Monterey – scratch that – The Sonoma Historics

Cars

Thirty six years ago, a group of car collectors got together to actually race their old-racecars. It was called the Monterey Historics, later the Rolex Monterey Historics, and the first race was at Laguna Seca on the same weekend as the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance. Over the years, they were joined by other car related events until the weekend became the biggest car extravaganza on the planet. There were races, four or five car shows, car auctions, art auctions, in a nutty but fabulous weekend. Now, for reasons totally unknown to me, Steve Earle who was the founder and guiding light, is leaving.

But there may be some good news here. Next year the races will be at
Infineon Raceway near Sonoma on June 5th and 6th. It won't be the same,
but, who knows, it might be better.

I have gone probably thirty times to the old Historics to see such featured marquis as Ferrari (several times), Mercedes Benz, Aston Martin, Alfa Romeo, Audi (Auto Union), Porsche, Miller, Chevy powered racecars, Ford powered racecars,  Chaparral, Maserati, Jaguar, and on and on. One year, Mercedes brought several late-1930's racecars that they had rebuilt for the occasion. Alfa hired Juan Manuel Fangio to drive the car in which he won the F1 World Championship in 1951. Collectively, the races have been one of the major highlights of my life.

And a lot of other people's life, I suspect. 

Below, three collectors race their cars (using the term race rather loosely as collectively the cars are probably worth in excess of three million dollars). From left to right are a D-Type Jaguar similar to the factory car that won the 24 hour Le Mans in 1956; a Ferrari Testarossa (redhead), so named because the cam covers on the V-12 engine were painted red; and, my favorite and one of the most adorable little racecars ever, the Maserati Type 61- called a birdcage because of its unusual frame.  

Three-Yellow-Cars

One of the great things about the Historics was that anybody could get into the pits to see the cars up close. 

Red-Black-and-Blue-Cars 

Actually, really close, and maybe ogle is more accurate than see. Look close and you can see that the guy in the Hawaiian shirt is drolling.


Birdcage-&-Birdcage-Truck 

Power Corrupts II

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I am a big Obama fan* and became a bigger fan after reading an interview of David Brooks in the Atlantic . Among other things, the article talked about a conversation Brooks had with Obama. Brooks said "Out of the blue I say, 'Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?'
Obama answers 'Yeah.' So I say, 'What did Niebuhr mean to you?' For the
next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr's
thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that
you have to use power while it corrupts you."

Obama knows that the power of the presidency will corrupt him and the trick is to get his good deeds done before he becomes too corrupt to risk doing them. Or, before the power corrodes his backbone and he starts to care less about doing the right thing than staying in power.

During the Iowa primary, Michele Obama commented that, if they didn't get the nomination this time, they would not run again. Many took it as a threat, but Barrack Obama explained that they were still normal people and were able to see what needed to be done for normal people. As he said "We just paid off our student loans a couple of years ago. In four years, we will be too far out of contact with normal people to see what needs to be done to bring change."

As I watch parts of the Senate debate on Health Care – and especially the Republican stonewalling – I realize that these guys don't really care about what is good for me or the country. They just want to stay in power. I know all the arguments against Term Limits, but one of the best things about the presidency is that it is limited to only two terms. 

* interesting…fan from the word fanatic – true believer.

“Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.” Eric Hoffer

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Last night, a friend and I went to see 2012 and ended up in a discussion on power and how it corrupts. He preferred to use the word "corrodes" as in "corrodes the backbone making it harder to stand up for what is right". I am not so sure of that.

I am inclined to think that the powerful end up thinking – believing – that what they want is the right thing because it is what they want. In the same way that Charlie Wilson, the then head of General Motors, said  – and presumably believed – "What's good for General Motors is good for the country."

This brings us to Eric Hoffer who was a Longshoreman from our very own San Francisco. In a book called The True Believer, Hoffer  postulated that fanatics, no matter what they are fanatical about, are all the same in their fanaticism. This was way before we were worried about Islamic true believers but his Thesis "Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power." fits perfectly. (The Video below starts a little hysterically, but the interview that follows is scary because it is so unhysterical.) 

 

General U. S. Grant, Mathew Brady, and the new American Hero

Americana, General U.S. Grant, Politics, War, What's a man?

 

Lee

 

In case you weren’t paying attention during your Civil War history class, the picture above in not Grant, it is Confederate General Robert E. Lee. It was take in 1863 and was pretty typical of a portrait of a Civil War general. He stands tall in his battle uniform, with resolute eyes, beautiful shinny boots (you can be sure he didn’t shine them), and a sword. Every inch the patrician. He was the son of Major General Henry Lee III “light Horse Harry” who later became the governor of Virgina.       

Grant, like Lincoln, was a mid-westerner. A common man. At West Point, Lee was Captain of Cadets  while Grant muddled along near the bottom of his class. Grant was quiet, shy, self-effacing. When Grant met Lee during the Mexican-American War, he was thrilled; Lee later said he didn’t remember the meeting. The next time they met was at Appomattox – after Grant’s army had pounded the shit out of Lee. Lee was still resplendent in his beautiful uniform, Grant was wearing a muddy privates uniform with his three stars pined on the shoulders.

Grant had come to do a job and he did it. The picture below shows just that.

Ulysses-grant

 

It is a new kind of portrait. It was probably taken during the Overland Campaign just after the battle of Cold Harbor. Grant is not the patrician hero: he looks tired, his eyes are sad, his boots are muddy. Unlike Lee, war is not a great adventure for Grant. It is a dirty job to be done.

Grant was the new American hero. The quiet man just doing his job. John Wayne. Gary Cooper in High Noon.  No braggadocio flourishes, just quietly getting the job done.

 

This is probably Mathew Bradley’s most famous photo. Not only because of it’s informality, but because it is so penetrating. I have read that a good portrait is a artifact of a relationship. This is a portrait of a man, the picture of Lee, in contrast, is generic. The pictures, together, are emblematic of the Civil War. Up until then, portraits were formal affairs but this portrait was informal.  Lee is shown as the patrician, and by extension, the south as feudal. They are formal portraits reflecting a formal society: ridged, stratified, looking back. This portrait of Grant, the dynamic new kind of American from the West, and by extension, the new and dynamic North: the new America.

An America that is open to the common man. Open to change, at ease with its new frenzy and energy and looking forward. In about a hundred years, from 1800 to 1900, we went from being the equivalent of a third world country to being the world’s industrial powerhouse. And the cleavage point was the Civil War: before it, we were mostly an agrarian society; after it we (the North, at least) were an industrial, urban society.

Appositional Phrases: something we should all know

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I love good grammar, or, maybe I should say, I love grammar rules. All those commas, semi-commas, and dashes are there to make the reading of dead words on a dead page sound alive when read. Atleast in my writing.

Many, probably most, of our rules in life come from the past and are no longer really doing any work – or, heavy lifting (as I hear more and more at the end of the decade).  At a dinner party, don't start eating until after the hostess comes from the time when making sure they weren't going to poison you was a bigger issue. Shaking hands showed you weren't carrying a knife.    

But English is alive and most of the rules reflect the living language. And, I like to think, I know most of the rules well enough to know when I can break them. When in doubt, I can always refer to my Strunk and White, my The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, or my Wired Style Book. But I don't think I have ever heard of the rules on appositional phrases, or – for that matter – even knew they existed.

Running into Michael Tomasky's blog entry on appositional phrases is the kind of thing I find fascinating about the Web. 

An appositive is a phrase that amplifies a noun and is set off by
commas. Charlie Weis, the outgoing Notre Dame coach, will
receive…Otis, Tomasky's 19-year-old cat, likes to eat…SFMikey, the
loyal reader and commenter who longs for a shout-out, wrote…In each
of these cases, the words in the between the commas are the appositive.
One rule of thumb: It's a phrase you can always remove from the
sentence, along with its commas, and the sentence will still track
grammatically.

Of course there is more to it than just this and it is worth a visit.