What the Hell is Basket Case Productions You ask?
We are brothers-from-other-mothers. we are comrades, co-workers, and motorcycle nutters! We love to ride our obsolete machines until they break-then we commiserate, wrench all night long, and talk about them incessantly until they're back on the road again.
We've both spent many years riding 2-wheelers. Tim was deeply impacted by a youthful reading of Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels and was further fascinated by his best friend's dad...who rode around his New England neighborhood on a restored '59 DuoGlide - with a perpetual stogie dangling from his mouth. This led to his formative years - the inevitable dirt bikes, and ultimately larger road machines. Girard turned his bicycle into a chopper at 10 years of age - simply by jamming hacksawed fork tubes from a friend's unused bicycle onto the ends of his existing forks - thereby establishing a long legacy of dodgy mechanical skills. The die was cast, however.
A veritable myriad of old motorbikes later...having owned and messed with them over the last 40 years - we can't deny that the Basket Case Productions crew are suckers for the unconventional, the madcap, and the unexpected. We are admittedly keen about antiquated technology and we don't flinch at the sight of rust, dust or crust. Neither do we squint nor shade our optic nerves, from the radiance of a well-placed chunk of luminous metal or the glimmer and glow of a skillfully applied pigment. We are Basket Case Productions and we love old motorcycles!
Basket Case Productions was originally formed as a way to compensate for all of the vintage motorcycle events that we were missing because of work. The best antique swap meets took place far from NYC, and it was nearly impossible to secure 3 days off in a row to allow travel by bike. Then one quiet day on the job, the idea was cast: "What if we somehow brought old bikes here to our workplace?" We got the nod from the gracious owner of Brooklyn Bowl. It's a well-loved music venue, restaurant and 16-lane bowling alley - and we were off to the races! We organized, curated and ran our event, entitled 'Split'n Lanes Dodgin' Gutters' at the Bowl for 5 years. We crammed as many vintage machines into the venue space as possible, and because we would close an entire city block outside for 'motorcycles only', we always had an impromptu show of hundreds of attendees' bikes on the street as well.
Now in our 7th year of creating one of the most unique vintage motorcycle events in North America, we have moved on from the Brooklyn Bowl setting to find fresh and spontaneous
locations that will allow us to continue our primary focus on Friends, and the Old Machines that bring us all together. Ultimately, we judge our own shows by how much fun we, ourselves have. That comes in large part, from the look of surprise and elation on the faces of our audience. Keep checking back to see when & where our next 'Split'n Lanes' event will be.
photograph by Alison Cutlan
