Cool short filmed by Scott Pommier for the Born Free 5 Show about “man, machine, and man’s best friend” ~ starring Pobbs & Shawn Donahue of Bronsonville Custom Cycles. Get ready for the show coming up June 29th, more details below…

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BORN-FREE SHOW MISSION STATEMENT

The Born-Free 5 Show is about the love of old motorcycles and like minded individuals having a good time together and enjoying these bikes of the past. It is also a family event, young and old a-like are welcome to come out and enjoy the show. This show is meant to unite people from all walks of life by bringing the passion that we all have of these old machines together for one special day.

If you come out to the event please be prepared to have a great time, see some vintage bikes…lots of vintage bikes, in a peaceful friendly family environment. The event site and local law enforcement have a (( NO PATCH / NO COLORS )) policy that we must abide by. We respect everyone’s right live & do as they choose so we must respect the event site’s policy as well. We thank you in advance for your cooperation and look forward to seeing everyone June 29 2013 @ Born-Free 5.

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Pablo Cruise & Shawn in the short film on Born Free 5 shot by Scott Pommier

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BORN FREE 5 website

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This isn’t just a show about tearing across the planet on a BMW– which would be cool enough for me to watch all day long. Neale has a real humanitarian heart, and the causes he believes in are truly the end game for him. The tagline for the show sums it up well– Adventure. Travel. Adrenaline, Storytelling. All on motorcycles. (BMW’s, at that.) 

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“Neale Bayly, renowned motorcycle journalist and philanthropic adventure rider, takes three average riders on the trip of a lifetime to Peru. They face unbelievable challenges through the deserts and mountains…but find it’s all worth it when their journey leads them to an orphanage…”

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Veteran motorcycle journalist, and RoadRUNNER contributor, Neale Bayly was adventuring through Peru when he arrived at the Hogar Belen orphanage. The abandoned children he met there turned his motorcycle adventure into a humanitarian cause. Upon returning to the U.S. he founded Wellspring International Outreach, a non-profit organization focused on coming to the aid of orphans around the world. In order to help raise awareness for Wellspring’s work, Neale has teamed up with Linda Midgett, an Emmy award winning producer, to create a three-part TV series. The show, called Neale Bayly Rides Peru, follows Neale and a diverse cast that includes a doctor, a pastor, an IT consultant, a chef, and a riding instructor from the BMW performance center as they first prepare for and then ride Peru. This journey takes them all the way back to Moquegua, Peru and the orphanage where it all began. Neale Bayly Rides will air on the Fox Sports’ Speed Network– 9 pm on June 9th, 16th, 23rd. Get all the details at nealebaylyrides.com

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Neale Bayly Rides on facebook

Neale Bayly Rides website

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Evel Knievel shared a long and colorful history with Harley-Davidson– professing that his very first motorcycle was a Harley that he stole when he was just 13 yrs old. Legend has it in 1960, Evel Knievel strapped his day-old son Kelly to his back for the boy’s first motorcycle ride. The 22-year-old Robert (not yet the larger-than-life Evel) Knievel fishtailed the brand new Harley on their maiden ride home from the maternity ward to the family trailer in Butte, Montana. He was so shaken by almost wrecking with his newborn baby in-tow that he promptly sold the bike.

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A great shot of Evel Knievel showcasing the beauty of his white leathers with navy and red trim. Knievel was buried in a leather jacket like the one you see here when he passed away in 2007. Pal Matthew McConaughey offered this eulogy– “He’s forever in flight now. He doesn’t have to come back down. He doesn’t have to land.” And yes, McConaughey was probably stoned. A bit of an odd pairing if ever there was one, but I ask you– Who doesn’t love Evel Knievel? 

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The iconic daredevil Evel Knievel poised on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Knievel’s surviving 1972 Harley-Davidson XR-750 is now on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Knievel also donated a leather jumpsuit, cape, and boots that he wore during jumps. –Photo by Ralph Crane

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Evel Knievel pulling a wheelie on his epic Harley-Davidson XR-750 stunt motorcycle of steel, alloy, and fiberglass that weighed-in at about 300 lbs. The Harley had enough power that it could be geared to allow Evel to take-off from a dead stop in 4th so that he could approach the ramp and build speed without shifting, eliminating the risk of missing a gear. It’s also been suggested that Evel’s throttle was setup by his mechanics to turn clockwise instead of counter-clockwise. That way when he landed the throttle would roll off to idle, instead of wide open– because the impact of landing made his wrists and hands roll in the counter-clockwise direction of the grip. 

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“I guess I thought I was Elvis Presley. But I’ll tell ya something–

all Elvis did was stand on a stage and play a guitar.

He never fell off on that pavement at no 80 mph.”

– Evel Knievel

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1975 — Evel Knievel on his Harley-Davidson XR-750 gearing-up for the Wembley stadium bus jump.

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Evel Knievel outside the Harley-Davidson factory with a trio of bikes.  via

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Evel Knievel signing an autograph for a young fan – Hell, who wasn’t a fan of Evel’s back then?!

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1975 — Evel Knievel promo shot on his Harley-Davidson XR-750  for the Wembley stadium bus jump.

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1973 — Evel Knievel and AMA Hall of Famer Roger Reiman,who in later years became Evel’s head mechanic in-charge of his stable of Harley-Davidson XR-750 stunt bikes.

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1970s shot of badass daredevil stuntman Evel Knievel on his Harley-Davidson XR-750 motorcycle.

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Great shot of Evel Knievel in white leathers on his Harley-Davidson XR-750 motorcycle.

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1975 — Evel Knievel on his Harley-Davidson XR-750 gearing-up for the Wembley stadium bus jump.

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1975 — Evel Knieve’famous  motorcycle jump of 13 Greyhound buses at Wembley stadium, UK.

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1975 — Evel Knievel, on his Harley-Davidson XR-750, jumping 140 feet at 90 mph over 13 buses at Wembley stadium. He barely cleared the last bus, and crashed on landing. Knievel suffered a broken hand, pelvis, and compressed vertebrae.  –Photo by David Ashdown / Keystone / Getty Images

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1975 — Stuntman Evel Knievel crashing his Harley-Davidson XR-750 motorcycle on landing following a successful 90 mph jump over 13 buses at Wembley Stadium.

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1975 — Evel Knievel crashed on landing following a successful 90 mph jump over 13 buses at Wembley Stadium. Knievel promptly announced to the crowd that he was done– there would be no more jumps. Still shaken, he stated to the crowd that they were “the last people in the world who will ever see me jump. I will never, ever, ever, ever jump again. I am through”. Injuries and all, Evel Knievel stood and insisted to be taken off his stretcher and walk out of the stadium. Once out of the stadium he was placed back onto a stretcher, loaded into an ambulance, and then rushed to the hospital. – Image by © Bettmann/Corbis

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1976 — So much for no more jumps! Here’s Evel Knievel successfully jumping 10 vans at Worcester, Massachusetts on his H-D XR-750. 

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1977 — Evel Knievel loading his .38 Smith & Wesson handgun in a New York City hotel room. After receiving kidnapping threats against his children Evel began sleeping with the loaded gun every night.

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WHAT I’VE LEARNED: EVEL KNIEVEL | For Esquire magazine, 2007

You can fall many times in life, but you’re never a failure as long as you try to get up.

Loving someone doesn’t mean that you can love her for six days and then beat the crap out of her on the seventh.

Women are the root of all evil. I ought to know. I’m Evel.

This country has become a nation of the government, by the government, and for the government. Our politicians are destroying us. We need a revolt!

When you’re mad at someone, it’s probably best not to break his arm with a baseball bat.

Heaven is a place you can go and drink a lot of draft beer and it don’t make you fat. You can cheat on your wife and she don’t get mad. You get a beautiful female chauffeur with nice, hard tits — real ones. There are motorcycle jumps you never miss. You don’t need a tee time.

Anybody can jump a motorcycle. The trouble begins when you try to land it.

The Internal Revenue Service is more ruthless than the Gestapo. Abolish the IRS! Stamp out organized crime!

I don’t believe in hell. I don’t believe in gods or Jesus Christ or sacred cows. I don’t believe in that big, fat-assed Buddha. Show me one piece of Noah’s ark. Show me one piece of the tablets that Moses was supposed to have brought down from the mountain. People need a crutch. They need to make up stories. I don’t want to do that.

You can be famous for a lot of things. You can be a Nobel-prize winner. You can be the fattest guy in the world. You can be the guy with the smallest penis. Whatever it is, enjoy it. It don’t last forever.

One day you’re a hero, the next day you’re gone.

People say they take responsibility for their own actions all the time, but that don’t mean they really do.

I think that all of these so-called born-again Christians should ask their preachers why they don’t hand out organ-donor cards. If you donated a kidney or a heart or an eye or whatever to your fellow man to keep him alive, you couldn’t be closer to God than that.

You can’t forbid children to do things that are available to them at every turn. God told Eve, “Don’t give the apple to Adam,” and look what happened. It’s in our nature to want the things we see.

If God ever gives this world an enema, he’ll stick the tube in the Lincoln Tunnel and he’ll flush everybody in New York City clear across the Atlantic. And that would just be a start.

We must tax the churches. Freedom of religion is bullshit when it’s tax-free.

You are the master of your own ship, pal. There are lots of people who fall into troubled waters and don’t have the guts or the knowledge or the ability to make it to shore. They have nobody to blame but themselves.

I’ve done everything in the world I’ve ever wanted to do except kill somebody. There are a couple of guys I know who need shooting. They represent the rectums of humanity.

If you don’t know about pain and trouble, you’re in sad shape. They make you appreciate life.

Everything in moderation is okay, except Wild Turkey.

If a guy hasn’t got any gamble in him, he isn’t worth a crap.

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Dorothy Stratten – Playboy Playmate of the Month for August, 1979 & Playmate of the Year for 1980.

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Anyone who lived during the time of the brutal killing and tragic loss of Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten, probably will never forget how utterly shocking and saddening it truly was. It spawned 2 movies (including the gripping classic, Star 80), books (including ‘The Killing of the Unicorn’ by Peter Bogdanovich, her boyfriend at the time), and many songs written in her memory. Fellow Canadian Bryan Adams actually co-wrote 2 songs about her. The crime is no less shocking today, and we are left with her story of a young girl who seemingly had acheived the American dream of fortune and fame, only to have it violently stolen from her, along with her young fragile life, by an insecure, low-life punk, whose name is not even worth mentioning. RIP Dorothy Stratten. You live on.

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“The Medieval Knight stands bold in its shining armour as Miss World of Wheels, Dorothy Hoogstraten (AKA Dorothy Stratten) dubs Ron Bergsma, who is one of the ‘Macho Man’ contestants from Universal Olympic Gym at the World of Wheels Custom Car Show, August 16th, 1978.” –Photo by Paul Snider.

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Dorothy Stratten in a bikini with the 1979 Firebird Trans Am custom-built by legendary George Barris and that starred in the Steve Martin film “The Jerk”. 

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OK, I couldn’t resist… here’s a photo of John Travolta with “Firebird Fever” signed by George Barris. “The most famous Pontiac Firebird ever to hit the streets was designed by famed car customizer George Barris who is also responsible for the ‘Batmobile’, the ‘Munster Koach’, the ‘General Lee’ and the ‘Monkee Mobile’. Hollywood promoters wanted to create a special car that would fit Travolta’s superstar image and tied into ‘Saturday Night Fever’. ‘Travolta Fever’ was built to promote John Travolta and his rising career. In 1980, when Travolta inspired a nationwide country music craze with ‘Urban Cowboy’, George Barris transformed the interior of ‘Travolta Fever’ with an ‘Urban Cowboy’ theme complete with appointed cowhide seats and an authentic saddle for the center console. ‘Travolta Fever’ is also equipped with NASCAR-inspired, sculptured fender flares and a large rear whale tail. Revell, the famous plastic model maker, produced and sold scale model kits of the Barris customized Firebird. In fact, John Travolta’s ‘Firebird Fever’ was one of the first celebrity car model kits ever offered by the company. After a short time of being shown on the West Coast, ‘Travolta Fever’ made its way to the Midwest, where it was leased from Barris by American car and custom hot rod designer Darryl Starbird and featured in several of his shows.” via

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Dorothy Stratten posing with the 1979 Firebird Trans Am wide-body custom-built by none other than the legendary George Barris, and that starred in the Steve Martin film “The Jerk”. Barris built it, and the “John Travolta Firebird Fever” Trans Am, side-by-side at his shop. “FF” sported a high-performance Pontiac 455 engine, custom interior with Recaora seats, custom flared fenders, Racemark steering wheel, T-roof with tinted panels, opening “Shaker” hood, rear “Whale tail” spoiler, Hooker side pipes, real rubber Firestone S/S radial tires, colorful “Fever” decals, custom instrument panel. “Firebird Fever” was released in conjunction with Revell’s matching 1/25 scale plastic model kit to capitalize on Travolta’s mass popularity at the time. Photo by William LaChasse, via Autoculture

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Dorothy Stratten – Photo by William LaChasse, via Autoculture

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Dorothy Stratten with a Harley Panhead chopper – Photo by William LaChasse, via Autoculture

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Dorothy Stratten signing autographs at a car show  – Photo by William LaChasse, via Autoculture

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1980 Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten and that low-life pimp husband of hers, Paul Snider. -

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Dorothy Stratten and the man she left Paul Snider for — film director Peter Bogdanovich. He was so grief stricken at her loss, that he stopped film-making to write a book about her — The Killing of the Unicorn – and then years later, after cultivating her from the age of 12 yrs old, he married Dorothy’s younger sister, Louise.

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The Passions of Peter Bogdanovich | People Magazine, 1989–

She was, director Peter Bogdanovich would admit, an obsession. Blond, delicately featured, a Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten was so beautiful she seemed luminescent, as if lit from within. A year after he first met her in 1978, when she was 18, Bogdanovich cast her in a movie and, though she was married, they soon became lovers. “I could hardly believe that she really existed, that she wasn’t a dream,” he later said of their affair. “There was something miraculous about Dorothy Stratten.”

In just five months, however, the director’s dream became a nightmare: Dorothy’s estranged husband, crazed by her decision to leave him and marry Bogdanovich, raped her, killed her with a point-blank shotgun blast to the head, and then killed himself. Her murder left Bogdanovich desolate, devastated. “I haven’t been dating,” he said, 16 months after Dorothy’s murder. “I’m a widower. I don’t know if I can ever love as totally and completely as I loved Dorothy.” He gave up making movies to write a book about her death, and he became devoted to Dorothy’s mother, Nelly, and her 12-year-old kid sister, Louise.

Too devoted, some said. He sent Louise, an insecure, pudgy girl with none of her sister’s delicate features, to a private school and to modeling classes. He bought her a baby grand piano and took her along on trips to Paris and Hawaii. He gave her a gold-and-diamond necklace and, when she graduated from high school, a Pontiac Trans Am. In 1986, he gave her a movie role.

Two weeks ago, Bogdanovich married Louise, now 20, in a small ceremony in Vancouver, renewing speculation about just when his interest in the girl became more than that of a close family friend—and about just what it had become. Skeptics suggested that Louise’s motivation had a practical side; her marriage to Bogdanovich would solve a chronic problem she’d had coming from her native Canada to work in the States. Those who know the couple discounted that—and saw in the relationship an eerie reprise of the director’s intense love for Louise’s sister, Dorothy.

When allegations of a romantic attachment between Bogdanovich and Louise first surfaced in 1984, when she was 16, they were silenced by a slander suit filed by Louise and her mother. (The suit was later dropped.) Some of those who know Bogdanovich best expressed little surprise at the marriage. Polly Platt, Bogdanovich’s first wife and mother of his two daughters—who were friendly with Louise during her frequent sojourns in L.A.—says the pair “had been together for a long time.”

But Louise’s mother, hearing of the marriage at her home in Vancouver, was distraught. “I feel he wants her because of a guilt trip,” she said. “This happened to my other daughter, who got her head shot off, and it’s gonna happen to this one. He didn’t do it, but he was involved. If he is in love with one daughter, how can he be in love with the other daughter?”

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1979 — Dorothy Stratten working at the Century City Playboy Club. RIP

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Here’s a cool video by Ray Gordon on the story of Hurst Racing Tires– owned and operated by Cody Adams & Steve Adams since 2005 in Oregon City, OR. They make each tire by hand, using the original equipment acquired by Ron Hurst himself when he started making racing tires back in 1961 to supply the local racers in San Diego, CA. You get a real appreciation that some things are just better when done by hand, using quality materials and time-honored craftsmanship.

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1979, Cleveland — Bo Diddley opened for The Clash on their US tour – Image by © Bob Gruen. In 1979, Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon of the Clash asked that Diddley open for them on the band’s first American tour. “I can’t look at him without my mouth falling open,” Strummer, starstruck, told a journalist during the tour. For his part, Diddley had no misgivings about facing a skeptical audience. “You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like,” he explained later to the biographer George White. “You have to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!” via

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The Clash where huge fans of Bo Diddley, as many of the formative British bands (and American too) of the ’60s and ’70s were– The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Beatles, The Yardbirds, and many more. Bo Diddley joined The Clash as their opening act on their 1979 US Tour– opening up a radical, young, new crowd to the sound of the man many consider to be one of the most important pioneers of American Rock & Roll music. Bo Diddley himself made no bones about stating that HE was THE beginning of Rock & Roll. Bo Diddley not only influenced sound– he also influenced the attitude, energy, and look of Rock & Roll for decades to come. Look at the pics here, I see the bold plaids that Diddley and other Rockers of the ’50s wore (Plaid was for hipsters, not squares, in the ’50s..), that emerged again strongly in the ’70s through the Sex Pistols (great credit due to Vivienne Westwood), The Clash and others. You can also see and hear where Jack Black got the lion’s share of his game from– no doubt Bo Diddley. The man is a legend and has never gotten his due, and the due that came, came too late. He had a well-earned chip on his shoulder, and even insisted The Clash pay him upfront, as he’d been screwed over so many times before.

“I was the cat that went and opened the door, and everyone else ran through it. And I said– what the heck, you know? …I was left holding the doorknob” –Bo Diddley

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ca. 1950s — Norma Jean “The Duchess” Wofford in white blouse, Jerome Green squatting in front with maracas, and Bo Diddley with his signature rectangular Gretsch guitar. Bo and his crew were the badasses of their generation, just as The Clash were in theirs. – Image by © Michael Ochs

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“If you can play– all you need is one amp, your axe, and you. “ –Bo Diddley explaining his feelings about The Clash’s monstrous wall of sound during their 1979 US tour.

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1979, Cleveland — Bo Diddley opened for The Clash on their 1979 US tour. I love seeing Mick Jones in his red tartan plaid shirt, and then looking down at the photo of Bo Diddley and crew rocking them back in the ’50s, and looking extremely badass. – Image by © Bob Gruen  

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ca. 1950s, New York — Bo Diddley, Jerome Green on left playing maracas. – Image by © Michael Ochs. Back in the 1950s, plaids like this may have been accepted among the Hipsters, but it was a different story in Middle America where it was still thought of it as the fabric of a counter culture movement– outlaw fashion. via

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“This group the Sex Pistols pukes onstage? I don’t necessarily like that. That’s not showmanship… They gotta get themselves an act.”  –Bo Diddley

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Bo Diddley opened for The Clash in 1979 on their US tour, here on their bus. – Image by © Bob Gruen 

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So how did Bo reflect back upon his 1979 US tour with The Clash? I think he summed it up pretty well when he stated that, “Every generation has its own little bag of tricks…” Watch the video below–

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No mention of Bo Diddley would be complete with a nod to The Duchess–

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Born Norma-Jean Wofford in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she began her career in 1962. After the departure of his first female guitarist, Peggy “Lady Bo” Jones, wherever Bo Diddley played, he would hear discontented whispers in the audience– “Where’s the girl? Where’s the girl? That’s when I got The Duchess,” he told his biographer. “I taught her how to play guitar, and then I taught her how to play my thing, you know. Then, after I hired her in the group, I named her The Duchess, and I says, ‘I’m gonna tell everybody we’re sister and brother.’ Part of the reason I decided to go with that little lie was that it put me in a better position to protect her when we were on the road.” via

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Lending her inimitable style to the grooves (and sleeves) of 1962′s “Bo Diddley & Company” and 1963′s “Bo Diddley’s Beach Party” albums, she accompanied him on his first tour of England that same year, where her guitar prowess created a stir equalled only by that of her skin-tight gold lamé cat suit. Asked by one dauntless investigator how she managed to get into it, Norma-Jean responded by pulling out an over-sized shoehorn. Eric Burdon later immortalised her in the Animals’ “Story Of Bo Diddley”. via

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1967– Sharon Tate for a spread in Esquire Magazine, 1967, in a t-shirt printed with the Vietnam Star. –Photo by William Helburn

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So this is what the internets are recently abuzz about– The Mad Men costume designer channeling the essence of Sharon Tate, circa Esquire magazine 1969, by placing the same Vietnam Star T-shirt on Megan Draper. Which, mind you– was probably not for sale at your local Hot Topic, head shop, or Amazon.com back then, so kinda random and creepy. It’s a pretty good ploy to generate some buzz– made me look twice, and I haven’t watched the show in a few years now. Probably exactly what they were going for. I will say, for the record, that the original photography by William Helburn is amazing– downright titillating, even.

But if you find this kind of stuff remotely interesting, the real tingler is how Steve McQueen himself almost ended up a part of the Manson massacre, and could have shared in Sharon Tate and the other’s gruesome fate…

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Sharon Tate for Esquire magazine, 1967 –Photo by William Helburn

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1967– Sharon Tate for a spread in Esquire Magazine, 1967, in a t-shirt printed with the Vietnam Star. –Photo by William Helburn

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From The Daily Mail, the alleged accounts of McQueen’s infidelities and loathsome ways that put him on the road to creeps-ville, and in the path of Manson’s murderous crew–

“For years, as his [a young Steve McQueen's] career failed to ignite, he leeched off a successful dancer called Neile Adams — spending her earnings on new cars, drugs and other women.

Eventually marrying her in 1956, he landed a small role soon afterwards in the film of Harold Robbins’s trashy novel, Never Love A Stranger. Within days, he’d embarked on an intensely sexual affair with the film’s leading lady actress Lita Milan — and then proudly told his wife about it. According to Neile: ‘Lita would be the first in a long line of flings that would plague me throughout our married life. OK, I thought, I can handle it — I have to — as long as he doesn’t flaunt it.’

But, as McQueen’s career gathered pace, he never stopped flaunting his affairs — with co-stars including Jacqueline Bisset and Lee Remick, not to mention a host of starlets and fans. Perhaps as a test of his wife’s devotion, he made indiscreet phone calls within her hearing and left lipstick smudges on his shirts (and trousers) and love notes in his pockets.

By 1960, Neile had given up work and given birth to a son and daughter. Still struggling to be the kind of wife he wanted, she’d boil up the high-grade peyote he bought from Navajo Indians, and then disappear while McQueen got stoned with his friends.

He also started going for all-night benders at the Whisky a Go Go club on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, where he met one of his chief partners in crime: a womanising hairdresser called Jay Sebring. The two men, fuelled by alcohol and cocaine, shared the sexual favours of a Bambi-eyed starlet called Sharon Tate, often in the same bed at the same time. And their friendship continued even after she married the director Roman Polanski.

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Sharon Tate for Esquire magazine, 1967 –Photo by William Helburn

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On the afternoon of August 7, 1969, Sebring went to McQueen’s house to give him a trim and suggested they attend a party that evening at Sharon’s house. McQueen said he’d be there. Before setting out, however, he was called by a young and beautiful blonde he was seeing at the time. Come along to the party, he said — but she told him she had a better idea for just the two of them.

Thus, by a whisker, Steve McQueen avoided being massacred by the Manson ‘family’, the hippie followers of the manipulative psychopath Charles Manson, who butchered Tate and three guests — including Sebring, who was shot and stabbed. Ironically, McQueen’s adultery had saved his life.

Two months later, when the killers were arrested, police discovered McQueen’s name on a hit-list of people whom Manson had decided to kill. It turned out that someone at McQueen’s production company had once rejected a screenplay by Manson. From then on, the actor carried a loaded Magnum at all times.

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Letter written to McQueen’s attorney, Edward “Eddie” Rubin on Le Mans / Solar Productions letterhead, by Steve McQueen, documenting his concerns about Charles Manson and his murdering crew of misfits. He, as wells as, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, and Tome Jones (good company…) were believed, through an investigation of the murders, to be targeted for assassination by Charles Manson’s crew.

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REQUIRED VIEWING “BULLITT” | THE GRANDDADDY OF CAR CHASE SCENES

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The Selvedge Yard’s ‘Tramp’ Triumph, custom built by Kevin Dunworth — photo by Scott Toepfer

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Here’s a quick shot of the ‘Tramp’ — the TSY collaboration with Kevin Dunworth of Loaded Gun Customs. If you were in Brooklyn Saturday night for the Iron & Air Issue Nine Release Party, then you saw it unveiled for the first time. To see more photos, read the story behind the build, and get the full specs on the Tramp– pick up Issue Nine of Iron & Air magazine.

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The Selvedge Yard’s ‘Tramp’ Triumph, custom built by Kevin Dunworth — photo by Scott Toepfer

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Thor Drake and the See See Motor Coffee Co. crew have put together this great little video that perfectly captures the essence of The One Motorcycle Show that went down back in February. I will personally never forget it, as many new friendships were formed that will last for a long time to come. I remember having a strong longing to attend, having exchanged emails and admiration for many of the good folks involved in the show– particularly Thor and photographer Ray Gordon. So I headed out solo on my birthday weekend not knowing exactly what to expect– and it turned out to be absolutely the right call. The people and energy were amazing, as everyone was super-positive and inclusive in a way was genuine and inspiring. There were more amazing bikes there than you could shake a stick at– but it was truly the unity of the people coming together to celebrate and support one another that made it such an amazing experience. It felt like family, and that’s probably the best compliment that one can pay.

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1970 Triumph T100C 500cc “Lemon Drop” — the winner of the “lots and lots of polishing” award at The One Motorcycle Show in Portland, 2013.

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See more photos of The One Motorcycle Show here

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So, I don’t know if you’ve heard– there’s a party coming to BROOKLYN. Iron & Air is throwing down for the release of Issue Nine at Fast Ashleys Studios– and you’re not gonna want to miss it. I might be slightly biased, but I ‘m pretty stoked that the bike built for me by Kevin Dunworth of Loaded Gun Customs will be unveiled that night, and will also be featured in Iron & Air magazine. There will be lots of local Brooklyn eats ‘n’ drinks– The Shop Brooklyn will be dishing out their special slow-cooked brand of goodness. And their will be plenty of badass bikes to ogle, and some cool art going on. If you want to partake in the festivities, you will need to RSVP on the Iron & Air Facebook page (look for the ‘EVENTS’ tab and click on “GOING’), OK? If you can’t handle that, or ain’t down with the Facebook you can always blow-up Sonia’s email at sonia@ironandair.com and ask her to put you on the RSVP list. She’s gonna kill me…

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The TSY ‘Tramp’ a collaboration built by Kevin Dunworth of Loaded Gun Customs coming to Brooklyn.

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IRON & AIR Issue No. 9 Release Party

Saturday May 25th 2013 @7-11PM

Fast Ashleys Studios

95 North 10th Street

Brooklyn, NY 11249 

RSVP here (on the ‘EVENTS’ tab)

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You can never have enough Norm Grabowski! From the grainy pages of Modern Cycle magazine, ca. 1965 (a follow-up piece  published after covering Norm’s epic Corvair-powered “Six Pack” motorcycle), by way of Nostalgia on Wheels. Below is Norm on the Harley before the sidecar, and following along after you’ll see it fitted with the Steib sidecar as it appeared in Modern Cycle.

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Norm Grabowski on his custom ’54 Panhead Harley with special high-torque cams on a ’38 H-D rigid frame. This was later equipped with a Steib sidecar frame adapted by Mike Parti. –pic via Irish Rich

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Norm on his red metalflaked Pan chopper with the jugs and heads painted white, at the drags. Check out the sissy bar – it’s a combination beer can holder / “church key” beer can opener….too fucking much!  

–Irish Rich  

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Norm Grabowski is the kind of guy who goes nuts over things mechanical. If you read the Modern Cycle issue of May 1965, you’ll remember the story we did on his Six Pack, the ultra-smooth power monster consisting mainly of an Indian motorcycle frame housing a Chevrolet Corvair engine. Norm’s latest creation is certainly as far out as the last one, but at least this time he stuck mostly to motorcycle parts in creating it. Completed last Fall, the three wheeler was seen several times on television on the short lived series, My Mother The Car, in which the actor was a regular. Grabowski drove the melodramatic villain, Captain Mancini, around in the strange looking chair.  –Modern Cycle magazine, ca. 1965    

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A startling, if somewhat unfunctional package, Norm’s new three-wheelet really gets the stares. Norm started with a 1938 Harley-Davidson rigid frame and dropped in a 1954 74 cu. in. H-D engine, which he left stock except for special high torque cams. The sidecar is a Steib, with special adaption done by Mike Parti of Sun Valley, CA. This was a major undertaking as it involved relocating the ball joints close to the outrigger rather than near the frame of the bike. Paint on bike and sidecar is the same candy pearl orange used on the Six Pack. In all, a wild package.  –Modern Cycle magazine, ca. 1965    

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Intricate exhaust tours from engine across front of, underneath, and up back of the “T” bucket. Built by Huth Muffler of Burbank it includes an aluminum-sprayed Austin-Healy duplex muffler. Upholstery in black Naugahyde was done by Lee Wells. Paint and striping are by Dean Jeffries of Hollywood, CA.  –Modern Cycle magazine, ca. 1965    

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Barrels and heads on Norm Grabowski’s Harley-Davidson Pan have been metal sprayed with aluminum and case polished. Foot shift conversion was done by Boyd DeFrance of D & D Cycle in Burbank, who also dod a goodly portion of the other mechanical work.  –Modern Cycle magazine, ca. 1965     

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The Great 1950′s T-Bucket Hot Rod Rivalry | Kookie Kar vs. The “Outhouse on Wheels”

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Funny how often we automatically assume that long-standing, famous couples must be deeply devoted, madly in love, and happier than a couple of pigs in slop. Sometimes, like in the case of Salavador Dali and his wife Gala– what looked like love may have been a case of shared sins and “the devil you know”… I found this juicy tell-all on the couple written for VF some 15 years ago that made my own mustache curl on end… I even had to omit a few bits that were just too much. Let’s just say, it seems that they deserved each other– neither of them seem exactly easy, let alone pleasurable, to be with.

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ca. 1930– Salvador Dali and Gala in Port Lligat, a fishing village near Cadaques, before they married. When they met in 1929 Gala was still married to the poet Paul Eluard, and she quickly began an affair with Dali, who was around ten years her junior. After marrying Dali, she and Eluard continued their intimate relationship. “Letters to Gala”  is the published collection of Eluard’s raw, twisted, and emotional letters to Gala that expose the powerful grip she held on him.

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DALI’S DEMON BRIDE

When Surrealist master Salvador Dali met Gala Devulina in 1929, the 25-year-old artist found a poisonous muse who defined decadence and outdid him in sexual perversity.

By John Richardson, Vanity Fair, 1998

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That Salvador Dali fell victim to his Russian wife Gala’s lust for domination is no longer a matter of conjecture. Ian Gibson, in an eye-opening biography of the artist that Norton will publish here this month, comes up with some terrifying new facts, which reveal in more detail and depth than ever before how and why this quintessential Surrealist—the master of the soft watches—allowed himself to be destroyed by one of the nastiest wives a major modern artist ever saddled himself with.

I can testify to the accuracy of Gibson’s account. In the early 1970s I was a vice president of M. Knoedler & Co., Dali’s dealers. One of my responsibilities was keeping the artist to the terms of his contract at a time when his eye was so bleary and his hand so shaky that assistants had taken over his more arduous work. I could not help feeling sorry for the seedy old conjurer, with his rhinoceros-horn wand, leopardskin overcoat, and designer whiskers, not to mention his surreal breath. The Wizard of Was, as someone called him, was all patter and very little sleight of hand. His virago of a wife and the creepy, conniving courtiers in charge of his business had reduced Dali to a mere logo, a signature as flamboyant as his mustache.

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ca. 1930– Salvador Dali and Gala in Port Lligat, a fishing village near Cadaques, before they married. Dali was reportedly a virgin when they met, who feared female private parts, and in a very close relationship with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. There are differing opinions on whether it was a gay love affair– some say it was, while others claim Dali rebuffed Lorca’s sexual advances. Reports are also that what Dali really got off on was candaulism.

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Gala’s business methods were very Russian: she did not haggle so much as berate and bully. In a jet-black wig held in place by a Minnie Mouse bow, this ancient harridan would drive home her wheedling demands for money with jabs of ancient elbows and blows of mottled knuckles. After one gruesome dinner at Maxim’s in Paris which left me black and blue, I refused to deal with her ever again.

“Dali need more money.” Jab!

“Then Dali had better start painting again.”

“Dali paint every day. You give more money, he give more paintings.”

“All our money got us last year were bits of paper smeared with ink from an incontinent octopus. Ouch! Gala, that was my kidney!”

To put one of Dali’s biennial shows together, I was obliged to beg, borrow, and improvise: cover nude girls in paint and roll them on sheets of paper; jazz up dud old masters with Dalian trademarks—a swarm of ants or a rotting sardine—thereby transforming them into artifacts that were no less dud but far more valuable. Amazingly, the stuff sold.

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1936– Salvador Dali (holding a fencing foil) and Gala –photograph by Cecil Beaton. 

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Gala is sometimes said to have hailed from one of those Shangri-las where everybody eats only yogurt and lives to be more than a hundred. In fact, she was born Helena Diakanoff Devulina in Kazan in 1894. Her father was a civil servant, her mother a member of the Moscow intelligentsia who wrote children’s stories. According to Dali, Gala was part Jewish; according to her daughter, she was not. As a child, Gala was delicate and had to be packed off periodically to sanatoriums. At one of these, this manic girl excessively pure, yet at the same time the victim of “whorish” (her word) fancies—fell in love with the young French poet Pau Eluard, who would win fame as one of the founders of Surrealism. The outbreak of war separated them, but in 1916, Gala made her way from Moscow to Paris to rejoin her poet lover.

Gala and Eluard were married a year later. Soon, according to Gibson, “her appetite for sex…was so overwhelming that it verged on the nymphomaniac.” She did not allow the birth of a daughter, Cecile, in 1918, to cramp her style. Apart from an unsuccessful attempt in old age to disinherit Cecile, Gala paid her little or no heed. Eluard prided himself on his sexual prowess, but he failed to satisfy Gala, so she took lovers on the side. They had to be exceedingly young, handsome, and horny. Since Gala was blessed with striking, Slavic looks, an appetizing little body, and the libido of an electric eel, she had no difficulty finding them. One of her first lovers was the charismatic German Dadaist Max Ernst, who had recently moved from Cologne to Paris. At Gala’s insistence, Eluard let this hot young genius share their bed. Two men proved much better than one… Few of the other Surrealists could stand Gala. Much as they revered the works of the Marquis de Sade, they felt threatened when an authentically Sadean monster manifested herself in their midst. Amused, she would give a derisive smile; angered, she would roar like a Siberian tiger.

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1932– Salvador Dali and Gala –photograph by BRASSAÏ Gyula Halash

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In August 1929, the Eluards and a group of friends went to stay in Cadaques, Dali’s hometown. The artist, who had yet to make a name for himself outside Spain, had already heard about Gala’s strange proclivities, but his first sight of her in a bathing suit, on the sacrosanct beach of his childhood, left him bewitched. Gala was the demonic dominatrix of his dreams. For her part, she was in the market for another celebrity husband. And in the 25-year-old Dali she found the man of her dreams, someone who shared her passion for money, power, and notoriety, but also someone whose latest paintings, with their references to Freud and Sade and their meticulous, Vermeer-like finish, were destined to have an instant succes de scandale.

One small problem. Dali had been in love only once before, and that had been with a man: Federico Garcia Lorca. Lorca had exerted a formative influence on Dali’s earliest work and was on the way to becoming Spain’s greatest poet. Hearing that his former lover was involved with a woman, Lorca was incredulous….However, Gala turned out to be unfazed by Dali’s homosexual propensities….

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1927– The poet Federico Garcia Lorca and a young Salvador Dali (storied to be gay lovers) near Dali’s family summer residence in Cadaques, Spain –photograph by Dali’s sister.

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Dali’s stuffy but dotty Catalan family was appalled by his involvement with this scarlet woman from sinful Paris. Wrongly assuming Gala to be a drug addict who had turned Salvador into a dope peddler, his father disinherited him, and his devoted sister, Anna Maria, embarked on a feud with Gala which would last until death. The following spring, Gala and Dali spent five weeks at Torremolinos—in those days an unspoiled fishing village—and scandalized the local women, who still wore black and kept themselves covered, by wandering around the streets tanned mahogany from sunbathing nude on the beach, caressing each other exhibitionistically. She would be bare-breasted and miniskirted, her ratlike eyes ablaze; he, bone-thin and no less manic-looking, his bare chest set off by a necklace of bits of broken green glass. In nearby Malaga, a friend in the tourist office tried to explain this bizarre couple away as Egyptians, which only made things worse, leaving them at the mercy of beggars crying for baksheesh.

Dali was a latecomer to Surrealism. An earlier generation of Surrealist painters—Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Andre Masson, Yves Tanguy—had paved the way for him, as had the Surrealist poets, above all Andre Breton, a control freak of genius who headed the movement. Surrealism turned out to be made for Dali, as he was made for it: “the painter of dreams about whom [the Surrealists] had long dreamt,” as the photographer Brassai said. The twisted imagery churned up by Dali’s dysfunctional psyche corresponded to the sort of iconography that Breton had envisaged for his movement. Thanks to Breton, the artist’s first one-man show in Paris, in November 1929, would be a sensation. This plus Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, the two subversive films Dali made with the friend of his youth, Luis Bufiuel, confirmed him as the last great star of Surrealism. No doubt about it, by coming into his life just as his career was taking off, Gala likewise helped to make Dali, just as in less than a decade she would play an active role in unmaking him.

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1934, France — Salvador Dali and Gala in Dali’s Paris studio in 1934, the year they were married in a civil ceremony. She was previously married to poet Paul Eluard. In 1958, Salvador and Gala remarried in a Catholic ceremony in Montrejic after being granted a special dispensation by the Pope. — Image by © Bettmann/Corbis

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After their marriage in 1934, Dali set about propagating the legend of Gala as his muse and collaborator. She also served as his business manager and publicist, and in no time succeeded in turning him into as much of a monster of hype and megalomania as she was. Inevitably she came up against Andre Breton, who loathed her as much as she loathed him. Inevitably she found herself fighting Breton for possession of her husband’s soul, and inevitably she won. Her victory condemned Dali to a career of repetitious hackwork-society portraits, Fifth Avenue window displays, hosiery promotions—which was instrumental in bringing not just him but the Surrealist movement into artistic and intellectual disrepute. With her White Russian terror of Communism, Gala also managed to subvert the liberal ideology that Dali had shared with the fellow geniuses of his student days, Lorca and Bufiuel. Disdaining the Marxism of the other Surrealists, the former atheist and anarchist went over to totalitarianism and its by-product anti- Semitism. Far from showing any sympathy for the proletariat, Dali reportedly announced, apropos of his surreal penchant for the macabre, that he preferred train accidents in which the third-class passengers suffered most. He hailed the swastika as “the fusion of Left and Right, the resolution of antagonistic movements.” On another occasion he described Hitler, childishly, as a nurse, and also talked with relish of biting “into the doting and triumphal sweetness of the plump, atavistic, tender, militarist and territorial back of [this] nurse.”

When Franco prevailed in the Spanish Civil War, Dali set about currying favor with the Caudillo by publicly recanting his former contempt for family values and the church. Breton, the most powerful force in French letters, anathematized the artist as a counterrevolutionary and expelled him from the Surrealist group. He also came up with a brilliant anagram for him, “Avida Dollars.” Dali’s period of greatness had lasted little more than 10 years. His “last scandal,” he promised, would be a return to classicism, but he no longer had the skill, the time, or the patience for it. Dali’s “classicism” turned out to be academic kitsch. Thanks to Gala, the rest of his life would be an ever accelerating degringolade.

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Feb 1937, Los Angeles, CA — a young 22-year-old Salvador Dali and Gala at Hollywood’s Brown Derby restaurant. — Image by © Bettmann/Corbis

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The Dalis spent World War II in New York. Although Gala hated the city, she made a fortune out of her husband’s sales-oriented shock tactics and his flashy commissioned portraits of the hard-faced doyennes of cafe society in ball dresses, posed against desert-island backdrops. These daubs effectively scuttled his reputation as an avant-garde artist. Away from his Catalan roots, Dali’s imagination atrophied and his work became slick and cheap. Only his paintings of Gala have any intensity. In 1948, back in his Surreal folly at Port Lligat, a fishing village not far from the parental house in Cadaques, Dali gave bombastic interviews contrived to ingratiate himself with the church. And to the same end he embarked on the first of a series of utterly unconvincing devotional paintings: a sanctimonious image of Gala, entitled The Madonna of Port Lligat. The fishermen of Port Lligat, who loved Dali but loathed Gala—she was always propositioning them—found the notion of her as the Madonna an absurdist joke. Nevertheless, the painting proved a useful prop when the Dalis had an audience with the Pope in November 1949. His Holiness admired it. On the other hand, friends of the artist’s youth, who remembered the fanatical intensity of his attacks on religion, were nauseated by his hypocrisy.

For them the seal of papal approval was tantamount to the mark of the beast. By the early 1960s, Dali had to work even harder on ever more degrading projects to support Gala’s addiction to gambling and boy toys. One hustler arranged for friends of his to steal her car while he was dating her. Less of a menace was a handsome, 22-year-old junkie named William Rotlein, whom Gala had picked up on a New York street. She bought him new clothes, weaned him off drugs, and took him to Spain, then Italy, where she made him swear eternal love to her on the tomb of Romeo and Juliet. Except for Eluard, Rotlein was the best sex she had ever had, Gala boasted. He even returned her love, which is probably why the affair lasted four years. It ended when Rotlein failed a screen test for a walk-on part in a Fellini movie. Gala despised failure and gave him a one-way ticket back to New York. Shortly afterward, he died of an overdose.

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Salvador Dali and Gala pose with the ironic and controversial “The Madonna of Port Lligat” which portray the anything but pure and holy Gala in a religious-themed devotional painting which Dali used as a tool to please the Pope, who was said to have admired it.

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To entertain her lovers, Gala obliged Dali to give her a castle, part hideaway, part love nest. Called Pubol, it was 50 miles from Port Lligat. The artist was not allowed to set foot there unless he had a written invitation from the chatelaine. Thanks to Jean-Claude Du Barry—a young man who ran a Barcelona modeling agency, and whom Dali described as “my purveyor of a**”—the artist and his wife had a constant supply of fresh boys… Woe betide them if they went after Dali’s girls, chicks with… When Gala was almost 80, she fell for a young student from Aix-en-Provence, who gave her the illusion of eternal youth. After a year or two, he was displaced by Jeff Fenholt, the long-haired star of Jesus Christ Superstar. Fenholt was given a recording studio at Pubol. There he spent night after night rocking away, to the intense irritation of Gala, who wanted him in her bed, as well as of the other guests, who wanted to sleep. Fenholt proved a very expensive item. He persuaded Gala to give him a sizable house on Long Island and send him large sums of money (“Must have $38,000 or will die,” read one telegram). According to Gibson, Fenholt showed Gala little or no gratitude. His impersonation of Jesus had not engendered any redeeming qualities; however, the role came in useful later on, when he switched to being a TV evangelist in California. Dali was said to be outraged at the expenditure and at the degree of Gala’s infatuation, which would last almost until she died. In 1981 the worm finally turned. Dali beat up his 87- year-old wife so badly that she had to be taken to the hospital with two broken ribs.

Gala had become more and more piratical. She preferred payments to be made in cash; that way she could smuggle large sums in or out of Spain, Switzerland, and France. So full of banknotes were the Dalis’ safe-deposit boxes at their Paris hotel that the manager begged them to move the contents to a bank. To the couple’s dismay, much of the currency had become obsolete. The artist then turned the management of his affairs over to a succession of secretaries. He was too stingy to pay them, so they had to make do with commissions, which resulted in their becoming multimillionaires at his expense.

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1942, New York– Original caption: And it’s off to work goes Salvador Dali. His method of going to work is not that of the ordinary mortal. He lies on a perfumed couch in his studio with a handful of pencils. Perfume is then dropped on his eyelids to influence the character of his dreams, for dreams are the stuff of which surrealism is made. –Image by © Bettmann/Corbis

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The first of the secretaries was a genial Irishman, Captain Peter Moore, who relieved Dali’s, or rather Gala’s, constant need for ready money by suggesting that they charge $10 each for Dali’s signature on blank sheets of paper onto which publishers or dealers could print whatever image they liked from the artist’s repertory. Since Dali could do a thousand signatures an hour, he relished this task. It was like printing his own money. After French customs stopped a shipment of 40,000 of these signed sheets to a so-called art publisher, respectable dealers shied away from Dali’s late graphic work. Once again he had done himself in.

Gala made no bones about the people who trafficked in these sheets of paper. “They are all crooks,” she said. “Who cares? They pay us cash, so what difference does it make? Dali painted the work. He can sell the rights to anyone he wishes and as many times as he wants.” It was not even as if Dali needed money: in 1974 he was worth $32 million. What little was left of his integrity as an artist was sacrificed to Gala’s nymphomania and greed for tacky aggrandizement.

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1942, New York– Gala gets Dali in the mood for work. Using long wands, she presses perfumed cotton swabs on his eyes to irritate the retinas. This hypnological practice ws supposed to stimulate his imagination and induce visions. The treatment is beginning to work, apparently, for Senor Dali has now begun to sketch while the perfumed pads continue the compression of his eyeballs. –Image by © Bettmann/Corbis

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After the friendly, businesslike Peter Moore was squeezed out in 1974, things got much worse. Gala insisted on replacing him with a former Catalan soccer player named Enric Sabater, a jerk-of-all-trades with a flair for public relations and monkey business. When he went to work for Dali, Sabater applied for a private detective’s license and took to carrying a gun. He set up a number of offshore companies and proceeded to build up a business empire for himself, which eclipsed the artist’s. According to Gibson, to keep the Dalis isolated from other advisers, Sabater tapped their telephones and ordered armed guards to stop anyone from entering their house unless authorized by him. By charging around with a revolver in his belt, eavesdropping and spying, Sabater reduced Dali to a “trembling mass of jelly.” Reynolds Morse, a collector of the artist’s work and a friend, claims Sabater had worked “the greatest con game ever on the greatest con man in art.” Besides a yacht and two luxurious residences on the Costa Brava, one with a lobster pond, Sabater amassed in five years a fortune of more than a billion pesetas (about $14 million). Meanwhile, Gala’s passion for Fenholt had left Dali in a state of abject depression. Was she going to leave him for Jesus Christ? To alleviate his panic, Gala gave him excessive doses of Valium and other sedatives, which made him lethargic. She would then dose him with “unknown quantities of one or more types of amphetamine,” thereby causing him “irreversible neural damage.” “Might it be possible,” Gibson asks the reader, “that Gala, in plying Dali with a mixture of pills from her private medicine chest, was…attempting to poison him? It is a possibility that cannot be entirely ruled out.” It was clear, in any case, that Gala’s treatment had reduced the artist to a bag of quivering bones. When the King and Queen of Spain visited him in 1981, he looked very battered: Gala was rumored to have made a dent in his skull with her shoe.

Ironically, it was Gala who died first, on June 10, 1982, aged 87. The fact that this occurred in a Barcelona hospital made for problems. She had wanted to die and be buried at Pubol. To avoid legal complications, Dali’s entourage decided that her body should be propped up, with a nurse beside it as if she were still alive, in the back of her huge old Cadillac and driven to Pubol. Doctors were brought from Barcelona to embalm her. She was then buried, wearing a favorite red Dior dress, in a tomb in the castle’s crypt. There, a few nights later, Dali was found on his knees, convulsed with terror. Although he had come to despise Gala, he could barely function without her. AccordingIy, he stayed on at Pubol. One of his nurses described him sobbing constantly and spending, in Gibson’s words, “hours making animal noises. He had hallucinations and thought he was a snail.”

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1959, Rome, Italy– Original caption: A crowd of onlookers watch Salvador Dali finishing his rhinoceros-inspired painting.  A bottle of Indian ink poured by Dali over the animal’s footprints on the paper produced the “work” he is here shown displaying.  Screen actress Isabelle Corey is helping Dali in his show. –Image by © Bettmann/Corbis

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After Gala’s death, Dali’s affairs went from bad to terrible. The new secretary, a seemingly harmless French photographer and self-proclaimed Dali expert named Robert Descharnes, turned out, according to Gibson, to be every bit as untrustworthy as his predecessor. Since Dali could not bear to return to the Port Lligat house, Descharnes temporarily moved his family into it, and nosy neighbors reported that he proceeded to ship the more valuable contents—archives, drawings, objects—to Paris. Descharnes’s credentials as an expert did not survive the publication of a book in which he claimed that Dali, despite the uncontrollable trembling of his right hand (so bad that he took to signing things with a thumbprint), had managed to execute a hundred paintings, unlike any he had done before, in 1982 and 1983. Gibson’s thorough research has revealed that a great many of these works are by someone named Isidor Bea.

For the last five years of Dali’s life, he was an invalid—an invalid from hell. He screamed and spat at his nurses and lunged at their faces with his nails. To annoy them he would soil his bed. He would take a pill only if an attendant would promise to share it or take one too. His incessant use of an antiquated bell push attached to his pajamas very nearly caused his death when it triggered a short circuit, which set fire to the bed. A nurse found him semi-conscious on the floor and summoned help. Despite Dali’s calling her “Bitch! Criminal! Assassin!,” the nurse managed to give him mouth-to-mouth respiration, which helped save him. While Dali was in the bum clinic, his sister, Anna Maria, once closer to him than anybody else, insisted on visiting him. “Go away, you old *****,” he supposedly shouted, and tried to hit her. A few weeks later he confirmed his intention to disinherit her. He was evidently on the mend.

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1980– The eccentric Spanish artist and painter Salvador Dali with his longtime wife Gala in Monaco. –Image by © René Maestri/Sygma/Corbis

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Not wanting to return to Pubol, Dali decided to move into an extension of the Theater-Museum which he had founded in the nearby town of Figueres. And there, except for spells in the hospital, he remained, “swathed in secrecy,” until his death. Because he refused to eat, doctors had “equipped him with a grotesque nasal-gastric tube leading directly to his stomach. The piece of apparatus made his speech even more incoherent and his throat painfully dry.”

In November 1988, Dali was readmitted to the hospital. Hearing that the King of Spain was in Barcelona, he requested and received a visit, which involved dusting off the famous mustache. Death came two months later, on January 23, 1989. To the surprise of most of his entourage, the artist was not buried beside Gala at Pubol, but in his Theater-Museum. He had once assured me that he was going to have his body refrigerated in the hope of resurrection. However, he ended up, like Gala, embalmed, pacemaker and all. He had also insisted that his face be covered in death, but at the funeral he was laid out in an open coffin for all to see, his grubby nails showing through his shroud.

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“In Voluptas Mors” by Salvador Dali & Philippe Halsman, which you may recognize from the movie poster for “The Silence of the Lambs”– used to symbolize the seven victims in Jonathan Demme’s classic film…

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1951– Nude women posed by Dali forming a skull entitled “In Voluptas Mors” –photograph by Philippe Halsman (in collaboration with Salvador Dali) 

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1951– Salvador Dali posing naked female models to form a human skull entitled “In Voluptas Mors” –photograph by Philippe Halsman (in collaboration with Dali)

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1951– Salvador Dali posing naked female models to form a human skull entitled “In Voluptas Mors” –photograph by Philippe Halsman (in collaboration with Dali)

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1951– Salvador Dali posing naked female models to form a human skull entitled “In Voluptas Mors” –photograph by Philippe Halsman (in collaboration with Dali)

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1951– Salvador Dali posing naked female models to form a human skull entitled “In Voluptas Mors” –photograph by Philippe Halsman (in collaboration with Dali)

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1951– Salvador Dali posing naked female models to form a human skull entitled “In Voluptas Mors” –photograph by Philippe Halsman (in collaboration with Dali)

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1951– Salvador Dali posing naked female models to form a human skull entitled “In Voluptas Mors” –photograph by Philippe Halsman (in collaboration with Dali)

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1951– naked female models posed by artist Salvador Dali to form the likeness of a human skull. –photograph by Philippe Halsman (in collaboration with Dali)

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photographer Philippe Halsman, who collaborated with Salvador Dali on “In Voluptas Mors” in 1951

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Brian Duffy photograph of David Bowie for the Aladdin Sane album cover, 1973. “Bowie’s sixth studio album marked the birth of the ‘schizophrenic’ character Aladdin Sane who was a development of the space-age Japanese-influenced Ziggy Stardust. To create the compelling album cover image, Bowie collaborated with photographer Brian Duffy and make-up artist Pierre Laroche. The result was one of the most recognizable images in popular culture– a ‘lightning flash’ design which has been reproduced in multiple forms world-wide.” via

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Unless you’re living under a rock (which may be the case if you depend on TSY for current affairs), there’s no way you could not feel the intense media blitz that’s happening around all things David Bowie. The release of the new single and album “The Next Day”…the 40th anniversary of Ziggy Stardust…the “David Bowie is” exhibit at London’s V&A…even the whole androgyny thing that’s sweeping the fashion scene bears his mark. Bowie is everywhere you turn, for chrissakes.

Look, there are those that revere Bowie as an ahead-of-his-time visionary who revolutionized Rock ‘n’ Roll. And there are those who see him very black & white, as a plodding opportunist who coldly studied what was happening around him (heavily borrowing from  true innovators at the time like Marc Bolan), and then expertly went about merchandising himself for mass commercial consumption. Both are fucking true. Bowie is an epic genius who learned through years of toil, trial, and error how to create a magical out-of-this-world persona and artistically sell it to us on a silver platter. No one has done it better in recent memory, and it’s unlikely that anyone in our lifetime will top him. Period. End of story.

There’s an incredible account by Glenn O’Brien in the recent issue of Out Magazine. Gay or straight, get over it, go buy it, and devour the entire spread on David Bowie. It is brilliant. You can read a chunk of it here after the jump. Now go– oh, you pretty things.

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 who revolutionized Rock ‘n-

“David Bowie (AKA Ziggy Stardust) wearing a sensational creation by Kansai Yamamoto. Born in Yokohama in 1944, the Japanese fashion designer was only 27 when he held his first international fashion show in London in 1971. The Japanese division of RCA records made MainMan aware of Yamamoto’s work and Bowie purchased the “woodlands animal costume” from Kansai’s London boutique– which he wore at the Rainbow Concert in August 1972 and which was later remade by Natasha Korniloff. Bowie subsequently viewed a video of a rock/fashion show that Kansai had staged in Japan the previous year and reportedly loved the costumes which were a combination of modern sci-fi and classical Kabuki theatre. Kansai and Bowie met in New York where he gifted Bowie two costumes during the 2nd US Tour. Kansai was then commissioned to create nine more costumes based on traditional Japanese Noh dramas for Bowie to pick up in Tokyo in April 1973. These were the flamboyant androgynous Ziggy Stardust costumes Bowie wore on the 3rd UK tour in 1973.” via The Ziggy Stardust Companion –photo by Masayoshi Sukita, the David Bowie archive

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David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust –photo by Mick Rock via

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David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust –photo by Mick Rock via

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David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust for the Pin Ups album and promo material, 1973. –Photo by Mick Rock via

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David Bowie (as Ziggy Stardust wearing an eye patch) performs “Rebel Rebel” on the TV show TopPop in Hilversum, Netherlands, 1974. This was Bowie at the end of his Ziggy era. (Photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images) via

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David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust –Photo by Mick Rock via

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David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust –Photo by Mick Rock via

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David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust rocking the famous platform boots from his Aladdin Sane tour.

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David Bowie and Mick Ronson on stage during the Ziggy Stardust tour, December 1972 / January 1973. Bowie is wearing a pair of platform shoes decorated with palm trees by Pelican Footwear, New York. –Photo by Mick Rock via

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David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust –Photo by Mick Rock via

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David Bowie on stage in Scotland during the Aladdin Sane tour, 1973. –Photo by Mick Rock via

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David Bowie on stage in Scotland during the Aladdin Sane tour, 1973. –Photo by Mick Rock via

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Lou Reed, Mick Jagger and David Bowie, Café Royale, 4th of July. 1973. “After the very last Ziggy gig at Hammersmith Odeon on 4 July 1973, came the Ziggy Farewell Party in Piccadilly. All kinds of characters showed up, including Ringo Starr, Jeff Beck, Bianca Jagger and Lulu, but David spent much of his time chatting and laughing with Lou Reed and Mick Jagger. From all the photos I took, you can see how focused they were on each other. Later Mick and Lou even danced together (I have the photo). The most famous photos are the ones with all three of them in a kind of cuddle and the shot of Lou and David about to kiss. This shot has only been published once previously.” –Photo by Mick Rock via

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David Bowie with Cyrinda Foxe, 1972. “Cyrinda travelled with us for part of the first Ziggy Stardust US tour. She’s the blonde in the now classic Jean Genie video that I directed. She was spawned by Warhol’s Factory and was a light-hearted fun person to be around. This shot is from a series of photos I took in some old bar in the Hollywood Hills. David liked it because it looked like something from an Edward Hopper painting. One of the shots was copied as an illustration for the original US Jean Genie single release ad. Recently it has been used on the picture disc limited edition re-release of the single, but in a colourised version.” –Photo by Mick Rock via

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David Bowie prays at the window, 1973. “Backstage, Scotland, May 1973. I’m not sure that he’s necessarily praying, but he’s certainly in deep contemplation, thinking no doubt about the continued vertical trajectory of his career! It’s one of my favourite shots of Bowie, although it took some 30 years for it to be published in my book collaboration with David, Moonage Daydream in 2002. It’s taken before the show, and from the light streaming through the window you can see that it’s still daylight. Quite often on that tour the gigs were in the early evening starting around 6pm.” –Photo by Mick Rock via

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David Bowie in make-up, 1973. “David was very adept at applying his make-up and did it himself mostly in those days. Lindsay Kemp had taught him the rudiments in the days when David had studied the art of mime with him in the late 60s. On his trip to Japan earlier in 1973 he had had met with Tamasaburo, the Japanese Kabuki star, who had given him a lot of tips on how to apply Kabuki-style makeup. David brought back with him a whole array of exotic make-up. In Moonage Daydream he writes, ‘I used to enjoy doing the make-up. It felt relaxing and put me in a kind of serene state before the show.’ The slew of photos I have of him applying make-up bear witness to his focused demeanour.”  –Photo by Mick Rock via

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David Bowie lunch on the train, 1973. “Taken on the train up to Aberdeen for the first gig of David’s final Ziggy tour, 15th of May, 1973. Another image that got lost in the archive until it finally surfaced in Moonage Daydream. I have a slew of photos on the train and in the stations of David in that amazing jacket. But the favourite one for fans is this one. Of all my limited edition fine art prints, this may be the one that has sold the most. Maybe it’s got something to do with the ridiculously ‘glam’ look of the magic duo and the obviously mundane nature of their British Rail lunch – lamb chops, boiled potatoes, peas with the bread rolls and pats of butter. But also perhaps something to do with the warm conspiratorial way they are looking at each other. They had the rock scene by the horns and they were savouring it!”  –Photo by Mick Rock via

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Who wouldn’t want to be there when Bowie met Warhol for the first time?

For OUT magazine by Glenn O’Brien

In 1971, David Bowie was having his Greta Garbo moment. On the cover of Hunky Dory, he looked a bit like her and sang a song called “Oh! You Pretty Things.” That was his vibe when he came to visit Andy Warhol at the Factory, on September 14, 1971. He was with his manager, Tony DeFries. They were in town to sign with a new record company, RCA, and Bowie wanted to pay homage to Warhol. Andy had been a hit in London in ’71 with his play, Pork, and Bowie had recorded a single, “Andy Warhol,” and he wanted to sing the song to Andy in person.

I don’t know if they had an appointment, but I remember someone saying, “There’s somebody here named David Bowie to see Andy.” I had been reading about Bowie and had heard The Man Who Sold the World. It had Bowie with long curly locks reclining odalisque-style in a vintage dress on the cover, and it only reached 105 on the Billboard charts. The Factory was the world’s HQ for drag queens at the time, and I thought that Bowie was jumping on the bandwagon. But something was in the air; hippies were wearing feather boas, and, unbeknownst to us, the New York Dolls were rehearsing somewhere. I said that Bowie was pretty famous and that we should, of course, let him in.

David had long hair and was wearing huge Oxford bags-style trousers, a floppy hat, and Mary Janes with one red sock and one blue — he was clearly aiming for a sort of eccentric androgynous look. I was immediately struck by his eyes, with their electric pupils. I was also struck by David’s wife, Angie, who looked more boyish than David and had quite a presence, and by the contrast of Tony DeFries, who looked like a Sicilian Elvis impersonator. Not very glam.

Bowie had studied with the famed mime Lindsay Kemp and had toured with Kemp’s company, so he certainly had the best mime credentials, but none of us knew quite what to make of the mime he performed for Andy. Then he sang “Andy Warhol.” I don’t think Andy could tell whether it was an homage or a send-up, with its rather ambiguous lyrics, but everyone was very nice and polite. I’ve recently seen the silent black-and-white video [of the visit]. The Factory’s video technique was even worse than its film technique, and I’m curious about the conversation I can be seen having with Bowie, my hair almost as long as his. I recall David asking me where he could get a copy of the Index Book and I recall that I had no idea what that was.

I don’t know what Andy thought of that day — probably not much, but he had that sense of judging a person’s self-esteem, and I think Bowie passed on that count. The next time I saw him was in London. RCA Records had gotten behind him big time, and, in 1972, they shipped a bunch of editors and writers over to see his new incarnation, Ziggy Stardust. It was a total transformation, with Bowie gone futurist with radical red hair, makeup, and Japanese designer clothes. It was fantastic. He was a new dandy prototype, a Beau Brummell for the publicity millennium. I saw the band play a great concert in a medium-sized hall in Aylesbury, and I hung out with David and his very friendly wife, Angie. We went dancing at Yours and Mine, a hip disco under a Mexican restaurant and, yeah, I danced with David Bowie. Fabulous!

Read the complete story here…

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“David Bowie is” — Victoria and Albert Museum

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“Norm Grabowski”s monster– the Corvair-powered “Six Pack”. Neil East (another rodding icon), owned AutoBooks in Burbank, CA, and Colorado Carbooks here in Denver told me that Norm used to come to L.A. Roadster club meetings on the Six Pack, and he said Norm had no problem kick starting this bike, when it was time to leave. It had no electric starter!” –Irish Rich 

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Norm Grabowski’s epic “Six Pack” — an air-cooled, flat-six Corvair engine mounted on the frame of a ’41 Indian shaft drive with no transmission, just a clutch. Another future Kustom Kulture legend pin-striped the bike– Dean Jeffries. Irish Rich (whose website is the authority on old school builders, and is due a ton of respect for his own incredible work) saw this impressive bike himself back in ’65, and has chronicled it well. Norm actually built 2 Corvair-powered “SIx Packs” — the other mated with H-D tranny called “PP ‘n’ Vinegar.”

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ARTICLE FROM BARRED OUTLAW MOTORCYCLE MAGAZINE, 1966–

Norm Grabowski lives in a beautiful ranch type home in the Sun Valley Hills with his mother and father. He stands 5′ 9″, 210 lbs, blues eyes, strawberry blond hair but cannot grow a beard. Almost every morning Norm takes his racing bicycle for a twenty mile ride. Works out every day and also takes a dip in his swimming pool. He doesn’t smoke and only drinks beer on weekends with his outlaw motorcycle buddies. He is in perfect physical condition. His only hang-up is his mother won’t let him drive his famous “Six Pack” Corvair-powered motorcycle out at night– but he does sneak it out occasionally.

Norm’s only comment about his “Six Pack” is that once you ride it, you won’t want to ride anything else. His only other gig other than motorcycles and acting is a nightclub act which he has done extremely well at. He sings like a girl or something unusual like that.

Two years in succession he has been on crutches for a period of several weeks. The first time a motorcyclist ran through a red light wiping Norman out. His buddies which were following in a truck picked him up thinking he was dead– but Norman survived. Just recently he shot himself in the leg practicing a fast draw with “Cold 45″– the kid has a 1966 4-door Lincoln Continental and a pretty sister to chauffeur him around. The lucky cat has three films to be released in which he plays important supporting roles” Out-of-Site” for Universal-International, “Happiest Millionaire” and “Gnomobile” both for Walt Disney Productions.

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ARTICLE FROM BARRED OUTLAW MOTORCYCLE MAGAZINE, 1966 CONTINUED–

Norm says, “Well, I loved doing the role on “Run For Your Life”…I thought it was good for a TV show considering what we could get away with. I think Barrymore did a great job of acting with his role, but he didn’t like the ending and walked off the set once– but like in most cases the studios have it their way and you’re working for them. Barrymore just didn’t think the character should die like a coward. And I sort of agree with him– but you can’t win them all. I don’t think the show did the outlaw world justice. I can’t regret playing the role because if I didn’t play it someone else would have– anyhow the paycheck was helpful.

I just hope one of these days I’ll get cast as “Joe Good Guy” instead of the bad guy all the time in these Hollywood motorcycle pictures.

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When Norm Grabowski added the sidecar the Corvair-powered ‘Six Pack’ it then became known as– the ‘Six Pack plus Sidehack’. “Norm Grabowski took a German-made Steib sidehack frame, and added a narrowed and sectioned fiberglass T-bucket body from CT Automotive to it. He did this around ’67-’68. Tony Nancy did the upholstery, and Jeffries matched in his striping.” –Irish Rich 

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Norm Grabowski’s only comment about his Corvair-powered “Six Pack” is that once you ride it, you won’t want to ride anything else!

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Norm Grabowski flexing with his epic Corvaired-powered “Six Pack”  - turned – “Sidehack” motorcycle.

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Norm is packing heat in this pic (see the revolver strapped to his leg…), which is kind canceled out by those hippy-trippy sandals he’s sportin’. “Norm Grabowski and his “Six Pack” on the back cover of the Defrance & Defrance (D&D Cycles) catalog, circa 1969.” –Irish Rich

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Norm Grabowski’s epic “PP & Vinegar” — an air-cooled, flat-six Corvair-powered motorcycle.

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Norm Grabowski’s epic “Six Pack” — an air-cooled, flat-six Corvair-powered motorcycle with a very over-the-top 1970s looking airbrush paint job.

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Norm Grabowski’s epic “PP & Vinegar” — an air-cooled, flat-six Corvair-powered motorcycle.

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Norm Grabowski’s epic “PP & Vinegar” — an air-cooled, flat-six Corvair-powered motorcycle now on display at Rocky’s Great Outdoors and Cycle in Burton, Michigan.

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R.I.P. Norm Grabowski (February 5, 1933 – October 12, 2012)

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From the archives of Nostalgia on Wheels comes this lil’ peek at Barred Outlaw Motorcycle magazine– a biker exploitation rag written not for riders, but for voyeurs looking for what makes those bad boys tick. Think of it as a primer for squares on bikers. There’s just enough laughable, inaccurate and hyperbolic writing that when they do actually mention the true 1%’er  MC’s it kinda lacks any sting. Hell, they can’t even get the year right for when The Wild One (the Godfather of all biker exploitation flicks) was filmed… ca. 1960??? What I do love about the magazine is the use of images, the layouts, fonts, etc. It is pure gold for the design-minded among us. It’s kinda refreshing compared to all the stripped-down aesthetic out there right now.

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BARRED OUTLAW MOTORCYCLE SPECIAL– ANGELS FROM HELL! Today’s rebels on wheels, living a legend of violence and excitement. Their love is hate…for everything and everyone– but each other!

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The outlaw clubs usually have names such as– the Galloping Gooses, Satan’s Slaves, Road Rats, Cavaliers, Outlaws, El Diablos, Chosen Few (a Negro group), Gypsy Jokers, Rod Regents, Tiki’s, East Bay Dragons (a Negro group), Vikings, Sportsmen, K-Lifts, Devil’s Henchmen, Monks, Coffin Cheaters, Iron Horsemen, and several others scattered throughout the state.

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Hanging out at some taco joint or roaring down the highway hell bent for mischief… They command attention and this is exactly what that want and get. Oddball attire, blunt-scissor haircuts, beards and goofy headgear. Add it all up and you’ve got a bunch of Barbarian bastards…or some claim, the mod generation gladiators. Read, look, and decide for yourself after all (as they say) isn’t this a dimocrazzy!

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HANGOUTS! Taco joints, drive-ins, low budget coffee shacks– these are “outlaw” hangouts. They love joking and re-living recent episodes in their bizarre lives…stolen bikes, latest spots to obtin a fix, who’s locked up this month…it’s all trashed-over…over a weed!

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…on purpose a fellow in a large truck ran into the back of a kid who was riding a little Honda. When the kid got up off the ground, the truck driver walked over and punched him. Unnoticed by the truck driver several outlaw motorcyclists were standing there and saw the whole thing. What happened to the driver and truck in the next few minutes shouldn’t happen to anyone. They literally tore the truck and driver to pieces. A bully is one thing the outlaws don’t like. Anyhow, it gave them a chance to do their good deed for the day…

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(Irish Rich spotted that the chopper rider above is a young Clifford “Sonny” Vaughs)

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“Outlaws” are not of this world…dope, orgies, you name it…they’ll do it!! Outlaws want to smash through the square world that hems them in. They leave no past, expect nothing in the future, they live for the moment, the instant thrill!!

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PARTY TIME!! Party to an “outlaw” means six-packs chug-a-lug with any bottle handy…Bay Rum to Jim Beam! Cocktails are for citizens! Petting…that’s for children!

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A stamp of individualism are the many Nazi souvenirs which are worn on the “outlaw’s” jackets. Members are not followers of any anti-government movement, but they collect these souvenirs much like a stamp collector. Many times they are seen swapping them with fellow outlaws from different parts of the state.

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…In the meantime, while they are stealing the dying outlaw, one of the caucasian roughnecks rapes a young, beautiful Negro nurse– but is in such a hurry that he doesn’t really have time to get her pregnant. This pointed out the fact that the gang is not prejudice. They get the nearly dead cyclist back to the pad to give him first aid through a marijuana cigarette. To their surprise he dies. Well, that’s OK, because it’s a blast to have a funeral…  –Name this biker flick!

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Most outlaw motorcyclists range in age from a minimum of 21 all the way to about 50. The majority are in their middle twenties. The average outlaw lasts about 6 years– he either has too many problems with the law, or he may want to hang it up for a different type life. To be an outlaw motorcyclist means that you must expect to get hassled by the police many times.

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Few employers ever want to hire a person who is branded as an outlaw motorcyclist. You have to learn to live away from a conventional society and be looked upon s a non-conformist, beatnick on wheels, or just plain individualist. You’ll have learned to abide by club rules. If a citizen provokes trouble with any of the outlaws, they will always get the blame because of their past reputation.

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What is necessary to become a president? Presidents are spokesmen for the club. They don’t necessarily need to be the toughest member– but should be able to hold their own in a good physical brawl. They re usually more articulate and have a fair ability to express themselves. Being an excellent cyclist and having an outstanding motorcycle is very important. On most runs they are road captains and will set the pace. He has to make sure his members make their bail bond payment on time.

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(A young Sonny Barger of the Hell’s Angels spotted in the pic above)

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When a new member joins a club he is issued his colors which are usually a sleeveless Levi jacket with the club’s name and insignia on the back. They re laid out on the ground to be “initiated.” All members will stand around it urinating, pouring beer, mustard, oil, grease. One member might “flash” (a term for vomiting), and anything else that might add to the filth will be thrown on the colors. They will then jump up and down on the jacket, making sure the dirt and filth is penetrating into the jacket. After the colors are official, the member is never able to wash it, for this is his party cloth and riding outfit.

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Brawls are quite common among the Barbarian breed of cyclist. What else might there be to do when the party gets boring? They have never been known to fight fair, or according to the rule book. In some cases after the fight is broken up, they will even shake hands. Then the madder of the two, while his opponent is walking away, will sneak up behind him and rap him over the head with a chain or whatever else might be handy at the time. Then the contest of who can fight the dirtiest will start all over again. To be considered a handsome outlaw, one should have at least several battle or accidental scars. It also makes an excellent conversational piece to reminisce about.

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You can never underrate an outlaw motorcyclist. Many of them are well educated and they’re a tough bunch of guys living the rugged life they live. A noted sociologist once said, “there is a touch of this in all of us, so that is why society tends to aggrandize the barbarian outlaws of the modern day.”

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NOSTALGIA ON WHEELS LINK

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After I graduated from college for Industrial Design the job market was extremely tough– which lead to a lot of time spent submitting my portfolio, and not really working as a designer. For a long while I wasn’t drawing at all– but I’m sort of always looking at photography, architecture and fashion. I also got into motorcycles– which is of course a slippery slope. I will always remember being in Wicker Park and seeing a couple of dudes on early ’80s CB cafe racers– that was the moment everything changed. I sold the car, got my Class M license and started looking for a project.

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I started drawing a little bit every day just for fun, and posted them on my Instagram page so friends could see what I was up to. After a while random people started looking at my drawings– and a year-and-a-half later I’m still drawing every day, and doing pretty well as a freelance illustrator. Being able to combine my love of art, design and motorcycles has been a total blast. I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of awesome shops and builders. The 1 Moto Show was definitely a highlight of my fledgling career so far. It was really cool to be able to meet some really inspiring people, and be surrounded by amazing machinery.

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–Doug Werner