Listen for about 28 minutes. This week: A first podcast! I hope you’ll forgive my inexperience with the knobs and levers that podcasters have to manage. I’ll get better at it, if I continue the podcasting. Let me know what you think. Next week: I’m still undecided. That’s okay. Maybe a little suspense is appropriate as spring begins.
The Boulangerie offers glimpses of what’s in a warm place rising or already in the bakery oven. This past week, interesting bindings on an old copy of Gibbon’s seven-volume The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I only announce when something happens in the Boulangerie with my Mastodon loudspeaker: @mrdelong@mastodon.online.
Share this one with someone who has admired a car, please. If you got this from a friend, how about getting your own copy? A subscription is free, and it’s only another email delivered on Thursday morning.
Here’s a PDF of the podcast script. Many people get impatient with podcasts and prefer to read.
This podcast draws from several loose-end writings I am weaving together, including (especially) “What's this funny-looking part for?” and (to a lesser extent) two other previous posts. The script also follows some of the unpublished chapter of my book project on the car, culture, and art — an exploration of power in American society.
One thing I have to admit: Putting together a podcast is much harder for me to tackle than writing an essay. There are so many moving parts and fittings to wrestle into place. I’m not sure it will get any easier, either; but I still am thinking that I’ll try to do one podcast every quarter.
Note that I talk fairly slowly, which many find useful for listening. Some might want to speed things up in their podcast app.
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Tags: car show, automobile, car, culture, club, society, music, opera, Hagerty, classic car, supercar
SOUNDS: The horse whinny — “Horse Whinny, Close, A.Wav by InspectorJ.” Freesound. https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/419231/. (www.jshaw.co.uk) Rights: CC-Attribution (4.0). theTone. The modem sound — “56kmodem Take04 Edit Clean M44.Wav by TheTone.” Freesound. https://freesound.org/people/theTone/sounds/209687/ Rights: CC-Attribution (4.0). Other sounds from Freesound.org and ZapSplat.com (https://zapsplat.com); really short opera snips from The Royal Opera.
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Berk, Brett. “A Classic Car Giant With a Lofty Mission: Save Driving.” The New York Times, December 16, 2021, sec. Business. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/business/classic-cars-hagerty.html.
You need to know when to clap at a symphony performance. There are rules, you know. You also need to know how to behave at a high-brow coffee gathering to ogle gazillionaires and their fairly useless car sculptures. Jacobs makes it easy to shake off the dust of Walmart parking lots and behave appropriately: Jacobs, James. “Attending A Cars & Coffee Event: Everything You Need To Know.” HotCars, October 13, 2019. https://www.hotcars.com/attending-a-cars-coffee-event-everything-you-need-to-know/.
A classic(?) 1990s web design, but a packed-full resource for finding a car club: “Classic Car Community.” Accessed February 28, 2023. https://www.classiccarcommunity.com/.
If the regular “C&C” website (https://cars.coffee/) seems a little dated, the Facebook page seems current: Cars & Coffee. “Cars & Coffee.” Facebook. Accessed February 27, 2023. https://it-it.facebook.com/carsandcoffeeofficial. I didn’t know there is a dot-coffee domain!
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Clubs, friends, cars, memories. Changing mixtures.