Peter Behrens's Blog, page 167

Autoliterate Subscribers: AL Has Switched To Follow.it

Dear Autoliterati, we have switched our subscription service from feedburner to follow.it so please don't be surprised when the emailed posts now come via follow.it. We made the switch because Feedburner will be defunct by July, and chose follow.it because it has some features you can now use (which didn’t exist on Feedburner), e.g. on https://follow.it/autoliterate?action=followPub&filter you can now define filters and more delivery channels, e.g. to receive your news via Telegram, news page etc. (many others to follow soon).The road ahead is wide open.
     Yeah, it's that ole Pinto Canyon Road. Presidio County, Texas.

1986 Chevrolet C10 Texas-ouest

 

West Texas 1986 Chevrolet C10

1950 Vincent Rapide

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We don't post many motorcycles here on AL mostly because we don't know a darn thing about them. But we're willing to learn. And today, seeing this Vincent on the block at BaT brought to mind Richard Thompsons's wonderful motorcycle ballad Vincent Black Lightning.  And then you need to hear Miranda Russell doing the song. And then Red Molly doing it.
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Cruise Night: Kristin Bedford and the lowriders of LA

Thanks to Stephen Hendrickson for the heads-up on Kristin Bedford's Cruise Night, a stunning look at another LA car culture. The book includes a collection of archival photos from LA's Mexican American lowriderccommunity and documents the contemporary scene as well. 

From Jacqui Palumbo's piece on CNN: "In the back of a 1952 Chevy Deluxe, a woman brushes back her hair, her heavily lined eyes closed in a moment of quiet, the words "No Soy De Ti" ("I don't belong to you") inked across her chest. Mary is a member of the Vintage Ladies Car Club, a Chicana lowriding community based in Los Angeles County, and she's one of the many lowriders photographer Kristin Bedford features in her five-year body of work "Cruise Night," which portrays the interiority of both her subjects and their cars.
"Cruise Night," recently published as a book, is a compendium of the vibrant velvet and leather interiors, wire wheels and dazzling paint jobs that make up the cars of the Mexican American lowriding community, bathed in Los Angeles' idiosyncratic golden hours or the artificial glow of ambient light at night."


"Lowriding took root in Los Angeles during the 1940s and is often traced back to the countercultural "pachucos" -- Chicano youths in colorful high-waisted, wide-legged and padded zoot suits who faced violence in the racial unrest that shook the city during World War II. Early drivers lowered their cars inches from the ground -- often with the help of a few well-placed sandbags -- and cruised them slow through the city streets; they were the opposite of the speedy and popular hot rod."


Autoliterate has posted on "The High Art of Riding Low: Ranflas, Corazón e Inspiración" at LA's Peterson Automotive Museum in 2017. 

1954 Buick Special

Maynard Bray caught the car in Downeast Maine. Speaking of Buicks, here's an Electra from the amazing year of 1959. And a 1958 Roadmaster. 

Internationally-minded

 

From Alex Emond: "Spotted in Tompkins, Saskatchewan. The grey truck seems  close to finished . Tasteful restoration, good colour choice, I'd say. The 3 works-not-quite-in-progress were elsewhere in the same village. Once upon a time there must have been a dealer in Tompkins, Sask., or nearby."AL: this International Harvester R-150 was for sale on Deer Isle, Maine back in February. Alex caught a 1940 International Model D hiding out in a barn last summer.

Toyota Workhorse

 

1995 Toyota Xtra Cab v6 4x4, on the block today at BaT.

1961 Buick LeSabre

 

From Markus Anstadt, in Denver: "Here's a 1961 Buick Le Sabre spotted on a Denver street in the fall of 2020. Note the JFK for President bumper sticker."Autoliterate believes that 1961 was annus mirabilis automobilia.

1965 Mustang convertible

 

Michael Moore in the East Bay caught the car. Last one we saw was in Cambridge.

Ford Econoline pickup. Marfa, Texas.

Basha Burwell spotted the Econoline in Marfa. Chevy's version of this truck was the Corvair rampside. We caught another E'Line on the other side of Paisano Pass in Alpine Texas. And how about this 1961 Chevrolet Greenbrier van? And (below) that freerange truck bed...? AL's guessing Chevy 1960-64.