Sofaleggera

It’d be easy to say this project started in 1992, when Polly wound up in my choir class. She was a smart, sexy Sagittarian; one who knew things beyond her fifteen years and was surprisingly well-adjusted, considering her manner of dress and taste in music. For the younger readers out there, there was in fact an age before Suicide Girls when identifying as a goth essentially meant taking a vow of unpopularity. Our exploits in my ’75 El Camino and my dad’s ’80 Colony Park were of minor legend; in a roundabout way, Polly may be partially responsible for the Pontiac G8 ST concept. For all that teenage hormonal folderol in the Central Valley, the seed of this video actually sprouted five years earlier in the Inland Empire, when a young Peter Hughes of Chino wrote a little ditty called “A Fangio for the ’80s.” It’s a snotty bit of Casiotone doggerel that’s nonetheless ridiculously charming. I find myself humming it while walking down Watt Ave. with an early-morning cup of coffee in my hand. In the ensuing 23 years, the affable, natty, literate Hughes honed his craft considerably, left Chino for western New York and gained some measure of notoriety as the longest serving member of the Mountain Goats besides John Darnielle himself.

For reasons that are completely my fault, Polly and I were out of contact for eight years. A year and a half ago, I had a Delphic dream about her. I got in touch. After getting to know each other again, we decided to go to the Salton Sea. Driving out the 10 toward Indio and then down toward the briny lake itself, we listened to a lot of the Mountain Goats. I seem to remember We Shall All Be Healed getting plenty of play. Not long after this, I had a white-hot flameout of a romance with a Denver musician/artist I’d met through an ex-girlfriend years before. Denver girl drove a GM-era Saab 900 three-door with a five-speed. Shortly after our affair expired, the Saab did, too. Hot on the heels of the implosion, I discovered Firebird Man, Hughes’ excellent — if infrequently updated — car blog. It turned out he was a fan of the Jalopnik of yore. I was astounded that he’d actually written an album detailing the exploits of Juan Manuel Fangio as a corporeal avenging angel — one bent on setting right the wrongs perpetrated upon Latin America from behind the wheel of a proper Saab 900. Then he asked me if I’d like to direct a video for one of the songs.

Readers, both gentle and ignoble, how could I refuse such an offer? Especially considering the fact that my friendly acquaintance Victor Muller had just purchased Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget’s former automobile division from a brand-hemorrhaging General Motors? The answer is simply that I could not. We ginned up a concept rife with kitbashed Catholicsm, Swedish automobilia, Latin American political/human-rights tragedy and shots of the original Watkins Glen Grand Prix course (upon which Fangio never actually raced). I flew out to Rochester, we borrowed a camera and spent three days driving around in Peter’s fantastic 1988 Saab 900 SPG. The result is above.

The 7″ containing the first two songs drops in a week (August 10th); the 12″ featuring the rest of Fangio’s black exploits sees the light of day September 7th, both courtesy of the fine folks at Fayettenam Records. Naturally, everything will also be available digitally. As for me? Well, I got one of my dearest friends back and made a music video featuring Juan Manuel Fangio driving a turbocharged Saab. How could I be anything but stoked?

Tags: "my god is an angry god", 900 spg, fangio, fayettenam records, firebird man, general motors, jalopnik, john darnielle, juan manuel fangio, music video, new york, peter hughes, polly, rochester, saab, salton sea, the mountain goats, turbo, victor muller, watkins glen, we shall all be healed

I can’t say much about my current project at the moment. Only that I am headed to Rochester, New York and that said project involves a turbocharged Swedish car and one of the most celebrated racing drivers in the history of the world. However, I am at liberty to say that the way the whole thing has evolved so far, has been almost a perfect collision of worlds both strange and familiar. The plate-of-shrimp moments have been dense with this one so far. And just the other day, I e-mailed my collaborator, excited that I’d just seen a Pinto wagon with a hood-mounted NACA duct. As you are no doubt aware, any vehicle sporting a NACA duct is a force to be reckoned with (cf. Ferrari F40, Lamborghini Countach, Porsche 935) and I despaired that the old Ford had been moving too quickly to photograph. Then, today, on my way to buy some boots to stave off the March upstate slush-cold, it appeared again. And, I might add, it was ten miles from where I’d originally seen it. Sadly, the best shot I was able to get was through my rear-view mirror and it’s not the tack-sharp gem I’d been hoping for. Nevertheless, there it was in all its black-and-white glory — what’s most likely the only NACA-duct-equipped Ford Pinto wagon in the Greater Sacramento area. Clearly, it had appeared out of the Central Valley latent-winter gloom to lend its blessing this project. Much, much more when I return from the world capital of imaging.

Tags: california, countach, f40, fangio, ferrari, ford, lamborghini, naca, naca duct, new york, pinto, plate of shrimp, rochester, saab, sacramento

I have a theory about Sacramento that is mostly true. As long as you stay between the East/West freeways, you’re generally all right. North of 80 and you’re into the stucco, new-construction muck and mire of Natomas. South of 50 and it’s the depressing chainlink nowheres of South Sac until Natomas’ Gemini, Elk Grove, rushes up to meet it in a flurry of HOA-mandated sameness.

I grew up, and currently live, between the freeways. And as a kid in the ’80s, I spent a lot of time navigating the area from the American River out to Folsom Lake on my bike. Howe Avenue (like most of the major streets around here, it’s named for an inventor), runs from I-80, south to 50 where it becomes Power Inn. At Power Inn and Folsom there’s a sizable substation. Some of the lines cut north and head up Howe. The majority follow Power Inn south, across the railroad tracks, past half-vacant strip malls, down past where a woman I love lives. We’ve never quite figured out what we’re supposed to be. Or we’re frightened of what we’re supposed to be. Or maybe we’re not supposed to be anything, but there are times when for all the world it seems that if it’s not a cruel hoax, it should be some sort of brilliant, dambusting fate.

When I was young, Howe Avenue scared and awed me. Not because the traffic was any hairer than on Marconi, Fulton or Watt — or because a sewing machine is inherently any scarier than a radio, a steam engine, or a boat powered by a steam engine. It was all in the high-tension wires. On a summer afternoon when the traffic was as tired as anything else in this town, one could hear the buzzing of the electricity. I rode with a palpable feeling of dread under those lines, wondering if at any moment, one would snap, hit the chrome-plated frame of my Redline and well, yeah, curtains for young Davo, a BMX hero cut down before his day in the sun.

When I was 16, as my friend’s mom predicted, I got into cars and driving and largely forgot about my bike. Howe Avenue sounded like “Creeping Death” or “Paranoid” or “Among The Living.” Between the blare of the stereo, the rush of the wind, the thrum of the choked-down 350 and the roar of the Yokohamas, the we-could-kill-you crackling hum was drowned out by a peculiar, dorky, teenage heavy-metal menace. When I was 18, I got into Hüsker Dü, moved away to college in Moraga and stopped watching the Super Bowl. For some reason, Super Bowl Sunday was always pretty in the East Bay, so I’d hop in the car, get a medium pesto pizza and head off for a drive in the hills. I don’t know how many years I did this, but yesterday reminded me of the same sort of Northern California afternoon; a day when spring starts to trying to break through. It’ll likely cave and try again later in the month; we’ll probably get more rain, but the first tentative effort at clearing out the January glum usually happens right about now. I have a specific memory of listening to New Day Rising on a day like this. I was living on the third floor of Aquinas Hall, so it must’ve been 1996. I picked up my guitar and played the little harmonic intro to “Powerline.” I remember thinking of riding my bike on Howe Avenue and marveling at how Mould seemed to have captured a little piece of my childhood in a song that kind of gets lost on a record stocked with standouts like “The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill,” “Terms of Psychic Warfare” and what’s arguably the album’s centerpiece, “Celebrated Summer.”

When Ford gave us the Fiestas, they tasked us with one mission a month, based around a theme. We could choose from a list of assignments or we could submit our own. At the time, the girl who lives off Power Inn was living in Monterey. I told her I was considering submitting a proposal for technology month that would take me up to the Bonneville Dam and then follow the Pacific DC Intertie across Oregon, south into Nevada, and finally down to Sylmar, where the 5 branches off into the 405 and the 210 and the DWP maintains a massive complex for the distribution of water and power to the greater Los Angeles area. She suggested that she tag along; that we take an extra day and head up to Walla Walla to see her dad. In the interim, things got complicated between us again, as seems to be their wont. The friendship once again flared into a white-dwarf romance that collapsed into black hole territory the day I left for Oregon. At a loss for what to do with the footage I came home with, I decided to tell the truth. I was shooting for something ethereal, some sort of aching dream-haze that could’ve been scored by Angelo Badalamenti. What I wound up with was something that turned out a lot creepier than I intended.

Ford basically left it up to us as to how much or how little we wanted to promote the videos we made. I was so weirded out by what I created, I couldn’t watch it. The YouTube channel I created specifically for the Fiesta stuff didn’t have much traffic or many subscribers, so I basically put it up and buried it. Didn’t post it on Facebook, didn’t send it to any of my blogger friends. Didn’t do anything with it. Then, weirdly, one by one, friends whose taste I respect started complimenting me on it, having found it on their own. My mom mentioned it to me, saying there was no way the story in the video was true, but actually, everything in the video is true, other than some of the shots may not actually be of Path 65, though I tried to follow its route as closely as I could.

Regardless of my unease with the finished product, a funny thing happened to me after that video was done — substations and high-tension wires became familiars to me. Instead of forboding harbingers of instant electrical death, they turned into something like traveling companions. I liked mentally cataloguing their variations; seeing how they weathered in the elements during my travels throughout the West. Substations — places that seem as if they exist solely devoid of organic matter — became reasons to stop and take photographs. The girl from the UK who came to travel the Southwest with me last summer found my fascination with them at turns amusing and irksome. She got into it for a while, referring to the towers as “The Pylons,” which I like; I think of them that way. Like they’re a race of alien beings, stoically and benevolently transmitting power for our use as long as we treat them with respect.

In the fall, when she was having trouble with the boy from Salinas mentioned in the video, the girl who lives off Power Inn and I had another flare-up/implosion. I spent a lot of time in the little Ford following the river, photographing the boats and bridges, trying to make sense of (or at least come to terms with) what was going on. South of 50, I often got to thinking of the other woman mentioned in that clip — the one with the Hood River Walmart doppelgänger — caught in a subdivision between the blinking television towers of Walnut Grove and the “Look, really! We’re a city! We swear!” skyscrapers of downtown Sac. Night after night driving aimlessly up and down the southern levees wore on me, so I headed north, looking for a route to Garden Highway from the airport. I’d found that if I left my camera set to auto white balance and fired the flash while leaving the shutter open for 15 seconds, the sensor would capture the incandescent light pollution bouncing off the low clouds or high fog of the October Central Valley sky, turning it a sunset orange at 2am. In my quest for a dramatic sky shot, I wound up on a road I’d never been on before. A road serendipitously called “Power Line.”

I can’t help wondering about the funny chain reaction that’s happened here. I moved back up here to sort myself out, following a woman who’d moved back up here to sort herself out; one who’d also lived in Aquinas Hall through the spring’s first poke at Northern California. Now a woman has come to Sacramento to sort herself out because I’m here. Yet my relationships with both of them are still remarkably unsorted. Are the three of us wired in some sort of psychic parallel? And yes, the other obvious electrical-engineering question has crossed my mind — how much energy have we all lost to resistance? Too much, I’d wager. Too much.

Powerline [Live Album Version]…

[Postscript: As I was cleaning out the Fiesta to give it back to Ford, I noticed the brand of inverter I'd bought during the ill-starred visit to Walmart mentioned in the video. Yep, "Powerline."]

Tags: angelo badalamenti, anthrax, black sabbath, bob mould, bonneville dam, california, east bay, electric power transmission, elk grove, fiesta, ford, ford fiesta, howe avenue, hüsker dü, ladwp, los angeles, metallica, natomas, new day rising, oregon, pacific dc intertie, power inn road, power line road, powerline, sacramento, saint mary's college, south sac, super bowl, sylmar, video

Since, by and large, I have made my living with a computer since I graduated from college, people assume that I know all about them. Which used to be true, because I had to. If I didn’t fix my machine, nobody else would. I am not, however, an inveterate fiddler or tinkerer. I like solving problems, but I also like the confidence of knowing if I do X, Y will summarily follow, and if Y doesn’t happen, Z is clearly the answer. Which, paradoxically, is why I shied away from web design. In the early days of the web, realizing my visions simply required too much code; too many unknown x and y variables for my poor pea brain to handle, so I turned to print to fulfill my design jones.

By the time the web got to the point that it could look roughly how I wanted it to, I was firmly ensconced as a print guy, which oddly enough, accidentally launched my writing career. To be fair, there was a certain amount of ink-on-paper snobbery involved. As my musician/designer friend Peter said when I mentioned this undertaking to him, “I spent a week last spring teaching myself enough CSS to rework my site using WordPress and omigod it almost fucking killed me. I’m not a coder, dammit, i’m an ARTIST!” On the other hand, my pal Vietze (who was of much support during this hairloss-inducing adventure) went to art school and found out he actually rather enjoyed playing with code as a means to realize his vision. Of course, Vietze also likes minimal techno.

For some reason, in the world of social networking, I’ve never had a burning passion to customize any of my pages. Perhaps it was because I didn’t feel the need to make a MySpace page any uglier than it already was. On the other hand, if I were ever to have a site of my own, I wanted it to be distinctly mine. With the attendant perceived zazz and/or verve that comes with paying one’s own hosting bill and being master of one’s own domain name. Given the miracles of modern technology, I figured with WordPress’ famous five-minute install and CS4, just how hard could it be? I’d just use Dreamweaver’s vaunted WYSIWYG features to apply what I’d constructed in Illustrator. I bought a copy of Dreamweaver CS4 All-in-One For Dummies, as this would clearly be a pretty dummyproof operation. Um, no. I summarily found myself drowning in a sea of PHP, CSS and HTML.

Although I abandoned caring what the site looked like in Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari all had their own idiosyncratic ways of handling the code. Dreamweaver was of very little help — it really seems to be a product designed for the World Wide Web of 2002. I got everything running perfectly on MAMP, but when I uploaded it to my host, a piece of the Javascript controlling the appearance of my search box decided it wasn’t going to function. After much gnashing of teeth and many cigarettes, in a last-ditch fit of desperation, I replaced it with a Hail-Mary bit of CSS kung fu that actually worked better. The night before I took the site live, I was reading up on Ruby on Rails. Bear in mind that when I started this adventure a month ago, all of the HTML I knew consisted of creating links and text formatting of the most rudimentary source. But after four weeks ensconced in this brave new world that had such code in it, I actually started to comprehend how it worked and could be useful for development. Plus, it came with my hosting package…hrm.

Tags: adobe, chrome, code, cs4, css, design, dreamweaver, education, firefox, for dummies, frustration, google, graphic design, html, illustrator, internet explorer, javascript, mamp, microsoft, php, ruby on rails, safari, web, wordpress

In high school, I was a photo junkie. My cute female friends stood (and sat, and lay) as my muses — and in the case of Ship and Amber, also my teachers — and Sacramento…well, Sacramento was something. It got photographed anyway; it was, after all, what I had handy. I shot shows at the Cattle Club, I shot football and basketball games; once we sent the yearbook off to the publisher my senior year, I spent my afternoons in the photo lab, printing for printing’s sake. Eventually, though, my SLRs started gathering dust. Perennially cash-strapped, I had a couple of $200-dollar Nikon point-and-shoots that never really did exactly what I wanted. So when my Coolpix L3 bit the dust in Death Valley last summer, I invested in a Canon G10. (More accurately, the dust bit the Nikon — it ceased to operate once the blowing sand wormed its way into the lens’ retraction mechanism.) Without getting too sappy about it, the rangefinder-looking G10 reminded me of everything I’d loved about photography in my film days, with the added ease and flexibility of direct import into Photoshop. My pal Hilary, whom I’d met through the Fiesta deal, was a huge proponent of flickr. And while I’d had an account for quite a while, I’d never really dug into it. The Canon made me want to. In fact, it really got me thrilled about once again creating art in general.

The above photo was shot when I was freaking out over some girl or another and figured a late-night photographic jaunt would help take my mind off things. About a quarter-to-two in the morning, I ran across this broken-but-unbowed traffic signal at the corner of Watt and Fair Oaks in suburban Sacto. Some ill-starred motorist in a brand-new Sentra had lost it on the slick street, slid clear across the intersection and struck the pole. He then took off, leaving behind bits of grille and emblem. When the fool drove back by to inspect his handiwork, the gas station’s employees missed his plate number. While I was fiddling with my camera, the brazen schnook drove by again. That time, we got the number, which we dutifully handed over to the California Highway Patrol — who, as a side note, wondered why on Earth anybody would be interested in taking pictures of a stoplight that had fallen in the grass. Oh, Chippies. Oh, art.

[flickr]

Tags: accidents, amber ebling, canon, canon g10, cattle club, chp, fiesta movement, flickr, hilary mchone, jen murphy, nikon, nikon coolpix l3, photography, sacramento, traffic light

About a year or so ago, after faffing about with iMovie and running headlong into its limitations, I decided to get serious about learning Final Cut. Right about the same time, Ford was ramping up a social-media-oriented promotional campaign for the relaunch of the Fiesta in the United States. Henry’s people had decided to give away a hundred cars to folks who proved they could cobble together some sort of video and get people to watch the thing. I made the below video, which was actually only the second thing I’d ever created in Final Cut. Nunez graciously posted the clip at Autoblog. Ford gave me a car for seven months. It was not brown, but it did come with free gas. And yes, that really is a cameo by Bob Mould at the end.

Tags: accept, advertising, bob mould, cars, clint eastwood, dirty harry, fiesta, fiesta movement, ford, ford fiesta, franz ferdinand, hüsker dü, lalo schifrin, life on mars, rocket from the crypt, social media, sovscope 70, subcompact, the go! team, the streets of san francisco, video

Well hello, everybody! Welcome to Sofaleggera. With the exception of a couple of goofy, short-lived Tumblr experiments, I’ve largely been absent from the blogosphere in the two years since I quit writing about cars on a daily basis. To be perfectly honest and put a fine point on a broad tip, I’d run out of things to say. By my rough calculations, I’d spilled somewhere in the neighborhood of a million words in two-and-a-half years. It seemed as though it were time to live something else. To be frank, I haven’t really kept up with the automotive press, either. I currently subscribe to zero buff books. I do not have an RSS feed clogged to the brim with whatever the automotive blogosphere is spewing forth. I haven’t attended an international auto show since New York, 2008. I actually have a fair bit to say on the whys and wherefores of all of this, but an intro post is no place for a manifesto, and indeed, manifestoes seem to have been co-opted by those who prefer to toss them out in the hope that somebody still considers said tosser some manner of relevant bellwether. As Rick Froberg once hollered, it’s a lotta talk; yeah, a lotta nothin’ to show.  So what is Sofaleggera, then? It’s just a place where I make stuff. No more, no less. Clog your feed with it if you’re so inclined.

Tags: about, blogging, blogs, buff books, cars, hot snakes, introductions, manifestoes, rick froberg, tumblr, writing