Austin Kleon

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Mechanics who hate cars

I used to take my ’97 Honda Accord to Sam Bell at the Lusty Wrench in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He recently closed up his shop after 40 years, and this is what he had to say about cars:

I was reminded of Sam when I read this profile of Car Talk’s Ray Magliozzi:

Let’s get something out of the way up front: Ray Magliozzi hates cars. And not in a my-car-is-a-pain-in-the-ass-and-it’s-always-breaking kind of way (though there is some of that too), but in a they’re-killing-the-planet kind of way. “How could you not?” Ray told me earlier this year. “They’re ruining the fabric of our lives.”

Ray talked to a podcast called The War on Cars about how much his brother and co-host Tom Magliozzi hated cars, too:

It was kind of odd that we did the show together for so many years, but he hated the idea of cars consuming our lives, our money, clogging up the streets, polluting the air, all the things that you hate, too…. My brother hated cars. And yet he—for years and years, I tried to convince him that if he didn’t live in Cambridge and wasn’t able to get around with public transportation or by walking, he’d have to have a car that was reliable…. But he was against cars because of all the things they do to our lives and to our world. And I agree on all of those points.

That was, of course, part of the genius of Car Talk: You didn’t have to even like cars to enjoy listening to it. (Or making it, obviously.)

The same was true of Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting. From a 2001 NYTimes piece:

Ross’s expanding circle of viewers are, for the most part, not even painting, nor do they have any plans to start. They watch because ”The Joy of Painting” is the most relaxing show on television….

“It’s funny to talk to these people,” said Joan Kowalski, the media director of Bob Ross Inc. and Walt’s daughter. “Because they think they’re the only ones who watch to take a nap. Bob knew about this. People would come up to him and say, `I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’ve been putting me to sleep for 10 years.’ He’d love it.”

“There are people who just like to hear him talk,” one station manager said. “We even get letters from blind people who say they tune in because he gives them hope.”

And while we’re talking famous public media figures, Mister Rogers hated television and only got into it because he thought he could make it a lot better.  (A kind of negative self-definition.)

Grumpy on the moon

As a borderline moon worshipper, I was enjoying most of the enthusiasm for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing last week (especially this thread of moon images, these vintage moon-crazy ads, gas station maps, and these poems about the moon) but another thing I was enjoying was digging up testimonials from people who were less-than-enthusiastic about it in 1969.

The New Yorker reprinted a Talk of the Town piece in which E.B. White wrote about planting the American flag:

What a pity that in our moment of triumph we did not forswear the familiar Iwo Jima scene and plant instead a device acceptable to all: a limp white handkerchief, perhaps, symbol of the common cold, which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all.

And later, recounts this bar scene:

“Damn!” the same voice said. “I hope those Whiteys never come back. They might just decide to stay there, too.”

“Nah,” a female voice said. “You can be sure the white man don’t want to live up there. It’s got no gold, it’s got no silver, it’s got no oil. And ain’t that what Whitey wants? He don’t want no part of all that rock up there.”

 

I love Gil Scott-Heron’s “White on the Moon,” which Jody Rosen called “one of the greatest, funniest pieces of protest art in any medium”:

I can’t pay no doctor bills
But whitey’s on the moon
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still
While whitey’s on the moon
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey’s on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey’s on the moon

I also like W.H. Auden’s grumpy poem “Moon Landing.” One of my favorite verses:

A grand gesture. But what does it period?
What does it osse? We were always adroiter
with objects than lives, and more facile
at courage than kindness

I’m fascinated by Michael Collins, the astronaut who orbited the moon alone while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong did their thing on the surface. I laughed at this bit in his NPR interview:

SIMON: Do you ever look up at the moon nowadays?

COLLINS: Not on purpose, no. I’ll be walking down, shuffling down the sidewalk after dark. And all of a sudden, I’ll kind of look up and go, whoa.

SIMON: (Laughter).

COLLINS: Oh, I went there one time.

At least, like Auden said:

no engine can shift my perspective.

Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens…”

* * *

UPDATE: 7/20/2021

Well, here we are, a half century later, and little has changed:

Life imitates comedy.

The moon landing happened during the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, and my favorite part of documentary Summer of Soul is a brilliant montage of juxtaposed reactions:

Which culminates with this joke from the comedian Redd Foxx:

UPDATE 2023/04/27: Here’s another fun one: Pablo Picasso quoted in the New York Times on July 21, 1969:

Wandering zines

If you pop over to Keri Smith’s website for her book The Wander Society, you’ll find printable PDFs of “The Wander Society Pocket Library,” handy little pocket zines you can print out and stick in your pocket before you go sauntering around.

The essays:

  • “The Art of Idleness” by Steven Graham
  • “Sauntering” by Christopher Morley
  • “Evening Over Sussex” by Virginia Woolf
  • “Walking” by Henry David Thoreau

They’re all worth reading, but my favorite, no surprise, is HDT’s “Walking” (1862):

If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.

It’s chased nicely by Morley, who says, “I can be as solitary in a city street as ever Thoreau was in Walden.” (1920, from Travels in Philadelphia.)

“The Art of Idleness” (1926) is excerpted from the recently reissued The Gentle Art of Tramping.

Virginia Woolf, by the way, was a fan of Thoreau, and wrote this about him in 1917, on his 100th birthday:

Few people, it is safe to say, take such an interest in themselves as Thoreau took in himself; for if we are gifted with an intense egoism we do our best to suffocate it in order to live on decent terms with our neighbours. We are not sufficiently sure of ourselves to break completely with the established order. This was Thoreau’s adventure; his books are the record of that experiment and its results. He did everything he could to intensify his own understanding of himself, to foster whatever was peculiar, to isolate himself from contact with any force that might interfere with his immensely valuable gift of personality. It was his sacred duty, not to himself alone but to the world; and a man is scarcely an egoist who is an egoist on so grand a scale. When we read “Walden,” the record of his two years in the woods, we have a sense of beholding life through a very powerful magnifying glass.

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