By Rob Brownie
Native to South Africa, Richard Poplak lives in Toronto where he writes and cycles
competitively as a road racer. His previous books include The Sheikh’s Batmobile:
In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Islamic World and Ja, No, Man: Growing
Up White in Apartheid-Era South Africa (both published by Penguin). Poplak first
met Igor Kenk in 2003 when he stepped into Kenk’s Bicycle Clinic to sell used bike
parts. Years later Poplak was invited by filmmaker and publisher Alex Jansen to write
Kenk’s story, using film footage that Kenk had agreed to have taken of him before
he was eventually arrested. The author was available for an interview in Vancouver
recently, one stop of many in his cross-Canada book tour.
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You’ve written about some heavy topics in the past- how did your earlier
work prepare you for the Kenk project?
I am interested in being controversial. Understandably, Kenk is viewed in a certain
way by the cycling community, which I am part of. I wanted to break through that
and write a story that would portray him as something more than just a villain.
You see his crimes are not so black and white and that is what people are so angry
with. The big problem is that many, many people in the community were involved in
his crimes. We were all duped into his ring and I was one of those people. I was told
about the store and I had some parts to sell from an old bike. I supported his crimes
as I did business with him.
Judging from the images of his bike store, he worked and lived in chaos.
The store was really a representation of his mind and in many ways it was
installation art. That is who Igor is and how he thinks.
What can we learn from a paradoxical character like Igor Kenk?
This story doesn’t restrict itself to Toronto. Bike theft is something anyone can
relate to whether you live in Portland, Vancouver or Miami. What Igor did was
sum up the bike thief ethos. He allowed us to feed into our desire for cheap shit.
He hated the people who came into his shop because he saw them as agents of
their own destruction to some degree. What can we learn from him? That we need
to look a little closer at our over-consumption and that if we are immoral we can be
manipulated.
Igor is pictured throughout the book wearing a T-shirt that reads “I’m
tired”.
Absolutely, I’m so glad you point that out. He is exhausted with himself and his
compulsion to accumulate. He makes the wrong choices along the way in every way.
Kenk is a man of furious appetite; you should see how he eats.
While doing your research you went to Slovenia to learn more about Kenk’s
early life.
Had I not gone to Slovenia the book wouldn’t look like it does now. The style we
used comes from an underground graphic art technique used in Yugoslavia in the
