No. 152: White Dwarf. Christmas was always so overwhelming it made him feel small. It wasn't the grandeur of the longago Jesus babe in its humble manger. It was the accelerating flurry, the feral grabbing, the Holly Jolly Christmas ringing porously through the loudspeakers in every store--even his groceteria. At Christmas, he refused all invitations to parties, dinners, gatherings. He wasn't a snob. It was just that everything made him so goddam sad. Christmas day he would be reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's little book "Nature" (1836)--as he had done each Christmas day for as long as he could remember. Emerson insisted that man ought to live in an original, nourishing relation to the universe. But that seemed an increasingly inexplicable ideal "Man is the dwarf of himself," Emerson had written, sounding a bit like the Nietzsche to come. Man is "disunited with himself . . . is a god in ruins." His reading would require the support of a heavy glass of Black Bush.
No. 151. Thunderball. Sometimes the car--his modified 1948 Jaquar XK-120--is real to him. Sometimes it's as much a sweet fabrication as it is a hectic memory. He is certain that he owned it once and drove it with mad precision all through Europe. But sometimes it is no more substantial to him than a cloud bank.
No.149. CAR-ving. Last week, he had carved a vintage speedster from plaster and it had pleased him greatly--mostly because it took him back to the wondrous Popular Mechanics magazines of his childhood. This week, he hacked out another plaster car model. This time he was thinking about the General Motors "Dream Machines" of the 1950s, conceived under the supervision of designer Harley Earl, the Cecil B. De Mille of GM car design. As design historian Stephen Bayley writes in his amusing book, Harley Earl and the Dream Machine (Knopf, 1983), "Earl conducted the design process with a mixture of discretion, emotional violence and bizarrerie." One of Earl's design innovations was the use of clay to make models (before him, car models had been made of wood). The clay modeling made for more fluidity and complexity of contour in the proposed automobiles--resulting, almost inevitably in features like wraparound windshields and absurdly towering tail-fins, taken to airplane heights for example, in the 1951 Le Sabre (the flower on GM's buttonhole during what Bayley calls "the golden age of gorp"). His own Dream Car carving came to nothing. Initially he was going for morphological extravagance. As he worked, however, he got interested in the essential properties of car-ness, and ended by producing a sort of ur-car that sat heavily on his plinth and looked like a fat potato with eyes.
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