92. Welcome to Muscle Car City
Added 2022-10-04 13:13:36 +0000 UTCHello, Dear Patreons: Episode 92 is here. It's the first part of a multipart miniseries we've been working on for a while now. Hope you enjoy it or, at least, don't hate-listen to it so hard that you burst a blood vessel!
--Aaron, Sarah & Doug
You see a lot of muscle cars on New York City streets these days. And with their modified mufflers and overpowered engines, you hear them too. Co-host Aaron Naparstek began noticing that a lot of the muscle cars he was seeing around town had stickers on them with the names of car clubs and their own Instagram accounts. He was intrigued. The Instagram account was, after all, an invitation to see inside the car — to pierce that bubble of privacy and anonymity that lets drivers get away with so much. So, Aaron began following muscle cars on social media. Pretty soon, he was immersed in New York City’s underground car club scene. And his once-sedate Instagram feed was transformed into a barrage of burnouts, donuts, takeovers, car meets, and crashes. Then Aaron decided he wanted to do more than just watch on his phone. He wanted to bring The War on Cars to the biggest car club event of the summer. If you thought Driving Under the Influence was a problem, wait until you meet the guys who are Driving to Become Influencers.
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Tickets are on sale now for War on Cars LIVE at Caveat on Tuesday, November 1 @ 7 PM.
This episode is sponsored by Cleverhood. Receive 20% off anything in the Cleverhood store using the special coupon code in this episode. Good for a limited time only!
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LINKS:
Some car accounts: Denys da Menace, Tyler Spec, The Scream Car
Car clubs: Brooklyn Hemi Boyz, Shake Da Block, Nemesis Auto Club
Sponsored by: Jimmy Rims and Tires
A taste of car club culture: Filming yourself weaving in and out of traffic on the expressway at extremely high speed makes you White Line Certified. If you end up crashing your car, send the footage to Team Macksauce.
Spectator run over by car doing doughnuts before NYC crowd cannot talk or eat (Daily News)
Passenger in critical condition after collision with car covered in ‘Scream’ decal (New York Post)
NYPD pursues speedy justice as drag racers, daredevils remain a problem on NYC streets, highways (Daily News)
What Parts of Car Culture Need to End? (Jalopnik)
Pick up some official War on Cars merch at our store.
Follow and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps people find us!
This episode was produced and edited by Aaron Naparstek with some help from Ali Lemer. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Our logo was designed by Dani Finkel of Crucial D Designs.
Comments
So, this is a really big divide in me. I have a mechanical engineering background, and like many people like me, I think cars are really cool. I consider many cars to be absolute works of art. Now, i've always gotten around on a bike, and since becoming an adult I've been a full time bike commuter. I have since developed the raging frustration I imagine I share with most of the War on Cars community. One thing I want really bad is to be able to rent a garage space at a race track. That way I could ride my bike to the race track, pull out my completely not street legal race car, tear up the race track for a bit, work on the car a bit and then bike home. I wouldn't mind this culture so much if it revolved around race tracks instead of parking lots and bars. It annoys me so much that these peoples' personalities revolve so heavily around their cars. They have to be in them, doing stupid shit on public roads, constantly. It wouldn't suck so much for everyone else around them if they had a safe and confined space to have their fun.
David Schwab
2022-11-06 02:55:19 +0000 UTCAaron, Amazing reporting here on a culture that I really had no connection to other than sometimes fantasizing that I had a rocket launcher to set things straight. But you just had to put a human face on (or at least voice) to someone that is thrilled by something that most parts of me detest - a fairly unanimous internal opinion at that. I found myself liking Denis. But what I got from this piece is a sort of desperation from Denis (and perhaps all of us) to feel something immediate and real in a vastly numb industrial culture that has lost contact with some of the fundamental realities of the soft animal bodies that we are. A primal need for these bodies is the unmediated rush and brush with the wild. But rather than situating and contextualizing our excitement in the larger-than-human world, this indigenous need is increasingly satiated through blending our porous flesh with hard, impervious machines. The machine has become for us totemic. We take on our identity and worldview from it and tribally identify with others that gravitate toward techno-totemism and away from what more deeply nurtures us.
Dave Cohen
2022-10-26 00:04:54 +0000 UTC
