Ever since the Merry Pranksters carved up a bus, painted it, and put "Furthur" in the destination window, certain subcultures in the Bay Area have embraced flamboyantly decorated vehicles.  And nowhere were they embraced more than in Berkeley.  During the heyday of the sixties, anybody who wasn't hopelessly square managed to at least throw some paint on their car.  Commonplace painted cars are out of fashion now, but the real gems of all-out automotive decoration have only matured and gained depth with time.

To celebrate Berkeley's special relationship with this uniquely American folk art form, the 2000 How Berkeley Can You Be parade ended with a caravan of eighty or more Art Cars.  Some came from all over the country, but quite a few were made right around here.

Unfortunately, a parade is a poor place to get decent pictures of them.  We'll just have to make do with what we've got.

Here is the crucial completing segment of my snapshotular recreation of the How Berkeley Can You Be experience.

The photos are divided into two pages: this one is for the Art Cars, and the other is for the People.

First came a peculiar form of V8 hot rod:

 

Then a specimen of beadwork:

 

A goth go-kart:

 

A chalkboard-mobile:

 

A gem of the Amphibious Rococo school:

 


 

This one is possibly the best known local Art Car.  The exterior is all stained glass.  Eighteen years in the making!

 

Another well-known local specimen is this instrument-mobile.  Many of the musical apparatuses mounted on it are fully operational, including synth keyboards fore and aft.  As it rolled through the parade, it was accompanied by two percussionists pounding the drums on its sides...  On the passenger side, a lady in black leather with a whip:

 

And on the driver side, a lady in black tape.

 

This got my vote as the most beautiful decorative design of the bunch:

 

And this one may be the winner at the opposite end of that spectrum, but it's still cool.

 

You may have noticed a giant termite in the background above.

 

A friend of mine helped make this one.

 

It's the only one in the group that looks fresh off of some showroom floor.

 

Some of the vehicles were not cars.

 


 


 


(I have a wiener you can ride whenever you want...)
 

And some were not even vehicles.

 

More cars:

 

(detail from above:)

 

The most elegant gothwork yet...  it's emitting suitably grim and bombastic pseudo-Wagnerian music:

 


 

All-American tailpipes:

 

Remember... what?

 

Who would have thought that the stylings of Carmen Miranda would ever end up looking elegant and understated?

 

Some local cars I expected didn't make it.  One or two covered with electronic parts, and one covered entirely with old cameras, are the ones that come first to mind.

On a side street was the Bicycle Rodeo and Carousel.  About a dozen playground ride devices built out of old bikes, as well as lots of handmade oddball cycles.  This ride is sort of a pedal powered Nasa centrifuge:

 

You can see a bit of the carousel behind it.  There's a teeter-totter, and rocking-horse-like devices...  There's even an exercycle modified to flog the buttocks of the rider -- and people just had to try it out.  And a crude analogy of a mechanical bull.

 

After the parade was food and music, but I didn't record any of that.

The part of the parade before the Art Cars is shown on another page.  See it here!

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