DoubleDown on Resignation!: Product Reviews from the Sadness Industrial Complex

Kentucky Fried Chicken seems to be the high water-mark:  The flurry of cleverly-engineered chicken products within the last couple decades has been....thought-provoking, to say the very least.  They introduced "Chicken-fries", back in '97, but have been sheepishly pulling them off the menu every few years, as consumer taste oscillates between indignant (and purely aspirational) health-consciousness, and gluttonous self-loathing.  Although the process of extruding chicken-paste into parallelepiped "fries," rather than vaguely blobular "nuggets," bears distinction in neither cost nor ethics, it seems that the customer just takes issue with food flaunting its artificiality so proudly.  The Colonel's newest thing is rendering regular, non-extrusion-paste chicken pieces boneless, in a mysterious process on which  can find no information whatsoever.   Just kidding.  Obviously there was a full write-up on Huff Po. The upshot is that the process is neither particularly horrifying nor remotely interesting. Some dark part of me was hoping that they had started breeding boneless chickens, a la "Oryx & Crake," because that would be terrible enough to actually deliver in narrative terms, but no. I actually got way more chuckles from reading corporate's terms and

conditions for "Boneless Happy Hour."

HOW TO OBTAIN A FREE BONELESS PIECE:
..To obtain the Free Boneless Piece...consumers should say the password “I ate the bones” to request a Free Boneless Piece or otherwise request a Free Boneless Piece...Participating KFC restaurant manager reserves the right to deny Free Boneless Piece to any person he/she reasonably believes has already received a Free Boneless Piece or has engaged in any other fraudulent activity.

I can't help picturing a despondent Bernie Madoff being denied his boneless piece with a firm, "Take a hike, bozo."

I'm kinda bummed that I didn't know about the promotion back when it was a thing, because that's just the kind of disgusting shit that I'm totally not above eating.  Realistically, the existence of, let's call it, "experimental" fast food, hinges on the assumption that the end user is purchasing and eating the product in a state of suspended self-respect.  Of course the principle example of this is the KFC Famous Bowl, immortalized via Patton Oswalt rant.

The internal dialog of Oswalt's theoretical bowl-eater are speculative, but the assumption that he is consuming it alone is probably correct.  I don't have the numbers handy, but I would estimate that roughly 100% of fast food meals are consumed alone.  Can we just call it "The Sadness Industrial Complex"?  Or did we use that for Big Pharma already?

The circumstances in which one feeds themselves S.I.C. products are those of surrender; this is what happens when you're too unorganized, too exhausted, or too chronologically bankrupt to find the actual thing you want, and settle for something so much worse, that it's embarrassing.  Consequently, the qualities you value in an S.I.C. establishment are totally inverted from those that you would in a regular restaurant.  Ideally, it should look at least somewhat dingy and decidedly low-rent, such that your physical self looks better in relief.  And you want no one there, since being seen is unpleasant at best, and has potential for sever damage with respect to social capital; once again, I don't have the data here in front of me, but I'm willing to say with confidence that if someone sees you eating a DoubleDown, the chances that person will ever have sex with you is slightly less than 0%.

Anyway, the fact is that working in a shitty office park off the expressway has led me to eat more fast food than at any other point in my life: partially a function of my laziness interfering with at-home sandwich production, and partially because the break-room in my office park is possibly the only place in north Austin that is more depressing than the interior of a Wendy's. Here are a few of the more memorable food products that I put inside my body recently.


The "Big King"  
assembled By Burger King.

Those sneaky bastards.   After three decades spent ridiculing McDonald's infinitely sequential patty-bun-patty-bun routine, they quietly slipped a knock-off Big Mac on their own menu.  That's really the only thing that's interesting here.  It's just a Big Mac you buy at Burger King.  Is this, symbolically, as massively important as it seems?  How many angry conference calls came before this impostor showed up?  Did a B.K. exec jump to his death when this product was approved?  Did an analogous McDonald's VEEP, jump on his desk to perform victorious krumping when he heard the news?  Unfortunately, eating this burger answered none of these questions.

Flavor:              2/10
Presentation:   2/10
Digestibility:    3/10

The "Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger" 
 assembled by Wendy's

Folks have gotten pretty burned out on this Pretzel Bread thing, but I totally understand why the major chains were trying to put the pretzel-treatment on absolutely everything.  Durability.  This shit is hard to deform, and consequently, this is the only fast food burger I've ever eaten that looked like the picture.  Even as a true garbage-eating adherent, I'm perplexed by the persistence bacon in fast food; the degradation of bacon starts immediately after it stops cooking, and the S.I.C. has yet to find a way around this; this bacon is exactly like any other fast food bacon: luke-warm, wet, and flavorless.   All that aside, the manufacturer's listing of caloric content is the most profound thing here.  680 calories for this hefty pile of pretzel, cheese, mayo and beef fat?   This seems...suspicious.  Do we verify these numbers? Is there an independent agency that has a mobile burger burning lab?  Fuck it. No one cares.

Flavor:              5/10
Presentation:   7/10
Digestibility:    2/10

The "Polish Sandwich"  assembled by Wienerschnitzel

Apparently this is a thing?  I first thought it was a physically-manifested Pollack joke, out of "Raising Arizona,"  but apparently this is  a product from a national franchise:  A single sliced Sausage, yellow mustard, a dill spear, both cheese and bread that appear to have been sourced from a bodega.  Polish Sandwich.    Really, I admire the simplicity here.  Although sausage itself is kind of a blackbox, there's something reassuring about getting a lunch that looks like it was simply slapped together by an absentminded parent. Here's why this is amazing.   Eating the number 9 breakfast at Micky D's leaves me with "McGriddle lipstick", a slick and persistent coating of some type of grease, and whatever syrup infusion has been chemically bonded to each little griddlecake discus.  Basically, the prospect of mysterious, synthetic poisons hidden within one's lunch isn't an entirely imagined concern, and the humble Polish Sandwich is much less anxiety inducing in this regard.  

Flavor:              4/10
Presentation:   1/10
Digestibility:    8/10

I guess I don't really have a point here.  Aside from public self-shaming.  Maybe the best hope for an improved diet is to document our worst meals as if they were our best.  

Down on the Salvage Lot

So I've been wasting a lot of film while picking parts.  Here are some, with one of my favorite passages from The Crying of Lot 49:

 "Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze,two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust–– and

when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused 
(when so little he supposed came by that out of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 cents, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes,  

for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or a car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for a drill all the bits and

pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes—it made him sick to look, but he had to look. If it had been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out, made a career: the violence that had caused each wreck being infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous. But the endless rituals of the trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long. 

Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest."

Plastic Wheel Covers and False Beams: My Personal Demons

I guess everyone has their triggers.  Some folks really like animals or whatever--one of those abused pet commercials comes on--with the chewed-up tails, tattered ears, eyes blinded by cataracts, but somehow still able to broadcast a lifetime of abject, uninterrupted pain--and they totally lose it--and forget all about the totally awesome conversation we were just having about which Katy Perry music video is the very best.  (Incidentally, it's still "Teenage Dream.")

Me?  My soul is slowly being killed by plastic wheel covers.  

A compelling case to give up on life.

I'm serious.  There are a million things people point to in our day to day lives that, to them, signal the complete collapse of reason, triumph of ignorance, and the utter futility of trying to find meaning or hope in anything, ever--and for me it's this.  Which is distracting, because, you know, they're everywhere.

Really, this design solution, if you could call it that, is the clear victor in today's marketplace; the overwhelming majority of cars sold today wear hubcaps at least this embarrassing as they leave the lot, and most will keep wearing them until the whole machine is mercifully recycled in a few years time.   

My understanding is that most folks are at least vaguely aware that the cover itself is ornamental, so it seems odd that the specific design elements in common use are so readily accepted.  Let's take it apart:  the most ubiquitous design you'll see today is this: an sunburst of false spokes, arranged in a nauseating mockery of a mid-nineties alloy, with the cheap, stamped-steel wheel clearly visible behind, and let's not forget the fake lug bolts--which are really a nice touch considering the lug bolts are the one thing that probably should be covered--and the fact that the real ones are presumably at least partially viable behind the false ones for double-ugly.  Think of the decorative spokes as knives driven deep into your eye-sockets, and the decorative bolts as salt and lemon packed into the wounds, just to make sure that it all really hurts.  Some even have fake brake rotors peeking between the fake spokes, although thankfully, this has been confined to the lowest rung, dollar-tree, aftermarket segment and no actual auto-manufacturer (not even Hyundai) has engaged this particularly idiotic practice (as of yet).

Because, don't get me wrong, I'm not against facade being used here, so long as it reads and presents as facade.  We used to do this as a matter of course, and it looked great:  Partial wheel covers, veiling only the lug pattern and hub bearing, harmoniously nesting within the steel wheel, yielding a clean, simple look, while obfuscating none of the structure itself.  Steel-on-steel; easy to manufacture, easy to clean: an elegant, timeless, and straightforward execution.  

I think I'm wet.

Basically, the modern wheel cover is the automotive equivalent of the tuxedo T-shirt:  A two-dimensional, half-joking imitation of an altogether different and infinitely more beautiful and complex arrangement, but very unconvincingly so.  The one distinct difference here is that the tuxedo T-shirt has not been widely adopted as the go-to, non-ironic formal dress solution.  People don't get married in tuxedo T-shirts and then wonder aloud at the fact that any idiot would pay even a dime more for a "real" tuxedo, when--come on--they basically look exactly the same, right?  That's what I see on the road everyday.   People driving around earnestly wearing tuxedo T-shirts.  

When I bought my current car, it was wearing some pretty gross specimens, finished in that sparkly silver which looks nothing like any kind of metal.  When I was a few blocks away from the prior owner's house, I pulled over and pried them off with my fingers.  They looked new, so realistically, I probably could have listed them for like twenty bucks on ebay, but instead, I broke them all in half and threw them in a nearby dumpster.  I guess it was worth twenty bucks to know they would never be on a car ever again.  

Caddy sans covers?  Pretty badass, actually.

Usually, pulling the caps on a big domestic number leaves it looking like the most conspicuous candidate to be the neighborhood's source of angel-dust cut with fiberglass, but at least it's honest (honest regarding the structure of the wheel that is, I'm not saying I sell angel-dust cut with fiberglass.)  Anyway, what I am saying is that, since the true wheel on my particular Buick was never meant to be exposed, it doesn't look very nice, but inasmuch as this is the actual thing holding up the car, the wheel is as honest in expression as the multi-spokes on this Austin-Healey:

Oh, hell yes. 

And, yes, I do realize that I'm probably a little over-sensitive to false structure.

A lot of my job involves doing math to figure out where to hide real columns, so that an architect can put fake columns someplace that would never fucking have fucking columns in the first fucking place.  Fucking.   Considering that a typical wheel cover is just a polar array of anywhere from five to a dozen fake columns...well, it kind of makes sense that this bothers me more than it would most.

Of course, we're not just talking columns.  Generally speaking, absolutely anything you can point to in the built world that expresses something of its material reality, be it the surface finish, an "exposed beam" or strut--all of that expression is complete falsehood, and usually as blatantly contrary to physical truth  as these plastic hubcaps. 

Disgusting.

Here's something that's very popular right now: stone veneer.  Whether in the world of pseudo-luxury custom residential, commercial or even government, you'd be hard pressed to find a large scale project that doesn't use this finish somewhere.  And insofar as structural rationalism has been out of fashion for as-near-as-makes-no-difference a century, the stone is typically haphazardly applied in a way that bears no correlation to how stone could even theoretically be used to build something.  What I really love about the practice is this: the veneer--which itself is simply cosmetic affectation applied to make the building appear more permanent, makes it nearly impossible to properly water-proof the true structure behind, whether wood or steel.  So something that would otherwise last for hundreds of years with proper maintenance,  is all but guaranteed to require demolition in less than a single generation, just so that it might look like it will last for hundreds of years.  When I was much younger, I may have found some irony in this.

And don't get me started on faux-beams.  It gets so much worse, guys.

Fucking kill me.

This is basically how we build everything now.  We've finally found a way to create things that are catastrophically expensive, embarrassingly insubstantial, and so nonsensical to any real-world, material limitation, that trying to intuit the nuts and bolts of the physical world by simply looking around you would not even be a value-neutral exercise, but one that would actively mislead you--we build so dishonestly that trying to work out the logic of creation in reverse would be more likely to simply drive you insane than to actually teach you anything.

Anyway.  Happy new year, everybody.

Capule Review: 1994 Buick LeSabre Custom Saloon

If GM and Chrysler didn't have such a longstanding history of using this naming convention, one might find some irony in the fact that the "Custom" moniker indicates that  this is the base model.

But they do, and consequently, one doesn't.

This is called "curb-appeal," folks

I never thought I'd buy a GM product.  In fact, back in high-school, had I been forced to wager what particular model I would never own, the H-platform Buick LeSabre would certainly have been a contender.  A friend's step-father drove one of these things.  He was the only real-live person I've ever heard say the phrase "there is no replacement for displacement" in full sincerity.   But, his bulbous Buick seemed disprove his theory in reverse (or maybe in inverse..obverse?)  The 3.8 liter engine made a comical 170 brake horsepower, which would be okay for an engine roughly half that size. I'm still more than a little amazed that GM managed to coax so few horses out of such a capacious barn.  In my mind, the car was a product specifically built for a consumer who either hated cars outright, or else understood nothing about them: the automotive equivalent of The Dave Matthews Band.  But things change.  And the years have been surprisingly kind to this low-rung Buick.

Durability:  8/10

This specimen sputtered to life in Flint, Michigan, some five years after Micheal Moore released "Roger and Me," his least fictional and most compelling documentary to date.  One of the larger narratives he did skip in the film, was the precipitous decline in quality that plagued the US auto industry.   The fact that, at this time, we Americans had irrefutably earned the reputation for building the most catastrophically-ill-conceived, haphazardly-assembled, and basically undriveable  embarrassments ever to sully our roads (which aren't so impressive, themselves).

Which was why I was surprised to see so many Buick's running around Texas--.  Back in 1990's California, if you wanted to buy something as comfortable,  conservative and unpretentious as  a Buick  you just went to your Toyota dealership and got a Camry or the tarted-up Lexus version. (Actually, if you're in the camp that considers the state an economic prophet/canary for the rest of the US, it won't surprise you that around this time all the middle rungs of GM's price ladder pretty much got slaughtered in CA). 

Apparently though, in the regions we now call "red-state America," folks were not as disgusted by GM's atrocious quality control record, or their embarrassingly shitty marketing, so they continued  to buy LeSabre's, Bonneville's and 98's instead.  And despite what we thought at the time, these H-platform cars proved damned hard to kill.  Don't get me wrong--the first year data from JD Power and Consumer Reports are all well and good, but for someone like me, who typically owns cars in the twilight of their...existence, the real numbers are sourced from how many you see on the road once they've reached the age and mileage that place them in a state of chronic neglect and abuse.  And a shocking number of these bread-n-butter, full-sized boats are still stubbornly clinging to life, scuttling about like giant, rusty cockroaches, more than likely delivering your pizzas and your drugs.

Wheel covers went straight in the trash, obviously.

Performance: 1/10

To be fair, all the roads in Texas are miserable, traffic-clogged straightaways, specifically designed for sloppy barges like this, so the point is all but moot.  If you actually find a corner, and try to hustle the Buick around it, you will find that it delivers all the drama of of Hollywood car-chase, with screeching tires, wallowing suspension and a roaring, push-rod engine note--sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Here's something: you know that moment, when a light turns yellow at just the wrong time, when normally you would think, "Should I accelerate across, or should I stop?"  This car doesn't have either of those options. The question becomes "I wonder if it will be worse to be going 5 mph slower, or 5 mph faster when this light turns red?"  That's literally all you can do.  

I do appreciate that the General ponied-up for Anti-lock brakes as standard equipment, but adding ABS to a car with suspension this soft and poorly controlled seems like a very expensive and roundabout way to address the issue--and yet manages to leave it not quite solved. Like building a house out of--I dunno--frozen caviar.  There are simpler solutions.

Although the car is under-powered,  people tend to get out of the way when you're coming up behind them at speed, presumably thinking the thing is being piloted by an oblivious octogenarian who has confused the throttle with the brake, and is on his way to mow down a whole field of marathon runners.  

Quarter mile time?  You know I'm fucking majestic, right?

Passenger Room:  10/10

It's really too bad that the power lock mechanism is broken on the passenger side, because the bench is so wide, I have to lay flat across and stretch the tippy-tip of my middle finger out to unlock it manually.

You're reading that correctly.

 And this real estate is not the result of clever packaging; the car's nearly two feet wider than its interior width.  Did I mention it has the center seat-belt in the front bench?  So three folks can sit up front legally, and four could fit abreast illegally (provided they were at least pretty good pals.) 

In fact, the width of this car is such that I have been robbed my of one of my favorite highway pastimes; this first-world problem snuck up on me, guys.

Cargo Volume:  7/10

By most metrics, trunk size would be considered more than adequate here.  Popular opinion holds that trunk volume must be assessed as an integer value measured in dead hookers,  (If you find this misogynistic, please remember that hookers can be any sex or gender.  You bigot.) I'd say this trunk could probably fit about 3 hookers, depending on what body-type you're into. Unfortunately, the space just isn't as flexible as that of a station wagon or roof rack. Also, not nearly so comfortable.

And way more exhaust fumes.

Character:  9/10

The worst thing about the car market today (or at least the thing that I complain about most) is the oppressive sameness that has engulfed everything over the last decade or so.   Oh, sure, things work much "better," but I really miss the specificity of character that used to exist between brands.  Not so long ago, the European, Japanese and American industries had distinct, unmistakable DNA.  When I was growing up, everything from Japan looked like a transformer and had totally incoherent marketing.  European cars were as remote and as chillingly-bourgeois as an ascot worn in earnest. And American "luxury"cars like this one had the character of ignorant (but well-intentioned) bucktoothed hillbillies, wearing clip-on bow-ties.  In short, they were like us.

Better always meant, simply, "more."  Clearly, this was the philosophy that pervaded every design meeting in Detroit.

Do your toddlers smoke?  Fuck it.  Of course they do. Everyone gets an ashtray in the armrest.  Four ashtrays. Why not?  Done and done.   

Also, six sun-visors.  No--four isn't enough, asshole--what if there are TWO suns, one shining on either side of the car, and then a helicopter pops up over the horizon with that spotlight in your face--'cause also, it's at night--then what, smart-guy?  Six visors.

And so on.  

The result is a car that evokes the feeling of a 1970's suburban living room, dark and smokey, with expansive velour furniture and a charming selection of hard plastics, printed in a mockery of natural wood-grain.    

Basically, it's so fucking obsolete, it's absurd.  But that's okay.

I remember watching some motoring show years back, that featured a Japanese Buddhist monk who drove a 1908 Bentley something-or-other.  Placing collector value momentarily aside, the host asked why he chose such a punishing and out-of-date conveyance as his main vehicle.  The monk said that the syndrome of the modern car was that it had become too well-engineered--too perfect.  That the absence of flaws had robbed the relationship between the machine and its driver of its intrinsic give and take: ultimately making it an unfulfilling one.  Simply stated, we love not in spite of flaws, but because of them. 

I'll sign on to that.  I do have a soft spot for the flawed.  Especially the terminally flawed.  The fundamentally and irrecoverably flawed.    

Part of me is aware that this is probably the worst car I've ever owned.  But I do like it anyway.  

The Car I Didn't Buy

The car was parked alongside a dub-shod and dented Cadillac Seville, and some ravaged F-series pickups.  All the vehicles had "For Sale" signs displayed or, in the case of the trucks, had been lazily tagged as such with smears of red across their windshields in paint that may have been (but probably was not) washable.  

I involuntary jumped up in my seat and yelped as soon as I saw this car, behavior which warranted an explanation to my boss, who was driving.  

We had just come from a site meeting with a contractor who seemed doubtful about the prospects for the renovation of the house in question.  He wasn't alone.  The architect had once almost involuntary breathed "God, I hate that house" into the phone during an conversation we had to confirm the location of a six-inch offset that zig-zagged through the floor in the middle of the structure, a demarcation of the ungraceful  hand-off in the foundation from slab-on-grade to piered-footings.  

The proposed renovations, like any, would leave the building with a haphazard collection of these irritating and inexplicable vestiges of the original design limitations, and the appended, grandiose monuments to conspicuous consumption.   In this case, the latter included an artificial beach on the rear deck and a prominent entry vestibule, containing four stories of stairs, cantilevering proudly  from the walls, granting the owner membership to the very exclusive club of  people who could very easily fall to their deaths within the confines of their own homes.  

It's a poorly kept secret of the construction industry that cost and potential for a catastrophe is disproportionately high when you compare renovation or restoration to new construction. A good rule of thumb is this:  if you're thinking of repainting the bathroom, just fucking tear the house down and start from scratch.  You'll live longer.         

Perhaps it's good that these were the types of things I was thinking about when I saw this car, which was a 1962 Imperial,  the very car I've always lusted after in the fantasy world of, "what would be the absolute coolest fucking car to own, ignoring scarcity, price or practicality."  This might sound like an oddly-restrictive category, but this is a totally normal thing for car-folks; and how we each manage to have about 16 "favorite cars."

Although my impulse was to demand that my boss turn around immediately and head back, I was able to quell the feeling and return after work, driving an hour in the opposite direction from my house, intending to snap a few photographs and make some inquiries, which I did.  It took me a long time to pull myself away, and I spent that time trying to figure out why this car feels so important to me.  

Although, it's not universally reviled among car stylist folks,  it's certainly not a favorite--as far as I can tell because its design philosophy was a few years behind the times.

Which should make perfect sense, really.  This is a car designed by the man who was arguably (and people really do argue about this) more responsible than any other single human for the trajectory of auto design during the 1950's, Virgil Maximilian Exner, Sr. a man whose  name sounds as ornate, overwrought,  and as vaguely Gothic as this Imperial looks.  When the '62 went to market, he was no longer lead designer of Chrysler, marking the end of his career within the mass-market big-three.  The world had moved on, so this would be the first in a series of orphaned  Imperials, several years of gestural attempts to freshen Exner's swansong 1961 design, which basically looks like this one (but with giant fucking tail-fins, already embarrassingly out of fashion when it was launched).  

And I'm pretty sure that this was the last "off-the-rack" car ever made with free-standing head-lamps.  As the overall automotive shape was evolving toward the rectilinear slab, this treatment required deep scallops on either side of the frontal fascia, starting just outside the grille.  Although this might be seen as one of the more needlessly pompous design features, I think it's just stunning--and not an insane choice, considering that there was nothing but wasted space behind the headlamps anyway.  Aerodynamically, I can't imagine it makes any difference one way or the other, so the only real drawback is that it's horribly expensive to do something that looks this good.  A bit garish though?  Duh.

Nothing about 1950's America was subtle, functional or remotely well-thought out--and neither is anything on this car.  Which is why I really don't understand critiques that bill Exner's work as especially excessive or farcical. That was the whole postwar zeitgeist right there.   Looking back, it's hard to argue that anything from the period doesn't fit that description in the grand scheme of things.   Parked next to one of these, the iconic and lauded 1957 Chevrolet looks just as tasteless in its design goals, but not nearly so majestic.

Yes, just about everything that speaks to the failed promise of the jet-age is represented in this specimen, only taken to their logical conclusions--this was a conveyance created as wastefully-large and as gizmo-laden as we, as a country, could muster.  For example, the transmission was operated without big, clunky levers, rather gears were selected with discreet electronics, like in a Toyota Prius.  If you think this sounds odd, because you assumed that we hadn't quite mastered that technology by 1962, you're quite right.  Oh, it didn't "work" exactly, but wouldn't it have been cool if it did? If only it were powered by self-assured swagger.  And 1962 is often cited as the year that American's endless optimism started to seem a bit...ill-conceived?   There was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and things were not looking good in Vietnam.  Everything was in violent flux, and the entire character of this car--even its very name seemed to hearken back to an era long forgotten.  Check out this super-sexist product info reel which doesn't address a single technical issue.  

The Imperial was a catastrophic failure in sales and build quality, but in its failure, it is confident, magnificent--dare I say--righteous?  Yes.  Righteous in its failure. Which is exactly why I think of it as the most American car ever built.  

Personally, I think it's exactly because Chrysler was always the company a decade late and a billion dollars short that their products seem so compelling in terms of narrative; they're distant history even as they're coming off the assembly-line and disappearing into the endless acres of rolling abortions, making them especially useful  in identifying the markers that will define an era; reminding us of what we are not.  

For this reason, I think the story of the entire American auto industry (which is equal parts comedy and tragedy) is told best by Chrysler.  Which is to say, they invariably fare the worst whenever something bad happens.   

Another favorite example of mine is undignified euthanasia of the all the old-school American marques.  We usually think of the day when the General pulled the plug on Oldsmobile--a muted affair to be sure which garnered very limited press; principally interviews with a few old codgers showing off their 442's and giving the outgoing Aurora a nice send off.  But the demise of Plymouth I find much more emblematic of this phenomenon, because of the fact Chrysler had relegated the brand to indistinguishable re-badges for so long that no one even noticed when they dragged it out to the barn and put the poor thing out of its misery.  And this really is the worst case scenario in brand-death, having passed so many years nearly dead, without any signs indicative of the presence of a cohesive soul--or for that matter seemingly any rational human intelligence pulling the strings.  I don't think I'm the only one who finds this scenario evoking the fear that my own decline into dementia will be so gradual, that my (theoretical) kids don't even give a shit when I die.  

But I digress.

...
I did find the owner, and I did ask the price.  In truth, even though it would have been really difficult to scrounge up the cash, I could have made it happen.  But I didn't.

The reason I walked away was that I knew, beyond any reasonable doubt that this project would become the fact that defined my entire life for a period of time beyond reckoning.  

As someone who grew up surrounded by projects that had silently rotted, and imperceptibly turned into monuments of neglect and failure, I knew that no good would come from this.  

A few weeks have gone by now, and I think about the Chrysler sometimes, especially when I'm working on a renovation project that is probably doomed, which is quite a lot.    

Unfortunately, we are curious and hopeful creatures.  Even though I knew that I had made the right decision, I also knew that I would never get the chance again, that I would never again come across my specific ideal, and certainly not find it in such perfect, unmolested condition.  

Occasionally, it's easy to see that our dreams are completely impossible, but some folks have to sink tens of thousands of dollars into a project before their own recognition scene.  One thing I can tell you: as far as I can work out, there isn't a "no regret" option.

My Kingdom for a Shitbox

Anyone who has spent anytime within earshot of me knows that I spend a lot of money on gasoline.  Subsequently, I've been thinking seriously of trading down to something that burns less (both in gas and liability insurance), preferably at a lower octane.  

But, things have changed in the last 15 years or so.  All the cars I was hoping to trade down into are gone. The shitbox, as an automotive institution has all but vanished from the road, and I am sad.

Maybe I should define my terms.  Many years ago, car manufacturers' entry level vehicles were small, light, unremarkably-styled, spartan in appointments, and literally cheaper than dirt.  These vehicles largely made no attempt to disguise the modesty of their design parameters; 13-inch steel wheels, manual-everything, with both carpeting and radio appearing on the "options" list. They were unpretentious.  They were practical.  They were shitboxes.  

I don't know whether the culprit is our own dishonestly optimistic consumer taste at the national level, exponentially increasing safety standards or things just "getting better", but now, even the basest of the base so-called sub-compact comes with chrome, 19-inch drug-dealer wheels,  8-speed, paddle-shifted, smarter-than-you automatics and....I dunno...blue-tube or whatever.

James May, reviewing the second generation Fiat Panda, described the attitude of the car as simply saying, "Look--I'm a cheap, little car.  Let's just get on with it."  Historically, the US has been a much smaller market for these cars (we never even got the Panda), but there was a time, not so long ago that cheap, wonderful shitboxes could be found for a pittance in the free-ads at every corner market.  

The following is a short list of cars I was hoping to find for sale (or at least find one on the street to photograph instead of stealing from the internet).  No dice.

Subaru Justy 

"Hey, ladies!"  

Subaru has now effectively cornered the market on granola-and-sandals parents, but before Fuji-Heavy Industries had ever heard of "branding" they were trying to sell cars to every Tom, Dick and Hitoshi. They even  made three-doors with non-mandatory 4WD.  Look how happy this guy is!

Ford Festiva

"I've really made it!"

Not to be confused with the Ford Fiesta, which is, by all rights an actual "cool car," with modern styling and creature comforts.  Ford used to import a little Korean shit-box which shared the Japanese car-naming tendency of using "almost a real word."

Toyota Corolla FX

"I fit inside my car.  Today was a good day."

In the late 1970's, the Corolla was available in seven body configurations.  Today it's available in one, and that one is fucking terrible.  The FX had a dramatically different look from the rest of the Corollas in the line, taking a cue from AMC's let's-just-chop-its-butt-off-and-call-it-a-day design philosophy, used to such great effect on the Gremlin.

Anyway, I'm at an impasse.  The cars I want were all crushed into salvage steel, when I wasn't paying attention.  I guess the used Hyundai Accents I see everywhere meet the criteria of being thrifty and unaffected in character...But there is a difference between a good-quality shitbox and just an actual piece of shit.