Just before the world changed, way back in February, Malcolm Pearson and I went to see the Nethercutt Museum & Collection which is the official name of an outstanding collection of cars in Southern California. The collection has all kinds of cars with an emphasis on luxury sedans of the late 1920s into the 1930s, and oh boy! what a great time that was for cars. And yet I didn’t like The Collection or The Museum that much and I am still working out why. Because of that, I didn’t blog about it right away, and then living under Covid 19 sucked up most of my bandwidth. In spite of that, it was too good a trip and too many exceptional cars to not say something. I think that too many exceptional cars may be the crux of the problem, both The Collection and The Museum were overwhelming, I felt like the car lover equivalent of a Strasburg Goose. One stunning car after another jammed together in an order that was not discernable to me.

The Museum and the Collection are across the street from each other in the nondescript Sylmar neighborhood of Los Angeles or, as the Museum puts it, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, and are the legacy of Dorothy and J.B. Nethercutt. The Nethercutts made their fortune with Merle Norman Cosmetics which J.B. took over from his aunt, Merle Nethercutt Norman, and built into a hyper-successful cosmetic company. Dorothy and J.B. used much of the resultant fortune to buy cars and other mechanical memorabilia. Spectacular cars and – I’m sure but I have no basis to judge – spectacular memorabilia. After years of collecting, they took this extraordinary and idiosyncratic collection public in 1971.

Both The Museum and The Collection are free but, to see The Collection requires a reservation on a scheduled tour for which, fortunately, Malcolm had already made reservations. We met our tour group outside The Collection Building and then walked into the building down a driveway and into a basement garage filled with an astounding group of cars, all licensed and ready to roll up the driveway and into the world. It was overwhelming, and full of fellow tourists so I had a hard time getting a photo-rhythm going. A couple of cars that caught my eye were a very early electric car and its charger which was both fascinating and completely un-understandable to me and a pre-General Motors Chevrolet.

After the garage, the tour went upstairs to the Grand Salon, an imagined thirties through fifties showroom done in marble. The room is spectacular and architecturally, in my humble opinion, doesn’t work. We entered the showroom from sort of a backdoor and there is no sense of a Grand Entry. Bernard Maybeck designed two similar showrooms on Van Ness in San Francisco and they are all about the entry into a world of luxury. Here we sort of sneak in through the basement like we are interlopers. That aside, the cars are even better than spectacular – whatever better than spectacular is – but it is a large tour and there are people everywhere making it difficult to see the cars at our own pace and make getting a good picture almost impossible (for me, Malcolm got some excellent shots).

Over in the corner, looking very neglected, was one of my favorite cars, the Cord 512, and I was surprised at how small and unimposing it looked. I have seen, probably, twenty of these Cord 810-812s – or two of them tens times each, I’m not sure as they do all look distinctively the same – and what a look, what a gutsy statement. The designer was Gordon Buehrig and he also designed the iconic 1956 Continental Mark II, and the car I would have taken home if I had won the door prize, a 1933 Duesenberg Model SJ Arlington Torpedo Sedan with which I took a selfie (sort of). The Duesenberg Brothers were successful racecar designers – they were the first American car to win a European Grand Prix, among other records, when they won the French Grand Prix in 1921 (the next American win was Dan Gurney’s American Eagle which won the Belgium Grand Prix in 1976) – who became unsuccessful luxury car builders. Unsuccessful meaning non-profitable in this case, the cars were terrific, very American, World-Class good, and very expensive (the Duesenberg in The Collection cost $20,000 when new which is about $397,100 now, that is a lot of money for a car without any of what we would call necessary amenities like power steering although it did have four-wheel hydraulic brakes).

Above the simulated main showroom, so to speak, are two more floors of mechanical wonders, mechanical dolls and lots of hood ornaments on the third floor – as I remember – and player pianos type mechanical instruments expanded to almost orchestra size on the top floor.

Looking at the pictures of these suburb cars, the assorted paraphernalia, and the mechanical oddities, I am reminded of the old Harrah’s Museum before it became the The National Automobile Museum or the Schlumpf Brothers Museum before the French nationalized and rationalized it as Cité de l’Automobile, Musée Nationale. All three museums started out as personal collections of car nuts – is nuts too strong, would aficionado be better? – with nothing in common except their pathological passion for collecting, collecting, and more collecting. In Harrah’s case, he had about 1450 seemingly random cars including a not so random whole building that had at least one of every car Packard ever built, displayed chronologically. When Harrah died, the Holiday Inn who had bought Harrah’s casinos, got the collection and sold off most of it. The best 175 cars were used to form the backbone of a new Museum, The National Automobile Museum (while the Schlumpf Brothers had about 575 cars of which 427 were completely restored and in working order).

The Nethercutt Museum & Collection, together, is only about 250 cars, all licensed and street ready. The overall quality is much better than either Harrah’s collection or the original Schlumpf brother’s collection – overall being the operative word, here – but it still has that personal idiosyncrasy of a private collection.

Across the street from The Collection is The Museum with even more cars. This is a collection of cars and car memorabilia that is impossible to see in one trip and I’m anxious to go back.

When I’m sometimes asked, when will there be enough women on the Supreme Court, and I say, “When there are nine,” people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that. Ruth Bader Ginsberg

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died I was shocked. I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked, she had been sick for a while but she had a whiff of immortality about her. While, it turns out, she wasn’t immortal, RBG was famously in good shape for her age, saying at one time that her personal trainer, Bryant Johnson, was “the most important person in her life”. Like everybody her age, she was born in a different universe than the one she died in, but unlike most people, she was one of the reasons that old universe changed.

Her death marks the end of an era; an era in which white women campaigned for white women’s causes thinking they were universal. For some reason that I’m clueless about, the baton of change, of growth towards equality, has been picked up by women of color. Maybe when RBG – hummm, RBG, not Ginsburg, like Scalia or Roberts – started her career, she was a woman of color. Maybe it’s just because it is hard to be an agent of change when one is a comfortable insider. Maybe it is easier for an outside to see past the artifices of the patriarchy. What ever the reason, Ruther Bader Ginsburg was an agent of change, to my way of thinking change for the better. May her memory continue to energize a new generation of young women and middle age women, and old women, and men of all ages. Rest in peace, RBG, your fight is over and you mostly won.

Solastalgia..as Albrecht defined it in a 2004 essay, Solastalgia is “manifest in an attack on one’s sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging (identity) to a particular place and a feeling of distress (psychological desolation) about its transformation.” from an article in the Los Angeles Times entitled Column: There’s actually a word for the climate change-induced despair you’ve been feeling

Solastalgia Emotional disquiet about negative changes in one’s environment. Ben Schott in Schott’s Vocab,

Night before last, at about one in the morning, I walked outside just to be outside. Just to wallow in the luxury of the soft, sweet air. It was warm and the sky was clear; I could see the stars. I could hear the crickets and the croaking of a single frog. It made me sad, everything makes me sad. Knowing that there is a word for what I’ve been feeling does not help. It was clear yesterday and warm, a beautiful early fall day, Still, beneath my pleasure, in my soul, I’m deeply despondent. I’m despondent because, as terrible as the last month was, the worst is not over, the worst isn’t even here yet. Next year will be worse and the year after that even worse.

Fires are out of control in Siberia according to Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, who writes that half of the fires in Arctic Russia this year are burning through areas with peat soil—decomposed organic matter that is a large natural carbon source…fires in Arctic Russia released more carbon dioxide (CO₂) in June and July 2020 alone than in any complete fire season since 2003 (when data collection began). According to Chris Mooney, writing in the Washington Post, Two Antarctic glaciers that have long kept scientists awake at night are breaking free from the restraints that have hemmed them in, increasing the threat of large-scale sea-level rise…The loss of the glacier could trigger the broader collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains enough ice to eventually raise seas by about 10 feet. And the list goes on and on.

May I suggest Train To Busan. To get the bad news out of the way – or, at least, the bad news from my point of view – Train To Busan is not only a zombie movie, it is a Korean movie, and it has subtitles. I’ve not seen many zombie movies so I don’t want to promote myself as an expert, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this has enough virus driving people into crazed zombies action for even the most dedicated zombie aficionado, making it, in a way, an action movie.

Korean movies are raw, I think that is because almost everybody in South Korea has some form of PTSD. Although Korea is rich and very modern now – the movie takes place on a faster more advanced train than any running in the US – when I was in Korea, only sixty years ago, the country was a war wrecked ruin. Everybody had been affected. The result is now, it is everybody’s grandparents who were traumatized and Korean movies reflect that. Not to mention that daily life goes on under the constant threat by the nuclear dictatorship to the north. As for the subtitles, I have a hard time both reading the subtitles and watching the actor’s faces. That doesn’t seem to be universal, however, because almost everybody I talk to about subtitles – who isn’t French – prefers them to dubbing.

With all those qualifications said, the movie is strangely exhilarating in its carnage. It has been a bad week for Michele and me and we were both in down moods when we sat down to watch Train To Busan. We were both in much better moods when we finished. Like every Korean movie that comes to mind, Train has a subtext of classism that must reflect a class divide in Korea. It is also a intimate and almost quaint movie about a too busy father and the world’s most adorable daughter. It is strangely a sort of feel good movie perfect for a low energy day.

I woke up on the morning of September 9th and it was too early, it was still very early twilight so I went back to sleep. When I woke again, it was still twilight except it was nine o’clock, well past dawn. Something was wrong. Well, duh! Something has been wrong for months, years, really. But this was more wrong. There was a doe with two fawns and a yearling in the back yard and she knew something was wrong. As the day wore on, it got darker not lighter.

Michele and I were both born in California so we are true Californians who know that, when something weird happens, it is time to get in the car and drive around. We started by going to what passes as the local shopping center to drop Precious Mae off at the vet. (She had insisted that she be allowed outside to play and the result was that she had a runny eye which turned out to be caused by a small piece of ash.) Under the new reality, we dropped Precious Mae off by putting her in her carrier and leaving it on the bench outside the vet’s office, they then came out and took both Precious Mae and the carrier inside and told us they would call us when she was ready to pickup.

By now it was 2:30 in the afternoon, dark, and, surprisingly, cold at 61°F. We decided to drive up to a view spot overlooking Crystal Springs Lakes but they were all closed so we drove up to Skyline which runs along the ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains and then back to the vet to pick up Precious. The world looked terrifyingly beautiful.