AR Master on 19/6/2007 at 19:07

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Ask anyone who knows me to any degree and they'll probably unanimously tell you that a) The boy ain't right and b) I was born 40 years too late.

I've always had something of an "unhealthy" obsession with things, like olden times crap and styles and the counter girl at Starbucks who lives at 233 Gainsburough Rd. and showers around 7:06 am every morning. I'm a huge fan of the movements from about 1930-1959, like the end of art deco, modernism, streamlining, futurism, and classic 1950 Americana. As far as I'm concerned, art stopped mattering around January 1, 1960.

My problem with shit is this: What the fuck happened that we ended up with the style we're in today? Everything is ugly, and whatever isn't is expensive. AWESOME.

I like to use radios as an example of how style stopped existing around the late fifties. Take a look at a Crosley or Philco or Westinghouse radio from around WW2. Hand built, carved from wood, intricately detailed and planned, with varying materials and a definite style. Essentially it's a sculpture that just happens to pick up an AM band. Now what?

Find a radio and it's not JUST a radio, but someone's sitting in an office thinking of shit to cram in there. What, you made a radio? Please. Add a clock, a CD player, tape player, 8 track player, equalizer, fish scaler, rectal thermometer and then we'll talk. Where to put it? Who the fuck cares, grab a plastic box and shove all that shit in there and call it a day. Ugly.

It's not hard to see why I and many others love the golden era. Take a look at automobiles. Nowadays design is sort of an afterthought, all that matters is how well they perform in a wind tunnel. I'll take a late great '58 over anything offered today.

"How's the Pontiac coming Jim? Great, bolt some more fins on that bitch. I want her to fucking fly when we retrofit them with the personal rocket engines they're sure to invent in '63. How's the clock coming along Phil? What's that? Only 8 pounds of chrome? Clean out your desk, I don't have time for you to fuck around. What you got there Frank? A pen? And it has rings floating around it for no reason? You're going to go far in this company son."

Seriously. Look at a '59 Olds and then look at an aught 6 Mini Cooper. Oh, it gets 60 miles to the gallon? That's great, where's the little purse to put my balls? Stop wasting my fucking time.

I propose we go back to a simpler time when a truck came around with bottles of milk and everything weighed a ton and was painted with fucking cancer paint and maybe had a little AIDS slapped on for taste, fuck it, if you can't handle a little AIDS in your Frigidaire then move back to Russia, commie.

A time where chrome was king and fins were in. Kids weren't fat because they were pulling a plow or working in a coal mine or something and womens knew their place (the fields) and you could buy a sprig of chocolate for a nickel and have enough change for the horseless tram to take you from here to North Columbus, and you were appreciative for the opportunity.

Now what do we have?

Fat kids with fat parents shouting "HOW DARE YOU" because the air conditioned bullet train doesn't have three foot wide seats rated to 500lbs so they can ride it to Wal Mart and pay $3.50 for four inches of deep fat fried chocolate coated honey. Oh yeah, and your speed-bump shaped car is wrapped in thirty pounds of rubber along the bottom so when you plow it through a mailbox at 40 miles an hour because you were entranced by the text spam you got on your cell advertising 30 cents off ham at Buttafucka Grocery you only total the front end costing $1,500 in repairs instead of being ejected out the front window and straight into a fucking vat of butter to baste in you fat, no-style fuck.

Where did we go wrong?

I got myself a 40's style beach cruiser after my old piece of shit bike got stolen by some moron who is sure to be surprised when they're riding it down a hill to the nearest glory hole only to find that the reason I wasn't using it is because the brakes were broken and I couldn't take it down a hill without exceeding the speed of sound.

A big, black, shiny beach cruiser with flared fenders and a bullet lamp and double wide white wall balloon tires that cruise over bumps, rocks and decaying birds with the greatest of ease. I had to have it imported. What else can you get? Go into Wal Mart or Canadian Tire or whatever and look at their bikes. It's like someone, at some point just said "Here's a triangle and some wheels, get the fuck out of my face". And people are okay with that.

WHY

Any time I take her out, I always get compliments. Some douchebag mentioned that it's "impractical" to ride although I don't go on roads with it. Yeah, that's great moron, drive your three pound carbon fibre space age polymer $4000 racing bike through 60 KPH traffic in your spandex racing uniform and Oakley sunglasses with your balls showing to the whole world and get yelled at to "GET THE FUCK OFF THE ROAD ASSHOLE". Old futurism and streamlining makes people happy and smile, modern road bikes make people scowl and gives you a sense of self importance. No time to cruise any more, everything has to be built in a wind tunnel to make sure it goes fast enough so you can get from assfucking to assfucking in the shortest possible time to ensure you miss everything there is to see.

Which, unfortunately these days is not much.

I also found myself a 1951 Frigidaire refrigerator, full of chrome and round corners and trim. I put that in my apartment, only to give my mother a heart attack when she visited.

"It's a fire hazard! It's old and top heavy and painted with lead! It's going to fall the fuck over and crush you and then your neighbour's cat, attracted by the smell of your crushed, rotting corpse will come over and drink the freon and die and her kittens will be poisoned and then you'll catch fire. Is that what you want? IS IT!?!"

Introducing safety features to shit is what started this downward spiral of design. Don't cramp a Plymouth Fury's style with seat belts and airbags, don't stick plastic finger guards in a Mixmaster, don't stap a million warning labels onto a Torcan desk fan telling you not to stick your fingers in it or your dick or use it in the shower or as a pillow or that it's inappropriate for children under three. If a kid can't learn the hard way not to jam his pudgy, fruit punch coated fingers the fuck into three whirling, razorsharp metal blades then there is nothing left to live for because you've successfully padded the whole fucking world in pillows (non allergenic!) and neatly packaged your nuts with a little bow (that might pose a choking hazard to children under three!)

So maybe that's where we lost the greatness of design. Maybe fins were proving dangerous to asshole kids who determined they were awesome places to slam their face into. Maybe chrome proved carcinogenic to infants if they're dipped in a boiling vat of it for seven hours.

My mother is worried about my safety when I fuck around with shit from the fifties. My favourite car, and one I plan on buying is the 1958 Edsel Pacer. Those of you who know about the Edsel's failure can laugh, but there's never been a more quintessentially 1950s auto as the 58 Edsel. However, its lack of seat belts, air conditioning, rubber siding, warning lights, tow cables, life rafts, signal flares and helmets worries her that it's going to kill me when I drive it. I imagine she sees it with a sort of Christine vibe:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v359/oxidizingmaterial/finaledsel.jpg

But that's exactly it. When we put art backseat to safety and features and convenience we end up with lump shaped plastic box cars and boring electronics and 400 lbs suburbanites rallying against stairs in a gym and losing sight of the awesome future the 50's promised us: Flying cars and jetpacks and robots and rods with rings floating around it to beat your kids with if they stepped out of line. I say bring back functional art: chrome, fins, streamlines, bullets and pastels and let this McMansion and Subaru shit filter itself into oblivion before people get it into their heads that rubber and flat white and stainless steel is acceptable to design shit with.

If I don't have a floating car or personal jetpack with rings floating around it soon heads are going to roll

Rug Burn Junky on 19/6/2007 at 19:49

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Well, with the rectal thermometer, I think that question is already answered.
Got that right, bitch. :thumb: As far as I'm concerned, there ain't a more beautiful car than a (http://www.fuselage.de/ply69/69ply07b.jpg) 1969 Plymouth Fury III Convertible.

My dad owned a Fury III ((http://www.fuselage.de/ply69/69ply05b.jpg) Two door hardtop, not the ghey sedan with the center post. In puke green. It was fucking glorious.) when I was a kid, and I've loved them ever since. When they say "large trunk," they fucking mean it. You could fit that beach cruiser of yours in there, flat.

Though I fucking hate beach cruisers. I was riding one around when I went to Newport Beach this past winter, and it was like trying to pilot an aircraft carrier on a 4 inch wide sidewalk with two lanes of pedestrians, bikes and rollerbladers. I think I was involved in a hit and run wherein I took out a family of four and their little dog fluffy, but I couldn't tell because of the vertigo caused by my arms being spread 6 feet to either side and wobbling everytime the bike hit a pebble of sand.

Gingerbread Man on 19/6/2007 at 20:06

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Much love for the Fury, but if you're talking Plymouth I'd have to go with a lime green 1971 Barracuda convertible. Expanding the field, I've always loved the pre-1960 look, especially dangerous, asphalt-and-pedestrian-eating motherfuckers like the '52 Pontiac Fleetleader.

I really don't see the point of several hundred varieties of the same running-shoe-looking crap we have now. Off the top of my head I could probably only name three to five unique and noteworthy car designs in general production today... not including exotics and ultra-high-end luxury stuff, obviously. And while I realise the ludicrousness of hating on modern cars when old school cars probably had far less variety of body / colour, I think the fins and curls and whitewalls and all that tastiness were a far better thing than the interchangeable plastic toys people boot around in these days.

Shit, if it wasn't for the fact that cars are virtually mobile adverts for the manufacturer, what with the huge emblems and model names and whatnot, nobody would notice the difference between a random sampling of thirty cars on the highway.

lol hyperbole ahoy


Damn right. My two favourite cars I've owned have been a 1978 Ford LTD II and a 1976 Mercury Montego. Fucking land boats, the both of them. Slip that LTD into first and gently ease the gas down, and I could have pushed a fucking cement truck out of a parking space. I probably wouldn't have had to worry about small-arms fire getting through to the inside of that thing, either. These days it's all tissue paper and tinfoil. :(

rachel on 19/6/2007 at 20:27

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http://stuff.freylia.net/topolino.png

Kolya on 19/6/2007 at 22:40

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All fine and dandy but it's you who should go back to Russia or Cuba because these are the only places where stuff still looks as you like it.
I could also point out how many people could afford a car back then and how many can do that now, and how you today have the luxury to choose between such an old, nice car and something that can safely transport your kids without costing you a fortune. But I don't want to spoil the nostalgia, as I'm frequently a victim of it too. :)