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FHM Jack LaLanne Q and A June 2003 p 72-73

Posted on February 1, 2011 by andrewvontz

It took me a minute to get around to posting this, but dug out this interview I did with Jack LaLanne in San Luis Obispo at his home in March 2003 for the June 2003 issue of FHM. Jack was rad. Meeting him was a pleasure and an inspiration. He was still a muscle-bound badass when I met him and as he appears to have been until the end of his life.

Before we started our interview, Jack offered me $10,000 if I could perform a single push-up. No sweat, you’re thinking, right? So was I, so I banged out a push-up. Then he showed me what he meant by a push-up. Fully prone lying on the belly with arms extended straight in front of the body, then push up. I gave it a shot. No fucking way. He had a good laugh, inquired about whom I was dating and settled into a recliner to hold court. Had a great sense of humor, sharp, humble, and fully committed to inspiring other human beings to rise to their full potential. Badass. Legend.

Took a quick tour of a building on his property where he had vintage muscle beach photos and all of the exercise equipment he’d invented or conceptualized, including some Gravitron boots for inversions and inverted hanging sit-ups.

Then I drove my Ford Taurus home and had to edit the below down to 1,000 words for publication. I’m running the unedited version here and I am confident I am the only journalist who inquired about LaLanne’s feelings about the Cookie Monster.

AV

FHM Jack LaLanne Q and A June 2003 p 72-73

By Andrew John Ignatius Vontz

NOTE:  Barry left me a note to pass on to you that the children used in the shoot were Brigit and Ian Larson (these are his spellings, can’t confirm)

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
How do you have a better body at 88 than most men do when they’re 19?
Because I work out two hours every day.  You don’t have to work out two hours, but I do.  I just want to see how long I can keep this up.  It’s probably an ego thing.  If the average person works out a half hour three or four times a week that’s plenty.

How long do you think you can keep it up?
I never put a limit on anything.  I never think about dying.  Any stupid ass can die.  That’s easy.  Living is tough.  You’ve gotta work at it.  You have to train for life like you train for an athletic event.  You’ve gotta eat right, you’ve gotta think right, you’ve gotta discipline yourself.  Everything in life comes down to two things.  Try and discipline.  That’s what most kids don’t have.  That’s what they should be taught in school and kindergarten.  You can’t give any kids any lickings anymore like when I was a kid.  Kids are a runaway bunch.

What was the worst licking you ever got when you were a kid?
I got one every day from the teachers for screwing up in school and then I’d get another beating at home because I screwed up in school.

When you were a kid, what made you decide to get into fitness?
From the time I was four years old, I was a sugaraholic.  I had these blinding headaches every day and I had no energy, no vitality, uncontrollable temper, failing grades, and all the kids used to make fun of me because I was so little and I’d try to fight back.  You can’t believe it, boy.  When I was fifteen years old I attended a health lecture and it turned my life around.

What did you hear at the lecture that made you decide to become superfit?
If somebody saved your life would you be into it?  It turned my whole life around.  These headaches left, my energy tripled, and I went back into school and knew what the teachers were talking about, made good grades, and became a champion athlete.  My whole life just changed from hell to heaven.

It was that simple?
The minute I started exercising and eating natural foods, it was just like that.  What makes you what you are?  The food you eat.  What develops your strength?  The exercise you do.

More importantly, how did you decide that a skin tight jump suit would be your uniform?
I wanted something that was attractive and something that was different and something that would show off my physique.  What’s the point of having a body if you can’t show it off?  It was functional and it became my trademark.  I wore the ballet slippers because they were comfortable and functional.

The fabric used in your trademark jump suits hadn’t even been invented back then.  What would you wear to work out in?
I wore wool to start out then spandex came around.

Of all your jump suits, which has been your favorite?
You mean the things I wore on my show?  I had so many of them.  Blue and black and green. . .

Did you have a different one for every day of the week?
Not every day but I would change often.

What’s the best way to pick one that fits yet doesn’t overemphasize personal areas of the physique?
All of my things were made to order.  They were tailor made.  You have to have it special made for you.

Who made yours?
I don’t have any idea.

Those suckers sure are form fitting.  Have you ever accidentally caught a nipple or chest hair in your zipper?
One day I split the seat of my pants so I couldn’t turn around on the show.

A crotch blowout always drives the ladies wild.  How did you do it?
I was doing an exercise and that was before spandex came in, it was wool, and the whole thing split out.  But nobody knew about it because I covered it up.

Now that’s a true champion.  So you work out two hours a day?
Seven days a week even when I’m on the road.  Every hotel has a gym and a pool now.  I work with the weights at least an hour and then I spend another hour doing my running or treadmill or I do a lot of water exercises.  I have big gloves that I use and things for my feet to give resistance.  I have a belt and I tie myself in place and I’ll butterfly for half an hour or an hour against an immovable object.  That’s tough.

What do people think when they see that?
They think you’re nuts.  But I like the results.

How do you manage to have the energy to do that every day?
Energy begets energy.  The only way you lose your energy is to quit doing things.  That’s why so many people sit around and do nothing and the more you sit around the more lethargic you get and the less energy you have.  You build up your strength and your energy, you just keep it going.  These muscles, they know nothing.

Mine are stupid, too.  Should I send them to boarding school?
My 640 muscles are my slaves.  If you have a slave, you feed it right, you treat it right.  It works for me.  A lot of people say I’m feeling terrible, I have aches and pains and I’m going to take a vacation and I’ll feel better.  Well you take all the aches and pains with you don’t you?  You can’t leave it at home.  The mind and the body are inseparable.  The number one thing is exercise.  That’s the key, boy.

What makes you miss a day at the gym?
I don’t miss a workout.

When was the last time you missed one?
I don’t even remember.  I have a conscience.  The only thing Jack LaLanne has going for him is telling the truth.  I practice what I preach.  If I did something that I didn’t believe, I couldn’t live with myself.  That’s why I live what I do and I tell the truth.  Besides I have a lousy memory.  I’ve got one thing in my mind.  I’ve never thought about making money.  Ever.  I thought about helping somebody, motivating somebody, get them eating right, get them to reduce their weight or increase their energy and change their life around.  When I went to the health lecture when I was fifteen, that guy saved my life and that’s why I’m so enthusiastic. Every time when I lecture I’m motivating and stimulating people.

What accomplishment are you proudest of?
My television show was on 34 years.  We had some of the highest ratings, millions and millions and millions of people. We got mail by the sacks, Jack you changed my life, I lost weight, I gained weight, I did this, I’m a different person.  It makes you feel good.  You’re helping people.

A lot of ladies must have been after the golden boy in the jump suit.  How did you avoid letting fame go to your head?
I never think about that.  What the hell?  Anybody that’s conceited, they’re stupid asses.  Pardon me.  You do your job.  There are a hell of a lot of things you can do that I can’t do.  There are a lot of things I can do that you can’t do.  We’re all different but we’re all the same.  This stuff about being a celebrity forces you in the public eye, this is ridiculous.  If you do something, if you’re good at your job, if you believe in it, if you’re not lying, you’re not cheating people, that’s what it’s all about.  I think about living.  I never think about what I used to be.  I never look backwards unless somebody asks me.  I don’t make the same mistake again, that’s all.  If you’ve got 100 units of energy and you spend 90 units of it to think what you used to do and the rest of it thinking about what you’re going to do, you’ve got nothing for now.  This is the moment.  If you’re not happy now you’re never going to make it.  You’ve gotta count your blessings, wake up in the morning, God, I’ve got a body, I’ve got hair, I can see, I’ve got a family, and I live in the greatest country in the world.  You’ve gotta work at happiness.  Most people don’t do that.  Oh, I’m not very smart or I don’t make much money or I don’t have a good education.  These are all excuses.  That’s why all these people from China and who come over here to the United States and can’t speak English and ten years later they’re millionaires.  But we here, oh no, always making excuses.

Why do you think that is?
Because we’re spoiled.  You’ve gotta take responsibility for you.  Living’s a pain in the butt, boy.  Dying’s easy.

Do you work out at the same time every day?
Around 5 in the morning.  For about thirty years I worked out at 4 in the morning.  Get it out of the way.

What time do you go to bed at?
I never think about it.  It all depends on what we’re doing.

Has your dedication to fitness left you with any regrets?
Nothing.  If I had it all to do over again, I’d put more energy into it.  This is my whole life.  I’m helping the most important person on this earth:  me.  If you can’t take care of you, you’re a failure.  If you’re no good for you, you’re no good for your family, your country, your lover.  You’re nothing.  You can count your blessings and try to improve all the time.  Just keep plugging and plugging.  You’ve got to work out until the time you leave this earth.

What do you do to cut loose?  Juice a new fruit?
We have friends, I like to read, I like television, we like to travel.  See, if you’re in good shape you’ll like everything.  The thing I don’t like to do is work out.  Ask a thousand athletes if they like to train.  They hate it.  Why do they do it?  Results.

Besides being the world’s oldest man who can still do 1,000 pushups, do you hold any records?
A lot of them.  One birthday I skied on one ski behind a helicopter to the Farallon islands and back from San Francisco.  Another birthday I put handcuffs on and I swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco.  No prisoner ever escaped from Alcatraz.  Twice I swam the Golden Gate in San Francisco underwater.

Did you see any sharks?
Oh yeah.  We had riflemen on each side.  Before I did one of my Alcatraz feats, two guys were hit.  One guy lost his arm and one guy got his leg all mangled so we had deputy sheriffs on each side with rifles in case a shark came up.

Were you worried about becoming a shark snack?
I never think of those things.  I think about what I’m doing.  My seventieth birthday, I towed 70 boats with 70 people in the boats and my feet and hands were tied and I swam for an hour and a half in Long Beach.

Did you swim with your head?
That was a tough mother boy.  It’s tough.  Every feat I’ve ever done no one has ever done before.  If I did something easy everyone would be doing it.

What makes you want to perform feats of strength?  Great juice?
It’s a challenge.  It calls attention to my philosophy.  If it doesn’t work for Jack LaLanne it’s not working for you.  Every time I did one of those feats, every gym in the United States, their business would increase 20-25 percent.  You’ve gotta be an example.  It was for publicity too.  Why did Jesus perform all of those miracles?

To inspire people?
Absolutely.  Because everything is possible and to draw attention to his philosophy.  But he had twelve guys helping him.  Everything we do in life we can’t do without publicity.

Who do you consider to be your apostles?
All of the thousands of students who followed the Jack LaLanne show.  I believed in it.  The ratings were up.

It didn’t hurt that your sidekick was Happy the dog though, did it?
When I first started, it was a morning show and the kids controlled it.  Now how am I going to horn in there and get the adults?  I had this bright idea.  I had this white German Sheppard dog and I had him trained.  So I would tell the boys and girls, come here, Junior, Mary, Francis, come quick to the television.  Jack wants you to do something.  I want you to get brother, sister, mother, and father, and get them in front of the television to exercise with Uncle Jack and I’ll have Happy do a special trick for you.  The kids would go in and wake the folks and if the parents wouldn’t work out with them, they’d cry.

Did you ever get any angry letters from parents who were made about being woken up?
Yeah.  But when your back’s against the wall, things come out of your head.  You’re lazy.  I’m lazy.  We only scratch the surface of what we really have.  But when you believe in something and you have to do something, we’re all brilliant.  Most people don’t have their backs against the wall.  They have everything going for them.

When you opened the first gym in America, what kind of people did it
attract?
Well see, I had a gym when I was in high school in my backyard.  I had a climbing rope and I had a lot of equipment and the police men and firemen in Berkeley, California couldn’t pass the physical and they came to me and I guaranteed them I could help them to pass the physical.  I worked them out in my backyard and practically all of them that came passed the physical. This was high school!  I had thirty or forty of my friends—you know what Amway is?

Yeah.  It cuts out the middle man.
I had thirty or forty of my buddies selling vitamins, whole wheat bread, health foods and I put them on a commission.  In high school.

That’s a little better than a lemonade stand, isn’t it?
In 1936 I opened the first modern health club where I had weight selectors, chrome weights, flowers all over, rugs on the floor, a real fancy gym.

Did people think you were a quack?
The doctors picked it up, oh that Jack LaLanne, he’s a charlatan, he’s a nut, he’s got old people working out with the weights, he’s got women working out with the weights, he’s got kids working out with the weights.  The old people will die of heart attacks, the young people won’t get an erection, the athletes will get muscle bound, the women will look like men.  That’s what I had to go through, boy.  I’m telling you.  It was a pistol, boy.  People stayed away from me like I had the plague.  I’m right in the middle of downtown Oakland, California, $45 a month rent and I couldn’t pay it.

What did you do?
One day a light came on in my head.  I put on a tight T-shirt.  I was winning physique contests, breaking all kinds of records, I was a champion wrestler, I was captain of the football team at Berkeley.  Everybody knew Jack LaLanne, ‘oh that nut, he’s eating funny food, working out with the weights.’  I went to Oakland High, one of the biggest schools around at noon time.  They knew I didn’t eat cakes and pie and they’d have a candy bar, ‘here Jack have a bite,’ just making fun of me.  I’d pick out the fattest kid I could find, the skinniest kid I could find and I’d go to their homes at night and I’d walk around the block two or three times I was so bashful in those days and finally the dad would come to the door.  Usually fathers would brag about their kids, but if he’s a skinny kid they’d say he takes after his mother.  If I’d go to fifty homes, I’d sign up fifty kids.  I wrote out a contract for them.  If the kid’s underweight, I’ll put ten to fifteen pounds of solid muscle on your boy in thirty days, double your money back.  Fat kid, I’ll take ten to fifteen pounds off that kid or double your money back.  I never gave back a penny, boy.  If they missed two workouts I was on the phone.  I’d tell them how to cut their hair, tell them you boys aren’t going to be leaders, you’re going to be followers.  After about a year I started getting phone calls from parents.  I had to have a special gym for the young kids, a special gym for the women, and another for the business men.  I’m telling you boy, it just took off.  But see, you had to believe.  You had to prove yourself.  Anything in life is possible.  You make it happen.  The people that made me popular were my students.  They got results.  Sure they’re going to go out and brag.  One fat kid I took 111 pounds off him in seven months.  The word got around.

Do you ever look back on your food recommendations or training techniques and think what the hell was I doing?
I haven’t changed.  If man makes it, don’t eat it.  I’ve always been against white flower, white sugar products.  I always believed in fresh fruits and vegetables, whole foods and brown rice, change your exercise program every thirty days.

What about Twinkies?  Are those golden brown delights a perfect food?
Would you get your dog up in the morning, give him a cup of coffee, a cigarette, and a donut?  You’d kill the dog!  Those Twinkies and all that stuff, it’s ten seconds on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.  It destroys the B vitamins which has to do with your sex life and your vitality and energy and your ability to remember things.  That’s why there are so many screwed up kids today. Their nervous systems are shot and they’re tired all the time and they’re worried and confused.

Do you ever swap tips with other fitness gurus like Richard Simmons?
He’s a good friend of mine.  I wouldn’t go out with him, but he’s a nice guy.  He’s helped a hell of a lot of people.  He’s got them eating right and exercising.  He’s doing a good job.  Most of the people come to me for ideas because I’ve been there for a long time and I’m pretty successful.

When you see late night infomercials for miracle workout machines, what do you think?
It makes me sick.  They ought to throw those sons of guns in jail, the three minute abs and the butt master.  It’s sick.  You’ve got 640 muscles in your body, this is nothing.  You’ve got to work hard, you’ve got to burn calories.  These people use that for a while and Christ they gain weight if anything and they don’t get any results so they quit.  It’s really sick, sick, sick boy.  I do infomercials.  It’s one of the most successful infomercials in the history of television.  We’re in every country in the world now, France, Germany, England, China, Canada.  I’m helping people.

Do you ever do anything with Deepak?
He’s good but he’s all into the metaphysical.  Religion and sex should be done behind closed doors.  Like this guy Falwell.  I heard him on all these programs, ‘if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ it’s impossible to go to heaven.’  How about the millions and millions of other people?  You’ve gotta know there’s a supreme being.  Do you think man could ever make anything like the human body?  Do you think man could ever make a machine that the more you use it the better it gets?  I have a new Corvette and the more I drive that thing the more it wears out.  The human body is the opposite.  The more you use it, then the body repairs it.  Every one of your 80 trillion cells are replaced every six to eight weeks.

70 years after you began your mission, why is America the fattest country in the world?
Look at how many fat kids we have today, more than ever in our history.  All this fast food stuff.  Do you have any ideas how many calories you get in some of these hamburgers?  I feel so sorry for these people.

When you see celebrities like Shaq hawking burgers, how do you feel?
Guys like Tiger Woods, Magic Johnson and all these famous athletes, I applaud them, they’re wonderful.  But geez, they sell their souls for a few bucks advertising all these soft drinks and all these terrible foods kids eat.  Why don’t these guys have their managers fix them up advertising something beneficial?  It’s really sick.  If you knew the millions of dollars I’d turned down for the ridiculous things people want me to advertise, you can’t believe it.  There’s no quick fix.  So many Americans they want to over eat, they want to underexercise and they go to the doctor, please doctor give me a shout for my heart attack or this or that.  There’s no way.  You’ve got to do it yourself.

When you see Cookie Monster on Sesame Street does it tick you off?
I feel sorry for the poor kids.  They’re so put upon.  You try to get these kids to cut out all the ice cream and cakes.  It takes years off their lives.  They’re getting high blood pressure and all of this screwed up stuff when they’re forty.  A lot of Americans die at sixty and they bury them at seventy.

Have you ever put all this physical fitness stuff to practical use—like lifting a car to save a baby?
I used to get in a lot of fights, boy.  Oh, I knocked a lot of guys out.  I never lost a fight.  When I got into physical fitness, I had this 49-inch chest, this 28-inch waist.  I’d go to bars to pick up girls or something and all these guys gave me a bad time so I’d clock them out.  One time at Trader Vic’s I was in there with my brother and a bunch of guys came in from the St. Mary’s basketball team and they started giving me a bad time.  One guy said, ‘you don’t look so tough to me you little son of a bitch.’  I said, ‘come on outside.’  That guy came outside, I picked him up and threw him over the hood of an automobile and I had six to eight guys attack me and I knocked every one of them out.  An hour or two later when they came to and everything was organized, they all came to me and apologized.

They were probably ready to sign up for the gym.  In this issue, we have a feature on the world’s strongest women. What do you think of people who get incredibly muscled up–aren’t they as big a freak as a shut-in who needs a crane to get out of the house?
I think it’s great if they don’t use steroids.  A woman cannot look like a man.  It’s impossible.  It’s all controlled by your hormones.  The more you work out, the more masculine you become, the more a woman works out the more feminine she becomes.  All this stuff that people are taking today, think of how many have died and ended up in mental institutions and have irreparable damage to their hearts and livers.  As long as the emphasis is on winning, people are going to use any method they can to improve their physical ability.  But there’s no easy way.  They take the easy way out and they pay a price, boy.

But can you be too fit or muscular?
No way.  Not if you do it the natural way.  Can you oversex?

You’d have to ask my collection of My Little Ponies, but I don’t think so.
That’s right.  Let me see, you’re a psychotic.  Let me see you get on the floor and do pushups until you die.  I bet you can’t even do forty pushups.

I’ll take a pass for right now.  What do you think of people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who promote a healthy lifestyle publicly, but privately did steroids, smoked pot and cigars and such?
You only hear about the negative.  There’s a lot of wonderful things happening, but you can never publish that because who will buy it?  Arnold is a wonderful friend.  I’ve known him since he was nineteen.  We had a big pushup and chin contest at muscle beach and I wiped him out.  It isn’t what you do once it a while.  It’s what you do all the time.  He smokes cigars.  Who the hell says cigar smoke is going to hurt you if you don’t inhale?  Jesus.  That’s the whole thing about being in physical condition.  If there’s anybody on earth who could get by with doing pot and all that stuff, it’s me.  My wife and I eat out practically every night and I always have a glass of wine or so.  I’d rather see you have a glass of wine than milk.

Sounds totally hot.
Name me one creature on this earth that uses milk after they’re weaned.  Man.  It’s the worst.  Why do you think there are so many heart attacks?  Milk, cream, cheese, butter.  All these damn milk advertisements with mustaches and stuff. . .

It’s a little weird.
70% of the people on earth are allergic to milk.  Can it be good for you?

Probably not.
Do you have three stomachs like a cow?

I do actually.
You’re drinking milk because you’ve been told to drink it.  You’re brainwashed.  You’ve gotta use your brain.  Would I put water in the tank of my Corvette?  Aren’t you a combustion engine?  Put the wrong fuel in the gas tank and it’s going to manifest itself in negative things.  It has to.

What do you do to fire up a studio audience when you’re filming an
infomercial?
I give them a little pep talk.  It’s a personal thing.  I’m talking with you at home.

Would you ever drop to the ground and tear off a thousand
pushups?
I’ve got some fingertip pushups I can show you.  That will blow your brains.

Where does your enthusiasm for juicing come from?
I started juicing when I was fifteen.  Christ, it was a great big thing, so inefficient, but this juicer of mine, I’m telling you, you can put in a whole apple and a whole pear without cutting it up and you can make two gallons of juice before you have to clean it.  You should read the mail we get.  People buy it for their wives and their kids and their lovers.

How many glasses of juice do you have a day?
I have about a pint.

Besides hundreds of gallons of piping fresh juice, what’s the most amazing experience your career has allowed you to have?
My wife.  No doubt about it.  Without her I’m a nothing.  She’s the power underneath my muscle.  When I started out I was a laughing stock, but then when I met Elaine she went along with me one million percent.  She’s my lover, she’s my financier, she’s my confidant, she’s my everything.

What should guys out there be looking for in a relationship?
If you’re not happy in a relationship, get the hell out.  You don’t change people.  Jack LaLanne doesn’t change, my wife doesn’t change.  I am what I am and you are what you are.  My wife and I understand each other. She goes along with my idiosyncrasies and I go along with hers.  It’s a team effort.  You’ve gotta work at it.  So many of these young kids, so much of their attraction is the sack.  You can’t stay in the sack 24 hours a day.  You gotta come up some time and breathe and be able to talk.  Living is a pain in the butt.  You’ve gotta put out effort and time.

And that applies to the ladies, too. . .
Absolutely.  Women are a different breed of cat, boy.  Why do you think they live longer?

I’m pretty sure it’s because they suck all of the life out of us.
Women, boy, I’ll tell you, you’ll never get ahead of them.

What feat of strength can we look forward to you performing to mark your 90th birthday?
I’m going to swim from Catalina to Los Angeles underwater.  I’ve had it planned for about five years.  I’ll change tanks every hour and a half, I’ll feed underwater.  I have a health drink with all kinds of proteins and things in it.  I’ll be underwater at least twenty-two hours.  That’s twenty-six miles.

What do you think about when you’re doing something like that?
I think about getting to the other side.  That’s the only thing I ever think about. I think about the goal, getting there.

All of this talk of exercise is making me hungry.  Do you ever indulge in a nice bacon burger with ranch dressing and onion rings or a loose meat sandwich?
Never.  I’m a disciplinarian, boy.  Every once in a while my wife will say, come on Jack, just take a bite.

When’s the last time you just took a bite?
I never have.  I quit eating those things when I was fifteen years old.  I went strict vegetarian for six years, then I started entering physique contests.  I was Mr. America, I won best chest and best back in Mr. America.  In those days they thought you had to eat meat so I ate meat.  Another time I went six weeks, I had a quart of blood a day.  The Watusis in Africa, they’re the most healthy people in Africa, that’s their whole food intake, blood.  I felt terrific.  I went down to the slaughterhouse, got a quart of blood, they put a coagulant in it.  It’s not the most social thing in the world.  Then one day I got a little clot because the coagulant didn’t work and that gave me the excuse to stop.  You’ve gotta try things, see.  How do you know unless you try them?  I tried everything, boy.  I enjoy eating.  I love it.  Every bite of food, I say I’m doing something for me, my looks, my longevity, my vitality.  You’ve gotta think, what is this doing for you?  It’s a sexual experience, eating.

Do you ever enjoy a nice warm cup of blood these days?
Are you kidding me?  I eat fish seven days a week, ten raw vegetables every day, five pieces of fresh fruit, and the only grains I eat are whole grains.  I take forty or fifty vitamins a day.

Is your pee bright yellow?
Everything’s normal.  That works for Jack LaLanne.  I’m still here.  Anything in life is possible if you make it happen.  God helps them that help themselves.  I hope the people that read this will do something for the most important person on this earth:  you.  You’ve gotta do something for you so you can do something for other people.  Living’s fun.  Work at it.

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Los Angeles Times: Bicycle Kitchen Nov 2, 2003

Posted on December 25, 2010 by andrewvontz

This story first appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine ‘Fixations’ section in November, 2003. I had an awesome, progressive editor at the time, Christina Dalton, who gave me the latitude to dial Angelenos into some of the coolest, most cutting edge shit happening on the fringes of various subcultures in Los Angeles. No idea what Christina is up to now, but high 5, Christina, thanks for that. Much appreciated.

I first heard about the Bicycle Kitchen through friends at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, just down the block from my Franklin Ave. hovel at the time. I made a trip over to the Kitchen, met Jimmy Lizama, and knew I’d met a special, gifted individual who was going to change the world. And with his collaborators, he did. The original Bicycle Kitchen was smug-free, a place for like-minded individuals to share their bike stoke. Later as fixed gear bikes became a fashion accessory and the Kitchen swelled in popularity, the vibe disintegrated and it became an ‘I’m Cooler Than You’ type of scene that I had exactly zero interest in participating in. They still kept getting thousands of people on bikes and stoked, and I applaud that, but they drifted radically from their original core mission in my opinion and let the allure of cool poison the vibe of their operation and what they were doing.

I later wrote about the Bicycle Kitchen for Bicycling magazine, a story that I reported for a full year and then had to wait an additional two full years to see published after I turned in my initial draft. My editor just didn’t understand the import of the story and what a huge cultural watershed the Bicycle Kitchen represented. And he didn’t believe Jimmy’s vision–to get Angelenos on cars and transform transport culture in LA (note: it happened, big time). A revolution was being born, and I was there, living it, participating in it, and helping to make it happen. I’m thankful I got to be there for that. I’m thankful I got the feature in Bicycling published eventually, which turned into a huge battle with the editor who had zero connection to what was happening in the most grass roots, energized, charged scene the cycling community had scene since I started participating in it in 1989. Of course he got it later and would eventually wax eloquent about $10,000 fixed gear bikes like he had been there since the beginning and was living it and got it.

So, yeah, whatever on that, but I’m thankful I lived the real deal, and I’m thankful I met Jimmy Lizama, a complete and total inspiration to me and the thousands of other people whose lives he has touched. Thanks for all you’ve done, Jimmy.

LIVE TO RIDE, RIDE TO LIVE

Metropolis / Fixations

November 02, 2003|ANDREW JOHN IGNATIUS VONTZ

If Jimmy Lizama had his way, the fossil-fuel-burning monsters clogging our streets would be relegated to the junkyard while Angelenos savor the city’s beauty and climate on bicycles. “I want to help working-class people who want to go to the market on their bikes instead of driving 10 miles to go to a store,” says the proprietor of Kill Your Car Courier service and a founding member of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition advocacy group.

When Lizama gets up in the morning, he commutes on one of his four bikes to downtown, where he spends his days pedaling subpoenas to areas as far away as East L.A. and Hollywood. Lizama often organizes events for couriers, including a recent scavenger hunt and race that traced the route of Michael Douglas’ character in the 1993 movie “Falling Down.” “I want to get regular folks biking to work,” says Lizama, 28. “My goal is to get bicycle culture going.” And he’s doing just that with his extracurricular venture, the Bicycle Kitchen.

On Tuesday and Thursday nights, still soaked in sweat from a day on wheels, Lizama pedals to the Kitchen, a bicycle repair co-op he created two years ago with fellow courier Randy Metz and freelance photographer Ben Guzman. The operation is crammed into the kitchen of an empty unit in the two-block Eco-Village cooperative near Koreatown, an endeavor sponsored by nonprofit funding and devoted to ecologically sustainable community development. The Kitchen is outfitted with four work stands and every tool an aspiring bike mechanic could need. Hanging in the front room in various states of repair are about 20 found and donated bikes being refurbished for use by rideless Kitchen users.

Neighborhood kids, professionals, couriers, environmentalists, students and blue-collar workers are among those who regularly drop in to learn how to work on their rigs, share expertise and revel in all things cycling-related in a laid-back, learning-friendly atmosphere where the toilet paper in the bathroom hangs on a stand made from a discarded bike fork surrounded by piles of the defunct cycling magazine Winning. It’s a far cry from the shaved-leg snobbery of bike shops that cater to affluent customers and racers. “People can watch someone who knows how to fix a bike, observe the process, and learn how to do it instead of going to a bike shop and paying too much money and not learning anything,” says Lizama, who worked in an art gallery before becoming a messenger.

An all-bike Los Angeles isn’t the only thing cooking in the Kitchen. The last Tuesday of the month, Lizama whips up a fresh batch of dough and bakes pizza for all present. L.A. may not yet be a cycler’s paradise, but all believers are welcome to a slice of the pie.

*

The Bicycle Kitchen, 117 Bimini Place, #110, is open from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday and Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m.; (213) 386-1002, www.bicyclekitchen.com. Parking in the area is extremely limited, and driving is discouraged.

*NOTE: You can read this on the Los Angeles Times website as well http://articles.latimes.com/2003/nov/02/magazine/tm-fxbikes44

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SPIN JAN 2008: DAFT PUNK COVER STORY

Posted on November 11, 2010 by andrewvontz

Sometimes as a journalist you get to meet your heroes. That doesn’t make your job easy, at all. You have to dissociate from any personal feelings you have about the subject, be a sharp reporter, capture the details you need, and quickly establish rapport with your subjects in incredibly intense, high pressure, must deliver situations. And sometimes your heroes turn out to be complete and total assholes. That wasn’t the case with this story, thankfully. Daft Punk were gentlemen and shadowing them as they prep’d for then performed at the Vegoose festival in fall ’07 was a once in a lifetime opportunity to get a glimpse into their genuine, real genius. Like most stories you report as a journalist, 99% of the interesting information I captured during the course of my interviews and reporting didn’t make it into the story because it wasn’t relevant to the audience I was writing for or the amount of space I’d been allotted for the piece.

I had no idea that Daft Punk played almost all of the music on Discovery then sampled their live performances and used those samples as the building blocks for the songs on the albums (which sound like samples of classic disco/funk/house–it’s them actually playing all of the instruments). They were very generous with their time and their ideas about music, art, and their achievements, direction, and aspirations as artists. I was very thankful to have the opportunity to write this piece and will never forget the experience. Watching Daft Punk, two very laid-back, shy, slight French guys, suit up in their robot helmets and outfits then walk clumsily up into the pyramid at the center of their stage show to the deafening roar of a rabid crowd of 100,000 people was pretty sick to watch. I stood at the side of the stage with their management, collaborators, and girlfriends and we all danced while Daft Punk banged out the hits. Good times.
__________________________________________________
DAFT PUNK/KANYE WEST COVER STORY
‘DAFT PUNK: ENTERTAINERS OF THE YEAR’
SPIN
JAN 2008

By Andrew Vontz

Nine hours into October’s Vegoose festival, the immortal five-note melody from Close Encounters of the Third Kind drifts out over the grassy field at Las Vegas’ Sam Boyd Stadium, and the crowd of 30,000 is packed so tightly it can barely move. The night’s headliners, Daft Punk (Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, henceforth referred to by his nickname, Guy-Man), are led by roadies to a control booth in the middle of a 22-foot-wide, 18-foot-tall, three-ton steel pyramid hidden behind a curtain at center stage. They’re decked out in their customary automaton-biker gear: face-obscuring helmets and leather jackets. As the curtain draws back, only their helmets and torsos are visible inside the pyramid, and blips of light pulse across blackness on the LED video screens covering its base. A massive lattice of glowing tubes serves as a second tier of lighting, and a large black curtain covered in diodes provides the stage’s backdrop. “Robot Rock,” off the duo’s 2005 album, Human After All, replaces Close Encounters, and when the first drumbeat kicks in and Daft Punk pump their glove-covered fists, the crowd form pyramids with their fingers, bouncing in unison with such ecstatic violence that the scene looks like a soccer riot. In the year 3000.

All this might sound like a particularly vivid ’90s-rave flashback. But many of the lucky 67,800 who witnessed the eight-date North American leg of the Daft Punk Alive 2007 tour — alternatively a provocative examination of the tenuous relationship between technology and humanity and the most mind-bending rock extravaganza since Pink Floyd’s pig took flight — are evangelical and slavish in their devotion. Two fans from Milwaukee, Caitlin Kliesmet and Margaret Kim, wear homemade, elaborately rendered robot helmets. Julia Brindle, 25, who caught August’s New York date on a whim and was so impressed she flew to Vegas for this final show of the tour, says: “I’m not a big electronic-music fan, but this is a transcendent religious experience.” And she is hardly the only relative electronica neophyte to finally see the (strobe) light — since the North American tour began in July, digital sales of the duo’s 2001 single “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” which Kanye West sampled for “Stronger,” have rocketed from 1,000 per week to between 5,000 and 7,000, while the new Daft Punk Alive 2007 CD and DVD attempt to pack the sensory overload to go. Somehow, the hottest electronic music act of 1999 has reconquered a mainstream American audience that traditionally prefers its rock stars to have instruments and, well, faces.

“We compare it to a Broadway musical,” Bangalter, 31, says backstage after the show. “There’s a lot of people involved, and every night is a different performance, even though it’s the same music and the same show. But it’s also like a movie in that you focus on an experience rather than the ego of the performer.” In their civvies, Daft Punk look like underfed art students, all skinny jeans and pristine vintage Nikes. Bangalter has close-cropped hair and wears a turtleneck sweater under a leather jacket. The long-haired Guy-Man, 32, whose English isn’t as fluent, nods in agreement, Silencieux Bob to Bangalter’s Jay.

Developed early last year for what they thought would be a one-off gig at Coachella, the Alive spectacle is as high-concept as it is high-tech, integrating ideas about evolutionary theory with the band’s own iconography — the pyramid first appeared in their 2005 video for “Technologic.” Bangalter and Guy-Man — and yes, it really is them up there, although the fact that the audience can’t know for sure lends the experience its convention-tweaking aura — communicate with one another via mics and monitors built into the helmets, remixing on the fly from inside the pyramid. Wireless Ethernet links the Minimoogs and virtual synths at their metallic fingertips to offstage custom computers that have the processing power of nine tricked-out Mac G5s. While the musical and visual elements are scripted and presequenced, both Daft Punk and their lighting designer can improvise around set cues. Every show has the same 80-minute run time with the same primary builds and breaks, yet there’s still room to manipulate the beats based on crowd reaction, which generally includes stomping, writhing, popping- and-locking, screaming, and — tonight, anyway — passing out.

“Contrary to belief, they don’t just push play,” insists Paul Hahn, the head of Daft Punk’s production company and Alive’s behind-the-scenes mastermind. “By changing the mix, they can change people’s perception of the visuals. It’s like a magic trick — giving away how it’s done would take away from the experience. But the robot personas open up creative possibilities, whereas if we had put Guy-Man and Thomas up there as themselves, it would be this megalomaniacal thing, this gigantic fascist’s pulpit.”

As the show progresses, the pyramid’s visuals escalate from minimal eight bit-style lines to complex 3-D geometric patterns, culminating in a racing montage of human faces. By the finale, “One More Time,” the robot suits themselves are part of the light show, electroluminescent piping making the duo look like Tron characters come to life.

“It’s not just performing and creating music and images that makes the show,” says Bangalter. “It’s God, in the middle of 30,000 people.”

*Read it on Spin’s website, too, @ http://www.spin.com/articles/entertainers-year-daft-punk

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SPIN JAN 2008: COVER STORY DAFT PUNK & KANYE WEST INTERVIEW ‘Strength In Numbers’

Posted on November 11, 2010 by andrewvontz

This was one of the most insane, high pressure, time-crunched opportunities I ever had the pleasure of executing as a journalist. After hanging out with Daft Punk backstage, watching from the stage as they suited up in their robot garb and killed the Vegoose festival the night before, I caught a plane with Daft Punk at the Vegas airport early the next morning. They flew first class–I was back in coach. When we got off the plane, a driver took our entourage directly to Smash Box studios in Culver City where Kanye West was being photographed. The photog literally had five minutes to capture the image that became the cover shot for the Jan ’08 issue of Spin before both Kanye and Daft Punk had to split off and head to other engagements. It was the only moment in the artists’ schedules where they could be in the same place for the photo shoot for months. While Kanye was getting styled for the shoot, the publicist brought Daft Punk into the room and I executed the group interview with about six people in the room. Both Kanye and Daft Punk were exceptionally cooperative, friendly, and forthcoming–not always what you get in these situations. Egos were checked and the artists shared an amazing conversation about their collaboration, their mutual respect for each other as artists, and what they wanted to do next. The following is the roundtable interview that accompanied the primary Daft Punk profile I penned for the mag. Link to the story on Spin’s website below. Of all the stories I did as a journalist, this was one of the most memorable because I’m a huge fan of Daft Punk and have massive respect for them as artists. They are very, very sharp guys with big ideas and huge talent driving what they do as performers, musicians, and artists. Kanye was cool but I didn’t get to spend enough time with him to get a feel for what he was like as a human being or artist. I was just happy he was cooperative and friendly and helped make this happen.
_______________________________
Spin
Jan 2008
‘Strength In Numbers’
Interview with Daft Punk and Kanye West

By Andrew Vontz

Whose idea was it to get you guys together?
KANYE WEST: It was their idea to come up with ["Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger"] and my idea to sample it. Just the way the song was put together, especially at the end — I’ve never accomplished that level of musicality. I think I’ve fallen short every time I’ve attempted to do something like it. But falling short of that is still way better than everything else in hip-hop.
THOMAS BANGALTER: The challenge when you’re taking a sample is to make it fi t your own universe. The interesting thing here is how he took our music and really made it his own in terms of his personality. That’s what we’re trying to do as artists — make universal the things we want to express. That’s what Kanye does. He distorts the initial meaning of the song, and that’s what’s interesting.

It seems like such an apt collaboration, given that you both play with the notion of celebrity and identity.
WEST: Like how I’m not on my album covers and stuff? These guys really stick with the whole not-showing-their-faces thing. Just amazing discipline — that’s straight martial-arts status.

Do you think the song has made hip-hop fans more interested in electronic music, or electronic fans more interested in hip-hop?
BANGALTER: I think we’re at a time when there’s less genre separation than before. There’s an open-mindedness on the part of both the musicians and the audiences. Things aren’t so segregated.
WEST: I faced some backlash when the single first came out. I think the electronic community was saying, “How dare you sample this holy grail?” And the hip-hop people were saying, “You have to always do what we’re used to you doing.” But I think hip-hop is about always being new and cutting-edge and coming up with a combination you haven’t heard. It’s bittersweet, because on one hand, you want to be influential, but on the other, you want other people to be original, too. We were really breaking new ground, and I can only imagine how long it took to make the original. [Turns to Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo] How long did it take to make the original?
BANGALTER: A long time. We’d work on a track and let it rest for a few months, then go back to it. And I completely agree with what you’re saying about being influential — what you want is for the next generation to destroy what you’ve done and start from scratch. It’s good to take risks when you’re nobody, but it’s more exciting and important to do it once you’re exposed.

Kanye, what did you think of the Daft Punk live show?
WEST: Ah, man, it sucked. [Laughs] It was very breathtaking and aweinspiring. I still don’t quite understand how they were able to do it.

Do you see yourselves collaborating in the future?
BANGALTER: We won’t speak about it.

*Read it on Spin’s website, too, at http://www.spin.com/articles/strength-numbers

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FHM March 2004: JENNA JAMESON FEATURE

Posted on November 11, 2010 by andrewvontz

FHM
March 2004

HED: A Heart Breaker’s Work of Orgasmic Genius
DEK: The Reigning Queen of Textual Intercourse Tells All

By Andrew Vontz

Forget ex-prez Bill Clinton and retired General Tommy Franks and all the rest of the writers who have scaled the New York Times bestseller list in recent months. They can write sort of okay but none of them have ever received a piledriving from Rocco Sifredi. A new genius has emerged on the literary landscape and she has Heart Breaker tattooed on her ass. Jenna Jameson has delivered millions of fans around the globe to happy endings in the comfort of their own homes. And now Jenna’s book, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale, is a New York Times bestseller. Jenna is perhaps the greatest literary talent the land has seen since Hemingway took off to drive an ambulance in the Spanish civil war. But her first stab at writing a book was not easy. “It was like bursting at the seams hard,” says the stacked vixen. In addition to making her even more rich—she estimates her personal wealth in the “millions and millions and millions”—Jenna’s book has brought the bi-curious author some fringe benefits. “When it comes to my book around 50% of my fans are women. And that’s hot.” But not as hot as her.

You’re now officially the greatest author of 2004—how does it feel?
That’s hot. I wanted to write the best book possible and just happened to make it to the New York Times bestseller list.

How has storming the charts with Bill Clinton and the O’Reilly factor changed your life?
People take me more seriously. I don’t know if they should—but they do. In this day and age people don’t want to just hear about death and dismemberment—they want to hear about sex and somebody’s real life.

Now that you are the toast of literary salons from Bangok to Paris what kind of stalkers do you have?
Usually women come up to me and they’re like oh my God, I love you, you taught me how to give a blowjob, I ended up getting pregnant because of you, I named my baby after you. But when it comes to stalkers I have a lot of religious stalkers.

Do things ever get physical with fans?
One time I was at a lingerie party and a guy walked by me. He reached down and shoved his fingers into me so I came around with an elbow and knocked him out cold. It was awesome.

How does your husband handle the adoring masses?
The thing that bothers him is when fans come up to him and say, you don’t know how many times I’ve jacked off to your wife. He’s like, what the hell am I supposed to say to them? I just want to jack them in the face.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve brought into the relationship that’s not a human being?
A pair of needle nose pliers. He had me doggy style and he put my little toe into needle nose pliers. We do fun stuff where he’ll put a belt around my neck and drag me around the floor and make me lick the toilet.

Would FHM find anything unexpected in casa Jameson?
A 500-year-old painting out of a church in Spain of the birth of Mary. A lot of people don’t realize that you can be a porn star and religious.

What should the United States do to end nuclear proliferation in North Korea?
Bomb ‘em! You know they love blondes right? I’m no longer blonde so I better send some of my friends.

Out of all the celebrities you’ve met, who has been the creepiest?
Wesley Snipes. I was hosting a show for the E! channel, the Wild On show and we were covering the Planet Hollywood opening and he didn’t even know I was a porn star. I was sitting there talking to him and he was a cool guy and he just out of the blue looks over at me and says, so, do you like to be fucked in the ass? There’s not much that makes me blush or be at a loss for words but I literally just got up and walked away. Nobody in his right mind would say that to a woman especially if they’re trying to get laid, right? Didn’t happen.

Have you ever gone after a man with a weapon?
When I was around 20 I had a little .22 and I caught my ex-boyfriend cheating and I tried to shoot him. He grabbed the gun before I could. And I would have.

What injuries have you sustained during your career?
I did a scene with Rocco—Rocco is pretty well hung. I just couldn’t hang with it. It was just so incredibly painful that I was walking bow-legged for a week. It was insane. In reality size like that is not a good thing.

A plastic replica of your pussy is available at finer sex shops everywhere. How did they make that?
They put you in a doggy style position and slap plaster of Paris all over you. I have had fans come up to me with it and say, I had so much fun with this last night. Will you sign it? I almost vomited on the guy.

Did he clean it?
I don’t know. That’s the scary part. I didn’t sign it.

Do you have porn de ja vu when the cable guy or pizza guy comes over?
Do you know how many times I’ve answered the door buck naked to the pizza guy just for shock value? A month ago I had four girls here and we were doing a live show for my web site. We were all naked on the bed screwing around and the pizza guy came and I was like, girls we’ve all gotta answer the door buck naked and we all did it. The poor guy hyperventilated. He didn’t know what to do. He was just looking at the ground and I was like, honey it’s okay, you can look. He was like, oh my God, oh my God, you’ve made me whole entire life. And then he just walked away.

Who should play you when they make a movie about your life?
My life has been a rollercoaster so it’s going to be a challenging role. People say Jamie Presley, people say Jennifer Love Hewitt. I think they’re just talking about the rack. You know who I really love is Charlize Theron.

Have you ever met her?
I was in the Louis Vitton store on Rodeo drive and I looked up and she was standing right in front of me and I was like holy shit! I’m not a shy person but at that moment I was. But then I mustered it up and went and said I’m Jenna and she said, I know. Then she went about her thing shopping and I went about my thing. I was trying on clothes and walked into one of the dressing rooms and there she was getting dressed. I just wanted to crawl under a rock.

Did you really write your own answers to FHM’s ask Jenna and Isaak?
Yes I did. It was pretty much my first writing job. It’s all FHM, baby!

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PREMIERE magazine ‘BE COOL’ Movie First Look May 2004

Posted on November 4, 2010 by andrewvontz

First Look: Be Cool

This was another brief story I wrote for Premiere magazine (RIP, like so many mags circa the early ’00s). I spent an afternoon on the set of Be Cool, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s followup to Get Shorty. Interviewed James Woods, director F. Gary Gray, and got thrown in front of John Travolta for about five minutes to grab quotes, too, while he had his hair and makeup touched up. Interesting experience, have met few people who had radiated confidence and poise the way Travolta did–but I’m guessing that wasn’t the case pre-Pulp Fiction when he seemed to be done in Hollywood. There’s always a nadir, for everyone, and there’s always a comeback, if you can fight through it. That’s the Travolta lesson. Onto the story. . .

___________________________________________________
Premiere Magazine
May 2004 p. 40
Be Cool

Starring John Travolta, Uma Thurman, James Woods, Danny DeVito, Harvey Keitel, Vince Vaughan, the Rock, and Andre 3000; directed by F. Gary Gray (MGM)

“You can’t have [a movie about] hip-hop without having fly rides,” a Nike-clad F. Gary Gray says as he surveys a traffic jam of his making on Beverly Boulevard in L.A. “I did the Mini Coopers in The Italian Job. Now I have Cadillacs and Hummers with spinnin’ rims.”

In today’s scene, a Russian mobster (Brian Christensen) leaps out of a 1967 Ford T-Bird to confront reformed gangster Chili Palmer (John Travolta) and gun down Palmer’s pal, Tommy (James Woods). “Bang! Bang!” Christensen yells, aiming a prop pistol at Woods, who promptly crumples onto a café table, knocking over his iced tea. Between takes, a grip uses a high-powered hairdryer to evaporate the murky liquid, while Woods examines his vintage Sergio Valente jeans on the sidelines. “I’ve spilled a lot of iced teas today, but I never got the jeans wet,” he says proudly, adding, “I’d never fucking own these, okay?”

In Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty, Palmer transformed from hard-hitting loan shark to hit-making movie producer. In this action-packed sequel adapted Elmore Leonard’s eponymous novel, he gets to know an even dirtier business: the music industry. “Chili is cooler than me for sure,” Travolta says, dressed head-to-toe in black to match Palmer’s tricked-out Escalade. “He’s the street James Bond.”

Marking their first reunion since Pulp Fiction, Uma Thurman stars opposite Travolta as a widow who has taken over her late husband’s record business.

Although there’s no word that they’ll be twisting again, Travolta does have an onscreen dance-off with Andre 3000, who plays a gangsta rapper in the film. (The Rock also makes an appearance as a gay bodyguard nicknamed “Fruity Pebbles.”)

Says Woods, who first met Travolta on the set of Welcome Back, Kotter in ’75, “John’s a black guy in a white guy’s body. He’s got the moves, but so do I. We were actually jitterbugging yesterday, and he was following, doing kick ball changes.”

Traffic rolling again, Travolta and producer Stacey Sher discuss whether Palmer should drop an F-bomb in the next scene. Once the delicate matter is resolved, Sher confirms that RZA from Wu-Tang Clan has sent the T-shirt Uma requested. Although the day is winding down, an important question remains: Can Travolta take Andre 3000 on the dance floor? “Maybe, maybe not,”

Travolta says, hedging his bets like any good loan-shark.

Welcome back, Palmer.

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ROLLING STONE APRIL 17, 2003 ‘COOL ISSUE’ LIAM LYNCH PROFILE

Posted on November 4, 2010 by andrewvontz

This was the first piece I ever wrote for Rolling Stone magazine when lad mags ruled the racks and Tony Romando, an editor who made a huge difference in my journalism career, gave me the opportunity to do this piece. Thanks, Tony.

I spent an evening with Liam Lynch at his compound in the San Fernando Valley to report this story. We also hit In-N-Out and then he had me play a guitar part on a track that went onto an album/DVD he released. Thus I entered the IMDB with a credit for playing on the album. Not what normally happens when you go to profile someone, and I was thankful for the chance to get to do something out of the ordinary and creative with such a talented dude.

As usual, I collected a huge amount of material for the piece and Lynch was such an interesting dude that he could have easily merited a 4,000-word feature. But that’s not where he was at in his trajectory of fame at the time and thus I had the very common task of reducing, reducing, reducing until I had the tight little nugget of text that found its way to print. Readers probably never realize the tremendous amount of effort that goes into compacting, contracting, synopsizing, and reducing a gigantic interesting life into the tiny blocks of text that are articles. But that’s the game. It’s very easy to screw these shorter pieces up and it takes years of practice to get good at boiling everything down to a goo that is satisfactory to editor, writer, and subject–a rare confluence, but one that has to happen every time such a story is produced, or it ends up axed and on the floor/out of the mag during production.

Glad this one made it, glad I connected with Tony Romando early in my career, and double glad Romando was a Big Brother fan. Ironically, there’s a WWE reference in this story. A few years later, Tony would become editor in chief of the WWE magazine (which opened the door to even more interesting experiences for me as a writer, including meeting a childhood idol, the esteemed Ric Flair).

COOL MULTITASKER: LIAM LYNCH

Published In:
Rolling Stone
April 17, 2003

For this writer-director-musician weirdo, reality isn’t that important. In fact, it gets in the way.

By Andrew Vontz

If George W. thinks he’s got his hands full supplexing evil ones WWE style, then he might want to peep a few time management tips from Liam Lynch, the new Howard Hughes of the digisphere.  After shooting No Doubt and Tenacious D on tour for their DVD’s, Lynch banged out all of the music for MTV’s Clone High while working on the five shows he has in development with the Jim Henson Company and co-writing the Tenacious D movie, which he is set to direct this summer.  “It will melt your face off and it’s rocktasstical,” says Lynch of the D project.  “Will Ferrell will probably be in it and some great scenes to classic and new Tenacious D songs.  You can also see how the D came to be.”

While he was at it, Lynch put the finishing touches on his 20 song major label debut, Fake Songs, and produced a pants-pissing funny feature-length DVD of animations, shorts, and behind the scenes footage that will come free with the album.  Like a blood-hungry rock’n’roll lion minus the platform boots, Lynch is a creature of the night that works until 8 a.m. in the editing suite and recording studio he built (himself!) in the detached garage of his LA home and then gets up at 1 p.m. to do it all over.

To aid him in his fanciful journeys through space and time, Lynch has five Macintoshes with wireless internet hookups, 10 sets of fake teeth, 140 episodes of Doctor Who, 23 rubber masks, eight wigs, four cats (who all have their own theme songs), two gaming systems, a live-in artist girlfriend with a degree in physics, and a drug-free lifestyle.  “I’m constantly in a nonreality state of mind so you don’t really need to get stoned,” he says.

Two days after completing a recording session with Ringo Starr, Lynch, a slight, unabashed geek in tattered black rocker gear, kicks back in his office chair and watches a video of the session that he stayed up all night cutting after the session for inclusion on the DVD, which, by the way, won’t be one of those bullshit DVD’s filled with more fluffers than a Valley porn shoot.

No, this DVD has shit that will actually make you laugh.  Or shit eating flies, rather.  The animation Flyz features a pair of flies who try to convince a spider not to eat them because they themselves are poo eaters.  A vignette called Time Taggers features Lynch playing a hipster homey time traveling through history to spray paint his ‘Zero Hope’ tag on a cathedral and Stone Henge.

Like his DVD and his album, everything Lynch has done he’s done himself, and on a budget that puts El Mariachi to shame.  He cut his first studio album before he was fifteen using money he’d raised washing cars, had a recording contract in Nashville before he was 21, and studied with Brian Eno, George Martin, and another Beatle, Paul McCartney, at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts during the mid-‘90s.  While at LIPA, Lynch created his hit MTV series Sifl and Ollie in his bedroom at LIPA using a pair of socks and a video camera.

Unlike many of today’s plasticine stars who are ready to beat an assistant with a cell phone over a hangnail, Lynch is humble, self-effacing, and driven by a relentless quest for fun.  He loves watching television, especially commercials, and writes some of his best material while playing video games.  “Video games use the same parts of the brain that playing instruments do,” says Lynch.  “If I need to think about something and get away from the work, I’ll play video games.”

Like a more upbeat, ATF-free version of the Branch Davidian compound, Lynch’s unpretentious LA home comprises a self-contained digi-Valhalla.  A door at the back of the garage’s editing suite leads into a soundproofed digital recording studio that has a set of drums his close friend Dave Grohl gave him. “He’s like Animal from the Muppets when he air drums in your car,” says Lynch.  “If you get hit you’re dead.”

Lynch views his sci-fi themed work spaces as time travel modules akin to Doctor Who’s time traveling Tardis telephone booth.  His Doctor Who fever runs so high that he will be given a replica of the Tardis as part of his record deal that will be the gateway to Dimension:  Lynch.

“Everything that happens in the two rooms is about time travel in some way,” he says.  “Time doesn’t stand still in my studio.

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SALON.COM THE STRANGE TRIUMPH OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC June 19, 2002

Posted on November 4, 2010 by andrewvontz

I greatly enjoyed writing this piece and it represents a bygone area of journalism when the web allowed the opportunity to stretch and flex rather than cater to 144-word attention spans. I heavily researched this piece and one of the highlights was interviewing John Digweed in his hotel room at the Chateau Marmont. I had an interview with the Chemical Brothers lined up during Coachella while researching the story, but they canceled the interview at the last minute because another writer (not me) panned whatever album they had just released on Salon.com earlier that week. Oops! That’s journalism kids.

If you listen to the background music in commercials or look where hip hop, indie rock, and pop music have headed in the eight years since I published this piece, you’ll notice that electronic music production techniques, tonal palettes, and instrumentation rule these days. They’re so pervasive no one even notices that we all listen to electronic music, all the time, now.

THE STRANGE TRIUMPH OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC

FIRST APPEARED IN:
Salon.com
June 19, 2002

It may not be on the radio, but it’s the most influential—and unifying—force in pop music today.

By Andrew John Ignatius Vontz

In 1997, at the height of the so-called big beat invasion, I walked into a Foot Locker store in Beverly Hills to buy a new pair of shoes. I may have been looking for some Air Max 95s. At some point, house music came thundering over the in-store sound system and strobes began to flash. I dropped whatever sneaker I was holding and waited for smoke to billow into the room while everyone pumped their fists in the air and danced.

Instead, everyone kept shopping.

Five years later, the big beat invasion is a distant, failed media meme. As exemplified in the work of Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers, big beat was electronic music squeezed into the familiar, easily digestible song structures of rock music. The DJs knew how to party and some of them even looked like rock stars, like Keith Flint from the Prodigy (you know, the “Firestarter guy,” the one with the weird mohawk?).

No single genre of electronic music since has received that kind of mainstream attention. Apart from a handful of anomalous acts with catchy signature sounds, like the Chemical Brothers or Moby, both of whom appear to have broken through for good, you won’t find electronic music on American charts and you won’t see electronic music videos on MTV.

Madonna just doesn’t count.

For the past decade, the mainstream and electronic music industries have tried to turn electronic music into a pan-cultural worldwide phenomenon. Globally, this effort has been indisputably successful. Electronic music is pop music in Europe. Kids play with Roland Grooveboxes, not Stratocasters, and dream of being the next Paul Oakenfold, not the next Paul McCartney.

But not in the States, even though house and techno were of course invented in Chicago and Detroit. Electronic music — dance music — did have its moment in the mid ’90s. And American record companies signed acts, MTV aired some Chemical Brothers videos and Billboard created a dance music chart.

But then the commercial prospects seemed to fizzle all at once. Serious electronic music fans turned against the acts that were promoted to major label status. And at the same time, the record-buying populace decided that they preferred teen pop, jiggy hop and nu metal. How definitive was the flop? On his current single, the biggest-selling act in pop music, Eminem, slams Moby and points out that no one listens to techno.

He’s wrong, not just because the techno underground flourishes, but because while no one was listening, electronic music truly attained commercial success in America — TV commercial success. And soundtrack success. Indeed, you can’t turn on the television or go to the theater without hearing electronic music.

Famously, every song from Moby’s last album, “Play,” was licensed for commercials or soundtracks or both. The French post-house duo Daft Punk act as shills for Palm computing and the Gap. And although you couldn’t name a track by the house act Dirty Vegas, you’ve probably heard their music in a commercial for Mitsubishi automobiles.

Meanwhile, every weekend, thousands of kids across the U.S. strap on leg-swallowing JNCO raver gear, pull on fuzzy backpacks, adorn themselves with kiddy candy jewelry and head to sports arena massives — giant raves featuring dozens of DJs and sometimes as many as 50,000 partiers. In some parts of the country raving has become as much a rite of passage for teens as high school football games and trying to get laid at the prom. Consequently, an entire generation of Americans has grown up dancing all night and hugging strangers.

Substantial, globally influential electronic music scenes flourish in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles. Many feel the latter city has become the epicenter of the electronic music universe because of its proximity to the mainstream music industry and because of its proliferation of clubs, massives, festivals and illegal one-off events in a multitude of electronic music sub-genres.

Mix CDs from the top DJs who play these clubs sell well, if not well enough to earn gold certificates. Paul Oakenfold’s 1998 release “Tranceport,” for example, sold 222,000 copies and a recent independently released continuous mix by relatively unknown New York DJ Louie DeVito has sold 315,000 copies according to the Village Voice. Electronic music is even starting to catch on in the heartland, where cutting-edge DJs pack clubs in Kansas City, Mo.

And finally, with the success of Radiohead and groups that use electro-beats, elements of turntablism and loops, electronic music production techniques have now become the norm in rock music. The digital and computer-based recording equipment long used by electronic artists is now the industry standard in pop music as well. In this respect at least, Americans are now listening to electronic music almost every time they turn on the radio or television.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

In April, at the Coachella music festival in Southern California, Microsoft passed out thousands of glowsticks bearing the X-Box logo during a set by British progressive trance/tech house duo Sasha and John Digweed. So if American corporations are so fond of electronic music, why don’t we hear it on the radio? See the videos on MTV? And popularly speaking, will the music ever amount to more than sonic cotton candy for watching movies, shopping at the mall and waiting for “Survivor” to come back from a commercial break?

Part of the problem is that electronic music still faces the same old prejudices that have plagued it from the start. You’ve heard them all before: Electronic music is repetitive; it’s empty fluff; it’s soulless; the people who make it play with computers, not instruments.

Because these criticisms continue to come up after more than a decade, it’s worth addressing some of them. As with all other genres of music, of course, there are good electronic music tracks and bad ones. Whether you like an electronic song or electronic music in general is wholly dependent on context. Just as a certain intellectual context makes it possible to appreciate John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen, so dancing is the key to the electronic aesthetic.

The most important thing to remember about the most globally prevalent strains of electronic music, house and trance, is that the purpose of both is to keep people moving on a dance floor. That repetitive four-four beat is supposed to be repetitive. At the same time, that steady kick drum leaves room for endless rhythmic variance and progression, just like the four-bar blues structure leaves room for endless innovation in rock.

Empty fluff? Yes, there’s plenty of that in electronic music. But so what? Some of the greatest rock songs, from “Blue Suede Shoes” to “Yellow Submarine,” have been deliriously fluffy. And an aversion to brainless meringue hasn’t stopped millions from buying Garth Brooks or Destiny’s Child.

As for the charge that electronic artists are not musicians, computers and digital tools are merely that. The music does not write itself. The artist, however, does enjoy a few advantages that he or she might not get with traditional instruments. Because electronic music is usually (but not always) digitally based and is frequently created on computers, it is unusually elastic. Electronic musicians compose with palettes of sound limited only by their imaginations and their patience. If they want to drop some tablas into the middle of a song or use a sample of breaking glass as the rhythmic basis of a song, their dream is often only a double click away.

A related problem is the ongoing confusion between DJs and the people who actually make electronic music. Although more and more high-end DJs are releasing full-length albums of their own work, such as Timo Maas’ “Loud,” the most prevalent form of electronic music on the market today is the continuous DJ mix, which approximates a live set, with the DJ picking tracks by other artists and mixing them together.

A DJ is still best appreciated as a live performer. When top DJs perform at clubs or massives, even the most educated listeners in the audience probably won’t recognize many of the tracks, because such DJs often drop ultra-rare records that are made available exclusively to them months ahead of the listening public. DJs of this caliber also often use dub plates, records that will literally wear out after a very limited number of plays, which they produce themselves or are floated to them by the best producers in the world, and which the public might never even be able to buy.

All but the most savvy of electronic music consumers, then, are clueless about who the people are who actually produce this music, how they do it, what they look like, what they wear, how they party or any of the other details that make celebrities out of rock stars. A slightly larger number of music listeners and consumers know the names, styles and techniques of top-tier DJs.

DJs don’t speak. Most don’t produce their own full-length albums. When they perform, their only motions are precise hand movements and brief shuffles to record bins that are obscured from view and confined to a 5-foot square area. There are no David Lee Roth jump kicks, synchronized boy-band dances, Michael Jackson moonwalks or Janet Jackson ass-shaking.

For American consumers, this is a problem.

The average American listener is used to going to performances featuring vocalists and instruments that are recognizable and produce the kinds of sounds that they’ve spent decades listening to. They expect these sounds to be accompanied by the visual spectacle of singers, rappers and dancers on stage doing their damnedest to entertain and otherwise get them fired up. To people who have only experienced music this way the concept of the electronic music DJ and the dance experience must be utterly perplexing.

If you’re used to live music as entertainment — in the sense of watching performers make spectacles of themselves as they create music while you passively consume the sonic byproduct of their efforts — then enjoying electronic music requires a shift in aural expectations, synthesis, digestion and physical participation. While there are certain branches of electronic music, such as the intelligent dance music created by producers like Boards of Canada, that are made for listening rather than dancing, by and large electronic music is made to make people dance. And when you dance, the DJ takes you on a journey, but he or she is usually not the focus of your experience at a club or festival or wherever you hear the music. Dancing is.

Most Americans still have a hard time relating to this.

- – - – - – - – - -

Call it the soccer problem. America remains pretty much the last country on earth that doesn’t really care about the sport. (And even the unexpected success of the U.S. team at this year’s World Cup is unlikely to change that permanently.) As with electronic music, you could argue that we don’t really like it because it doesn’t really jive with our cult of individualism. We believe that history is made by great men and women, whether in politics, sports or the arts.

In spite of their homogeneity, rock and hip-hop are still the music of the individual. And both rock and hip-hop, with their alternately boastful, self-deprecating, uplifting and emotionally self-destructive lyrics, masquerade as the music of the rebel. The fact is, both genres have been bought and sold and recycled so many times that it’s hard to connect with most pop music on an emotional level. Who feels the pain of some multimillionaire who had a bad childhood? Still, the ideologies espoused in pop music are far more in line with the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, me-against-the-world myth that dominates America’s vision of history, a kind of romantic ideal perhaps best embodied by the image of Ted Nugent hunting elk by his lonesome with a large gun. And for the most part, electronic music, without words, cannot forge this ideological connection to American listeners.

So electronic music remains invisible. But at the same time, it’s the sound that keep everyone cheering at monster truck rallies and baseball games, dancing on the weekends and cruising the Gap. Whether we know it or not, we love this music. Advertisers wouldn’t use it otherwise.

Will Americans ever admit it?

Probably. For a number of reasons that have largely been overlooked by champions of electronic music in the popular press, electronic music’s success in America has taken longer to happen than it has in Europe. But it can happen. Here’s why.

The omnipresence of electronic music in advertising and films continues to prime listeners. Dirty Vegas’ “Days Go By” was only an import record when it debuted in that Mitsubishi commercial with the woman dancing in the front seat. Weeks later, it was playing on commercial radio, identified by New York DJs as “the song from that commercial.”

Further, like the fans of Phish-style jam bands who chronicle every move of their favorite groups and follow them across America, the electronic music listenership is loyal and dedicated, and until this music is everywhere, they will travel to find it wherever they can, turning on others along the way. When the music industry finally wakes up from its decade-long slumber and wraps its tendrils around electronic music, the fan base will already exist to ensure its commercial success.

There remain two problems: Electronic music songs mostly don’t have lyrics, and electronic music artists don’t have public images. But just because the music doesn’t have lyrics doesn’t mean that it’s not smart or complex.

Further, electronic music is constantly evolving. Even critics who get this aspect of electronic music fail to understand that some electronic music artists and DJs who are hugely popular aren’t content to continue to pump out the same styles of beats over and over. A review in the June 6 Rolling Stone criticized Sasha and Digweed for spinning undynamic, heavily repetitive tunes at a show in San Francisco.

This San Francisco performance happened to be the same weekend that I saw the duo at Coachella. Over the course of the past year, I’ve noticed that a lot of trance producers and DJs have shifted from the histrionic, arpeggiated synths that have dominated progressive trance for the past several years toward a far more stripped-down sound that relies on broken kick-drum beats, long, minimalist builds borrowed from the tech-house genre (as often heard on Digweed’s own Bedrock label), tribal hand-drum samples, and strange, simple breaks in lieu of snare roll orgasms.

This is the kind of music that Digweed has been spinning and producing since at least the time of his 2001 Global Underground performance in Los Angeles, so to criticize him for not playing the same records that they did in 1996 is to fail to understand that these artists aren’t the Rolling Stones.

More generally, what some critics of electronic music don’t (yet) understand or acknowledge is that the absence of words provides the opportunity for narratives that transcend the boundaries of language to be built in much the same way that narratives are built in jazz and classical music. Trance, house and jungle, for example, all use builds, instrumentation and sampling to greater and lesser degrees to create powerful transporting narratives. In this way, dancers in such disparate locales as the Moroccan desert, the beach in Tel Aviv, Ibiza, the Ministry of Sound in London and Giant in Los Angeles are all able to connect to the same track. Language and image are no longer barriers; the only musical language that matters is the language of tension, release and dynamism implicit in the construction of electronic music.

Ultimately, then, the factors that seem to be holding back electronic music from succeeding in America are some of the same reasons that its widespread commercial success may very well be inevitable. Record companies don’t understand why mass groups of strangers get off on congregating in dark rooms to dance their asses off to records made by invisible artists from around the world. Sooner than later they will — or, in the grand tradition of the record industry, they’ll simply buy a record label that does.

What corporate America can’t completely commodify or sell, though, is the experience of hearing this music on a dance floor surrounded by people who are going off. At its best, the electronic music experience brings together people from all walks of life to celebrate and move to the same unifying rhythms. And that is its power, especially in a Balkanized era of global strife, terror and paranoia. The beauty of it is that it is born again every night in dark rooms, open fields, beaches, forests, warehouses and desert dunes around the planet — wherever people mass around sound systems and celebrate to the pulse of electronic music.

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SLATE May 6, 2002 STUDIO STORMTROOPERS: The Big Business of Star Wars Queues

Posted on November 4, 2010 by andrewvontz

STUDIO STORMTROOPERS
The big business of Star Wars queues.

First published in:
Slate
May 6, 2002

http://www.slate.com/id/2065301/

By Andrew Vontz

Two Star Wars fans in Seattle have been living in a 10-foot-by-20-foot tent in the parking lot of a Seattle theater since Jan. 1, waiting for the May 16 opening of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. If they make it to opening day, an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records awaits them for the longest wait in line for a movie. (They’re chronicling their stay here.) Fans in Los Angeles have been waiting since April 4. New York’s Episode II line opened April 28. In all, Star Wars fans have queued up in more than 21 locations in the United States and Europe, putatively to be among the first to buy tickets and view the film.

But being first to see the movie clearly isn’t what’s at stake for these fans. After all, the average person will be able to see Episode II on May 16 simply by calling Moviefone or showing up at the box office. Granted, some rabid fans are doing it out of sheer ostentatious devotion. But for others, the lines can be sidewalk-borne mini-MBA programs for aspiring film promoters. These people aren’t the simple ass-sitters of yore. They’re conducting an intensive study in guerrilla advertising and Internet marketing techniques. The bottom line for these fans may very well be the bottom line.

Consider the history of Countingdown.com, the organization that sponsored the watershed of Star Wars lines, the one outside Mann’s theater in Hollywood in 1999 for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Lincoln Gasking, Phillip Nakov, and Tim Doyle created the site after meeting on a Titanic message board, where they cooked up the idea of a film Web site that would cater to fan anticipation of upcoming films. After promoting Titanic on Countingdown.com, they decided to try for a multiweek line-sit for The Phantom Menace. Sponsoring lines in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, then, they used the Countingdown.com Web site to promote the lines, leak Episode I-related information, and host live Web broadcasts from the Hollywood line.

In total, the three Countingdown.com lines garnered countless media mentions, served up 30,000,000 streams of video to Web users, and raised a total of $75,000 for the Starlight Children’s Foundation, a children’s charity that creates play zones in hospitals for terminally ill children. Line-sitters either donated money out of their own pockets or found sponsors in the same way someone participating in a charity marathon might. By hooking up with a good cause, the line-sitters were able to garner even more media attention and give what appeared to be an indulgent, slightly lunatic activity a semblance of good citizenship.

But the primary feature of the line wasn’t people waiting on the sidewalk—there were only a handful on the day I visited in ’99. The complicated point system used by Countingdown.com enabled fans to rotate in and out of the line to attend to real-world concerns like urination, bathing, and working. Instead, the main component was the tented media command center. Countingdown.com’s promoters erected several structures on the sidewalk and crammed them full of Internet video production gear, directors’ chairs, internet hookups, and other audio and video equipment.

The hard work put in by Gasking, Nakov, and Doyle paid off: During June of 2000, their Web site was acquired by Pop.com, a subsidiary of DreamWorks and Imagine Entertainment. They would now be paid to promote DreamWorks and Imagine properties. Although Pop.com folded, Countingdown.com survives and draws more than 1 million unique visitors per month according to Nakov, who is now the official Countingdown.com spokesman. The site now strategically deploys lines that act as both marketing tools and charity fund-raisers for the Starlight Children’s Foundation. For X-Men, they got fans to line up for a week in advance on a sidewalk outside an L.A. theater. Recently, they held a weeklong line for Spider-Man.

Though Nakov and co. were once enthusiastic Star Wars fans, they betray no trace of their former enthusiasm now that they’re on another studio’s payroll. (Episode II is a 20th Century Fox movie.) But other sites, such as www.liningup.com, www.starwarscampers.com, and www.waitingforstarwars.com, have taken up the gauntlet and are plugging Attack of the Clones with their own Web sites and charity initiatives. As for Nakov, he offers this viewing recommendation for the weekend of May 16: “Go see About a Boy, starring Hugh Grant. Absolutely wonderful movie. It’s a real, real great film.”

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Bicycling Magazine Bicycle Film Festival Feature Published June 2005

Posted on November 4, 2010 by andrewvontz

A funny thing happens in journalism when selling stories. If you are on the ball, see the handwriting on the wall, and spot an emerging trend that’s going to become hugely important in the near future, it doesn’t matter unless an editor sitting at a desk who is far removed from what is happening in the world/scene/culture they’re supposed to be at the center of happens to be tuned into whatever it is you’re pitching. Pitch something before an editor has had an inkling of the same great idea themselves, it ain’t gonna hit. Pitch it too long after and someone else will be writing the story. Like everything else in life and work, timing is everything.

Researched and wrote this in November 2004, sold it shortly before heading up to SF to do my reporting. While Bike Snob is now a fixture in Bicycling, at the time bike culture of the non-racing sort wasn’t much on Bicycling’s radar at all. Bicycling definitely got on the bandwagon with the fixed gear scene and non-racing bike culture, big time, once it became blatantly obvious this scene was, in fact, huge.

I knew it was because I’d been rolling with the Midnight Ridazz in LA since the second installment of the ride (about 30 people, which I saw metastasize into 3,000+ at its peak). I sold Bicycling a Midnight Ridazz story, too, but it got spiked before it happened. At the time, it was hugely obvious to me from what I was seeing and living in LA that this scene was going to hit, and hit big, nationally. But that’s the freelancer’s dilemma in a nutshell right there.

Was stoked to get this piece pub’d and draw some attention to the BFF, a bike culture force in its own right that has helped spread the magic of this scene across America and around the world. Big ups to Brendt Barbur, the driving force behind the event.

AAAAAAAAAND ACTION!
The Bicycle Film Festival Shows Our Sport From All Angles

Bicycling Magazine
June 2005

By Andrew Vontz

While “Welcome to the Jungle” thunders over the sound system at Mighty, a hip San Francisco dance club, more than 400 people pump their fists in the air and scream like Axl Rose. Couriers and courier wannabes clad in cutoff pants with Timbuk2 bags fill the folding chairs on the dance floor and sit alongside professional types in slacks and middle-aged guys with beards and specs. The crowd didn’t come to Mighty for a glam rock revival, though. “I’m here to see some bike movies,” says Rob Horning, a production designer and mountain biker from Los Angeles in Diesel jeans. The valet bike parking racks out front are filled to capacity while the crowd witnesses the first night of the Bicycle Film Festival, an exhibition of 29 narrative and documentary movies about bikes during the course of three nights ranging from “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” to a documentary about double-decker bike jousting.

Who are all these people? Why would anybody want to LOOK like a bike messenger? What’s a bike film festival anyway? And, uh, where do I have to go to get somebody to valet park my bike? The strange mix of people at the four-year-old festival might be perplexing if you think of the Tour De France, spandex shorts, and the Sunday group ride when you think of bicycling. But in SF, New York, Los Angeles, and other big cities around the country, fixed gear bikes and the courier look are hot. Just think of all the Timbuk2 bags you see non-pierced, non-courier types carrying in business class. The crowd includes everyone from Catherine Choo, 33, an attorney and bike commuter with Pantene perfect tresses, to Victor Vesey, a bike activist with wild hair past his shoulders, and strong b.o.—that’s bike odor. “If you have the excuse of a ride you’ll go and ride a bike because it’s within a certain context,” Vesey says. The festival has provided such an excuse and the valet bike parking makes the festival a bike friendly destination. The San Francisco Bike Coalition, a 4,500 member strong brigade of cycling activists, is responsible for the parking. It’s a service the Coalition provides at events around the city almost every weekend. Imagine that—people riding their bikes to get around the city. Wild, huh?

The festival is the brainchild of Brendt Barbur who created the festival four years ago in New York City during a ride that ended when he was doored into an oncoming bus. He sustained a separated shoulder, a spinal cord injury, blown out knees, two sprained ankles, and a broken jaw. While lying in a hospital bed he concluded that he was supposed to work as a bike advocate, not an actor, his pre-accident gig. “I think riding a bicycle should have more respect. There are health benefits, environmental benefits, social benefits. It’s community service.” So he created the Bicycle Film Festival.

If you think you’re not a part of the culture at the festival, you may be right. Or maybe you’re dead wrong. The last time a bike messenger showed up at your office with a FedEx, he probably smelled. But didn’t your chamois stink after your last epic? And didn’t you ever wonder what, really, that guy’s daily duty was like, how he rode, and where? Admit it, you’ve wonder if you could hack it as a bike messenger, just like you wonder if you could hack it, somehow, on Lance’s wheel. And because of that, trust me, you want to see what these 400 people are seeing right now, since the crowd is slackjawed at the riding they’re witnessing on a giant screen above Mighty’s stage. In Lucas Brunelle’s “Drag Race New York City” it’s the dead of winter and cross-dressed riders are riding faster than traffic as they scream through red lights, weave in and out of gnarly gridlock, and dodge packs of terrified pedestrians. They’re riding in a race a lot more dangerous than a stage of the Tour. It’s called an alleycat and the messengers are trying to be the quickest to complete a series of checkpoints scattered throughout the City. Up on the screen, a rider on a fixed-gear narrowly avoids a head-on with a bus. Down in the crowd, a woman in pigtails with a Kryptonite chain wrapped around her waist screams back, “Totally sick!”

Maybe being packed into a beer-soaked club watching fringe cycling movies isn’t your cup of tea. Fear not because I spent an entire weekend arm-warmers deep in the muck to bring back this report on what’s happening in the world of bike movies. The lunatic fringe isn’t for everyone—including some of the people at the festival. “I barely take recreational rides. People who do novelty experiences that happen to be on a bicycle, great, but I don’t find it very attractive,” says Chris Carlsson, a festival attendee who runs a print shop, commutes, and happens to be one of the founders of Critical Mass. Bike films might not be ready to conquer the world, but there were a number of films at the festival that could get just about anybody fired up to down a lo-carb muffin, pull on some spinning shorts and get on the road to burn some calories. Here’s the dirt on four of the best films I saw that are a sure fire way to stoke any cyclist.

RED LIGHT GO
USA, 2002, Mini DV, 52 min.
Directors: Manny Kivowitz, Ben Barraud, Toby Barraud

“I’m a professional cyclist,” ponytailed New York courier Mike Dee says at the beginning of this hour-long documentary about the ins and outs of working as a messenger in NYC. This flick chronicles the camaraderie and culture that couriers create through riding, racing, and drinking. We learn that cars, cabbies, pedestrians, and people in offices almost universally treat messengers like crap, that they make almost nothing for what they do, and that respect is the ultimate commodity on the streets. Winning alleycat races is how they get respect and “Red Light Go” features footage of multiple races. “I’ve often compared a messenger and his track bike to a Jedi Knight and his sword because you have to be able to look in front of you and predict when f#@$d-up things will happen,” says Evil E, courier and race facilitator extraordinaire who plans a Halloween alleycat race—from his jail cell. The race footage gets redundant after a while and the camera work, editing, and narrative could all be tightened up, but Red Light Go will make you want to ride in the city.

HOOD TO COAST
USA, 2003, Video, 9 min.
Director: Rev Phil

Ever looked at your child’s 12”-wheeled bike and wondered what would happen if you tore off the training wheels and raced it down a mountain pass road? I haven’t either. But I can tell you that it’s one of the more funny things you’ll ever see someone do on a bike. The Zoo Bombers are a crew of Oregonian merry pranksters who assemble in the parking lot at the summit of Mount Hood to bomb the road to the bottom on an impressive arsenal of kiddie bikes. It’s most spectacular entertaining, and stupid adventures humankind has undertaken since people started hucking Niagara Falls in barrels. No one dies during the race, but I almost puked from the nauseatingly shaky handheld camera work. Hood to Coast looks like something you might have shot in fifteen minutes with your dad’s VHS camcorder in 1987, but like the Bomber’s bikes, there’s something magical, childlike, and intrinsically appealing about their adventure.

WARRIORS: THE BIKE RACE
USA 2004, Video, 17 min.
Directors: Josh Weinstein, Michael Green, Jesse Epstein

In August of 2002, 800 riders divided into 68 teams took to the mean streets of New York to complete the Warriors alleycat race, a ride from Manhattan at dusk to Coney Island at dawn the next day. But this wasn’t just any old alleycat. The huge turnout made it the biggest alleycat ever held in America and each team was decked out in outrageous themed costumes that ran the gamut from Mad Max wear to sci-fi gear to threads that imitated the look of gangs in the original film. Think Halloween meets Hollywood meets bike race and you’ve it. The racers were bikers from around the world. Teams had to complete outrageous tasks at each checkpoint from wrestling a giant man to the ground to competing in a trackstand competition to downing a quart of ice cream. This short video follows the race from start to finish intercut with clips from the feature film. The editing and videography are lo-fi but it looks like so much fun you won’t even notice.

TOUR OF LEGENDS
The Netherlands, 2003, 16-mm, 68 min.
Director: Erik van Empel

Did you know Gino Bartali’s victory in the 1948 Tour de France may have saved Italy from civil war? Did you know that Bartali liked to smoke cigarettes after each stage to relax? Neither did I but after Tour of Legends will make you fall in love with a Tour you never knew about.  To capture the ’48 Tour and the hard men who contested it shortly after World War II van Empel interviews racers who rode it. They recount leaving behind jobs as coalminers and butchers to contest the Tour under the most brutal of conditions during an era when riders changed their own flats, carried their own food, and resorted to giving each other piggyback rides to get to the finish line. Beautifully shot on film, this brooding feature length piece concludes with a drive up the Galibier at night that fades into ghostly footage of the race up the same Col in the ’48 Tour. An instant classic and a must see for anyone who wants to touch the beating heart and history of the Tour.

Of course, the BFF is clearly more than the movies in it. It’s a chance to see all of the craziness happening around the bike world in one weekend in San Francisco. And to live it, too. What to do with all of that excitement? Go riding of course. On Saturday riders lined up for a chance to ride in an alleycat just like those seen in Red Light Go and Drag Race NYC. Like all good rides, this one finished with meat and beer in Golden Gate Park where dozens of bikes lay in the grass. For the Aeolian ride later that day, fifty people donned custom-made white windbreakers that inflated into bulbous shapes to ride through the city as a rolling art project. Like these rides, many of the featured movies might seem as far removed from your cycling life as Yoda frolicking in the Dagobah system. But before you turn your nose up at these almost invisible frequencies at the far end of the cycling spectrum, watch one of these flicks and see if you don’t walk away stoked. I dare you.

SIDEBAR
You probably won’t find the films in the festival on NetFlix or at the local bike shop but visit www.bicyclefilmfestival.com to pick up a DVD with some of Barbur’s favorite selections or visit the following web sites:

“Drag Race NYC” Lucas Brunelle

http://www.digave.com/videos/

“Bike Thief”

http://neistat.com/

“Diversion”

http://www.diversionvm.com/

“Red Light Go”

http://www.redlightgo.ws/

“Paperboys”

http://www.res.com/index.res.html

“Nasty’s World”

http://www.solpinfilms.com/

“Chain Reaction 5″

http://www.dh-productions.com/

“No Way: The Hans Rey Story”

http://www.hansrey.com/

“Hood to Coast”
Zoobombers

http://www.zoobomb.org/

“Portland Chunkatholon”
Chunk 666

http://www.dclxvi.org/chunk/

Lo-Fi Customs

http://www.loficustoms.com/

Aeolian Ride

http://www.aeolian-ride.info/

Critical Mass
“Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration” ed. Chris Carlsson

http://www.akpress.com/dosearch.php?itemid=3459

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition

http://www.sfbike.org/

Pedal Revolution

http://www.pedalrevolution.com/

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