AGV Backmarker: Is there a Hunter S. Thompson
Chair of Motorcycle Studies in the near future?
April 13, 2006
By Mark Gardiner
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At exactly the time this “Backmarker” gets posted, I’ll be chairing a session of an academic conference in Atlanta. Officially, it is the Joint Conference of the National Popular Culture and American Culture Associations. Mostly, it is a gathering of Ph.D.s and university professors; anthropologists, historians, comparative lit scholars and the like.

With motorcycling now a topic of academic study, we can’t help wondering if Hunter S. Thompson just missed out on the opportunity for a cushy job at U of Colorado in People’s Republic of Boulder.

A few years ago, the popular culture conference emailed a University of Texas El Paso grad student name Gary Kieffner, suggesting that since he was a biker, he might want to chair a motorcycle-studies subcommittee. Kieffner put out the initial call for academic papers on the role of motorcycles in pop culture. That brought together a group of university profs, including Suzanne Ferriss and Wendy Moon, who then founded the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies. It was through the IJMS that I attended the conference last year as an observer. The ’05 gathering was held in San Diego, where I lived at the time.

The Marriott hotel, down by the harbor, is a typical convention hotel. There’s a Starbucks concession in the lobby. I lined up for coffee with earnest grad students taking it all dead-seriously; they were there to present papers and get their first teaching positions. Tenured Profs, in tweed even in Southern California, greeted old and ruefully hung-over friends.

Upstairs in the conference rooms, chairs were set out in mostly empty rows. At the front of each room was a table at which three or four academics sat, taking turns dominating a PowerPoint projector. “Motorcycling Culture and Myth: Media Impact, Bias, and Ideology” ran just down the hall from something incomprehensibly titled “Transcending Duality: Ideologies and Hermeneutics.”

I listened to a Florida university Prof named Steve Alford who rides a VTX1800. His talk was on German motorcycle travel literature. When it was over, the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies group retreated to Steve’s room and phoned for pizza. A freewheeling conversation roamed far into the night.

I rode home, telling myself that the roads were empty, it was just a few miles, and that I was not endangering myself. What, I wondered, would Hunter S. Thompson have made of this?

Thompson broke into the American consciousness in the mid-‘60s with Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Other journalists were cool, distant and objective. Thompson wasn’t. But while his writing style was novel, his technique was old-school anthropology. He was Margaret Mead, going native, on Benzedrine. The mainstream media didn’t know how to take his Gonzo style, until they realized how easy it was to sell.

One of the other presenters in the “Riders’ Narratives” panel is my friend Bill Rodgers. He’s a painter and professor of art at the Alberta College of Art, as well as a vintage racer. Both Bill and I are talking about memory and riding—specifically the memorization of the Isle of Man TT course. Rodgers’ art often involves deconstructing and/or painting over other works. In this case, he’s working over a book about a famous WWI battle ... Bill Rodgers photo

I suspect that Hunter S. Thompson spent a lot more time thinking about the Hell’s Angels than actually riding with them, though his writing about the gang, and motorcycling in general, included compelling descriptions of riding and its rewards.

I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid... I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.

Some people will tell you that slow is good—and it may be, on some days—but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....

Forty years later, Thompson killed himself when he could no longer live up to his own myth. But he lives on in every aspect of American journalism. The observer came to motorcycles, was caught up in them, and the entire medium was transformed; objectivity took a nearly lethal shit-kicking.

Now motorcycling is coming to university as a subject of study. Have we made it? Or does this mean we’ve passed from action into history? I ride precisely because I over-intellectualize almost every other aspect of my life. On motorcycles I finally stop thinking about what other people think of me. I stop thinking about thinking, and live in the moment.

That said, the doubts I have about turning a perfectly visceral experience into an object of intellectual, academic, even metaphysical study didn’t prevent me from agreeing to take part in this year’s gathering.

Months ago, the IJMS sent out an email with suggested themes for this year’s papers, including a category called “Rider’s Narratives”; describing the ride. I offered to read an excerpt from Riding Man that muses on the ways we memorize courses with our bodies as well as our minds. So, in some ways, my contribution is still anti-intellectual. I also offered to chair a session on the subject of “Commodification and Consumerism,” which seemed to suit my background in the advertising business.

... The book’s pages serve as a “canvas” on which Rodgers lays out a mental “map” of the Isle of Man TT course. The title of the 5 1/2 x 8 foot work is Atlas—a nice play on its quality as a map, and a coy reference to the trusty Norton Atlas twin. Bill Rodgers photo

Although the motorcycle sessions only account for a small percentage of the total conference, we are still probably over-represented, in terms of the actual prevalence of bikes in popular culture. Face it: in terms of shelf space in bookstores, column-inches in newspapers, or TV time, we barely register. The exposure we do get is lopsided; I thank God that, at least, that there are no papers on the Teutels.

I wanted to know what I was getting into as chairman, so I asked the conference organizers to forward me copies of the four papers that would be presented in the Commodification and Consumerism session today (Thursday, April 13). Three of the four are more or less what you’d expect to find at an academic conference, but the fourth is liberally illustrated with biker-themed pics culled from hardcore porn mags. That’s one way to ensure good attendance, but I’m glad that my own reading is not until Saturday. Talk about a tough act to follow.

One of the other presenters in my session is Lisa Garber, an L.A. rider and psychologist (she’s actually an eating-disorder specialist in Beverly Hills, which you’ve gotta figure is like being a gold miner in Fort Knox, but I’m getting off topic). Her paper has something to do with lane splitting. I told her to rewrite it about lane splitting much too fast and retitle it, “Splitting It Wide Open.” That way we’d have a chance of filling a few seats in our session, too.