Tag Archives: car

Hood Ornament

Posted on by Bill Chance

I’m no expert, but I think this design was originally from a Pierce Arrow.

Not to be confused with a Peirce Arrow – which is true only when everything is false.

The first Pierce-Arrow archers were slight in frame, partly clothed, and helmeted. Later versions depict a helmet-less archer with no clothes and a little more muscle. Both versions are graceful and elegant, which is funny when you consider that a fellow sweeping the floor of the Pierce-Arrow factory was asked to be the model. After attending archery classes to add realism to the pose, Albert Gonas used his broom for the arrow.
—-from historicvehicle.org

Hood Ornament, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas (click to enlarge)

Hood Ornament, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)

The job of a hood ornament is a tough one. You are out there, unprotected, in the wind.
You wonder what it would feel like to be the Spirit of Ecstasy – even on a Rolls, exposed, fighting the sun and the rain.

And so unappreciated.

Back in the cool days, nobody would think of buying or driving a car without a piece of iconic sculpture rising above the radiator cap. Now they are all but gone. The malfeasance of the modern world in its various manifestations is exposed in the reasons for the disappearance of the hood ornament.
Too expensive.
Too easy to steal.
Too original.
Too personal.
Too dangerous.

The same mysterious forces that saved me from being impaled on the steering wheel also saved the young engineer’s wife. Apart from a bruised upper jawbone and several loosened teeth, she was unharmed. During my first hours in Ashford Hospital all I could see in my mind was the image of us locked together face to face in these two cars, the body of her dying husband lying between us on the bonnet of my car. We looked at each other through the fractured windshields, neither able to move. Her husband’s hand, no more than a few inches from me, lay palm upwards beside the right windshield wiper. His hand had struck some rigid object as he was hurled from his seat, and the pattern of a sign formed itself as I sat there, pumped up by his dying circulation into a huge blood-blister – the triton signature of my radiator emblem.
—-J.G. Ballard, Crash

Shiny

Posted on by Bill Chance

Shiny happy people laughing

Meet me in the crowd, people, people
Throw your love around, love me, love me
Take it into town, happy, happy
Put it in the ground where the flowers grow
Gold and silver shine
—-REM, “Shiny Happy People“

Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas (Click to Enlarge)

Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
(Click to Enlarge)

Steel rusts. It’s mostly iron anyway – and iron always desires oxygen, leaving the crumbling brown rust behind. Steel always rusts. When you see something this shiny… and it isn’t plated – look for the polishing marks. Somebody really went after it with a buffer – grinding away the oxidation, the spent, the ruined – leaving the fresh metal to gleam in the sun.

It won’t last. Nothing ever does.

“I like it when she’s shiny, like a star, like a guest on the Donnie and Marie Show.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

Blur in the Intersection

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The long triangular grooves on the car had been formed within the death of an unknown creature, its vanished identity abstracted in terms of the geometry of this vehicle. How much more mysterious would be our own deaths, and those of the famous and powerful?”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Pearl

Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Pearl
(Click to Enlarge)

Sometimes the world is hidden in the nooks and crannies of the cable television spectrum – especially in the middle of the night.

There are these shows when some bunch of celebrity grease monkeys steal some poor victim’s car and then rebuild it – adding subwoofers that can shatter glass eardrums, lights visible from other planets, and an aquarium in the rear deck— things like that. Hopefully, they also shove in an engine that starts and brakes that stop.

At the climax – the reveal – the dupe is shown his new pimped-out chariot and he cries. He says, always, “Thank you. My life is changed.” The show ends with the impression that everything will be all right now.

I like that part. I am a sucker for redemption. I like to bask in the feeling that it is even possible that everything will be all right (although I know that it is not true).

Think about it. They are talking about a car. A hunk of metal and rubber – a capsule of steel and glass – a rolling coffin propelled by the burning ghosts of ancient jungles.

But maybe they are right. A car is freedom. A car is the ability to change your location at will. A car is sex… and a nice car is good sex.

When I was young, I went to a lake with a friend of mine and we were swimming in the green water, constantly being slightly bitten by tiny fish, and listening to some women talking to each other while they sunned on a worn wooden dock. One asked another if it was OK if she went out and had her hair cut the same way as the other. Then one asked another about her boyfriend.

“I don’t know,” she answered, “I don’t really like the guy, he doesn’t treat me that well, but he has that really nice sports car.”

“After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

Ghosts of Pedestrians

Posted on by Bill Chance

On Thursday, I spotted an event that was going on down at Klyde Warren Park at eight in the evening. There was a free concert by Paul Thorn. I checked out his youtube page and thought it might be interesting. It wasn’t really my type of music – but he seemed to be a talented and interesting songwriter.

After work, I was way too tired – but I didn’t want to waste another evening flopping around the house, so I pulled myself together and went down to the train station.

Unfortunately, the music was not to my liking – live, with his full band it was way too country-rock for me. I had hoped it would be more in the vein of acoustic songwriter country folk-rock – but this was full on boot-scooting country pop-rock – probably my least favorite genre of music.

I stuck for awhile, then set off walking. After stopping by the reading area and looking through an art book of odd and disturbing (I liked them) paintings by Balthus (the streetlights are almost bright enough for reading) I cruised by the food trucks (right now, we are especially broke, so I ate leftovers before going downtown) and then turned to walk back to the train station.

I had my camera and, on a whim, did some shots of traffic and people by resting my camera on a concrete pillar or whatnot – and adjusting the f-stop for long exposures.

The results were a happy surprise. I came up with a half-dozen that I liked (I’ll put them up here over time – sorry to subject y’all to my experiments). More importantly, It is a technique that shows some promise. Now, I need to work on some spots and do the shots with a tripod and remote release – to get a bit more flexibility in the shot and sharpness in the background. Maybe I can add some models, some added light, or possibly some stacked shots.

So, despite the music not being to my taste, the evening wasn’t wasted.

Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Pearl

Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Pearl

While I had my camera sitting on a low concrete wall in front of the Chase Tower in Downtown Dallas, a saw a family of three crossing at the light, coming toward me. I pointed the camera toward the street and triggered the shutter into a long exposure as they passed.

The City at Night

Posted on by Bill Chance

Well, I just got into town about an hour ago
Took a look around, see which way the wind blow
Where the little girls in their Hollywood bungalows

Are you a lucky little lady in The City of Light
Or just another lost angel…City of Night
—-LA Woman, The Doors

Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Pearl

Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Pearl

Someone is Having a Bad Day

Posted on by Bill Chance

I was on my way home from a fun bike ride on Exposition Avenue and in Deep Ellum when I saw traffic coming to a sudden stop and a column of nasty black smoke rising in the distance. A car was on fire, right before the Highway 75 Exit to Woodall Rogers.

Car fire just north of downtown, Dallas.

Car fire just north of downtown, Dallas.

I had this happen to me once… it isn’t fun.

Years ago, I was sitting down in a cheap Chinese restaurant, about to dig into a lunch-portion of cashew chicken when somebody stuck their head in the door.

“Excuse me, does anyone in here drive a blue Ford?” he asked.

“I do,” I piped up. I assumed I had left my lights on or some such drivel.

“Oh, it’s on fire.”

Not good news. I had been having trouble with the carburetor (this was in the ancient days of yore when every car had at least one carburetor) backfiring and such and it seems to have decided to spit out flames while it was sitting there in the tiny parking lot of the Chinese restaurant. This was in the dark days, the absolute nadir of American engineering and the cars were all a terrible, complex mess with all sorts of odd-looking, unfathomable, and flammable parts bolted to their engines and equipped with carburetors that, apparently, were prone to self-immolation.

It had a mile of rubber hoses and tubing supposedly fulfilling mysterious functions running all over under the hood like a giant bowl of evil black spaghetti. All of this was burning, sending a giant column of toxic smoke high into the gray sky.

I stared, dumbstruck into inactivity, at the conflagration until the proprietor came out with an extinguisher… so I extinguished it. The white powder mingled with the black soot and molten rubber in such a mess that I knew the car had had it.

Now I was faced with a difficult choice. The whole restaurant was staring at me, standing there, holding the spent extinguisher next to my ex-vehicle… but I still had a fresh plate of Chinese food sitting inside.

So, I sucked up my pride and what little dignity I had left… walked back inside, sat down, and resumed my luncheon. This was only about a half-mile from my work, so after I finished I strolled out and walked back along the road to my work for the afternoon. This was before cellphones, so I couldn’t really even call anybody to come get me… and I don’t think I would have anyway.

While I walked I would look back over my shoulder at the column of evil black smoke as it continued to rise and then spread out in a cloud that seemed to hover high in the sky, exactly between me and the bright spot in the cloud cover that represented the sun.

I wanted to put this whole thing behind me, so I signed the title, stuck it behind the license plate of the burned out wreck, and had a salvage company come take it away for its scrap metal value without my presence. I asked them to pay the owner for his extinguisher in cash, and they sent me a check for whatever was left.

I was able to buy two Compact Disks with the balance… I think they were Tears for Fears and Fine Young Cannibals (their second CD).

bad_day2

bad_day3

Old Engine

Posted on by Bill Chance

I’ve been working hard, riding my bicycle from five to ten miles every day. It’s getting really hot, but luckily, you make your own breeze on the bike and it’s possible to get some riding done in the heat. Staying hydrated is the key. I carry two water bottles and a big liter container full of iced water in a bag and that helps. As the summer gets worse, I’ll start wearing a hydration pack – though the thing is a pain to fill and to keep clean.

What I do when it gets hot is to ride a bit, then stop, rest, drink some water and maybe read some on my Kindle. Ten miles and three short stories seems to be a nice bit of morning’s work.

I still feel stupid riding around, but I’m getting used to that. Feel stupid, look stupid – after a while it’s all the same – you have to do what you have to do. It’s more a matter of survival than of vanity.

Sometimes I carry a small point-and-shoot along with me, though I don’t see much worth pointing at or shooting. I did run across this car. I’m not a car expert or a connoisseur of automobiles but this one looks pretty darn cool.

If it has the original engine inside – it’s the same age as the one on my bicycle.

1957 Thunderbird