#We re on the road to nowhere drivers#
#We re on the road to nowhere professional#
#We re on the road to nowhere windows#

A freeway oasis could only look as it does if there is no need to conspire they don’t seem to defend against any threat, even one that has to be denied.

These lines, I thought, could never have been written about the America created by the freeways. I recall Auden’s famous lines in “September 1st 1939” The suburban America I grew up in, the America responsible for freeway oases and tract homes, floats on the ice of permanent fifth-rateness, and whenever I encounter that standard, I feel comforted. Stephen Spender, I think it was, once expressed amazement that anyone could call Americans materialistic - true materialists, he observed, could never have built such a cheesy civilization. It would serve, it was enough, there was no need to do more. I couldn’t quite grasp the point then, but the same confidence was responsible for the look of the restaurant. There was no threat because she wouldn’t recognize one. I can’t help thinking that she displayed a peculiarly American confidence. She was so assured that they were pulling back without acting put off.

#We re on the road to nowhere drivers#

The truck drivers were a little unnerved.

#We re on the road to nowhere professional#

She was friendly without flirting back, unthreatened without any hint of professional cool. They were probably doing it more out of habit than anything else, but they were lifers and their manner had an obvious air of threat. The truck drivers were constantly flirting with her. Even so, she still moved and talked with a kind of style - she had an air about her. She looked bored - but then it was such a foul day she’d probably spent most of her shift there. When she wasn’t waiting tables, she was sitting by the kitchen door, flipping through a newspaper. She didn’t look or act like anything special, just your average Midwestern girl. If I had it to explain again, I would have tried talking about the waitress there. I thought it was appropriate I found it comforting. I didn’t quite see it then, and Beth certainly would not have approved, but the truth was that I didn’t just like the place. I couldn’t explain it wasn’t an important question for either of us, but I couldn’t. The tacky details were there only to keep it from looking like a cafeteria. She was a connoisseur of kitsch, and by her standards kitsch had to be lurid, grotesque, and uncompromising. I tried to explain - all I could say was that I liked the kitschiness. I said, truthfully, that none of it bothered me there was even a way in which I liked it. The fake wood-grain Formica, the feeble little curtains, the cute place mats, the plastic plants that didn’t even bother to seem real - it was all so tacky, so devoid of locale, so American. She wasn’t being a snob about it she’d been in a lot worse places and would never pretend otherwise. A couple of truck drivers laughed to themselves in the middle of the room, and my friend Beth and I were in a booth in the corner.īeth wasn’t happy with the restaurant.

#We re on the road to nowhere windows#

The windows had iced over snowdrifts rearranged themselves in the parking lot. In my own work, I strive to enjoy the ride with powers of observation to discover new things along the way that perhaps others miss.This was a bitterly cold day, the dead of winter. Basically, we’re all going to die sometime, we might as well enjoy the ride. One turns around when the day is waning, the gas tank is emptying or the stomach is churning not because the end has been reached but because the return from nowhere has just begun.ĭavid Byrne wrote the rock song Road to Nowhere for the 1985 Talking Heads album Little Creatures and considers it a joyful ode to doom. Give us time to work it out” The Talking HeadsĪlong the Road to Nowhere one will find many fine subjects to inspire, if one allows the journey to be as important as the end point. In 1985 the Talking Heads sang about a Road to Nowhere: When do you reach the end? You know it when you see it. The road to nowhere is the equivalent of experimentation in abstract expressionist painting. Many of my best images have been found in the middle of nowhere. I’ve taken many a “Road to Nowhere” in my pursuit of photography subjects. The Road to Nowhere – Idiom: A plan, project, development, or course of action that appears to have or offer no meaningful, desirable, or useful conclusion.