SR 500: Poetry in motion

Bikes

More creative niceness from California here, namely Long Beach’s Lossa Engineering.

There’s a real sense of drama to this short by Ricki Bedenbaugh. The beautiful noise of the big single and the orchestration of the soundtrack is cut together in a lovely urban rhythm.

This film has a particular piquancy, because an older cousin of ours had set our adolescent bike fantasies alight when he bought one of these big, booming singles and taunted us with his rocker cool (which didn’t seem that cool at the time).

Cuz would take the merciless mickey out of us as we watched him roar past, us slouched bored on our Raleigh Grifters.

Though he was swathed in patched denim, monkey boots and the ubiquitous RUSH t-shirt, and we were all about disco, boogie and Lambrettas, it was secretly the sound of the SR500 that I would ape by tucking the mudguard end over the Grifter’s rear knobbly.

The guys in Long Beach have certainly made this a much cooler bike than it ever was in its original form.

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