I remember the days years ago when Tom Kennedy would dream aloud of one day making art cars for a living. Years hence, to my eyes, he's realized that dream. Today he and his new wife Haydeen work on a hippo car. At Burning Man just months ago, the couple delivered the Green Dream Machine to the man who conceived and commissioned the art piece, an ethereal, soothingly-lit floating lily pad of a car with a giant overhanging leaf canopy hovering, waving, bouncing lightly along, all its weight and umbrella girth held aloft by naught but "Kennedy magic," a beautifully woven steel "tree" rooted in the rear. It was a joy both to behold from afar and to ride inside along the rainbow, neon-lit playa night beneath the black, black northern Nevada night sky.
Tom Kennedy has created some 25 art vehicles in a dozen or so years since quitting the corporate world to dive in with all the colorful cars and artists he once could only watch out his office window in downtown Houston. Nearly half a dozen of all the cars he has created have been commissioned pieces.
A few years back, Tom created a Cheshire Cat car for Burning Man mogul Marian Goodell. It was sweet. But what was really sweet was swimming circles around the ever growing sea of what Burning Man now calls "mutant vehicles" in the whale. The Great White Whale. Moby Dick with a propane-pressurized blow-hole shooting 50-foot columns of fire into the night sky.
Sitting atop the whale's nose one night manning the propane cannon, I was delighted by a comment by longtime cacophonist and mad creative genius Chris Ratcliff who said, or rather asked, "How does it feel to be living one of the most vivid lives on the planet?"
There are no words to express how it felt, none perhaps except.. vivid.
That was atop the 72-foot long whale with Tom at the helm. Today it's tiny little hippo parts. Tomorrow perhaps a giant truck with fins over the rear wheels and a 20-foot missile that rises on hydraulics and screams and smokes as though to launch at any moment, an appropriately ironic "smile bomb" to jostle the complacent brain into critical thought in these strange dark days of our government's renewed war on peace.
But whatever he builds, it's all the same in my mind. Tom Kennedy is living his dream.
I'll bet it is a vivid one. - RSM
