Form over Function = Art

I take a fair amount of crap over my dislike for motorcycles with “personality” and intolerance for form over function (choppers and other non-functional toys). For starters, I’m not particularly visual: ask me what my favorite color is and the answer will be “Who cares?” There are a few colors I don’t like, a lot of colors that are acceptable, and a few that I prefer under particular conditions. Likewise, I tend to look at mechanical things as tools and tools are either useful or not. If they are really useful, I don’t care what they look like at all. Or, at least, I put the cosemetic aspect so far in the background I only think about it in really rare and slightly drunken moments.

My wife is a visual artist. She is very visually oriented and wouldn’t recognize a function if one were staring her in the face. The function of plastic bags evades her, or (like me and colors) she doesn’t care about even basic functions. I buy large bags of bird seed for our outdoor feeders and if she beats me to being first to open a new bag, the bags look like a rabid squirrel chewed its way into the package. This might not seem like a thing to a more normal person, but I have a system for filling the feeders, mostly because I hate squirrels and spillage attracts squirrels. My system is fairly anal, I admit. I cleanly cut the top off of the bag, spread the bag so that it fills the can, stick the feeders all the way into the bag, and fill the feeders with a pitcher so that all of the excess falls back into the bag. She, on the other hand, disassembles the top foot of the bag, pours seed randomly in the container, around the container, and even some into the feeders. Squirrels love her. These bags were actually designed to be containers and a reasonably organized systems of distribution and art turns them into chaos.

So, for 49 years we’ve lived together with disparate interests and conflicting styles. Art, as I define it, comes from an old Greek (or Chinese or Abo) word meaning “not good.” If something is art, the execution will be amateur, the choice and use of materials will be juvenile, and purpose will be obscure or nonexistent. My wife and her artist friends are convinced that I’m too obsessed with purpose and artisanship (an insult, to the art crowd). I’m convinced that if the workmanship sucks, I don’t care about the rest. When I look at a piece of ironwork art, I look at the welds first. If they are amateur, poorly formed, or ground off to hide the poor workmanship, I don’t take the rest of the work seriously. Same for woodworking. I’m looking for a level of workmanship before I start considering the form. As a mediocre musician, I have always required music to be something more complicated than I can perform if I’m going to spend my money on it. 

The fact that this motorcycle is unrideable except under the most restricted conditions defines it as art and not a functional vehicle, in my mind. I’m a big fan of engineering, like the KTM at the beginning of this essay and not much of a fan of cobbled and useless art, like this cruiser. I’m not bragging here. I realize that this function-over-form requirement limits my ability to appreciate purely form-based art. I don’t see anything but discomfort, impracticality, and unnecessary complication and expense when I see a bike like this cruiser. I don’t have a mechanism that allows me to appreciate it as art alone.

A designer/author named Don Norman sums up my problems with bad design (art) in his book, The Design of Everyday Things, “Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.” Motorcycles, for example, are dangerous, complicated, and non-intuitive (countersteering, for example). Good design would minimize that. Lousy design adds to all of the negatives without providing any value, other than chaos, to the rider. And if you’re not riding your motorcycle, you are not a motorcyclist but an owner of a piece of art.

As Norman said about Apple products in a FastDesign article a while back, “Apple is destroying design. Worse, it is revitalizing the old belief that design is only about making things look pretty. No, not so! Design is a way of thinking, of determining people’s true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them.” Likewise, motorcycles with a primary purpose of “looking pretty” are destroying motorcycling by convincing rube motorcyclists that looking cool (or clownish, depending on your perspective) is more important than going places safely and competently. These toys are so badly designed that they need to make as much noise as possible to compensate for the fact that the riders are helpless to defend themselves with the qualities a decently designed motorcycle and motorcyclist take for granted; agility.

Wow! If I were in a better mood, I’d go back and pare this down to one argument. I’m not in a good mood and probably won’t be for at least 4 years. The worship of ignorance, chaos, and corruption has become a national religion and I don’t expect to enjoy it any more than I like looking at a piece of badly executed “art.”

Translating from English

I mentioned a new on-line British motorcycle magazine a few posts back, The Riders Digest. The April issue is one of the more interesting motorcycling reads I've experienced in years. To give you a taste, the editor wrote a politically incorrect intro about going slightly hooligan on his Suzuki scooter and warned his readers to suck it up if that bothered their gentle sensibilities. An incredibly windy dude, who rightly hides behind the stage name "Anarchy 2012," wrote one of the least informative bike reviews ever penned on the Honda NC700X. My own product reviews have been altered forever after beating my way through the deep brush of his opinions and life history to a seriously unsatisfying conclusion.

A white-haired near-geezer, Paul Browne, wrote one of the most concise and interesting diaries about giving up his job in Ireland and running off to tour the Americas with a hot young thing he'd met as a motorcycle salesman. If I were more jealous, I'd have to hunt him down and lecture him about his total lack of personal responsibility and how he is making the rest of us old farts look sedentary and boring. I do not understand a single sentence of his description of where the money came from for this trip. I could read a whole article explaining how "the Irish government had just paid out on a savings scheme that put a little over twenty grand into each of our pockets" and how quitting his job as a bike salesman earned him "a golden handshake that was enough to buy me a new bike." In the States, the only people who get golden handshakes are execs who know where the company keeps the bodies buried. Seriously, I want to understand where this money came from. I fucking want to retire so badly my feet hurt and I can't see anyway it will happen in my lifetime.

The rest of this issue of The Riders' Digest is as unpredictable and varied as all of motorcycle journalism combined. The magazine swings from one end of us to the opposite without a hitch or apology. Michael Moore's Sicko had a couple of scenes that made me despair that, after all our hoolyballo about being the "home of democracy," England was more democratic than the US. TRD has the same effect on me, motorcycle-wise. I seriously hope this magazine catches on and does some serious damage to the current state of motorcycle journalism. The closest thing to TRD that I've seen in the US was the old Dirt Bike Magazine from the Super Hunky-editing days and the best issues of our own rag, MMM. Getting rid of the paper publishing costs takes some of the risk out of possibly alienating sensitive advertisers, but TRD's website and the PDF magazines are terrific and that can't come for free. Here's hoping this new version of an old magazine sets some new standards.

Murderball or Football

This one's for you, Pat.

A while back, a friend commented that I was unable to appreciate the skill exhibited by a cop wallowing around a gymkhana course on his hippo-Harley. He said something about me being unable to appreciate the skill required to make this bloated tractor of a motorcycle maneuver almost as well as a motorcycle.

Pat, you're right and you're wrong. I do appreciate the cop's skill, for what it is. However, I'd rather see a great rider on a great motorcycle, because that is actually interesting. Who knows if the cops can actually ride well? Yeah, they're great considering their handicap, but why intentionally reach for a handicap?

I got another reminder of my preference for all around competence over being pretty good at a boring skill today when a local television station ran the 1931 "A Connecticut Yankee" with Will Rogers. I wish I could find a link to the jousting scene in this great movie. The king's man is on a draft horse, all duded up in armor and fringe, while Rogers is on a cutting horse, in working cowboy clothes, with a lariat for a "weapon."

Not only do Rogers and his cutting horse kick the cruiser . . . whoops!

Not only do Rogers and his cutting horse kick the knight's ass, the mobile pair are a lot more fun to watch. I wish I could find a link to the jousting scene. [Will Rogers rocks!]

It's Sunday afternoon as I write this and the whole argument reminded me of  sports of all types. Yeah, it's really impressive that the guys who play Murderball are as good as they are at their sport. But what are the chances that Murderball will be on prime-time television Monday night or Sunday afternoon? What do you want to watch, guys in wheelchairs or guys who can throw a football 90 yards, run 100 yards in 9 seconds, knock other 250 pound monsters flat on their asses, or move like a ballerina hooked up to a freight train engine? Last I heard, the Special Olympics didn't get any television coverage, let alone major station attention. I must not be the only one out here more interested in the "best of the best" rather than "pretty good in mediocre conditions." Harsh words, but someone needed to say them and it might as well be me.

Buying Time, but No Sellers

Winter isn't over yet, so I'm not counting myself out but it's not looking good. I'm on the hunt for a cheap, low mileage Yamaha WR250X. They were out there last winter, but I hadn't yet committed myself to the idea. Now, I'm there but the bikes aren't.

It's not that there are no WR250X's available, it's that they've all been gaywadded-up by idiot kids. Take, for example, this Craig's List mess:

"Yamaha WR250X supermoto!!!

"2008 wr250x has about 3750miles. really fun to ride all street legal from factory. FMF exhaust, FMF power commander, has digital camo decals! willing to trade towards polaris iqr or skidoo rev"

The price is ok, $3500. But a new WR250X liists for $6,490 and I've found 2009 models at dealers for as low as $5500. Deducting the usual 30-50% for a used bike, that means I am expecting to pay $3850 tops.

Look at that bike. Loud pipe, half-assed aftermarket electronics, and the gayest paint job since Liberace's rhinestone piano. Of course, the kid owner didn't keep the stock pipe and isn't sure he can find the Yamaha electronics. So, taking off $500 to clean up the body work, $250 for the electronics, $250 for the pipe, at least $500 to have to fix all that crap, and $500 for the 3750 kid no-maintenance, high-abuse miles, My opening offer was $1850 and that wasn't even enough to make it worth calling the fruitloop. Come on, if you're going to trash a bike, at least have the common sense to total it into a wall and save yourself the embarrassment of putting it up for sale and displaying your bad taste to the world. Putting pictures like that on the web is like bragging about your skid marked shorts on Facebook.

I have a line on a bone stock WR with 300 miles in Iowa. I haven't seen pictures yet, but the price is right and the distance isn't too awful. Maybe this weekend, with a little luck.

Highway IQ

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

I stare into every car, truck, van, or SUV that shares the roadway with me. Women probably think I'm checking them out. Sometimes there might be an element of that. I'm human. I stare at guys just as often, though. No matter what they think, I'm not checking them out. I am stereotyping them, though. I know that's politically incorrect, but there it is. Like the marketing gurus say, "impressions are everything." Or "image," something like that. I don't have time to get to know these people. I'm not even interested in doing so. I just want to know, as quickly as possible, what kind of hazard they present to me. Cops call this "profiling." Lawyers get really upset at this practice. So sue me.

The average person has an IQ of 100 points. I grant that and start from there. My built-in point system adds or subtracts from that number almost as quickly as I can make out the interior of the vehicle. From there, I either disregard the driver, more or less, as a threat or apply evasive tactics to get as much distance between me and the hazard. The dumber the driver, by my IQ accounting system, the quicker I want to escape their sphere of disaster influence. You probably do the same thing, either more or less aggressively than me.

• Driver is in a 4(or more)-wheel vehicle: -5 points (How smart do you have to be to drive a cage?)

• Driver is a cop. This class of government official has an inflated sense of driving skill, not reflected in performance. They are prone to make sudden, irrational moves when their radio distracts them. They regularly ignore stop signs and stop lights. They scare the crap out of other drivers, making everyone in their vicinity a little less skilled and attentive: -10 points.

• Coffee, hairbrush, and/or cigarette in hand: -15 points for each item

• Driver is tipped at 45 degrees, so that his (always a guy) head is right under the rear view mirror: -20 points (This appears to be a Minnesota thing, because I've never seen it anywhere else, but it always means the driver is drunk, stupid, physically incapable of holding himself upright, or all three. I treat this driving posture as a flashing "beware of idiot!" sign.)

• Backwards baseball cap, blue hair, cowboy hat, or ski mask on driver's head: -25 points

• Coffee in face or driver is most often looking in any direction other than the vehicle's path of travel: -30 points

• Driver looking at self in rearview mirror with hairbrush, coffee, or cigarette in hand: -40 points

• Cell phone in use or beer in hand: -50 points

• "Start Seeing Motorcycles" or other pro-biking sticker on the vehicle: +2 points

• I catch the driver's eyes in the rear view mirror: +10 points

• After seeing me once, the driver looks again every few moments to see if I'm still there: +10 more points

• Both hands on wheel, head and eyes in motion: +25 points

• The driver is towing a trailer full of dirt bikes: +50 points

After I've made the above calculations and classifications, I use a modified version of the David Roth (ex-Van Halen frontman, current-EMT-has-been) crowd intelligence rule. I roughly count the number of vehicles in a 100' distance, front to back and both sides, of the vehicle and divide the driver's IQ by that number. In heavy traffic, everyone is a menace to my safety, almost by logical default. I'm the least likely vehicle on the road to harm the passengers of another vehicle, so I'm in the logical space for an escape route for other vehicles.

Just to calibrate your appreciation of my scoring system, an article in Scientific American Magazine once stated, ""Adults in the bottom 5% of the IQ distribution (below 75) are very difficult to train and are not competitive for any occupation on the basis of ability. . . " and "Persons of average IQ (between 90 and 100) are not competitive for most professional and executive-level work but are easily trained for the bulk of jobs in the American economy. . . " That's pretty cold, isn't it? Nature and the highway are cold as the floor of an icehouse. As far as my own survivability is concerned, a web article on IQ gave me the following information about the brainpower behind the numbers and I've added my own "Estimated Driving Skills" column to assess my own risk based on the driver's IQ:

IQ Range	Estimated Driving Skills (Alert Level Color Code)
Below 30	Flashing Red: This driver is clearly an unpredictable moron, an outrageous hazard at any speed, expect any damn idiot move from this rolling example of chaos theory. Ultimate alert.
30 to 50	Red: Mostly unpredictable, slow-witted, prone to panic and irrational lane changes. High alert.
50 to 60	Orange: Unless a slight change in traffic, road condition, or the moon's position relative to the sun occurs, you can probably count on this driver to remain stable. Check for distracted behavior every second or two.
60 to 74	Yellow: Loud noises, bright colors, anything sparkly or in motion will distract this driver, but he/she will probably do something mildly predictable when panic occurs. Moderate alert.
74 to 89	Blue: Mostly, this driver is stable. Pay special attention to this driver at intersections, on curves, and near fast food entrances. Fairly low alert.
89 to 100	Green: Probably not a risk, if anyone else in the above categories is sharing the road, this driver warrants minimal attention. I'd still avoid spending any time in an adjacent lane with this driver.
Above 100	Invisible: The chances are slim that this driver provides much risk. Based on past experience, one of these guys will probably be who kills me.

I realize these generalization are culturally "unfair," "biased," and even irrational. They are based on my nearly half-million miles of motorcycling and they are habitual. I constantly and automatically balance my belief that most people are decent and well-intentioned and that most drivers are nuts and "out to get me." My riding state boarders on paranoia, I'll admit. My confidence in my ability to deal with these contradictions varies with the road conditions and my concentration. You'd think that this would take the fun out of riding a motorcycle and it does put a damper on outright highway euphoria, but I'm disinclined to that mental state as you might have noticed. Riding a motorcycle is risky and that's part of the attraction. However, there is a definite line between assuming risk and committing suicide and evaluating the folks I share the road with is part of my risk assessment.

Loud Pipes Are Powerful Fun

All Rights Reserved © 2009 Thomas W. Day

People who worry about the future of motorcycling are particularly concerned that the statement being made by a blasting motorcycle exhaust is going to be the death of the industry and the activity on public roads. Proponents of this noise pollution like to claim that "loud pipes save lives," but the evidence for that claim is weak to non-existent. Obviously, if it's true for motorcycles it should be true for small cars, medium sized-cars, buses, and every other highway user and, if one motor vehicle gets to claim that "safe ground," everybody will want a piece of the action. The trend is going the other way. Most industrialized societies have had more than enough of noise pollution and the public is not going to take much more of it. Noisy motorcyclists may claim discrimination, but it's easy to argue that, outside of emergency vehicles, motorcycles are consistently the loudest vehicles on the highway and the least useful.

Anyone familiar with manufacturing and quality systems knows that you don't go after all of your problems at once. Even the federal government doesn't have unlimited resources. One tactic is to use the Pareto Effect, which states "80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes." When it comes to peak traffic noise, improperly and illegally muffled motorcycles top the 20% list. We can whine about being picked on, but logic would dictate we get hammered first. Since evidence points out the fallacy in the connection between loud pipes and safety, the only reason left for making that kind of noise is recreational.

If safety isn't a useful reason to be noisy, why are so many motorcyclists so damn loud? I think the most likely reason is, "Loud pipes are power." Jimmy Page once argued that electric guitar was the coolest musical instrument because "with a flick of a pick, you can drive 100,000 fans deaf." That's power. Similarly, with the twist of a wrist an untalented, uninteresting working class man or woman can nearly deafen everyone within a few dozen yards. At the least, you can irritate people for a mile in every direction of your exhaust. For people who are powerless in their everyday lives, this kind of clout isn't something to sneeze at.

Loud pipes are a statement of freedom. Again, flaunting the law, good manners, and the opinions of people who otherwise might be able to control your life, a noisy motorcycle is a way to "stick it to the man," even if "the man" is your neighbors, your community, and the rest of society. Loud pipes are a giant middle finger held high above the din of a boring life. It's hard to argue someone out of their "right" to make that kind of statement. Hard, but not impossible. When the statement is made so broadly, hitting the people you want to offend and everyone else, it's not hard to imagine a rapid succession of legal events that could shut down a lot more than just loud motorcycles.

A while back, a trio of Canadian goofballs were fined $16,000 for filming themselves shooting ducks from their car. The Canuck boneheads posted a video of themselves on YouTube "laughing and firing at least 42 rounds from a high-powered rifle into a large pond filled with ducks and grebes." One of the three compounded the stupidity by saying. "We thought we were just having fun — really immature, stupid fun, you know?"

Same story, different device. Blasting the highway with omnidirectional, illegal, unnecessary noise is "really immature, stupid fun." I know. Tolerance for immature, stupid fun is vanishing in our overcrowded world. When that noise produces absolutely no value for anyone, even the dumbest biker ought to know how this is going to work out. One of the goofy duck-blasting Canucks apologized by saying, "“We should have known better but we didn’t, and for that I am sorry.” All motorcyclists are going to be apologizing for the actions of a few who didn't know better and aren't bright enough to quit their destructive behavior. Like ignorance, stupidity is a poor legal defense.

The Roar of the Marching Morons

This is a freaky funny video. Some of you may desperately want to own a SoundRacer V8. Some of you will recognize the juvenile symptom demonstrated in popular motorcycle magazines when editors and reviewers say "the bike needs a little boost from a less restricted pipe." Some of you will want to apply for a grant to study human perceptions and mental deficiencies demonstrated with the SoundRacer V8 and the usual "performance" gained by wasting money on loud pipes on slow bikes.

Whatever your reaction, it's obvious that this dude is actually deluded into believing his kidmobile can carry on like a sportscar because of the noise made by his car's stereo system. Louder is faster. Damn, humans are dumb. What kind of parent names their kid "Shonky?" Is that a merger of s**t and donkey?

A Cool Idea?

I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for video. In the last year, I've been sent at least a half-dozen YouTube clips that turned out to be phony; and I fell for all of them. This could be the same kind of scam, but it makes some sort of sense; at least, to me. It's a hell of an idea for those field repairs that require more time, tools, and patience than some of us have.