An old story from the Dublin Review:
The fade of a November day in Los Angeles, on West Century Boulevard, and the light fats up, and the last of the sun’s glare fixes on the plate-glass windows of the Sheraton Gateway hotel. Every ninety seconds or so, a plane takes off from LAX nearby. Homebound traffic slopes along Vicksburg Avenue and Avion Drive. The air has its typical, local heaviness, its gasoline spice. The flags of twenty-one nations hang limply from their poles on the Sheraton’s breezeless concourse. At a slight remove, on West 98th Street, in a rented Hyundai, parked discreetly beneath a beech tree, lurks the artist Sean Lynch. He is working a telephoto lens. He rings me in County Sligo and minutely describes the scene. Then a confession:
‘I’m worried about the valets,’ he says.
Lynch is learning the art of the stakeout. He must appear nondescript and innocent; he must will himself to recede into the shadows. Despite the suspiciously milling valets, he manages to keep a steady eye trained on suite 501 of the Sheraton and he shoots off some film. Suite 501 is slightly less than halfway up the twelve-storey building and a little in from its eastern edge. Lynch says it is difficult to date the hotel precisely, but it probably looks much as it did the last time there was a stakeout on 501.
That was on 19 October 1982, when the hotel was still known as the Sheraton Plaza La Reina. The stakeout concluded with the arrest of the car maker John DeLorean for the alleged possession of sixteen million dollars’ worth of cocaine. At the end of a long, media-saturated trial, the judge ruled that the FBI had engaged in entrapment and DeLorean was cleared of all charges. But the affair effectively signalled the end for the DeLorean Motor Company and its manufacturing plant in Dunmurry, Co. Antrim, outside Belfast. A lot of investors lost their money, among them the British government, Johnny Carson, and Sammy Davis Jr.
DeLorean – the name carries a charge yet for us children of the ’80s, evoking a species of burly entrepreneurship so redolent of that decade. Sean Lynch grew up in Moyvane, north Kerry. His father was a car mechanic and ran a garage on the main street there. The DeLorean sports car, the DMC-12, was always in the news. It was a flash of colour on our grainy screens, a little smirk of sexiness. ‘DMC’: DeLorean Motor Company; ‘12’: it was to retail for $12,000. The car’s trademark: the gull-wing doors that opened up, not out. Those of us of a certain age swooned at the smoothness of the movement, and at the car’s distinctive shape. It was at once boxy and curvaceous.
Lynch has for long months now been immersed in an ocean of DeLorean material. He has visited scrap dealers all over Ireland in an attempt to trace the old panels and moulds that shaped the DMC-12. He has commissioned an engineer in Co. Wexford to recreate the exterior panels. Next year, he will exhibit in London his reminted DMC-12, along with text, photographs and ephemera gathered during his investigation. He believes his artistic method is in many ways consistent with a historian’s practice. His DeLorean project is an attempt to document and preserve the kinks and nuances of a fading industrial saga. His work is at once playful and sternly attentive to detail. The Wexford panels are being made from stainless steel, as was DeLorean’s practice. During his period at General Motors, the American automobile industry was frequently accused of manufacturing cars that would need replacing inside a few years. By producing the DMC-12 in a material that would never rust, DeLorean believed he was making a car that could live forever.
Now an oxblood dusk settles on the LA airport zone, and it is past midnight in Ireland – the flood waters rise in the swamplands of the south Sligo bayou, and it is the end of a troubled decade in a troubled new century. But as Lynch and I speak, we are spiritually in the early 1980s. I ask him how long he intends to persist with the stakeout.
‘As long as it takes,’ he says....
....MUCH MORE
