A couple of years ago, Jen's rolling suitcase broke, so we took advantage of Briggs & Riley's very good lifetime warranty by hand delivering the wounded wheelie to their repair facility in the hinterland of Moss Beach, California. Once we found it, we were impressed by the care and knowledge shown by the people working there and by this nicely decaying little car in the parking lot.
It's a Willys Aero Lark built in Toledo, Ohio sometime between 1952 and 1954. (Willys also made this nifty little toy.)
Whatever color it may have been, the ocean air has corroded it down to a subdued palette of elegant, tropical decrepitude.
The Aero Lark is no longer there ("No wing bestirs the undisturbéd air") but the truck next to it is. (I am still flabbergasted at what you can see in Google Maps.)
I wish there were more cars like this in colors like this today. And decay itself is always interesting. What happens to things when no one's paying attention? I'm more suspicious than surprised at the independence of mind betrayed by missing objects that chauvinistically insist on being where I left them rather than where I thought I left them.
I wondered (for the five seconds you wonder anything before Googling it) if "beautiful decay" was an aesthetic with a following outside of Goth and soon I was viewing the Flickr group beautiful decay. I was already listening to My Number One At Work radio station, Drone Zone on Soma FM, and the coincidental combination of music and full-screen slideshow formed a surprisingly coherent pharmeceutical cocktail. I felt like M. L. Gujral and in a Gujralian frenzy combined this and this as a recipe for the idea of a cathedral, while this plus this produces a self-generating documentary of mournful but uncertain political vantage.
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