It was midnight, or maybe ten… Eighty on the open road when the Ipod cued up the tune. “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away… It’s just a shot away…”
I’d learned long ago never to skip through that song, never to turn to something else. Some music’s Important. Shoots straight into the cerebral cortex, demanding your immediate, complete attention.
Keith allegedly wrote the song in minutes, killing time in some friend’s flat. Just popped out of his head onto paper.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps he’d been writing it for decades, the lyrics collecting in his head over a childhood in desperate post-war England, then years in the convulsions of the Sixties, in the teeth of mass upheaval. Let it Bleed came out in 1969, but with its ominous, apocalyptic themes, the record’s muse was clearly ’68. And however old you might be, wherever you might be from, we’ve all studied 1968. Vietnam slipped from bad into ruin, psychopaths shot Kennedy and King… Even Andy Warhol took a bullet. The whole world had gone to shit, and the only question people were asking was where it went from there. Another shoe to fall? The start of a new revolution, or an even further collapse? All that energy and anger, it had to go up or down. Everything’s always going somewhere. That’s the narrative, right?
Some have argued a man needs a maid, a point with which I’d never quibble. And just as I subscribe to that notion, a man also needs a decent car. Not an expensive one. Not some gaudy Escalade or Range Rover, Porsche or Benz SL. Just a good set of wheels. Heavy, awful on gas, with full time four wheel drive, leather, sunroof and, of course, most important – more significant than any other option – a stereo that can shatter your eardrums without the slightest hint of distortion. Even at the highest decibels.
In these frantic days of high tech annoyance, of Blackberries, Bluetooth and smartphones, of texting, Twitter, Facebook and the maddening inescapable conclusion We Can Never Be Truly Alone, a car is man’s last stand. His final hope of private dignity – that he controls his destination and could, if he liked, Disappear. Or just an easy micro-vacation, a place to hide, Dogfishead in the coffee holder, open highway and the sole form of interruption not some mindless text from a boss, but a sharp cross wind through the windows… a shock of cold night air blasting down from the vacant mountains left and right. A moment of not being pulled, cajoled, directed or pestered… the fantasy he’s going nowhere.
At least that’s what it used to be. Now it seems that’s our reality – where we’re at.
I want to write how for the last three years there’s been a change in the air outside. A sense we’re but a spark from an explosion, in a respite, standing on the beach as the surf peels back before a tsunami that could either lift or crush us. That the country sits astride the thinnest of fences, one nudge from resurgence or implosion.
But that’s not the feeling anymore. The talk radio nuts, pundits and politicians are but a monstrous hurricane of bullshit. Fictions, lies, narratives… in service to the mass delusion we’re headed for some radical change.
There will be no progressive revolution. There will be no new Ronald Reagan. No policy cure for unemployment, and no transformative technology to save us. No riots from those left behind, no civil unrest in the streets as the desperate get squeezed into pulp. The tea party anger will abate and those forgotten, well… they’re going to disappear, slip off the edge of the Grid. We’ll fragment, but at glacial speed, an endless series of soft landings engineered in the interests of those of us with something to lose. As it rolls along and we get tired of hearing about it, the process will become all but invisible.
Sure, this is hypothesis, some might say conjecture. But we all see the same clear facts, and I’m hardly out on a ledge saying ’11 will look like ’09 and ’10, and that ’12, ’13 and ’14 will pretty much look the same.
There’ll be you, me, what we do, and this necessary malignancy of delevering. I’ll follow the usual schedule. Two or three times a week, out there on the road in the night, slicing the dead air and every once in a while, the Ipod’ll hit that same song – the one I’ve been hearing every other day since junior high. “War, children… It’s just a shot away… It’s just a shot away.”
And yet it never comes. Well, at least not domestically.
There will be no other shoe to fall. It’s myth and nothing more. Nor will there be a resurgence. No sustained up or down, only the illusion of both as we lurch on in fits and stops with an occasional bailout here and there when Important People become frightened. Welcome to the Flat Age, the Vacuum. Take a breath, sit back and pour yourself a triple. Nothing’s going anywhere.
I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day… I could feel them wondering why I wasn’t dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. – Charles Bukowski, Women.
Of the myriad lies, myths and abject imbecilities accepted as fact by a depressingly large majority of primates in these glorious United States, none offends logic as much as the spoonfed-and-swallowed notion all intoxicants are equivalent, or even approximately so.
Acid’s as identical to speed as single malt scotch is to Budweiser. Marijuana’s a gateway to cocaine as the Beatles would lead one to Slayer. The baseline of all this thinking, the “Just Say No” mantra of the ’80s, was a vile marketing trope, a reduction cynically aimed at the lowest of common denominators… a zero-tolerance slogan blurring endless families, genera and species of intoxicant.
Yet it stuck for the unaware (and those who didn’t want to know different). And this I find a dangerous lie. Vodka’s not a buzz like rum, mushrooms nothing like blow. Heineken and Woodford Reserve are in no way interchangeable drunks.
To a pro, an aficionado, the nuance in the differing effects – what one substance does and one does not – is the defining character of a buzz. And one needs to know these distinctions to pick his poisons wisely, avoid what offends his constitution.
In the spirit of drawing some of these boundaries, here’s an outtake from an early draft of Happy Hour Hour is for Amateurs explaining why I never get drunk on beer. Why beer is a substance to enjoy, but never a substitute for liquor.
_____________________
I should have known better than to drink beer. Sure, I enjoy the substance – perhaps more than any other. But at core, in an organic sense, at the deepest cellular level, I am a Hard Liquor Drinker.
This leaves one with limited options at the usual office function.
The robots in human relations know liquor’s risky to serve. People open up on scotch, have sex in the bathroom on martinis… These things cost businesses money – settlements, firings and such. And worse than any of that, liquor-drunks speak their mind, tell their co-workers and bosses What They Think. This can destroy “morale,” undermine the broadly observed fiction everybody likes their job, gives a damn about the firm, and wouldn’t have quit before they started if they’d never needed the money.
To prevent this honest discourse, they no longer served any spirits at official office happy hours. Where once there’d been Chivas and Stoli, there was Amstel and chardonnay, the favored social lubricants of People Who Stop at Two:
Hi Rachel. Great choice on the white, huh? Compliments the goat cheese and arugula sandwiches. Let’s talk about a local gallery you’ve been to recently. Throw some obscure artists’ names at me and I’ll volley back with a comment about some Czech author the Times says we should all be reading. We’ll then segue into a discussion about your recent appellate argument. I’ll say ‘fascinating’ a few times, chug the last of this carbonated piss and excuse myself to get another… I figure six equal one double Wild Turkey.
…Maybe eight.
And if you’re a hard alcohol drinker, you know – you cannot play with beer. It’s a vicious, sneaky fluid.
I’ve navigated a three thousand pound truck through a blizzard on a half bottle of Ciroc, delivered a best man speech on God-only-knows how many glasses of Johnny Walker Black and hit a three irons out of heavy rough on enough Basil Hayden’s to power a lawnmower. A smart editor would tell me to write that I didn’t intentionally do such things, particularly the drunk driving bit. That would, of course, be a lie. Slamming three foot powder drifts along a snow covered back road on a headful of vodka/Red Bull stingers is an experience every decent American should know. And it’s sacrilege to give a best man speech with a blood alcohol level below 2.0. As to golf, after a lifetime around courses… after having shot in the 80s and shot in the 100s, having used overlap and interlock grips, blades and offset heads… after having futilely taken lessons and tried a dozen different swings, this much I know of the sport: It only approaches tolerable, and can only be played correctly, on the precipice of Utterly Plastered.*
And why would I ever think different? In many, possibly most, regards, I’m much more effective after drinks. Not “better” in some craving, dependent sense. Just a little bit smoother and more graceful than otherwise might be the case. A buzz clears the overburdened mind, wipes away the surface detritus cluttering this Modern Life… Blots out a dozen or so of the ceaseless, disconnected observations, impressions and questions racing through my head at any moment. Yes, caffeine and stress rev the brain, but it’s ethanol that channels the horsepower. At least in a creative sense.
But beer… Well, beer is Different. Beer is my kryptonite – the drink that makes me a fool. And I’m not alone in this. In fact, I’d say it’s quite to the contrary, that everyone’s an idiot on suds. There’s a reason the classic beer drunk is drawn as a slobbering oaf, more than considerable truth in the stereotyping of these creatures as morbidly obese monks and slurring red faced Germans in obscenely-tight lederhosen. Beer is a sloppy, numbing drunk – a blunt force volume intoxicant drowning the brain and organs. You’re stupid, sluggish and gaseous, with not a thimble’s worth of thought in your skull.
Where whisky goads an Id to action, beer leaves you dim and rudderless, your grey matter treading foam and hops. Beer’s why college students swan-dive from balconies into hotel swimming pools… why your high school girlfriend vomited in the closet one door down from the bathroom… why your buddy-who-just-got-divorced shit his pants and passed out in a lawn chair at that Memorial Day pool party. Beer’s the voice in your head, right as you’re about to come, saying “Just a couple more thrusts… I can pull out of her in time.”
This was what caused all the worry. Whisky can kill you, that’s true. But it’ll rarely be the source of embarrassment, a fount of public shame and disgrace. Beer’s the polar opposite. None above a nine year old girl could imbibe enough to die from the its effect. But it will kill everything else. Career and respect of peers… assumptions you had native intelligence slightly above a Bonobo’s – these are all undone with beer.
And here I was on my fifth. Or was that seven?
_________________
* Some would go one step further – say you need liquor to play golf well, and the best in the game are closet drunks. That the muscle relaxation of booze is required to zen a golf swing. That Tiger is a gin rag with eyes, as are Mickelson, Westwood and Els, and that those in the clubhouse know. They understand. One need only look at John Daly, at his death dive from the money list and tour, to see the folly in going on the wagon.
3. Cocksucker. This one’s rank illogic, an utter lack of facility with the simplest binary algebra. If X = Y, and Y = Z, and no other conditions are offered, then X = Z as well. You wouldn’t use “Mom” as an insult. And yet your mom is a cocksucker. Don’t bristle. This is all just technical stuff… Science. And if we really have to get technical, so is your sister, your aunt, your grandmother (if she’s alive), your kindergarten teacher, your nanny, and that 14-year-old cousin about whom you’ve had those really uncomfortable dreams (the one who shows no recognition of gravity in that tartan private school skirt), etc…
Anyhow, back to the formula… If mom’s a cocksucker and “cocksucker’s” an insult, then “mom” is an insult as well. Or, conversely, “cocksucker” is no more an insult than “mom.” I wouldn’t recommend calling mom a cocksucker or deriding a nemesis with “mom,” but putting aside the colloquial bastardizations of the terms barring those interchangeable uses, one would have to admit, logically, there isn’t a whole lot of sense in insulting anyone with “cocksucker.”
A long time fan of wordsmiths from Carlin to W.F. Buckley to William Safire, I quite enjoyed doing this little piece. Read the rest here.
And while you’re at it, read the rest of Brobible. Highly entertaining, and exceptionally well written, delivered and edited.
Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right/Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
- Stealer’s Wheel (1972)
Everybody’s nuts right now. Panicked, angry and confused – frayed to the edge of a shattering, lunatic breakdown… Like the man on the bridge in “The Scream,” a single shock – one corkscrew plunge in the Dow or notice of a temporary layoff – from jumping headfirst in the river. That or melting down in a rage, frothing like the crazed anchorman in Network.
The Edge – that point where a man understands he’s got absolutely nothing left to lose – grows closer everyday for a whole lot more of us than the rest of us would like to admit.
Is this the end of Western Domination? Curtains for the American Dream? Probably not (if you’re an eternal optimist like me). But unless you’ve shit for brains, this much is absolutely clear – we’re sitting in the eye of the hurricane, waiting for the second wall to level our Monopoly money recovery. And if the dominoes we all plainly see fall as it appears they will, well… stock up on canned goods. You’ll have a lot more to worry about than an oil spill inflating the cost of shrimp by this same time next year.
And that feeling it’s beyond our control – that we’re helpless, adrift and assuredly, cosmically fucked – has the finger-pointers out in droves. Bleeding hearts and madmen like Paul Krugman are screaming for a second stimulus, blaming the “rich” and their avoidance of taxes for our staggering fiscal deficit. “The wealthy use the GOP and armies of lawyers to shelter them from taxes!” On the other side, the Tea Party blames the poor – mythical “welfare mothers” and the safety net programs they claim, wrongly, keep those “freeloaders” in gilded subsistence. “The poor forty percent of this country pays no income tax at all!”
The warring factions’ only point of agreement is that the middle class is going to get screwed. That when the proverbial bill comes due – and it will, probably sooner than we think – the rich and poor won’t pay it. The tab’ll get handed to the Middle, the least deserving of the three.
This is where the dogma of the liberals and the Tea Party starts tripping my gag reflex. Anyone who’s worked in a corporation in this country knows, the existence of an entirely honest, entirely hard-working middle class is myth and nothing more. There are actually two middle classes – the Productive Middle and the “Fattened Middle.” One carries the other, and the Fattened Middle has earned every bad turn this rotten economy’s given it.
A very early draft of my book contained an Atlas Shrugged-like rant about this “Fattened Middle.” It didn’t flow with the book’s comedic thrust, and its points were made more elegantly elsewhere in the text’s narrative. But I’ve always liked this rant, and every author everywhere has a secret urge to publish his own “Who is John Galt?” speech. So here’s mine. A riff on the Fattened Middle, and why they deserve no quarter.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
How do you describe these people – this “Fattened Middle” of America? In government they’re known as bureaucrats; in corporate America, middle management (the non-revenue producing kind)… A long line of Waylon Smitherses bringing zero added value to the table. Hiding in their cubicles and offices, bouncing e-mails back and forth, passing decisions up and down the chain of command. Doing exactly what they’re told and nothing more. No forethought, no going the extra lap. Their sole aim never Success, but avoidance of termination… of getting a pink slip and being left to scramble, rebuild themselves on their wits.
But the fault doesn’t lie with them alone. Our McEconomy’s their perfect petri dish… A world of Byzantine administrative temples, with endless shadowed spaces – places where a man who wants to hide can duck responsibility forever. You can’t finger a bureaucrat or a middle manager on anything. What do these creatures decide? Nothing. And they’ve stacks of emails to prove it. “Here it is. March 2004. I passed that request on to the Finance Committee. I told them it was beyond my authority, right there in my response. I save all my responses.”
Of course you do.
And no, you can’t fire all of these people. Technically, most provide some service, some function that justifies their position. That’s their insidious hook, what keeps them in The Organization – performance of some finite task for which it’s obvious they’re overpaid, but for which finding a cheap replacement would be annoying and time-consuming. And they’ve never had a first or second strike. Their personnel files are squeaky clean. Ten years of cost-of-living raises. An award for most organized filing. A string of B and B+ reviews. Then there’s that issue of morale. Who fires a little league coach or the neighborhood Boy Scout den leader? What would that jolly, jowly HR administrator do if he were cut loose on the street? What are his skills? Saying “Yes” or “I’ll have to look into it” quickly? Firing the poor bastard’s killing him.
And so the inefficiencies persist, cancers on the body commerce. So much wasted time. So much idiot procedure. So many dollars pissed away that ought to be pooled into bonuses for the twenty percent of workers who actually create value.
I know, I know… “We can’t all be productive, but we all need something to do. These people have salaries, and those salaries get spent on stuff, and the selling of that stuff keeps our economy afloat!”*
That’s true, and you know what else? Unsustainable.
This screed might sound mean, and it is. But if you’ve worked in a law firm, or any large organization… If you’ve played e-mail tennis with these legions of chair-warmers daily, You Understand. Here’s an example of your day, my day, representing corporations and agencies, and their middle-to-upper middle management functionaries, earning their middle-to-upper upper middle management salaries, pensions and health benefit packages:
SERVE:
RE: ACME Co. Release
From: _______@______.com (Me)
To: bcarter@_____.com
Bob,
Here’s the release in the ACME matter. Let me know if this is OK.
RETURN:
RE: RE: ACME Co. Release
From: bcarter@____.com
To: ________@_______.com
Has Tim Perkins OK’d this? He’s got final say on these matters.
VOLLEY:
FW: RE: RE: ACME Co. Release
From: ________@______.com
To: tperkins@____.com
Tim,
Bob tells me you have final say on the release in the ACME case. Tell me if this is OK. We are obligated under court order to finalize it by Monday.
I think we need to have a meeting on this. How’s everybody’s schedule Tuesday afternoon?
Ahhh, the Meeting… The nucleus of every bureaucrat and middle manager’s world. The place where those with no interest in actually solving a problem can ricochet criticisms around the room, looking sage-like for raising a variety of theoretical “strategic concerns”… Where they can appear important airing their complaints about policy, procedure and arcane hypothetical risks no effective thinker would ever burn brain cells considering.
The meeting is middle management’s driving range, where they can swing freely for the 300 yd markers, safe in the comfort of knowing they’ll never be asked to come up with a better idea than the one they’re assailing with meaningless broadsides and corporate-speak gibberish. “Well… I’m really concerned that maybe taking this position will hurt our perception with organized labor in this area.” “This needs to synergize better with long term labor policy, which is progressively oriented.” But then if asked to provide a serious answer as to how the company might actually, pragmatically address the concern they’ve raised, these otherwise omniscient wonks suddenly devolve into mutes, shrugging at each other like a collection of Marcel Marceaus.
And there’s no use in trying to make them accountable. No use in pressing them for constructive answers, demanding to know what value they’ve brought to the company in exchange for the past decade of Cadillac benefits and free donuts. The Fattened Middle lives in a haze, terminally disconnected from what causes the productive to produce, detached from any semblance of ambition or curiosity. Horatio Alger in reverse, shuffling from their Japanese sedans and minivans to their offices, believing that as long as they eat three square a day and avoid ever making a decision the “American Dream” – an insulated cheesecake “career” on the government or corporate dole – is birthright.
They’re wrong, of course. But it’s a whole lot worse than that. In their confounding, parasitic persistence, they’ve perverted and warped the American Dream – turned the damned thing on its ear. The Dream, the bargain, at least a I’ve understood it, wasn’t a trade of perpetual comfort for thirty years of risk avoidance and prolific paperwork creation. The concept, for those who weren’t born with a trust fund, was with a good bit of work and some luck, you’d get back multiples of your sweat equity in dollars. If you worked smart and shrewdly, there was a good chance you’d earn a solid living, possibly even get rich. But it was never enough to just bank hours, or punch out a certain number of emails reminding management You’re Essential.**
Still, that flawed expectation persists. From skyscrapers to factories to City Hall, the Fattened Middle is entrenched, their “I am, thus I deserve” mindset a widely accepted religion. No class plays the victim better, and no class protects itself more. Consider how the armies of non-revenue creating administrators in your office busy themselves… What the workers in the government agencies sending your company reams of forms to be filled out do with themselves each day… What the people in the Human Resources department three floors up are doing right now…***
- Insert image of monkey scratching its ass here -
Perhaps that’s a bit unfair. Some are actually doing something. The moderately ambitious of them are creating mazes of new rules and policies they alone can navigate, all with a singular objective – to justify their paycheck. You’ll never know these rule custodians exist, but the minute you have to get something done – finalize some important project or close a significant deal – They Will Appear. Like a lump of rotting food jammed in the drain of your sink, from inside the company or out, these bureaucrats and administrators and their laundry lists of concerns and requirements will hold up every transaction, constipate the simplest business process… All in deference to the pretext that every corporate or government decision, from purchasing office toilet paper to opening an overseas plant, is too important to be made quickly, or by any single individual.
Bankers work with money, chefs with food, tailors with cloth, etc… What do these middling middleists create? They don’t fly your plane, fix your plumbing, or stitch your suit. Don’t drive your cab, drill your teeth or do your taxes. Don’t fix your car, bag your groceries or manage your money. They’re not developing the office tower down the street, designing the next generation laptop or writing the great American novel… Not curing any diseases, writing a marketing plan or landing the next big sale… They’re not taking the angry calls from any irate clients, making the presentations or trading any stocks or bonds… To describe most of what they do is to simply say They Are. It’s been said in every office twenty percent of workers do one hundred percent of the work. We all know the Fattened Middle. They’re the other eighty percent – creating the appearance of consistent proficiency with toil no one can describe and the value of which is rarely, if ever, measured.
And by insulating themselves from the axe, these parasites have created a second world, a middle management reality – an intractable, institutionalized selfishness – that permeates and corrupts every corporate and government office. A protective bubble for those in it; for those outside, an endless, energy and profit sapping irritation… a never ending ticker tape of complexities and annoyances costing a fortune to address. Worse yet than all of that, the Fattened Middle steals from the needy, most of whom would work twice as hard as the average bureaucrat or middle manager.
All of this damage, this waste, this immense needless inefficiency so a complacent, unproductive sector of an otherwise noble class can cruise through life unmolested, collecting $75,000.00 and up paychecks.
Yeah, I know… Doesn’t sound like a lot of money. Until you consider the size of the Fattened Middle.
Look around your department, your office, your floor… Look around the streets at rush hour, or the corporate park you drive through every morning. Look at the immense facades of all the enormous government buildings downtown. How much of what’s going on in these places is superfluous, overpriced – terminally, congenitally redundant? And how many people are engaged in this monstrous circus of busywork? How many bodies soaking up resources to create what no one needs or what at best should be done by computer? And how many times today will one of them get in your way? Infect or disrupt what you’re doing with some niggling peripheral concern or inane policy mandate. How many times will you come in at 8:00, hoping to get out by 7:00, only to spend the morning hostage to an idiot email chain, answering all those questions nobody ever needs to ask.
They say offshoring of American jobs is a “giant sucking sound.” Maybe. Or maybe the real sucking sound is right here, all around us every day, sitting in the office next door, punching out a memorandum on last week’s strategy meeting. Maybe it’s so loud, been with us so long, we don’t even notice it anymore.
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*Until it doesn’t. Until we’ve nothing left but a society of administrators, and we can’t allow the natural creative destruction necessary for a healthy economy to take place because if we did, we’d realize there was no real economic activity underpinning the slop of corporate structures, government agencies and financial houses of cards comprising our society. It’s one thing for the rest of the world to whisper about the emperor’s lack of wardrobe, another to put him on stage nude before an audience of would-be bond vigilantes.
**If only wealth were awarded based on mere hours expended, no matter how intellectually untaxing the toil… How many years ago would I have renounced professional work and picked up a spade to hoe ditches for the township?
***The business of America isn’t business. That ship sailed long ago. The business of America today is red tape. We’re a giant DMV, creating McJobs and Whiffle Careers in impossibly complex corporate and governmental hierarchies, masturbating processes, policies and frameworks creating nothing but salaries from streams of revenue that look more and more frighteningly fictional. What’s the alchemy involved in turning procedure for procedure’s sake into money? Somebody, somewhere has to make something of actual value sufficient to sustain all that administration. That or it’s all just a huge, impenetrable Ponzi scheme.
Here’s the second installment of a series lauding “brilliant, understated rock stars we ought to recognize more often – the frequently underappreciated who create the classic sounds we associate with the more self-promotional members of their bands, or whom we never pay attention to at all…” The idea is to build out an entire band of them – guitar, drums, bass, vocals and keyboards. Part I is available here.
Drums: Charlie Watts
I know… How can Charlie Watts be underappreciated? He’s a member of the world’s greatest – and most famous – rock and roll band?
Exactly. And that’s a lot of why Watts is overlooked. In the immediate orbit of people like Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones, who wouldn’t have been lost in the shadows? And Watts has always been immensely private – a gentlemen who simply beat the skins as Mick duck-walked the stage and Keith and Ronnie traded riffs, staggering, stoned, mugging through cigarette smoke.
That Watts has been recognized more as “rock star” than a technician – celebrated more for the company he’s kept than the skill he brings to the drum kit – is a criminal, sinful oversight. Because in fifty years of playing, the man has never missed a beat, never played anything off tempo. …Well, maybe a few times, but never so badly you’d remember. Never so beyond salvage he couldn’t make you quickly forget.
As I noted at the start, however, his band, their fame – the forty years of Kleig light glare on Mick and Keith, the death of Brian Jones, Altamont and all other scandals and drama that have cemented the Stones in our culture – is but a part of what’s overshadowed Watts. The other part of it, perhaps the bigger part, is that Watts is almost too good a drummer… too tight for his often sloppy band, so precise he almost slips into the background.*
Consider his early competition, the drummers we still view as masters. Keith Moon never saw a space he couldn’t fill, or a fill he couldn’t embellish. Same went for Mitch Mitchell. Bonham and Ginger Baker took over songs, became the gravity guiding everything around them. Watts never took the lead. He played an ensemble part, with tight economic fills you might not even have noticed, or if you did, thought were rote, mechanical… I’m not a student of the drums, so I can’t say how complex they were. But this much I’ve learned of art in general – that something might look or sound simple is rarely proof it is. More often than not what you’re hearing is the skill to make the difficult appear easy. Or simply flawless execution. Both describe Watts’ work:
The tempo shift between the verse and chorus show an amazing discipline. Watts stops on a dime and segues into an entirely different time sequence – one at odds with the previous rhythm – then shifts back seamlessly.
The subtle rolls behind the beats at the start of this song are genius – an ideal finishing touch, or accompaniment, to the greatest riff in the history of rock music. You might never have considered the importance of those sounds, consciously even noticed them, but without that filler, the song would have had just a bit too much dead air between the early guitar notes.*** It’s the little touches that always make the difference.
And if you doubt Watts can still play nearing 70, here he is in 2006, slamming through “Live With Me,” a tune built around a relentless drum beat (yeah, Christina Aguilera’s guesting in it, but it’s a smoking version of the tune, and she adds some welcome vocal heft).
Part III to follow.
___________________________________
*Mick Taylor, a ridiculously talented guitarist who elevated the Stones’ sound from Let it Bleed through It’s Only Rock and Roll, is frequently cited as the only virtuoso player in the band’s history. Absolute bullshit, and proof of two things: (1) the veracity of the argument Watts has been underappreciated; and, (2) that the music press’s taste is in its mouth.
**If I were old enough or responsible enough to concern myself with writing a will, this is the song I’d demand in lieu of a eulogy. Should I one day crash the Canyonero into a bridge abutment at 80, a victim of steering with my knee while talking on the cell phone, chugging a coffee and struggling to read some highly urgent business-related gibberish on a half-crumpled fax lying on the dashboard, when you click here that’s what you’ll hear.
***That Watts can turn 180 degrees in the middle and play the “Tito Puente” or “Latin jam” section of the song as well, if not better, than any drummer Santana ever had, shows his almost limitless range.#
#Yes, the Tito Puente link is gratuitous, and pointless. Possibly more pointless than a footnote to a footnote. Except that I follow a rule – every time Puente is cited, he must be linked.
The best song will never get sung/The best life never leaves your lungs/So good, you won’t ever know/I never hear it on the radio/Can’t hear it on the radio – “The Late Greats,” Wilco (2004)
If you don’t know, I’ve been doing a radio show, “Here’s What to Think,” with Dr. Rob of Shrinktalk.net and my long time editor, Donika. This week’s installment, “The Elephant in the Room,” is an interview with Paul Shirley, ex-NBA power forward, author of Can I Keep My Jersey? and creator of FlipCollective.com.* Among the myriad topics we discussed, including a smear-job some media outlets did on Shirley after he wrote an article criticizing Haiti’s well-known societal and infrastructural deficiencies on ESPN.com after the earthquake, we talked a good bit about music.
Specifically, we talked a lot about Pearl Jam. And more specifically than that, why Pearl Jam will never be the world’s greatest rock and roll band. That they’re not Zeppelin, the Stones, or even the Velvets… But that they just might be the world’s most dependable band – pumping out consistently great songs and performances record after record, tour after tour. It’s true. If you’ve listened to Pearl Jam’s catalog, or seen them play live, you know: The group simply Delivers. No pomp and circumstance. Minimal, if any, marketing. They follow the Grateful Dead’s approach – just play the tunes, and play them well.
Can’t ask for much more than that, can you? What’s better than a band that records and tours incessantly, banging out a killer set every night?
And yet as fans we rarely laud that approach – that dedication to persistently, methodically, without fanfare or drama, pumping out one great piece of art after another. That’s a tragedy, I think, because there are a lot of Pearl Jams out there, performers who are more “professionals” than “personalities.” Performers who focus more on the arc of the guitar solo or the timing of the drum fill than the next controversy they can stir by bad-mouthing ex-lovers in Rolling Stone.**
There ought to be an award for these performers – an “Underacknowledged Genius” or “Consummate Professional” Grammy. But I’m not holding my breath. In a music landscape dominated by ghoulish deformities like Lady Gaga, American Idol plasti-pop shiite and auto-tuned McCountry stars Hank Williams would have gored with a broken whiskey bottle rather than share the stage with at the Opry, I don’t think professionalism is going to be celebrated by the music industry any time soon.***
So I’ll do it here. This is a list of brilliant, understated rock stars we ought to recognize more often – the frequently underappreciated who create the classic sounds we associate with the more self-promotional members of their bands, or whom we never pay attention to at all… A “Supergroup of the Often Overlooked.”
Lead Guitar: David Gilmour
Think of Pink Floyd and you think of Roger Waters. And you think of Waters, of course, because you think of the The Wall, Water’s autobiographical two-hour rock opera. Not surprising either takes center stage in the band’s history. In the twilight of the group’s most productive and creative phase, Waters’ egomania consumed the band. Consider The Wall, with its limitless pubescent angst and endless, whining introspection. Who but a terminal self-promoter, a monstrous pathological narcissist, would produce such an epically bloated opera focused persistently, maddeningly, on nothing but his own tedious neuroses?****
But Waters wasn’t the whole of Pink Floyd. Thankfully, not even close to it. The sound of the band – what made their music majestic, unlike anything before or since – is all David Gilmour.
There are three phases of Pink Floyd, and David Gilmour’s been the backbone of the group in each. First, of course, was the Syd Barrett Phase, where the band put out psychedelic pop like “See Emily Play” and “Arnold Lane.” Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Saucerful of Secrets were disjointed and flimsy albums, but still brilliant in spots, showing Barrett’s promise as a songwriter. Unfortunately, before any of that could be realized, as a result of underlying mental illness, or gross overuse of LSD, or both, Barrett lost his mind. Gilmour stepped in to cover for him at live shows, and that was where Pink Floyd’s sound shifted from thin and trippy noodling to a feedback-drenched sonic attack. Compare a 1967 “Astronomy Domine” with Barrett to one from 1968 with Gilmour. Gilmour brought The Heavy.
From there, after a few shaky records, the band hit its stride, a run of amazing records dominated by Gilmour’s guitar. More, Obscured by Clouds, Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Her and Animals – the list’s amazing, on par with the Beatles’ Revolver through Abbey Road phase, the Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet through Exile on Main Street period or, for a more updated equivalent, Wilco’s string of perfect records running back to Being There (yeah, Tweedy’s that good). Unlike a lot of those comparisons, however, Floyd’s peak isn’t characterized so much by amazing songwriting, but by the sweeping walls of sound it created, all built around Gilmour’s unique style of playing. Many have tried, but no other band sounds as immense as the Floyd of “Echoes,” “Sheep” or “The Nile Song.” Some things defy replication.
The last era of Floyd, excepting the post-Waters records, which I’m not considering here, is what I’d call the Waters’ Soapbox Phase. If you’re the kind of person who pays attention to the lyrics, which I doubt most Floyd listeners are, you can hear a “Don Henley” effect slipping into the music starting as early as Wish You Were Here.***** Like Henley in “Hotel California” or “Life in the Fast Lane,” Waters whines about the crass commercialism of the record industry in “Have a Cigar.” By Animals, he’s bludgeoning the audience with Orwellian metaphors on the desperation of cogs in the industrial system.
By The Wall it’s all gone to shit… The audience is his therapist. His father’s death, the disconnectedness of being a sheltered, obscenely wealthy rock star and flailing rants against World War Two (as if England had a choice)… his axes are all ground, then ground some more, then a couple more times, just for good measure. Thankfully, the music’s so inspired, and the guitar on tunes like “The Thin Ice,” “Run Like Hell” and the solo in “Comfortably Numb” stunning enough that you needn’t pay any attention to the words. The Final Cut, Floyd’s aptly titled last record with Waters – a criticism of England’s attack on the Falkland Islands subtitled “A Requiem For the Post-War Dream” - is almost a bad joke.****** But I say “almost,” of course, because despite Waters’ attempts to turn the album into a spoken word diatribe with more extraneous verbiage than a Kevin Smith movie, Gilmour floods the record with amazing guitar work, not only rescuing the thing, but turning it into a great record.
Below are three exhibits proving my point about Gilmour – examples of him doing what he does best in a song from each one of the Floyd phases. The first is “The Fletcher Memorial Home,” a languid, meandering tune Gilmour turns on its head with a staggering solo that can’t be more than twenty notes long. I’ve been in the condition to “visualize” music enough to describe this solo without being ludicrous. And this thing appears as jet, or the wing of one – drafting long, flawless lines in its wake, puncturing through the fog of an otherwise forgettable dirge. Where a million other guitarists would have fired off dozens of notes, Gilmour selects a mere handful. But he makes every single one count, bending them to maximum impact. The effect is soaring, sweeping – more like the symphonic movement than a single instrumental solo. Comes of like something Wagner might have scored… optimal dramatics, but never overdone.
The second’s a somewhat obscure song from Atom Heart Mother, “Fat Old Sun.” Perfect “Echoes” era Floyd. The solo in this clip, from Gilmour’s Live from Gdansk disc, simply smokes.
The final one is a Syd Barrett era tune written by Richard Wright, the late Floyd keyboardist. The clip’s taken from a television show aired shortly after Wright’s death. The song’s got a lot of space in it, Gilmour’s playing slide, and considering it was a tribute to Wright, he could’ve gone nuts – played a mad, epic solo… interpolated elements of other Wright compositions. Instead he plays it tight, economical. Keeps it the way it was written, but as no one else – not even the other members of Floyd with any other guitarist, including the greats like Clapton, Beck or Page – could make it sound. Because like everything else he’s done, Gilmour “owned” the song the minute he started to play it. You just might not have known, as he never gave a damn about credit. That was for Waters, the tortured artist of the band.
Part II, “Drums,” to follow soon.
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* If you like the stuff I’ve written about the economy in the past, particularly our refusal to acknowledge and constructively address our financial circumstances on both a personal and national level, you need to read Shirley’s piece, Confessions of an Economic Simpleton.
** John Mayer doesn’t suck simply because he’s a pathetic scandal hound. John Mayer sucks because his music is shit. Even when he’s actually trying (the three songs per record that aren’t aimed exclusively at 16 year old girls), he’s sleep-inducingly dull.
*** Hank Williams III has my proxy on the rest of the argument against modern county: Play This Loud.
**** There are confessions to be made, and indictments to be handed out, regarding the sources of any artist’s neuroses. And perhaps it was Waters’ aim to splay his private life across the canvas in a manner the society he grew up in would abhor as a form of rebellion. In listening to The Wall, however, and hearing Waters bleat and screech about the endless injustices he suffered in a nation treating its citizens as barbarically as England apparently did (perhaps it was just his neighborhood), you can’t help wishing he’d developed a British “stiff upper lip” in place of his sense of self-importance.
***** Yes, I realize it’s almost impossible to compare something as awful as the Eagles to Pink Floyd. It’s also impossible to discuss self-important rock stars without dropping Don Henley’s name. He’s the archetype asshat of the category.
****** Not a joke. Along with providing an excuse to release a pile of outtakes from The Wall, the album is a response to Margaret Thatcher’s decision to go to war over the Falklands, an obscure and utterly useless British colony off South America the neighboring Argentinians had decided to annex. England famously won this dire conflict in large part by parking its ships just beyond the range of the invaders’ artillery, then shelling the shit out of the place. Waters later wrote a song critical of the use of such mechanized warfare during the Persian Gulf War titled “The Bravery of Being Out of Range.” Though Floyd employed every technological advance in its music, in matters of combat, he appears to be a stickler about fair fights.
“[I]t takes two to lie – one to lie and one to listen.” – Homer Simpson, “Colonel Homer” (1992)
Unless you’ve been in a coma, you’ve probably seen some snippet of the Senate grilling of Goldman Sachs’ executives. I won’t bother characterizing that embarrassment here. My earlier post on Twitter suffices:
The Goldman Senate Hearings. For the non-red light district crowd who’d otherwise never see a prostitute argue with a bookie.
But viewing that awful spectacle – watching a hopelessly out-of-her-depth lifetime government employee like Clare McCaskill attempt to cross examine a guy like Lloyd Blankfein on reconciliation of derivatives – an interesting question hit me.
Insider trading’s rampant, everyone knows that. A number of economists and policy wonks have suggested in the past the market might be more transparent if we admitted that fact and legalized the practice. In that same vein of thinking – in light of the obvious fact that humans will always commit frauds, more frequently the more money’s in play – I have to ask… Why not allow bankers to lie to one another?
Look at every disastrous policy or business decision creating the Great Recession and you’ll find a common element: lopsided informational asymmetries. The Goldman case is a perfect example. Paulson and Goldman knew something ACA probably didn’t. IKB apparently knew nothing, and took what it heard from the other side of the deal as fact. That or it thought it knew better than everyone else involved, and couldn’t have been more incorrect.
Either way, the reason IKB got taken was a simple lack of due diligence. The company was lazy with its research – assumed too much based on suspect sources, or simply didn’t analyze enough. But how do you cure that problem? We can’t regulate companies to competence, legislate their managers to shrewdness. Vigilance is only enhanced by a known, increased exposure to risk. And how better to reach that goal, keep every player on his toes, than allowing everyone to lie?
If every firm involved in the mortgage backed securities mess assumed every other firm was utterly, completely full of shit, the “marks” would have all been raging skeptics. No one would have accepted the surface valuations. Those Germans would have done their homework. Everyone would have done more homework. Paulson and Goldman wouldn’t have attempted to hoodwink a buyer the way they did. The chance of success would be too low.
I know what a lot of you are thinking… Madness! This has to be the stupidest goddamned thing you’ve ever written! (And you’ve written many stupid things!) We can’t allow dishonesty as a standard business practice – have our markets balanced on millions of people engaged in efforts to defraud one another!
Really? Are you sure that could never work? Because that’s exactly how our legal system operates.
I’ve sketched the various forms of “soft lying” lawyers engage in under the banner of “advocacy” numerous times in the past. This description, a mock obituary for a litigator from a piece called “Witness Preparation,” codifies them best:
[O]bituary writers can’t tell the truth. They can’t say that, among the many things [the litigator] might have been, he was undoubtedly a conniving, manipulative liar. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have been successful enough to warrant all that ink. “Lawyer” and “liar” aren’t mere sound-alikes – lying’s what we do. We just don’t call it that. We offer platitudes like “there are three sides to any story – plaintiff’s, defendant’s, and the facts… by fighting, we ferret out the truth.” That’s true, but it also means one side is lying all the time. Our lies, however, are never direct. Nobody counsels his client to bald-faced bullshit – that could cost you your license. We lie by omission, hide facts or hijack the focus, making the other side’s credibility the issue, obscuring the claims against our clients. We warp the language of an agreement into something its simple verbiage could never have intended. Most of us rationalize this by lying to ourselves – suspending disbelief and supporting our client’s most obscene prevarications. I’ve been dressed down several times by partners for merely joking in private that our client was lying.
“The Judge will decide what’s true. You aren’t the Judge. You have a duty to your client. You’re an advocate, and that is all.” Translation: “I know our client is lying. You know he’s lying. But we want his money.”
And those are just rationalizations for the neophytes and service partner shlubs. The big fish don’t need the justifications. They know that the trick to lying effectively is complete self-delusion. First, you have to make the facts your client gives you real in your mind, as though they actually happened exactly the way you’re going to tell them to the jury. Give them a history, some context, a back story. This sounds easy, but as the WMD debacle in Iraq eloquently illustrates, it’s actually hard as hell. The real facts have a pesky habit of surfacing at the worst times, and this causes serious problems. You might mix up your client’s story with the true facts during a hearing or trial. If one real fact sneaks in, the rest have a tendency to flood in through that hole in the dyke. If you start thinking about the truth, your conscience might kick in subconsciously, leaving you a less than zealous advocate.
But how do you bridge the holes in your client’s fantastic story and bury the guilt of abetting his lies? With the second half of that self-delusion – the victim complex. Your client’s been screwed by his opponent before, so even if he’s wrong on this claim, he deserves to hit the bastard for some money. Your client did something wrong, but something we all do from time to time… Why should he lose a fortune due to some bad timing? It’s not lying; you’re righting a wrong – getting even for the aggrieved. And there’s no justice if you lose. Once a lawyer’s made the leap to this pedestal, the actual bullshitting’s easy.
You might say that’s cynical. Most litigators with the capacity to honestly assess their trade would offer a different descriptive: Accurate. Call it whatever you like, “advocacy” is a form of spinning, misrepresentation by omission, and both are, well, lying. Unswayed? For context’s sake, consider some of our nation’s most illustrious litigators and trial lawyers, and a few stories about their work:
Bill Lerach: The dean of shareholder class action “strike” suits. Served two years in federal prison as part of a plea agreement arising from an investigation his firm for alleged payment of illegal kickbacks to ‘professional’ class action plaintiffs.
The Pinnacle Corp. Billing Fraud Investigation: Associate at multinational law firm took partner to state ethics board for fabricating 450 hours of work in a mere two month span.
The Ross Survey on Billing Fraud: Barely more than half of attorneys responding believed bill padding was unethical; nearly one third have engaged in it.
But I haven’t come to bury Caesar. I’ve come to offer litigators and trial lawyers as examplars – to ask if what’s acceptable for them shouldn’t also be so among bankers. If an “adversarial system” where opponents spin and misrepresent facts to unsophisticated jurors is a credible enough structure through which to find truth in an architecture where our liberty and property can be forfeit, why can’t a couple of equally sophisticated finance professionals bullshit one another? If justice emerges from attorneys weaseling one another in the litigation process, wouldn’t the most informed trades result from two parties openly trying to deceive each other, suspicious as lawyers, vetting every element of the opponent’s proposition?
Why do we preclude that in finance? Is it because the money the bankers are dealing with is so much greater than what’s at issue in the legal business?
Wall Street compensation pool (2009): $130 billion
Amount Fed earned on repayment of loans made to big banks and mortgage backed securities purchases (2009): $46.1 billion
Economic costs of tort litigation (2008): $254.7 billion
Is it possible the reason is emotional, or worse, political? Perhaps attorneys get a unique pass because, unlike bankers, who have to buy the government’s cooperation, lawyers directly control the legislative and regulatory processes? (Need I cite figures comparing the number of JDs and MBAs working in the federal government? Didn’t think so.)
Maybe it’s as simple as party. Democrats love lawyers. Can’t get enough of them. “We need to embrace complexity!” That was our law professor-cum-President’s charge. No problem in the world that can’t be solved with a new volume of rules. And no better source of campaign funding than the industry that makes its living navigating the effluent stream of them Washington widens every day. And Lord, do populists on the Left love their attorneys. Robin Hoods for the working man! The little guy’s only chance against the monstrous, heartless corporations! And we are in populist times, with the Left, as always, playing for emotional votes… demanding economic “fairness,” whatever that is.
Populists, however, are exceedingly simple creatures. They worship notions like consistency, howl at the suggestion of hypocrisy. If you let them run the asylum, some might soon start asking, “When we’re done fixing health care, and cleaning up all these banks, should we clean up the Court system, too? Reform the legal industry people have been complaining about for decades?” They might ask the Democratic Congress to kill its golden goose.
Of course, that’s never going to happen. Neither party would ever give up the contributions it gets from lawyers. But in a better world – an intellectually honest, logical one – that lawyers are allowed to deceive while finance workers may not should at least give the banks some leverage, an argument against absurd regulation. If the legal system decides matters involving our core, essential rights, and the process through which it finds truth is an admitted competition of lies, why hold something as amoral as finance – trades among the most sophisticated of institutional investors, no less – to a higher standard?
Why should Goldman be flayed for pulling the wool over a bank’s eyes the exact same way “Philadelphia Lawyers” pull it over juries’ every day? And if the answer’s something incoherent – “Because that’s just ‘the way it is,’ and lawyers are different than bankers” – then perhaps the Left-leaning populists backing Democrats should rethink their allegiance. In the sort of republic they favor, where fairness would be paramount, consistency the highest grace, how can a party, Congress, or Administration root out thieves and degenerates on Wall Street without first cleaning the rats out of its own basement?
That or just let the bankers lie, too. Either approach would be more credible.
Author’s Note: I recently found a file of outtakes from Happy Hour. This one’s a conversation from a bar, discussing career management, and why in all but a few circumstances, “vice” and “routine” are antonyms.
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“I don’t see how you can’t drink every night.” Martin looked perplexed.
“Do it every day and you can’t get drunk anymore.” I stubbed a smoke out in the last of the mussels. “If I have a bunch of these after a couple days off, I’m stung – professional grade loaded.” I held the glass of Stoli in the air, shaking the ice cubes.
“I need a Jim Beam and Coke when I get home.” Martin signaled the bartender. “Have one and you’ll have two. Two and it’s three and–”
“And so it’ll go.”
“The waitress, red hair…” He gave me the elbow. “Serious rack.”
“Push up bra.”
“Let a man dream.”
“You know why they wear black skirts?”
“Slimming. No shit.”
“Look a whole lot different in white.”
“I can suspend disbelief.”
“I wreck. It’s my thing.”
“Four, though… Four’s the line.”
“The line?”
“Never more than four bourbon and Cokes… On a weeknight.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’ve nothing against drinking every night. I go on runs, months at a time. But I try not to.”
“It isn’t the healthiest–”
“That isn’t it.”
“You’re a gym guy.”
“You think that’s about health?” I picked the spent filter up from the plate. “Vanity. That’s what that is.”
“You’re practically hitched.”
“It’s terminal.”
“Monogamy…”
“Vanity.”
“Honest for the shallow… give you that.”
“How are those exclusive?”
“What was the point?”
“Why not drink every night.”
“Why not?”
“Agreed.”
“Well, then that’s settled.”
“Wait — I meant — …I need a Red Bull.”
“And people pay for your advice…”
“It’s simple. You know how if you drink a lot Thursday, you can’t get drunk Friday?”
“I can get drunk Friday. I get drunk Saturday, Sunday–”
“Yeh, but you can’t get really drunk…” I waved at the redhead. “You know, damaged. Buzz gets weaker every day you sauce.”
“Commitment.”
“Commitment?”
“You versus the tolerance.” Martin fired back the last of his drink, an excuse to bring the waitress back again. “Beat it.”
“You never get as ripped like you’d been sober a few days. Push it all you like — you can’t lose your mind.”
“Madness.”
“You’re shitty.”
“Irrelevant.”
“If it’s routine, it’s a job. If it’s a job, it’s not a release. No release, where’s the holiday?”
“Wherever I’m sitting…” His voice trailed into the noise. Martin knew the point, but the ass on another waitress passing was five, six times more important. Always is. I lit another smoke and scanned the bar.
No use in debating the issue. Martin had been an advocate of sustained, daily escape as far back as our college days. Baking was the standard prescription, but in the past few months, as his job had turned to just shy of torment, he added an IV of Beam to the mix.
This made all the difference, of course, because liquor’s a far meaner poison, at least on a consistent daily level. Millions of people smoke pot before, during and after work every day. And if you consider the extent to which it keeps a whole lot of them from drinking, a vice that kills a worker’s next day production, the government should more than legalize it. If “[T]he business of America is business,” and the Republic needs us fixated on dreck sixty, eighty hours a week to keep the rocks rolling up the mountains, Uncle Sam needs to rethink his “Drug War”… Subsidize huge Turkish hookahs for every corporate suite in the country.
No one would work! Our economy’d collapse overnight!
This is what many might be thinking. But that would be undeserved props, because that isn’t thinking at all. See, our economy’s already fucked. The Market’s a gentrified dog track, this housing thing’s crashing like a stone, and the only thing we build here is Debt. Why? Because nobody likes what they do.
It isn’t the stress; it’s the Boredom. Slogging ‘round the cracker factory’s torture. And it’s all near equally vacant. Butcher, baker, credit default swap creator – work in the same trade every day and you’ll soon forget you’re alive.
But what the hell else can we do?If you can’t take that yoke of boredom, some other duller suit will, and that son of bitch’ll lap you. What’s the solution there?
Get out of our heads at the office. Seriously, why the hell not? Half the people there are already on anti-depressants. If we all smoked a lot more pot, there’d be much less employee turnover. When you’re stoned, angst’s an abstract concept, disgust too harsh to consider and stifled ambition too disturbing. You shove them miles out of your head, focus on your fractal screen savers… The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of the Place” – the song you hum every morning in the hall – is traded for “Oye Como Va.” Suddenly work isn’t so bad. You write some stuff, read some stuff, talk about nothing with some people and then they give you a check. You go home, bake some more, watch TV, fall asleep, wake up and do it again.
If only I could have persisted in something like that routine. I’d have probably made managing partner.
Hot damn… Another lovely week in this glorious year of the Lord, Two Thousand and Ten. The market’s coughing back all its gains, the jobless rate ticks to 10.1 and the latest ISM Survey has the service sector barely growing. The hot money’s racing overseas, the President’s got nothing but promises and our Congress only cares for re-election. $100 million in new AIG bonuses, populists howling for trade wars and everybody’s holding their breath… “What happens later this year, when home buyer tax credit’s gone?”
I don’t know and I don’t care. The best one can do is ride the waves, pray for some grand swell underneath, an unseen sudden surge, blasting us Up from nowhere – a new and monstrous Bubble gifted us straight from God.
But I’m not a man of religion, and I’m seeing few silver linings. And neither are you, I assume, or you wouldn’t be here, reading this. So rather than dwell on the Ugly, let’s talk cars once more. Because really, what’s more nostalgic – a better flashback to the Booms, and a better symbol of Escape – than a $500,000 Porsche that does 100 miles per hour in just over three and a half seconds?
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I’ve been told the Benz and the BMW are good cars, but Porsche is a whole other level in terms of both performance and durability. But I’ve heard this mostly from Porsche owners who seem to enjoy feeling superior to BMW and Benz owners. Agree?
Rosie: This brings me to a short rant about how amazingly stupid people are… Especially when it comes to an inability to distinguish the fact that two different hood ornaments on the exact same car do not amount to to different cars… But hey if VW and Porsche want to tear a page from the Camaro/TransAm play book, more power to them. A Porsche is a Volkswagen, granted so is a Veyron, but at least the Veyron has the decency to look like something other than a stretched VW bug. Of all of them, I’m probably most fond of the 2002ish M5. I though the car had understated good looks and one quick trip to Dinan and you had yourself something that would upset your neigbor with the Carrera 4, badly.
DK: It’s true. The older, air-cooled cars especially, are built like tanks. The interiors are kind of crude, but the engines use air to cool themselves, rather than water, so they don’t get traditional overheating problems, and they sound like Satan’s flatulence. They are also not easy to drive. The 1980′s Porsche turbo was known as the “lawyer killer”, because 300 horsepower, turbocharging (which gives you a very snappy power delivery), and primitive, VW-Beetle based underpinings are a handful for even the best driver.
Autoproficianado: It’s not just the owners. It is a better car. I’ve never been part of the “I’m better than you because I have (insert car/watch/black card)” crowd. Those guys have issues and also a script for whale cock-derived penis enhancement pills. By the way… Did you see this automotive press release when Dartz, the builder of the Russian SUV with the whale penis interior, realized they offended Pamela Anderson? We all know how much Euro-Russian trash loves some Hep-C blonde Canadians. Classic…
ARMORED CAR WITHOUT PENIS. LET’S SAVE THE WHALES.
One month ago DARTZ presented uberluxury armored car with whale penis interior – PROMBRON’ (ex.RussoBaltique), lot of people name this car as DARTZ.KOMBAT. As the world’s resonance was very huge and DARTZ got lot of angry e-mails from Greenpeace, WWF and also Pamela Anderson, DARTZ make strong decision to stop their plans regarding such interior.
“We have no any ideas to kill the whale or something like that. All we want – to make just luxury car. Real luxury car which will be world number one car. Our brand was started at 1869 when in Riga was opened Coach Factory or Russo Baltiysky Vagonnij Zavod – PBVZ, and first products was luxury train coaches. At 1907 was made a decision to open Car Department, and at 1909 first car left factory – the name of this car was RussoBalt. This was luxury and sport cars. At 1911 specially for Monaco Rally car got french style name – RussoBaltique. At 1912 factory made world first 4 x 4 wheel drive car, and at 1914 – armored car. All we want to unite luxury and armoring traditions of RussoBalt factory in one car, which brand celebrated 100 years now. At 1922 RussoBalt was renamed to PROMBRON’ (ex.RussoBalt).
We just looking for most expensive products for this car – and that’s why we choosed whale penis leathure when we checked it is most of most. After wave of protest we realised our mistake and make a decision not to use natural leathure at all. We will focus on world most advanced nanotechnologies to achieve interior highest quality using artificial materials which also was never used for cars. We want to tell our hello to all whales: “Our Sea Brothers! We all know that earth are stand on three whales – we will keep You live! We don’t Earth fall down to Ocean!”
Also we make a decision to pay more attention to glass and on our new car model we will use glass which will be made by special technology – from artificial grown chrystals, which will be gold sputerred to cut IR and UV rays, which make driving inconvinient when sun shine.
DK: As for my favorites; in my head, I know a brand new 997 GT3 is probably the best Porsche so far, but emotionally, I have to say that the last 993 Turbo, the last of the old school, air-cooled “true Porsches” is what I’d really want. But deep down, I know that my skill as a driver would match up with something like a base Boxster.
Rosie:917/30. The baddest, most powerful sports racing car ever built. (Yes, “Period“.) Mark Donahue was once asked if the car had too much power and Donahue was purported to say “A race car has enough power when you can spin the rear tires, in top gear, at the end of the longest straightaway.” This car was the vehicular end to the ’60s just as Altamont was the end of the ’60′s for hippie culture. Porsche came to the freespirited, the-only-rule-is-there-ain’t-no-rules Can-Am series and beat everyone so badly that the series folded. This car was Thompson’s high water mark in the desert.
Let me beat on Benz for a second. I drove a small Benz CLK convertible around a bit last year and I thought it was a piece of crap. The comparable Audi seems a much better vehicle in terms of handling, comfort and overall quality. Is Benz still suffering from its past “Chrysler-ization”? If so, does the cheapness extend to all models or just the lower end stuff? I remember the S Class doors on the ‘80s Benz sedans felt like bank vault doors. Is the S Class still maintaining that quality?
Autoproficianado: Ah, Chrysler… planned obsolescence. GLK meet Jeep Commander. R-Class meet Pacifica. S-Class meet dollar store quality chrome plastic grill. I mentioned taint licking a bit back and this brand is right up there. There’s a reason why thirty year old diesel Mercedes-Benzes are still running and seven year old ones aren’t. They suck. If Audi made this kind of crap over the last 15 years they’d be dead. Mercedes-Benz is lucky to have its branding strength. The legacy of being the best car money could buy. There was a time for that. But it’s over. Mercedes-Benz is a taxi cab in Europe. It’s a joke. But I have to give it to them. They sell a $200,000 CL65. It’s just a coupe. It’s not a supercar. People buy it because it’s a Mercedes-Benz. BMW, Audi and Lexus can’t do that off their brand image. The S-Class hasn’t been a real car since the S420. It’s plastic, cheap and boring. A lot of guys love their S63s, and it’s not a bad car, but the S-class just isn’t what it used to be.
DK: I don’t know if it’s “Chrysler-ization” as much as there was a big arms race between the luxury manufacturers to cram as much technology and gadgets into a car as possible, which resulted in a reliability meltdown. Audi stayed free from this with the A8, and while it was never popular, anyone who knew about cars would tell you that the A8 was a standout car. This is where the Germans lost a lot of ground to Lexus as well. When the LS400 came out, that S-Class was still built like a tank, but the gizmos were creeping in. The next generation, around 1999, the car got more expensive, and everything became computerized, the styling was a little less Germanic, and the lack of good electronics meant everything went bust. I mention Lexus because a lot of people got tired of having to bring their car into the shop every few weeks when the windows wouldn’t roll up, so they bought the cheaper, but still prestigious LS430, which was just as quiet, roomy and powerful, for a lot less money. BMW also managed to stay free of these gremlins, even with the radical new 2003 7-series, but that car is a different animal altogether.
The newest S-Class has rebounded spectacularly in terms of quality. It really is a world-standard car again. But I’d still take an A8. I think the new S-Class looks too much like a Hyundai. But those AMG cars with the big block V8s are mean as fuck.
Now, as much as I like Audis, having driven BMWs, I find the Audi’s handling a bit disconnected from the road. I like the feeling BMW gives that you’re actually connected to the pavement. Does Audi make a vehicle that handles in a comparable fashion? Why is Porsche the only actually-purchasable car that provides that feel?
Autoproficianado: I’m a HUGE Audi guy. I’ve driven all of them. I’ve had 3. If Audi was to be compared to my anatomy it would be my dick I love it that much. They’re a whale of a good time. (OK, I’m jumping the shark with that one). In truth, only the Audi RS cars give you great steering feel (RS4 and the non-US RS6). Their S and S-Line (sports package) cars aren’t that bad. But Porsche really is the best and there just isn’t a comparison. The only car in the BMW line up I would take is the upcoming M1 or the current 135i. This is a proper bimmer akin to its predecessor, the first M3 (E30). The current M3, M5, M6, X5 M and X6 M (the X6 being the dumbest vehicle BMW ever made) are all too heavy and lack any soul. A Porsche is always a Porsche. Its engineering starts at the steering wheel. Even their Cayenne SUV and Panamera sedan feel like a Porsche. What’s the difference between a Porcupine and a 911? The prick’s on the inside… But to anyone saying that the Porsche is a VW, drive one. I’d take a GTS Cayenne over the Audi Q7 over the VW Twat-rag (Sorry, Touareg) any day.
DK: Audi has always been handicapped by pedestrian Volkswagen underpinings. They are mostly front wheel drive, until the tires lose grip and the AWD kicks in. But they’ve taken huge strides, and have totally revamped their lineup to be more BMW like, with nicer interiors and aggressive styling. For the first time, the BMW 5-series, which is considered the best sedan in the world, bar none, is getting beaten by the Audi A6, that only a few years ago, was described by a journalist as “like driving a car with square tires”. The new S4 and S5 are true muscle cars, with great handling to boot, and the R8 is certainly the hottest car right now, as well as a revelation for supercars. I’d say they’ve made a total 180 degree turn with their lineup, and they’re finally being accepted as an equal to BMW, rather than Acura.
Rosie?
Rosie: I skipped the last questions because I’m not terribly impressed with an of the premium luxury cars. In my mind a luxury car should ride and feel like a ’66 DeVille. I just don’t have much to add. I have limited seat time in Audis but I was flat knocked out by their commitment to winning LeMans over and over again by pushing the envelope and doing things right every time. I don’t know that it transfers into anything on the street other than the RS6, but then again, the RS6 drew a lot of water…
But as to that unique BMW ride you mentioned, my wife owned a 2000 E46 convertible and two of my friends own E36 M3s. Both of those friends are (or were) professional racing drivers and still drive their ’99 M3′s nearly every day. I have a shit-ton of laps around the track in both cars, and have driven one of them off road in an almond orchard somewhere outside Bakersfield. Until about two weeks ago, however, I’d never driven one on the street. Within a day of doing so, I happened to also drive a 1999 C5 Corvette (with an automatic transmission). Now, the M3 had a 153 thousand miles on it. It had race compound DOT street tires, improved struts and springs and it was fitted with whatever you call “Monte Carlo Bars” when they’re not attached to a Mustang. The ‘Vette was my father’s car and I have to stipulate that every car my father has ever owned looks like he stores it at the wet end of a salt water boat ramp. And, if I recall correctly, I think the car competed in the 2002 running of the Fabulous Mint 400…
Anyhow, with those qualifiers in place, I will say that for pure sports car performance, handling, braking and acceleration, the M3 felt like it completely owned the Vette. I was surprised because I’ve been in a few Z06s that would turn your nut hairs white they run so hard. I’m blaming a lot of that on the auto transmission and also the overall build quality of the M3 versus the Vette. The automatic in the Vette is the same transmission that motivates such performance luminaries as the Chevrolet Suburban and, of course, it’s harder edged sibling, the GMC Suburban… And it feels like it. Transmission lag in the Vette would put the 930 Porsche’s infamous doctor-killing turbo lag to shame. Fortunately, the Vette is so ponderously overweighted and slow that it’s impossible to be caught by surprise with some sort of unexpected rush of performance. On the other hand, the M3 accelerated sharply (considering it’s an inline six that’s a pretty big compliment). The handling was tight and precise. The fit and finish of the car was still very well composed. Especially in light of the fact that at least 50,000 miles of its 153k miles were spent at the threshold, on the race track (And that doesn’t even consider the fact that I had removed the entire plastic nose undertray while trying to replicate the gravel stage of the rally in the aforementioned orchard. Ari Vatanen, I’m not).
However, when measuring sports/touring car performance there is one critical metric in which Vette absolutely destroyed the M3… Not looking like a social climbing jerk-off. Nobody in a Corvette has ever been accused of being yuppie scum. White trash, maybe. Erectile dysfunctional, perhaps. But never a yuppie. This was validated when I drove the Vette up PCH on a Saturday afternoon. People I passed smiled and waved at me. Two different, bona fide California bikini girls told me they liked “my” car as I was waiting at a traffic light. Other Vette owners gave me the high sign as I passed. Could you imagine an M3 owner waiving to another M3 owner based solely on the premise that they’re both driving and obviously fond of the same kind of car!? Fuck no. And frankly, for people who actually know haw to drive them, isn’t not looking like a yuppie douchebag what owning a serious performance car is all about?
One person in this group has outrun the police in a high speed chase. (Guess.) You’re being chased by the cops. What car do you want? And no, you can’t say “a truck” and change the hypo to allow yourself to go off road. You’re on a windy, desolate rural highway and the cop has the traditional V8 sedan with the big block engine and the special handling suspension.
Autoproficianado: Only one person? The typical police car is the Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor. This car has an electronically limited top speed (Model year 2006 and on) of 120mph. It’s loaded with batteries and other police gear. Most sports cars can get away from it. You’ll want a car that can do about 150mph. Most police won’t chase you at speeds in excess of 120mph even if they’re in an unmarked Camaro or Mustang that can go faster. They like to live too. NJ happens to have a no pursuit rule. So, it does matter where you’re being chased. This leads me to my next point: The answer is not a supercar… I know, sad right? What would be more thrilling than dusting the cops in a Lamborghini Murcielago LP670-4 SV? A good part of getting away is blending in. If you’re driving a super car they’ll find you. You can’t outrun the radio if you’re going to be spotted by every citizen with a cell phone or every cop in the state. Also, if you’re driving a European car in the sticks you’ll be found later as well. But who drives in the south anyways? The movie Ronin made the right choice. They chose an understated, powerful, AWD sedan; the S8. If you’re in an all wheel drive car and it’s raining, snowing or you’re driving aggressively in the bends you’ll have better grip than the rear wheel drive cop car. As much as I’d like an RS4 for this, it’s a little loud. The S6 and S8 are limited production and although subdued you’ll never see another one on the road to blend in with. My choice: the BMW 335i xi sedan with a manual and in silver. It’s not the best AWD or the fastest car in the world but it’ll do 150mph. It handles and there are loads of them on the road. If you do end up getting caught (down the road when you’ve returned to normal speeds) it’s a better defense to be driving a common car than if you’re driving a McLaren. Or maybe I’m wrong and the best thing is not having your license plate identified… and in that case it’s the Bugatti Veyron. SEE YA!
DK: I usually think about this in the context of the city, where discretion is key. So a Pontiac G8 with the V8 engine would be perfect, especially in biege. But on a rural road, it’s different. I’ll say this; most police cars are slow. The Ford Crown Victorias in particular, are not fast at all, their V8s are pretty anemic and the handling package isn’t all that great either. Even something like a V8 Dodge Charger can be outrun by a V6 Camry (theoretically).
The new Nissan GTR would be my pick. It’s not the most exciting car to drive, but it is one of the fastest, and it will never let you get caught out. The grip of the AWD and the amazing suspension mean that you can rape anybody short of Michael Schumacher, no matter what the weather, road surface or opposing car is. You would literally need a Ferrari Enzo or a Bugatti Veyron to match its performance. I drove a GTR recently, that had been bumped up to 650 horsepower, and let me tell you – the phrase “I nearly shit my pants” is now a horrible cliche, but it was entirely appropriate for this car. Not only would the cop not be able to catch you, he would have no idea where the fuck you went.
Rosie: I guess if a trophy truck is off limits I probably can’t ask for a Bell 222 or a 40 Skater with a pair of 1,600hp Sterlings, huh? OK, if I’m required to stay on the pavement, then I really see only one logical choice… The Yamaha R1. You have to have the chops and the balls to run it as hard as it can run, but if you’ve got the goods so does the R1. It has brutal acceleration, otherworldly brakes… and it’s small enough to hide behind a dumpster until the heat blows over.
Simple title, simple thrust. This is the first of a two part series on cars.
They’re the setting of so much else I’ve written – so many bare knuckle moments, frantic idiot runs with no destination in mind. Hardly surprising, of course. Cars are our every concept of freedom crafted into pistons and gears. When the walls close in as they do, your car’s your only escape – a three thousand pound metal tribute to the notion of Running Away – “Midnight Rambler” at eleven, highway laid out ahead. And even if it’s just your commute, a respite, a fantasy, that yes, if the day came where you gave up and snapped – if spending one more moment on the treadmill seemed a fate worse than terminal cancer – you could gas the motherfucker up, point it down the nearest open road and vanish into the Horizon.
Yes, I love cars. I’ve owned at least dozen in my life, and I’ve driven everywhere, all the time, even when I didn’t have to. But I’ve never discussed them here, at least in depth. Never mentioned any dream cars – what I’d buy if I won the Powerball.
That’s a shame, and it needs to be remedied. And considering we’re in the midst of a depression, what better time to discuss exotic sport coupes and 1.5 million dollar SUVs with gold plated windows and their own private supply of ultra exclusive vodka? Seriously – you haven’t tested the capabilities of any respectable SUV until you’ve taken the bastard four-wheeling in a snowstorm on three or four shakers’ worth of Red Bull and vodka… windows open, for proper communing with nature.
But enough about the night I got the truck hung up in that Nativity Scene (the AA classes are bad enough). Here it is, a blue ribbon round table on, simply, Cars.
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• Derek Kreindler is an automotive journalist based in Toronto. His work can be seen at various online outlets, and at his blog, Rich Corinthian Leather. Derek is fortunate enough to have driven everything from a Ford Escort to a 650 horsepower Nissan GTR.
• “Rosie Palmer”… Well, I asked Rosie for an intro.This is what I received:
In addition to being a life long motor sports enthusiast and a graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Major Saul Kellerman was the first Jew in space. The Major is currently on administrative leave from NASA pending the conclusion of an investigation surrounding unauthorized use of “zero gravity foot power” in the Discovery hangar (he assures us he was “out of town when that shit went down”). In his free time, he enjoys his collection of pre-war Indy cars and Bonsai farming. Major Kellerman is also socially conscious, the founder of several charity organizations dedicated to freeing “political prisoners” Ben Kramer and Randy Lanier.
Readers of the comments and a few pieces from the past might recognize Rosie under a different name. Readers of Happy Hour might know him from this description:
[O]ne of those rare personalities that defies simple definition – a huge, hulking freak, equal parts menacing and absurd and one of those strange minds who could be the smartest and dumbest person in the room at once… a violent force of nature – reckless, monstrous, unbridled by boundaries of money, time, distance or common sense, the sort of lunatic who’d start the weekend at the corner pub and end it two states away, penniless, wandering around a hotel with nothing but “How?” in his head.
That was a sketch from a time and place long past, what almost feels like a lifetime ago. But even now, yes – Rosie’s foot remains on the gas. He races cars. And in the right set of circumstances, just about anything else with an engine in it.
• “Autoproficianado” is a car lover who’s spent his entire career in the automotive industry, much of it in exotic vehicle market. He’s worked in several different positions in the field, along the way gaining knowledge on buyers, market trends and the nuts and bolts of the machines most people only dream about owning.
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To start it off, let’s have the conversation about dream cars. You can have any three vehicles on the world, any year model. Which do you go with?
DK: I’ve always hated this question, from the time I was three and people asked me “what’s your favorite car.” I never have an answer, because there’s too many. Most people gravitate towards sports cars or expensive luxury cars (and no doubt, I do too), but I have a lot of oddball choices. I like the Volkswagen Phaeton because it’s one of the finest cars ever made that nobody knows about (or would recognize). I like the Citroen DS because it’s still technologically advanced despite being made in 1959. Hell, I drive a Mazda Miata, which brings up all sorts of shit-talking from my friends (but car people know it’s the best sports car this side of a Porsche 911).
Rosie: As you know, I’m largely an American car guy. Big loud and shiny. It’s basically my measure of anything I consume. It can be cars, girls, food or booze… It’s got t0 be big, loud and shiny. I mean hell, I drive a lifted F250 diesel crew cab on a long haul commute in infamously bad California traffic. That said, I do have some personality quirks (defects) that push me to be somewhat inconsistent in my tastes (the Per Jouet/MD 20/20 night at the beach, for example). So my choices are kind of all over the road, so to speak. Anyhow, enjoy my efforts to make myself look stupid…
1. 1988 Nissan GTP ZX-Turbo (either the Lola 810 based car or the Trevor Harris revised car). I want to say the Mazda 787B LeMans winner, with its sexy and otherworldly 4 rotor Wankel engine. You know Wankel dreamed the basic combustion cycle for that engine while he was asleep. Maybe it’s the mushrooms, but man, that really freaks me out. That said, the Nissan is a sentimental favorite of mine.
2. Hard not to pick that Russian SUV with the whale cock interior… I’m just sayin’… (Although I will admit that the thought of sitting on a whale penis is a bit, um fruity… but hey if you’re going to go fruity, might as well be a size queen!)
3. OK, I know… I know… I’ve got to be a good guy and pick one “real’ car that I would actually drive around, huh? Shelby Cobra. A 427 car. I know the “purists” will claim that the 289 car built the racing history but the 427 car is too much of everything, which as Bob Weir will tell you, is just enough… If you don’t already own a Cobra, then it has to be on your wish list, otherwise your penis will fall off (I’m starting to see some sort of theme here, I guess I shouldn’t have watched that John Waters stand-up special last night).
4. Since that second choice was clearly a fraud, I’ll give you my third choice. One problem, my third choice is a tie between two different cars… I’m making a mockery of this already aren’t I? Anyhow, the opening sequence of Cannonball Run should put the Lamborghini Countach LP5000S on anyone’s top three list. The sound of the motor, the over the top looks, Adrienne Barbeau’s enormous breasts… It’s on my list and I don’t give a crap if I have to park it in my living room and just look at it because it doesn’t run. The other car is a car I fell in love with as a kid. It oozes style, Americana and Elvis driving from the back while his pet monkey rides in the driver’s seat… It’s the 1958 Eldorado Biarritz. From the stainless steel roof to the “space age” jet intake trim on the sides, nothing says we dropped to A-bombs on your ass like the top of the line ’58 Caddy.
No other car appreciates in value while you’re driving it. Economically, if you can buy one it will never cost you anything. They only made 106 in different variants and it was made in an era where CAFÉ (emissions regulations) and DOT safety requirements (ABS, Airbags and electronic driver aids which add weight and take from the driving experience) didn’t limit what type of car you could build. The driving dynamics are uncompromised. A manufacturer couldn’t build one today if they wanted to. You can’t get one. They’re just not for sale. If someone would sell it to you, you’d be lucky to get it for 5 million dollars today. That number will continue to rise exponentially over time. It’ll be worth 10 million dollars in 2015; I promise you. The car does at least 231mph. It’s made of carbon fiber, Kevlar, magnesium and gold foil. It looks like a space ship under the skin. Today’s supercars don’t use some of the technology these guys were using 20 years ago. It’s got the doors, looks, performance and exclusivity of the quintessential supercar. It’s a three seater with the driver’s seat in the center position and a passenger seat on either side. The car is so awesome that you can drive it with your wife in one seat and your girlfriend in the other and both of them are cool with it. They’ll blow you as you warp past the 200mph club. They’ll have to, it gives that much wood. It is my unicorn. I want one like a Christmas puppy.
Three others that touch my heart and cause me to grow in the pants:
Bentley Continental SC – This cars’ got it like stacks and hoes. Pimp.
I understand people buying exotic sports cars, but one thing that’s always baffled me is why people buy things like Bentleys or Rolls Royces. Aside from the “I have fuck you money” cachet, what do these cars offer that one can’t find in an Audi W12 or a Benz 600?
DK: Once upon a time, buying a Bentley or a Rolls Royce actually meant something. Literally everything was bespoke, they weren’t gaudy (Bentley didn’t even advertise their horsepower until recently, merely stating it was “adequate”.) Kings and statesmen were chauffeured in a Rolls Royce, while rogue gentlemen types with too much money and time drove Bentleys – and they were monsters. Now they’re based on BMWs and even Volkswagens (in the case of the Bentley). The Bentley Continental is the same as an Audi A8 W12 and the Volkswagen Phaeton.
But buying a German car used to be a true exercise in “fuck you” money. Before the 190E, or 0 down $299 a month deals on a C230, a Benz came only in a sedan, with a black interior, vinyl seats and a diesel engine (0-60 time estimated at 20 seconds) with a 4-speed manual. And it cost more than a loaded Lincoln or Cadillac (back when Cadillac meant something, too). So really, buying a Mercedes wasn’t a rational decision, it was a “fuck you I’m rich and have avant-garde tastes” purchase. BMWs were something else; some magazine writers declared that BMW’s were the finest driving machines available, and people bought into it. Then, like Rolex (which makes good, rugged, but not overly sophisticated watches) they became a yuppie status symbol, and cars like the E30 came out, which were little more than race cars and too raw for the L.A. law set – they bought the 318i, debadged of course.
Rosie: The only guys I know who own Bentleys are Armenian pimps and MMA fighters… I suppose you could extrapolate what you will from that… There’s an element of perverse criminality that’s drawn to those cars. Any time you see a fat, old, white guy driving one rest assured that he made his fortune the old fashioned way; white collar crime.
Autoproficianado: Most exotic sports car owners don’t even know how to drive their cars. Half of these guys just want to have the prestige. It’s amazing what you can put a Ferrari badge on that sells. Ferrari socks, really? This idea of prestige goes for Bentley and Rolls-Royce owners too.
Bentley and Rolls-Royce are great cars, however. Bentley offers a Continental GT Coupe and it’s a sports car. The base GT is 550hp, AWD and at 100 mph it feels like you’re standing still. It has grip for days and the passing power on the highway is unbelievable. The SuperSports version at 621hp competes with a 911 turbo. It’s ridiculous for a 5,000 lb car to do 0-60 in 3.7 seconds. The Rolls-Royce is remarkably quiet, smooth and comfortable. There’s nothing like it. Where Maybach is just an oversized S-Class from Mercedes-Benz, the Rolls-Royce is an experience. The interior is so quiet you feel like you’re in space. This feeling is complimented by their starlight LED headliner. There’s nothing cooler than coach doors that close themselves. The engineering that goes into their umbrellas is uncompromising. The car is so solid and the suspension so compliant that when your driver hits speed bumps at 40mph your champagne won’t spill from your RR engraved crystal glasses. The attention to detail, the hides and grain are so luxurious that it’s like wearing a tux. It just feels good. Other good feelings come from the ample space to be taken advantage of in the back.
OK. No one needs one.
People buy these for status but also because they’re bored with being “Strivers Class.” It’s been said a man is only as loyal as his options. When a guy gets to the point where he believes that everyone has a 911 Turbo he needs something else. If people didn’t feel that way then boutique car companies like Spyker and Pagani wouldn’t exist.
Let me narrow the focus a bit. A lot of lawyers read this site, and lawyers like to buy the upper middle class status cars – Lexus, Benz, Audi, BMW, Porsche. What would you say are the best cars in the “striver’s class” vehicle demographic – say, between $40k and $100k?
Rosie: OK, I’m actually going to try to field this one seriously because I’m sick of watching people who only make a hundred or hundred and a half a year piss away their salaries on an A6 that frankly won’t impress anyone this side of an under aged Mexican car-jacker. The people who live in the “striver’s” demographic aren’t going to buy the best car in their price range so it doesn’t really matter what you tell them to buy. Personally, the G8 GXP and the CTS-V would be my choices, because they’re American cars and they’ve got the goods. Buying these cars funds those grandparents that put you though law school’s pensions. And don’t you think you owe them a bit more that referring to them as “quaint” or “deceased”? Additionally, they’re great cars. Flat out better cars than any of the Lexis, BMWs or Infiniti that I’ve driven. I guess, if I was going to do everyone a favor, I’d strongly endorse the AMG C63 to every last “striver” I could get my hands on. The car is a rocket ship and the vast majority of these people will break their asses in no time. And let’s face it, wouldn’t the world be a better place with less of the type of people who buy C Class Mercedes?
And while I’m on my bully pulpit, I want to make one thing virtually clear. Adult men don’t drive 3 Series BMWs (M3 coupes excepted). And adult men don’t drive Convertibles unless they’re made by Cadillac or Lincoln and unless they were built before 1973. I hope people are taking notes, because this is Important. Nothing says “my life didn’t turn out quite the way I expected” like a 35 year old guy in a 330i.
Autoproficianado: The answer is Porsche. Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BMW and (unfortunately held in the same esteem) Lexus are all competing with each other. The Porsche is in a different league. The steering feel, handling, performance and quality can’t even be compared to in the same breath as the others. If you’re “striving” and you buy a Lexus, BMW, Mercedes-Benz or Audi you’re not really setting yourself apart from anyone else. You’re just competing. With a Porsche you can spend tens of thousands of dollars on custom options and even get leather on your a/c vents. The other brands don’t offer that level of bespoke.
The best of each brand available today:
Audi- NO, not the R8 V10. It’s over 100K (get the Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 instead if you’ve got the bread) and you can’t get the Q7 V12 TDI (Turbo diesel) OR the RS6 in the states. The RS5 is not out yet and they don’t make the RS4 anymore…I guess I can’t eat the cake right now so I’d take the S5. It’s sexy and the first real coupe Audi’s offered in decades.
BMW – 135i or upcoming 1 Series M. It’s light, small and fun.
Mercedes-Benz – G55 (A low mileage used 2009 barely makes the cut at 99K or less). I actually like something offered by Mercedes-Benz and it’s this car. It’s Mercedes-Benz at its best. The truck is 30yrs old. They stuck the biggest motor they could into it. It’s a big obnoxious heavy box like all the other Mercedes-Benz’s. It’s stupid. But hey, it chirps in 2nd gear and for that I love it.
Lexus – I hate every car they make. I hate them like I hate Ferrari. Oh, by the way. FUCK FERRARI.
What would you say are the ultimate sucker cars in that demographic, the ones people overspend on for status, but aren’t worth near the sticker price? I want to know who I can smugly feel superior to in the parking garage (besides the guys driving top end Range Rovers).
DK: Well, for starters, any Land Rover or Range Rover is a piece of shit. They were once good cars that you could take deep into the bogs and moors of England , go hunting, then take your wife to the theatre in them. Now they have grilles that look like an electric razor, abysmal reliability, and are driven by people who feel threatened by the Mercedes G-Wagen; which is also a military vehicle, originally developed for the Shah of Iran and used by a lot of armed forces, but they swaddled it in leather and wood and people pay $100,000 for a truck that’s no good in urban conditions
The biggest sucker cars are ragtop sports cars, that weren’t designed as ragtops to begin with. So the Boxster, which everyone dumps on, is actually a dynamically superior car to the 911 Cabriolet. The engine is better placed, it’s a lighter car, and it’s been braced significantly to compensate for the rigidity that’s lost when you remove a car’s hard roof. You will regularly see people taking their Boxsters to the track. The 911 droptop is a total poseur car, and the BMW M3 Cabriolet is even worse. They are always driven by douchebags or trophy wives, and always automatic.
Rosie: The top tier Japanese luxury cars. Quality is perception only. Depreciation rivals that of American cars. Ride quality is poor and the greatest performance improvement they’ve come up with is the eccentrically shaped throttle body actuator which makes it feel like the car is accelerating rapidly at low speed by opening the throttle in a nonlinear fashion. If I ever want to die in a fiery inferno, I’m going out like Richard Pryor, not in a Toyota with an ECU that says “HAL 9000” on it…
Because I try to avoid driving these cars, I don’t have a lot to go on here. So I tagged in a friend of mine who’s an FIA GT series race engineer in Finland to get the dope. He stated, unequivocally that any modern Ferrari is a sucker’s bet, a car for people with little knowledge of exotics… An experiment that usually ends after that one failed attempt to be a “high roller.”
As an aside, I have a good friend who bought a Porsche GT3RS last year. He’s since returned it to Porsche under California ‘s Lemon Law. The car was a pile of crap that began using oil at just over 1,000 miles. The dealer and the factory treated him very poorly. On of my favorite comments he made to me during the process was “Thank god I didn’t sell my Ferrari.” You know what they say about opinions and assholes…
Autoproficianado: The answer is any Lexus. More than the BS “Let’s put the same absurd 6.3 V8 engine in every one of our cars!” AMG series Mercedes-Benzes. More than the M brand BMWs that are fat pigs. BMW hasn’t put out a good M car since the Euro E30 or the E36 lightweight. Lexus just sucks taint in the most BDSM way possible. Now, within Porsche, the sucker car is the 911 Carrera. For less money one should buy the Cayman S and they’ll have a MUCH better Porsche. The base 911 is a total sucker car and is solely bought due to status. Lexus is really a Toyota. It’s not “like” a Toyota. It is a Toyota. No manufacturer rebadges a car worse (outside of the US). They’re boring to drive. Everything is fake: the wood, faux tanned leathers, “aluminum” trim etc. What’s the difference between a Camry and an IS250? Not a thing, except for the 32% markup. Suckers… We all know Lexus didn’t help the Nazis kill Jews but that’s not a good enough reason for anyone to buy one. If one has an apprehension against buying German they should get a Cadillac CTS-V and be American. Recall the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Before anyone mentions the LF-A, it’s $400,000! For a Lexus! That’s more messed up the Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
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