I'm not sure why, but the slightly aged (no! it's vintage!) (it is!) (swear to God!) magazine-y feature below seems to feature far more than its share of pithy aphorisms... it's chock full'o'nutty aphoristic goodness!
I think it's the muscle car factor. I used to remove surfboards and skateboards and skimboards and wetsuits and boogie-boards and Carl's Jr. styrofoam burger-boxes and Yellow Pages (hey, geezers, remember them?) and everything but the essential Thomas Bros. map out of the various GTOs and El Caminos that I would then go dyno-tweak onto the Pasadena Freeway on-ramps....
(For them that don't know, the Pasadena Freeway, allegedly The World's First Freeway, was and is kind of bizarrely designed, in that you must NECESSARILY, no matter what manner of vehicle you're steering, STOMP ON THE GAS in order to enter, from a dead stop with maybe twenty or thirty or forty or so yards until YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING AT LEAST THE MINIMUM 55 MPH (which any Californian can tell you is and ought to be and ever will be somewhere between 65 and 80). Which is way-bitchin', frankly, if, on-ramp after on-ramp, you're tuning your Tri-Power three-carburetor '66 GTO, or better yet, seeing, for entirely scientific study purposes, exactly how far the gas-gauge needle will drop if you crank open the hood scoop on your low-geared, high-compression-head RamAir III '69 GTO and Fuckin' STOMP ON IT. (Aimed, let it be said, almost directly from dear beloved glorious downtown LA straight toward Pasadena's mythical Jet Propulsion Labratory.)
Anyway, as I was saying up there somewheres: aphorisms. Galore!
Such as:
"Fiberglass being fiberglass and easy to slice with a Skilsaw..."
(See, I don't much care whether you personally think much of this as an aphorism, but I know, in my heart of Skilsaw'd fiberglas'd hearts, that this is about as pure a sentence as is possible to achieve in American. Screw you, as Ray Wylie Hubbard nearly almost said, I'm from Arizona.
Same goes double-or-nuthin' for this one: "Blowers and air-injector stacks began bursting through hoods just as Big Daddy Roth's cartoons had always predicted they would; All Hell burst loose."
Or this:
"Hood scoops — functional, semi-functional, quasi-functional — sprang up like flared nostrils on horny beasts..."
Or:
"Rockets are rockets, and cars from the Fifties are anything but."
And then there's the opening line of this opus, which I think has proved to have a near-eternal aesthetic endurance:
"Muscle cars don't have fins."
Okay, so maybe by Oscar Wildean standards these are long-winded and louche' . . . but this next, this next one, this very next one . . . well, if I write no other sentence in life . . . (and some afternoons, that's exactly my mood) well, I wrote this one:
"Good cars go fast."
So there, dammit.
"Good cars go fast."
Take that, LeCorbusier et/und Mies Van derRohe; Form follows function, less is more; both be damned.
"Good cars go fast."
That, if I must say so myself, kicks major ass.
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