Great recommendations... the town/country contrast and the Steinbeck recommendation. The functions of machines in
Grapes of Wrath are ambivalent, right? The "Cats" that demolish housing and farms, the tractors that industrialize the farm, and the car that they try to use as a vehicle of escape. And for
Travels with Charlie Steinbeck *made* that camper to seek America in. I have the same feeling about Kerouac versus Steinbeck.
Other film possibilities:
Grease
The Wild One
Easy Rider
Fast & Furious (2001)
Smoke Signals
Most of these films, except Grease are in some sense a comment on the Western or an application of its metaphors and characterizations in new contexts... I like trying to reach deep into the mythic and technological history: prairie schooners and cowboy duds. And I'll make presentations in that direction. But for texts I only have three weeks, I need material to frame the inquiry around pathways through American culture that suggest how ecomodding becomes as "American" as a Western, I suppose... you see Top Gear reaching for this kind of cultural politics in their short clip about the sipster: the opening and closing sequences are classic Western genre references. The camera angles at the start are much like any Western where we meet the forbidding land before we meet the outlaw/hero who will save the town (in this case "save the world"). The final seconds feature sipster saddled-up and riding off into the sunset. Those are among the most powerful and motivating metaphors in American life... their marketers knew what they were doing. It's superficial in their form. I want the students to think about this stuff in grainer grassroots contexts ... think of it while hacking cars, or hanging out with car hackers ... in the culture of the customizers and amateur engineers that populate parking-lot carshows and ecomodding challenges.
Quote:
Originally Posted by slowmover
(I'll have to write this quickly)
Differentiate between town & country.
A car in the city is the normal Coasty viewpoint, West or East (and irrelevant ethnic takes; plus boring suburbia), but for 80% of America it was access to goods/services over part of a larger region that the car was revolutionary. Steinbeck is a better choice, both Grapes and Travels than opium-eater Kerouac. One needs the memory of the hatred for the railroads, but also the limitations of the horse. Damned both ways. The "car" as that synthesis of liberation from the problems of both.
The Wild Bunch is a much better choice than T&L, for the car represents the old nomad versus land-tied problem anew -- Gypsy versus farmer, Jewish mendicant versus city-dweller; nomad fear meme -- and fits better with Pirsig though that both use motorcycles is irrelevant; stage-props; Wagner stripped down. We come and go as we please, but we are thus tied to the machinery irrevocably.
Tying it together under Hucho ought to be interesting: the lowest cost over a maximum distance (as motorcycles are useless) for the transport of persons & small goods. Comancheros and coastal schooners are an even better set of analogies: willing to risk the frontiers external and internal. A sci-fi novel of asteroid-mining by huge numbers of skilled individuals -- risk-takers, loosely co-aligned -- is another (even if perfectly unlikely; as a thought exercise by some authors; maybe an excerpt from K.S. Robinson Mars series).
Fossil fuel meant dominion over climate & terrain. Cast it against Vaclav Smil and societal time-frames of energy-sources. An individual can find ways to transport high btu liquids. Good luck, only, that he is not in Vichy France keeping a charcoal-burning car supplied. The navel-gazing version of cars is long-dead. Corpse a'horseback since 1973.
Forests and coal mines once, electrical generation next -- all are tied to economies of scale.
Personal "independence" may as well have been the ad slogan. But to cast it as energy independence among small groups would be a better realization. Isolation didn't work out.
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