I had to get a blood test today because I am going to get a knee operation this Wednesday. Over the check in counter of the blood lab, is a water color – or, maybe, an acrylic – painting of Lake Como. 

Looking at the picture, I was struck by the beauty of Lake Como and how that beauty must influence the people who live there. I am drawn to beauty – I think everybody is. When Malcolm Pearson and I went to the Mullin Automotive Museum a couple of weekends ago, there were a couple of cars that just stunned us. We just stood in front of them – awe-struck.

At one point, Malcolm said something along the line of God was there when they designed that car. I don't believe in God but I do believe in Something; I just prefer to use the word Divine. I would really prefer to use Connection or Bridge to the Infinite, but both of those are cumbersome and  require too much explanation. Divine seems to work.

I feel pretty much the same way every time I go north down the Waldo Grade and look over Sausalito, the houseboats, Richardson Bay, and across to the Tiburon peninsula. Like Lake Como, it is staggeringly beautiful. I have been over that section of road at least 500 times, and it still takes my breath away. The people who live there, live with that view must be happier than someone living in a slum.

I don't mean always happy or happy just after they got diagnosed with breast cancer, but happier than they would be if they lived somewhere without that view. And it is not just that they are richer. People who live surrounded by the beauty of Lake Como must be happier and, originally, they were peasants; no richer than today's slum dwellers.

As a movie lover, I noticed pretty early that there are two kinds of LA movies: movies that show a beautiful, idyllic, LA and movies that show a seedy, nasty LA. The first is always a happy movie, maybe a romantic comedy, and the second is always a sad, downer movie. I spent a year in Korea, stationed in a HAWK anti-aircraft battery, on a hilltop overlooking the Yellow sea. It was a gorgeous place with staggering sunsets. I remember it with fond memories.

I am starting to think we should spend more money cleaning up slums, planting more trees, painting more bus-stops. I am convinced it would be money well spent. Well spent in that the whole country would be better off.

Meanwhile, back at the Mullin Automobile Museum, when talking about cars as Art, the two names the raise to the top of any list are Ferrari and Bugatti. Today, Ferrari is much more famous and anybody who loves cars, especially anybody who loves race cars, has a favorite Ferrari. Mine is thge 250  Testarosa. 250 Redhead.

Named redhead for the red painted red cam covers – talk about Euro-trash – I love it.  It had six Weber downdraught carburetors and four megaphone shaped exhaust pipes – the sound of it's twelve cylinder engine @ 8,000 rpm has been compared to the sound of canvas tearing  (OK, by Ferrari himself, true, but still) – and very bad brakes that Ferrari thought would be as good as his British competitors if only the brakes had enough cooling, thus the pontoon fenders that make it so lovely. One sold for $12.2 million in 2009.

But Ferrari – el commodore, himself, who couldn't bear to go to races lest he see his beloved cars get hurt – was an heartless industrialist compared to Ettore Bugatti, La Patron.  His art pieces were built in a private compound that La Patron toured daily on his specially designed bike . He built Bugs that ranged in size from – literally, as Joe B. would say – a peddle car for his kids to a limo for kings, called the Royale, with a wheelbase of 169+ inches (for comparison the huge mid-60s Cadillac had a wheelbase of 129.5 inches) and a radiator cap featuring an elephant standing on its hindlegs. .

All Bugattis, even the Royales, were light, agile, and very fast. Fast for their time, and, most of them, just fast. A 1931 Type51 Bugatti race car – not this one which is a 1924 Type 35, but a similar one and they were almost all similar with a distinctive Bugatti look – could hit 140 miles per hour. In a car without seatbelts or a roll bar.   

Bugatti is now owned by Volkswagen and the Bugatti Veyron is the fastest production car in the world at 268 mph but it is not a real Bugatti in that it was not made by La Patron and, in this museum, it is relegated to a dark corner by an exit.

Meanwhile, the center piece of the collection – the holiest of the holies – is the late 1930s Type 57C  – C meaning compressor or what we now call a supercharger – which is reputed to have sold, recently, for somewhere between $30,000,000 to $40,000,000.The cars – and there were only three made – were designed by Ettore Bugatti's son, Jean. They featured a straight eight cylinder, supercharged engine, and had  riveted seams that gave it a distinctive look.

(The first and last pictures are double clickable to enlarge.)

As Malcolm and I stood watching the car rotate on its special turntable we took on the same quiet awe as everybody else. There are side reasons for that awe: the car is restored way past the level with which it left the factory; it sits in the center of the museum among similar but lesser wonders; it is the center of attention; but, for me, it is the artifact-ness of it that most captivates me. It is the distillation of one man's vision.

Building a car is a team effort, but only when that effort is in service to one person's vision does it transcend an automobile as an appliance and become a work of art.

 
Defense Secretary Gates is in Chile doing something and promoting the new START treaty. I do not know why he is in Chile – which as far as I know is not involved with START – but while he was there, he visited a military academy where this picture was taken.

The guy in the background,  looks a little too Nazi for my taste.

In the early 1960s – after the Beatles song  I Want to Hold Your Hand came out, but before Why Don't We Do It in the Road? which I always thought pretty much covered the arc of the 60s, but that is another story – I taught continuous wave radar to Germans at Fort Bliss, Texas. Because of the heat, classes started at 6am and the Germans would march in – in the morning twilight wearing grey uniforms and jackboots  – singing Deutschland über alles.

I thought that was a little too much, but, at least, they had the common decency to not wear helmets. Now even we are wearing a sort of old German helmet.