The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby

The most alarming bit to me was this pitting of Mondrian against Brancusi. The idea of Detroit as Mondrian, these straight formal lines all hard and Apollonian, versus the Dionysian whimsy of the capricious streamline curve. What the Kandy Kolors indicate—the violets, carnal yellows, and tangerine flakes—the colors of rebellion. But I have always voiced an interest in the baroque, the cathedral work of Bernini, even as I have surrounded myself with minimal forms and blank palettes, tools to let the mind go blank. Secretly I’ve suspected that Mondrian was right. I think of Nietzsche’s essay on the Apollo/Dionysus binary, the challenge he throws down. The romance of the Dionysian, even as we can’t fail to identify ourselves in the more strict portrait of the sun god. And too, along with all this, Wolfe’s idea of Art, and how it does not apply here—Art is tight and thought to death. But here with the cars we have the romance of the willfully naive, the outsider position combined with technical innovation—necessity as the mother of invention, new science used to make the crazy things crazier and they won’t be driven anyhow, art as a byproduct of this devotion to form and convention, albeit a form and convention that they have invented for themselves. Not the adult who tries to go back to childhood, but rather the kid who just refused to grow up. It’s stunted, but kinda pure.

Veni, Vidi, Varooooooomi !!! Long live the New Journalism (and its current incarnation The New New Journalism)!