RUDIMENTS, pt. 190
Making Cars
One time about 1966 someone's
father drove us to the airport,
Newark, all we ever called it.
Back then it was pretty neat
because they had this lounge
area, high up by a level or two,
and it was faced with enormous
glass, and had some chairs,
auditorium style but not vast
or anything, maybe 25 seats.
That was back in the day when
no one cared who came and
went, no one looked twice and
passengers, visitors, travelers
and anybody could just hang
around. They had these little
walkway-gate things and at
each one was a posted light
board or something with arrivals
and departures and where this
gate-flight was headed or
coming in from, and when.
You could just walk from
gate to gate. But what I liked,
and did it a few times, was
just to take an afternoon,
Saturdays I guess it was,
and just sit there - it was
like a big real-life movie
screen outside all that glass.
You'd see planes coming in,
landing, taxi-ing, lining up for
flights out, unloading, the
carousels coming and going
- for luggage and food and the
guys who worked the cargo
bays and luggage carriages
and all. It was fascinating
and beyond all meaning, for
me, especially, in that flying
was a whole other option I'd
never been exposed to. I didn't
know it from anything and so
all I saw was adventure. It
seemed crazy for 'metal' to
be put to such use - riveted
and welded, heavy and
streamlined, ripping off into
clear air, or descending from
it. There really was an entire
class of people to whom this
was all nothing. Chicago and
L.A. on a whim. Fascinating.
I couldn't structure my own
life broadly enough to take all
that in. Yet I was sure that those
people thought nothing of this
in the manner I did - to them it
was just their form of commerce,
discourse, talking away. I'd sit
there just mesmerized, thinking
about the world in terms of what
I saw. I remembered well, about
1957, being a kid and, in my yard,
looking up and seeing my first 'jet'
- a French Caravelle - in the sky,
instead of the usual square-form
prop planes that had dotted the
sky constantly until then. That
was the beginning of the days
of the Beings and and that
whole 707, 727, 737, 747, and
on, thing, as the planes progressed
in size, speed and capacity. I'd
never before seen jet engines
or turbos or whatever they were
hanging on the rear tails of a plane,
and the swept-back wings of the
jets. It was all sudden and new,
with their own new sound too.
That was a turning point of
the world for me. I remember
it well. One by one, inch by inch,
all things were underway with
transformation. All the trains
running past my yard had been
electrified, and there was no
more soot and smoke as they
had chugged by, previously.
The step-up in efficiency and
cleanliness and sound was
considered an improvement,
but I already felt it as a loss.
-
The world I had known was
fading - being replaced by
different definitions of words
I'd never used anyway.
Everyone was happy-go-lucky
about things. I tried to stop it,
slow it down, and by extension,
myself - remaining aloof,
away. Maybe, even as a kid,
I changed my own world, at
age 8, with that train crash -
it gave me the space and time
I needed to remove myself
from the normal run of
everyday matter. When I
awoke, months later, it was
as if I was or had been,
Christopher Columbus himself,
with a whole new world. Same
world anyway, but I saw it totally
different, less like the sailor-boy
Columbus and more like, or as
if, he'd time-traveled and
returned, instead of just
sailing some guttural sea.
-
You know, we all enter
corridors, each of us, and
those corridors are our own
worlds - entryways and
side-paths beckoning. All
along the way we have
choices and needs and
understandings, and we
have to meet them or
determine at least our
own ways of dealing
with them - just like
that enormous pane of
airplane glass I watched
through. Aloof, and fascinated
too, I tried understanding the
situation given. Not an easy
task. It seemed like
everywhere around me
the world was getting
smaller by design. Speed
and ease were making
everything accessible. A
funny sidebar to this is,
whenever, back in the mid-70's
or something, when President
Carter had all the energy-crisis
stuff going on, the speed limits
on all the highways were being
brought down to 55. That was
a big setback - supposedly a
person's car ran 'most efficiently'
at 55mph, for gas mileage and
all. Everyone back then was in
a near hysteria and panic over
the fact that scientists had
proclaimed we'd run of gasoline
by 1992 or so, and face a
world without car-fuel. People
went nuts. Of course in 1974
it was like 57 cents a gallon
and once they got to the
'shortage-threshold' price
of a dollar or dollar-ten, and
then up from there, all of a
sudden a few years later
there was plenty of fuel,
and now you never hear a
word about us 'running out
of' gasoline (oil). It's all an
induced hysteria for control,
like they do now with global
warming and all that
faux-proto-science stuff; to
command people, and institute
controls. The world doesn't
change, we just interpret it
differently each time. The
world does what it God-damn
pleases, to us or not, with us
or without us. Anyway, about
that time I wrote a piece in
which I used the cutting of
the speed limit, in light of the
Monroe Doctrine, and tied
them together. (I'll tell you
it in a minute). I sent it off to
a friend of mine, in California,
Ed Rudolph, an old Studio
School guy when he lived in
NYC. He thought it was great,
and he took it somewhere and
read it, some college thing, and
it was the big hit of the semester
- raves and accolades. Pretty cool.
The point I made was that the
essence of the Monroe Doctrine
(America stretching from sea to
sea) had been achieved, and the
American people were getting
agitated and stir-crazy with
having nowhere new to discover,
feeling closed in, stateside the
land having been closed. The
government's reaction this
was to lower the speed limits
everywhere so that it would
take people longer to get
anywhere, long distance
anyway, and so they'd get
the feeling that the country
was still large and vast and
untapped. Yeah, you had
to be there.
No comments:
Post a Comment