Month: August 2009

The “American Girl in Italy” Lambrettista

Surely you’ve seen the poster, it has graced countless dorm rooms, and hangs in every other Italian restaurant in Chicago. Ruth Orkin’s photo “American Girl in Italy” has been a popular symbol of Italy for decades, but the first thing any scooterist sees is the early Lambretta to the right of the frame. Corriere della Sera recently tracked down the Lambrettista (now 79 and living in America) and interviewed him,. From what little sense the Google translation makes (he’s a Clint Eastwood lookalike? What?), it sounds like a fascinating story.

CARB fines Viva $1.875 million

The California Air Resources Board has fined Viva Motor Sports and some Viva dealers $1.875 million for importing and selling motorcycles, scooters, and ATVs that didn’t meet CARB requirements. CARB chairman Mary D. Nichols summed up the case:

There are plenty of great motorcycles that meet clean air standards. Most dealers know this and carry only bikes that have their California smog certificate. Those who try to cut corners put themselves in a lose-lose situation. Violators pay penalties and damage their reputations while putting public health at risk.”

Only $268,000 of the fine will be collected if the companies follow CARB regulations in the future. Importers complain that CARB regulations are too strict and the approval process is overcomplicated, but CARB is one of few agencies that have the power to regulate scooter imports and punish violations, so it’s good to see them actually going after some flagrant violations.

Owners can return the bikes, if the bikes are not returned, they will be barred from future registration.

(Thanks to NoHo Scooters and Scooterism for the story!)

Electric Lambretta GP?

dscn0053gp1The current issue of Scoot! Magazine features an ad from GP200.net promising an “All-Electric GP200e” with a photo of a vintage Lambretta GP.

The link redirects to Wheego.net, which features absolutely no info on the scooter. Wheego is an electric car company that like most electric car companies seems to have already hyped their vehicles profusely, then missed a few self-imposed deadlines. Wheego is apparently backed by EarthLink founder (and ex-Mobil-exec) Mike McQuary, whom I will never forgive for the hour-plus I spent on the phone cancelling my EarthLink account, but my distrust of this endeavor goes beyond that experience.
Continue reading “Electric Lambretta GP?”

VVV: Rancid, Rancid, Rancid

Rancid: A little ska, a lot of punk, almost cartoonish machismo, it’s no wonder they’re a scooterist favorite. And it doesn’t hurt that their videos are loaded with scooters. Welcome to a triple-play Vespa Video Vednesday.

Artist: Rancid
Song: “Salvation”
Album: Let’s Go (1994)
Scooter(s): Several vintage Vespas and Lambrettas
Scooter content: about 15 seconds
Jump to the good parts: 1:22, 2:08

After a few weeks of VVV, we start to see a pattern develop: when you need some subbacultcha cred, just call the local club and have ’em show up for the video shoot. In this case (my favorite Rancid song, if you care), the boys are on the run from the suits, and they get chased through an alley full of scooters, which later join in the chase. Good footage, the scooters dont’ seem too extraneous, and it’s a good song. I bet this video sent a lot of punker kids to the classifieds looking for scooters.

VVV listmaster David Smith says there’s a scooter in the video for Rancid’s biggest hit, Time Bomb, but I’m not seeing it. Maybe at 1:16? (Sorry, can’t embed that video. Amazingly, the YouTube videos linked from Rancid’s site were removed by their label, and some of the ones that remain have embedding blocked)

Artist: Rancid
Song: “Red Hot Moon”
Album: Indestructible (2003)
Scooter(s): 4 vintage Vespas
Scooter content: 3 seconds
Jump to the good parts: 0:00

Rancid hasn’t gone away, they pop up with a new album every few years (the latest came out a couple months ago). This video is for a lesser known track from 2003, but it’s a good one. It appears to be shot in and around the historic New York City club CBGB (which sadly closed last year), and the opening shots feature a group of mods and rockers parked in front of the club. From there, the video goes all over the place, with some live footage, and a couple different storylines, and we don’t see the scooters again, but if David’s right (I’m sure the comments will be full of people telling me how blind I am), that makes three videos with scooters from one well-known and famously uncompromising band, two of them fairly big hits. That’s going to be hard to top.

Hyped to death

BusinessWeek talks about why GM just doesn’t get it:

Why won’t [the Volt] be knocking socks off? Because by the time dealerships actually receive their Volts, the impulse buyers will have been seeing the vehicle for almost three years. To GM’s most cherished buyer demographic, the Volt will be old news by the time the first one hits the streets.

The same applies to most products, including scooters. People often accuse me of favoritism towards (for instance) Genuine and SYM, and being mean-spirited about other brands. To be fair, I’ve had less-than positive things to say about both Genuine and SYM, but I think part of the reason I have so many good things to say about them is that they’re two brands that do a great job of building up hype while keeping expectations realistic, then deliver on time, with a product that’s even better than what was expected.

Most other brands just don’t do this well. Piaggio posts photos and press releases months, sometimes years, before a product is available in Europe. Then, any excitement from the European launch is long-gone by the time products finally arrive in the U.S. To make matters worse, U.S. models are often stripped-down versions of their European counterparts. Diamo (Italjet) and CMSI/TNG (the Lambretta/Scomadi/”L” series) hyped vaporware for years and years and never came through. Cobra/Peirspeed’s exciting MadAss250 was old news when it arrived a few weeks ago, a few years after dealers and consumers expected to see it.

The small-but-dedicated American scooter media is always hungry for news. Bloggers, journalists, and newsgroup admins become players in this careful balance between hype vs. reality. We love a scoop, but we hate empty promises, especially when they’re repeated for years, and our bullshit detectors have become finely honed since 2000 or so. Obviously, getting press is important (What the hell has Kymco done in the last 9 months?), but press is useless when products are years away from reality. Ultimately the decision to release information is up to the manufacturers, and they could be doing a better job of it. Genuine (since the Stella) and SYM (recently) have done well to reach out to the small-but-dedicated scootersphere, always being honest and realistic about their plans. This communication benefits the company, who keeps interest in their products high, the media, who get something to talk about, and consumers, who get a realistic forecast of the direction of the industry and reliable new-product information.

Get Smart, Anne

The latest celebrity scooterist is Anne Hathaway, riding what appears to be a Chinese Yamaha Vino knockoff for Garry Marshall’s film Valentine’s Day, which will hopefully be called something else by the time it comes out in 2010, because there are, like, ten feature films already called that.

Miss Hathaway is a favorite around here, but this film’s scooter choice is a bit ironic, since her recent movie “Get Smart” was involved in a big marketing blitz with Vespa and Subway, and I don’t remember even seeing a scooter in that film.

If those aren’t enough photos of Anne with a scooter, here’s a photo of Anne with a photo of a scooter, probably from the Subway/Vespa promotion. The girl-to-scooter proportions there balance out the Amazon Mary Jane Watson Lambretta Spider-Man comic cover we posted this morning.

’Tween Wolf

Phil Waters from POC Scooters had the chance to take a road trip on SYM’s Wolf 150, here’s his report:

merwolf1

Ever since we first spotted the SYM Wolf 150 at DealerExpo in Indianapolis in February, we’ve been pretty well enamored with it. Some of us readily admit that our love of scooters goes hand in hand with our love of motorbikes so seeing the resurgence of the small displacement motorcycle is pretty important to us.
Continue reading “’Tween Wolf”

Spider Man and more scooter comics

Eric tweets that the new issue of Amazing Spider-Man (#602) features Mary Jane on a Lambretta. Is that computer-generated art or a gouache painting? And why is Mary Jane so huge? I avoid comic book stores because I’ve chosen to waste all my disposable income on scooters and records, but I might have to pick that up.

Eric runs Modern Buddy, and even if you hate Twitter, follow his “Scooterism” on RSS, it’s always great stuff.

Speaking of comics, Eric (OTHER Eric) at Chicago Scooter Club recently posted a roundup of scooter comics, including Chynna Clugston-Major’s “Blue Monday” and “Scooter Girl” series and a new “Mods and Rockers” comic. And don’t forget Ed Brubaker’s Deadenders and The Originals by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame.

Spree to the beach

Artist Jay Nelson rigged up a custom Honda Spree with a surfboard-bearing roof, a retractable awning, and a wooden storage bin. (An early sketch shows he originally intended it to be a Vespa.)

Funny how stuff like this spreads around… The scooter was exhibited last Fall at Nelson’s “The Autonomous Zone” exhibit at TripleBase gallery in San Francisco. Apparently a current exhibition of Nelson’s work at Gottino, a restaurant in NYC, brought the scooter to the attention of a Portugese-language green design blog, and the image ended up on Notcot, where it was spotted at random by John Park at Makezine. In this case, 2SB reader Sharon spotted it there and sent it our way (Thanks, Sharon! This rant has nothing to do with you), but I’ll probably see the Makezine story later tonight when I’m scanning Google News Alerts, and it’ll be on every scooter blog and newsgroup in America by tomorrow, credited to Makezine. I just point this out because it’s interesting how blogs come across stories then other blogs link to the blog they saw it on rather than the original blog, and what could have been a big bonanza in hits for the person that originated the story ends up bogging down their server with anonymous hot-linked image hits. It’s the internet, whattaya gonna do, but I thought it’d be fun to track down the reason that a year-old art exhibition was suddenly getting a spike in attention. It’d be fun to do a website that pulls stories off Boing Boing and Metafilter and Slashdot and Digg and tracks them back to their original genesis, which is usually by someone that put a lot of effort into the story, and was forgotten in the process of re-writing, simplifying, linking, and forwarding.

Not that I don’t do the same thing, all day every day (though I generally don’t help myself to photos when I don’t know where they came from). I’ve been sort of reluctant to post this sort of sixth-hand story lately, but I guess that’s what what bloggers are supposed to do. Hopefully my occasional hard work on original content makes up for it. Sorry about the weird tangent there, but these things interest me.

Perseids tonight

Tonight’s the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, we saw a few last night from the front porch with Chicago light pollution, so if you can ride out somewhere dark and clear tonight, it should be amazing.

Darren has organized a group ride for Chicagoans. Meet at Dunkin’ Donuts, 5000 W Irving Park. The ride departs at 10pm.

VVV: Les Breastfeeders “Mini Jupe et Watusi”

Velcome! It’s Vednesday, and here’s your Video: today we’ve got another of the dozens of videos on David Smith’s list that I’d never seen. Les Breastfeeders from Montreal:

Artist: Les Breastfeeders
Song: “Mini Jupe et Watusi”
Album: Déjeuner Sur l’herbe (2004)
Scooter(s): ’60s Vespa (VBB?)
Scooter content: about 30 seconds
Jump to the good parts: throughout

For the second week in a row, we milk Canada (or should I say MuchMusic) for a VVV, and while JDiggz’ video was fun, this one is even more fun, and the song is way more up our alley. Les Breastfeeders have been around for a few years, mixing up a garage rock sound with power pop and a hint of classic Yé Yé that Stereo Total stole from Serge Gainsbourg and Françoise Hardy. Which, hell, how can you not love that combo? They top it off with an undead tambourine player named Johnny Maldoror, who I’m guessing is the Quebecois version of Bez out of Happy Mondays, or the weird old guy in Arrested Development (not Jeffery Tambor, I’m talking about the band!).

In this particular effort, they tie together a song honoring the mini skirt and Watusi with a slick video featuring a Godfather-style gangster plot. Les Breastfeeders’ bassist Suzie McLelove appears on a white Mod Vespa throughout the frenetic video, and delivers the hit weapon and facilitates the getaway. This is the best video/song combo to grace VVV yet, and I’m having a hard time seeing it going anywhere but downhill from here. I’m definitely going to be tracking down some more music from these guys and putting VIna’s nearly-useless bachelors’ degree in French to the test.

Thanks to everyone who’s been sending in videos! David’s list contains enough to last a couple years of Vednesdays, but keep ’em coming! Hard to believe there are so many!

NoHo’s “Cash For Clunkers” Program

NoHo Scooters in Los Angeles is doing its part to clear out our streets and carports of junk scooters, without government subsidies! Bring in any scooter, running or not, and get $300 off a new one. That’s the best deal you’re ever going to get on your Geely with a seized engine and 250 miles on the odometer. NoHo Owner Mike Frankovich tells us “Somebody had to do it!.”