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Showing posts from September 2, 2007

Today's Classic Cars of Tomorrow...Today!

I came across a great post at HooptyRides (blog of fixit-genius Mr. Jalopy) on the subject of classic cars, and whether or not any of today's cars will ever be considered "classic". It's the August 21 entry, and well-worth the scroll-down. Mr. Jalopy was inspired by this article in the Wall Street Journal. I agree with Mr. J's critiques and insights, particularly regarding the extensive use of plastic in modern cars as impediments to their classic status. He's right: pretty much every car you see on the road today is one or two decades away from cracking, crumbling, and being scattered by a light breeze. That said, I considered it a supreme injustice that neither of these two mentioned two current cars that *I* consider classics, plasticity notwithstanding: The Honda Civic SI (all three major iterations): The BMW M-Class Z3/4 Coupe (In its older and soon-to-be-released versions):

Lightning Links!

#1!!! A sweet trans-Atlantic ground-effect wingship hypothesized in Popular Science, way way back in 1984, and featured recently on BoingBoing's new Gadgets site . #2!!! A revisiting of Rain Man from the Onion's wonderful pop-culture studies site, The AV Club. Highly recommended because of the perspective of its author, and because of said author's insights (which I guess must stem from that perspective...I guess I have only one reason to recommend it, but it's a reason that branches and evolves in beautiful ways...). #3!!! An essay by genius Bill Watterson (creator of Calvin and Hobbes). Watterson embodied a perhaps never-to-be-repeated synthesis of brilliant draftspersonship (control of line, depth, and gesture), insightful and understated use of color, and penetrating worldview of sufficient depth to grasp the mind of a brilliant and hyper six year old and those of his parents with equal sensitivity and wit. That might be the worst sentence I've ever writ

Quick Art Hit

BoingBoing.net, my fave blog, has been posting about Cayetano Ferrer recently. His stuff is thought-provoking and beautiful, and I think I might be able to use it in my thesis! Click the title of this post for a link to his site. You can also go to BoingBoing and search their site for "Cayetano Ferrer" for photos of a cool project he did by painting billboards with the images of the landscape they obscured. Yeah. Not only is it a neat way to explore the presence/absence tension and the illusory nature of our ideas of permanence and possibility, it also is a great subversion of the advertising media in service of art rather than the vice versa.

Still clearing out the link piles...

First, a few political nuggets! Bad few weeks for the GOP and the administrationEither this rabbit hole goes deeper than humanly imaginable, or the wheels have finally come off the noise machine. Or this is a statistically meaningless cluster of bad news for the Prez. This decent article from Huffington Post shoots two fish in the same barrel: Karl Rove and American journalists. Bill Moyers speaks to the base and utter cynicism that drove Rove and Bush to brief political victory, at great cost to, well, the world. Slate rounds up the best political cartoons about good ol' Larry Craig, and Christopher Hitchens writes in the same online-magazine on the same topic . Whoops, and just like that it was bedtime. More tomorrow....