accelerate

I was meant to go into the local community radio station with Clif this morning and talk about moral panics. However, we did not have clearance from security to enter into the building (at UTS). So I’ll finish one off my diss chapters instead. Accelerate!

EDIT: 10pm.

Fuck, I am back in the groove, and it feels good.

And I am as bourgeois bad-ass comfortable as a 1980s Eddie Murphy movie sequel.

Flying!

Flying!

Phantasms! Events! Panel vans! Yes, panel vans… Panel Vans! PANEL VANS! Fuck hegemonic masculinity! Object = x!Panel vans! And coffee! And iPod dancing around my little flat. And crazy blog post edits! Crazy!

Fuck, I am back in the groove, and it feels good.

Accelerate!

EDIT: 1:15am. Away. Actually two more chapters or 1/5th of the diss, not just one.

1) “Street Rodding and Sanctioned Events” 2) “Panel Vanning and Panel Vans as Events”

The Street Rodding chapter examines the representational role of the ASRF in relation to registration authorities in the 1970s with the introduction of the Australian Design Rules (ADRs) which govern the rules about the design and engineering of all road registered vehicles in Australia. The ADRs were used and still are used as a social engineering tool to get troublesome cars and their owners off the road. The chapter examines how the Street Rodders firstly mobilised against this threat and then secondly how they protected themselves against threats from within. I argued the Australian Street Rod Federation (Technical Advisory Committee) served as a kind of poltico-technical social representation. Very straightforward stuff.

The Panel Vanning chapter is much more speculative and draws on Sherri Deaver’s argument regarding ‘custom street vans’ as both art objects and events. I do a Deleuzian reading of her argument to argue that the sense of the van is produced in the movement of feedback in circuit of producer-consumer. I then pick this up and run with it arguing that the important gendered dimension of Panel Vanning is not in the reproduction of already established hegemonic gendered sexual relations but in the production of new phantasms represented by the mythology of Panel Vanning, ie the ‘fuck truck’. Lastly, I draw on Meaghan Morris’s arguments regarding the social contract of Laborism to compare the ‘open’ Panel Vanning scene to that of ‘protected’ Street Rodding scene.

Ahhh…