Category: Uncategorized

Electric Boogaloo

Articles like this always strike my fancy.  It’s not that I want to start ripping my car apart or that I see converting cars as a feasible process or something that people are going to rally to.  Nonetheless being my father’s son I do have a nostalgia for working on vehicles.  I will be the first to admit that I fell pretty far from the tree and there’s plenty to do with cars that I don’t understand.  Instead I sit around in autoshop waiting rooms wishing I had paid closer attention when I was a kid.

Still, there’s something to the image of people working through the gas problem we have right now and which is only going to get worse.  These guys are from MIT and aren’t folks sitting around in a garage.  That’s what I’d like to see though.  There’s something uplifting about the idea of folks getting fed up and saying “screw it, let’s convert the car.”  Maybe it’s just the tangible feeling that comes along with “fixing” a problem.

The Lost Generation

Interesting piece on the perception of WWI in the US.  Part of my project will necessarily be framed by WWI and the effect that it had on the nation as a whole.  One thing I find interesting about the piece is the way Lengel basis our collective memory on film.  I think that there has been a wider portrayal of the war in other venues.  The dissatisfaction of the 20s would seem to at least point to that.  This isn’t to say that Lengel isn’t on to something here.  Is it any wonder that so many ex patriots went to Europe?  Rememberence (Veterans) day in England at least is a much more tangible event than it is here and there’s certainly still a collective memory of the Great War.  The issue here is how the teens gets turned into a blank spot of American history.  Everything happened “over there,” but the fact is that the effects of the war were already home roosting.  On a smaller scale it is not unlike Vietnam or this very moment.