When scooter news breaks, we put it under a tarp in the garage.
One of our favorite shops, Motorsport Scooters (aka Scooterwest) in San Diego, CA, has a spiffy new site and a big “NC-17” anniversary party scheduled for Saturday. If you’re not in town, take advantage of 30% off all items this weekend when you order from the new site.
And here in Chicago, don’t forget about Logan’s Run on Saturday and Scooterworks Chicago’s Sunday Ride.
The Scooter Scoop reports that the MadAss 125 is finally available at dealers. We first reported on the MadAss more than six years ago, and a 125 version was announced shortly later. The Xkeleton Trickster, a knockoff version, beat the MadAss 50 to the U.S. market, and original MadAss importer Tomberlin (who now runs Schwinn’s scooter business) apparently never got the MadAss 50 off the ground here. Since then, Pierspeed became Sachs’ U.S. importer, and displayed the 50cc and 125cc versions at DealerExpo in early 2008. The 50cc finally became widely available in spring 2008, but supply problems held back the 125 for another year and a half. A sweet-looking MadAss 500 prototype was the darling of the internet last summer, hopefully that becomes reality, and the seemingly-forgotten X-Road 125 (and a rumored 250 version) would also be nice additions to the lineup.
Aprilia, an arm of the Piaggio group, has released a pair of two stroke race replicas to honor their re-entry into World Superbike competition and the rider that brought them glory in Grand Prix racing in the 1990s, Max Biaggi. The RS125 motorcycle and the SR50 scooter have been decked out in race replica bodywork. The Italian factory has produced replicas in the past to honor Tetsuya Harada, Valentino Rossi, Marco Melandri, Manuel Poggiali and Jorge Lorenzo. The best part is just that this shows they are continuing to make the two stroke one-two-five. Thanks, again, to Motoblog.it.
This Saturday (August 6, 2009), join the Chicago Scooter Club for Logan’s Run, a tour of Logan Square.
Ryan, hold off on the TMax, it’s going to have 2010cc and a flux capacitor. Oh, wait, 2010 is the model year. It can’t possibly be almost 2010, can it? Surely Oberdan is behind this, right?
Vespa Video Vednesday is back, on an actual Vednesday! Here’s a good one that I think ten people sent me two years ago when it was new and I never even watched until I saw it on David Smith’s master list that inspired this enterprise:
Artist: JDiggz
Song: “Make It Hot”
Album: Memoirs of a Playbwoy (2007)
Scooter(s): Series 1 Lambretta, Vespa P-series
Scooter content: about 30 seconds
Jump to the good parts: 1:11, 1:42, 4:08
Canadian rapper JDiggz’ tune doesn’t do much for me, but it’s at least innocuous. The fact that the video is so totally incongruous to the song kinda makes it better, and the fact that they steered clear of the obvious gang-war motif buys them some points, too. It’s very nicely shot, and fun. JDiggz looks totally slick, and his posse of mods and hot-pantsed bootie chicks is somehow funny and believable.
The La Dolce Vita-esque intro is funny, but doesn’t really fit with the Quadrophenia thing. Though it appears to be a TV175, the Series-1 Lambretta predates the mods-and-rockers era, and the P-series Vespa is even more out of place. Of course JDiggz fans could care less about that. It’s obviously shot in Toronto on a leftover Jackie Chan movie set, which doesn’t really evoke London or Brighton, but JDiggz looks just about as wobbly and uncomfortable on a scooter as Phil Daniels.
Remember that time we had an idea for a regular feature and only kept it up for three weeks? Check back next week and see if we can break our record!
Oberdan, just stop it already, I can’t read Italian and Google translations never make it clear if the insane vehicle I’m looking at is a real manufacturer-endorsed concept sketch, or just random nuttiness that popped into your head.
Update: he’s got a new Gilera sketch, too.
And a million more on his Motosketches site, which is a joy to visit. We love you Oberdan, we just can’t tell the difference between fantasia i realtà.
Yep, we were gone for a week or so, checking out the scooter scene in Sturgis, Michigan. (I posted a similar photo on my Facebook page and apparently my friends actually think I’d waste valuable vacation time at a Harley rally.)
In any case, we’re back and there’s some some good stuff on deck, including a Vespa Vednesday Video and some good news from Genuine.
So we’re back with the second installment of Vespa Video Vednesday, only a couple days late, and this time we’ll choose a video at random from David Smith’s list… Ah, crap, not this one…
Band: Third Eye Blind
Song: “Semi-Charmed Life”
Album: Third Eye Blind (1997)
Scooter(s): Many vintage Vespas and Lambrettas
Scooter content: 30-40 seconds
Jump to the good parts: all over the place
This is the sound of late-nineties douchebaggery, the sound of Spin-Doctors-wannabees stomping on Kurt Cobain’s grave throughout the second half of the decade. To be honest, it’s not a terrible song, it’s catchy enough, but its oversaturation in commercials, movies, shitty parties, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch was more than enough to make these guys rich, and they probably hate the song more than I do. It’s such a chick flick cliche that even chick flicks make fun of it now.
I didn’t have a TV for the second half of the nineties, so I never saw this video until a few years ago. I don’t imagine I would have cut the song a break even knowing about the scads of sweet vintage scooters in the promo clip. If you turn down the sound, and you aren’t prone to seziures from the EXTREME! NINETIES! ONE! SECOND! EDITS!, there’s a lot to see here. Clearly they rounded up a So-Cal club at the height of the vintage glory days (Burgundy Topz? Secret Society? someone will post an angry comment and tell us, I’m sure) and you can see in the scooterist’s faces, they’re hoping the song doesn’t catch on and immortalize the two afternoons they spent hanging out with these guys.
Check in next vednesday! Ve promise it vill be better.
If you’re as big a nerd as me, your Tivo would catch this anyway, but tonight is the debut of The Science Channel’s “How It’s Made” episode about the Vespa. Get a rare inside look at the Piaggio assembly line in Vietnam China Pontedera, Italy!
Continue reading “Vespa Factory on “How It’s Made””
Every few years, our old friend David Smith, a Chicagoan living in Japan, gets in touch, and it’s always something good. This time he sent me a list of about 100 music videos featuring scooters. Some are obvious, and some are obscure, even in Japan. Some feature dozens of scooters throughout the video, some just flash one on the screen in the background for a few seconds.
So that (and Matt’s Halo Benders find) gave me the idea to try another weekly feature on 2strokebuzz: Vespa Video Vednesday (pronounce it like Count Floyd). Every week (or two) we’ll feature (steal) a video featuring a scooter. Goodtimes! Right?
Let’s kick off with a video that’s not on David’s list, that I posted a while back: Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark’s “Telegraph.” With no further ado:
Band: Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
Song: “Telegraph”
Album: Dazzle Ships (1982)
Scooter(s): 3 red Vespa 50 Specials
Scooter content: 5 seconds
Jump to the good parts: 0:42, 1:00
OMD’s best song had a Karmann Ghia in the video, but this isn’t a half-bad song. The great 12″ single cover was designed by Peter Saville and there’s evidence he was involved in the video; his secondhand futurism is echoed a bit, and his cover for their first album is used as a backdrop.
Check in next vednesday, when… we’ll have already forgotten that we promised to do this veekly!
Don’t lock it to Granny, Lock it to something solid. (Thanks, Eric!)
Via ScooterDiva‘s Twitter feed: A fan of Modculture.info sent them three great photos of his parents on their Lambretta LDs in the fifties. You see so many celebrity photos, and so many promo photos, but it’s rare to catch the pre-mod scooter era in candid family photography.
Matt and I keep finding videos for old favorite bands and songs that we didn’t even know had videos. And the Halo Benders’ (Calvin from Beat Happening and Doug from Built to Spill) “Don’t Touch my Bikini” even has a moped in it, so I have an excuse to post it here!
I ♥ K, and I ♥ grainy out-of-focus un-color-balanced Super 8. Makes me wanna put out a ‘zine again.
Richmond, VA has been facing a bit of a scooter theft epidemic lately, so Chelsea from Scoot Richmond has hit the boards with some great anti-scooter-theft tips. Thanks, Chelsea!