from New Mexico

All images ©JW Burleson 2012

"Mutant Truck, Pepto Sky"                    

"Ocate, N.M. Flatbed"            

"Storm Approaching Ocate, N.M. "

"North San Ysidro, N.M."

"Retired Power Wagon, Encino N.M."

"Villanueva, N.M."

takes a girl to drive a truck, part 2

Michael S. Moore responding to last Saturday's Autoliterate post re. girls, boots, trucks:
"First off, it's not where the boots are bought, it's where they've been. Here's Her's.

"She sez there's at least 180 miles on them, walking, and that was just last summer...dunno where they came from, but it does appear they spent some time on the Smoke Creek Desert.  While I'm at it, here's Her Truck (ran when parked; one of these days we'll have to find someone around Walsenburg comparabe to your Marfa guy and get it back on the road.)----M.S.M

John Wall Barger & blue Dodge

" I just read this poem in a brand-new collection from Halifax poet John Wall Barger (currently living in Hong Kong), his second collection, Hummingbird (Palimpsest). It’s a gutsy, detail-packed, colorfully lively collection of what could loosely be called "travel poems"--set everywhere from New York and Mexico to Taiwan, India, and Italy. The following is in the sub-genre of childhood on-the-road poems.  Notice that a couple of passages are in italics. And, yes, "de-sert" (with hyphen) is part of the poem. The book also includes a couple of Greyhound bus poems, and one set on a Mexican bus." --Brian Bartlett

Away

 

from the haunted doghouse

from our high shuttered house with the gutters & frogs barking --

 

between my parents in the blue truck

on the grey highway

 

we rattled like a bag of tools, an army tank

-- the insides of the blue truck

 

shiver at my two feel like green bean sprouts

under the DODGE wheel

 

shiver, wink, spark

like fireflies, gold vines, frog guts, frantic.

 

Dad rolls down the window,

spits away! The road hacks & coughs right back.

 

Out back under the mackinaw

are my Tinker Toys & Lincoln Logs. Telephone poles

 

are stickmen with broken kites.

Dad flattens his fingers

 

on radio buttons, one knuckle

a triangle, I've been through the de-sert

 

on a horse with no name, now his sore pinky taps

my knee, my mother Jean winces at it,

 

sews some more, It felt good to be out of the rain . . .

Her hands on needles & canvas

 

are warm carrots --

she smells like sunlight, mint,

 

she smells quiet today,

glad maybe to sew our future tipi home in Nova Scotia.

 

Away empty doghouse!

Away crooked rope swing!

 

Far from here anyway, this blue truck,

this boundless bobbing line

 

of electric thread,

my left eye fixed on a crystal nick

 

in the windshield.

                                                                  --John Wall Barger

Ferrari. Porsche. Speedway. This is not a truck post.

Okay, I'm supposed to be on a book-tour, tirelessly promoting my new novel The O'Briens. And I am: I've been talking, reading, and selling The O'Briens for the past week in New Jersey, in Pennsylvania, and all around North Carolina. Heading to Toronto next, for a couple of book events on Wednesday and Thursday. But, thanks to some book guys who are also car guys, today I rode through the green hills from Winston-Salem to the Virginia International Raceway in this innocuous, totally bland, ho-hum, meek, bud-vase-friendly little econocar:

(Ferrari cognoscenti will already have identified a _ _ _.) More on the little red imposter next post. At VIR I was able to clock some race laps (riding shotgun) in this Porsche:

                                                                Ho-hum, another day in the book trade.

Nova Mar Vista

Saw this Nova (1970) on a walkabout, rainy spring day, Mar Vista, L.A.

The Dodge truck has posted before, but every time I see it--in Mar Vista--I want it.

Another Mar Vistan. 3/4 ton. 1972? For sale, too,

My Brilliant Careerism, part 14

The Michael Silverblatt/Bookworm interview that I taped in LA a couple of weeks back was aired yesterday, on KCRW. You can find the podcast here.  We both admire the films of Terence Malick.  Michael is passionate about books, and a "Bookworm" interview really is a conversation.
         My new novel The O'Briens has gone into a second printing. The Canadian paperback is out (in Canada). And Random House has just done a new printing of my first novel, The Law of Dreams.
         I'm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina this morning, heading to Winston-Salem this afternoon. This evening I'll be signing books, 6pm-9pm at the Associated Arttists Gallery Hop event in downtown W-S. Tomorrow I'm reading at Barnhill's Books in Winston-Salem, 5pm.
         Of course while in Southern California I kept an eye out for machines, and came across this brilliant pair of Impalas, '63 and '62, in Santa Barbara.

rat rod: the 1945 Chevrolet pickup

I love this 1945 Chevrolet pickup, which belongs to Michael S. Moore. Rebuilt with a rat-rod aesthetic: unfinished look; bare essentials. Meant to be driven, not merely shown. And Moore proved that by driving the machine from Colorado to Califoria in the winter.

"Built by James Gardiner of Brokenlight Customs in Berthoud, Colorado, over the winter of 2010 - 2011.  

" it was sufficiently together to drive from Berthoud to California in February of last year...I flew to Denver, picked up the truck the same afternoon, and left the next day after James made some adjustments to the linkage.  First night, over the Rockies, was spent in Fruita, CO; I then crossed Utah and stopped in Ely, Nevada.

"Third day crossed Nevada, stayed in Reno, visited friends and set out for California only to have 80 shut down by a blizzard...

"...while I was breakfasting in Truckee...the truck's too low to for chains so I snuck into California over Yuba Pass...below 5500' it rained, all the way to the Bay Area." --M.S.M

A note on rat rods from Dan Picasso:

"For many years I was affiliated with fellows building this very type of Hot Rod- a great deal of importance was placed upon using period-correct and arcane speed parts, wheels, tires, instruments, engines such as Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Pontiac, Buick and so forth [avoiding the ubiquitous Chevy smallblock] and embracing the inevitable [rust] as opposed to spending thousands for perfect paint-  as a reaction to the creeping decimalism of modern hotrodding which was becoming a rich man's game.

Naturally this aesthetic became popular among the gold-chainers, and consequently the prices on our parts and cars rose to the extent even the crusty stuff became expensive.  Kind of like how funky neighborhoods populated by artists, writers and musicians without a pot to piss in were gentrified and taken over by the moneyed set, and the vanguard types had to leave.  Sic semper argentum.

Feh."  -D.P.