Who Killed the Electric Car?

What if you could have a car with all the power and speed you'd expect, but that's also clean, quiet and doesn't need gas? Considering the price of gas these days and instability in the Middle East, who wouldn't want to ditch a gas-guzzler in favor of a better alternative?

Those cars do exist, but according to a new documentary film, you won't be driving one now or anytime soon. "Who Killed the Electric Car?" follows the recent history of the battery-electric car. In 1990, General Motors funded the EV1 prototype, a sporty car and an engineering marvel. Given this emerging technology, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) issued a mandate requiring an increasing percentage of new cars sold in the state to have zero tailpipe emissions.

At first, automakers such as Honda, Toyota, Ford and GM created electric vehicles to comply with the mandate. But then something odd happened--GM and others sued CARB to drop it, even as eager drivers joined long waiting lists to lease electric cars. With rising pressure from the automakers the federal government and the oil industry, CARB eventually dropped the mandate.

How could this have happened? To answer this question "Who Killed theElectric Car?" focuses mostly on the EV1 and it's lessees. It's a feel-good story up until GM's puzzling recall-- and subsequent destruction-- of the EV1 fleet

The film is packed with emotional testimonies from former EV1 lessees who fought and pleaded to keep their cars. Ironically, GM cited lack of consumer interest as its reason for the recall, which begs the question: Why didn't GM promote the EV1 more? Aside from the 800 lessees, few people, especially outside of California, even knew the cars existed.

"Who Killed the Electric Car? from Mother Earth News, June/July 2006

article by Scott Hollis

selected by lizzie

Game Plan

We now have enough passages to get this show on the road! Your reward, darlings, is a brand spankin' new blog, to which all of you are contributors. I've posted the passages I've already received. You guys can keep emailing me with cool passages, and I'll post them, or if you're feeling empowered, you can post them yourself! Make sure to let us know which brilliant mind is contributing what, so we can give credit where credit is due. The details:

to see the blog:

1. go to http://dooooiiiitttt.blogspot.com


to post passages yourself:

1. go to: www.blogger.com

2. login: username: bookclubb (that's 2 bees)
password: [redacted]

3. click on "new post" (the green icon)

4. type in your passage

5. click "publish post" (the orange button) and bask in your own fabulousness!

There are some REALLY COOL passages on here. I know some are long, but they're engrossing, funny, interesting, smart and - again - a good excuse not to work. Enlighten yourselves, and enjoy!

Mr. Harvey

Mr. Harvey took the waxy orange sack of my remains to a sinkhole eight miles from our neighborhood, an area that until recently had been desolate save for the railroad tracks and a nearby motorcycle repair shop. In his car he played a radio station that looped Christmas carols during the month of December. He whistled inside his huge station wagon and congratulated himself, felt full-up. Apple pie, cheeseburger, ice cream, coffee. Full. Better and better he was getting now, never using an old pattern that would bore him but making each kill a surprise to himself, a gift for himself.

Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

selected by Mariele

Beauty Afoot

I was drifting, daydreaming really, through the waning moments of a panel discussion on the subject of "What's Happening Now," drawing cartoon daggers on a yellow pad and vaguely formulating strategies for avoiding punch and cookies, when I realized that I was being addressed from the audience. A lanky graduate student had risen to his feet and was soliciting my opinion as to what "The Issue of the Nineties" would be. Snatched from my reverie, I said, "Beauty," and then, more firmly, "The issue of the nineties will be beauty" -- a total improvisatory goof-- an off-the-wall, jump-start, free-association that rose unbidden to my lips from God knows where. Or perhaps I was being ironic, wishing it so but not believing it likely? I don't know, but the total, uncomprehending silence that greeted this modest proposal lent it immediate credence for me.

My interlocutor plopped back into his seat, exuding dismay, and, out of sheer perversity, I resolved to follow beauty where it led into the silence. Improvising, I began updating Pater; I insisted that beauty was not a thing-- "the beautiful" was a thing. In images, I intoned, beauty was the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder; and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begged the quested of their efficacy and doomed itself to inconsequence. This sounded provocative to me, but the audience continued to sit there, unprovoked, and "beauty" just hovered there, as well, a word without a language, quiet, amazing and alien in that sleek, institutional space-- like a Pre-Raphaelite dragon aloft on its leather wings.

"If images don't do anything in this culture," I said, plunging on, "if they haven't done anything, then why are we sitting here in the twilight of the twentieth century talking about them? And if they only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren't doing them, we are. Therefore, if our criticism aspires to anything beyond soft-science, the efficacy of images must be the cause of criticism, and not its consequence-- the subject of criticism and not its object. And this, " I concluded rather grandly, "is why I direct your attention to the language of visual affect-- to the rhetoric of how things look-- to the iconography of desire-- in a word, to beauty!"

I made a viola gesture for punctuation, but to no avail. People were quietly filing out. My fellow panelists gazed into the dark reaches of the balcony or examined their cuticles. I was genuinely surprised. Admittedly, it was a goof. Beauty? Pleasure? Efficacy? Issues of the Nineties? Admittedly outrageous. Bus it was an outrage worthy of a rejoinder-- of a question or two-- a nod-- or at least a giggle. I had wandered into this dead zone, this silent abyss. I wasn't ready to leave it at that, but the moderator of our panel tapped on her microphone and said, "Well, I guess that's it, kids." So I never got off my parting shot. As we began breaking up, shuffling papers and patting our pockets, I felt a little sulky. (Swallowing a pity allusion to Roland Barthes can do that.) And yet, I had no sooner walked out of the building and into the autumn evening when I was overcome by this strange Sherlock Holmesian elation. The game was afoot.


The Invisible Dragon, "Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty"

by Dave Hickey

selected by Mia

Iron Maiden

A man is "deformed" if a limb or feature is missing or severely skewed from the human phenotype. Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women's bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

The Beauty Myth

by Naomi Wolf

selected by Rori

Let's Give It To 'Em Right Now!

To drive the point home, as he came to the end of the second verse and approached the song's bridge, Rockin' Robin raised his squeak-perfecto voice to the point where you thought it was going to run out of hormones and break completely, and uttered for the very first time in human history a line heard 'round the world:

"Let's Give It To 'Em Right Now!"

At that moment Rockin' Robin Roberts entered the lists of true rock'n'roll immortals, as sure as the guy who convinced Leiber and Stoller that it was better to write a song about a hound dog than a stray cat, as definitely as whoever told Little Richard to sing about tutti-frutti rather than Neapolitan. His cry is pure inspiration - "Let's give it to 'em, right now" yowled breathlessly and, what's more (and better), totally out of context. Here the guy goes singing about lost love and separation from home and, all of a sudden, his misty remorse and nostalgia curdles into a cry for vengeance: "Let's give it to 'em, right now."

Richard Berry never thought of inserting that line because it had nothing to do with what he was singing about. But Berry and his Pharoahs told a fictional story, and Rockin' Robin Roberts and the Wailers were spilling their guts.

Give 'em what? Rich Dangel knew and he gave it to 'em before Rockin' Robin's yelp had faded: a guitar solo that raced pulses in its simple emblematic urgency, ripping the cover off that cool calypso before returning to the glories of duh duh duh. duh duh. In that swift interpolation, Rockin' Robin Roberts did way more than breathe new life into "Louie Louie." He made it a song that everybody who'd claim it without nicknaming it had to know. It's too mystical to say that the Wailers' "Louie" made the Kingsmen's version inevitable -- or maybe not mystical enough, since inevitability suggests that there are no miracles -- but they did more than prepare the way.

Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World's Most Famous Rock'n'Roll Song; Including the Full Details of Its Torture and Persecution at the Hands of the Kingsmen, J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I., and a Cast of Millions; and Introducing, for the First Time Anywhere, the Actual Dirty Lyrics

by Dave Marsh

selected by Greg

Book Club Launch

hey dudes and dudettes -

recently i've been thinking about how everyone i know is brilliant. no, really. and i thought, where does all this brilliance come from? and yes, cats and kittens, most of it comes from within, from your shining selves, but as an english teacher i also thought of how the wonder of books is enriching your (and therefore my) juicy, juicy brains. and i thought, damn, i need to tap that!

perhaps a similar thought has crossed your mind.

as a result, i had an idea: why don't I find out what people are reading, and read it too? deceptively simple, right? but i wanted more . . . how could i read PARTS of some books without reading them straight through, and so still gain some brain-juciness in the time it takes to nuke the nachos between tv soccer matches? teasers, of sorts, but the kind that don't involve soft drinks or cars or techno music . . . hmmmmmmmmmm . . .

and then it came to me. passage-based internet-friendly book club! here's the game plan: EVERYONE who receives this email, shoot me back an email with a passage (or passages) from a book (or books) which you have been reading and enjoying recently. i will compile them and edit if necessary, and send them back in glorious email form (or in some other way - technology will be based on participation). lather, rinse, repeat. if discussions of particular books develop (yay!), they develop. if not, no biggie. either way, you will read a little, know a little more, and see what crazy shit all your friends are reading. DOOOO IIITTTT.

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ITTTTTTTTTTTTTT!

thanks, lovelies.

michelle