Peter Behrens's Blog, page 530

CALIFORNIA SLEDS

 These images from the Benicia (Calif.) Band Benefit Car Show are all courtesy of our man in the Bay Area, MSM. And that's his 1945 Chevrolet pickup built by James Gardiner of Brokenlight Customs.

Step-Vans: Value Van, Kurbmaster, and Citroen HY

Alex Emond©2013 Alex Emond ©2013

Jonathan Meades and Places

"He (Meades) talks about the suburbs of Brussels, Birmingham’s road system or the churches of the 1960s as if they were the most important, intellectually intricate things around. Which, of course, they often are: what need is there, he asks, for Donald Judd when there’s the Isle of Grain ....

"What Meades does most often is praise things, especially things that are habitually ignored: he is surely our greatest exponent of what the Russian Formalists calledostranenie, ‘making-strange’. Architecture, as an art form, isn’t quite mundane enough to be made strange, and for that reason Meades would seldom recognise his writing as being about ‘architecture’ as such. Rather, it is about Place, somewhere architecture happens, at times in a very dramatic way, but doesn’t necessarily have the leading role. Architects take non-art, ‘the rich oddness of what we take for granted’, the mutability, detritus and accident that define truly worthwhile Place, and replace them with something static and unchangeable. However, unlike Iain Sinclair or the London ‘psychogeographers’, with their taste for pathetic fallacies and loathing for anything remotely new, Meades does not fetishise the spaces between. ‘I have to admit to a fondness for pitted former rolling stock dumped in fields and for abandoned filling stations,’ he writes. ‘But man cannot live by oxidisation alone.'" 
--from Owen Hatherley's review of Museums Without Walls by Jonathan Meades.  You can read the whole review here.

1964 Pontiac Laurentian Safari Station Wagon

from our correspondent in the Canadian Rockies, Alex Emond:
"PB, you should be wearing a G.P.S. collar, like biologists put on albatross, so we can just look at a map and see where you are and where you have been. 
"Yesterday morning I saw this outrageous hipster hearse out in the "Industrial Compound" here in Banff. Very, very cool.  Kind of funny that Banff, which has virtually no industries besides T-shirt silkscreening, drycleaning and a bottle depot, has an Industrial Compound. Best views in town!"--AE
(Check out this AL post on Canadian Pontiacs)

"The Ford Country Squire" Jane Hilberry

The Ford Country Squire
At ten, when the Rector’sfamily asked me to their cottage,I was thrilled.  I sat
with the suntanned childrenin the backseat and atefrom their bag of chips. 
The windows were sealedin the air-conditioned station wagon,and some fresh air
would have been good —how fast the trees pass, how strangelythe earth spins—
and I a fugitivefrom my own godless family,trying to join
this church, this life—But the leaves on the treescurled and I followed,
doubled over, my mouthhopeless and openand there, on the new-
smelling floor mat,I rejected the transplant.I left my mark. 
                           -JANE HILBERRY
                           "The Ford Country Squire" appeared originally in the online journal Ohio Edit

Missing Amsterdam

Advanced Design 1953 Chevrolet 3100 half-ton pickup, WoodenBoat, and "Aphrodite"

Sean McKay is working on this truck at his shop, Affordable Performance, on the Naskeag Road in Brooklin, Maine--a couple miles past The WoodenBoat School and the other end of town from Brooklin Boatyard. Speaking of BBY, I went down to Center Harbor yesterday, a good blue day, steady cold 15 knot breeze from NW. There are maybe a dozen boats out on their moorings so far. The season begins.



Here's Aphrodite at the BBY last year. A North Shore cruiser. Long Island to Wall Street. She was rebuilt and restored at Brooklin and comes back every year for a tune-up. There are a lot of very talented craftsmen in this little Maine town.

Travelling Light by Peter Behrens

Travelling Light, (Canadian spelling!--and The New Yorker) my new short story collection, is being published this month by House of Anansi. You might recognize the cover photo, by Jarrod McCabe, from a series of AL posts that ran Dec 2011-Jan 2012: JM's photographic essay on his winter road trip from Montana to Massachusetts in a brand-new/old F250.    The first story in the book is called "Civil Wars" and you can read it here. The first Travelling Light newspaper review apeared in Friday's Toronto Star. Also a review in the May issue of Quill & Quire
  The book ought to be available this week from Canada's wonderful & crucial independent booksellers  and online from Amazon.ca and Chapters/Indigo (they both will ship orders to the US.)  Travelling Light is downloadable from iTunes

1951 MG TD on the Naskeag Road

Time to get an inspection sticker. Drove out to Sean McKay's shop, Affordable Performance, on the Naskeag Road. One of the great things is the drive out there, on the Naskeag Road, especially on a blue  sky day in early May. Great view of Blue Hill Bay from the Amen Farm.
Affordable Performance is across the street from the cemetery...
and next door to a church...
The shop has been a car shop probably since the Model T era
Sean was working on a 1951 MG TD

1975 GMC Sierra Grande 15: Marfa & Maine

The big story of the week here is the release of the truck from its winter storage in a barn--actually, it has been locked up since we left for The Netherlands last August. A 1975 GMC Sierra Grande 15, with a Chevrolet tailgate. Charged the battery yesterday. Today she fired up with a snort and rumble. Maybe I'll post some photographs tomorrow. Here are a few from Texas, where we found the truck  sitting in Bee Pierce's lot one morning, a few years back. She was originally sold by Casner Motors in Marfa, Texas in 1975 and spent most of her life in Presidio County...







but now she lives in Maine.