Hank Young’s Disk Drive

Hank Young’s Disk Drive

Originally uploaded by cliff1066

Hank Young creates internal-combustion confections that allude to the legendary grandeur of the past. He has appropriated a sweet spot in our collective consciousness for the way automobiles and motorcycles of the Jazz Age flaunted their mechanismo. Whereas a chopper, by general consensus, is supposed to assault one’s sensibilities on all counts, a Hank Young example takes a more subtle and less intimidating approach. It makes you want to pull up a chair, pour some whiskey into a tumbler, and ponder its intricacies at your leisure. Only then would you be truly ready to ride it. Like a Swiss chronograph with multiple complications (stop hands, date, alarm, moon phase, alternate time zones, windows, and sub-dials), a Hank Young motorcycle exemplifies an excess of effort to reach a modest result, beauty notwithstanding. True to chopper culture and his own hotrod roots, there is nothing practical about his results, no more so than one needs a $50,000 wristwatch to tell time. But they show how what is unnecessary can just as much be the mother of invention, if sublime satisfaction is the upshot. Young’s bikes are neither replicas nor facsimiles, but the tangible evidence of an imagination that evokes old motorcycles by reinventing them. They are classy, if not classical. In other words, they never looked this good before. Still, Young celebrates motorcycles with an attention to historical detail that strikes a postmodern chord. Plainly products of the present day, they look as though they might have been ridden by Jules Verne, looking forward a century ago.