All posts by Steve Stern

A thought on New Year predictions

Americana, Psychological Musings, Uncategorized

 

Predictions are almost always based on logic and the future is almost always outside the logic box of the present. In very late 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and, in retaliation, in even later 1979 or early 1980, then President, Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would boycott the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow.

At the time, I thought that it was a bad move on Carter’s part and have come to think even less of it as I look back. In 1980, the Olympics were advertised as being about the amateur joy of Sport and one of the – alleged – differences between the Soviet Union and the United States was that our athletes were independent amateurs and the Soviets were state sponsored professionals. How could the President tell them to stay home? But he did; and they did. I still think that the boycott made us look petty and powerless.  It was a childish, If you are going to invade Afghanistan, I’m taking my toy and going home (when the team wasn’t even – theoretically – the President’s toy).

More importantly to my argument here, I also thought that it was a bad precedent. The next Summer Games would be in Los Angeles and it seemed to me that the Soviets would probably return the favor by boycotting our Olympic fifteen minutes of fame. After that, would come the Olympics in Seoul, an American client state, which would not even allow the North Koreans, a Soviet client state,  into the country  so the Soviets would most likely pull out of that Olympics. This was less than twenty years after Khrushchev had – reportedly – banged his shoe on the lectern at the UN, saying We will bury you. and the Cold War was still going strong. Of course. none of this happened. None of this came even close to happening and I realized how weak my chain of logic was.

By the 1992 Olympics, the Soviet Union no longer existed, something that had never occurred to me (or the CIA, I might add).

In the 1950s, General Electric starting building their Appliance Park in Kentucky and by the 1980s, it was the largest production facility in the world; bigger than FoxCom. But, during the late 1990s and the oughts, GE shipped production overseas leaving much of the Appliance Park empty. A couple of years ago, there were rumors that the Appliance Park was being put up for sale, but nobody wanted it because everybody was shipping production overseas as fast as possible. The experts were writing about the almost universal job flight to some cheap, offshore, factory. We lamented that, with the loss of manufacturing jobs, went the machinery and the collective memory needed to compete for future production.

Then a funny thing happened, Jeff Immelt, GE’s CEO, started to actually look at the numbers. The costs of sending production offshore were more than expected, the cost of bringing the produced items back is increasing with the increasing cost of oil, and the problems turn out to be more extensive than projected (what a surprise). It began to look like it might be slightly cheaper to manufacture some high-end stuff here, so GE brought back the production of a high-end water heater. It turned out that, because we have lost alot of our production ability, the water heater, as designed, was too complicated to build in the USA. But the engineers, the designers, were right next door and they could walk over and talk to the – probably few remaining – production guys. They could work back and forth, making the water heater simpler, easier, to build. While they were at it, they redesigned the production line.

In the end, General Electric was able to drop the sales price of the water heater by about $300, form about $1600 to $1299 and – probably – make more money. As a bonus, the quality of the water heater has gone up and GE was able to cut their inventory because it is so much easier to ship from Kentucky than China. Now GE is bringing back some manufacturing capacity from Mexico and I just read General Motors is bring back the production of the new Camaro from Canada.

None of this was projected – say five years ago – when jobs were  being shipped overseas like crazy and we were all worried that we would end up not actually making anything. The problem with projecting the future is that we almost always project the present out into that future void and, often, that is not what happens. Back when Jimmy Carter protested the Soviet intervention to basically protect the pro-Soviet Norther Alliance, nobody would have believed that – some twenty years later – we would be in Afghanistan arming, training, and protecting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. The unknown future is often ironic.

In an asides, one of my favorite movies is Personal Best which is about a group of women competitors vying for berths on the 1980 U.S. Olympics team which did not go to Moscow.

 

 

Voisin and the Mullin Automotive Museum

Art, Cars

A week or so ago, Malcolm Pearson and I went to see the Voisin show at the Mullin Automotive Museum. Actually, Automotive Museum is somewhat of a misnomer, it is really a museum of French cars and – really, almost exclusively – pre-World War II French cars, extreme Art Deco French cars. The Mullin Museum is in Oxnard, about five and half hours – without gas, pee, or food stops – out of our way, and there are not many people that I enjoy being with, besides Malcolm, that are also willing to get up early enough to leave San Jose at 6:30, drive to Oxnard, walk around the Mullin for three hours, and drive back to San Jose that same night. Even to see a brace of Voisins (17 Voisins might be more than a brace but they were bracing).

As an aside, Voisins are fine cars and seeing a group of them is interesting and great fun, but they are not great cars. Maybe a better way to put it is that they are great cars, but they were not great in the right direction. To my mind, they seem to be on the same level as Lancias (and, as somebody who has owned three Lancias, I mean that in the best possible way). Both Lancia and Voisin were trying to make – make is pretty weak sauce for the passion involved – great cars but both made engineering decisions that were both brilliant and wrong for the market. End aside.

One of the very nice things about this special show of Voisins is how they reflect the early history of the automobile. Because Voisin was an aircraft inventor and manufacturer – he first flew an airplane in 1906 and, because the Europeans didn’t know about or didn’t acknowledge, the Wright Brothers, he won a prize for the first controlled flight – the early cars were built using typical airplane construction techniques  (including aluminium rather than the more typical brass).


By 1938, when Voisin built the Avions C30S Coupe for the Paris Auto Salon of the same year, the cars were more mainstream – and not all personally designed by Gabriel Voisin himself – but still very distinctive and exquisitely made. Along the way, the company made some memorable cars that, in my humble opinion, would do honor to anybody’s livingroom as a piece of sculpture. In 1934, they built the black and yellow Avions Voisin C27 Grand Sport Cabriolet with a body designed by Giuseppe Figoni – before he joined forces with businessman Ovidio Flaschi, thereby creating Figoni & Falaschi that is, by far, the best name of any car-body design company, ever – and was sold to the Shah of Persia. In 1935, they built the Avions Voisin C27 Aerosport Coupe with a large sunroof.

In 1938, Voisin built the  Avions C30 Cabriolet with coachwork built by Dubos that was later requisitioned by an Nazi stationed in France (maybe the Nazi liked it because it was more sedate, even a little Germanic, compared to many of the other cars.

In 1935, Gabriel Voisin, himself, designed and built the C25 Aérodyne which was Voisin’s “car of the future”. It was hyper-expensive in the middle of the depression, improbably streamlined, featured an huge – powered – sunroof, and had the best Art Deco upholstery I have ever seen.

 

By almost any standard, it was a tour de force but it had a six cylinder, sleeve-valve, engine while Bugatti – out in the sticks in Molsheim – was building less expensive cars with with eight cylinder double overhead cam engines.

What I like about these cars is that they were built by individuals, artists. Idiosyncratic artists that often got lost in their art and held it dearer than making money or, even sometimes, making a good car. For years, Ferrari built very fast cars with V-12 engines designed by geniuses like  Gioacchino Colombo and Aurelio Lampredi and they didn’t have radiator fans which Ferrari considered – I don’t know exactly, undignified? too feminine? too ordinary? – unnecessary. The problem was that no radiator fan made these cars very hard to drive in the real world with actual traffic and traffic jams. When asked about this problem, Ferrari said that Nobody should drive a Ferrari in traffic, if there is a traffic jam, just pull over to an espresso bar and wait for traffic to clear. This is the same guy who – for years – refused to install disc brakes on his race cars because they were invented by the English. (I had a Ferrari Lusso – luxury in English – that didn’t have a radio or a glove box, or, even, a locking passenger door.)  Bugatti refused to install hydraulic brakes on his cars, preferring to keep mechanical brakes – with delicate cables and pulleys going every which way – long after everybody else had agreed that hydraulic were the only way to go.

To me, all this makes the cars more fun, more interesting, even if it makes them less of a transportation appliance and the French were and still are  the best -worst? – at idiosyncratic cars. Here are a couple more examples without further comment.

1939 Delahaye Type 165 Cabriolet with a Figoni et Falaschi designed body

1938 Dubonnet Hispano-Suiza H6C Xenia with a Jacques Saoutchik designed body

 

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Sandy Hook Elementary School and shootings and guns and knives and China

Uncategorized

I want to say that I am – like everybody else – shocked and horrified at the killings at Sandy Hook School and I am, but more than that, I am pissed. I am pissed at our refusal to deal with Gun Control as a nation. I am pissed at our refusal to look at our national propensity for violence and at our elected leaders inability to take on The Gun Lobby.

Guns kill people. Most guns people have today – and as far as I can tell, ALL guns used in mass murders – are designed to kill people. They are not hunting weapons or target-practices weapons, they are weapons designed – well designed, beautifully designed – to kill as many people as fast as possible. Guns kill people and as if some cosmic hand leaned down to underline that guns kill people, there was a parallel violent spree in China yesterday. Only, because it is so hard to get a gun in China, a knife was used and twenty two Chinese children were wounded – only two seriously – and none were killed.

I read some shithead who said, Many will seek to turn their outrage to action. But now is not the time for politics. Let us instead reflect upon what was lost today, and first grieve together for the victims…. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth. Now is exactly the time for politics. Now is exactly the time to start working on getting rid of most, if not all, of these guns. Now, while our rage is up enough to actually do something about it.

 

Tavi Gevinson

Americana, Psychological Musings

Until I saw a sort of offhand reference – as if the reader would obviously know who she is – to Tavi Gevinson, I had never heard of her. I don’t know how I missed her as she is about as famous in her world as Fernando Alonso is in his. On the outside chance that there is atleast one other  person who hasn’t heard of Tavi, she is a sixteen year old fashion blogger. The astonishing part, however, is that she started when she was eleven – she was born in 1996 – and was famous enough by the time she was 15 to interview Joss Whedon for her blog ( The Style Rookie).

By the time she was 13, Gevinson was a special guest of Vogue Magazine at the New York Fashion Week. By the time she was 15, Gevinson founded Rookie Magazine which bills itself as a website for teenage girls with advice like How to Decorate Your Room like a Movie, or Ask a Grown Man:Jon Hamm, or Breaking in a Broken Heart : How to draw power from a truly crappy experience. Looking at Rookie Magazine started out as surprising and slowly became an amazing experience. Everything I have read about teenage  girls is written by someone who was a teenager years before and is – sort of – remembering their teenage years from an older perspective, this is written – or edited – by an actual teenage girl and it is so much more sophisticated.

In Breaking in a Broken Heart, Rookie says Develop compassion. Now you know what it feels like to feel like garbage. So you can recognize that feeling in others, and empathize. It strangely becomes a healing experience for both people when this happens. You get over your heartbreak even more, and so do they….Discover that you are loved. Go ahead and try to reject this because it sounds corny and you don’t like feelings. I’m sorry, it’s just the objective truth of the matter. When you understand that you are loved, that there are, really, people who love you, that you DESERVE their love, and that you really do have huge, undying support in this world, from your friends and/or family and/or pets and/or God if you believe in that, the love that you lost begins to feel smaller in comparison.

In talking about Loosing It, Rookie says To avoid having to answer a million questions, I prefer to regard “losing your virginity” as a choose-your-own-adventure. Oral, anal, vaginal, manual, sex toy, something else? YOU PICK! When it comes to identifying as a virgin, only you can decide what “counts.” Maybe you “lost your virginity” the first time you gave oral to your girlfriend. Maybe you it was the first time your boyfriend fingered you. Maybe it was your first-time P in V. There is no wrong way to decide when you’ve lost your virginity. It is an intangible characteristic that only you get to choose whether or not you identify with…That said, maybe you think the whole concept of virginity is stupid. Who’s to say that you ever had one in the first place? Who’s to say that you lost anything when you had sex for the first time? I prefer to think of first-time sexual encounters as gaining a new experience, not losing something. Instead of thinking of things in terms of virginity, feel free to tell someone that you gave oral sex for the first time, or that you haven’t tried vaginal intercourse yet. There is no wrong way to talk about first-time sexual encounters, and anyone who tells you otherwise is likely just as clueless as the rest of us.

I sometimes have a feeling that the next generation will not be able to handle the trashed world we are leaving them. While it is true that we are leaving them a country in which the average kid will not be able to live the same lifestyle as their parents – lifestyle usually being defined as having as much stuff and using as much energy – and we are leaving them a world in which our leaders refuse to even admit that the climate is changing, and we are leaving them a future world in which we did pretty much everything I was taught to believe was responsible for the fall of Rome, this, next, generation just seems better. More capable of looking at real problems.

Reading Rookie, and reading about Tavi Gevison or listening to her TED talk – yes! at something like sixteen – is a hugely reaffirming experience. Check it out, I suspect you will be shocked and thrilled as much as me.