1939 Ford pickup

Posted this truck a couple years back. At Bill Grant's boatyard over in Sedgwick. Our Scout (a Cape Dory 25, not an IH 4x4) has wintered in the boatyard and it's time to start thinking about getting her wet, and all the prep work that will involve.

Nathan's coupe. From Brokenlight Customs

Nathan's coupe...courtesy Brokenlight Customs

CALIFORNIA SLEDS

 These images from the Benicia (Calif.) Band Benefit Car Show are all courtesy of our man in the Bay Area, MSM. And that's his 1945 Chevrolet pickup built by James Gardiner of Brokenlight Customs.

Step-Vans: Value Van, Kurbmaster, and Citroen HY

Alex Emond©2013

Alex Emond ©2013

Jonathan Meades and Places

"He (Meades) talks about the suburbs of Brussels, Birmingham’s road system or the churches of the 1960s as if they were the most important, intellectually intricate things around. Which, of course, they often are: what need is there, he asks, for Donald Judd when there’s the Isle of Grain ....

"What Meades does most often is praise things, especially things that are habitually ignored: he is surely our greatest exponent of what the Russian Formalists calledostranenie, ‘making-strange’. Architecture, as an art form, isn’t quite mundane enough to be made strange, and for that reason Meades would seldom recognise his writing as being about ‘architecture’ as such. Rather, it is about Place, somewhere architecture happens, at times in a very dramatic way, but doesn’t necessarily have the leading role. Architects take non-art, ‘the rich oddness of what we take for granted’, the mutability, detritus and accident that define truly worthwhile Place, and replace them with something static and unchangeable. However, unlike Iain Sinclair or the London ‘psychogeographers’, with their taste for pathetic fallacies and loathing for anything remotely new, Meades does not fetishise the spaces between. ‘I have to admit to a fondness for pitted former rolling stock dumped in fields and for abandoned filling stations,’ he writes. ‘But man cannot live by oxidisation alone.'" 
--from Owen Hatherley's review of Museums Without Walls by Jonathan Meades.  You can read the whole review here.

1964 Pontiac Laurentian Safari Station Wagon

from our correspondent in the Canadian Rockies, Alex Emond:
"PB, you should be wearing a G.P.S. collar, like biologists put on albatross, so we can just look at a map and see where you are and where you have been. 

"Yesterday morning I saw this outrageous hipster hearse out in the "Industrial Compound" here in Banff. Very, very cool.  Kind of funny that Banff, which has virtually no industries besides T-shirt silkscreening, drycleaning and a bottle depot, has an Industrial Compound. Best views in town!"--AE

(Check out this AL post on Canadian Pontiacs)
(And AL posted 1964 Pontiac wagon, a Parisienne, a couple years back.. looking for a makeover.)

"The Ford Country Squire" Jane Hilberry

The Ford Country Squire

At ten, when the Rector’s

family asked me to their cottage,

I was thrilled.  I sat

with the suntanned children

in the backseat and ate

from their bag of chips. 

The windows were sealed

in the air-conditioned station wagon,

and some fresh air

would have been good —

how fast the trees pass, how strangely

the earth spins—

and I a fugitive

from my own godless family,

trying to join

this church, this life—

But the leaves on the trees

curled and I followed,

doubled over, my mouth

hopeless and open

and there, on the new-

smelling floor mat,

I rejected the transplant.

I left my mark. 

                           -JANE HILBERRY

                           "The Ford Country Squire" appeared originally in the online journal Ohio Edit