If you hadn't noticed, the automobile is far more than a means of transportation in America. Whether or not people admit it or even realize it, we choose cars to reflect who we are--or at least who we want people to think we are. Even the hybrid driver, as divorced as she would like you to think she is from car culture, says something with her choice: "I'm a responsible person who doesn't waste resources." And just like the divorcee in the red sports car who'd like you to think he's virile, it's usually just a front.
For every thousand poseur out there, though, there's a genuine article. Whether it's the car itself or the person who built it, they're a few levels above their peers. And what's luckier for us, we aren't a bashful crowd. We often champion the greatness around us. Sometimes it's by mere word of mouth, but a few go to great lengths to print their praise. An even smaller group actually writes books.
We get lots of books. So as they came through, we noticed a pattern. For the lack of a better term, they illustrate the ways we express ourselves with cars. Some of them, like the two entries about Ford's Model T, commemorate the car that changed the world a century ago. Another book proves that the Corvette, a catalyst for wanderlust with no provisions for baggage--let alone emotional baggage--is reason enough to celebrate.
Two more books showcase the people who start with mass-produced modes of transportation and reshape them into unique specimens that reflect their owners' specific wants and needs. So diverse is our world that one book is about nothing other than one photographer's images of cars built along a narrow strip of Los Angeles during a five-year span half a century ago. Yet another blurs the sinuous line between the automobile and the female form.
All books speak to us in one way or another, but these are special. Rather than teach us how to rebuild carburetors or build chassis, they show us how to appreciate the symbolism of the things that inspire us. And in a time when we're collectively feeling a bit low about ourselves, these books are a reminder of who we, as car people, really are.
What it's called:
Cole Foster and Salinas Boyz Customs
Who done it: Cole Foster and Mike LaVella with foreword by Kirk Hammett
What it's about: It's Cole Foster's autobiographical account of his life, his shop, and the cars that emerge from it.
Notes:
You probably wouldn't have ever heard of Salinas, California, had it not been for John Steinbeck. But if it weren't for Cole Foster, you probably wouldn't have ever aspired to go there.
Cole is, without a doubt, one of the Salinas Valley's progeny, even if he is a transplant. He operates Salinas Boyz, a little shop that makes pretty big statements: tasteful but staggeringly modified hot rods, custom cars, and motorcycles. But his latest statement is a little bit different than the prior ones. Along with Mike LaVella, editor of Gearhead, the magazine where the whine of overdriven blowers meets the overdriven crunch of guitars, he wrote an autobiographical account of his life.
But just as the case of his cars, trucks, and bikes, his biography is a little bit different. In fact, it's a bit of a feat that he even went through with it. If you subscribe to the theory that cars are an extension of a builder's personality, and if you know Cole's work, you can infer that his modesty belies his complexity. Whereas most builders do extreme things to justify the amount of work they invest in a project, Cole seems to go to great pains to hide his. In fact it's what makes the book such an undertaking: it's tough to get him to talk about what he did to a car, let alone talk about himself. It's certainly not out of arrogance or secretiveness. No, he'll talk; however, he'll do it in a way that you and I would if we were asked how we breathe or did some other innate thing. It's the thing that comes natural, and his work certainly bears that.