The Coolness of Cars = The Coolness of Art October 25, 2007

So, to continue–just a bit longer–this discussion of how cars, car culture, and my childhood love of Hotwheels and all things automobilic influenced my burgeoning interest in art, I want to talk about fifth grade.

In fifth grade, I became friends with a guy named Thomas (pictured here, from my fading fifth grade class photo):

Thomas was the first friend who became a partner-in-crime, with whom I had similar enough sensibilities that we began to encourage each other’s interests and talents. By this I mean, as all the other boys were comparing notes on which was their favorite NFL team and which girl they hated the most, he and I drew pictures, wrote stories, and made up games that only we two appreciated.

I don’t mean to put too much of a fine point on this, but Thomas was probably my first artistic collaborator. One thing we often did share with each other were our drawings of cars and car-related stuff. For instance, Thomas invented the “race-track drawing,” which quickly became a staple of our classtime doodling and note-passing. This was a drawing of a fantasy race track for cars, rendered from a bird’s-eye view looking down at the race in progress.

We spent a lot of time drawing these over multiple sheets of paper that we would tape together, and we ever were competing with each other to come up with ever-more creative trappings on our courses–jumps, loop-de-loops, chasms, shark ponds, rough terrain, etc–and ever-more outlandish race cars.

I have no idea what happened to Thomas–where he ended up going to school or where he lives now–as my family moved an hour east in the middle of that school year. I never saw Thomas or any of those kids again, and, lacking my artistic collaborator, I gave up making race track drawings altogether…

And while I’m not saying that the race-track drawings were any kind of great art, I should add that fifth grade was the year that I first began to be widely identified–by parents, grandparents, teachers, fellow students–as someone with “artistic talent.” The school art teacher–who came in to teach lessons only once a week usually–actually asked my parents if she could give me private lessons, a luxury we could not really afford at the time.

As proof of this growing art-identity, consider this–my class photo from that year. You’ll note the artistic trappings on my shirt; those are paint brushes:

Man, I liked that shirt. I wouldn’t mind having one like it today.

Reveries, revelations… October 18, 2007

Although I knew, when I started this blog, that I wanted to talk about what it was in our backgrounds–mine and my brother’s–that led us both to become artistic, I hadn’t really plotted much further than this basic idea. I did not know what I actually would end up writing about, and whether what I wrote really would get to the heart of the Art Brothers premise. I had no idea why, for instance, my first post had to be about Speed Racer (other than the fact that it was such a big part of a certain section of my early years); I just knew it had to be.

Now that I’ve given it more thought, I realize that the influence of cars, California car culture, and all things car-related really did have a profound impact on my artistic outlook. For instance, David reminded me that I had a penchant, back in the day, to paint my old Hotwheels when they had become old, their paint chipped, their luster worn off. I would take a little bottle of enamel paint (I remember I had several colors–midnight blue, red, silver, gold, black), and I’d gussy them right back up.

After thinking about this, I realized that his habit came out of my interest in model cars–you know, of the sort where you buy a kit and glue the pieces together with model glue to make the whole. I did these kits very often as a kid–and though I’m certain I never did them very well, that didn’t matter so much. What I mostly loved was tweaking the designs to make them my own–painting them special colors, toying with the decals, etc. I remember in particular one model kit very clearly–a 1960ish Corvette–that I spraypainted (in the garage, of course) a sparkly candy-apple red (where these paints came from, and how I got my hands on them, I don’t know; my parents were often very hands-off, much to the benefit of my artistic development).

Here’s a good representation of what the Corvette ended up looking like (at least as I remember it in my head):

One could argue that my later artistic interest in paint, painting, gluing and collaging, and in certain cultural forms and certain shapes emerged from these early childhood car projects. Probably that’s oversimplifying things, but I will post (someday, when I find them) images of some of my earliest serious art work that reinforces the connection.

When Hotwheels Came Back Into My Life October 14, 2007

So, after working three or four years in mind-numbing cubicle land (a few years ago), something must have short-circuited somewhere in my few remaining active synapses. This is because, one day, before I even knew what was happening, I suddenly realized I was buying small toy cars to decorate my cubicle, and I had no idea why. Here’s a representative sample (of about half of the cars I ended up buying):

If I had to speculate why I suddenly became so enamored of a childhood toy, I’d suggest it was probably out of nostalgia for a lost childhood. When I was ten or so, mom and dad realized that they could no longer afford to be a one-income family. So mom had to get a job, any job (the first job was at a taco stand, if memory serves), and still there was little money left over to pay for any kind of childcare. I was often asked to be more responsible than I was prepared to be–including occasionally babysitting my brothers, and later even cooking for them.

As a result was I ended up chucking away–early on–any trapping of childhood, often giving to my brothers the toys that I’d loved as a kid (including my cars, my baseball cars, my Big Jim and GI Joe dolls. (Yes, I played with dolls; what of it?) I ended up having much less fun as a kid than I probably could have, so I suppose it makes total sense that I would later as an adult try to recapture the fun.

Portrait of the artist as a young car lover October 5, 2007

When I was a kid one of the few toy items that I had in regular supply were toy cars–primarily of the Hotwheels and Matchbox variety. As it turns out, these little items made a big impression on me.

For instance, I can still recall, all these years later, my favorite car when I was 8 years old. It was this model:

The Hi Trailer, from Matchbox series nr. 56 in 1974, a fancified version of a formula-one car. We–my brothers and I–called it the “Sidewinder” for some reason. We liked it because it was, hands down, the fastest single car we ever owned, almost never defeated on the race tracks we lined up out in the patio. This had something to do with its particular balance of weight, plus the fact that it had Matchbox wheels, making it far superior to any Hotwheels car (which tended to favor style over function).

This experience, of course, is not so unusual. Lots of kids, in my era and afterward, have become hooked on these tiny, shiny replicas–of both real and fantastical automobiles. I’m sure other people–of more academic-minded bent–have written something about how this childhood car fetishization has helped feed the ongoing cultural dominance of the automobile–from Speed Racer and Beach Boys songs in my childhood, to Pimp My Ride and The Fast and The Furious of today. Whatever the case, these toys are remarkably evocative objects to many kids, and perhaps for this reason they are remarkably enduring toys.

Two aspects of my childhood car fetish, it should be noted, are unusual. First, while this fetish vanished when I reached that dreaded age when all things childish and uncool must be put aside, it never really went away and remained latent until just a few years ago–when I inexplicably began collecting toy cars to fill my cubicle space at work.

And second, perhaps more unusual still, this fascination with the toy cars is connected to the creative impulses that became my practice of art. I’ll write more about this in a later post.

Here he comes, here comes… September 21, 2007

I’m going to start this thing off by musing on Speed Racer.

This action-adventure anime series was on TV, on good old channel 52, when we were growing up in the 70s in Los Angeles, and it was like amphetamines for us as kids. We watched it religiously, rehashed the episodes over and over, acted it out with our friends and our collection of Hotwheels, and all secretly wanted to live it.

We all wanted our own Mach 5–the car that Speed Racer drove for his dad, Pops Racer, in various international races. We all wanted a brother like Racer X, who secretly helped Speed whenever he was in trouble.

And apparently, we weren’t alone in our love for Speed and the Mach 5, as the 1990s saw numerous revivals of the show, the appearance of a host of nostalgic items (I bought a replica Mach 5 matchbox car), and an additional series.

There’s even now slated to be a revival movie, made by the guys who made Matrix. Who knew back then? We were just kids who liked Speed.