Another Successful SACBO in 2012

2012-06-27

Reported By Tim Klein

Imagine you were riding in space on a surveillance satellite and looking down onto the West Coast. Early this June, if you'd known exactly which driveways and garages to zoom in on from your lofty vantage, you'd have witnessed some rather odd goings-on. Near Los Angeles, you'd have seen D.B. Wilson packing his bags into his square Scion made to look like an electric toaster, complete with two giant toast slices popping out of the roof. Shifting your celestial gaze northward to Pacifica, California, you'd have glimpsed jazz singer Tré Taylor gluing squirrel figurines to her multicolored Squirly Whirly car, and recording silly songs in squirrel voices for her car's sound system. Across the Bay in El Cerrito, Emily Duffy would have been touching up her Candy Home pop-up trailer and attaching fresh beauty accessories to her pink VainVan, a rolling ironic protest statement against the fashion industry.


Photo by Tim Klein

Sweeping your view northward to Vallejo, you'd have seen Sherry Tobin hitching her newly refurbished and impossibly cute ladybug camper trailer to her equally vivid ladybug truck, while LaVonne Sallee was compensating for the recent accidental loss of her artcar's rear bumper cover by filling the gap with a row of her subversively altered Barbie dolls. North, in Eugene, Oregon, you'd have spied Tyler Runyan applying orange paint to his scale-covered angler fish car. Farther up Interstate 5 in Portland, Extremo the Clown would be seen busily packing a variety of masks, red noses, and monkey puppets into his towering sculpted truck. Just over the border in Washington would appear your humble narrator winding endless strands of fresh yarn onto a huge old Chrysler luxury car. It was nearly time for the annual Seattle ArtCar Blowout, and this imminent event was having its usual ripple effect on the far-flung artcar clan along the West Coast and beyond.

Finally focusing your satellite eyes on Seattle itself, you'd have seen the Blowout's tireless leader Kelly Lyles and her enthusiastic crew preparing for 50 artcars to descend upon the Fremont neighborhood for a three-day weekend.


Photo by Tim Klein

In addition to the gathering itself, one of the most fun parts of a big artcar event is the colorful, circus-like caravan that swells in numbers along the highway as it gets closer to the event city. Sherry Tobin organized the kernel of this year's West Coast caravan in the San Francisco Bay area early in the week, and by the time she reached my house at the southern edge of Washington a few days later, she was shepherding a string of eight decked-out vehicles. They filled up my suburban corner lot with glorious funkiness, much to the amazement of my unsuspecting neighbors. More cars arrived in the morning, and by the time the caravan set out for the last leg of the journey, we were eleven strong, jabbering to each other on CB radio the whole way. (Artcar culture: Caravans always use CB channel 13.) We mostly stayed in the slow lane, but even so, we caused bottlenecks in the fast lane as all of the mundanes who passed us slowed down to gawk and take photos and give us the thumbs-up. Man, oh man, there's nothing like an artcar caravan on a public highway on a sunny day! (Artcar culture: A non-artcar or its driver is a "mundane". But lately there's a minority faction who would like to replace this term with "muggle".)

We arrived in Seattle just in time for the first item on the weekend's itinerary: a tour of the Nucor Steel plant. Reportedly it's an exciting tour, with spectacular gigantic flames and white-hot molten steel. But they could take only a dozen, and I was the thirteenth to make it to the door, so instead I had a good time hanging out at a nearby restaurant with my fellow late arrivers. I later saw some photos of the twelve chosen ones in squarish helmets and bright orange protective gear, looking a bit like long lost Devo band members.


Photo by Tim Klein


Photo by Tim Klein

After the tour, Lara Seven, in her Disk Drive car strikingly covered with colorful old computer floppy disks, led us on a caravan through the streets of Seattle. We stopped for a while at scenic Alki Beach, and some of the artcars found themselves serving as vivid backgrounds in a quinceañera photo session that was happening when we arrived. Later we ended up at Tiny Bella, the charming house of car artist Ivan Cockrum and his wife Mary Saucier, where we were treated to excellent barbecue and homebrewed beer.

Some of us made our way over to the home of folk artist Tim Fowler, whose house and shed are adorned inside and out with his artwork. Tim had never been to the ArtCar Blowout, but the sight of all the artcars parked on his street seemed to set some gears turning in his head. I spotted him in the artcar section of the Fremont Fair the next day looking thoughtful, and he told me about his germ of an idea for an artcar made using a set of old shovel heads that he'd been painting faces on. To help fertilize that little seed in his mind, I gave him a copy of Wild Wheels, a book by Harrod Blank.


Photo by Tim Klein

Those out-of-towners who could sleep in their artcars and trailers parked overnight in the ArtCar Zone parking lot at the fair site. The organizers had assigned the rest of us to various volunteer hosts, and I'm grateful to Norma Baum and Maque Davis for the use of their excellent guest quarters for the weekend.

The Seattle ArtCar Blowout (SACBO) is always held in conjunction with the annual Fremont Fair, so the artcars are displayed in a big parking lot at the fair site on Saturday and Sunday while the fair is open. It traditionally falls to Don Ehlen to direct the packing and unpacking of all 50 cars in and out of this one lot without collision, loss of life or limb, or violation of fire codes. He's a master of this real-life version of the Tetris video game.


Photo by Tim Klein

In addition to the artcars, the other big draw of the Fremont Fair is the Solstice Parade. It starts off with the famous naked bicyclists, hundreds of 'em, generally "dressed" in silly "costumes" made only of body paint. I was glad to see that the naked basketball-dribbling unicycle team was back this year. I learned that the nudies have never officially been part of the parade (why, that would be outrageous!), but are instead parade crashers who take an opportunity to coax some cheers from the restless crowd before the parade starts. But I suspect the parade waits patiently every year till the bicyclists have done their thing.

I confess that I don't normally like parades much (unless I'm lucky enough to be in 'em!). But I've seen two Fremont Solstice Parades now, and enjoyed them both immensely from start to finish. Brilliantly, the organizers have banned corporate logos, printed words, and motorized vehicles. This policy eliminates the tiresome advertising and political messages that dominate most parades, or at least forces such entries to be more creative than just a banner hung on a pickup truck. The result is a cheerful and humorous procession of artistic, surreal, interactive creations by Seattle's illustrious counterculture. All told, the parade lasted maybe two hours, and I spent the whole time laughing and feeling good about humanity. Colorful, smiling people with bags on long sticks collected donations from the crowd, and I gladly tossed in a few bucks. Every parade curmudgeon like me should see the Fremont Fair parade at least once.


Photo by Tim Klein

After the parade, much of the crowd migrated over to the ArtCar Zone, and for a while it was our turn to make the masses smile. I answered questions and gave out Yarn Car postcards until I was hoarse. Extremo the Clown cranked up his stereo, donned a monkey mask, and danced non-stop (and I do mean non-stop) the entire day. Meanwhile, some of the car artists set up displays to sell their other artworks. Event organizer Kelly Lyles had a whole tent full of her vivid and humorous artworks, and I was pleased to see that newcomer Lavonne Sallee was selling a good number of her Barbie doll mutations.


Photo by Tim Klein


Photo by Tim Klein

I had a personally significant moment when I met local Seattle car artist Tim Furst, who was there with his big jungle-themed camper. I learned that he was one of the members of the Flying Karamazov Brothers, a troupe of comedic jugglers who came to my tiny Ohio college campus in 1985. On an evening when I was at a particularly low point in my life, they gave me such a night of belly laughs that I still remember it today. I was happy to be able to shake his hand 27 years later and thank him for that.

When the fair closed, we all walked over to the History House museum. While waiting for car artist David Crow to cook up salmon steaks on a fish-shaped grill of his own construction, we hiked up a hill to visit the famous Fremont Troll, who lurks under the Aurora Bridge, clutching a full-size Volkswagen beetle.

Afterward, Gypsy Mermaid directed her gypsy van's digital projector at a convenient wall in the ArtCar Zone parking lot, while I rode along with Ranger Kidwell-Ross in his toy-covered "Toynota" truck to buy gas for the generator to power the projector and sound system. Drunken hipsters staggering past the gas station had fun playing with the toys while we filled the gas can. Back at the site, drinks in hand, we all settled back and watched a movie — a nice, relaxed ending to a gloriously frenetic day.


Photo by Tim Klein

The next morning we met at scenic Marshall Park for coffee and donut jousting. The latter is a SACBO tradition, in which a bicyclist holding a pool cue like a lance tries to skewer a suspended donut through its hole. (Occasionally, someone actually succeeds.) Kirby Lindsay then led us on a cruise through the Seattle streets, ultimately back to Fremont for the second day of the fair. Again, Extremo the Clown danced non-stop for the crowd the entire day, masked alternately as a monkey, a robot, and Spider-Man. For all I know, he may never actually have stopped when the fair ended the previous day, and may have continued dancing all night. That's a clown with some serious energy.

When the fair ended, Don Ehlen on his bicycle directed us in an orderly fashion in pods of eight artcars out of the parking lot, having given each of us clear and explicit printed directions to the closing party. My pod didn't even make it two blocks before taking a wrong turn. But in dribs and drabs, we all ultimately made it to the Orient Express, an Asian food restaurant built inside seven old passenger railroad cars. One of the cars was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Presidential car, and we conducted an impromptu FDR lookalike contest, each of us grinning and holding a chopstick in our teeth in front of a framed copy of his famous grinning-with-a-cigarette photo.


Photo by Tim Klein


Photo by Emily Duffy

And so the weekend came to its reluctant end, and the artcars all went their separate ways again, destined for their homes in Washington, Oregon, California, Michigan, British Columbia, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, and Georgia. But some of us, not quite ready for it all to be over, met the next day for a pilgrimage to world-renowned novelty store Archie McPhee. I've heard car artist Philo Northrup call Archie McPhee a "candy store for the artcar set". For the Yarn Car's rear view mirror, I bought an essential accessory for a fuzzy car: a pair of smooth dice. Others of us filled baskets (and in Tyler Runyan's case, an entire shopping cart) with rubber bacon, giant combs, bobblehead nuns, and other such treasures that will doubtless make their appearance glued to fenders at next year's Seattle ArtCar Blowout.

Check out Extremo Dancing:


Check out the rest of Tim's photographs from SACBO:


Emily Duffy's SACBO Pics:


Rex Rosenberg's Video Walkthrough of all the SACBO Artcars:


A bunch of random photos of the Solstice Parade and Naked Bike Riders from Flickr:


Now you should go read Gypsy Mermaid's take on SACBO:

• Pink Batman Tesla
• Boombox Car for Sale
• Sweeter than Any Chiquita
• Hand Engraved Honda Civic
• Artcars on the Radio
• Help Keep the Jesus Christ Monkey Car Alive
• Sue Shefman and Cheerio Video Interview
• It's Coming! Houston Artcar Parade 2013
• First Hand Woven Car?
• Last Day to Sign Up for Houston Artcar Parade
• Vannadu in Washington Post
• Artcars in Fulshear St. Paddy's Day Parade
• Maria Del Camino, Part El Camino, Part Tank
• All Art Day at Poe Elementry
• ArtCar: The Movie Big Success on PBS Fundraiser
• Artcar: The Movie on PBS
• Bonnie Blue Art of Women
• Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth in CNN Money
• Artcar Free to a Good Home
• Texas Art Asylum A Great resource for Artcar Artists