Carhenge

RoadsideAmerica.com is seriously indispensible when driving across the benighted continent of North America.  Where else would you learn about Salem Sue, the World’s Largest Holstein Cow (who faces I-94 from a rocky outcropping near New Salem, North Dakota)?

It’s kind of a crappy website in terms of design, although not as singularly irritating as Evite.  A lot of the content is duplicated and not sorted chronologically, and it can stretch back to the 1990s, which is like the Egyptian Old Kingdom for the internet.  It was when no one could has cheezburger but Manhattanites could use kozmo.com to courier anything they wanted to their dangerously edgy Loisaida shitholes.

Anyway, anyway, here is Carhenge, which I vaguely knew about but used RoadsideAmerica to determine that is in fact in Nebraska.  Along with Chimney Rock, it was the only reason for us detouring back east from Cheyenne instead of driving straight to Denver.  Both the terrain and the weather that day were decidedly English, so it looked well fit.

Alliance, Nebraska. September 2008.

The main circle of cars (all of them American-made) is matte gray, so this side sculpture (called The Fourd Seasons) which represents wheat and its stages of growth, is really the only colorful component.  It’s also decidedly less creepy.  Not that the overall effect is mysterious or Druidic–and the extraordinarily chatty woman in the gift shop attested to that–but it’s pretty prescient now that the extinction of US automotive manufacturing is here.  Dead, gray painted-over windshields in cars half-buried in a remote field kind of sums of GM’s management style.

I love that it was made in 1987.  For some reason that year and the low-to-middlebrow-cultural trends (stock market crash, ailing American industry, widespread ignorance of sushi or lattes or radicchio) and films that have a lot to do with cars (Harry and the Hendersons, Adventures in Babysitting) make it pitch-perfect.  It’s too self-aware to be kitsch but not airy enough for camp.

Obamaha, Obaha, Omaba, ‘Tevs

Suck it Nebraska, Obama just won one of your electoral votes.  This is the first time that one of the two states that splits its votes (Maine is the other) actually split its vote.  Since McCain will probably walk away with Missouri (suck it, bellwether), it appears the final electoral tally will be 365-173.  A poetic total for Obama, in a way.

I like anything that chips away at the stupidity of the electoral college, and to see it come from an otherwise crazy-right-wing locale is kind of nice.

On the subject, tangentially, of Maine, I just watched The Mist and it had two scenes that were pretty damn suspenseful.  Of course, I thought War of the Worlds was one of Spielberg’s better movies (not a fan, in general) and I insist that Halloween is totally not scary.  My boyfriend thinks Frank Daramont is a lesser demon of some sort, but I thought it was a pretty good adaptation: quite faithful, except for the end, which dispenses with the original story’s optimistic non-resolution for something more fucked up.  I guess the length of a novella makes it ideally suited to become a screenplay and satisfy the Fanboys.  Anyway: Obama won something and scary movies are good.