automotive connoisseurship

Palo Alto Concours d’Elegance – . Taking a tour with Jon Summers. What are the values and principles that govern the collection of cars? Just what are the values applied to these extraordinary artifacts? Age, elegance, finish, rarity, historical significance, market value … These are questions of automotive connoisseurship.

Bill Rathje

Bill Rathje died last Friday. Inventor of garbology, pioneer in anthropological approaches to contemporary material culture, expert in ancient civilizations, prescient, daring, and, above all, a great and warm person, larger than life. He had been ill for a long while, but I always thought he’d get better when his doctors found the right medication,…

Mark Bradford

We made it at last today to the Mark Bradford exhibition in San Francisco at SFMOMA – [Link] Exhibition website – [Link] Maybe it’s about … tracing the ghosts of cities past. It’s the pulling off of a layer and finding another underneath. It’s the … details that point to people saying, “We exist; we…

Paul Ingrassia – 15 cars for America

Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Ingrassia was with our Revs Program yesterday at the VAIL Facility of CARS (the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford). He was sharing with us his superb new book: Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in 15 Cars.   Written in his crisp and elegant prose, the book…