The Supremest Cutlass
Sometimes you have to give credit where credit is due. In this case, I have to give credit to "Regular Car Reviews", mostly for doing something I never had the courage to do.
When I wrote my first print column for Bicycles Today magazine some twenty-four years ago, I was already deeply and thoroughly involved in the navel-gazing quasi-discipline of English lit-crit. I could spout chapter and verse about text and meaning and the New Criticism and Eliot and Pound and so on and so forth. I approached this stuff with the deadly seriousness commonly reserved by saner people for the handling of radioactive waste or irritated ligers. I bristled at the mention of "authors" like John Grisham or Anne Rice. I made a permanent enemy of a professor for standing up in the classroom and describing our reading assignment of the week, Mary Gordon's Men And Angels, as "the sort of culturally impoverished white trash garbage that appeals to the moron within every so-called intellectual prole whose parents earned their living by digging ditches and waiting tables."
When my professor turned crimson, I then said, "But what could I expect from someone whose idea of a scholarly work is a ---" and here I sneered as best I could while wearing a bright-red Chicago Bulls Starter jacket, "---hagiography of someone like E.L. Doctorow." At the end of the semester, when I received a "B" from that fellow, one of just two "B"s I'd receive from that department over the course of four and a half years, I resolved to punch this guy in the face the next time I saw him, a plan I confessed to another faculty member and was promptly shamed out of pursuing. What can I say. I was, and remain, an uneasy mix of painfully shy intellectual and pit-road assailant, and I never know which half of me is going to show up at any given time.
This inclination towards the pedantic has always mixed uneasily with my chosen topics of public discourse, and it's often caused me to be unnecessarily recondite about...
...okay, hold on. Let me try again. Sometimes I've messed up perfectly good articles about bikes and cars and guns by trying to elevate the tone unnecessarily. As you can see in the previous one-sentence "paragraph". Over the course of my writing career, I've tried to sneak in everything from first-person Updike riffs sprinkled between the Profile cranks and "Leary" BMX tricks to a discussion of John Fowles and the Viper TA. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but I've always thought of the lit-nerd stuff as seasoning to mainstream writing, not the main course of a dish you could serve to the one billion English-speaking monkeys out there on their computers across the globe.
The Regular Car Reviews guys, on the other hand, as Robert Downey, Jr. would say, "go full retard" every chance they get. Except the "full retard" is really something like "full pop-culture lit-crit." This interview says it all:
“We know how to do a close reading, and we can approach a car from both the primary source, which is the car itself, and all secondary sources,” said Mr. R. It’s important to be able to look at a car and find “what influenced this car in the time of its design… what was going on in the world, or in the local community, where the design firm was. When the car was being made. And possibly how can you make an argument, with whatever was going on in the world, affecting this car.”
Oh, boy. The phrase "close reading" is the literature major's equivalent of "reharmonization" or "Gantt chart". The word "reading" doesn't always mean "reading"; you can perform a "close reading" of anything from Pulp Fiction to a sculpture. The word "close" really means "divination". As in, you're trying to guess the author's intent, both conscious and unconscious. Mr. Regular's further discussion in the paragraph indicates that he is one of those "close readers" who focuses heavily on context. Not everyone does, which is why some Shakespeare critics are obsessed with source texts and contemporary performance notes and others prefer to read the plays as bare texts without a single thought as to what life was like at the Globe Theatre or in the Elizabethan period.
As a consequence, the Regular Car Reviews are rarely about the cars themselves. They're about the cars in context. As such, they combine the guilty pleasures of every VH1 "I Love The (Insert Decade Here)" show with the ego-stroking reassurances people of my generation got from knowing some of the references in the song "We Didn't Start The Fire." I can still remember my girlfriend's roommate singing that song and then patiently explaining what "JFK - blown away!" meant. My God, that was one stupid young woman. Unfortunately for me, she pushed all my buttons in the worst possible way. How odd to think that she long ago disappeared into the miasma of rural motherhood while I remain myself, at least to my eyes:
And I will go on shining Shining like brand new I never look behind me And my troubles will be few
The RCRs have the sheen of intellectual accomplishment without the substance. Like a film studies class, they provide a veneer of deep thought, carelessly glued to the fiberboard of pop culture junk. But in a world where the average person spends more time listening to Drake or the Zac Brown Band than they do reading an actual book, they represent a genuine service to car people. I have no doubt that many viewers have opened up Wikipedia and spent time learning about a diverse array of topics after hearing some of those topics popping up in an RCR.
In short, they're like Thin Mints. They're not good for you, but you could do worse.
Mr. Regular is now a co-columnist of mine at Road&Track. In his honor, I wrote a rebuttal of his debut piece. I'm hoping we'll have many more chances to tread this kind of loamy soil, rich with easily-gleaned significance and sugary-sweet with the frothiest sort of intellectual satisfaction.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to turn from Jekyll to Hyde, fire up my motorcycle, and ride it down the sidewalk next to the city daycare.