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Monday 15 August 2011

Out of Gas


.

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Gas ration stamps being printed and inspected with a magnifying glass at the Bureau of Engraving & Printing, Washington, D.C.
: photo by Warren K. Leffler, 31 January 1974





Few appreciated the beautiful
brief moment it was, when the mechanical
beasts we had spawned to control us
seemed to be running out of blood






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Gasoline lines
: photo by Warren K. Leffler, 15 June 1979

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Long lines of cars at a gas station waiting for fuel
: photo by Warren K. Leffler, 15 June 1979

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Man directing line of cars at a gas station:
photo by Thomas J. O'Halloran, 15 June 1979

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Working oil pump in Tyler, Texas
: photo by Warren K. Leffler, 28 March 1973

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Pipeline near Atigun Pass, Brooks Mountain Range, Alaska. (Photographer's note: "Shots around Galbraith Lake, construction camp near Atigun Pass highest crossed by the pipeline!)
: photo by Mac Chrysler, 15 June 1977


Photos from U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection, Library of Congress

3 comments:

ACravan said...

It's fascinating to see and read this. I've been working (that's what I call it; actually, Patrick Hamilton already did most of the work) on something based on the final chapter of Hamilton's novel, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, called Coleoptera, which has a similar theme. The several pages concluding the novel really need to be read in their entirety to appreciate their profound, weird and unsettling effect, but two important sentences are: "Men, having surrendered unconditionally, set to work (not unlike the unhappy builders of the Pyramids) laboriously and carefully to satisfy the demands of their crawling yet pitilessly exacting new rulers. The beetles were not magnanimous in victory." Curtis

TC said...

Curtis,

It may be the magnanimity deficit on the part of the beetles has left them open to a belated, oblique wave of subversive backlash.

Well, perhaps not a wave... an eddy?

On Monday night Bobby Cox, the ageless manager of the Braves, referred sarcastically to a Giants pitcher named Vogelsong as "Volkswagen".

Case in point?

ACravan said...

An eddy definitely...possibly. I'd say "a luta continua" if I was even semi-certain that was the case, that there was a struggle and not just a film that's continuing to unspool (digitally now, although bits and bytes don't exactly unspool). I'm still giving the edge to the beetles and almost daily feel that I'm living in the world of "V" (the old sci-fi mini-series, which I saw again recently) or, perhaps, Alien Nation. I spoke to an old friend in London yesterday. We hadn't been in touch in ages. His remarks about last week's riots in London and elsewhere were entirely in line with what you supposed they might be in another comment. I just don't know where things are heading. Jane returns from the piney woods of Maine this afternoon after 8 weeks untethered from electronics. I'm a little jealous of the peace and quiet she has enjoyed. Have given up on trying to sign in through LiveJournal, by the way. It's too uncertain to work, so I'm using Google, which is fairly reliable. And now that they're acquiring "American Bellwether Technology Giant Motorola" (Schaumburg's finest), they'll even sound American (and not like "V" people from the planet Google). Curtis