As a male with only a passing interest in cars but a healthy curiosity about television shows produced in and about Dallas, I sometimes find myself watching Fast N’ Loud. If you’ve never heard of it, you probably live a richer, fuller life than I do. But it’s a very popular car show on the Discovery Channel, and it centers on Gas Monkey Garage, which is over near I-35E and Walnut Hill, not too far from SpeedZone. So when one of the show’s main characters, the magnificently bearded Aaron Kaufman, left Fast N’ Loud and started his own Discovery show, to be filmed in a garage not far from the Design District, I decided to commit journalism. The story went online today, and you can get you some of that right here. But here’s a super bonus FrontBurner-only piece of artisanal content for you:
The picture you see above was taken by yours truly. To the left of the frame, you see D Magazine’s staff photographer, Elizabeth Lavin. As is her wont, she made the photo shoot much harder than it needed to be (and got a result much better than it would have been). If a subject is prepared to sit for a portrait in her workplace, for example, Elizabeth might instead convince her to climb into a jon boat and motor out to the center of White Rock Lake, which actually happened once. I was there.
So it went with Aaron Kaufman. After I interviewed him at his Arclight Fabrication, Elizabeth was supposed to shoot him there. She instead talked him into dragging one of his hotrods out to the levees for an al fresco shoot at sunset. Getting permission to do this from two departments at Dallas City Hall was, as you might imagine, a slightly complicated process. But Kaufman was kind to go along with the idea, and everything went off without a hitch (except for the part where a gust of wind blew over a huge light, which I caught with one hand while holding a $1,000 lens in the other).
Anyway, read the story. If you aren’t one of those people who lead rich, full lives, it’s worth your time.
