Motorcyclist Gets It Right



Out of the tens of thousands of worthy motorcyclists in the country, Motorcyclist Magazine got it absolutely right this year in declaring Andy Goldfine "Motorcyclist of the Year." Andy and the amazing folks at Aerostich/RiderWearHouse have been making motorcycling safer, easier, more fun, and drier/warmer for 33 years (which means another Very Boring Rally is due in 2 years). Many of us would have been doing something else by now (if we were still alive) if it weren't for Aerostich gear.

Andy has been a friend since I moved to Minnesota and started writing for MMM. Andy's gear has been protecting my body for a whole lot longer.

One of the last pictures of me wearing my ancient (1984) Roadcrafter was in the KLR MMM review way back in 2002. I bought this fine stylish assortment of nylon, zippers, snaps, and cotton bat padding when I first moved to California and discovered that California motorcyclists thought 50F was "too cold" for motorcycling. Since I'd just moved there by motorcycle from Nebraska, my opinion of Californians went down a few notches. Worse, none of the motorcycle shops within easy range of my new home, Huntington Beach, stocked any sort of wet weather riding gear. However, in the back of Cycle or Cycle News (I forget which) I found a picture of a rider in a full-length suit and the ad claimed the suit was "waterproof" or some such thing. Desperate for protection, I ordered the grey/red suit pictured above (the red turned to salmon sometime in the 80's) and I have to give that suit some credit for my Cal State Long Beach bachelor's degree and a ten year California career in professional audio equipment because without that suit, I'd have given up on California a few weeks after being forced to commute by cage.

 

I can't explain why, but this is my favorite picture of me in my

Darien suit circa 2007. It was taken with my old beater Canon

camera by a Montana ranger who told me the story of this

sabotaged dam.

In the late 90's, I met Andy and he immediately dubbed me and my Roadcrafter to be a pair resembling "an overstuffed sausage" (probably the reason the suit had spent the last decade at the bottom of my closet). He sold me a (considerably larger) Darien suit in 2006, before I left for Alaska and a few years later I bought a prototype AD1 jacket and AD1 pants for backup. I've written about both here more than a few times.

 

It's not like there weren't obstacles to overcome. In the Motorcyclist Magazine interview, Andy said, “At first only a handful of riders ‘got it,’ including motojournalists, who were on bikes every day. And even then we were made fun of.” I still get the "going into outerspace?" bullshit whenever I stop near the usual pirate crowd. Usually, when we compare our day's ride (100-150 for them, 400-1,000 for me) the conversation comes to a stuttering end.

 

Google "aerostich roadcrafter crash" and it is impossible to not be impressed by the stories of the skin, bones, and lives saved by Aerostich equipment. There are dozens of Aerostich imitators, but only one company makes gear that you can wear for most of your life and Andy Goldfine founded that company. Even the owners of the imitation gear owe Andy a debt because none of that cheap Chinese-made gear would be here today without Aerostich to copy.

 

Helmets off to you, Andy.

Motorcycle Magazines & Me

[I wrote this one a long time ago, as you can see by the copy-write date on the header. It's still mostly the way I feel about the leading motorcycle magazines.]

All Rights Reserved © 2008 Thomas W. Day

In looking for product to review, I realized that one of the most arrogant things a writer and a magazine could do is review the competition. Since they don't know we exist, I decided if the cynical Shakespearean adage "discretion is the better part of valor" was catchy enough to gain traction, arrogance and courage might hook up as well. Another motivation for doing this review is that lots of new riders don't know what the rest of us read when we are not reading MMM. With that in mind, I thought it might be sort of a public service to describe our rivals. With that as my guiding light, I decided to do an analysis of the major motorcycle rags. (This is my definition of "major" magazines, your mileage may vary.) There are some pretty good on-line magazines, but I'm not going to look at them on this pass. I decided to list the magazines in order of my opinion of their value, so you'll probably have another bone with which to pick.


#1: Motorcycle Consumer News (www.mcnews.com)
The advantage MCN has over the competition is that this little magazine (practically printed on rag paper) doesn't accept advertising. So, MCN's reviews should be uncontaminated by commercial influences; as if that is possible in corporate America. Sometimes, though, MCN's reviews are the best you will read when the product has serious problems. Unlike the glossy, advertiser-driven rags, MCN writers will occasionally tell you about the things they don't like in a bike, gear, or even the industry.

David Hough's criticism of the MSF's political tactics and training deficiencies, a couple of years ago, was the only voice in the woods. Since the MSF is sponsored by the motorcycle manufacturers and the organization exists to put a happy face on the sad world of motorcycle mortality statistics, the woods were thick. None of the other rags would have touched that subject, but MCN took it on for a series of articles.

Like most of us who review bikes, MCN wastes time describing the technical characteristics of the bikes they review. Anyone who is capable of cutting and pasting data from the manufacturers' press releases can look like a technical wiz by doing this and, since everyone else does it, MCN is wasting precious space in repeating that tactic. Skip the marketing drivel and go straight to the "riding impressions." MCN costs $41/year, so wasting time and space doing what everyone else does for $7/year makes me reconsider my subscription every time they do it. I do, however, hang on to MCN copies until I'm sure I've gleaned all value from each issue.


#2: Cycle World
There is one great thing about every issue of Cycle World, Kevin Cameron. The brilliant author of Sportbike Performance does a technical article, TDC, in which he takes apart yet one more complex idea and re-describes it so that the rest of us have a useful understanding of what is going on inside the mechanical world. Funny thing about CW. In writing this column, I looked all over the house for the magazine and was unable to find a single copy. After working my way through Cameron's column, I rarely spend any time on the rest of the magazine and give it away almost immediately. Kevin is worth the $7/year I spend on CW. No, I am not a Peter Egan fan. Apparently, making that statement alienates lots of local CW readers because Egan is a Wisconsinite and while Minnesotans hate the Packers and successful Minnesotans, we're supposed to love our neighbor motorcycle pundits. I find Egan to be long-winded and a little like listening to Paris Hilton describe her jewelry and makeup.


#3: Motorcyclist
I go hot and cold with Motorcyclist. I, often, love the articles contributed to this rag from outside of their staff. For example, Ed Milich's article, "Field Guide to Common Internet Motorcycle Wackos" was as good as funny motorcycle articles gets; and accurate. The editors of Motorcyclist are thin-skinned, a little reactionary, and highly sensitive to their advertiser's needs/demands. I rarely read the bike reviews or "shoot-outs." Everything is wonderful and you should buy them all is the gist of those puff pieces and I can't afford the time to "read in-between the lines" to sort out what they really thought about the stuff they rode. I can't tell the reviews from the ads and there are pages and pages of ads. Motorcyclist's photo shots cater to the hooligan crowd and that doesn't do much for me, either.

Kenny Roberts mans their "MotoGP Desk," but rag's index is so badly laid out that I usually hear about what he's written from other readers long after I've discarded my copies. Sometimes the mag reminds me of those webpages designed with black text on a dark purple background. Sometimes it's too much work to fight through the format to see what the writers had to say.


#4: Rider Magazine
Rider has vanished into a weird marketing scam (Riders' Club), but it used to be a rider-based, rider-written touring magazine. I have hopes that someday it will return to that standard. I bump into Rider about a half-dozen times a year and in recent years that experience always reminds me of the magazine I used to like, but the current magazine is not it.

Motorcycle Advice: Harley Davidson Rider Gives a New Biker Some Tips

How to be cool, from the mouth of someone who can almost spell "cool." It's pretty much all here:

Thanks Sev.

What It All Means

The things revealed in the exposure of the internal workings of Motorcyclist Magazine shouldn't come as a big surprise to anyone. The inner workings (and collapse of) of the main stream press has been discussed practically to death in the last decade. A recent series of discussion in Politics Daily ("'Beyond the Killing Fields': Why Journalism Is in a 'State of Chaos") says as much about consumer product journalism as it does about political and state-of-the-world journalism. To use William Goldman's phrase, "follow the money." Money created modern journalism and money is going to change it. Publishers like William Hearst invented old-school "yellow journalism," promoted the Spanish-American War, waged war on a variety of social issues, and made boatloads of money from it all. When the money really became the issue, in 1929, the corporation's (and Hearst's) politics changed, much of their editorial stance swapped directions, and has steadily become more conservative over the last eight decades.

The trick to modern journalism is to convince readers that the publication is intended for their interests and entertainment while consistently promoting the interests of the advertisers. For that to work, the readership has to be fairly gullible. The problem is that readers are inclined to be skeptical. The most gullible citizens generally aren't literate, curious, well-informed, logical, critical, or analytical. While those folks would be most magazine's target audience, they aren't consistently reachable through the written word. Television is their media of choice. It will be interesting to see how motorcycle magazines find a place in the new world of information and entertainment.