Another Lesson In Human Psychology

Like everyone, I occasionally get email forwards of odds and ends from friends and relatives. These are often alerts about computer viruses or impending public health menaces or the like. Some of them are cute and funny, but on balance the email forward seems to be the manna of urban mythology; a good 90% of this stuff is untrue or at least factually compromised. (Pilot rumors are very much like this; almost nothing of what gets bandied about in the cockpit or crew lounge has any factual merit. It's such a strange phenomenon that we continue to spread what we know is very likely untrue.) Unless it comes from a trusted source, my natural skepticism leads me to dismiss them out of hand.

Here's an example, albeit a harmless (and even fun) one.

I bought a DVD a few years back from a company called Animusic. The disc featured a collection of musical pieces played on computer-animated machines, Rube Goldberg collections of pipes and wires and mechanisms conjoined with quasi-traditional musical instruments, all of which appeared to play themselves. The computer animation is pretty high quality, enough so that it's not immediately obvious that what you're watching is not real (that's its appeal; it's certainly not the very banal music).

I say not immediately obvious, but after a minute or so it becomes clear that, however cool the idea, it's just not something that's plausible mechanically. The fine-tuning required to make such a machine work is simply too great--the machine is absurdly complex--and the little variables in physics mean such a machine could never operate mistake-free. When this one does, it's a give-away.

Anyway, the marketers of the DVD were not pretending it's anything other than computer animation. I sold the disc after a couple viewings, as the concept was more intriguing than the actual product.

In the past year or so, I've received a couple forwards of this email:

University of Iowa Farm Machine Music

This incredible machine was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa. Amazingly, 97% of the machines [sic] components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft Iowa, yes farm equipment!

It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of setup, alignment, calibration, and tuning before filming this video, but as you can see it was WELL worth the effort.

It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University at the University and is already slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.

Of course, this is my old Animusic video.

So someone has invented a back story--a creation myth, if you will--to explain the existence of the "machine," and that story has spread around the web like wildfire. Like an imitation of the famous Honda advertising video (showing another Rube Goldberg mechanism, but this time a real one composed entirely of Honda Accord parts), a collection of statistics and factoids have been dreamed up to give the myth some credibility. (The Honda video is justly famous for its improbability and for the herculean effort required to actually pull it off without editing the video--I forget the actual number, but I think it was in excess of 600 attempts before everything worked. It's worth noting that the chain of events in the Honda video is about a millionth the complexity of what the Animusic video portrays.)

The existence of the Animusic video itself is not mysterious to me; it seems a worthy and comprehensible exercise to take some computer music and generate some fantastic animation to accompany it, and even animation that fictitiously shows the music being generated. But you have to wonder where the follow-on myth comes from. Is it a Wikipedia-like compendium of the efforts / corrections / amendments of a series of people? (I could do some checking: are there different versions of the story? The one I was sent matches exactly the version at Snopes.) Or did some single individual dream it up as a prank? Is it an exercise in harmless internet malfeasance, like a computer virus but without the desire for damage? Maybe a skepticism-free person saw the video and believed it real and felt it MUST have an explanation.

What does it say of human psychology that the myth spreads this way, that lots of people devote effort to spreading the story and no one to checking its verity? I suppose the story is simply more fun than no story. And it IS a cool little video, wherever it comes from. But it's all too easy to imagine people being convinced the machine is real, and then making an investment in that argument; and it's a short step to sputtering anger about the "injustice" of someone else's denial of the machine's existence--we see similar steps taken all the time.

For my part (naturally) I see the seeds of every mythology in all this. We are a species that loves stories, and they are one of the key denominations of social currency. But clearly stories are not functional for the careful preservation and transmission of factual information. I remember the first time I watched a game of Chinese Telephone. Everyone's played this, a kids' game where one person is told a bit of information (the longer the better), and then instructed to pass this on verbally to the next person, usually in isolation from the others. That next person is given the same instructions, and so on through a crowd. And very quickly the story being passed on bears little or no resemblance to the original data. It's a perfect exposé of how utterly useless the human mind is in retaining facts and passing them on orally.

Anyway, I'm rambling to no particular point. This does all make me think about how huge the invention of writing is to our species and our culture. But even then it's not iron-clad, as our memories are faulty and the desire to embellish and improve is just too strong. And when we add to the mix (as was not the case in our present video) social standing or prestige or power over others, the accurate transmission of data has quite a bevy of handicaps to overcome. This is a harmless little video, but it seems to me a window into some part of the human psyche.

Family My Ass

A lesson in irony: one of my pet peeves about the poisonous Faux News is their use of fear and anger and lies to sell their partisan view of the world. Glenn Beck (and Hannity and O'Reilly and Coulter, etc., etc.) bounces from one world-threatening conspiracy to the next, all in the guise of "exposing the sordid truth which the liberal media is trying to keep from you."

It's funny how often these claims are a spooky mirror-image of reality, an attempt to obscure conservative attempts to perpetrate exactly the sin of which liberals are accused.

In my current read, Republican Gomorrah (review to follow), the book's author Max Blumenthal talks about a secret society called The Family, a powerful organization centered in Washington, DC that seeks to implement and spread a fundamentalist christian worldview. It is an anti-democratic entity, one dedicated to gaining power and influence without the burden of making its case to the voting public. The modus operandi is rather to gain power by secretly supporting candidacies of Family members to elected positions, thereby packing the halls of power with Family-friendly minions. It's all secretly done, of course; no one openly admits 1) to being a Family member, or 2) what the Family's goals are; no candidate admits to getting support from the Family, nor do they run on a Family platform. Blumenthal names a number of politicians who belong to the organization (Wikipedia names 11 current Senators and nine Representatives as current members, among others), none of whom, naturally, will talk about the Family or confirm / deny their membership in it (though lots of people will acknowledge the Family's influence in their lives). Many of them live at the organization's properties in Washington called the C Street Center.

Today I was reading up a bit about the Stupak-Pitts Amendment--a fascist little 11th hour addendum to the House health care bill, a sop thrown to white men which played some role in getting the bill passed. And I was surprised to learn that a number of Democrats voted for this bit of institutionalized misogyny.

All are reputed to be "Family" members.

This led to a very interesting little exposé from Rachel Maddow:



Her guest here is Jeff Sharlet, author of the book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (rapidly added to my to-read list). I'm interested in the Catholic angle he talks about at the end. It's like a clever little escape valve for public anxiety. I wonder how calculated this is? Or are Catholics just happy to take credit for someone else carrying their water? We can all roll our collective eyes at the Catholic Church's desire to implement a theocracy here; but it appears there's a new enemy of democracy in town. One which no one will talk about.

We should be outraged. Just like Glenn Beck says, except for real reasons and not the lies that keep him eating lobster every night.

That any woman would support (let alone celebrate!) this amendment--a group of white men determining en masse what all women should and should not be allowed to do concerning their own bodies!--is absolutely stupefying. What's next? A repeal of voting rights? The illegalization of mothers working? Why not just mandate the wearing of a large No. 2 on the outer layer of clothing to connote women's second-class citizenry?

I'm accustomed to conservatives hypocritically crowing about Freedom while blithely working to restrict the freedoms of others; I did not expect this war on women from Democrats.

Fall in Guangzhou--3

(A florist shop operating out of a tiny corner of an abandoned apartment complex--a rarity here. Maybe there is a big construction project planned for the site.)

After a late afternoon snack on my third night here I wandered the little side streets around the hotel. I love that people congregate in the evenings on the sidewalks and by the little stairway entrances to apartment blocks or neighborhoods, everyone catching up on the latest gossip and generally being part of the community. (This is especially intriguing to me in that I have no such interface with my own community.) I especially love the knots of mostly men surrounding makeshift card and tile games, the boards resting on the ground or an upturned crate with people crowded around. There are far more people involved than the two or four who play, so that the games become spectator sports (I saw these games all around the city at all times of day, but there's clearly a nightly gathering after work in the neighborhoods). Everyone smokes and stands around chattering. Sometimes there is a loud commentary to the game, and other times it's clear that people are there just because other people are there.

(Neighbors chatting on a beautiful Guangzhou evening.)

(As I write this, I think my own community disengagement comes in part from America having no analogous milieu to this street culture. We are a culture of individuals; people gather around a cause, or for some specific reason, and not simply as a herd instinct. Maybe the church used to serve this function--maybe it still does--but I'm not aware of these Chinese gatherings having an ideological or political underpinning.)

The apartments, as seen in the windows and on balconies, are littered with the detritus of modern life lived in cramped, ancient spaces. The balconies and windows are all hung with laundry--one must assume that almost no one not upper-middle-class has a clothes dryer. I can't help wondering how the living spaces are allotted. Clearly the country's recent foray into private enterprise has enabled (or exacerbated) a differential in living conditions (I'm sure it's always been there, but surely more people have more money now than in the past); along the river the residences are much swankier than in other parts of town. Does everyone get a certain housing allowance based on age or job or family size or party membership? And is one then able to augment the housing allowance to live in nicer digs? Or is it done some other way? Many of the older apartment buildings look crumbling and filthy, but I have no idea what they are like on the inside. And are these coveted spaces? Or is this just the baseline government-issued housing? Is housing issued near where one works? Or can one just up and move at will?







On my last day in town I thought I'd head off in a direction I don't usually walk and see what I came across. I generally head East out of the hotel for half or 3/4 mile and then head South toward the electronics market and the river. This is how we began our 12 mile walk on Tuesday. But I'd never been further East than where I turn South. So today I just continued a couple miles further along this stretch, and planned to head South from there and pick up the river back West. Once underway I remembered there were a couple gigantic skyscrapers under construction in this part of town, and decided to make them the goal of my walk.

I think I could simply wander the streets for a living. (I'm reminded that my mother could be perfectly entertained to ride around in the car, and I share this love of gently changing scenery with her.) A walking pace gives one time to absorb all the little details, the smells and sounds and bits of human interaction that almost any other mode of transport would gloss over.

The two big buildings at the terminus of my walk, it turns out, are the new Guangzhou International Finance Center and the TV and Sightseeing Tower. The latter is on the other side of the river, so I didn't get terribly close to that one. But I made it to the base of the IFC. (Both buildings are so new that not a trace of them shows up on the Google maps images.) These both appear to be ambitious, architecturally-innovative showcase structures. And along the way one passes all manner of old and new, big and small, China in a nutshell.

(The IFC in the background.)

(The TV & Sightseeing Tower. An amazing latticework structure.)

My experiences in Guangzhou convince me more than ever that China is ascendant; it's the most aggressively forward-moving place I've seen. The sense of electric expectancy is everywhere. People have their heads down as they move forward step by step, but the sense of forward motion and of incremental steps turning into massive movement is palpable. One of my sightseeing partners on day 1 felt that Guangzhou is a dirty city (and he's from Manhattan, no less), but I just don't see it. Any city of multiple millions will have its sanitation issues, but most everyone is employed and everyone takes a bit of care for their little corner of the word (though it's interesting to note that people sweeping their sidewalks are virtually all middle-aged or older). People are clean and nicely, if unostentatiously, dressed, most places are swept and cleaned up of trash, graffiti is under control and there's an order to most of the big city clutter. There is a sense of a massive and growing middle class on the streets, and I suspect this would not have been so in decades past.

It sounds like I may have occasion to visit Guangzhou again, as our Shenzhen facility is still in the works. In any case, all indications are that Shenzhen is of a very similar stamp to Guangzhou.

(Medicine or food? You decide.)

(Or maybe just pest control.)

(A friendly--and filthy--little street dog catching some rays.)

(This strikes me as the short-straw bicycle job. Traffic here is insane.)

(Hey, look! A modern Harley!)

Fall in Guangzhou--2

(The Chinese pack mule.)

I'm still not sure exactly what it is about this place, but I get such a vibe from Guangzhou. Some of it is obviously the foreign-ness of the place to an American, and I daresay I felt it on my single visit to Shanghai as well (so is it China? Or urban China?). This isn't a big enough sample for me to suss it all out properly, but there's just something in the air here. I think part of the vibe comes from population density, something to which I always respond positively (and something almost universally reviled by my coworkers). This is the New York or Chicago of a foreign people; so the thrust is not lost on me even if the details almost entirely are.

I also think--I've said it before, I know--the electricity in the air stems at least in part from the ancient country exploding with growth and commerce and possibility. Young people are fashionably dressed and engaged in all manner of self-improvement (at least economic self-improvement, though everyone appears well-educated), but they spring from households and parents with a foot in a very different kind of past. I think this mixing of worlds, and the rapidity of the change, plays a role in the personality of Guangzhou.

There's so much I'll probably never know about this place, which doubtless contributes to my sense of intrigue about it. I'm inclined to look into studying a bit of Chinese, as I expect I'll have regular means of using it here. (I looked into Mandarin versus Cantonese: Cantonese, naturally, is spoken in this area here--Guangzhou being formerly known as Canton--and in nearby Hong Kong, which is one of the main commercial engines of China. But Mandarin is the official language and is spoken most everywhere else. More intriguing yet is that the two languages are written exactly the same! The difference is in how one speaks what is written down.)

(Inside a toy market.)

(Having no idea what any of this stuff is, we've taken to calling this landmark the "Jetson Mosque.")

(A bicycle garage near the Baiyun purse & leather market. That's the whole of the shop.)

(Lunchtime on the street.)

(One of a zillion little convenience booths around the city.)

(Bamboo construction scaffolding.)

(I thought private enterprise couldn't get much smaller than that bicycle shop. I was wrong.)

(Concrete mixing on the street: pile ingredients together; collect water in a hole in the center; scoop out as needed.)

(Air compressor powered by an old chuffing one-lung diesel running full-tilt at about 500 rpms.)

(The McDonald's by the hotel.)

(A first: a little hand-washing kiosk in McDonald's. Note the 7-11 in the mall thru the door. The Chinese do love their 7-11s!)

(...to be continued.)

Fall in Guangzhou--1

I wasn't expecting to be in Guangzhou for this layover, and I had lamented on my last visit that I was likely not going to make it back to this place for which I had a growing fondness. I was originally scheduled for a one day layover in Shenzhen, which will be our new base of operations in this area; but I was informed a couple weeks ago that Shenzhen is not quite ready for business, and so the trip would take us back to Guangzhou. And then a scheduling SNAFU caused me to lose my planned three-day layover in Sydney and turn my one-day Guangzhou layover into a four-day!

Talking to my fellow crewmembers, I appear to be the only pilot who feels any affection for this place (beyond the near-universally-admired shopping opportunities), but I was very happy for the additional time here (not that I was in any way complaining about three days in Sydney; I was sorry enough to lose that).

This trip was my first opportunity to fly into China in daylight. We flew in over Hong Kong and Shenzhen, touching down in CAN about 5:pm. Seeing the massive urban sprawl in daylight takes one quite by surprise. From Hong Kong to Guangzhou--I'm guessing this is about 100 miles or so--it's virtually one big city, with an unfathomable number of construction projects big and small underway (the Chinese appear to have a special affection for the elevated freeway). I still have my hands quite full trying to do my job to some minimum baseline of proficiency, so I was unable to give the scenery more than an occasional glimpse. But what I saw made me want to sign up as a jumpseater on the next daylight flight here just to look out the window.

As for our time on layover, I'm accustomed after 15 years of this to spending my layovers alone. Not only do I feel like I get quite too much of my outspoken Republican coworkers, being locked in a broom-closet-sized space with them for 9 or 10 hours, but I'm happy to be beholden to no one on these days away from home. I've grown used to being my own master here, and I love wandering where I like or watching movies or listening to music entirely on my own whim. But I was surprised on the flight up here from Sydney that neither the captain nor the IRO, both of whom had been here numerous times, had every strayed from the immediate hotel area except for the occasional taxi ride to a market and back. They thought my wanderings seemed quite adventurous, and they both expressed a desire to accompany me to Shamian Island and the electronics markets. And in addition to being fun guys to fly with, they ended up being fine sightseeing companions and a nice change from my usual solo excursions.

By day's end we had logged over 12 miles on the hoof, hitting our desired spots and a bunch of other stuff to boot. We had picture-perfect weather, with sunny (and atypically clear) skies and light breezes and low 70s temps--I'm so used to it being a thousand degrees, so this was especially refreshing.

These are a selection of photos taken while wandering the streets, generally posted here in the order they were taken.

(So hard to find labels for places. This bridge is on Neihuan Rd.)

(A lovely park on the Pearl River. Lots of these range-of-motion exercise machines with people getting their daily exercise on them. We saw several parks like this around town. Free health clubs, as it were.)

(And right next door, ballroom dancing lessons! There were numerous groups at practice here and nearby.)

(Two of Guangzhou's newest construction projects in the distance. I would visit one of these in a few days.)

(Old and new; rich and poor.)

(A park by Dongshan Stadium.)

(New construction along the river. There are a zillion of these.)

(A floating TV screen, for nighttime advertising cruising the river.)

(A cool building with multiple four-story atria.)

(Lunch at Lucy's on Shamian Island. Like before, people collect here over lunch to kick around a hackey sack-like thing. Several groups were amazingly good, all just middle-aged normal folks.)

(In the White Swan Hotel, one of several huge Jade sculptures.)

(Architecture on Shamian Island.)

(... to be continued.)

A New Review of an Old Movie

One of the fringe benefits of these little trips to China is the availability of movies. It's hard not to stock up on everything you have even a remote interest in seeing, as the cost of acquisition here is less than even a rental cost back home (not that I would advocate the deliberate flouting of copyright law…)

Tonight's movie: Black Snake Moan. From director Craig Brewer (known for 2005's Hustle and Flow), this 2006 film tells of a couple tortured souls who find their redemption through an unlikely connection. Christina Ricci plays Rae, a young woman dealing with a lifetime of sexual abuse and exploitation. Her tortured past has left her fundamentally mis-wired for life, and she passes her days fighting against nightmarish memories and fretful anxiety which she compulsively attempts to quell sexually. This behavior (of course) has earned her the reputation as the town slut, with the men typically wanting her and condemning her for it. She has managed to keep herself in check in recent times with her boyfriend, Ronnie (played by Justin Timberlake), who values her as a person and treats her with respect and, not incidentally, is happy to give her a ready means of acting out her anxieties. But Ronnie suffers from panic attacks of his own, a condition which Rae recognizes and understands; and she has learned how to help Ronnie work through his debilitation.

And so the two of them interlock in a fortuitous way, each helping the other stand upright. But this delicate balance is disrupted when Ronnie enlists in the National Guard. His departure triggers extreme anxiety in both of them, and deprives them of the support network on which they each are completely reliant for normal functioning--with unfortunate consequences all around.

This is one of those movies where before watching it I found myself intrigued and rather shamed at my intrigue. The promotional material for the film shows Christina Ricci wearing next to nothing--a bare scrap of a t-shirt covering her breasts (well, mostly) and a little pair of white panties--and the previews show her writhing and moaning almost like a greazy porn flick. I assumed there was something more than this to the story, of course, but it seemed kind of unclean to have too much enthusiasm for it in advance. And from the perspective of middle-aged male lechery, the film doesn't much disappoint. The diminutive Ms. Ricci is indeed comely--if aggressively trashy--and she is paraded around on screen in a way that would be shamelessly gratuitous if her nymphomania were not an integral part of the story. Nor do I mean to make light of her difficulties; what seems at first blush to be pure titillation for the film's male viewers is in fact a debilitating condition which imperils her very existence. Hollywood license aside, this all seems truthful enough.

The real love story here is not between Rae and Ronnie but, unconventionally, between Rae and Lazarus (played by Samuel L. Jackson). I say unconventionally because they are not lovers and there is not a sexual element to their relationship. Lazarus finds Rae lying unconscious and bloody on the rural dirt road by his mailbox, the bad outcome of her ride home after last night's party. Lazarus takes her into his home and tries to nurse her back to health. When the combination of her personal demons and the cocktail of drugs and booze she consumed at the party make her quite unmanageable, Lazarus decides to chain her to his radiator so she can't just jump back into the life of debauchery for which she is so well known in the community. With Lazarus deeply bruised by the abrupt end of his own marriage, he vows that he will do whatever it takes to get Rae healthy.

Clearly the movie is not intended to be taken literally. Only a psychopath nutbag like James Dobson would advocate chaining someone to a radiator as the proper response to mental illness and physical and sexual abuse. But the chain is a metaphor for connection, a way of showing the isolated Rae that people care about her and about what becomes of her. I couldn't help but think a bit of marriage vows, a mechanism that keeps people from throwing in the towel and fleeing too quickly when their relationship hits a rocky patch; without weathering trying times together, it's difficult to forge a deep and meaningful bond. And so it is here. Lazarus means to do well by Rae, but her first reaction upon waking up from her drug haze is, naturally, to just flee. She revolts violently against the stricture, but Lazarus can see that she will not find peace and happiness unless she faces her demons. And with the passage of a little time--and the realization that Lazarus has no designs on her as she has come to expect of all men in life--she grows to respect him and to realize that he cares for her and means well despite his draconian measures. Lazarus realizes pretty quickly that it's not his place to live her life for her, but when he unchains her enough time has passed that she too realizes that a life without connection will lead to her destruction. And in this unconventional way she has found a true friend.

The story is shocking enough on the face of it, but it actually works surprisingly well, provided one doesn't keep reality's yardstick unnecessarily close. The underlying themes of the film are meaty enough, and the glimpse of an insular life in a small town gives the film a slightly exotic quality. The underlying question of race is also here, though it's not a star player. But it's a tension that also helps give the film some depth. There are wonderful performances all around, from the stars of course, but also in several of the smaller roles. Justin Timberlake is surprisingly good as the conflicted Ronnie, a man without confidence living a near-subsistence-level existence in the rural South. Also wonderful--surprisingly to me--is John Cothran Jr. as the pastor of Lazarus' local church. There's a strong chain between the pastor and Lazarus, a community chain, and Mr. Cothran brings a really wonderful humanity and warmth to his character. His preacher plays a vital and worthy role in the lives of these people, and he does so in a way that avoids most every cliche we might expect of a characterization of a black Southern preacher.

It all wraps up in the end in a way that's slightly unsatisfying, mostly because I think Brewer has touched upon a lot of stuff that needs more than two hours to play out. In that sense the conclusions feel a bit rushed, but not nearly enough to negate all the good work done along the way. I'm slightly surprised to recommend this one.

Grade: B+

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

This struck me as an example of how statistics can be used to reach any conclusion, especially if we don't pay close attention. Yesterday's Associated Press had an AP Impact story about the missteps of the Cash for Clunkers program. Titled Clunker Pickups Traded for New Pickups, the scandalous exposé reveals some dirty laundry from the now-discontinued government stimulus program. In particular, the report focuses on transactions where the new vehicle purchased got the same or only marginally better gas mileage (and, in a few cases, worse mileage) than the "clunker" being traded in.

The most common deals under the government's $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program, aimed at putting more fuel-efficient cars on the road, replaced old Ford or Chevrolet pickups with new ones that got only marginally better gas mileage, according to an analysis of new federal data by The Associated Press.

The opening statement "The most common deals…" implies that most of the transactions of the program failed to yield an improvement in fuel mileage, one of the intentions of the program (in addition to trying to boost the economy and assist the ailing auto industry). But another report, this one citing a Washington Post summary of the program, states: "The average clunker traded-in, the Post reports, had an EPA fuel economy rating of 15.8 miles per gallon. The average new car purchased, 24.9 - an improvement of 9.1 miles per gallon."

Going back to the AP Impact report, the press release continues:

In scores of deals, the government reported spending a total of $562,500 in rebates for new cars and trucks that got worse or the same mileage as the trade-ins — in apparent violation of the program's requirements. The government said it is investigating those reports and said in some cases they were probably entered incorrectly by dealers or based on outdated fuel economy figures.

This is a program that involved some 690,000 transactions (according to US News and World Report) and nearly $3 billion in government disbursements. It seems to me that "scores" (a score being roughly 20) of transactions involving just over half a million dollars out of $2.88 billion is a fantastic success rate; it's the exception that proves the rule.

But the reporter has his teeth in the issue and will not be swayed:

The new data, obtained by the AP under the Freedom of Information Act, include details of 677,081 clunker trade-ins processed by the government through Oct. 16. More than 95,000 of the new vehicles purchased under the program — or about one in seven — got less than 20 mpg, according to the data.

Yeah, this hard-hitting investigation dug deep, having to invoke the Freedom of Information Act to get at the sordid truth! But to my almost innumerate brain, that sounds like six out of seven purchases were of cars getting more than 20 mpg. That sounds like success to me. And there is no mention of the composite mileage of the clunkers traded in on the sub-20-mpg cars. A 14 mpg truck traded on a 19 mpg truck would be something over a 30% improvement while still earning a berth on the AP blacklist.

I don't want to rush to support the yahoo who used the program to buy a new Hummer or who drives a big 4WD pickup for no apparent reason, but it seems short-sighted to assume that everybody trading a pickup for a new pickup is doing so for illegitimate reasons. My brother, for example, works in construction and needs a pickup. Had he purchased a new one under this program he would be among those lynched by this AP Impact report.

It's absolutely proper that the program be scrutinized and reported upon, and I'm pleased to hear that there is some government follow-up on those transactions that do not appear to meet the program guidelines. But this all seems very routine; meanwhile, the AP Impact report seems like an exercise in reverse-think, like a journalism school assignment where one is asked to take facts and make them convincingly say the opposite of what they conclude. It's reality TV in print form: a story specifically tailored to push people's angry buttons, a tactic that amounts to the core operating principle (if you can call it that) at Faux News.

We've had far too much fear- and hate-mongering masquerading as journalism; a misleading dispatch like this --from the AP of all sources--only panders to frothing and willfully misinformed troglodytes who already exert entirely too much influence over our news coverage.

(PS: I remember a similar-toned story in the tabloid USA Today from a decade ago. Showing a large graphic automobile fuel gauge with the needle on E, the headline shouted "Flying on Empty?" The story went on to tell--shockingly!--that in something like the preceding nine years 10 or 12 aircraft had "pushed back from the gate without enough fuel to get to their destination... and four of them took off!" No crashes, no fatalities, no injuries. Just a desperate Glenn-Beck-like attempt to sell papers by appealing to base fear and personal safety. I remember thinking that that statistic was, in reality, an amazing endorsement of the safety measures currently in place; few industries could boast such a performance--think of the number of departures in that time!--yet here was "The Nation's Newspaper" finding terror in a sunny day. I realized then that we have no reason to think they're doing a better job on subjects of which we are unfamiliar than the butchery I routinely see them perform on subjects where I DO know a thing or two. I've not purchased one since.)

Pat Condell for Pope!

British comedian and atheist Pat Condell has an excellent series of YouTube rants on religion. Here are his two most recent.

Here he talks about Islamic efforts to curtail religious free speech, particularly giving warning to America--our Constitution, with its Establishment Clause and First Amendment, is one of the few beacons of light for religious freedom--about this impending threat to our founding principles.

And here he waxes eloquent on organized religion, particularly the tyranny of the clergy.

Even if one disagrees with him (which I do not), I think there is great value in exercising skepticism and critical thinking--in all aspects of life; we should adopt views which we have reason to adopt and not because we are told we must.

Get Serious

I needn't dwell too much on my fondness for the Coen Brothers. A disproportionate number of my favorite films are their handiwork, and I anticipate each new release with a special eagerness. Hand-in-glove with this anticipation is the question of what, exactly, makes for a Coen Brothers film. That's not as easy a question as it sounds, at least not for me. Their films are as noted for their dissimilarities (think No Country for Old Men versus O Brother Where Art Thou?) as for those things common to all, and I couldn't confidently say that those common things--an eye for the quirky, a love of oddball characters, wonderful dialog--would guarantee a great film. And of course they haven't ALL been great: Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers seem to have come and gone without too much attention.

Their latest film, A Serious Man, seems more rooted in reality than most of their films, playing with elements of the Coens' own upbringing in suburban Minneapolis in the '60s and '70s. New York stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a college physics professor whose life suddenly and unexpectedly comes apart at the seams. His wife announces one day that their marriage is over and she wants to marry a family friend; his two kids are dysfunctional--his son is distracted in school and an habitual pot smoker, and his daughter is hateful and shrill; Larry's brother has moved in with Larry and family, making for an additional stressor on everyone; Larry is up for tenure at work, but some anonymous person is attempting to sabotage that tenure; and he's being blackmailed by an underperforming student.

Larry's response to this meltdown is to turn to his Jewish faith for answers and support, which in this case has the effect of going out in a storm to yell at the weather. His problems continue to snowball, and each person to whom he turns for help--even those who mean well--only makes his problems worse. Part exploration of Jewish culture, part Kafka novel, the film ends up being--how else to say it?--unmistakeably Coen Brothers, an oddball black comedy that raises a bunch of questions and answers none of them. In fact, though the movie is quite funny, the thru-line of the story doesn't sound like it has the makings of a comedy. I've noted this before, that for our own convenience we pigeonhole their movies as being THIS or THAT, but their comedies are often laced with darkness and violence, and their dramas are often quite funny. I guess this shape-shifting ambivalence is another part of their formula.

And so I find myself attached to whatever the "Coen-ness" is, but not every movie has the same resonance for me. A Serious Man does the Coens' usual job of introducing us to a stable of not-quite-normal characters (to widely varying degrees) and then letting us join them in their twisted little sandbox. But ironically, the world of this film--Jewish life in late '60s suburban Minneapolis--doesn't provide me with much familiar territory. The Minneapolis part I know very well, of course; but the Jewish part is just too far afield from my experience to provide a useful paradigm. It's often the case, of course, that a story's spine is unfamiliar to me personally (say, the ganster's life from Miller's Crossing or a '90s stoner in L.A. in The Big Lebowski), but most of these stories take place in a world which I've fleshed out through literature or in fantasy; I simply don't have any connection to Jewishness. But I imagine someone more familiar with this than I will find all the Coens' usual filmmaking virtues in abundance here.

But absent that connection, I find I'm hobbled in my access to the story, which in turn prevents me from being carried along quite as fully as I'm used to with their films. It's all wonderfully acted, of course, and beautifully shot (the Brothers are working again with Roger Deakins, after using Emmanuel Lubezki on Burn After Reading), though many of the film's roles serve only as bumpers in a pinball machine, as something for Larry to carom off of as he is ground up by life.

Here's another one I'll want to watch again, and maybe I'll suddenly see something I missed the first time around. But for now I will say that many of their past films have worked so well for me because the disparate elements of filmmaking have come together in rare fashion. A Serious Man doesn't hit as many marks for me (but I will say that the ending will keep people talking).

Grade: B-

Where I Take Sam Harris to the Mat

(...well, in the alternate fantasy universe where I actually know something Mr. Harris doesn't.)

During some recent long drives, I've been listening again to the two hour audio program of the Four Horsemen, a discussion about religion with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. These four are the spearhead of a burgeoning atheist movement, all four brilliant writers and thinkers and educators who seek to put rationality front and center in our discussion about religious matters.

I'm entirely in these guys' camp, of course, as numerous posts and book reports will attest. But after listening to this discussion a few times, there's a thing that gnaws at me. About halfway through the second hour, the four are discussing whether they would prefer to see churches empty, and there's a consensus, more or less, that what is desired is not that there be no churches, but rather that we evolve a different kind of church.

And in this context, Sam Harris makes this statement [emphasis mine]:

I think there's a place for the sacred in our lives, under some construal that doesn't presuppose any bullshit. I think there's a usefulness to seeking profundity as a matter of our attention. And our neglect of this area as atheists at times makes even our craziest opponents seem wiser than we are. Take someone like Sayyid Qutb, who's as crazy as it gets--Osama bin Laden's favorite philosopher. He came out to Greeley, Colorado, I think, around 1950 and spent a year in America, and noticed that all his American hosts were spending all their time gossiping about movie stars and trimming their hedges and coveting each others' automobiles, and he came to believe that America, or the West, was so trivial in its occupation, and so materialistic that it had to be destroyed. Now this shouldn't be construed as giving any credence to his worldview, but he has a point: there is something trivial and horrible about the day to day fascinations of most of us and of most people most of the time. There is a difference between really using your attention wisely in a meaningful way, and our perpetual distraction. And traditionally only religion has tried to enunciate and clarify that difference. And I think that's a lapse in our focus.

Far be it from me to critique Sam Harris--whose writings I love and esteem--but I think he's wrong here on several counts, criticizing what is not so toxic and quite giving (even guarded) credit where none is due.

First, the person who does not grasp the profundity in cosmology or in the flowerings of Darwinian selection (with all that follows on from it) has not in the least grasped these subjects--to say nothing of music or literature or art.

Second, the head-in-the-sand mystic doesn't get to determine what is worthy for anyone but himself; and inventing a self-validating mythology which demands that IT is the essence of the profound doesn't give a scrap of validity to a made-up story or to its claims to profundity. Questions about what the universe is and how it exists and about how humanity came to exist and even about how we should interface with each other; these things certainly touch the profound, but the answers are only profound to the extent that they give us a glimpse of something real or probable. And I submit that religious answers to the big questions are fantastic, politically-motivated guesses, and answers to the small questions have nothing to do with religion.

Third, the realization that people occupy themselves with the trivial is Day One of Human Psychology 101 (the non-credit course). People in virtually all cultures ARE obsessed with just the things Harris mentions, but clearly these attentions serve a function (even if we haven't fully sussed it all out). The status contest with others in our community; the love of gossip as an exchange of social currency; a fascination with celebrity--these things are in no way confined to America or the West. And much of this behavior appears to be hard-wired, part of the psychological mechanisms that provide an aspirational ladder and social cohesion and general group function. In any case, chatter about celebrity and hedge-trimming and automobile-coveting is harmless, even if shallow, and infinitely to be preferred to the ascetic sociopath bent on genocide if we don't see things his way.

A variant of this concession to religion comes up in almost every debate between the religious and the secularist. The religionist typically trots out the argument that there's a place for religious contemplation because scientific knowledge--by its own admission!--is limited. But there's no traction to this argument: our knowledge of the universe and philosophy are simply what they are, no matter what games we play or how we pretend (and this knowledge has increased exponentially because of the scientific method and very much despite organized religion). Whatever it is that science cannot answer, I guarantee that the religious leader doesn't know the answer either. On the contrary, pointing out what science does not yet know only shines the spotlight on all that religion claims but can't possibly know. The deus ex machina leaves your question still unanswered, and it lacks the dignity of the simple truth: we don't know.

I think Sam Harris approaches this question as one who has experimented with, and is interested in, consciousness-expanding by way of drugs and mysticism. As a practitioner of neither of these things, I cannot claim there to be no basis for his thinking. But I think I can say this: the religious foot in the door of the sacred to which Harris alludes is a reality which applies to the tiniest handful of people. I simply don't believe that most people's grasp of the profound extends beyond the outer reaches of normal curiosity, whether exercised in a setting of religion or science or art. I reject the idea that religious contemplation opens up vast worlds of profundity--except for those who would think profoundly in any case. I've spent my whole career working around default-religious people, and they certainly are not attuned to the profound in any demonstrable way.

There is awe enough to be found in the real world, in an honest assessment of what we do and do not know. Fairy tales only cheapen and brutalize the body of real knowledge amassed by our species on this speck of a planet.

The Seeds of Meltdown

I listened today to an episode of Fresh Air with Terry Gross from about a month ago. I typically catch Fresh Air on one of several radio broadcasts during the day, and for things that I miss (or particularly interesting things) there is a podcast available for download. This particular episode, from September 10th, featured journalist Max Blumenthal, author of the recent book "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party."

This is a pretty distressing hour. As ever, Gross's questions are calm and probing and thoughtful; the distress comes from Blumenthal's exposure of just how far from the middle ground of solid sanity the fringe Right has strayed (and is straying further), and especially, how these unhinged people are having a marked effect on broader media coverage of politics. They are succeeding in framing political debate in this country, despite espousing views which I believe most of us reject in raw form as lunacy. President Obama's entreaty to school kids to work hard and stay in school is subversive and brainwashing; Obama is not eligible to be President (either because he's not a citizen or, as Sarah Palin put it, "He's not one of us"); Obama is equivalent to Hitler and Stalin (never mind that they are political polar opposites); Obama wants to exterminate old people; Obama plans to put conservatives in concentration camps; the government is going to confiscate all guns. No claim is too outrageous to make, and none of it need be tethered to facts or even common sense. And people are mad as hell about the non-facts.

A couple points seemed especially interesting. We are fighting a global war against terrorism, and yet the membership ranks of far-right paramilitary groups--arguably, would-be terrorists in this country--has risen sharply since Obama was elected. Blumenthal attended gun shows where people were clearly trying to acquire stockpiles of weapons, including high-powered rifles like .50 cal. (which seems ludicrous for personal use). There is a huge religious element to the opposition to Obama, always riding a wave of invented paranoia backed up with mythological fervor. It seems telling that a common battle cry of these far-right groups is the claim that liberals seek to undermine the Constitution and destroy the very fabric of the country, and yet a number of the movement's leading lights are on record as desiring that our system of representative democracy be overthrown and replaced with a military theocracy (these two competing idiocies remind me of the angry signs at the recent "town hall" meetings, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!"). I don't know how much more subversive one gets than that--to openly express a desire for overthrow of even the idea of democracy.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as silly extremist prattle--I think that is the tendency of most sensible people--if the lies and hysteria weren't making their way without even cursory journalistic checks into the mainstream media. It's like a malignant infection that our normal vigilance and sense of fair play are quite unequal to arresting the spread of. Even semi-respected journalists were near to joining the fray in demanding that Obama produce a birth certificate--something demanded by no other President in my lifetime--and, when he did so, the demand changed to require the non-fake document (like the creationist who, upon scientific discovery of a transitional fossil declares "Now there are TWO gaps!").

The podcast seems like stuff the world ought to know. We look the other way here at our peril.

My Embrace of the Futile

So of course nothing will come from this, but I decided it seemed almost immoral to just sit here crying in my Diet Coke and not at least speak out. So here's what I mailed out to the President of Harley-Davidson:

10/20/09

Mr. Keith Wandell
CEO, Harley-Davidson Motor Company
3700 W. Juneau Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53208


Dear Mr. Wandell,

You are doubtless a very busy man, so I hope you will forgive me the indulgence of five minutes of your time.

I'm writing to protest the closure of the Buell Motorcycle Company.

I've been an avid motorcycle rider for 35 years. I've owned a dozen bikes, including, in the last 15 years, three BMWs and three Hondas. My last two bikes have been Buells.

I admire Harley-Davidson. I admire the company's marketing savvy and success in producing a distinct brand image, and in garnering an intense, worldwide loyalty to that brand. But--and I intend no disrespect--there is a huge body of riders in this country and elsewhere who, for whatever reason, will never be Harley owners. Harley-Davidson owns a certain swath of motorcycling real estate, but there a lot of other philosophical ways to be a biker than the niche which H-D so skillfully fills. When I went to replace my last BMW in 2006, I had a difficult time going to a Harley-Davidson dealership to look at the Buells; such is the gulf that separates me, and others like me, from H-D's piece of the motorcycling pie. But I went, and I looked, and I test drove. And I bought. And now I've bought again.

It is a testament to the solidity of Erik Buell's ideas and to the strength of his dream that he has succeeded in building from scratch the only mainstream sport-based motorcycle company in this country. And it's not just a marketing triumph: the machinery itself is so brilliant as to be transformative. His ideas--both the engineering principles, like the Trilogy of Tech, and his more general ideas about what makes a successful and engaging motorcycle--come brilliantly, almost magically, alive in the flesh. It's not stretching the point to say that from humble, garage-racer beginnings Erik Buell has built up a small but vital concern that is changing the world of motorcycling. Harley-Davidson is going forward with its own agenda, but Buell is working--and beginning to have a real impact--in worlds far flung from H-D's. Erik Buell has made a small line of models that give a credible challenge to the likes of BMW and KTM and Moto-Guzzi and the Big Four from Japan. All from two small buildings in East Troy, WI! Now with the new Rotax-built Helicon motor, and with a new high-profile success at the racetrack, Buell is poised for another great leap forward. This is simply an extraordinary story.

I know nothing about financial matters. Certainly, I'm in the dark about Buell's business numbers. And if the BMC is a drain on the resources of its parent company during difficult economic times, then it's understandable that something must be done. But no one has made the case that Buell is a financial burden; only that they are held to be a "distraction" from H-D's core concerns. But is this really the case? From the outside, Buell appears to run quite independently. (I make my living as an airline pilot, so doubtless much is incomprehensible to me). Regardless, pulling the plug on the company altogether is surely not the only option. It's said that it will cost Harley-Davidson millions of dollars to shut Buell down; could this money not be spent separating Buell out from H-D to make it an independent or saleable concern? It is inconceivable to me that buyers are not even now waiting in the wings. And if Buell is not a serious drain on Harley-Davidson's resources, I would be mortified to learn it was being sacrificed in pursuit of a favorable balance-sheet transaction or as a roll of the dice in search of a share price boost. The death of the company as a cost of such a maneuver seems unconscionable.

I don't know Erik Buell, but I know a bit of his truly remarkable story. Harley-Davidson has played a key role in that story, helping bring the BMC from garage tinkering to a serious concern: I believe at last count Buell has sold somewhere North of 135,000 motorcycles worldwide. To end the experiment now and in this way is such an avoidable and unnecessary tragedy. Erik Buell and his company--and his legion of devoted customers; indeed, motorcycling itself--deserve better than this. I implore you to work to find a solution that does justice to Erik Buell and to the company that bears his name.

Sincerely,

Bil Stachour, etc., etc.

I don't even expect more than a form-letter response, but if I get one I will post it here.

***

This article makes me think I might have been more emphatic.

RIP

What a sad and infuriating day.

Harley-Davidson announced today that they will pull the plug on the Buell Motorcycle Company, effective the end of this month. They also announced that they will sell the MV Agusta brand, but apparently they will not offer to sell Buell because of the interconnectedness of Buell's business and dealership networks with Harley's own.

I, of course, have a brand new Buell in my garage, my second in three years. And while this turn of events has no impact on my bike or its servicing or warranty or on my riding pleasure or the brilliance of the bike itself, it still feels like a punch in the gut. I've covered my feelings about these bikes in several posts here, and I just never swing a leg over the bike without marveling anew at what an inspired bit of engineering it is.

I did quite a bit of hand-wringing about the initial purchase in the fall of 2006, feeling that the bike seemed to have all the right moves on paper but feeling nervous about wandering so far afield from my comfortable Honda and BMW experiences. But the more research I did on the Buells, the more I was won over. It seemed almost unbelievable that so small a company, one located in a couple nondescript industrial buildings in a little farm town outside Milwaukee, could have something meaningful to say against the likes of Honda and Yamaha and BMW. But here was a genuine bit of innovation, an old concept bristling with new ideas. And when my local dealer insisted on a lengthy test ride (really!), the bike just grabbed hold of me and wouldn't let go.

In the end--after I owned it and had put some miles on it--I really fell for my Buell. And I came to really respect and feel a passion for everything that encompasses Erik Buell's vision: light weight and a sporting underpinning; a truly innovative brake system; the fetish for mass centralization; the fuel in the frame (and the distinctive look that resulted). And the biggest surprise for me was the Sportster-derived motor (derived, but very heavily modified), with its reasonable power and quite unreasonable torque. I had never had a bike that provided such an easy and shocking squirt of torque, even right off idle. The bike will practically dislocate your shoulders at will. And the whole package came together with absolute brilliance, quite as well or better than any machine I had owned from any of the goliaths of the motorcycle industry. I had every expectation of great things to come: they had their new, designed-from-scratch, Rotax-built Helicon motor, and they were enjoying their first success at the upper levels of racing. Life looked good; the future looked exciting.

And just like that it's done. It's a business decision for Harley, I know: Harley's drop in profits--a function, of course, of the overarching economic malaise--means, apparently, that sacrifices must be made. But it confirms every foul thing I think about Harley that their perceived way forward is to look backward, back to their retro-fetish nostalgia machine. Their announcement says they will concentrate on "strengthening our core business," which means, I'm afraid, "Ramp up the marketing machine to sell more two-wheeled jewelry to the wealthy image-obsessed." Of course I'm biased, but it seems a perfect inversion of sensibility to throw out all that is forward-looking and innovative and technically advanced and competitive--all of it a pittance in the Harley universe--and concentrate instead on what is old and stale and gaseous. And the pain comes from having, for the first time in my riding life, the option available to be biased toward an American-made motorcycle that was NOT a kind of badness Viagra for the biker wannabe. The industry has been shown one way forward and, unable to see beyond a year or two of recession-induced bad numbers, they quickly throw in the towel and retreat to their happy place. But I wonder how long that place will remain happy, the place of $25,000 fashion accessories in a post-recession world (when we get there).

I can't imagine what Erik Buell himself must feel. He's been building motorcycles with his name on the tank now for 26 years. I can't say, of course, that the recession would not have killed his company off in any case, but it's a shame that Harley-Davidson bought into things initially and then bought the Buell company entirely, only to let it drop when the going got tough. That they are unwilling to keep the door open for Buell to continue under someone else's management seems criminal.



(I"m remiss not to mention that for the 180 employees of Buell the tragedy is far worse. I refuse to abandon all hope that some solution might be found.)

Addressing the Impossible

I had an exchange with a Facebook commenter the other day. My short post there expressed dismay at the hysteria brought on by our President's having been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Quite apart from any question of whether the award is warranted, what is there here to fulminate about? This isn't anything that the administration sought. The foaming opposition seemed spearheaded, unsurprisingly, by Fox News, whom I excoriated (as I always do), and Rupert Murdoch's bevy of hysterical hate-mongers and fear-mongers. The commenter's response was to the effect that O'Reilly and Hannity and Coulter were no worse than MSNBC's stable of Leftists, specifically citing Ed Schultz and Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

Leave aside that this in no way answers my charge: is that really true? Do these MSNBC commentators stir up hatred and play on fears like every single talking head at Fox? Do the MSNBC folks propagate and perpetuate lies for bald political ends as Fox does, apparently as a network policy? From what I've seen, the comparison just doesn't work.

I don't watch MSNBC just as I don't watch Fox. I get my news from NPR and the Associated Press. But I have yet to see a single YouTube clip of Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity or (here I would invoke my god's salvation if I had one) Ann Coulter that didn't make me despair for this country and for representative democracy. And by the same token, most of what I see from Keith Olbermann seems exactly right. I don't know Ed Schultz, and I've only seen Rachel Maddow a couple of times.

But if this is an example of a "flaming Leftist," then I'd be proud and delighted to throw in with them.



I find it ironic that for years we have been told by the Right in this country that opposition to their agenda is "anti-American." Yet here we see them actively hoping and striving for the failure of our democratically-elected President, and cheering for his downfall. That they stir up support for their virulent hate by propagating outright lies--he's a Communist; Bush's bank rescue makes Obama a "socialist;" he wants death panels to kill off old people; his desire to get health care for millions of uninsured people in the world's richest country is "fascism"--is no impediment if enough fear and hate are agitated.

It's this my-way-or-the-highway approach, this willingness to do absolutely anything in pursuit of power, that's really un-American.

A Toast To The Hitch

From Richard Dawkins's blog:



(The whole piece, lecture and Q&A session, is wonderful and can be found here.)

A Short Book Review

Joe Gores, Spade & Archer

2009

***

If I were to commission an author to write a book specifically to appeal to my (non-machinery) fetishes, this one would hit close to the mark. Detective fiction writer Joe Gores' 2009 book Spade & Archer tells the back story of Dashiell Hammett's character Sam Spade from prior to the book (and the movie) The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade is, of course, the book's central character, and the broad strokes follow his career as a private detective over three periods spanning from just after he leaves the employ of the Continental Detective Agency up to the arrival in Sam's office of Falcon's Brigid O'Shaughnessy. These three periods correspond to breaks in a particular case in which Spade (and later Spade and Archer) is involved.

The book was written with the permission of the Hammett estate (specifically, Hammett's daughter), and introduces us to all the characters made famous in the book and movie (including Lieutenant Dundy & Sergeant Polhaus, his secretary Effie Perrine and, of course, Miles Archer--and his wife Iva), and gives us some detail about where they've come from and how they made their initial acquaintances.

These elements do not guarantee a compelling book, of course (even if they guarantee a degree of interest), but Gores has his mentor's measure. The book is stylistically seamless with Hammett's original, the tone tough and hard-boiled and the plotting brisk. And he fills in these semi-familiar characters as though he were working from Hammett's own notes. Miles Archer was really an incidental character in the original, but here Gores gives him a personality and a chunk of the story; and he gives us Spade's opinion about the man, something that just didn't get much play before.

And it all works most satisfyingly. If you like crime fiction; if you love this period of history; if you like film noir, this is your book.

An Exercise in Flexibility

So in the midst of my training a few months back I did in fact find my way to a new car. And after a year of fretting over the decision, I chose...

...a Ford.

I surprised even myself with this decision, and certainly it's the riskiest choice of the few to which I had narrowed down. My finalists were a couple different trucks and two or three mid-sized SUV-type things; and true to my history I was leaning toward a truck (I've never really needed a truck--apart from a couple years when I was building a house--but I've just always preferred them: I like the room and the ruggedness and the versatility.) But my dad convinced me that a truck was less-well-suited to how I'm using my transport nowadays--namely, cruising on the freeway about 75% of the time between WI and KY. And I couldn't argue with this assessment. So, eliminating the trucks from consideration (the Honda Ridgeline and the Toyota Tacoma) left me a trio of mid-sized wagons / crossovers / SUV-thingies from which to choose: the Honda Pilot, the Toyota Highlander and the Ford Flex.





From just a style and equipment point of view, the Flex came out on the top of my list, and the deep discounts available on American machinery just now made the decision easier. Perhaps I may come to see my process as flawed (certainly I railed against the marginal quality of my last American car, a '97 Buick Riviera), but I felt that when I could not identify a clear winner I should go with an American car. I realize that the Japanese vehicles I was looking at are built here with American workers, but I still think the consequences of our indigenous auto industry going belly-up would be far-reaching and potentially catastrophic. To the extent the industry is badly-managed, they should sink or swim accordingly. But where they are solidly on base it seems they should be rewarded. Anyway, as I say, I may come to wonder at my own decision-making process. But for now, this is what's sitting in my driveway.

We began our tenure together with three rapid-succession round trips to KY, amassing a cool six thousand miles in the first two months. And after about six months now we're up to 11,000 miles on the clock. That's enough to begin to have a picture of what works and what doesn't. So here's the initial report card.

The first issue--I might as well get it off my chest right away--involves fit and finish, one item specifically. The passenger-side doors, and the front one particularly, are not hung very plumb. The panel gaps all around the door are notably inconsistent (if you look for these kind of things), and the character lines are misaligned. The aft top of the window frame is raised a fat eighth of an inch relative to the front of the door behind, not enough to affect how the door functions but enough that a detail person will notice (I did not notice, naturally, until I got home). As my neighbor succinctly put it as soon as he saw it, "You'd NEVER see this on a Japanese car." And he's right.

(From this angle it's quite noticeable. In the wider shots above it's harder to see.)

After a week or so wondering whether I cared enough to do anything about it, I took it to the dealer to see if there were an adjustment. Alas, no; they would have to take the door off and re-hang it, and I still can't decide whether I like that idea or not. Given that the door closes properly and makes no wind noise nor leaks any water makes me disinclined to wake the sleeping dog. And my confidence in a positive outcome was not boosted by my interaction with the dealership's body shop. The guy clearly had trouble grasping the validity of my complaint as an aesthetic concern; he looked it over and asked me whether the door did not work right or did it make noise, etc. etc. He said they'd be willing to attempt to rehang it, but he wouldn't recommend it. There was no guarantee, he said, that they wouldn't make it worse. I had hoped he'd take a quick look and say "well THAT'S bullshit; we'll fix that straight away!" But instead, when I said that I was surprised it would come from the factory this way, he said "Oh you wouldn't believe what comes out of the factory!"

Dude, this is SO not the right answer.

(The top of the window frame probably shows the misalignment most clearly.)

The rear passenger door is also slightly misaligned, though not nearly so much as the front door (if the front door were OK, I think I'd never have noticed the back door).

Anyway (with that off my chest) it's the only substantive thing I can find to complain about so far. The fit and finish for the rest of the car seems first-rate, inside and out. The quality of the interior materials seems very near the Hondas with which I'm familiar--the plastic work is perhaps not quite there, but it's awfully close, and everything seems assembled with some care. The switchgear--window switches, radio and HVAC switches, turn signal / wiper stalk--all seems a goodly step up from the Fords I've looked at in the past. The car has triple doorseals and laminated glass, which make it considerably quieter than anything else I test-drove. With a great 300W surround-sound Sony audio system in this hushed environment, it's a really nice place to pass the long hours.

And the audio system merits a special mention. Fitted with Microsoft's Sync system (a Ford exclusive), the radio features one AM, two FM and three Sirius Satellite memory bands (for a total of 60 station presets), plus USB and Line In inputs, and bluetooth connectivity to boot. The USB and bluetooth connections--the phone specifically--are controllable with voice commands, including the artists / albums / playlists on my iPod and my iPhone's contact list. I don't understand the technology that allows it to "understand" what I'm saying--and it's clearly a voice recognition and synthesis thing, as I have never needed to train it to understand me--but it works pretty damn slick. (When you give a command, it repeats it back to you, giving a sense of how it "wants" to pronounce names. Susan is in my phone book as "Sweet Pea," which the Sync insists on pronouncing "Sweet Puh.") And it's quite seamless: if a phone call comes in while I'm listening to a playlist on my USB-connected iPod (these being separate devices), the iPod fades out and the phone ring fades in along with a display on the Sync screen of the incoming call number (or, if the caller is in my phone book, the caller's name). When the call is done, the iPod fades back in right where it left off. Because the iPod is connected through a USB cable, all the iPod functions are available at the radio's control panel. Most functions, as I say, are available through voice commands, which is actually a useful feature as scrolling through the iPod's menus while driving feels like a bad idea.

The sound itself is pretty awesome, aided by the very quiet interior.

The motor is Ford's tried-and-true 3.5 liter Duratec V-6, good for 262 horses and 248 ft/lbs of torque. It actually feels quite snappy, and seems pretty quiet and buttoned-down most of the time. If you really step on it, the sound is a bit frantic (in a distant, muffled way), but it moves a pretty heavy vehicle with greater urgency than I expected.

I've obviously not driven in snow yet, but I expect the AWD system to function effectively (Susan's Honda Element always amazes me at how quickly the back tires kick in, and how eagerly it will grind through even very deep snow). Ford is now using this same drivetrain, with slight variants, on several car models, so things should be properly sorted out. We'll see about that, of course. It delivers the mileage advertised--16 city, 23 highway--and has a very spacious interior. The legroom front and rear is like a limousine, and there is shoulder and headroom to spare. Even the third row, which I will rarely use, has adult-sized seats and pretty easy access (though if the third row is used the space for luggage is more limited). I've had four people in it already several times, and one could very happily take a cross-country trip this way.

The Flex feels like a safe place to be, with a full complement of airbags and the usual electronic nannies--ABS and stability control. The doors feel heavy and substantial, and the steering and brakes, while not sporty, are smooth and linear. As I mentioned above, it goes down the road with a minimum of road or wind noise, and the ride is firm and controlled, neither pillowy nor harsh. (I have noticed that the body aerodynamics are such that it doesn't like the windows rolled down at speed, for whatever that's worth; and the moonroof must not be laminated, as it admits wind noise unless the sunshade is closed.)

I guess I do have one other little gripe: I really hate the American fetish for fake wood in cars. I don't grasp the connection between cars and wood in any circumstances, but FAKE wood just seems the nadir of cheese, the cheapest implementation of what was never a sensible idea in the first place. My old Cadillac had acres of the creaky, stupid-looking stuff, and I'm shocked that we just can't learn this lesson in corporate shame. My Flex has a black interior, so--fair enough--the strips of subdued brown make for a nice color contrast, but that's a color thing; the patterning and finish make it patently obvious that the wood is fake, and I can't imagine a modern design house signing off on this as a good idea. And even if I decided I could remove the panels and, say, paint them so that they were not desperately trying to be what they patently were not, the glossy stuff continues across the dash and into the sealed instrument cluster, where it joins up with the gauges' whorehouse chrome accents (another move from the playbook of your great-grandfather's Oldsmobile--"Look how rich and opulent this is; don't let anyone tell you you just paid an arm and leg for a piece of shit!"). So one has to live with it. While I think the American car companies have never gotten a handle on instrument and display design like the Japanese did three decades ago--and the Flex's gauges are as plain as a 2X4--at least they are functional and reasonably precise and easy to look at. Certainly, I'll happily take basic-and-functional over all the ways they could have gotten this wrong. The rest of the interior seems tasteful and fairly understated and well-implemented (I read one review that said the check-pattern perforated leather seats looked like garbage bags, but they seem nicely done to me).

(I stole these from the web. Mine does not have the navigation screen. The "wood" strip on the steering wheel is kind of odd and not particularly pleasing to the touch.)

So that's it so far. I probably won't keep the car for much beyond the duration of its warranty coverage, but even so I don't expect much in the way of mechanical trouble. But because the rest of the world doesn't have much confidence in how a Ford will age, I imagine I'll be horrified at how much the trade-in value plummets over these three years.

But that's a post for another day.

Today's Lesson: Equipment Matters

(Ahh, the island life!)

Another day spent on motorcycle riding around Oahu. I ended up taking a very similar route to the one I drove a month or so ago when I did this the first time. I didn't intend to repeat myself, but, except for a few variations, the path just kind of took me that way. Out of Waikiki past Diamond Head, along the North shore of the island and back through the center past Pearl Harbor.

The day was less fun than the first time, partly because the weather was less cooperative, but mostly because the bike I rented, a Yamaha V-Star 950, was a pig. I'm trying to decide how much of my ennui about the bike stems from failings on Yamaha's part versus my antipathy toward "cruisers" generally. And I think the bulk of my unhappiness can be traced to the latter. The V-Star may be fine for a cruiser, but that qualifier is the whole problem: I just find that every functional thing about the bike has been so severely compromised in pursuit of the cruiser style that the bike's just not any fun to ride. I think I'd rather have been in a sports car. How sad.



I intended to take out the BMW F800GS I'd rented the last time--an impressive and brilliantly-engineered do-everything motorcycle--but alas, someone already had the bike out (though the two guys looked at each other when I asked about it, making me wonder if there was something more to the story). And they didn't have much else that interested me: a bunch of Harleys, a few other cruisers, and a couple sportbikes--an older and a newer Yamaha R6. (Another shop down the street had a Triumph Bonneville for rent, which I'd be interested to ride, but this place was offering a repeat customer discount.) I really should have taken the R6, but I was afraid it'd be uncomfortable for a day's ride. So I picked this new V-Star thinking it might be a pig but at least it would be comfortable.

Well, I was half right. It WAS a pig.

(A huge pedal for the mostly useless rear brake. And then only one disc up front for a big, heavy bike.)

The bike is quite slow for a 950; it offers only one seating / riding position, which is suitable only for short distances; there is no cornering clearance whatsoever; the brakes are underwhelming; the instrumentation and displays are pitiful. And the thing that drives me craziest is that all these things follow inevitably when style trumps function. The whole motorcycle is an exercise in neo-retro styling, a "lifestyle" fashion accessory that only incidentally is expected to carry people on public roads at speed.

This bike is a perfect example of a backwards design process: they STARTED the design with a "cool" riding position(!)--low-slung; feet out front; high handle bars, preferably with a long rearward sweep--and worked backwards from there. Most of the bike's deficits stem from this initial choice. In order to have the low seat height (which is not in itself a deficit), the bike ends up with a wheelbase like a school bus, which in turn gives it the maneuverability of a cruise ship. That length also makes the bike heavy (and usually quite flexy), and this one feels as athletic as a garden tractor. This fetish for having the feet way out in front of you places the weight of your torso AND legs onto your tailbone (instead of having the feet underneath you, where the pegs carry the legs and the butt carries the torso, minimizing sore spots). The seat needed to make this work is deeply padded like a la-z-boy, but the position of the pelvis and the arms reaching out in front of you makes for an awkward, enforced slouch that quickly grates. ("But it felt fine in the showroom!" OK, then leave it parked in your living room and use it to watch TV.)



The feet live on "running boards," which, like the handlebars, are foam-mounted to keep vibration away (making a perfect prophylactic layer of isolating foam between you and machine at all points). The boards force the feet to be in exactly one spot and one angle / orientation forever. The left foot sits just inside the tongs of a heel-and-toe shifter (a Harley innovation, dating from their daring move away from H-pattern hand shifters in, like, the '20s). This feature is designed to assist one in working a gearbox that was too stiff to LIFT with the toe: it lets you do a whole-leg stomp for upshifts AND downshifts. But in this case it forces your foot to sit in one spot only. Presumably Yamaha can build a gearbox that does not require this kind of shifter, and without the double-pedal one could use a standard footpeg; but the style is all about retro, and that's how the old-timers did it. Meanwhile, one's knees are held quite far apart by the bulky (but boldly chromed) airbox covers, and the placement of the feet and hips force one to squeeze one's knees together constantly to prevent a spread-eagle into the slipstream. So tiring and unnecessary.

And the final legacy of this obeisance to retro-fashion is the fact that the whole bike is almost dragging on the ground just sitting still. Ergo, it takes almost no corner at all to make the floorboards drag alarmingly on the ground, and if the corner is bumpy one might drag more substantial bits (it didn't happen to me, but I can see it would be very easy to drag so much that the tires' contact patches unload, causing one to slide sideways).



The motor is tractable enough, starting easily and providing pretty linear throttle response (though the bike's weight and mass would mask a lot of fuel injection glitches). Vibration for a big twin is nicely controlled, and it makes nice, if generic, sounds. But--here's another silly sacrifice to style (or maybe economics)--there is no tachometer so that, like your daddy's Oldsmobile, one doesn't really know what the motor is doing. There's plenty of space for one atop the triple clamp, but we can only assume that would clash with the aesthetic. The speedometer, without which one presumably can't get by, is down on the gas tank between your knees (surrounded by an acre of cheesy chrome, which flashes sunlight in your eyes irritatingly), making one have to scan quite far afield from the road ahead to monitor your speed. Shift timing is by feel, by an osmotic mind-meld with the motor: "This feels like the right place to shift." There are five forward speeds, but a sixth would be helpful here. One can be comfortably in fifth gear at about 25 mph; so 60 mph was pretty frantic. (70 mph was too torturous with the riding position to contemplate.)

Obviously, I'm not impressed. If I won this in a contest I'd sell it or give it away. My Ulysses seems like a miracle comparatively.

***

Well, enough of that.

A couple other pictures.

A ship storage yard near Pearl Harbor. This is a little part of it.

I may have posted the above before: after arriving in HNL a month or two ago, under the wing of the MD-11, I spied an old Great Lakes airplane I flew in and out of Chicago in my early airline pilot days--101UE. How cool to see it out here.

Then today I see another, getting a little engine work done on the ramp. I can still read "United Express" above the windows, under the white paint. I went into the hangar and talked to the mechanic a bit about the airplane, but he didn't know of his company's history with it. Both planes now fly mail between the islands. He didn't know how many the company owned.

Lie Is The New Truth

Tonight: Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!

Supposedly based on actual events (though who knows what that means in Hollywood), Matt Damon stars as Mark Whitacre, a vice president at agri-business giant Archer, Daniels Midland (ADM) who gets himself entangled with the FBI in the early 1990s over some of his company's less-than-legal practices. When Whitacre brings a possible case of corporate sabotage to his bosses' attention at ADM, they decide to contact the FBI. Whitacre, put off at first, eventually agrees to help the FBI get the information they need to nail the bad guys, both inside ADM and out.

That is the foot in the door through which swarms a biblical plague of lies. Whitacre is a man from whom issues all manner of tale and pronouncement, which soon has the FBI chasing its tail as it tries to fry bigger and bigger fish. The thing is, though, almost nothing Whitacre says can be counted upon to be real. I had previously awarded the medal for Man Without Conscience to William H. Macy's character Jerry Lundegaard in the Coen Brothers' 1996 film Fargo, but I think Damon's character here takes the prize. He plays a constantly-moving target with such quiet virtuosity that I'd be loathe to trust the real Matt Damon after this performance. What begins as a cheeky and seemingly-naive self-confidence eventually turns into shocking comedy. By the film's end he has knocked every kind of social anchor out from under us, and we find ourselves doubting everything. This is very much a one-main-character picture (with some very good acting in supporting roles, especially by Scott Bakula as FBI Agent Shepherd and Melanie Lynskey as Whitacre's wife), and Damon sinks his teeth into the role. Whitacre's deficits are subtle but pervasive, and Damon almost plays a kind of Terminator, a creature who closely resembles a human being.

Steven Soderbergh has had quite the varied career in film, having acted as writer, producer, cinematographer, editor and even actor. But he's mainly known as a director, and even here he has cut a pretty broad swath, from his early film Sex, Lies and Videotape to Out of Sight and The Limey to Erin Brockovich and the sci-fi flick Solaris, to the blockbusters Ocean's 11,12 and 13. So one can't really say The Informant! is or is not his thing: it appears that everything is his thing.

But even with his resumé this film is a bit of an oddity: it's supposedly based on actual events, and yet a lot of liberty seems to have been taken with Mark Whitacre's character. His lies may be well enough documented in company and FBI records--and they make for a compelling character, one around whom it does not seem ridiculous to base a story like this; but Soderbergh (on a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns) makes constant use of voiceover throughout film, giving us (what is imagined to be) Whitacre's interior monolog as he skates through these pretty earth-shaking events. The voiceovers are a striking stylistic device, making Whitacre seem by turns observant and vapid, focused and scattered, and always prone to dwelling on the impertinent. This kind of introduces schizophrenia into the whole concept; either the film is attempting to tell an essentially true story, or it's a fabulous bit of creative writing that gives us a compelling (in a train-wreck sort of way) character. It doesn't seem to me that it can successfully do both. In the end, I think authenticity takes a step back into the shadows, and I'm fine with that. But I might have left off the scroll in the beginning that claims a link with actual events; this is an example of a film that is not better for that supposed link to reality.

Lastly, I should make a nod to the soundtrack, which is by Marvin Hamlisch. I remember him primarily for winning an Oscar for his work with The Sting in 1974, though I see now he kept pretty busy both before and after that film, working steadily up into the late 80s and winding down into the mid-90s (I've seen a number of the movies he worked on, so it's a bit odd that I'd forgotten about him). I hadn't heard his name around lately, so I was glad to see he was still kicking. His score for The Informant! has a cheesy, Muzak quality which contributes nicely to Whitacre's used-car-salesman persona. The whole film makes a bit of a mockery of wholesome, middle-American life, and Hamlisch captures this well in his score.

So, a worthy effort and a fun film. Not a great one, but good enough.

Grade: B

As Seen On A Rifle Butt

It's been a couple weeks now since I saw Quentin Tarantino's latest, Inglourious Basterds. I've been a bit slow to put up a review both because all my travelogs have kept me occupied, but also because I'm not of a single mind after my first viewing, and I can't figure out which mind wins the toss.

Tarantino is best known, of course, for his brilliant and groundbreaking 1994 film Pulp Fiction. Film buffs may also be aware of his earlier film Reservoir Dogs (1992), which almost serves as a test-run, a pilot for his main attraction, Pulp Fiction. Despite his fairly sparse output over the years, there seemed a great deal of hype surrounding the release of Inglourious Basterds (something about which I suspect Tarantino himself is not squeamish. He seems like someone who lacks normal social graces--he comes across as a very odd fellow--but who cannot keep himself away from a gathering of film people). Indeed, it was the opening selection in this year's Cannes Film Festival. I think it's a measure of Pulp Fiction's greatness that this kind of hype can still be generated around Tarantino, as nothing since Pulp Fiction has seemed near equal to that magnum opus. (I think the Kill Bill films were a most worthy effort; but I wonder if they could have propelled Tarantino to greatness if Pulp Fiction had not already ensured it.)

Inglourious Basterds tells a fictitious triple-plotted tale about Nazi-occupied France in WWII that weaves its strands together in the end. More or less. The title refers, as the previews make clear, to a band of Jewish American soldiers who parachute into occupied France with the aim to do "one thing and one thing only: kill Nazis." The small squad of volunteers is led by one Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played with a grimly comic turn by Brad Pitt. Raine, practically a cardboard cutout of a macho soldier, has a huge rope burn scar under his neck and speaks with a clipped military style seasoned with a nondescript Southern drawl. He seems a man who has seen a great deal of human ugliness and who has kept his sanity by keeping his attention focused on the task at hand: killing enemy soldiers. So one thread of the story, the one we expect, focuses on the exploits and disposition of the Basterds.

But we must also know their enemies, and so the film's first scene lays the foundations of the other two stories. Waffen SS Colonel Hans Landa (a once-in-a-lifetime role played by Austrian actor Chrisoph Waltz) has earned the not-altogether-unwelcome (to him) nickname "The Jew Hunter" for his ability to sniff out people who have evaded the Nazi dragnet. When we meet him, he is tasked with wandering the French countryside to find those who are harboring Jews and dealing with both parties--Jew and protector--accordingly. It is immediately clear that Landa and the Basterds will need to have a reckoning. That's story two. And finally, as Landa's crew slaughters a hiding family of Jews, a teenage girl escapes, running across a field to safety. Landa allows her to escape (in an interesting parallel to the Basterds; see below) but vows that she will be dealt with in due time. We meet up with her a few years later in Paris, now a young woman who has inherited a movie house from a dead aunt. She has changed her name and tries to live anonymously, buried in her work running the cinema. An unwelcome personal interest in her by a young Nazi officer in Paris conspires to bring her and Landa and the Basterds (and quite a few other luminaries) together on a single night.

Tarantino is notorious for several things, among them being a kind of idiot-savant of film--people who know him have often commented that he is virtually an encyclopedia of all things cinema. And so his method is not one of simple storytelling; one expects his films to be dense with references and an extreme celebration of style. His films are also known for graphic and shocking violence. Well, with the setup of this film, one should never be in doubt about the payoff to come. We have alluded to Hans Landa's brutality, and then there is the matter of the Basterds. Their stated mission and methodology is not simply to kill the enemy--every army seeks to do this in war--but to do so in a manner that systematically strikes terror into a group of people who seem intent on terrorizing everyone else--the hunter becoming the hunted, etc., etc. And so the Basterds make a point of killing as brutally as possible (taking a play from Native American warriors, they collect the scalps of their victims--if, that is, the baseball bat has left enough intact), one at a time, while the other captured Nazis are forced to watch, and then they let the last soldier of the captured group go free to spread the terror. But not before, um, he gets indelibly branded for his allegiance.

But not all the violence is overt; Tarantino is deft with his use of tension and implied menace. The character of Hans Landa (which won Christoph Waltz a Best Actor nod at Cannes) is brilliantly conceived and played. His opening scene is an amazing little etude of sustained tension, a conspicuously friendly chat between to very unequal men, a chat with an unmistakable and lethal underlying purpose. Several Nazis in the film are shown as slippery characters who appear to befriend people while having an ulterior motive, but Hans Landa raises this to an art form. Never has the promise of savage retribution been so silkily delivered. And yet he emerges as a man whose single-mindedness has morphed (like a liquid Terminator) into mental illness. He breezes into a room and up to a friendly chatting group and immediately begins politely asking exactly the questions that bring first discomfort, and then a black pall, over the room. He's as menacing as Hannibal Lecter except that we would never see him coming.

I often say that I need to see a given film a second or third time to consolidate what I think of it, and I really have that sense here. In some bold and obvious ways, this film is a triumph of virtuosity. Each of these story lines is boldly drawn and deftly rendered, and the characters are compelling and interesting (including fun little turns by Hitler and Goebbels). But in the end I don't feel very convinced about the sum of the parts, about how the individual lines weave together. The title implies that the Basterds' story forms the film's spine; but the other two plot lines (with their ancillary baggage) seem to take up at least 2/3 of our time and constitute the real story of the film. The connection between these other two stories (which are very well wedded) to the Basterds is contrived and doesn't quite work. I understand that something more than a marauding band of killers might be required to plot a satisfying film, but the Basterds seem to end up with a few big scenes in someone else's story, as almost a subplot in their own movie. (Such is how I remember it, anyway.)

And there are a few instances here where I think the director simply tries too hard to be stylish. Especially in his use of anachronistic music clips at key moments. We have graphic killing in 1945 being shown in slow-mo to the background of '70s instrumental ballads replete with cheesy strings and chicka-wocka guitars. No doubt there is some tenuous film-buff link to justify this, but I feel it just doesn't work. It's a distraction from a story that already needs a little help staying tied together.

And that's it in a nutshell. Quentin Tarantino is a man who has successfully made a life of immersion in film and film history. He seems especially taken with genre films, and this is another attempt to tackle a particular genre. But he is his own genre; his vision is such that everything he does must have his indelible style, an idealized style of his youth. Reservoir Dogs was an etude on violence and plotting. But all of his films since then have been set in, or influenced by the '70s. And I'm simply not convinced--this film does not convince me--that '70s style can be applied to a WWII picture.

Grade: B-