My Domain

Protected by guardian ghouls and cuddly bears. BP

The Apartist

Adrian Palengat who runs the APART gallery - which rolls like designer tumbleweed across the planet (well various locations in London, LA and Baja so far), representing young international artists, has a new blog on the go. Yours truly is featured today. BP
"The Apartist is a daily publication, offering an intimate insight into the working lives of selected creative figures around the world"

No Substitute for Cubes

Framing up a nice big art print is like putting clean linen on your bed, you wonder why it took you so long. Sideburn collaborator Chris Watson sketched my Guzzi, fuzzy logic makes me smile. This is the office wall I've got my back to in this shot.

1) Can't remember where this came from, but it's like a rice sack and humped on my shoulder, stuffed with dirty smalls on the way to the local launderette, it caused me to get pinned up against a wall in Liverpool by a police meat wagon mounting the kerb.
2) Used to collect Francis Debaisieux postcards while on holiday in France, of 'quaint' peasant life, then came across this life-size poster in a petrol station! Wonder if I would have become that old boy if I'd stuck at the rural dream?
3) Fantastic embroidery of an F-15 fighter by Claire Elizabeth Platt picked up at the old Cafe Kino, Bristol.
4) The idea of gardening is wholesome, but I have black fingers. Everything I touch dies. Kitsch Kitchen plastic flowers are a much safer bet.
5) Ultimately dashing Silvio Grassetti on the Monza(?) banking.
6) 948 cubes in felt-tip by Chris Watson.
7) People still give me cautionary grief about this helmet but it's a NEW repro made by Bandit in Berlin. I wear it for short track without a visor unless it's really muddy as it feels too fishbowl with. I'm a fresh air freak.
8) Lewis Leathers road racing boots.
9) Wore a Davida bowl several years on the trot in London. Nothing more comfortable. (yeah yeah yeah, "nothing more unsafe"). Still wear the Dusted one when snowboarding.
10) My Mum paid a mechanic £5 to drag these Peter Jones mahogany glove-box draws (32 of them) out of a skip and up the stairs of our flat in the early 70s.
11) Is it a global phenomenon that when one moves house, it takes Years to finally unpack the last box?
12) Original title artwork from SB#10 Pikes Peak 'One Hellava Hill'.
13) Mughal period Indian beard styles reference chart.
14) Proper Italian water-slide transfer of tiger temptress, and a shot of my brother on his BSA C-15 back in the day.
15) Before downloading everyandanything that catches my eye into countless computer folders, I used to tear things out of magazines and pin it on the wall for inspiration. Seems like rather an antiquated adiction now.
BPUP DATE:
If you would like your own bike sketched in this style from a photo, contact CW via his website.

High Heels in the Workplace

Crosseyed from an continuous home-alone week glued to my Eizo monitor, head down for the Sideburn #10 finish line. The larder, fridge and freezer now bare. My pyjamas can walk on their own. Decided a trip outdoors and some manual labor (involving more than just my index fingers) would probably be heathy. Made it all of 50 feet out into the garden and into my shed. It's slowly coming together. Made some stack heels for my workbench so that both halves sit at a mighty 97cm high, so whether standing up or sitting on my new repro Tolix stool, it's comfy.The next dilemma is wether to cover the platforms in glam rock silver glitter, or go more Joan Jet (here played by Kristen Stewart in the 2010 biographical film The Runaways), with white patent leather? BP

I love magazines

After months of putting it off I decided to tidy up my shed/office on Monday. I'm still not finished and it doesn't take long for it to become a mess again, but it's good to get at least some magazines in order (especially as I refer back to magazines a lot) and send the chaff to the recycler.

One fireproof drawer is full of Dice. They're up to 40 issues! Amazing achievement. Inspirational mag. I have the full set. Oh yes.

While I was at the Stafford Show at the weekend I bought some copies of Street Bikers from the Magazine Man. They cost an arm and a leg, but I love them. While I was flicking through the latest I saw a page on the Japanese flat track club Field Day- who we have a great feature on in Sideburn 9 (coming soon-ish). I looked closer, next to the photo of the bizarre pre-race dance ritual and noticed they were flying the Sideburn flag!

A final bit of magazine news, one of Britain's major publishers, Bauer (German lot who took over EMAP) are supporting the biking charity Riders for Health - co-founded by Randy Mamola. Every subscription Bauer get (on a number of mags including Bike, PB, Classic Bike, Practical Sportsbike, MCN, Q, Empire...) they're giving 'up to £10' to charity. If you don't know, Riders for Health supply bikes and expertise to African doctors to allow them to ride to and treat isolated villages. Well done big business!

Go here to find out more. G

Chaos Theory

"A Shite Tip nae a Tight Ship" as a Glaswegian friend of mine exclaimed. I can't even swing a cat in my shed, it's ridiculous.Junk includes:
1) Mosquito net made from deep fat fryer anti-splatter mesh gaffer tapped to branch. Vain attempt to de-larvae new pond of 1 trillion mosquitos before they become vampires and decimate the neighborhood.
2) Superlight pressed aluminium ramp, trouble is it could be doing with an extra foot longer, making bike loading a lot easier. Now have heavy extendable Multispaz wheelchair ramp (to the left) which is the biz.
3) Dual-sport broom and Swingerball - 'get fit and tidy up'. That'll be the day.
4) Dual-sport knobblies for my CCM - 'interchange between street and off-road wheels in minutes'. That'll be the day, I've had these for 3 years and they still haven't made it on the bike.
5) battery charger for frying already dead batteries.
6) Kids merry-go-round MV Augusta inc 6 megaphone exhaust. Only missing the screen. Originally planned a trad red/silver paint job, but now thinking Wrench Monkees stylee.
7) DIY work table made from odds'n'sods.
8) 'Dr on call' style tool box. This has all my electrical diagnostic stuff in.
9) Street-find shelf with draws. Crap and water sodden before I got to it. Why did I bother?
10) 'on the road' tool bag for essential get-you-home fettling/breakdowns. Its been to Spain and back strapped to my brothers C15 BSA. Very sentimental. Just learnt from Drogo that its actually originally a 'Lord of the Manor' shotgun cartridge bag.
11) Harro Elefantenboy tank bag. This thing is amazing. Opens up in 3 tiers with a map window in the top. Perfect as a wardrobe bungeed on to my Guzzi. It's been everywhere.
12) Crap mini chest of draws. Now so trapezoid the draws don't open without a fight.
13) Davos toboggan. The Best. With a smeer of seal pup fat on the rails, so much faster than the modern plastic ones.
14) What more wheels?! 17" that came on the CCM when I bought it. Tomahawk re-mould tyres, cheap as chips, very sticky.
15) "Don't make 'em like they used to" assorted spades and hoes. £4 a pop from local house-clearance junk shop. All my new ones are bent or broken.
16) Broken in 1/2 Moulton bicycle frame. It's already donated some bits to modify my new one.
17) Assorted 3/4 empty tins of paint.
18) (sigh....) repro 'Made in China' Raleigh Chopper seat bought on eBAy alongside shagged real one. Embarked on restoration of all-original bike, only to find buying new parts on eBAy would be cheaper than re-chroming etc the original, but then realized you end up with a bottle-top quality pastiche.
19) Trusty 4b'2 shelf brought over from my Amsterdam photo studio. Daft if you consider the bulk and hassle, but not if you consider there is no better. Ikea is the pits.
20) Euro Trash Co-Burn CCM one day this will be a tidy looker. Promise.
21) Maneki Neko lucky cat bought in Nieuwmarkt, it rakes in ca$h. Yeah right.
22) Gemeente Amsterdam galvanized rubbish bin. Simple pleasure every time I kick the lid up.
23) Tinfoil robot made for kids birthday. They were terrified.
24) Classic pegboard. Various instruments of torture should Jamie decide he wants a hair cut round mine.
25) Cornerstone of my project sleeper chop. Always thought it was a German Simson Schwalbe but just had a Google to check, and it's not.
BP

SB#8 Work In Progress

Just a couple of stories to finish and a few loose ends. Gary, Mick and I have been quietly beavering away. It's yet another mad fusion of flavours. Funny to think when were busy with SB#1 we were worried how soon we would run out of stories. Thankfully this thing has its own legs now - not that we know which way it's going to turn next.Alfresco studio, photographing a stack of WWII snap shots of desert speedway-riding allied troops. BP

SignFlu

Naff; the dummy I made of this Sideburn T used a generic free-font brushscript for the signature on the front. Then by chance, this fellow Cooper passed by my wife's shop to offer his signwriting services, so I roped him in, and he did a great job. I'm chuffed how it turned out - and it instantly SOLD OUT. BPWild West bird boxes, hoardings, skateboards, hot rods, toilet seats, Mona Lisa on a pin-head; Cooper can paint it.

Flatplan

After Gary's lovely post on Sideburn 7 at the printer's, I thought I'd cough up this artefact from the building of the mag. As our regulars know, Sideburn is distilled out of the ether that covers a triangle with its points in Spalding (GI), Bristol (BP) and Rome (MP). Given that Sideburn work fits in around our day jobs, and that its words and pics bounce thousands of miles between us time and again, it's easy for things to get messy and we all have our ways of wrestling the greased Sideburn pig into its pen.

This is my incarnation of the flatplan and it marks a glorious moment just before #7 was finished, with only the merchandise page to be ticked off. About an hour later I was lying on the floor next to my desk at home in a pool of my own urine, surrounded by empty wine bottles and squashed pasta. Nothing to do with Sideburn, it's just a bad habit I've got into.

Anyway, here you go, a bit of Sideburn belly button fluff. MP

'Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?

Madness Absolutely, 1980, the first album I bought with my pocket money, was musically eclipsed by Ghost Town The Specials, 1981, one of my all time favorite singles (although I didn't crack open my piggy bank at the time). I have absolutely no excuse why in 1982, David Essex Nightclubbing did seem worthy to be my first single. But the same year I made amends with my first picture disc; Alexei Sayle's infectious Ullo John! Gotta New Motor? which is proudly pinned up in my office. Ahh the formative years. BP

Size Does Matter

Computer woes are the modern day equivalent of God testing Job, and in this techno dependent age, I receive those lightning bolts fairly frequently. My G5 Mac has been living on borrowed Sunday school time since SB#3 so it was Godsend that it lasted just until SB#6 was completed - crashing daily even when only one program was being used at a time. But then I realized apart from vital commercial photo work and Sideburn stuff that was backed-up on Lacie external hard drives, I had 75.59 Gigabytes of music = 14,795 songs (half of which was irreplaceable), some important emails, and assorted files which were not. Oh Damnation. So I did a few quick Hail Marys and went to the überhip down town Apple store. Miraculously they managed not only to give the spent piece of used jet trash a jolt of Frankenstein life, but keep it powered up just long enough for me to download the left-overs on to a second Lacie external hard drive. Praise be to the Lord!

My new system is a MiniMac wired up to a 24" Eizo screen.
It's fanfuckingtastic. BP

Crash 'n' Burn

My G5 iMac has been on operating on borrowed time since before the production of SB#5, it crashes with more gay abandon than Randy De Puniet, and it's as retarded as a village idiot fully tanked-up on Scrumpy. I hereby promise myself to take it to the end of the garden and to schnitzel it with a sledge hammer before burying it in the concrete foundation to my new shed before work on SB#7 begins.

GI's laptop also highsided recently, and was deemed a write-off. It's frightening how much computers have become so pivotal to our everyday lives, and yet how fragile they are.

The good news is SB#6 is DONE and the HiRes PDFs are uploading to the printers as we speak / sleep / swear - the bastard has only crashed 3 times so far today. Each new issue should be easier and faster to churn out - even with computer glitches, but maybe we're getting more fusy, cos they certainly ain't. BP1) G5 iMac jet trash. Built in absolesesnce at it's most frustrating. A single defect component calls for a whole new circuitboard. There is no such thing as repair. When just a couple of components go down 'it is no longer ecconomically viable' to buy replacement circuitboards.
2) Lacie Rugged hard-drive back-ups. My life and magazine depends on these.
3) Waccom tablet this can turn anybody into Bob Ross with electronic powers.
4) Note book full of all the various fonts, point sizes and other layout notes for each issue.
5) Unopened = unpaid bills. Hopefully they will just go away.
6) Coffee mugs x 4. Without their lubrication my rusty engine would seize up.
7) Epson Stylus 2100. This used to be the Daddy of DIY pro printers. I printed my portfolios on it, but haven't used it in a while and now the nozzles are clogged. The individual ink cartridges cost an arm and a leg. More jet trash.
8) Experimental photocopy effect crap test print from printer 7) for opening SB#6 story (see next SBlog post).
9) 'Speed Choice' I got done for speeding, so had to go on a 'speed awareness cource' to learn to drive slower - or get points on my licsense + a fine. Every time they said "Any questions?" I didn't have the cheek to say "Can we instead be taught how to drive faster?"
10) Original Stylophone. When it all gets too much, a quick session on this noise box normally calms me down.
11) Stabilo Boss. Aeons before laws made HiViz not funny anymore, this marker pen has been lighting up dull text.
12) Rye House Rockets speedway bib I bought at Allan Bellham's shop.
13) New SB#6 special offer T.
14) step ladder upon which Mrs is tiptoed to make this photo.
15) Moroccan carpet I bought in an Amsterdam flea market. Smells like damp Labrador, used to be on the floor of my Peogeot J7 camper and has travelled all over, so it's a sentimental carpet.
16) Suomy MX lid I painted in the style of Van Gough's Japanese garden.
17) Davida Speedster painted copper Metalflake by K-A-R-S Tristran in Belgium.
18) Marchal spotlamp as fitted to my XS650 chop. It's sat there to inspire me to get back in the garage. Supposedly.
19) Db killers from my Guzzi. See previous note above. Likewise.
20) Computer ornaments. A ridiculous idea. You dont do anything with them and they just gather dust.
21) Man in need of a holiday
22) Sesame Street DVD show compilation 1974-79. Fabric of my youth.
23) Beyond the darkness, there is light.

I like magazines

The Inman bunker.

Ben's Workstation

Mick Phillips and I are on opposite ends of the neat'n'tidy spectrum. He being a Matron with a bee in his bonnet about hospital corners, where as my workspace often infringes health and safety laws. The photo shown is not an accurate representation. More likely scenario is the desk is piled high with stuff with no fixed abode / work in progress. BP
1) Apple iMac G5. This thing was as fresh as the Audi TT when it came out, but it's as reliable / fast / quiet, as a 5th-hand MZ. It had a total seizure during the completion of SB#2 and had a minor stroke during SB#4. I'll be glad when I can afford something else.
2) Wacom tablet. I couldn't live without this. It's a digital scribble pad and makes Photoshop more intimate - but you still can't beat drawing hand fonts (or any illustrations) with a real crayon on real paper.
3) Lacie hard drive. this baby saved my life a few times, but my fancy Porsche Lacie died so I should copy all the files; preferably to granite slabs, in case this one keels over. It has SB#1, #2, #3, #4, and #5 work in progress on it, plus a ton of other irreplaceable stuff.
4) Breakfast is around 10 o'clock, after the kids have woken me at 7 and I've taken them off to school.
5) Speedway bibs (see page 59 SB#1) bought these last week from the wonderful Alan Bellham shop which I shot for SB#5.
6) MO magazine Germany have used my Wrench Monkee portraits to go with a story on their fabdabulous Gorilla Punch Honda.
7) old Kodak Ultra III photo paper box. Have another 30 of these from when I used to work as a printer in an Amsterdam lab, full of prints, sketches, magazine cuttings, and assorted inspiration flotsam and jetsam.
8) Samsung NV40. My snapshot camera, bought in Luton airport. It's shite. My wife has a Leica C-Lux 2 it's amazing.
9) The Last magazine. It's about the demise of general magazines in the digital age, versus the staying power of quality niche titles.
10) SB#1, #2, #3, #4 as reference for the next one.
11) Drawing of me by my 12 year old nephew (none too flattering).
12) Hand font try-out for the SB#4 Wrench Monkees Husquarly story.
13) George Formby and the Shuttleworth Speed Demon bike - there was a great replica at Goodwood this year
14) Ortleib rubberized courier bag. totally waterproof man-bag. So airtight, can act as a buoyancy aid if you capsize you canoe.
15) Blue Room speakers, these need to be hung up in the front room. Amazing sound for midgets.
16) Bosozoku by Masayuki Yoshinaga. If there's a fire and I've only got time to grab one book from my library, this is the one.
17) Not intending to go for a 1940 Officers' mess look here, but the first time my wife opened this 'original feature' cupboard, a whole pane of glass fell out and nearly guillotined her toes off.
18) Sherman tank.
19) Suomy MX lid I painted in the style of Van Gogh's Japanese Garden, but then day-glo
20) Not a child entertainer by trade, this was my first attempt at bendy balloons, and acted as a sign post for my daughters birthday party.
21) ex Peter Jones department store glove compartments. My Mum rescued these from the rubbish and paid a mechanic £5 (in 1973) to drag them into our flat in London. Ikea furniture does not last more than 36 years and survive moving house 5 times
22) Evel Knievel by Ideal™. No big boys office is complete without this made in Hong Kong 'gyro-mechanism stunt cycle' classic.
23) Herman Miller Aeron office chair with added pure wool padding.

Mailout

After many months of nailing SB#4 together, now stage two starts. The labourious process of mailing. Most of what you pay goes to Postman Pat (the UK > USA costs are crazy), a smaller percentage to the printers, and about thr'pence ha'penny to us. All the subscribers issues have now gone out, followed by contributors. Surprisingly Gary's local post office (just a single counter in the local minimarket) don't seem to fazed by the daily mound of Jiffy bags that he and Mrs I take down there. This photo was taken at breakfast last Saturday when we had a hot-crossed-bun fueled session. BP

Mick's Workstation

Mick Phillips is stuck out on our Italian wing, but he's not even a runner he's a flanker. He's Sideburn's literary fixer and ensures all our 'i's are dotted, 't's crossed, and that we don't make too many grammatical boo-boos. He's written for the motorcycling press, with a certain twisted wit for many many many years; including Motorcycle News, Classic Bike, Road Rocket, Bike, Performance Bikes and now for Sideburn too. We Love him. This is his workstation in Rome.

You've caught this looking especially tidy, though it's never all that messy.
1: Barry Sheene, Cadwell Park, 1978. I was working on Bike magazine when Barry died in 2003 and we sold a load of these, the money going to his favourite charity.
2: Another dead great. When Joey Dunlop died in 2001 Bike's then art editor, Richard Brown, tidied up a shot dug out from the archives and highlighted Joey's name on his leathers in yellow. I think this was from Joey's second year at the TT, which would have been 1977. This tweaked shot now pops up all over the place.
3: I love the old London American Recordings label. In a past life I was a Ted, and one of my mates, who was also a Ted back when we were in our teens, recently got married, so I did him a compilation CD of rock 'n' roll stuff with a love theme and mocked up a London label for the CD. This was a spare.
4: A signed photo from MZ works rider Alan Shepherd. He told me the best Boy's Own story ever, involving the Iron Curtain, a former Nazi rocket scientist, Daytona, impossible odds and improbably victory – all involving him, an unassuming carper fitter from Northumbria. He's dead now. There's a theme going on here...
5: Mike Hailwood on a 500 MV in the 1963 Senior TT. He won. He's dead. Blimey...
6: Me and my 1973 Guzzi V7 Sport in the south of France. Don't ask about that bike, it's all too pathetic...
7: Numberplate for my entry on the Guz in the Coupes Moto Legende at Montlhery, France, in 2002.
8: This indispensable bit of kit turns any sound coming out of my computer into an FM signal and throws it 150ft or so. Forget your tiny iPod gizmos, this means I can listen to the same stuff all over the flat.
9: Ben Miller, former Bike magazine staffer, went to Poland on a job and came back with a load of these hand-painted plastic speedway figures. In the lucky dip I got Ryan Sullivan, the Aussie who happened to be one of the top riders for Elite League Peterborough Panthers, the team we used to go and watch after work. Their stadium is half a mile from the Bike offices.
10: Proof reading a layout of Ben's for SB#4
11: SB#3. It's always handy to have a back-issue as a benchmark reference when making a new issue.
12: Amstrad keyboard from 1872. The keys and case are made of special kiln fired pastry.

Flexi Office contd.

5 after midnight, and I've just had long overdue dinner for two with the Mrs, in the Jamie Oliver restaurant in Bath (good but not brilliant). We're staying with my Mum out in the styx and she's baby sitting. Before heading back out of town - and no internet, I have to send some SB#4 Emails; a PDF to Mick Phillips in Italy for proof reading, a new layout proposal to GI, and give some constructive critisism to James Bettinson who's just done some layouts too. The long closed internet cafe luckily left its server switched on, so standing in the street with a Lassie hard-drive sticking out of my pocket, it's business as (un)usual.
My rubberized Ortleib courrier bag is my own all-weather Tardis man-bag. Apparently if I was to get washed overboard it could act as a small life-raft; it's so air-tight it could even act as an airbag if I crash with the bike. Can't say I'm in a hurry to put that theory to the test. BP

open plan

It's a good thing we've each got our own supplies of tea, milk, sugar, and biscuits. The Sideburn office is 1257 miles long, 994 miles wide on the east face, and 447 to the north. Earlier this century we sacked the courier pigeons that had some aerodynamic issues with the CDs, and employed a team of Polish courier rats that Mick Phillips headhunted from the Motorcycle News dispatch department. The printer would send over a small box in which the highly-trained white rats, would hastily reassamble the pages using metal type and wooden blocks. Then you'd write down the corrections on small bits of paper and pop it in little hollow cylinders that the rats had dangling round their necks. It was a marvellous way of working, but union action put paid to all that in the early 1990s. Now we're just getting to terms with the interweb and electronic mail.
BP

work in progress

Using a small crappy snap as reference, I rattle canned the title header for the forthcoming SB#3 Scorpions story on A4 copy-paper. And then scanned them. The Photoshop airbrush effect is much too smooth and you don't get the nice runs.
8 stories complete, 6 to go.
BP

Kitchen table publishing 2

Sorry people, Rome wasn't built in a day, nor is Sideburn magazine. Here's my kitchen table and my little apprentice. In an ideal world we would be paid a lot of money to do what we love, and there would be more than 720 minutes in a day. And I wouldn't mind a Swedish au pair. BP