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Our Buicks, ourselves

By Christopher Shea
August 2, 2009

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ANDREW BUSH’S photographs of ordinary people driving, on view in his book “Drive” (Yale, 2008) as well as two recent shows in New York, convey the intimate side of the automobile era, and they carry a fresh poignancy, too, after the recent near-collapse of the American car industry.

Unlike much car photography, Bush’s images aren’t about the machines, as Adam Harrison Levy, a writer and documentary filmmaker, points out in a fine essay posted at Design Observer. You won’t find fetishism of the Mustang, Corvette, or various other exemplars of Detroit engineering and design. Rather, the photographs are about the relationship between humans and their vehicles.

“It’s been over one hundred years since the combustion engine was first invented,” Levy writes, “and we now eat, drink, talk and die in our cars as naturally as we do in our domestic spaces.”

Bush’s photos, it’s worth noting, predate the cell phone, which wedged its way awkwardly between humankind and car, changing the dynamic. The classic era of the American automobile could be said to begin in 1956, with the birth of the interstate highway system. Could 2009 mark the terminus? And, a decade from now, will photographs of commuters in their Insights and Priuses carry the same cultural punch as Bush’s photographs?

The problem with ‘Wind in the Willows’
IN 1908, WHEN “The Wind in the Willows” first appeared, the Times Literary Supplement said that “children will hope, in vain, for more fun.” There’s something to that, as the literary critic Michael Dirda notes in the New York Review of Books while reviewing two new annotated versions of the classic. (Katherine A. Powers reviewed the same books for the Globe in May.) The language is dense and, except for Toad’s reckless driving and, subsequently, his escape from prison, the tale a bit short on action. As Peter Green, the biographer of Kenneth Grahame, put it, the book is suffused with “timeless, drowsy beatitude.”

Still, Dirda may go a step too far when he draws a parallel with another major author of the period:

While “The Wind in the Willows” certainly has the appearance of a children’s book, this masterpiece nevertheless tends to be most deeply affecting to those past forty. It’s a bedtime story for readers of Henry James, and throughout its pages one periodically hears the faint, wistful cry that haunts Strether in ‘The Ambassadors’ (1903): “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”

“Wind” is a rich book, grounded (as C.S. Lewis observed) in a sophisticated understanding of English social life. But “The Portrait of a Toad” it is not.

Living on the edge
AS PART OF an art project-cum-experiment in living, two brothers are living on the vertical facade of a building in the Old Center section of Rio de Janeiro, reports Archinect, a networking-and-news site aimed at architects. Since May, 27-year-old Tiago Primo and his 20-year-old brother Gabriel have been spending 12 hours a day suspended above the street on an outdoor wall equipped with a bed, sofa, hammock, coffee table, houseplant, and - naturally! - a victrola. The wall is outfitted with climbing pegs and other mountaineering gear so the brothers can move easily from the bottom “floor,” which is painted red, to the top one, painted yellow. Archinect does not say when the installation will end.

Christopher Shea is a weekly columnist for Ideas. He can be reached at brainiac.email@gmail.com.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.