I went to the GP’s office for yet another pre-op session, bloodwork, EKG, blah, blah. This time they’r repairing three botched spinal surgeries, going back to 2006. When they’re done, I’ll be able to walk upright without pain for the first time in, oh, I don’t know, 10 years?
I’m sitting in the waiting room, taking inventory of the magazines—it sounds quaint, I know, over there is a pile of People, over here of Vanity Fair, Time, Newsweek, Harper’s, The Atlantic, the kind of middlebrow mix you’d expect minus The New Yorker—and then I see Hot Rod, which I last studied in high school. Hello? What’s that doing here? How many gearheads got insurance good enough for these well-appointed rooms at Columbia Doctors, more or less across Broadway from the main event itself?
I knew these guys in high school, the ones with the 650 Triumph motorcycles and the comparable BSAs, or the muscle cars they bought (and maintained) with their own money. They were mostly “greasers,” working-class guys new to the suburbs who took the shop classes and who, unlike us “socialites”—the sons of white-collared middle managers—went to work rather than the practice fields after school.
I hung out with a couple of them, one guy drove a 409 Chevy until he had to give it up to the cops because it was a stolen vehicle, another, older dude owned a 1965 Shelby GT 350 Mustang—he was 22 and in love with my girlfriend, so I got to drive that wild thing, a 289 cubic-inch V8 that generated 365 horsepower, no back seat, just a shelf for the spare—and I knew how to tune up my parents’ cars, especially my mother’s very cool silver blue 1965 Corvair black-top convertible. My last year at Carthage College, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I actually replaced the clutch in my stripped-down 1958 Ford (which I bought in 1969 for $50).**
After that emergency repair, though, my only close encounters with gearheads and engine blocks came when I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, adjacent to the clan known as the “Fuck Brothers” because they all sprang fully armed from the same gene pool, fully clothed from the same wardrobe, and fully equipped with the same vocabulary— every one of them was a skinny white boy in jeans and wife beater and baseball hat who parked engines on cinder blocks in his front yard, grew his stringy blonde hair to the waist like Greg Allman, and overloaded every sentence with improbable variations on the f-word. “Like, what the fuck, man, you fuck, you’re fucking kidding me, right, I mean, fuck me and the fucking horse you fucking rode in on, that’s just not fucking right.”
You can imagine what I expected when I opened Hot Rod (a colony of the MotorTrend empire). A lot of exotic gear, garish pics and graphics, insider jokes and jargon, technical specs for engines, ads for lubricants decorated with female shapes, and of course bad writing, like in the fanzines, tabloids and lowbrow websites, where everything stands at the opposite extreme from the last item mentioned. In short: machine-tooled pornography. But no.
Sure, there are exclamations and superlatives, also air-brushed photos of gleaming engines and polished tools, but generally speaking the design, the art, and the prose are—what?—tasteful? All the objects in view are beautiful, even the Amish shop broom hand-made by father-son teams out of corn straw, but they are approached by the camera lens and the captions with appropriate attention to and respect for their utility, their value in use. The finished vehicles are street-ready, for example, although some of them are pictured racing on a frozen Minnesota lake (Model As and 1932 Ford coupes) or at Daytona (stock Corvettes). Outside the ads, the tools—sanders, welders, drills, fabricating tables, wrenches—are in use or on a shop wall, and the pictorial placement of the more esoteric parts, like polyurethane bushings, tells tourists like me what they’re for.
Apart from lubricants, the ads are for tools and kits (jacks, dashboards), parts (frames, struts, shocks, chassis, water pumps, motor mounts, cylinder heads), events (the Hot Rod Power Tour, NHRA Camping World, Drag Week), insurance (Progressive only)—and cigarettes (Lucky Strike, Winston) The layout, design, and art in these spaces are cringe-worthy, at least compared to the words and images that crowd the magazine’s commissioned articles. My guess is that advertising doesn’t pay any bills here, because there are too few pages of it, and half of them are sponsored by Hot Rod or the mother ship, MotorTrend.
The articles fall into three categories: stories about specific in-person race events, short pieces in a regular feature called Wrenchin’@Random, and essays on building or restoring an ancient vehicle. The events, 24Hours@Daytona, Polar Devils—racing on ice—and Fuel-Altered Drag Races, are just boring because the pics can’t capture the exertion, the sound, and the motion that make them worth attending. But every piece of the six-part Wrenchin’@Random feature is fascinating, even for an ignoramus like me, because watching these guys add 33 cubic inches to a small-block 350 Chevy C10 pickup, just to boost the horsepower by maybe 10%, or install a custom retro dashboard in a 1966 Malibu Wagon, just to make the interior look cooler. or replace the suspension on a 1999 C5 Corvette they bought for $11,000, just to get it track-ready, lets you in on their secret. They like the final product, of course they’re proud of it, and they drive it on city streets to prove the point, but they love what it takes to get there—they love the craft, the technique, the process, the grease, the noise, the hands-on doing itself, for itself. They write the way they work, with care.
No more so than in the three essays on the (re)creation of a 1955 Chevy by John McGann, the editor-in-chief [see cover photo], a 1970 Plymouth Road Runner by Steven Rupp, and a 1951 Ford Custom by Douglas Glad. They read like catalogs for an art museum exhibit or a gallery show, and in a sense, they are. These are accomplished aesthetes at work here, the writers and the (re)builders alike. They find beauty where the rest of us see rust, decline, or decay, integrity and utility where we see only empty shells and cast-off parts of once whole vehicles. I’ll briefly summarize two of the essays on my way to the study of the most ancient artifact, the ‘51 Ford, because it epitomizes the aesthetic sensibility and the political unconscious of this magazine.
The 1955 Chevy is a life-size replica of a Hot Wheels design by Brendon Vetuskey, an employee of Mattel, the company that makes the toys. He liked his miniature plastic version so much he die cast it at a scale of 1:64 and went from there. It’s built around a fuel-injected 454, nothing stock about that or anything else in this totally artificial device, not even the front axle, which was scavenged from a Chevy truck. Reproducible it ain’t: “How very meta,” as McGann the writer puts it. Like the magazine cover screams, it’s ROLLING ART, sculpture on wheels. So is the 1970 Road Runner, a dissonant pastiche, a discordant collage, a de-centered hodge-podge—“kind of like Lego but with a welder,” as Shawn Jones the owner describes his method—built on the unlikely foundation of a NASCAR Toyota Team chassis. It’s beautiful in the way that a child’s crayon drawings are: too colorful and too centrifugal to rest your eyes on.
I couldn’t invent the self-conscious snobbery that saturates Douglas Glad’s loving portrait of the brand-new 80-year old Ford built by John Moss, an “industrial artist” who runs a business called Brass Junkie in Huntington Bech, CA. Here’s the buried lede: “Great art is created by a convergence of circumstances that motivate the artist. A stock car with good lines combined with years of laboring over the details creates something with more feeling than schlock thrown together to sell or impress the rabble. The best description of why this car exists is a movement called wabi-sabi, an ancient Japanese philosophy that explains why John Moss, and an entire generation of car guys, love old cars.”
Good lines? The industrial artist chopped the roof, recanted the windshield, and swapped out the front grill for a ‘53 Buick’s wide grin, so the old lines have been withdrawn, shall we say, without erasing them. Most cars of the late 1940s and early 50s looked like oversized beetles, plump and rounded, no sharp angles or jagged edges—fins start to protrude in 1955, and grow to their dorsal pinnacle by 1959—topped by turret-like canopies, as if all occupants should still be dodging the world out there beyond the windows. The ‘51 Ford had outgrown this maternal mold: it looked like a large pregnant mammal well past her due date, ready to shed some weight and change its shape. John Moss helped it along.
Wabi-sabi is for real. It’s a late-medieval aesthetic that still animates Japanese culture. It celebrates and amplifies the traces of deterioration, decay, even degeneration, as the insignia of life, so that a literal translation into English hovers around the verb “to rust.” John Moss came late to wabi-sabi, but his previous designs and sculptural installations had assimilated its lessons, and this rolling art is a new monument to its embrace of the glamour of ruin.
Having spent a couple of days reading Hot Rod, I can say that the magazine as such radiates an approach to objects in the world that similarly acknowledges their transience, their fragility—all things are already on the verge of death—and accordingly adopts an aesthetic of repair that both preserves and annuls them. This attitude toward the effects of time is a way of being in the world that brings objects to life, into a new state of usefulness, or readiness. They were withered, wasted, discarded, as their handlers will soon or someday be, but now they serve a purpose. This is the political unconscious, the formal presupposition, that determines the visual and verbal content of the magazine.
To illustrate my claim, I turn to “Starting Line,” the editor-in-chief’s column at the front of the book. Here’s how it opens:
“Three weeks ago, I stopped at Whole Foods for groceries on my way home from work. Upon returning to my car [it’s the Chevy pickup that got the extra 33 cubic inches in Wrenchin’@Random], some dude commented on my C10, saying, ‘I’m sure that’s not good for the environment, but I do like your truck,’ or something similar. He said that to me as he was boarding his behemoth soccer-mom-spec SUV with a smirk on his face. Windows up and A/C on, he was backing out of his parking spot before I could inform him that just maybe keeping a 55-year-old vehicle on the road is actually not a bad thing for the environment. Certainly no one labored for slave wages in precious metal strip mines for any component in my car. More importantly, everything in my C10 can be recycled. Everything. Not one single component will end up in a hazardous waste processing center or catching fire and burning an entire container ship down to the waterline.”
Nothing goes to waste in this world elsewhere, which stays out of sight, in every sense, of us middle-class socialites. We don’t see the gearheads unless we need them to fix our broken machinery, and we don’t notice their salvages unless we get a taste of their decadent art, in magazines like Hot Rod. Or until we realize that our work ethic is no match for theirs.