Daniel J. Wilson, a cab driver/artist/documentary filmmaker in New York, started recording conversations in his cab and put them together into an audio collage. Then his cab became a transportation, performance, and gallery space all-in-one when he played the collage back for passengers.
“It’s this world where people act like you don’t exist, even though you’re three feet away,” Mr. Wilson, 35, said from the front seat of his cab recently. “You get this fragment of a person.”
Of course, those fragments can have jagged edges. Unlike a bartender, who is expected to at least feign interest in the tales told by his regulars, a taxi driver is rarely used as a sounding board. Yet he is still privy to explosive confessions and earsplitting breakups, office gossip after work and whiskey-induced phone calls before dawn.
In the coming weeks, I want to delve into some topics that reflect the darker side of transportation (e.g., safety and danger, discrimination, inequality). I decided to keep this week as filled with light and happy as possible. I watched The Muppets recently. The show and the movies were a fixture of my childhood so it was great to see the gang reunited. Jason Segel also redeemed himself (I just don't get the appeal of most of his films). In any case, I remembered that Kermit was often pedaling around on a bike. In The Great Muppet Caper, Kermit and Miss Piggy ride rented bikes through a park in London.
Kermit rides a bike in from his swamp home in The Muppet Movie. He crashes his bike in the opening of Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas. In fact, there are so many bike-related Muppet moments that they're compiled on a Muppet wiki page. Puppeteer David Goelz explains the fascinating behind-the-scenes of shooting a frog using an alternative mode of transportation:
With The Muppet Movie, we had a very sophisticated
bicycle rig that was a little radio-controlled car that was mounted in the bike
between the front and rear wheels, and it had a mirror on it so it reflected
the ground in front of the bicycle (as you saw from the camera's point of
view), but it broke just before we had to shoot the bit, and so we ended up
doing that with three strings from a camera crane, and there were many many
takes and we ran out of time finally and never got it to work right. He was
always kind of tilted on the bike -- if you look at the final take in the
movie, he's not really riding a bike that's straight up and down, it's kind of
tilted over to the side.
I missed an installation called Metropolis II when it was here in Los Angeles at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) a couple years ago. I took a peek at the exhibitions listings recently and was pleased to see it's back:
Chris Burden's Metropolis II is an intense kinetic
sculpture, modeled after a fast paced, frenetic modern city. Steel beams form
an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including
one six lane freeway, and HO scale train tracks. Miniature cars speed through
the city at 240 scale miles per hour; every hour, the equivalent of
approximately 100,000 cars circulate through the dense network of buildings.
According to Burden, "The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the
speeding toy cars produce in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic,
active and bustling 21st century city."
Here's a short video showing the installation from some cool angles along with commentary by artist Chris Burden.
It looks really neat, though I don't agree with his idea about cars running free (they're not wild horses) and his suggestion that we'd be better off if they could travel 250 miles an hour (I hope he was being facetious). I do like his comments about modeling an urban environment that's on its way out. When he talked about the tension that comes from the constant and excessive noise of the piece, it reminded me that noise pollution and too much artificial light are apparently killing us slowly. Get earplugs and blackout curtains if you want to survive the modern world.
His indoctrination into black life began at a New Orleans
bus station. When he politely asked a white clerk for bus times, "she
answered rudely and glared at me with such loathing I knew I was receiving what
the Negroes call 'the hate stare,'" he wrote. "This was so
exaggeratedly hateful I would have been amused if I had not been so
surprised."
In another instance a white bus driver prevented the blacks on the bus,
including Griffin, from getting off the bus during a rest stop in Mississippi.
Griffin and the others waited in discomfort for the trip to resume.
Eddie Murphy goes undercover as a white man in a 1984 Saturday Night Live sketch that's a satirical take on Griffin's book: "I studied for my role very carefully. I watched lots of 'Dynasty'. . . .And I read a whole bunch of Hallmark cards." When he ventures out into the world, he finds that strange and unexpected things happen on buses - things that give the term "choice riders" new meaning. (Bus scene starts at 2:35)
In a little piece of William H. Whyte-Jane Jacobs inspired fieldwork, filmmaker Dean Peterson gathered very interesting footage of people going up the stairs at a subway station he frequented in New York City.
Rubber is the story of Robert, an inanimate tire that has been
abandoned in the desert and then suddenly and inexplicably comes to
life. As Robert roams the bleak landscape, he discovers that he
possesses terrifying telepathic powers that give him the ability to
destroy anything he wishes. At first content to prey on discarded
objects and small desert creatures, his attention soon turns to humans,
especially a beautiful and mysterious woman who crosses his path.
Leaving a swath of destruction behind, Robert becomes a chaotic force
and truly a movie villain for the ages.
Here's Robert on a lonely highway pondering his next psychopathic move.
Andrew O'Heir reviewed the film for Salon. Much grittier than Cars. Sort of like Natural Born Killers meets Christine (minus the chassis) with some Carrie thrown in. If Javier Bardem's character in No Country for Old Men came back as a car part.. . . Okay, I'm out of film/tire analogies. Nothing much more needs to be said about this other than it's awesome and it's bringing up all my tire trust issues. Oh, and that mobility is the key to his reign of terror. A violent side view mirror or fender just wouldn't pack the same punch.
There's been a lot of coverage in recent days about the new pope, and I've seen mention several places of the fact that Pope Francis took the bus to work with the Argentinean masses instead of using a chauffeur. This reminded me of a favorite quote by Lisa Simpson, animated observer of the world:
Ah! The ol' Number 22. Clean, reliable public transportation, the chariot of the people, the ride of choice for the poor and the very poor alike. . . .
