RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 177 Making Cars I always considered a lot of things to be simply items that slowed one down. I was all about speed at this point, swiftly getting things done. I didn't much think about banking the angles, shooting off the sides, or any of that strategy stuff. That was all for the crafty ones, the movers who figured they were going places. Where? Jobs, careers, stock and board rooms, banking or government service. I had a friend, Howie Kessler, who said, and all he cared about, was that he wanted to be a civil engineer. He knew this at like age 14. I said, 'What's that? What do they do?' He replied, 'They build things for government agencies, roads, bridges highways and all.' Huh? How he ever got to that point is beyond me, and I don't know if that's what he actually ended up as, but he knew what he wanted. Or so he claimed. I myself was so  mixed up into escape and subterfuge  that a...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 176 Making Cars One thing I never, ever, liked was manufactured emotion  - pretty much the kind of stuff you'd see back then, 1960's TV. It was, and still is, really miserable. And not only is it miserable but it's also responsible for much of the resultant problems we face now; all sorts of things just now coming home to roost. The results of sexist violence, abuse, use of women as sex objects and men as walking lust-buckets. That's the paradigm as it was drawn, and guess who drew it? The same breed of snipe who still draw it. And their vulgarity and abuse of others is well-rewarded. It's a real dilemma, and one marked and made much worse by the validation given to it by the millions who sit through and watch it, attend it, ask for it. So, I guess there's nothing to do. - I used to wonder anyway about people who'd be interested in that line of work. It all seemed so forced an...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 175 Making Cars For a while I had this thing about streamlining. I wanted to streamline the truth, have reality streamlined, even time itself. It was an easy grasp. On my wall, there was a large poster I'd somehow gotten, through my father, who'd presented it grandly to me, from General Motors. It was a selection, each illustration, date, and info, arrayed, with the car photos each about the size of a large postage stamp, of a good selection of GM cars over the years, leading up, I guess it was, to about 1960 or so. Can't remember that. I always enjoyed the photos. There was always something about cars to me, not the mechanical aspects, not the running, but the design work, the sculptural parts. How the unity of motion-ideas and design went into hard-goods, metal, glass, and steel, to somehow capture the essence of what the thing itself was. I don't think, say, a toaster or a radio, had that. They d...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 174 Making Cars One thing that used to bug me, from early on, and I could never explain it, had to do with some sort of sensation I'd get in trying to think past things. This is all difficult to explain, and I'm only using words so that makes it even harder. There's an unmarked cellular-thought limit past which the human cannot think. Just like one cannot 'see' in the dark  - meaning 'see' enough to distinguish or read -  so there's a place beyond which the 'Human' has no presence, and no means to even go. So when people used to say 'you're living in the completeness of your being, your world,' I knew they were just saying junk and not realizing the import of it at all. As an example, it's impossible to configure what it's like 'outside' of space and time. We cannot get 'beyond' the end of things. Our minds and selves cannot comprehe...