Images Via Life Archive/Conceptcarz/Supercars.net.

Italian neorealist film director Roberto Rossellini had a bit of taste.

Not only was he one of the definitive auteurs of post war European cinema, he also commissioned this gobsmakingly beautiful car. You can see by the cut of his suit that the man had style. But getting on the phone and getting Sr. Scaglietti to rebody your Ferrari?

That’s what we call panache.

The story goes that the car the great director owned was originally a red 375 Pininfarina Spyder but was rebodied as a Coupé by Scaglietti and painted silver.

And you can see how the Coupé format works perfectly for those Northern European winters (Rossellini spent a lot of time in Paris). Notice those wonderfully scalped flanks similar to those on the 250TR, the pinched rear end that was such an inspiration for the E-Type, and of course that wonderfully long, elegently scooped nose.

Whoever restred this beauty showed real attention to detail, as you can see from the beautifully rendered interior. And though you’d have to sell a small family’s worth of kidneys to afford even those wire wheels, there’s something of that spartan, post WW2 Italian aesthetic that’s reflected in its incredible presence.

The perfect car for the perfect creator. We’re in love.

When Nicolas Refn’s film Drive came out last september we were obviously interested straight away.

What’s not to like about putting the words ‘existential’ and ‘car’ together?

Any close reader of this blog will understand that imbuing meaning into cars is what we’re all about.

But it’s easy to disappear, of course, in a void of pretence — and to project your own fantasies of what cars mean to you — when writing about these things.

We saw the film at the movies and was pretty unimpressed. Not sure wether we expected a full on action extravaganza crossed with a Euro art-house flick — an impossible mix that would have been bond to fail.

However it happened, we were left somehow wanting more.

We had a feeling that the problem might have something to do with time and place and context — and so, we watched it again recently.

What arises on second viewing is a much more powerful, resonant movie. We found that we remembered many of the lines and the scenes hit by hit — and the most important thing that arises is ‘the driver’ and his relationship to the cars that are his vehicles through his many moral minefields.

The video below (taken from the DVD extras, I believe), brings out how deeply tuned into the steel the lead actor Ryan Gosling became during the production of the movie — and I reckon there’s something visceral and real about a bloke’s relationship with his motor that resonates.

Never know, it may turn out to be a classic after all.

And that movie poster is a bit special too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stumbled across an amazing collection of original Motorsports slides today for sale on eBay.

It really brings to mind the glorious beauty of film and transparency photography.

We here at Influx towers are of course obvious revelers in the joys of digital photography. We have utilised the full quiver of readymade tools that have been developed to saturate your pics with that old school, retro feel.

Seeing these slides, though, you can really feel how our user-friendly digital retrospectives can’t yet match the lovely feel of the real thing.

Not sure exactly who the subjects are and exactly which motorsports seasons we’re looking at here: perhaps you can help?

pic: Michael Fordham

Thanks to the kind folks at Wikipedia chrome, or chrome plating, is actually a technique of electroplating a thin layer of the chemical element chromium onto a metal object.

It was originally used extensively in industrial and military applications, from as far back as 2000 years ago in China. Chrome’s hard, slippery properties helped reduce friction and increased the hardness of any metal surface to which it was applied.

But mid-century folk started applying it to objects of desire like cars and bikes, well, the rest is history.

But we couldn’t help noticing that new technologies, not to mention the ease of digital render, has made full body chrome, or chrome effect bodywork, become something to think about. Even this sort of job makes your ride look for Tron than American Graffiti.

We scoped the outrageously chromed AMG at the recent Autosport show, and the gallery is a ragbag digest of shiny contemporaries from all over the webs. Try to separate the renders from the real.

We reckon the mainstream carmakers should offer chrome as an option…

Photograph: John Witzig

Even if you care nothing about the noble art of surfing, if you have a penchant for the abilities of old cars to take you places you won’t fail to enjoy this heart-heart-rendingly nostalgic video from Australia in the 1960s.

And whats more you’ll see how hard these fellas pushed their heavy old heaps of Aussie iron. You could wile away a fun ten minutes trying to name which cars are which. We’re certainly no Australian car experts.

It focuses on the explorations of a coterie of Australian surf pioneers, at the heart of which were Bob McTavish pictured overlooking one of Noosa’s point-breaks, is lovely old FJ Holden in silent contemplation to the right.

The picture by Photographer John Witzig is one of those that’s passed into legend. Noosa heads, now about as crowded and developed as a beach side resort can get, was when Witzig and friends like hydrodynamic Genius George Greenough found it, this eden like exotic spot.

Certainly shows that you don’t need bespoke, surf-marketed SUVs to get you places.

All I’ve Found (George Greenough) — Sea Movies from www.KORDUROY.tv on Vimeo.

If you’ve ever been to the little island of Malta you’ll have noticed at least two truths. The Maltese are mad (in a passionate, hilariouly, brilliant way) and they are into their motors.

In fact, the latter part is taken into their culture right to the heart. And as well as blasting little birds out of the sky with rifles, all things automotive obsesses your average Maltese heart in the same way as food, love and intrigue remain the quotidian passions of your typical Parisien.

A brilliant little book edited by Maltese writer Emma Mattei brings out this seldom focused upon aspect of her homeland — and this is just a little part of its broad and deep appeal.

Two photo essays and a little bit of ruminatively well-written text will take you through the details. The roads are in pretty poor condition and there’s not much total mileage of them anyway, and the wheezing, belching buses transport a lot of the punters around the island.

But even if you don’t care a stuff for cars, this little book is really worth getting hold of. It’s a truly uncommon guide to a place and its people.

Available from Miranda Books

I always thought the 512 BB was a really under rated Ferrari.

In my opinion, in fact it’s one of the prettiest Ferraris ever.

There was something wonderfully understated about those Pininfarina lines. As a kid in the seventies it seemed the cooler, more elegant opposition to Lamborghini’s outrageous Countach.

It probably stemmed from the time I came up close and personal with one.

As a kid (I must have been 9 or Ten years old), me and my mate Keith Curwood would cycle down to the junction of the A12 and sit there and spot cars. Sad but true.

Every now and then, when the main lights turned red, a real gem would turn up. It’s a bit of weird ‘confession of an urban kid of the seventies’ thing to admit, but this was the only sort of geeky sport I was interested in.

I would of course pretend by Raleigh Grifter was a Moto Guzzi Le Mans too, and tug the flappy mud guard end to scrap along across the knobbly tires so it made a noise that approximated the sound of an Italian V-Twin.

This was all included in my mass of pre-teen dreams of exotic power and freedom a nice precursor to that flowering of auto-eroticism that came once we went to big school.

The 512 BB that pulled up was, I remember as if it was yesterday, an incredible powder blue, and it had cream leather interior and an even more incredible blond siren sitting in the passenger seat, wearing a hugely furry white fur coat.

This was bling before bling was bling, a Boogie Nights style spangled up deliciousness of a scenario.

It must have been 1976 or something. And it stayed with me for the rest of my life.

The 523 BB had 12 cyclinders arranged in a boxer engine, and prefigured cars like the 308, 328 and the Testarossa.

So, even if it stood in the Countach’s shadow from the moment it was born in 1974, it will always represent to me much more than the Lambo’s slightly staid cousin.

image PRPS

A lot of people out there are understandably dubious about the connections between car culture and fashion.

This video, though, is really worth a look. Donwan Harrell is a car nut and creator of PRPS, a high end jean brand out of the states. And the video, scored Via Highsnobiety and The Slevedge Yard this week, brings out how car culture has in fact informed the designer’s passions and crystallised in Japanese spun Selvedge denim.

It’s a bit of a stretch, sometimes, to draw parallels between cultural forms as vastly opposed to all things greasy and automotive and the perceived, fey, fickle and transient world of the catwalk.

So often ‘Fashion’ as a business exploits subcultures, little scenes of passionate friends engaged in whatever pursuit floats their boat — in order simply to sell the look and feel of the obsession to the rank and file of the mainstream.

PRPS seems to be a little bit different.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ok, you can’t drive it on the road, it looks like a nightmare in which Hieronymous Bosch interprets a Wagner symphony in a room full of blood lusted Valkyries, but we can’t keep our minds off AMG’s SLS GT3.

Merc launched the car back in 2010, but this is the first time we’ve been up close and personal. Ever since we saw it in the steel at this year’s Autosport show we’ve been tormented by the potential of the power and the glory infused in this hell’s teeth baring power machine.

The SLS itself is spectacular enough, but give it the AMG treatment and qualify it for the FIA’s GT3 spec and you can bet it’s going to be jaw dropping.

Mercedes might be enetering a new market in offering these things to privateer racers willing to engage in what the company call ‘a favourable price structure’ to score one of these babies. Image turning up at your local hillclimb with one of these?

Perchance to dream.

All the details available here.

Late last year I flew into Los Angeles to report a story on southern California’s unique, vibrant, influential car culture. Nearly half a century earlier a slightly more talented writer did the same thing. Tom Wolfe, who would go on to write The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities was 32 years old and on his first assignment for Esquire. His brief was pretty much the same as mine: go out there, meet the guys building these extraordinary-looking hot-rods and ask why kustom-kar kulture, as they like to spell it, took off in southern California and had such an impact on the wider culture, and whether the lumbering Detroit carmakers could learn from it.

Tom Wolfe is a character in America’s unfolding drama

It was a big deal for Wolfe. He panicked and got a terrible case of writer’s block and just typed all his notes out in a long memo to his editor, Byron Dobell, who’d arranged for someone else to write the story. But once Wolfe relaxed the easy, impressionistic style in which he wrote the notes made great reading. So Dobell just knocked the ‘Dear Byron’ off the top of the memo and ran the whole thing in the magazine. The story, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-flake Streamline Baby, is seen as one of the first examples of The New Journalism, even if Wolfe was panicking rather than consciously innovating as he wrote it, and it’s one of the best things ever written about cars. I have a copy of the original 1963 Esquire on my desk as I write this, but you can buy the story in the Wolfe anthology of the same name, and there are a few other car-related classics in there too.

I wasn’t trying to copy, outdo or update Wolfe’s piece. There’s no point. What he saw in ’63, I saw last year: the great hot-rod builders like the great artists in their studios, building cars of the most perfect stance and proportion for those who could afford them (not cheap), but staying outside the automotive mainstream, with the big carmakers paying attention and doing what they can to capture some of that automotive mojo, but never quite getting it.

Cars like this ‘surf woody’ helped cement the Barris legend

Counter-cultures don’t usually last fifty years, but this one has lasted even longer, and goes back to the end of the Second World War when GIs came home with a need for speed that the old Model A Fords they’d left behind couldn’t satisfy. That mixed with the nascent LA art scene and the racing on dry lake beds and illegal late-night public-road drag strips and the weather that encourages summer-night cruising to create the whole kustom kulture. It influenced so much: not just car design but journalism — not just Wolfe’s story, but half of America’s big mainstream and modded car mags grew out of Hot Rod magazine — and music — Brian Wilson and Little Deuce Coupe — and film. George Lucas’s first big flick, American Graffiti, is pretty much the perfect summation of that whole scene. Shot on a tight budget, it was riotously profitable and he wasted the proceeds on some flop called Star Wars.

Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth created a more monstrous myth than that of Barris

And astonishingly, the people haven’t changed either. George Barris has been at the chromed hub of Cali’s kustom kulture since before the GIs came home. He invented the name. Already, by the time Wolfe met him for his Esquire piece, he was “the biggest name in customizing”, and a “solid little guy, five feet seven, 37 years old, and he looks just like Picasso”. Wolfe liked the great artist analogy: Barris’s ascent, he said, was like “Tiepolo emerging from the studios of Venice, except that Barris emerged from the auto-body shops of Los Angeles”.

He was right to make the comparison. While the work of the other great hot-rod builders, like Alex Xydias and Pete Chapouris of the famous SoCal Speedshop focused on pure, perfect automotive form, Barris and Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth pushed on into art, their cars as much free-form scuplture as transport. Roth passed in 2001 but Barris’s vast canon of work now includes everything from subtle kustomizations for the Hollywood glitterati of the fifties to the Batmobile of the sixties and countless other movie cars. Detroit was paying attention, and still is. “I was amazed,” Barris told Wolfe in ’63 about his first trip to Detroit’s design studios. “They could tell me about cars I built in 1945. And all this time we thought they frowned on us.”

Celebrity hookups were Barris’s stock in trade

Artists like Barris and Roth could never go work for corporate behemoths, so instead the global car industry came to them: the biggest change since Wolfe’s story is that virtually every major carmaker now has a design studio in southern California, hoping that their hyper-edumacated young stylists will catch whatever it is that makes SoCal cars so great. Meanwhile Barris, at 86 looking like the well-aged pop star he is, keeps at it. To paraphrase William Shakespeare (if you haven’t heard of him, think of him as the George Barris of literature): “Age cannot wither him, nor kustom stale his infinite variety”…