My Black Brick

Some new sites I’ve added to the sidebar. Tons of crap cars and jerry rigs.

That Will Buff Out

You Drive What?

There, I Fixed It

Image from thatwillbuffout.com

I used to go to hot rod shows with my dad back in the late 70’s/ early 80’s and they were usually jam packed with custom conversion vans. Tons of candy apple paint, air-brushed illustrations of vikings and evil polar bears and lots of furry dashboards. Most of them had beds in the back, including one with a waterbed and a huge fish tank.

The Selvedge yard has compiled a slew of pictures of the craze in all it’s metal-flake glory.

Before there was “Christine“, there was “The Car”, a movie I remember seeing on late-night TV in the early 80’s. I’m sure it was a drive-in theater treat when it came out in 1977. Nothing like being chased by a huge, vaguely Ford-looking black bucket of Bondo.

BONUS: Hot Rod Magazine’s 40 top car movies. Nice to see Mad Max represented.

Via Jalopnik

I got tripped up by all the Toyotas. Pretty good little quiz though.

AND PASSED WITH AN AVERAGE SCORE. C

In 1974 movie goers were treated to Gone in Sixty Seconds, one long chase scene expanded into a full-length feature film. The movie barely had actors; it was just stunt drivers skidding and careening around, smashing fruit stands and plate glass. In this clip, we see the final jump sequence, repeated twice in slow motion, then once in real-time. By Jerry Bruckheimer’s standards it’s pretty tame, but at least it’s a real car and not a CG cartoon, like the one used for the final jump in the 2000 remake.

BONUS: James Hetfield flies down the hills of San Francisco in Metallica’s “I Disappear”.

In the wet dream of Bob Lutz, the 2010 Cadillacs are a multi-stage rocket blasting across the salt flats under the watchful eye of the NASAesque GM launch team. The new CTS Sportwagon bursts forth as the first stage in a cycle that ends with a new coupe.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I had the please to read Chuck Closterman’s “Eating the Dinosaur“. In it he talks of how, as a culture, we’ve come to accept the lies that the advertising media presents us, and the fact that we don’t take things literally. The media business knows this, and presents products to us with the knowledge that we don’t take them seriously. Advertisers moved from presenting their clients products factually to evoking an impression to the subconscious of how a consumer will feel when they buy their product. We’re at a point now where we know it’s all lies, so advertisers can just present any hyperbolic scenario and know that we won’t think they’re presenting truth; it’s just stuff that looks cool blowing up! Therefore, we get a 264hp V6 station wagon being compared to a rocket burning hundreds of gallons of fuel each second to achieve earth orbit.

BONUS: The first few seconds of this Cadillac ad show a woman grinning as she drives a new SRX. I was pleasantly surprised to recognize Paula Merritt, a woman I knew briefly a couple years ago through a friend in Brooklyn. She used to play drums for Grandma’s Boy (now Bad Girlfriend) before moving to LA to further her modeling career. Looks like she’s doing well. Way to go Paula!

This Volvo “is aimed at the most demanding of customers: the independent woman in the premium segment.” So states the narrator for “YCC: Your Concept Car”, a look at creating an automobile specifically for women. Not to be confused with Rush “YYZ”, or F.U.B.U. “For Us By Us”, the YCC has such innovations as paint that is “just like a non-stick frying pan” and no easy access to the engine compartment. I assume this means that an independent woman in the “premium segment” couldn’t be bothered to know what’s going on with the car.

Over the soothing tones of new-age electronic jazz we learn it’s a “tough car” but not “brutal”. According to one of the women on the design team:

“You’re not buying a technical product; you’re buying by emotions.”

At :53 is my favorite part. A zoned out woman with a sweater casually draped around her shoulders wakes to tell us what our first impression of the car will be: “A feeling of, uh, grace… and, uh, space.” But she’s totally grace-less, speaking slowly and staring bug-eyed into the void.

VIA Sociological Images

BONUS: Trip out to the ambient music on this YCC promo video. Turn up the speakers for 9 minutes of hot buzz.

The grandiosity of the narration in this video is hilarious. It’s a 10 minute film documenting the design and testing of 1949 Fords. It’s no ordinary car. It’s “Designed From the Inside Out”:

Here is the idea, a motorcar, conceived as a space for the riders, space that is to be enclosed and powered…

Yup, that’s a motorcar alright.

I love how @6:30 the cars get handed to the marketing guys and angels in heaven sing their approval.

In this Disney film from the late 1950s we are introduced to the highway of tomorrow. I look at this and wonder if they could possibly have been that naive. An atomic reactor melting rock to tunnel through mountains? Complete robotic control of your car? Rocket powered cargo ships? Everything works smoothly and cleanly in the world of colorful cartoons. In real life I think there’d be problems with highways cantilevered on the side of the Grand Canyon.

Disney obviously hated the clutter, chaos and decentralization of the city. He dreamed of a centrally planned world where there were no conflicting interests, everyone agreed that his vision was ideal, and we could be whisked away from dirty reality and concentrate on shopping. No thanks, Walt.

From the Onion: Ford Unveils New Car For Cash-Strapped Buyers: The 1993 Taurus

I like how it comes pre-loaded with Primus “Sailing the Seas of Cheese”