Videos
Chinese Mods? Why Not? (Or: Hang on to your Vintage!?)
A fascinating seven-minute short on YouTube. Will the Chinese be bitten by the Mod bug?
While surfing the interwebs, we happened to come across this intriguing little short. Featuring clips from “Quadrophenia” and “Brighton Rock”, it offers some history of the ‘mod’ movement and subculture, and introduces us to a fellow who’s helping to start a mod/scooter movement in China. While the narration is in English, the interviewee speaks in Mandarin (or Cantonese?), and we don’t have the benefit of subtitles. More’s the pity; I suspect what he has to say would be very interesting.
Interesting too, are the possible implications suggested by what is an otherwise an innocuous little vid. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last few decades, China has become an economic powerhouse. More and more Chinese folks are achieving a middle-class lifestyle or better, and there is more emphasis on easing into a consumer culture. So what would happen if a Mod revival happened to take place in China? Scooter use is widespread, and a growing interest in vintage could make for interesting developments in the scooting world, as a growing population of aficionados could put real pressure on a finite supply of scooters and parts. Best to take care of those vintage machines and your parts stocks; who knows, they could become quite a hot commodity!
Just sayin’.
Westenders in the News!
KING-TV reporter Gary Chittim goes on location at Scoot About to report on how rapidly rising gas prices could revive a moribund scooter market. Note the AutoMoto 3-wheeler in the background (more on that later).
With the ongoing unrest in the Middle East, gas prices are steadily marching northward again, with talk of $4/gallon by summer, and some are gloomily predicting $5 fuel. But every cloud has a silver lining, and since the last time gas spiked and gave a big boost to scooter sales, one wonders if it can happen again?
Westenders
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