The Auto

Much of my thinking in and about automobiles is indebted to the indeliable and tremendously missed Anne Friedberg. Friedberg spent much of the 1990s and 2000s in her car, traversing greater Los Angeles and like a good Angeleno, used that time for social and professional phone calls, planning, work. Friedberg loved automotive visuality--the windshield itself glimmering like a giant screen. She wrote of drive-in movie theaters and the transport of cinema itself. She was Auto Magic.

At the time, I was on the other end of the phone quite often, working with Anne to run a small cinematheque. Tethered to my land line in my studio apartment I often wished for the freedom of the road that I lacked.

Since those days, I've become a bit of an auto-naut. I like cars with manual transmissions, specifically hatchbacks. I think I saw The Italian Job one too many times. I'd love a Mini-Cooper of my own but I'm stickler for fuel efficiency. A hatchback strikes me as a particular mid-century, modern car dream: modular (my seats move down, up, out if needed) and transformable. It is a Jetsons car. I like that self-sufficiency. I also like to be able to pick up furniture at thrift shop should the need present itself. Now that I live in Michigan, where cars are such an important part of history and the economy, I think about them differently. They are not the dream-machines of freeway living one has nightmares inside of out West. Cars are the things grandfathers built, they are tied to the vast and now abandoned plants that pepper the region. They are smog. Haze. Money. Most of all, cars in Michigan remind me of money--of what cities have it and what don't and where the cars and car companies took them. Still, I am an American after all. I love my car. I crank the stereo up when I drive to campus and relieve that early sequence in The Silence of the Lambs: "Oh yeah, alright, take it easy baby, make it last, make it last all night, She was An American Girl."