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fast as a shark

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fast as a shark

Tulsa's Not That Far: Thrill of the Road


Tom Albrecht (front) and J.F. Musial, hosts of Thrill of the Road.

I always felt at home when we entered Colorado, where the plains became arid, the rabbit bush prolific. (Occasionally we would take "the southern route," heading into the harsh rocks of northern Texas or New Mexico.) Our search was for elusive river beds—sometimes full only in the spring. In the shallow pools, we would seine—this is a type of net—for fish, to find what species still remained or were gone, extinct due to human folly. When it got dark, we'd pull off to the side of the road, kick the rocks out of the way, throw tarps down, and prepare our sleeping bags. We never checked into motels. Mom would get out the Coleman stove and Dad would take notes about the day's proceedings. We kids would then run through the sagebrush until dinner. Next morning, we'd get up with the sun and shake our shoes out to make sure no scorpions had crawled in. Sometimes we'd change location every day.

I mention this only to explain why I am not bothered by my current lifestyle.
- Roger Miller

More »

Feature

12:00 PM on Tue Oct 30 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
696 views, 4 comments

Latest by TurboJew: I've always thought Tom was more of a Tom Ford (From 5th Gear/TG Mag) lookalike :) more »

fast as a shark

The Other Side of the Wind: The Trials of a Transcontinental Record

Ahhh, the French champagne has always been celebrated for its excellence! Alex Roy doused with bubbly upon successful breaking of the transcontinental record.

Orson Welles once spoke of "the confidence of ignorance" in terms of the beginning of both his stage and screen careers. Henry Rollins once remarked that he learned not long after he joined Black Flag that one could get away with a lot of shit if one merely acted as if it was all one knew how to do. Alex Roy simply wanted to make a lap of Manhattan as fast as possible after seeing Rendezvous. He ended up breaking a transcontinental record that stood for 23 years. More »

Feature

12:30 PM on Mon Oct 15 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
6,963 views, 9 comments

Latest by Trackback: Filed under: Etc.Click the shot above for over 80 pics, scans and images.If you were scouring the interwebs yesterday, you might have come across a story about Team Polizei's record-breaking transcontinental run from New York to L.A. Our friends over more »

fast as a shark

Fifty Years of Kerouac's "On The Road"

Fourteen years before the United States mandated exit numbers on Dwight Eisenhower's brainchild of a road system, a Lowell, Mass native of French-Canadian extraction named Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac published a novel that would change countless lives; a mash note to an already-dead America living under the weight of what Igor Kurchatov and J. Robert Oppenheimer had wrought. More »

Feature

1:30 PM on Thu Sep 13 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
919 views, 18 comments

fast as a shark

Rolling Nirvana



Imperfect perfection as a child is rarely equaled as an adult. Why do we remember games of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" more fondly than some random hookup with a hottie picked up in a bar? Adult perfection is just more complicated. Spouses, jobs, locales, children of our own that we want to stuff so full of perfect moments that they can't possibly fail in life. And hopefully don't go around picking up STD's in bars. More »

Feature

1:00 PM on Thu Aug 30 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
893 views, 20 comments

Latest by cargirl76: btw - the Mirage definitely went 125, I might have been trying to impress you when I said it went 135. I'm pissed about the Lotus too. more »

fast as a shark

I Voted No on the 250 GTO



While the Loverman and I agree on a great many things and have quite possibly slept with too many of the same women (all before we knew each other), now and then there is a great schism. DAF vs. FAF, Evo vs. WRX. Killdozer vs. Dave Matthews. Okay, so the last one was a complete and utter lie. But the 250 GTO is one of the only Jalopnik Fantasy Garage cars I've ever voted down. And it sounds like insanity, even to me. More »

Feature

6:15 PM on Tue Jul 31 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
2,463 views, 44 comments

Latest by n/a: I must confess, while I voted the 250 GTO in (solely because it is an undesputed classic), I'd rather have seen the F40 or even the 400i inducted. To make any sense of that, you need to know that I've more »

fast as a shark

The Toyota Prius -- Is it the Ronnie James Déesse?

When I was twenty, I studied in Germany. Bonn, to be exact. I had a friend there named Kai who loved techno and had just received his first car, some sort of Citroën hatchback. It was red, and he hoped someday to buy an Audi with an S in front of its numeral. But at that point, he had what we all ended up calling Kai's Rote Heiße Citroën des Liebes. I don't remember the model, but a couple of days before I met Kai, I'd seen a 2CV parked on the street. It was covered in bad EKG tape stripes, Laney amplifier decals and sported a giant die-cut Savatage decal across the rear window. I knew immediately and instinctively that Kai's car was not a patch on its forebear. Some may decry the Deuche as a rip of Hitler's Beetle with the drivetrain at the opposite end, but the car that debuted in 1955, spawned an obsessive geek-cult of wack-ass masochists and occupied the opposite end of the French motoring spectrum from the plebeian flip-windowed runabout was about as revolutionary as they came in those days. Having run into a DS on the street a few days ago, I got to thinking. Does the car have a modern-day equivalent anywhere in the world today? And if it does what could it be? The only answer I could come up with is the Toyota Prius. More »

Feature

4:45 PM on Fri Jul 13 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
1,486 views, 10 comments

Latest by B-town: @eltonito: Perfecto Eltonito. more »

fast as a shark

Return To Us Our Manta! It Shall Save GM!

Call me "Ich-Manni." Here in the electron-bright pages of tha Jalop, I have often implored manufacturers to bring back a simple, lightweight RWD sports coupe. We collectively have bemoaned the lack of availability of certain European models built by American manufacturers but not sold on our shores. And of course, I have professed my love of the Opel Manta so many times that it borders slightly on the ridiculous. Kind of like the time in college when I used to piss off the guy in the Doobie Brothers shirt by playing "Louie Louie" incessantly on the guitar while he attempted to extoll the virtues of Dave Matthews. But I have hit upon an idea, and if General Motors does not grab hold of it and run like a 400-meter relay medalist with a lit roman candle protruding from his keister, they're hopeless. And here is what I propose: Mssrs. Wagoner and Lutz, bring back the Manta. More »

Feature

4:30 PM on Fri Jun 29 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
1,808 views, 26 comments

Latest by brandegee: @Maymar: I think what ottomaddox means is that with the sheer amount of traffic in NYC area, it's not worth risking a near certain accident in a light-weight RWD coupe. It's one-thing to pilot a heavy CLK or G35 around more »

fast as a shark

The Way It Hits You, Or a Three-Way Tie For First

I've known my girlfriend for years. We met as teenagers and immediately connected. We kept in touch sporadically, went through a lot of parallel experiences and a multitude of different ones. Way back when, she thought I was a goofy punk rocker with bad taste in motor vehicles, but she wrote about my cars and I anyway. We danced around each other, intrinsically knowing that the other one had things to do. And since I'm seeing her tomorrow, and I figure that she needs more punk rock in her life at this juncture, I've made her a compact disc in place of the mixtape I was too shy to to give her over a decade ago. There's a freedom in letting go of seductive romance and saying, "Okay, the plays are over and here's where the collaboration begins." Not that I'm not a sucker for participating in seductive romance. After all, I did own an El Camino. More »

Feature

4:59 PM on Fri Jun 22 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
1,375 views, 23 comments

Latest by BLS: Honda. The Ferrari/Shell is amazing but it is one dimentional. Plus the Honda comercial is funny in a weirdly inspiring way. more »

fast as a shark

Manta - der Film, Total Geil!

Truth be told, my Manta fixation goes back over 25 years. As a kid visiting Northern Ireland, I was inextricably drawn to GM's Euro ponycar; it seemed the most American thing on the road, coiffed, as it was with cues that spoke of Yankee muscle. Camaro ducktail here, Monza curve there. Okay, fine. I was influenced heavily by 1970s muscle-appearance cars. But the Manta just looked like the baddest-ass thing on the road in what was then a fairly poor country. That said, I knew that Manta drivers, even back then, were revered for their manliness and reviled for their loutish nature. Eleven years ago, eight years after Manta production ended, I studied in Germany. Although nobody mentioned Mantas, per se "Manni" was shorthand for your stereotypical Bitburger-swilling, mulleted hoon. Which brings us to Manta - der Film. More »

Feature

4:45 PM on Fri Jun 8 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
1,188 views, 19 comments

Latest by Turboner: Oh, and this dude I went to high school with, who rocked an OG mullet, had a 429 Pinto with straight pipes. It was almost as obnoxious as it was awesome. It was like a penis on testicle-shaped more »

fast as a shark

Standing at the Gates of the West: So-Cal Hot Rodding and the War

To Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, the Gates of the West may have been New York City. Or Saint Louis. Or San Francisco, where they holed up to record overdubs and vocal tracks for Give 'Em Enough Rope with Sandy "More Cowbell" Pearlman. But for many returning soldiers at the end of World War II, the Gates of the West were the breakwaters of San Pedro Bay, at the dangling, southwesterly tip of Los Angeles. Last night, Kasey Dubspeed and I did a runner from the coast up to Cole Coonce's place in Eagle Rock (or "Buzzard Boulder," as Cole perennially refers to it) for his annual Memorial Day barbeque. Cole's backyard is somehow an odd nexus of Los Angeles culture of the city's Golden Age. I spent much of the evening chatting with fashion-and-film-industry people, but at Cole's, one may just as likely end up in a conversation with a Top Fuel driver, a cycling fanatic or a random person who saw the Germs like 48 times and lived to tell the tale. The Second War, as Mike Watt refers to it, gave the world Los Angeles — a diverse, wonderful, maddening, depressing, stunning, sick megalopolis. The GIs who stepped off the boat here after the cessation of hostilities gave us hot rodding. More »

Feature

4:30 PM on Mon May 28 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
1,197 views, 5 comments

Latest by phenotyp: Oh, and a P 38 and a reference to the Me 163? Awesome. more »

commentary

Fast as a Shark: East of Eden: The Fall of the Gumball 3000

Alex Roy, Gumball organizer Julie Brangstrup and Michael Ross just before the cars are released at at the airport in Athens. More »

Feature

1:00 PM on Mon May 7 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
12,131 views, 35 comments

commentary

Fast as a Shark: Living on Chinese Rocks

I can't in truth call my Shanghai trip a comedy of errors, although there were errors, one of which resulted in my flying home first class. And while some of the Engrish I encountered was laugh-out-loud gut-busting. I can't quite refer to it as a tragedy, either. What it was, however, was a slightly nebulous, inchoate paradigm-fucker of a time/history/distance shift. More »

Feature

3:45 PM on Wed Apr 25 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
1,546 views, 11 comments

commentary

Fast as a Shark: The Problem With Words

Conversation with three rednecks in beat Silverado in the middle of an intersection: More »

Feature

commentary

Fast as a Shark: No Sleep 'til Lynbrook

It's 10:46pm California time as I sit down to write this. But I'm not in San Pedro. I'm somewhere near Saint Marks Place in New York City, and the only sounds in the room are the tapping of two Apple keyboards and the rattling dull whine of air filters sucking the cigarette smoke out of the air of a spacious loft replete with a machine gun and a glass-encased model of the Bismarck. On the chairs at the bar hang three jackets, with a black, non-descript number in the middle. To its left is a navy blue Red Kap work jacket with a lakes modified roadster screenprinted across the back, reading "GEARHEAD." To its right hangs a high-visibility orange example sporting a rearing horse patch on the sleeve denoting a foreign police agency. More »

Feature

7:00 PM on Fri Apr 6 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
228 views, 2 comments

Latest by lascauxcaveman: Another nice slice-of-mindset, Davey. Just a note, if you're helping someone whack their memoir into shape, maybe you should know that (at the risk of execution) that last phrase in graph seven should read "to Spinelli and me yesterday." more »

commentary

Fast as a Shark: Cannibalism, In Pursuit of the Elusive Awesome

Now and then, I wonder if this malaise is not a thirtysomething crisis, and then I take a step back and realize that it really isn't. Age is merely a tipping point, where the enthusiasm of youth is finally allowed to a step back in the face of a broader historical perspective. There is a transitional moment where it's understood that while independence and DIY will always rule, they are not quite the all. There is a beauty to industry, but when industry becomes the be-all, end all, there's a spirit that gets lost. Lost yet? Let me extrapolate a bit. More »

Feature

1:00 PM on Wed Mar 28 2007
By Davey G. Johnson
388 views, 27 comments

Latest by clashtastic: @Davey G.: I've got it. more »