Flamed Cars

By at 2:00 pm Thursday, May 28

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

I've been fascinated by cars with flames ever since I was a kid poring over my big brother's hot rod magazines.

boingflamerudy.jpg

[Photo by Don Marritz]

In 1973 I had a fairly generic white Ford that I painted flames on my myself. Here's a picture of me with the car and my daughter, Georgia, who's now a graphic designer of such books as the best-selling Twilight Movie Companion.

I did a hand-painted, amateur job on my flames--- not at all the way the pros do it---but it was fun. And, despite the dire warnings of my friends, I was still able to sell the car when I moved.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Show and Go car show in Riverside, California, which got me excited about flames all over again.

boingfilissleadsled.jpg

I found a quintessential flame-car photo on the web today, it's this Merc Lead Sled shot, and it appears on John Filiss's "Serious Wheels" site, among other gems in the "Mercury Custom" section...just look under "M".

boingmaninflamecar.jpg

Today I finished a painting on this theme, "Man in Flame Car." It's hard to pin down the guy's mood. (More info on my paintings page.)

Read more 

Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician, and a computer scientist--with thirty-two published books. In the 1980s he received two Philip K. Dick awards, for his cyberpunk novels Software and Wetware, which are available as part of the Wares tetralogy. Rucker has a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he worked as a computer science professor at San Jose State in Silicon Valley for twenty years. He took up painting in 1999, and he's had three shows of his pop-surreal works in San Francisco. Rucker's latest publication is his autobiography, Nested Scrolls. Nested Scrolls received the Emperor Norton Award for "extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason."

Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.