It’s got a Lincoln motor and it’s really souped up.
That Model A Vitimix makes it look like a pup.
It’s got eight cylinders; uses them all.
It’s got overdrive, just won’t stall.—-Charlie Ryan (also Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen), Hot Rod Lincoln
Car Show, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Ooh baby, watchful lines vibrate soft in brainwave time.
Silver pictures move so slow.
Golden tubes faintly glow.Electric faces seem to merge.
Hidden voices mock your words.
Fade away and radiate.—-Blondie, Fade Away and Radiate
Car Show, Texas
“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable–if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Oblique Strategy: Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame
(click to enlarge)
I have always liked this photo that I took at the Invasion Car Show, in Deep Ellum. I’m not sure, but looking through my archives, I don’t think I have used it in a blog entry before. I might be wrong.
Think about how everybody used to – especially when cars had hood ornaments like this – viewed speed. Travel was going from props to jets and life was speeding up. Think of how wonderful it must have felt. Think of riding in a metal tube thousands of feet in the air moving at hundreds of miles per hour, in comfort, in luxury, while a beautiful woman served you food and drinks. It is a miracle.
Of course, we all know how this speed thing has turned out. The speed increases, props, jets, and now the speed of light through a device held in your hand to every corner of the world, instantaneously. We move so fast now, we don’t go anywhere.
It reminds me of a quote from a book I just read. When the railroads were first built, people believed that they would suffocate if they travelled faster than 30mph as they would not be able to breathe due to the surrounding air rushing past them. Engines were throttled so they couldn’t go over thirty.
They were afraid of a speed that we take for granted. I think they may have been right.
“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography
Car Show, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography
Super Soul: And there goes the Challenger, being chased by the blue, blue meanies on wheels. The vicious traffic squad cars are after our lone driver, the last American hero, the electric centaur, the, the demi-god, the super driver of the golden west! Two nasty Nazi cars are close behind the beautiful lone driver. The police numbers are gettin’ closer, closer, closer to our soul hero, in his soul mobile, yeah baby! They about to strike. They gonna get him. Smash him. Rape… the last beautiful free soul on this planet.
—-Vanishing Point
Beautiful Cars, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Super Soul: This radio station was named Kowalski, in honour of the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of the soul. The question is not when’s he gonna stop, but who is gonna stop him.
—-Vanishing Point
There are colors not found in nature.
And I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way.
Car Show, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Style changes, style stays the same, style comes full circle.
Car show, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes. working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
I have never been a car guy. I am interested in three things in an automobile. One, that it start. Two, that it get to where I want it to go without falling apart. And Three, since I live in Texas, well, air conditioning is important.
Other than that…
On the other hand, this is, without a doubt, a thing of great beauty.
Invasion Car Show
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Quick! Hang a right…Cut over to G Street. I just saw a vision! I saw a goddess. Come on, you’ve got to catch up to her… This was the most perfect, dazzling creature I’ve ever seen… She spoke to me. She spoke to me right through the window. I think she said, ‘I love you.’ That means nothing to you people? You have no romance, no soul? She – someone wants me. Someone roaming the streets wants me! Will you turn the corner?
—-Curt Henderson, American Graffiti
This is the American dream forged in steel and covered in gloss. The curves, the mass, and the speed. Conceived in that back seat would be the only way to properly start out a real life. It’s painted the color of Angel’s blood and polished until the objects that appear in its coat are more real than life.
And that’s what it looks like standing still. Think of the throaty roar of the engine – the smell of the exhaust – the blare of the radio (I still don’t think digital music sounds right in a car – nothing since the quadraphonic eight track has).
I was looking at this car and a cop walked up, stood beside me, and said, “That is a beautiful car.”
“It sure is,” I replied.
I guess I should have made a note of its make and year, maybe the person or garage that restored it… but I didn’t. I usually do that sort of thing, but I guess I wanted that car to exist simply as it is, as a vision of metal, rubber, glass, and paint – not as an object with a history that was created from nothing by the mind and sweat of men.
Drivers Wanted
–VolkswagenThe power of Dreams
–HondaEverything We Do is Driven By You
–FordNever Follow
–AudiPorsche, There is No Substitute
–PorscheEngineered to move the human spirit
–Mercedes-BenzBorn to perform
–JaguarBaseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet
–ChevroletSheer driving pleasure.
–BMWDon’t dream it. Drive it.
–JaguarThe Penalty of Leadership
–CadillacZoom, Zoom, Zoom
–MazdaThe Relentless Pursuit of Perfection
–Lexus
Bill Chance 