All posts tagged cars

The Old Tune by Samuel Beckett (1960)

GORMAN: Miss Bertha so sweet and good.
CREAM: Sweet and good, all right, but dammit if she doesn’t take me for a doddering old drivelling dotard…

The Old Tune is a free translation by Samuel Beckett of Robert Pinget’s half-hour-long 1960 radio play La Manivelle (The Crank). In Pinget’s original play two garrulous old Parisians, Toupin and Pommard, meet in the street and spend half an hour reminiscing about the old times and each other’s families. Beckett turns the Parisians into two old Dubliners he names Mr Cream and Gorman. The Old Tune was first broadcast on BBC on 23 August 1960 with Beckett stalwarts Jack MacGowran as Mr Cream and Patrick Magee as Gorman.

They’re good, aren’t they, MacGowran and Magee. MacGowran’s voice is very effectively that of a bluff old codger even though, when you actually see him, he’s quite tall and thin, and Magee’s voice has something of the weedy vulnerability which made him, in my opinion, so sensationally haunting in Beckett’s radio play, Cascando, written the year after this production. Both bring out the Irish flavour of the language and setting.

A plot of sorts

An old organ grinder, Gorman, is struggling to keep his knackered barrel organ playing on a street in Dublin. It plays a few bars, falters and he thumps it, it plays a few bars more and then lapses into silence. At that moment who should come down the street but old Mr Cream who recognises Gorman as an old friend and they start talking and reminiscing. Beckett had free choice of the tune the organ was to play since none is specified by Pinget and chose The Bluebells of Scotland, presumably suggested by the mention of a bank of bluebells near the start of the play (see my comments about the play’s title, below).

Pinget and translations

It might seem odd that Beckett, by now a name to reckon with, should have undertaken a translation of someone else’s work, but a) he had worked as a professional translator before and after the war and, of course, composed half his own works in French and then translated them back into English, so was very used to moving between versions of texts in different languages; b) he was good friends with Pinget, who had himself translated Beckett’s radio play All That Fall into French; indeed, Pinget’s play Lettre Morte was presented on a double bill with Krapp’s Last Tape at the Théâtre Récamier in Paris. So the more you look into it, the less surprising it becomes.

Anyway, it was less a favour to a friend than an opportunity. What’s striking is how utterly Beckett makes the originally French play by someone else sound as Irish as himself and the two garrulous old men sound entirely like Beckett characters, wittering on about the perils of motor cars and how it all used to be country round here and the lack of compassion of the young, tut tut, in the manner of Beckett’s countless gaga old men.

In fact the basic structure – two old codgers misremembering and bickering over trivia – is a primal element in Beckett’s works, from Mercier and Camier in the novel named after them, to Vladimir and Estragon in Godot, to Hamm and Clov in Endgame.

As to content, well it consists of a steady stream of senile old reminiscence marked by extreme attention to banal detail: Cream explains he is now a widower and had been living with one of his daughters, Daisy, but how, since her death, he has moved in with the other daughter, Bertha (Mrs Rupert Moody). Gorman tells us that his wife is still alive. Both men, we learn, are in their seventies, Gorman is seventy-three, Cream is seventy-six, and on they rattle, swapping reminiscences and half memories, about cars, about serving in the army, about an old law case, and so on.

Looking in a bit more detail you see that, as in so much Beckett, although the actual content is trite and trivial, the interest is in the treatment. Two aspects stand out, the repetition and the gaps.

Repetition

The verbal repetition of the play is both a kind of naturalistic depiction of the highly repetitive speech rhythms of the old and forgetful, but at the same time a highly stylised dissection of language and the dislocating effect created by incessant repetition, repetition which threatens to empty language of meaning.

CREAM: 1903 , 1903 , and you 1906 was it?
GORMAN: 1906 yes at Chatham.
CREAM: The Gunners?
GORMAN: The Foot, the Foot.
CREAM: But the Foot wasn’t Chatham don’t you remember, there it was the Gunners, you must have been at Caterham, Caterham, the Foot.
GORMAN: Chatham I tell you, isn’t it like yesterday, Morrison’s pub on the corner.
CREAM: Harrison’s. Harrison’s Oak Lounge, do you think I don’t know Chatham. I used to go there on holiday with
Mrs Cream, I know Chatham backwards Gorman, inside and out, Harrison’s Oak Lounge on the corner of what was the name of the street, on a rise it was, it’ll come back to me, do you think I don’t know Harrison’s Oak Lounge
there on the comer of dammit I’ll forget my own name next and the square it’ll come back to me.
GORMAN: Morrison or Harrison we were at Chatham.
CREAM: That would surprise me greatly, the Gunners were Chatham do you not remember that?
GORMAN: I was in the Foot, at Chatham, in the Foot.
CREAM: The Foot, that’s right the Foot at Chatham.
GORMAN: That’s what I’m telling you, Chatham the Foot.
CREAM: That would surprise me greatly, you must have it mucked up with the war, the mobilization.
GORMAN: The mobilization have a heart it’s as clear in my mind as yesterday the mobilization, we were shifted
straight away to Chesham, was it, no, Chester, that’s the place, Chester, there was Morrison’s pub on the corner and
a chamber-maid what was her name, joan, jean, jane, the very start of the war when we still didn’t believe it,
Chester, ah those are happy memories.
CREAM: Happy memories, happy memories, I wouldn’t go so far as that.
GORMAN : I mean the start up, the start up at Chatham, we still didn’t believe it, and that chamber-maid what was her name it’ll come back to me. [Pause.]

The repetition of themes, or of names and snatches of phrases, this repetition with variations, can be compared to the way music is composed, with the statement of certain themes which are then subjected to elaborate variations. It’s certainly not snappy dialogue designed to convey information, the opposite – it is a fog of misinformation which is more concerned with the music-style twirls and repetitions of key phrases and words.

Silent pauses and noisy traffic

There is an obvious correlation between the misfunctioning of the barrel organ which stops and starts and then sputters out a sentimental tune, and the misfunctioning of the two men’s minds, as if their brains, like the machine, require thumps and bangs to make them function.

More than that, in the handful of places where it intrudes into the narrative, the fragmented tune played by the barrel organ almost suggests that, in some eerie way, it is somehow underpinning reality itself. At several points not only the tune stops but the entire play stops with it, everything stops, and there is dead silence.

GORMAN: Do I remember, fields it was, fields, bluebells, over there , on the bank, bluebells. When you think … [Suddenly complete silence. 10 seconds. The tune resumes, falters, stops. Silence. The street noises resume.] Ah the horses, the carriages, and the barouches, ah the barouches…

It’s relatively understated, for Beckett, but I think this eerie, almost science fiction element, is suddenly apparent, in one or two haunted moments…

Different titles

One other point, Beckett clearly added entirely new content or the English equivalent of the French original content, such as naming British Army regiments and pubs in English towns (Chatham, Caterham etc). But it’s worth pausing a moment over the change in titles. Pinget named his play La Manivelle which translates as The Crank. I’m not sure whether this refers to the person or to the metal tool you’d use to hand-crank something like a barrel organ, or whether there is a deliberate play on words to refer to both. Either way, Beckett has chosen for his title something completely different, referring to neither a character nor the machine, but to the music itself. He has brought to the fore the role of music in the play.

Now the barrel-organ music doesn’t actually occur many times during the performance so it’s easy to think that Beckett, also, intends a pun, and that he is using the phrase ‘the old tune’ not only to refer to the piece of music the barrel organ plays, but to the entire style of doddery reminiscence of the two old boys.

On this reading, the title becomes a sly reference to the super-familiar Beckett idea that people just talk and talk and talk to fill the space, to give themselves the strength to go on, to fill up time, to create their own being; it is talk which means nothing and gets nowhere and changes nothing, which defines the self but is as impoverished and empty as that self.

The words ‘the old tune’ sound innocent enough, indeed they have an unusually sentimental ring for a Beckett title. But at the same time they allude to the world of bleakness, emptiness and struggle to go on, which is Beckett’s core concern.

Pauses and traffic

Back to the idea of the two eerie silences in the play and the numerous pauses the text contains. Having noted them, it’s worth going on to say that there are, in fact, not nearly so many pauses in The Old Tune as in Beckett’s other radio plays of the period. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the pauses aren’t so pointed and stylised. Although the stage direction ‘[pause]’ occurs regularly, it is placed to as to reflect realistic pauses in the ebb and flow of two old geezers’ garrulousness, rather than to interrupt the action altogether, in the self-consciously disruptive way which we find in his other plays of the time.

In fact the flow of words is interrupted more by a positive, intrusive element than by the negative element of silences and pauses, and this is the incessant roar of passing cars. This is something the audience can very plainly hear and which the pair of codgers directly comment on in a passage devoted to noisy traffic and the precise brand of car they’ve seen whizz by, before the drop the subject and move onto others. But every few minute before and after this passage, another car roars by, interrupting their maunderings (‘bloody cars!’).

So many times that it makes you reflect that the two old men are almost literally (and, as we’ve observed, rather eerily) tied to the outdated and clapped-out Victorian technology of the barrel organ, stuttering stopping and starting as it does, while the modern world – in the form of the steady stream of shiny, noisy motor cars – is literally passing them by (‘bloody cars!’).

Irishry

The commentary points out that Beckett drew on the stylised language of John Millington Synge, who had a similar middle-class upbringing to him, along with the verbal excesses of Seán O’Casey, who had a more working class provenance. The listener is certainly struck not only by the Irish accents but the Irish locutions used throughout:

GORMAN: Slipping along what would you want slipping along and we only after meeting for once in a blue moon.

I’m not familiar with Synge but I studied O’Casey’s play, Juno and the Paycock at school, and I remember the way the characters use a high heroic diction which contrasts with their shabby, impoverished circumstances. It’s a contradiction which is both comic and tragic at the same time, and you can think of that fundamental dichotomy – between characters who are physically and mentally impoverished using not only highfalutin language but invoking high philosophical concepts or dropping references to Dante and so on – as a really basic structural idea which underpins Beckett’s entire oeuvre, typified by the characters in The Beckett Trilogy crawling through the mud, pulling themselves through the mire, their heads full of garbled philosophy and obscure references to Dante.

The Old Tune is often overlooked by critics because it sticks out as an anomaly, a throwback, in Beckett’s steady progression towards evermore abstract and highly stylised dramaturgy, towards works which are more stage direction and choreography than dialogue and character. It’s like a last flaring-up of a more straightforward humanist view of character and an invocation of the Irish accents and speech rhythms of his youth, which he was rarely to use again.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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by Simon on December 18, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 18, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/18/the-old-tune-samuel-beckett/

Cars: Accelerating the Modern World @ the Victoria and Albert Museum

The blight of cars

I hate cars.

Pollution

Cars emit vast amounts of toxic fumes, poisoning passersby and making our cities hellholes of pollution.

Due to the increase in the use of private cars, road traffic pollution is considered a major threat to clean air in the UK and other industrialised countries. Traffic fumes contain harmful chemicals that pollute the atmosphere. Road traffic emissions produce greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. (Road Traffic and pollution)

Destruction

The post-war obsession with cars led councils and developers to rip the historic hearts out of most English cities and towns, creating inhumane, alienating and polluted labyrinths of urban freeways with urine-drenched concrete subways as an afterthought for the humble pedestrian.

Death

Cars kill people, lots of people.

According to the World Health Organisation, more than 1.25 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes, and injuries from road traffic accidents are the leading cause of death among people aged between 15 and 29 years of age. (Road accident casualties in Britain and the world)

Cars killed childhood

Lastly, the number one concern of most parents of small children isn’t paedophiles or internet porn, it’s that their kids might be run over by traffic. (Play England website) That explains why parents don’t let their kids play in the street as they did in the halcyon past, but prefer to keep them safely inside. Which contributes to lack of exercise and growth of obesity among children, as well as adversely affecting children’s mental health. Car culture, in other words, killed childhood.

Personally, I think cars should be banned, period.

Cars: Accelerating the Modern World at the Victoria and Albert Museum

This is a dazzling exhibition celebrating the rise and rise of cars which shows how they are not just machines for getting from A to B but were, right from the start, spurs to all kinds of other industries, helping to create:

  • countless aspects of industrial and commercial design, from instrument panels to ergonomic chairs
  • innovations in industrial production, specifically the assembly line techniques pioneered at the Ford car plant in Detroit
  • entire new areas of engineering relating to roads and then to motorways, the construction of stronger road bridges, flyovers, ring roads etc using the new materials of concrete and tarmac
  • an explosion of consumer accessories from safety hats and goggles to driving coats and gloves all the way up to modern Satnavs
  • as well as providing a mainstay for the advertising industry for over a hundred years
  • and becoming a dominating feature of popular culture in films, novels and much more

The car is, when you stop to consider it, arguably the central product of the twentieth century, the defining artifact of our civilisation (and, in my jaundiced view, a perfect symbol of our society’s relentless drive to excess consumption, ruinous pollution and global destruction.)

They promised us the freedom of the road, instead we got day-long traffic jams on 12-lane highways, toxic air pollution, and over a million dead every year. This photo shows congestion blocking the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway

The car has transformed how we move around, how we design and lay out our cities and towns, it has transformed our psychologies and imaginations. As one of the curators explains:

“The V&A’s mission is to champion the power of design to change the world, and no other design object has impacted the world more than the automobile. This exhibition is about the power of design to effect change, and the unintended consequences that have contributed to our current environmental situation.

Structure of the show

This exhibition is brilliantly laid out. You progress through a labyrinthine serpentine curve of cases displaying over 250 artefacts large and small, and studded by no fewer than 15 actual cars, from one of the first ever built to a ‘popup’ car of the future.

Photo of the Benz patent motor car, model no. 3, 1888. Image courtesy of Daimler

The exhibition is immensely informative, with sections and sub-sections devoted to every aspect of cars, their design, manufacture, the subsidiary industries and crafts they support, the global oil industry, and car cultures around the world, it really is an impressively huge and all-embracing overview.

But the thing that made the impact on me was the films.

I counted no fewer than 35 films running, from little black-and-white documentaries showing on TV-sized monitors, through to clips of Blade Runner and Fifth Element on large screens.

There’s the iconic car chase from Bullitt on a very big screen hanging from the ceiling and then an enormous, long, narrow, gallery-wide screen which was showing three long, slow and beautifully shot films of landscapes which have been impacted by the car – a complicated freeway junction in Japan, oil fields in central California, and the ‘lithium triangle’ in Chile, between Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, where lithium is extracted for battery production a vast expanse of flat desert which is being mined to produce lithium and its landscape converted into a colourful patchwork of slag and beautiful blue purification reservoirs.

At both the start and the end of the show are totally immersive films which are projected on screens from floor to ceiling, the first one a speeded-up film of a car journey through London, projected onto three split screens; the final experience in the show is standing in front of a shiny round little Pop-Up Next car around which stretches a curved screen onto which is projected a montage of car disaster imagery, including car crashes, road rage incidents, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, Jimmy Carter telling us about the energy crisis, which gets louder and faster and more intense until it collapses into a high speed blur of colour. And looming over us, the viewers, I realised after a while, is an enormous drone hanging from the ceiling and looking down on us like one of H.G. Wells’s conquering Martians.

Cars Exhibition, 19th November 2019

All very trippy and intense and sense-bombarding. If you fancy a quiet exhibition, this is not it, sound from all the films is playing at once and, given the subject matter, they are almost all dynamic and fast-moving.

The exhibition is divided into three parts although the continuous serpentine journey past the display cases and films isn’t divided, as in a ‘normal’ gallery, into ‘rooms’.

1. ‘Going Fast’

The exhibition with records of all the gee-whizz visions of a perfect techno future which the car has been lined with throughout its history, with lots of illustrations from magazines and sci fi stories, clips from movies predicting flying cars such as Blade Runner or The Fifth Element. On a massive projector screen right at the start is playing Key To the Future, a film made by General Motors for their 1956 Motorama car show.

This was just one of a series of Firebird concept cars produced by General Motors. Interestingly, the design was inspired by the new jet fighter planes which had just started flying, and the cars copied the jets’ fluid silhouettes, cockpit seats and gas turbine engines designed to reach 200mph. they weren’t actually sold but were produced as experiments in function and design. And to thrill the public at motor shows with exciting visions of hands-free driving.

One feature of these designs for future cars was that a number of them were Russian, from Soviet-era drawings of an ideal communist future. It’s worth noting that the curators have made an effort to get outside the Anglosphere. Unavoidably most of the footage and technology is from America, with a healthy amount about the British car industry, and then sections about Fiat in Italy and Citroen in France.

But the V&A have gone out of their way to try and internationalise their coverage and they commissioned a series of films about car culture in five other parts of the world including one on South African ‘spinners’ (who compete to be able to spin cars very fast in as small a circle as possible), California low-riders, Emirati dune racers in the Middle East, and Japanese drivers of highly decorated trucks. As well as a section towards the end about the ‘Paykan’, a popular people’s car heavily promoted in Iran in the early 1970s which became a symbol of modernity and affluence.

Installation view of Cars at the Victoria and Albert Museum showing an Iranian Paykan on the left, a desert-crossing Auto-Chenille by Citroën in the centre, and a funky bubble car on the right. Note the massive projection screen at the back displaying a panoramic film of oil fields in central California

The section continues with the first-ever production car, the Benz Patent Motorwagen 3, introduced to the public in 1888, and the futuristic Tatra T77 from the Czech Republic, which was designed in the 1920s by Paul Jaray, the man who developed the aerodynamics of airships.

French advertisement for the Tatra 77 (1934)

There’s a whole section about the founding and development of car races, from the Daytona track in Florida, to Brooklands race track in Surrey, both accompanied, of course, by vintage film footage. They explain how the British Gordon Bennett Cup prompted the French to invent the Grand Prix in 1906. There’s racing against other cars, but also, of course, the successive attempts to break the land speed record which attracted great publicity from the 1920s, through the 30s, 40s and 50s.

Britain First Always – Buy British, UK (1930s) Artwork by R. Granger Barrett

And there’s a feminist section of the show which focuses solely on the great women car drivers who appeared at Brooklands such as Camille du Gast from France and Dorothy Levitt, and Jill Scott Thomas who became an important symbol of the women’s rights movement.

There’s a gruesome life-size sculpture of a man named ‘Graham’, which shows what shape a human being would have to be to withstand a car collision. Graham was commissioned last year by The Transport Accident Commission in Victoria, Australia to demonstrate human vulnerability in traffic accidents, and made by Melbourne artist Patricia Piccinini in collaboration with leading trauma surgeon Christian Kenfield and crash investigation expert Dr David Logan.

Graham: what humans ought to look like to optimise their chances of surviving a car crash

2. ‘Making More’

The second section is devoted to the manufacturing of cars and focuses heavily on the range of innovations in manufacturing pioneered at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit as early as 1913. There are models of the factory, black and white film footage of conveyor belts, unexpected footage of meat processing plants where Ford worked as a young man and which the car plants were to some extent modelled on, photos and sketches of all aspects of the production line along with a list of the very tough rules and regulations Ford imposed on his workers.

Sure, they were paid double what they could earn at other factories (a whopping $5) but the stress of staying in one place performing the same function for 12 hours a day, with no smoking or talking and strictly regulated loo breaks took its tool: many workers developed psychological illnesses, many just quit.

Ford’s factories were designed by the architect Albert Kahn who pioneered an entirely new construction space that allowed for larger, more flexible workspaces, a design which quickly spread around the world, for example at Fiat’s Lingotto factory. There are floorplans, architects’ designs, models and photos of all this twentieth century innovation, plus the animated feature Symphony in F celebrating the complex supply chains Ford had established which was shown at the 1933 ‘Century of Progress’ Chicago World’s Fair.

By contrast one wall is filled with some immense film projections of a modern, almost totally-automated BMW car assembly plant in Munich, and there’s a Unimate Robotoc Arm, one of the first robot implements used on a production line as early as 1961 at the General Motors plant in New Jersey The principles are the same but human input, effort and endurance have been almost completely eliminated.

Murals were commissioned to celebrate the wonderful new productiveness of human labour, including the wonderful Detroit Murals by Mexican mural maker Diego Rivera

Production line methods were quickly adopted to a wide range of goods including everything from furniture to architecture, and the speed and rhythms of factory life spread into pop culture, influencing music, dance, fashion and the propaganda of the new totalitarian states.

Hitler, the show reminds us, was a big admirer of Henry Ford, who was himself a noted anti-Semite, and consulted Ford about mass production techniques to help improve German efficiency, which resulted in the remarkably enduring design of the Volkswagen and Hitler’s pioneering Autobahns, but also led the Germans to the efficient mass manufacture of other consumer goods like the Volsempfänger or People’s Radio.

At the other end of the cultural scale, the exhibition includes the ‘production line’ video made in 1965 for the Detroit girl group Martha and the Vandellas song Nowhere To Run To. The Motown Sound which they typified was, after all, named after Motor Town, the town that Henry Ford built up into the centre of the American car industry.

There were to (at least) reactions against production line culture. An obvious one was the creation of powerful unions formed to represent assembly line workers. Following the landmark sit-down strike from 1936 to 1937 in Flint, Michigan, membership of the Union of Automotive Workers grew from 30,000 to 500,000 in one year! Thirty years later, and the exhibition includes some of the posters produced by a Marxist art collective in Paris to support striking car workers during the 1968 mass strikes in France.

But another reaction was against mass production, and in favour of luxury. The Model T meant cars for the masses, but what about cars for the better off? In the 1920s luxury car manufacturers returned to creating bespoke, hand-crafted models, and this triggered a growing market for high-end car accessories. The exhibition includes examples of chic hats and lighters and motoring gloves, all associating the idea of motoring with glamour and luxury (‘To drive a Peugeot is to be in fashion’).

A custom-made Hispano-Suiza Type H6B car from 1922 provides a close-up look at the luxurious and meticulously crafted world of early automotive design.

Hispano-Suiza Type HB6 ‘Skiff Torpedo’. Hispano-Suiza (chassis) Henri Labourdette (body) 1922. Photo by Michael Furman © The Mullin Automotive Museum

Thus the development of mascots on car bonnets, a small symbol which allowed consumers to quietly flaunt their wealth and taste. Thus between 1920 and 1931 French designer René Lalique produced a series of car bonnet ornaments made of glass, which are on display here.

There’s a section devoted to the development of colours, shades and tones, and to the science of producing lacquers and paint which would be durable enough to protect cars in all weathers. Even mass market manufacturers took note and in 1927 General Motors was the first producer to set up an entire department devoted to styling, the ‘Art and Colour Section’. As far back as 1921, under chairman Alfred Sloan, General Motors implemented a policy known as ‘annual model renewal’. Taking its lead from the fashion industry, the cars would be restyled and relaunched annually, with a new look and new colours (although the engineering and motors mostly stayed the same).

And hence the development of extravagant car shows like ‘Motorama’ launched in 1949 by General Motors, an annual series which came to involve celebrity performers, original songs, choreography, models in clothes straight off catwalks, and promotional films.

The ever-growing commercialisation of cars and life in general sparked a backlash in the 1960s and the exhibition explains how the humble VolksWagen became a cheap and cheerful symbol of people who dropped out, adopted alternative lifestyles, and often decorated their VW with hippy images and symbols.

The exhibition features a striking example of a car customised by Tomas Vazquez, a member of the lowrider culture that emerged in Latino communities in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s.

3. ‘Shaping Space’

The final section of the exhibition explores the vast impact of the car on the world’s landscape, nations, and cities. It looks at how the petrol engine beat early electric and steam-powered competitors by promising the ability to travel the world, transforming drivers into individual explorers.

Displays include the first ever Michelin guide published in 1900, a little red book giving tips about where to drive in France – examples of the tremendous artwork Shell commissioned to encourage drivers to get out and explore Britain (the Shell guides), and a look at the special off-road cars called Auto-Chenille by Citroën and created to undertake a publicised treks across Africa and Asia.

This section looks at the vast ramifications and impact of the oil industry around the world, from the early days when it was celebrated as a miracle resource, through the evolution of oil-based products like Tupperware and nylon. There are fascinating maps of oil reserves, films about oil extraction

And then on to the 1970s oil crisis which helped inspire the new environmental movement. There’s footage of a grim-faced president Carter making a TV broadcast to the American people and telling them they have to be more careful how they use their limited resources, ha ha ha, and a poster for the first ever Earth Day, called by new environmental activists for 22 April 1970.

Poster for the first Earth Day, 22 April 1970, designed by Robert Leydenfrost, photography by Don Brewster

So it’ll be Earth Day’s 50th anniversary in a few months. And how well have we looked after the earth in the past 50 years?

Not too well, I think. Most of us have been too busy buying stuff, consuming stuff, competing to have shinier, newer stuff, and top of the list comes a shiny new car. I was amused to read the recent report that all the world’s efforts to get people to use electric cars have been completely eclipsed by the unstoppable rise of gas-guzzling Sports Utilities Vehicles. These throng the streets of Clapham where I live. In twenty minutes I’m going to have to dodge and weave among these huge, poisonous dinosaurs as I cycle to work.

As a tiny symbol of our ongoing addiction to the internal combustion engine, there’s an animated map showing the spread of motorways across Europe from 1920 to 2020, which contains the mind-boggling fact that plans are well advanced for a motorway which will stretch from Hamburg to Shanghai! More cars, more lorries, more coaches and buses and taxis and motorbikes and scooters, burn it up, baby!

This final room has the most diverse range of cars on display, including early cars from the 1950s that attempted to address fuel scarcity such as the Messerschmitt KR200 bubble car, alongside the Ford Nucleon, a nuclear-powered concept car, and the exhibition closes with the immersive film I mentioned above, streaming around the ‘Pop.Up Next autonomous flying car’ co-designed by Italdesign, Airbus and Audi.

Summary

I think this is a really brilliant exhibition, setting out to document a madly ambitious subject – one of the central subjects of the 20th century – with impressive range and seriousness. It covers not only ‘the car’ itself but touches on loads of other fields and aspects of twentieth century history, with a confident touch and fascinating wall labels. The serpentine layout combines with the clever use of mirrors and gaps between the partition walls to make it seem much bigger than it is, as do the umpteen films showing on screens large, extra-large and ginormous.

It’s a feast for the mind and the senses.

And it’s not at all a hymn of praise: the curators are well aware of the baleful effects of car culture: there’s a digital clock recording the number of people who’ve died in traffic accidents so far in the world, and another one (in the 1970s oil crisis section) giving a countdown till the world’s oil resources are utterly exhausted (how do they know? how can anyone know?).

But there’s also another digital counter showing the number of cars manufactured in the world so far this year and it shows no sign of abating or slowing down. Car, lorry, bus, truck, coach, motorbike production continue to increase all around the world and is often [author puts his head in his hands and sighs with despair] taken as the primary indicator of a country’s economy.

We’re going to burn this planet down, aren’t we?

Promo video

Curators

The exhibition is curated by Brendan Cormier and Lizzie Bisley, with Esme Hawes as Assistant Curator.

Related links

More V&A reviews

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by Simon on February 3, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Design, Exhibition
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Posted by Simon on February 3, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/03/cars-accelerating-the-modern-world-victoria-and-albert-museum/

The Muse Among the Motors by Rudyard Kipling

‘A series of verses on motoring and motorists, in the form of parodies in the style of earlier writers’

1. Kipling was an early enthusiast for motor cars from the moment his friend, the newspaper tycoon Lord Harmsworth, arrived at his Sussex home in one in 1900. He quickly bought a very early model – in fact a soon-to-be redundant steam-powered car, a ‘Locomobile’ – and employed the first of a series of chauffeur-engineers to drive and maintain it for him.

2. Kipling’s family was very artistic and throughout the children’s childhood and youth, the whole family read poetry and plays together, especially Shakespeare. Encouraged by this cultured environment, Kipling showed a precocious ability at writing pastiches and parodies from an early age. One of his first books was a self-published collection of parodies titled Echoes, printed when he was just 19.

After the turn of the century, when the South African war was over and Kipling had settled into his new home in rural Sussex, the two interests came together in a series of light-hearted pastiches of early, medieval and romantic poetry, with Kipling copying the styles of various classic poets (Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Donne, Milton, Byron Wordsworth and so on) as if they’d written poems about motor cars.

The first 14 were published in the Daily Mail in 1904 – to which he added six more in 1919, and a further six in 1929, making 26 in total. Some are very short. None are masterpieces. Some are mildly amusing. I like his take on the alliterative four-stress line of Anglo-Saxon poetry:

The Advertisement

(In the Manner of the Earlier English)

Whether to wend through straight streets strictly,
Trimly by towns perfectly paved;
Or after office, as fitteth thy fancy,
Faring with friends far among fields;
There is none other equal in action,
Sith she is silent, nimble, unnoisome,
Lordly of leather, gaudily gilded,
Burgeoning brightly in a brass bonnet,
Certain to steer well between wains.

and his spoof of Chaucer (I particularly like the line about Paris, that is exactly the kind of thing Chaucer says about his characters):

The Justice’s Tale

(Chaucer)

WITH them there rode a lustie Engineere
Wel skilled to handel everich waie her geere,
Hee was soe wise ne man colde showe him naught
And out of Paris was hys learnynge brought.
Frontlings mid brazen wheeles and wandes he sat,
And on hys heade he bare an leathern hat.
Hee was soe certaine of his governance,
That, by the Road, he tooke everie chaunce.
For simple people and for lordlings eke
Hee wolde not bate a del but onlie squeeke
Behinde their backés on an horné hie
Until they crope into a piggestie.
He was more wood than bull in china-shoppe,
And yet for cowes and doggés wolde hee stop,
Not our of Marcie but for Preudence-sake—
Than hys dependaunce ever was hys brake.

And this one, copying a poet called Adam Lindsay Gordon who I’ve never heard of, but which has the combination of sentimental pathos and humour of the Barrack-Room Ballads, and also the punchiest final line.

The Dying Chauffeur

(Adam Lindsay Gordon)

WHEEL me gently to the garage, since my car and I must part –
No more for me the record and the run.
That cursèd left-hand cylinder the doctors call my heart
Is pinking past redemption – I am done!

They’ll never strike a mixture that’ll help me pull my load.
My gears are stripped – I cannot set my brakes.
I am entered for the finals down the timeless untimed Road
To the Maker of the makers of all makes!

Related links

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by Simon on November 11, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 11, 2016

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