Something a little different for the blog, but a film I found particularly interesting. This is a fascinating look through the soon to be auctioned Rusi Klein collection of cars in Los Angeles by Magnus Walker.
One thing that rang true after watching this was the enduring interest in scrap and salvage yards, and how photogenic they can be. One of my first magazine covers was on a country lifestyle magazine, with a truck at Rush Green with weeds growing through it. It made the readers of Hertfordshire Countryside sit up, and write and telephone in!
Anyway, one for the next 20 minutes or so you’ve got free to just wonder at the backstories of all these vehicles, and what the future holds for them..
Albion Yard 
You had me at Magnus Walker. Sold. And you’re right about the captivating value of cars in states like you introduce. Until we left the Island, my Saturdays often saw me wandering local salvage yard Brackeley Auto Parts. Brackeley was a “u-pick” lot where you show up with your tools and wander their yard in the hopes of finding a car like the one you are working on that wasn’t broken like the one you are working on. Most days I was an imposter who just liked walking through the rows of cars and imagining a version of me who owned one, or knew what it was like to own one. What was it like to have a 1980’s Buick? Was I frustrated that [insert Brand here] would be one of the first brands in Canada to tease buyers with longer payment terms on cars that would be broken before the payments ran out?
Brackeley’s sign advertised junk cars for salvage. But inside their gates was the stuff of dreams. Imaginations arranged on pillars of cinder blocks. Potential ripe for the harvest.
I love it. Now, let’s go rev up the TV! It’s watching time.
Chris
Chris, I L ove that memory, and yes Magnus’ attitude cars are for living and driving is so refreshing! I get triggered if I end up around an old airplane, the smell of aluminium and the inside of a closed up fuselage, it has a funk all of its own, immediately has me wondering about its backstory, where it’s been, who with, was it a good one or a hangar queen, so many unanswered questions. I’ve been meaning to try and find a small aerofoil cross section to do a variation on the wing design too!
Oooh, airplanes are a thing that would be surreal to experience like that. In daily (“civilian”?) life they’re a ride on but don’t touch thing. In museums they’re a touch but don’t feel thing. Photos of where they store abandoned airplanes seem surreal. The sum of things like that is like being told to only feel half a feeling where what you wind up with is an acute sense of what you can’t feel instead of what you can.
Airplanes, cars, and trains. The tools of connection and I love this thread about how we do.
Part of that connection comes with the associations between the person and the artefact. To my daughters it’d be a smelly old plane, but having a lifetime connection and interest in them, to me they have a ‘life’, maybe that’s why we preserve aircraft/trains/cars etc because they are a form storyteller
I agree. Inside that construct is a fascinating opportunity to learn about our own fascination. (The same scenario works in my house too)
I could try convincing [loved one’s name here] about attributes of the thing why I think I like it and why they should now that I’ve taken the time to illuminate them.
But it’s also an invitation to get to know them and me better. Really get dirty with a little retrospective interrogation (“Why do I actually like this?”) and in that expose a little vulnerability. Loved ones are different from acquaintances because love moves through vulnerable openings in our facade to move between people so we can share a feeling (transacting love?).
Why certain metal structures on wheels with motors I really like and why others stir no emotion at all; I guess.
Does the motor inherently give the metal structure ‘life’, therefore it’s easier to engage with?
I hadn’t thought of that question. I love it.
Only because I think we leave behind a bit of ourself when we make or use things, I guess I just always thought the feeling of a life in a thing was recognizing the possibility others have been in this thing. A bus without a motor would still feel like a bus, right?
Maybe it’s the wheels? Somehow when you take a train off its wheels it feels more like a shed.
There’s definitely a connection between the whole entity. A bus without wheels would be meh, in the know, you’d know it doesn’t, didn’t couldn’t work. Is the visual potential to ‘work’ a key? At a scrap yard we see an empty engine bay we can imagine the motor in there, Detroit V8, Porsche flat six. With an aircraft the Merlin, or a JT-8 hung on a wing behind streamlined panels. I can ‘feel’ all these emotions. If you take me to a preserved railway I have very little interest, I do not go to them, never have. Show me a disused line or withdrawn stock, locomotives though, Sold, as you say!
Great minds think alike: I was also about to ask about “potential”.
I was thinking of all those trains left static in public parks. It’s clear that this could never do its job so it exists in a paradox of clearly having purpose but that time has passed. They become like three-dimensional pictures of a train.