Fish Out of Water

So I went to a cruise show this week (cars, not singles) for reporting purposes and, surprisingly, enjoyed myself. I know little about cars beyond which pedal is the brake and which the accelerator, how to operate my windshield wipers, and how to change CDs, so I couldn't begin to ask owners any detailed questions about their lovingly detailed cars and engines.

But there is something very aesthetically pleasing about antique cars and trucks. Their colors, lines, angles and shapes are lovely and sadly missing in today's models, foreign and domestic, all of which I find are becoming increasingly round (gravitating to the same look with a modicum of difference in the same way that prestigious universities set their tuition rates), except Chryslers, which has these terribly haunched, boxy designs with tiny windows that are so ugly. (May Bob Nardelli, he of the $210 million buyout at Home Depot, preside over the company's demise!)

The elongated hoods on the convertibles, the pale blues and the deep reds, their leather interiors and horizontal radio dials and speedometers: Something about these cars screams such a different and specific era that, combined with their fine craftsmanship and symbolism of lifestyle, one day they should be treated as the same historical and artistic relics as 18th-century colonial American furniture or Victorian dress now are. And sitting in a driveway (or on a pedestal), there's something about antique cars that can be contemplated as form over function, in a modernist way (even if the car rose to dominance in early postwar, post-urban postmodernism).

If superheroes' fashion sense can be an exhibit at the world's most renowned, prestigious museum (huh?), then 1920s-1960s cars certainly deserve their own.

(Photo taken by cell phone. Noting this because I'm proud I learned how to send photos from phone to e-mail account. In fact, it works well enough that I took a photo of a fire-ravaged house by phone and it appeared in the next day's paper. Techmology.)