The Last Wilderness
“The dreams don’t end after we open our eyes. First, we taste the thick morning air that drips through the mesh of our tents, and in the tree branches above us we watch the tangled strings of pale green moss hanging down like long, bony fingers coaxing us to climb out of our sleeping bags. As we walk through the small, dank campground we see a thick brown slug slime its way up the side of an empty can of Rainier Beer, breathing through an open stoma on the side of its body. Then a deep voice cuts through the quiet dawn: ‘The water is warmer than the air is,’ Noah Culver says as he stands knee-deep in Lake Quinault, which sits at the bottom of a glacial valley on the southwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula in Western Washington State.”
META Magazine, Issue 024
Ouka
“The 1984 film The NeverEnding Story introduced us to Falkor, a white-haired, 43-foot-long ‘luck dragon’ with huge brown eyes who soars through the skies of the fictional land of Fantastia. We immediately fell in love with Falkor because, in many ways, he’s a giant flying dog; give him a few ear scratches, and he can’t help but let his big tongue droop from his mouth. What we wouldn’t give for a companion like Falkor, and to fly through the sky on the back of our furry best friend, but fiction is fiction … or so we thought. Turns out that Falkor doesn’t live in Fantasia but rather in a van currently parked in the French Alps; his name isn’t Falkor but rather Ouka (oo-ka), and he isn’t a century-old flying luck dragon but a three-year-old Samoyed who enjoys paragliding. To understand how Ouka became a flying Samoyed, we must go back through the pages of his story and understand how he came to find his owner, 39-year-old Shams.”
Drool Magazine, Issue 06
Halfpanzer
“After a day of drinking beer in the oppressive summer heat of California’s Palm Desert, brothers Iliya and Nikita Bridan did something that they’d talked about doing for two years: they went into the garage, took out a reciprocating saw, and used it to cut the steel unibody of a Porsche 912 coupe in half. ‘We had nothing at that point, we just wanted to get started,’ Nikita says. ‘This entire project, we have not thought far at all; it’s literally been spur of the moment, one day at a time.’”
Iron & Magazine, Issue 044
Danny Trejo
“On August 23, 1969, 26-year-old Danny Trejo walked into a Grey-hound bus depot in downtown San Francisco after being released from prison, where he had spent four and a half years for attempting to sell four ounces of fake heroin (sugar) to an undercover cop. ‘I went through the doors of the bus station and saw this beautiful German shepherd sitting there with his master with no leash on,’ Trejo recalls, ‘and I yelled, ‘A dog!’ and the German shepherd turned, looked at me, and just came up to me like he was my dog. It was almost like he knew I hadn’t seen a dog in a long time … It was a perfect homecoming.'”
Drool Magazine, Issue 04
The Wheeler Dairy Killings
“The boy searched his father’s eyes for a familiar anything but found nothing, and he strained to remember the eyes he had seen and known that same morning, but he remembered nothing. The man sat in an unblinking daze as his eyes followed the cold bottle of beer spinning on the lazy Susan, set just off-center and sweating in the summer midnight, and as the dad reached for the bottle, the boy studied the scars on his father’s hands. The boy remembered the stories that his dad had told about how he had gotten them, and he realized those were probably lies, too. The next morning the police would pull the bodies of his three friends from the mangled wreckage of Pete Norman’s Mustang, and they’d say it was a drunk-driving crash, and no one would question it as the truth. The town would weep at candlelit vigils, and the local newspapers would publish tragic stories about the teenage lives lost too young, but the boy would know the truth: His best friend and the girl he loved were torn to pieces by a campfire ghost story, and he lied because he was told to do so. The boy caught his reflection in the kitchen window but didn’t recognize himself, with two black eyes, a broken nose, and a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his neck. The sight turned his stomach to knots, and when he closed his eyes, he saw her and the flayed skin on her bloody face, and he saw the eerily human eyes of the godless creature that had killed her.”
META Magazine, Issue 019
Cynthia Erivo
The acronym “EGOT” describes the rarest, most diversely talented Hollywood entertainers who, throughout their careers, managed to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award. As of now there are only 16 individuals worthy of this designation — including Mel Brooks, Whoopi Goldberg, Audrey Hepburn, and Andrew Lloyd Weber — but before long they’ll be joined by 34-year-old Cynthia Erivo.
Drool Magazine, Issue 04
Review: 2021 Moto Guzzi V7
The 2021 Moto Guzzi V7 is easily likable, lovely to look at, and is far more fun to ride than its predecessor was. The thoughtfully executed, much-needed redesign adds the power that the outgoing bike wanted for without making it inaccessible to entry-level riders, and further accentuates the charisma and style that the V7 has exuded since its birth in 1967.
BikeEXIF.com
A Colt Turns Stallion
“There is good money to be made by building trendy, cookie-cutter motorcycles, but the shops that churn out reiterative cafés and uninspired scramblers are as boring as the clients who are willing to pay for conformity machines. ‘I seriously struggle all the time to not get lumped into the hipster build thing,’ says self-taught customizer Colt Wrangler, who in his five years of building motorcycles has produced several inventive, individualistic, show-stopping bikes — as well as several bikes that did nothing to advance his creativity.”
Iron & Air, Issue 041
Through Puppy Eyes
“The five-mile gravel road to the campground is narrow and jagged, and it is a high-stress endeavor with a 17-foot-long, 2,500-pound camper in tow, but after 30 minutes of trundling along we reach the campground and find an idyllic campsite just before the place fills to capacity. We take Blue on his first-ever hike, a 2.5-mile trail that skirts the edge of three small trout-filled lakes. Mallory fears Blue’s tiny legs might preclude him from hiking, but those fears quickly dissipate as we watch the pup run up steep grades, jump felled trees, and leap from boulder to boulder. At a creek crossing he refuses to walk over the small bridge and whines until I carry him, but I am glad to have an excuse to hold my little man and kiss his wet nose.”
Drool Magazine, Issue 01
A Lucid Existence
“Aaron Beck’s Barracuda is as exacting as it is haunting, and it isn’t hard to imagine what he’ll build next, because chances are he’s already drawn it. What’s difficult to imagine, though, is how he could build something more beautiful than this car — but no doubt he will thanks to all he learned through his first-ever automotive build.”
Iron & Air, Issue 039
The Man in the Window
“The world ends at the edges of my front window because it has to, because if it doesn’t I oppose everything she is working toward. Three mornings each week I stand in our street-level living room and watch as my partner walks to our truck in her nurse scrubs and leaves for a 12-hour shift at the hospital. Some mornings after I watch her go I do nothing but sit behind the glass and slowly drink my coffee and stare out at the street. All day people in masks walk by our house, and all day they stop to gawk at Luci, our adorable 16-pound tabby cat who lives in a suction-cup hammock that hangs in the front window. She woos with dreamy smiles and bulbous contortions, and disgusts when she pushes her hind paws against the window and splays spread eagle, licking clean her hairless pannus that hangs low like utters.”
META Magazine, Issue 018
Only Toys Retire
“My tour guide Galo Canote pointed a finger across the parking lot at the spray-painted script that read ‘OTR’ and said the tag belonged to ‘On The Run,’ one of L.A.’s oldest and most respected graffiti crews. He said that if I see ‘OTR’ on another wall in the city, it could carry another meaning: ‘only toys retire.’ ‘Our walls are being gentrified,’ he said, explaining that L.A.’s graffiti community is being pushed out of its home by a more moneyed class who enjoy authentic living in overpriced lofts, their buildings festooned with studio-perfect murals painted by street artists, or ‘toys’ as Galo refers to them.”
Kite in a Storm
Go Takamine of Brat Style
“He stands at the edge of a dirt oval in the Southern California desert with no one to race but his shadow. Straight out of the pits his form is impeccable, his riding style inimitable, and even though he is on a 93-year-old Indian Scout, he is so incredibly fast. When he reaches the end of the straight his inside leg stretches supernatural, and his steel hot shoe carves into the freshly groomed dirt. He stays off the gas for a moment and slides through a staccato of backfires, and then wrings open the throttle wrapped thick with cloth tape, and yanks back on the tank-mounted shifter, and crosses the start-finish line with his body tucked against the bike. He turns lap after lap until his muscles ache and forearms throb, but even then he doesn’t stop, racing through the last minutes of daylight. When he pulls off his helmet, the sweat on his skin glistens under stadium lights, and his eyes shine bright and boyish.”
The Bike Shed
Stitch by Stitch
“With his neck craned forward and his eyes wide, fixed on the tissue-thin stencil beneath him, Bill Farrelly slowly turns the hand-crank of his well-oiled, century-old Cornley sewing machine, watching as the needle punches through a denim vest and leaves behind a delicate chain of looped stitches, snaking one by one to form a back patch: a flaming grim reaper with a smoking shotgun in its bone fingers.”
HOG Magazine, Issue 053
An Artist with the Temperament of an Engineer
“After the Third Reich fell, artists and designers in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden began to develop a distinct Scandinavian design language. They studied the modernist principles of Germany’s anti-fascist Bauhaus school — which feted the union of fine art and craft until the National Socialist Party forced the school to close in 1933 — and embraced minimalist, functionalist, practical, and democratic designs, with an emphasis on using materials that captured the natural beauty of Nordic life. The Scandinavian design movement was led by many free-thinking leaders — Alvar Aalto, Arne Jacobsen, Bruno Mathsson, Tapio Wirkkala, Verner Panton — but one of its most influential, colorful, and protean characters was Sixten Sason.”
Iron & Air Magazine, Issue 038
A View From the Moon
“I often wonder how it would be if she hadn’t given birth to life. As adorably simple as those first creatures seemed, we soon saw the tangled webs of energy inside of each and every organism. Before we knew it, plants flourished and flowered, and fish crawled from her waters to walk on land. In awe we watched birds take flight, and in horror we watched mass extinctions, one after another, and through it all she smiled and said, ‘Life will find a way to go on.’ She told me you’d be the best of them, and for a while I believed her, but then I watched as your fires turned into sleepless cities of electric light, your crude machines coughed poisonous gasses into her air, and your weapons of hubris marred her perfect face. I saw how your irrepressible avarice had convinced you of a perfectly myopic understanding of existence.”
META, Issue 017
The Quiet Side of Recharging
“It is a struggle to accept electric vehicles. We recognize our unsustainable use of oil, but still we romanticize the death of fossil fuel like it’s divine nectar, not the slowly decayed remains of some prehistoric monster. Electric vehicles are met with resistance for threatening the norm, and with an understandable sigh of reluctance because at the moment EVs are more inconvenient than traditional gas-powered vehicles.”
The Bike Shed
Motor City Murals
Piles of ash smolder in the shadows of vacant buildings fled by big businesses before they went bust. Every day at sunset a somber dirge buzzes through tired speakers along Woodward Avenue. Criminals with insatiable bloodlust rove pothole-ridden streets until a shiny, silver cyborg with a badge puts them down. This is Detroit only in the most demented of dreams, apocalypse-porn that is not at all like the real thing. Sure, streets are crumbling and personal safety is a concern in some spots, but Detroit — now a downtrodden metropolis fading from its former glory as America’s Motor City — is doing its best to push forward, struggling as it searches for a new purpose.
Iron & Air Magazine, Issue 029
Akron Boy, Nashville Guitar
He’s the leader singer of The Black Keys and The Arcs, an accomplished solo musician, and the founder of a newly established record label, Easy Eye Sound. Dan Auerbach, 39, a deep, soulful artist with eight Grammys to his name, hails from Akron, Ohio, but seems reborn in his adopted home of Nashville. When he isn’t in the studio playing or producing, he’s exploring the Tennessee backwoods on one of his many post-war Harleys, all of which proudly wear the patina of their past lives.
Iron & Air Magazine, Issue 031
909 Miles in a McLaren 720S
Along Exmoor National Park’s coastal bluffs, indigo waves fold over one another as they crawl onto gray sand beaches. Far in the distance, factory smoke stacks rise up from the shores of Wales. At the bottom of this steep country road sit Lynmouth and Lynton, small towns lighting up as the sun dips below the horizon. The rolling hills of lush greenery sit in stark contrast to the fluorescent orange sky as the McLaren 720S bleeds slowly into the background, the fading light finding its way into every channel and outlet of the mid-engine supercar’s auburn body.
Automobile Magazine, July 2017
Moto Himalaya
Does motorcycling really need another self-indulgent writer to share life-altering lessons learned whilst riding through the Himalayas, painting with every color on their palette to create some sort of Seven Years in Tibet vibe? Still, there might be slivers of stories worth sharing. The trip manhandled my mind and body and emotions; the ride was as hard as I thought it would be, and the experience more moving. I didn’t know how I felt then, or feel now, and only know what happened, or at least what I remember, a year later, looking back on Royal Enfield’s Moto Himalaya.
Iron & Air Magazine, July 2018
Pavement Is Lava
We are a horde of yawping savages, horned invaders from the farthest corners of Vinland, tearing across volcanic desert in the Highlands of Iceland beneath a midnight sun. This would’ve been a terrifying sight several hundred years ago — when Vikings ravaged this island nation, ruthlessly pillaging and killing — but not now, and we’re seen for what we truly are: an unintimidating group of juvenile men riding $800 minibikes in costumes.
Iron & Air Magazine, Issue 037
Lead(-Acid) Sled
“That’s a true American car, from a time when Americans knew how to build cars,” says a shirtless man, missing a few teeth, peering through the half-open window of his lifted pickup. It happens at almost every stoplight: some baby boomer waxes lyrical about Detroit’s glory days and how 70-year-old cars are somehow superior to today’s automobiles. A grotesquely flawed line of thought, and it’s all we can do to smile and say “Listen and watch” as the 5,000-pound, all-electric ’49 Mercury coupe quickly and quietly accelerates away.
Iron & Air Magazine, Issue 036
Fast, Loud, Deathproof
Suicide Machine Co. in Long Beach, California, is known for creating beautiful performance motorcycles out of Milwaukee slag, and its hometown owners, Aaron and Shaun Guardado, are infamous for smashing up demolition derby cars and trading elbows in the Super Hooligan flat-track series. The shop propagates a death-defying spirit that delights with brooding charm; the Guardado brothers have walked away from so many gut-wrenching crashes that people actually wonder if they can cheat Death itself.
Iron & Air Magazine, Issue 035
State of Mind
The silence has Sonny worried. I watch his ears dip and perk, his eyes dart as he looks for his owner. We’re on top of a 40-foot boulder, looking into a bright morning sun as we try to spot 33-year-old Carlin Dunne, when Dunne jumps his trials motorcycle between two other boulders in the distance. He stops and calls for the 2-year-old, adopted Blue Heeler, who hops from rock to rock, obediently following his owner. (I miss you, Carlin.)
Iron & Air Magazine, Issue 024
A Beautiful and Vulnerable Hell on Earth
In the early 1800s, white fur trappers tried explaining the wiles of Yellowstone and were shrugged off as attention-seeking liars. Mountain man Jim Bridger described it as a place “where Hell bubbled up,” with boiling pools of mud and mountains of glass and waterfalls that shot up into the sky.
HOG Magazine, Issue 051
Clone-A-Willy
The thought took me by surprise: “Why don’t you make your dick into a dildo?” Two weeks before Valentine’s Day, I didn’t know what gift to get my girlfriend, and the idea of making a rubberized replica of my penis sprang from some strange, unfortunate corner of my mind.
Men’s Health, July 2018
Silent War
The march to the front lines of the electric motorcycle revolution is over. It proved fatal for many — Alta Motors, Brammo, Mission Motors, et al, abisti non peristi — but not Zero Motorcycles, now America’s only “mainstream” all-electric motorcycle manufacturer. Zero spent $250 million over the last 13 years to keep pace with rapidly changing EV engineering, help establish the electric motorcycle market, and build the strength necessary to take on its most formidable challenge yet.
Iron & Air Magazine, Issue 036
Wild Belle
We swooned when we first heard Natalie Bergman’s smoky, seductive voice. In 2013, she and her brother Elliot brought Wild Belle to life in their hometown of Chicago and wowed the scene by using unique instruments to create catchy, Caribbean-influenced music. We talked to her about the band’s forthcoming album, her funky cut-and-paste artwork, and how cars and motorcycles have influenced her.
Iron & Air Magazine, Issue 027
Inside the Cocoon
We don’t know when the autonomous-vehicle revolution will start, or how it will look, or what to expect—apart from a tangled mess of red tape and legalese—but we know it will inspire change, like any worthwhile revolution.
Automobile Magazine, March/April 2019
Born of Speed
The people we admire and emulate are often as imperfect as we are. Everyone is flawed by their humanity, and our mentors and role models should inspire us how to be — and how not to be. Kevin Busch built Zeus in memory of his childhood hero, his grandfather, but he knew the man well enough to appreciate both his gifts and his faults.
Iron & Air Magazine, Issue 037
Behaving Badly in Baja
The gate is locked when we get to Cuatro Casas Hostel, so Otto jumps the fence to find the owner, Richard Stevens, who would look like Bruce Willis if Bruce Willis were homeless and had nine fingers. He introduces us to his Doberman, Pakalolo—Hawaiian for marijuana—then shows us to our rooms, which smell like stale piss. A huge whale skeleton rests alongside the drained skateboarding pool, and a dozen old surfboards line the outside of a small, thicket shack perched on the edge of a 50-foot-high cliff overlooking the Pacific.
Automobile Magazine, December 2017
Camping in a Porsche Cayenne
When we spotted the spray of whale spouts out in the ocean’s misty distance, Mallory’s rust and seaweed eyes lit up; she loves whales—all cetaceans, really. We followed a pod of humpbacks along the coast into the bewitchingly adorable town of Mendocino.
Automobile Magazine
700 Miles in an Acura NSX
An android in the automotive world, mimicking its supercar rivals in a wholly convincing but absolutely atypical way. I’ve yet to be impressed by something as dead behind the eyes as this twin-turbocharged, hybrid 2017 Acura NSX.
Automobile Magazine, March 2017
A Curious Man
In 1977, the Ward family moved from the boonies of Elkridge, Maryland, to New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood so seven-year-old Jonathan could pursue a career in acting. During off weeks, Ward roller-skated between arcades or picked through his apartment building’s trash chute in search of boomboxes, fans, or other electronics he could disassemble, study, repair, and sell. He hustled New Yorkers until 1985, when CBS relocated him to Los Angeles to play the middle sibling in the TV show Charles in Charge.
Automobile Magazine, June 2019
Driftless
Frank Lloyd Wright is not buried here. There’s a slab-stone grave with his name on it, accompanied by a piece of stained glass, but the ground beneath us holds no bones. In 1985, Wright’s widow, Olgivanna, ordered the architect’s remains exhumed from the Unity Chapel in Spring Green, Wisconsin, a mile down the road from Taliesin, Wright’s “bungalow of love” where he hosted an architecture school, and where his mistress, Martha “Mamah” Borthwick Cheney, and six others were murdered by the house handyman in 1914. Wright’s ashes were mixed with Olgivanna’s and are now enshrined at Talisen West in faraway Arizona, but the bones of his mistress Mamah remain in the Unity Chapel garden, unloved under a cracked and overgrown headstone. When we turn to leave the cemetery, we see our all-new 2019 Harley-Davidson Low Rider S perfectly framed by the chapel’s iron gates, looking menacing against the pastoral background.
HOG Magazine, Issue 050
Brewtown Throwdown
In my life I’ve built one custom motorcycle, which I blindly hobbled through with surprising results, but somehow it felt like this eight-person team looked to me during our two-day build of a Harley-Davidson Forty-Eight Special. I kept saying, “I don’t know what we’re doing.” And everyone just smiled.
Maxim Magazine, March 2018
Rad & Old
Zoé David built her first motorcycle five years ago after a boy broke her heart. “One day my boyfriend dropped me, like a shit,” says David. “I decided to find a bike … I don’t know why. I wanted to make something new. I didn’t have a lot of money, so I bought a 1951 Terrot MT1 that didn’t work and made it run. Then it was like a drug.” The 24-year-old architecture student from Normandy, France, fell deeply and madly in love with motorcycles, and in short order built a 150cc ’54 Peugeot 155 and a 100cc ’90 Honda Win, which she took on an eight-month solo ride around Vietnam.
Iron & Air Magazine, Issue 029
