught a glimpse of the water. The American Royal, a huge rodeo and stock fair, was on and there were horses hobbled in parking lots, and pastured along the levee.

It was late afternoon. The sun raked in. The sky was a deep, deep blue. Black shadows. Backlit trees in fall colors; as if the the world was created for cinematographers. I rocked it; if my quads got any more pumped, I'd've been at risk for compartment syndrome. As I approached my turn around point, down in the East Bottoms I came to the long straightaway where I sprinted into a headwind.

The East Bottoms is, well, sort of a weird area. It's mostly industrial, with some run-down residential and a great honky-tonk bar – Knucklehead's – hidden away there, too. I passed a trailer park, and heard the sound of a compressor and a nail gun. The place was was mostly filled with actual trailers like the ones you'd pull on a vacation, as opposed to mobile homes. The nail gun was being used to skirt one of the trailers to keep winter drafts out from beneath it. I thought, The guy should've taken care of that last winter – which was KC's hardest winter in decades. Or, had he just been foreclosed out of some warm home and moved into those new digs?

I turned around, caught the tailwind, and cranked up my cadence, as fast as I could spin. Ripping back down the straight with my head down, for the nth time I felt intense gratitude for such simple pleasures, and for having managed to stay in shape. I spent a few weekends last summer watching Kevin Atherton limp around the Lloyd Brothers Motorsports Ducati at flat track races. While he's resolutely cheerful, it's clear his racing career took a huge toll on him. I've had friends pay far higher prices than that, too, enduring injuries I know I couldn't bear.

Our sport is dangerous; that's not news. I wasn't one of those riders who thought, It won't happen to me. I thought about danger often. It was never dying that scared me, it was not dying that scared me. I've got some expensive Ti components (and I'm missing some cognitive functions; if you tell me your phone number, I have to write it down one digit at a time) but so far, I've come off lightly.

In fact, I'm able to enjoy simple physical pleasures not in spite of motorcycles and motorcycle racing, but because of it. It's not just that motorcycles haven't killed me (yes, I'm touching wood as I type this.) Motorcycles actually kept me alive.

I've never really told this story in much detail, but 15 or 20 years ago, when I was a club racer up in Canada, I got sick. I had some kind of autoimmune disorder, which depending on which doctor I asked was either lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. You know the expression, 'off the charts'? My white counts were literally off the charts. I got a graphic output after one lab test and the bar graph went off the edge of the page. When I finally got in to see a specialist, after a long wait, he looked up from that lab result and said, “I wouldn't have been surprised to see you come in in a wheelchair.”

I was lucky that when it came on, I was in outstanding physical condition; I'd been training hard since university. I had a lot to lose before I'd ever be incapacitated. And, typical of people with lupus, I found that while it was painful and utterly exhausting to keep working out, the harder I trained the less I felt the symptoms. Still, I could only slow – not reverse – the course of the disease.

Month by month and year by year, I lost strength and range of motion in virtually every part of my body. It was frustrating because I was club racing and learning to ride better, but I couldn't really capitalize on it. I had to be super-careful not to crash; the drugs I was taking made the risks of injury much higher and besides, just getting out of bed in the morning already hurt like hell. By the time I raced in the TT, in 2002, I was careful not to let my friends see how hard I had to struggle just to get into my leathers or let them know that I'd almost bleed out from a shaving nick. And after that... It was as if my body had been holding out just to let me live out that dream, because in the next year, symptoms took a turn for the worse.

During that year of precipitous physical decline, I found myself wondering, At what point would in not be worth living? My life had, for decades, been defined more by physicality than intellectuality or spirituality. I decided that at the point where I couldn't wipe my own butt, I didn't want to live. Let me tell you, it was seriously depressing and I frequently rehearsed, in my mind, that hunting accident.

Through that period, I really wanted to finish my memoir, Riding Man, and I was grateful that I could at least type. But the thing that kept me going was that I could still ride motorcycles. Maybe not well, or nearly at the level I once had ridden; getting a leg over the saddle was a real trick. You really don't need Too Much Information on this so I won't go into detail, but even though there days when I wasn't flexible enough to reach my butt, I still put in 1,000 kilometers in the alps, unearthing the story of Pierlucio 'Spadino' Tinazzi, the hero of the Mont Blanc Tunnel fire.

So I put off the hunting accident.

Before I reached that point, I found a doctor who changed my drug regimen to one that worked way better, at least in the short-to-medium term. The drugs I was taking were literally toxic – one of them is used to kill cancer cells in chemotherapy – but they radically improved my life. Once they really kicked in, I could ride OK. I could cycle and swim and, as before, the harder I trained the better I felt. For the first time in over a decade, I started to feel better and better, not worse and worse.

After a year and half in France, I moved back to North America, to San Diego. I started working at Motorcyclist, had health coverage for a while, and found a new specialist. By that point, I was an expert on lupus and rheumatoid arthritis myself, and we had a long discussion about which of those two diseases affected me. It didn't really matter, since I had a treatment that worked for the time being, and in any case, neither disease is curable. At that point, when I looked at friends my age who weren't sick, they were mostly in such crappy shape that I wouldn't have traded places with them.

Then my cool job fell apart, I got divorced and remarried – poor but happy – and I started to feel... good. My doctor and I developed a plan to wean me off drugs and, for the first time in well over a decade, my blood tests started to look... normal. I don't use the phrase 'miracle,' that would be too strong. But about two years ago, my doctor – a very experienced rheumatologist – got a little teary when he said, “Don't call me again unless you get sick.” That's not something those guys get to say. Their patients don't get better, the job is just to mitigate the symptoms as long as possible.

I know that the thing that got me through to that point, was, there was a part of me that was determined to stay healthy enough to ride motorcycles. The weights, the cycling, swimming, yoga; the glucosamine sulfate, the 30,000 aspirin, the prednisone, the methotrexate... all that stuff wasn't to ward off pain and depression and slow the progress of the disease, it was, This is what you have to do to ride. You know those idiots in the German-inspired half-helmets who wear those “Live to ride, ride to live” patches? Well, for me that was literal truth.

I climbed up out of the East Bottoms through downtown KC, and right up at the top of that hill in the financial district, I was distracted by something I saw on the sidewalk. Two private security guards were sort of wrestling an unconscious street person upright on bus stop bench, and he ended up slumping heavily to the sidewalk. It only took a few seconds for me to process the situation. It wasn't violent and as far as I could tell, they were just getting ready to call the cops or an ambulance which would be doing the guy a favor. He wasn't very warmly dressed, and when the sun went down the temperature would quickly drop into the thirties. One of the guards noticed me noticing them and as I rode past called out, “Good afternoon sir, how are you?” They'd said similar things to me when I'd passed before under normal circumstances, but his question was incongruous when there was someone lying right there at his feet who was clearly not having a good afternoon .

The light turned green and I pedalled away. At the next light I stopped beside a limousine. The passenger window rolled smoothly down. I looked in at the driver, who called out, “Want to trade?” It crossed my mind that his job paid better than motorcycle journalism, but then I remembered that my job allowed me to the freedom to hop on my bicycle and train, or go for a motorcycle ride, on any unseasonably fine day.

I laughed and said, “No.”

“I'd rather be where you are,” he said. “This is the wrong kind of saddle-sore!”

Then, he rolled up the window and the light turned green.

A few blocks later, one short final sprint, I was home. I locked up my bicycle downstairs, glanced at the Triumph and my '65 Dream, and thought, You deserve to take the elevator today. Before I'd even reached my door, I could smell chili simmering on the stove.

Get America back up on its wheels

Ask Harley-Davidson how Trump’s trade policies have worked out for American exporters. Does Donald Trump tell it like it is? What he tells people in private is that veterans are losers and suckers, and that his blue collar supporters disgust him. Would a businessman know how to grow the economy? We’ve seen his taxes now. “Drain the swamp?” His appointees have enriched themselves. All that’s left – the only reason anyone could have to vote for this buffoon – is racism. That’s the one thing he’s been honest about.

I began writing about motorcycles for a living in 2000. So we’re coming up on my sixth American Presidential election as a motojournalist. Until now, I’ve never even considered writing a post on whether you should vote, or who for. This time, it’s different.

Last week, I highlighted another great New York Times story by Vanessa Friedman, the Times’ fashion editor, who has been killing it with an occasional series on political fashion in which she barely conceals her contempt for Donald Trump.

When I tweeted out a link to Vanessa’s story, I wrote admiringly of her acknowledgement that in this moment journalism needs all hands on deck. Fashion editor? Find the fashion angle, but make people think about the dire situation we’re now in.

A few days later I wondered, “What about motorcycle journalists?”

I’ve never written so obviously about politics. After all, motorcycling and motorcycle racing exist largely independent of politics.

American motorcycling and motorcycle racing skew conservative. People who ride American V-twins or who attend AFT races even more so; a large number of my friends who ride love their guns, too. So I probably won’t make myself any more popular by urging you to vote for Joe Biden next month, and support Democratic candidates for Senate, in order to save the fucking republic. 

American motorcyclists skew conservative. If you’re a MotoGP fan or a hipster on a caféd-out CB550, please vote to counter these people. If you’re from Kansas (where this photo was taken) your vote for President won’t matter, but your vote for Barbara Bollier, who is making a surprisingly strong run for a Kansas Senate seat, may be even more important..

It’s been a hell of a four years, eh?

I don’t doubt that in 2016, a majority of American motorcyclists who voted cast their votes for Donald Trump. I didn’t but if you did, I get it. Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate. And millions of Americans were tired of “business as usual” in Washington, admired an outsider who “told it like it was”, and thought a self-made billionaire entrepreneur might remake the federal bureaucracy in the mythically efficient free-market mode.

But four years later, we know better. Hundreds of prominent, lifelong conservatives have banded to together to support a Democrat, just this once. Hundreds of senior military officers and intelligence community operatives—people who are inclined to keep their politics almost obsessively private—have openly described Donald Trump as this moment’s greatest threat to American democracy.

The lie’s been put to any idea of Trump as an effective executive, and hindsight’s 2020: The idea of Trump draining the swamp is beyond laughable. He may be lazy and only semi-literate, but his one knack has been using his position to enrich himself. All that’s left, as an argument to vote for him is, he’ll keep the brown people in their place. So if you’ve read this far and are still thinking, “I’m going to vote for him,” then yes, you’re racist.

Then there’s the pandemic

Both the New England Journal of Medicine and Scientific American recently endorsed a candidate – Joe Biden – for the first time in their histories. The United States has twice Canada’s per capita death rate. Developing nations like Vietnam are kicking our asses when it comes to protecting their populations, and economies, from Covid-19.

[I]f almost everyone in the U.S. wore masks in public, it could save about 66,000 lives by the beginning of December, according to projections from the University of Washington School of Medicine. Such a strategy would hurt no one. It would close no business. It would cost next to nothing. But Trump and his vice president flouted local mask rules, making it a point not to wear masks themselves in public appearances.—Scientific American

Even before the pandemic, the American motorcycle industry and American motorcycle racing were having a tough go of it. We never really recovered from the Great Recession of 2008-’09. Like most other businesses, most American motorcycle dealerships, distributors, and manufacturers have unnecessarily suffered because of Trump’s grossly inept and often willfully ignorant “leadership”. Motorcycle racing was severely hurt. Not only was Austin’s MotoGP race canceled last spring, I can promise you that it will not happen next spring either, because after 10 months of gross incompetence by the Trump administration, there’s so much Covid-19 here now that it is impossible to make the U.S. safe for foreign visitors any time soon.

Back in the spring, some dealerships far from east coast hotspots did well with dirt bike sales as people looked for ways to have fun while social distancing. Stimulus checks helped. But as we enter a winter in which countless people’s savings will run out and countless small businesses will close, the Trump administration’s mishandling of the pandemic will come back to haunt all of us. Motorcycles are a great escape, but the motorcycle industry is still a part of a sick economy, and motorcycle racing is part of a sick culture.

So it’s come to this: In more than a century, American motorcycling and motorcycle racing has never faced an existential threat from an American political actor. But this time, it’s incumbent on all of us – regardless of our normal political habits – to ensure that Trump and the people who enabled him are voted out in November and thrown out in January. If the GOP learns anything from what I hope will be a historic repudiation, those of you who lean conservative can go back to your party in 2024.

I won’t flatter myself by calling this an endorsement, so I’ll let New England Journal of Medicine’s editors speak for me.

[T]ruth is neither liberal nor conservative. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.—New England Journal of Medicine

For fuck’s sake, vote.

I'll miss Cycle World, but not for the reason you think

This comment was posted on Revzilla’s Common Tread blog. It was made with tongue-in-cheek of course, but the underlying truth is serious. Digital=Ephemeral

I’ve been anticipating the end of Cycle World as a print magazine for a decade now. As a freelancer, I had a checkered relationship with them anyway. Getting paid was a chronic problem.

CW had some authoritative staffers and contributors during the years I dealt with it. Don Canet was a terrific test rider; Peter Egan was too good for any motorcycle magazine, and Kevin Cameron still provided an occasional deep insight. But at the top, editors and publishers were not just experienced but also hidebound.

Years ago, after one of the serial upheavals there, new owners replaced the publisher. As it happened, I came to know the new publisher’s identity before it was public. I remember telling another insider who it was going to be and she immediately spat, “That’s it. They’re screwed. They had an opportunity to change things, but decided to stick with same bunch of losers.”

Proximate cause of death? Disruption in publishing generally; a weak motorcycle market; Covid… take your pick. As I wrote back in 2011, I still think there’s a role for a motorcycle magazine of record—a real one, in print. Others disagree. But there’s another reason I’ll miss Cycle World even though I didn’t really like it.

The end of permanence

Lance reported on the end of Cycle World on Revzilla’s Common Tread blog, and one of the comments really jolted me.

“I'm gonna have to buy a lot of iPads to keep my garage walls covered with motorcycle pics.”

It was tongue-in-cheek, but got to a much deeper truth. People always warn you to be discreet online, because “the Internet is permanent”. But it really isn’t. I wrote hundreds of Backmarker columns for the old RoadRacerX.com site, but when Racer X pulled the plug on that magazine, the website wasn’t even archived.

A tiny fraction of what I wrote is preserved on the Wayback Machine archive, but many of those early Backmarkers are lost forever. Hard drives have crashed, old computers have been rendered obsolete and thrown out, and backup drives have been lost in moves. Sometimes, I can extract old copy from archived emails, but back then I used a Yahoo email address and they’re not reliable any further back than about 2008.

After RoadRacerX.com was summarily killed (it was profitable, by the way, just not profitable enough) Bart Madson, who was editing Motorcycle-USA.com, invited me to move Backmarker to that site. I posted hundreds of Backmarker columns there, too, before it was killed by new owners. At least they left the site up—presumably because it had some advertising value. But the last time I looked for an old column there, I could not find the site at all.

By contrast, in the early 2000s I wrote about a hundred Classic America columns for the UK magazine Classic Bike. At the time, the magazine had a laughably rudimentary website—basically it was just a link to a subscription service. My column never appeared online, but because Classic Bike is the kind of magazine that almost every subscriber hangs on to, my columns will remain readable as long as there are people to read ‘em. My point is that once a story is physically printed in a mass-circulation magazine, it will always be available. You might not be able to retrieve it in seconds, but if you’re willing to search for it, you’ll be able to find it.

When I researched my story about the British Army team’s escape from the 1939 ISDT, I got a special library card and went to the British Library’s newspaper and magazine archive in north London, where they happily provided any physical magazine that I wanted. At that time, they were at least 60 years old. I can fucking promise you that no motorcycle web site will still be online in 2080.

It’s not just the Internet that’s proven impermanent. It’s digital formats generally

When I left the Isle of Man in 2002, I had hundreds of rolls of 35mm film—B&W and color—stored in binders. I didn’t really know where I was going from there, and the last thing I needed was a suitcase full of photos, so I asked around amongst photographers, to determine how I could have them scanned and archived.

The consensus was that the best choice was to send them in to be scanned to Kodak Photo CDs. I spent hundreds of dollars scanning hundreds of select images, and once I had the discs in hand, culled almost all the original negs and trannies.

You can already guess where this is going, I bet. Now, almost 20 years on, there’s simply no way to extract and display those files. No common image handling software can read them. The only IoM images I can now use are the ones that I happened to open with Kodak’s proprietary software (when it was supported) and saved as .jpg files.

So don’t give me this ‘the Internet is permanent’ BS

I’ll tell you what’s permanent. Print. Physical media. Yes, you can burn a newspaper, but you’ll never burn every copy of a newspaper. And yes, paper’s biodegradable but if you just take a stack of newspapers and bury them, they’ll still be legible when they’re unearthed in a century. Stained, mildewed, water-damaged, but ultimately readable. We’re still reading paper documents from ancient Egypt, for fuck’s sake.

So that’s unlike my old Backmarker columns. And photos taken in the Civil War are still usable, unlike the ones I trusted to Kodak Photo CDs less than 20 years ago.

Speaking of permanence, the best of my (surviving) Backmarker columns can be yours forever, for just $22, if you buy a copy of On Motorcycles: The Best of Backmarker. Click the pic to jump straight to Amazon. And thanks for reading.