Blogging elsewhere

I'm in that awkward transition from one blog site to the other. I like blogger, but I'm currently trying out wordpress, so to view my current blog post, go to:

www.alexanderkblog.wordpress.com

thanks!

-Alex-

Smurfette of the north and heroes of old...shows.

I have a question: when did videogame producers get crazy cute?

And the producer of Assassin's creed, no less. Game producers are usually eccentric Japanese guys or white guys with patchy hair and voluminous belly buttons filled with cheeto crumbs. I think we have a smurfette situation here.

Too bad she's canadian.

There's also an interesting thread going on at FinalGear's forums titled "Car heros of your childhood." I have indeed added my two cents, quite possibly and completely inadvertently in order of influence. What are your car past car heroes? what are your current ones? tell me. tell FinalGear, too.

I'm going to have the Magnum P.I. theme stuck in my head all day now. sweet!

Things I don't like about the Tesla

So I'm writing an article about the Tesla Roadster for the spring issue of the magazine and I'm having a difficult time finding anything good to say about it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm super pleased that I get to write about it and I'm equally excited that's going to be the featured auto piece, it's just a car I fundamentally hate. Here's the deal:

The concept of an alternative energy powered car is nothing new. First of all, nobody ever liked paying for gas, even when it cost less than a buck a gallon. The other thing is since we've been this plucky, advanced society, we've always looked for new ways to implement our new technology into our everyday lives. For the most part, we've been successful. Everybody got a refrigerator after WWII, for starters. speaking of the war, a great example of instituting new methods of propulsion is the jet engine. that came about and they immediately went to work attaching them to planes, for obvious reasons. you better believe that someone tried sticking them on cars, which clearly never developed outside of the odd mechanic with a lot of spare time and, disturbingly, a spare jet.

I dare mention the Ford Nucleon, a car that would have destroyed a lot more than the climate.

Since we're a society that's clearly adopted electricity to power everything, it's not hard to imagine that people would want to make our cars run on it too. I'll even go so far as to say its not a bad idea. what I don't like is the extra baggage attached to the concept. Those who want electric cars don't want them simply for what they are, they want them because they hate conventional cars for some reason or another. For one person, it's the environment, for the other is it's the car's fault we're dependent on foreign resources. I don't fault this reasoning. I think these are perfectly valid arguments that should be openly discussed. the thing that bothers me is that these opinions primarily come from a population of people who morally despise the car.

These people don't think the car should be enjoyed, basically. they think that the car shouldn't be anything than a method to go from point A to point B. There should be no reason to have high performance automobiles that go incredibly fast, as fast is dangerous and so on.

To me, these people are dead. And I don't mean that in a corny, mafioso kind of way. I picture these people sitting in a pea green family room eating a "perfectly acceptable" bread pudding, daring never to experience the zest of a single cheeto. This mentality isn't the way to lead your existence. Everything can't be "bad". Yes, there's a line, and we have legal and spiritual guidelines to help us along the way, but those are in place essentially to make sure we don't hurt ourselves and each other while we're out there living. And when I say out there living, I don't mean doing what we need to do solely so we can sit there and continue to breathe for our allotted time. That's called a Tree.

I'm talking about enjoying ourselves, doing things that excite us and make ourselves happy. We're all here, on earth, existing for one reason or another with no instructions as to our general purpose, so we make our own: we make the time we have enjoyable and do what we can so the next lot that comes by can do the same. hey, it's the least we can do.

Part of that is taking what we have and know and improving it. we run, so we try to run faster. we eat and drink, so we try to make food and drink more enjoyable. We have art because we found that we can make things we like to look at and listen to, so we make more. We made this thing called the car, and it's fun, so we try to make them go faster because we can, and we should. Of course a lot of it is dangerous and of course it's scary, but these are poor reasons to not do something. Just ask anyone who's ever accomplished anything. And I do mean anything.


I've said all this because the main reason why I dislike the Tesla so much is because it isn't just another way to have a car to be fast and enjoyable, it's fuel for the argument. What should be a welcome addition to the automotive world, or at the very least a middle ground for the environmentalist and auto enthusiasts, is basically a way for those of ill intent to get rid of the conventional car. People will continue to make others think the internal combustion engine is a "bad" thing on a moral level, they'll hold the Tesla up as an example and say "here's a way to do all the things other cars do without being 'bad'." everyone will then turn on the car as we know it, forgetting all the happiness and success it brought us for the past 100 years.

I don't mind alternative methods of doing things. I don't mind alternative thinking and opinions on issues, either. What I don't like is making who we are and what we do morally reprehensible, and the Tesla's the brainchild of people who think they're better than everyone. It's the attitude embodied in the Imac ad campaigns as well.

The Tesla Roadster isn't here to make the automotive world better, it's here to be a dick.

Answering the call

it's 2:30 in the AM and I should be sleeping, but...well, here we are.

Highlights since October..

Still working for the magazine. I've settled in nicely, hiring photographers to cover events and parties, writing articles, and doing general PR stuff.

I had a great test drive for an article, a SMART fortwo. A car So tiny and so different, I have to abuse italics just to get the point across. this deserves its own blog (soon, I mean it this time).

went to Rhode Island with Melissa. Newport is a sweet town.

plenty of other stuff happened as well, it's all just a little difficult to recall at this hour.

So why the insomnia? For starters, I rarely sleep well. I don't think I've slept on a decent schedule for 6 years. I tend to stress a lot. a lot. so much so that I have to abuse italics again. I also suffer from depression and OCD. I don't talk about it. at all. ever. with anyone. I don't know why I'm blogging about it now, but maybe it's because I think it effects the relationships I have with people. My skittishness and odd behavior (not returning phone calls, breaking plans, not being able to maintain steady friendships, general xenophobia, lack of motivation, self loathing) could possibly stem a great deal from that.

How's that for insight? you thought this was going to be about cars.

Since Christmas, I've spent every night playing Call of Duty 4. Now its far from unusual for me to have marathon videogame sessions, but this time, its harder to stop. and when I'm not in front of the Xbox, I'm yearning to get back. It's become a white 20 gig crack pipe and I don't know how to put it down. The only answer I can comprise is, oddly enough, a very unsoldierly concept: retreat.

I'm retreating. I'm hiding. all the things that normal people have to deal with during their daily lives has, for me, become extremely hard to deal with, so I'm focusing on fake people and fake events just because it let's me not be me for a while. when I get interrupted, I get agitated and snappy to people. when I have real things to do, I put them off. when I'm forced to maintain a semblance of being a social entity, I dread every minute until I have to stop and leave.

It's not a violence thing. I don't lust after the thrill of causing simulated harm to caricatures of Islamic extremist or Russian mercenaries. Indeed, I'll begin to sympathize with my pixelated foe. I wonder what terror ran through a soldier's mind as he stormed forward to protect his beliefs, armed with his killing skills and automatic rifle. his life steeped within conflict and training, he must have possessed a battle-hardened soul that wouldn't hesitate to cut down a platoon of men on the battlefront given the chance. amid the shouting, the strobe of muzzle flare, he presses forward, turns the corner to find...me. with a double tap of my MP5, he's fatally wounded and drops to the floor. And then I think, after his whole life, his whole adult life that was dedicated to fighting, after becoming so dull to the fact that he kills people, it all went away in that moment he met me. mainly because I was a fraction of a second faster than him. what fear is going through his head as he lies there? what a nightmarish realization he must be having. his life is over. even as he squirms in digital blood, he fires his sidearm desperately in my direction, desperate to kill, desperate to kill me. I shoot him again.
this is just a videogame. these things actually happen to real people, and its frightening to put yourself in their shoes, if only for a moment.

Maybe I'm drawn to the sense of duty. I've always liked the mindset and efficiency of the Military. things happen. shit needs to be done, so shit gets done. its that simple. your hands will get dirty and you will be in pain and you will not like it, but you will do it anyway because it is your duty. Duty tends to be something difficult to define. It usually comes down to something that one is obligated to do. I think that I translate it a little differently. I think that to me, duty is another word for purpose. In the game, I have a clear cut purpose: to go over there and physically stop those who want to do bad things. It's an honorable notion, even if it's fake.

I think I'm just at a loss for what my purpose is. I don't know what my duty is. You'll probably say cliche's like " to yourself" or " to loved ones", and you'll probably be right. still...I don't know.

I don't often go on about stuff like my "feelings" and crap. it's well beyond my comfort zone.
don't know how to end this either. I just know that Capt. Price of the SAS 22nd regiment probably wouldn't approve.

Bentleys, Top Gear, and the magazine machine

So I work at Elements Magazine now.

It just kind of happened, really. I wrote a couple articles for them, which they enjoyed, and they needed some help around the office, and after a casual conversation with the brothers Neher (Scott & Eric, EM editors) decided to have me on board. All of this, I'd be remiss not to mention, is due to Melissa for thinking of me when assigning those two articles and for mentioning my illuminating greatness to E&S when they mumbled about needing extra help. I love you, Melsh.

It's been a full week and I can say this with absolute certainty: I love my job.

As stressful as its been, being thrust into the exposed gears of a hectic magazine machine, I've found myself fitting well as another cog instead of grinding it to a halt like an errant monkey wrench. I like the people, I like the work, and when I get something done, I feel good about it because it's not easy, so I feel satisfied that I accomplished it. Most importantly, however, is that it's fun.

All this was necessary preamble for what I really wanted to write about, and that is my first test drive.

Cars have alot of real estate in my heart. They are predominant land owners, up there in status with the "Melissas" and the "Indiana Joneses"....and "Star Warses".. anyway.

I spend a very large part of my day watching or talking about Top Gear, my favorite show which mostly consists of three guys driving cars, talking more about how they make a person feel than inane technical specifications. they talk about the mysterious "X-factor" that cars have, that hard to define quality that makes them so endearing, something I can relate to a great deal. I have longed fantasized about being a host of this show, driving supercars around an airport runway, making snide comments about the french, and arguing why this or that car is awesome or terrible. I'd be a happy man if I could, in small way, break into this life of writing about cars, which is great, because then this happened...

I get a message from Scott that basically says his buddy Michael Todd (owner, Champion motorgroup) told him that they were revealing the new Bentley Continental GT Speed, a 600bhp version of their coupe, and asked if I wanted to shoot over there the next morning to check it out. Hmm, what to say.

The next morning I drive out to Republic airport in Farmingdale. I'm supposed to be at Hangar 6, and I'm not exactly sure where I'm going, but I'm following this red Bentley with a confused man in it, presumably lost as well. I arrive, Valet, and I'm greeted with the spectacular sight of a gleaming white hangar filled with private planes and Bentleys on display, and sitting in front, like a supercar tribunal, is a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, a Gallardo Superleggra, and a Mercedes SLR McLaren.

"Welcome to automotive journalism," they seem to say.

I registered and was told that they are trucking groups of 6 or 7 out to the airstrip (fun fact: in what I'm told is the old "G-unit" van). I hung out in this plane hangar, admiring how it was all painted white and was incredibly clean, then immediately purchased one for my fantasy house in my head.

I hung out with this guy, whose name I forgot, for a while who looked a bit out of place. I don't think he was even signed up for a test drive. I'm not sure where he was from, but he said he "got an email" and decided to attend. he was a slightly large black guy, bit sweaty, and he stood out to me because, while the rest of the people there were sharp dressed moneymakers (as in "yeah I just flew my family down to Bermuda", "my neighbor just got a ridiculous Ferrari", etc.-type people) who looked bored while waiting to test drive so they can go back to the office, this character was standing in the middle of the hangar staring at "the tribunal" with a smile from ear to ear. I liked him immediately.

So "G-unit" finally shows up, and I'm called to join the next group ( mysterious black guy came. just jumped in, taking someones spot, confusing the women attempting to organize the event) and we headed out to the airfield. we step out and two Bentley Speeds are lined up on the runway in an oval track made up of traffic cones. These things are gunmetal, with orange-y type leather, and it looks like a socialite who wants people to think he's tough, but he's too fancy to pull it off. no one's buying the hard act, even though he's got holes drilled into the pedals.

Two guys introduce themselves as instructors from Skip Barber racing school and tell us that they'll take each of us around on the course, and then switch seats, and we give it a go. I every much enjoyed standing around on the runway watching these Bentleys taking runs through this track, so I hung back until I was last. I sat in the passenger seat and Travis, one of the instructors, explains the test drive they've set up. the first thing is to floor it off the line, then half-brake at the next set of cones and glide through the top of the oval. after that, weave through the slalom that they set up, gun it again, then at the end of the straightaway, break hard.

Travis takes me through it and we switch. I'm nervous as I keep thinking that this is my first time doing something like this, and I don't want to go too fast and f-it up, nor do I want to go too slow. so nervous am I that the first thing I do after I buckle in is I begin to adjust the mirror, so, y'know, I can see all the nothing and no cars behind me on the test track.

The Shift is placed into "sport" and I'm off the line in a yacht with wheels. the Bentley is so plush and the torque is so immense, its as if an invisible force is thrusting you into a luxury hotel suite. as soon as I'm off the line, my nervousness vanishes, and after lightly breaking at the start of the oval, I throttle through the rest of it, much to the displeasure of Travis. We speed through the slalom at about 40 or so, then after which, I floor it again to the breaking line. now, I've watched this thing stop at high speeds 12 or so times already, and it all seemed so gentle. I really want to see what this can really pull off so at 90mph I slam the breaks as hard as I can, resulting in a low baseline of break pads doing their thing and this hiss of air, as if the suspension is made primarily of marshmallows. and that was it. if I tried to do that in, say, a Mustang, my lunch and head would be laying next to each other on the dash. In this, I wasn't even thrown forward really, it all felt really...polite.

And that was it: this polite, leather, marshmallow affair. Not a bad morning's worth of work.

Thunder Horse

I'd like you to meet someone...

This is Bucephalus.




(more pics to follow)

I saw Ocean's 13

attraction is powerful and complicated.

At first, it can all seem so simple: that girl is pretty, I desire sex, this car goes fast, I want one, that kind of stuff. even when it gets a bit more involved, you can still reasonably see where it comes from. wealth and fitness for example. "wealth can get me stuff, and fitness will make me strong and desirable" you would say, and this is without mentioning the want for security, but you see what I'm getting at.

I can't, however, explain the ultimate attraction. the attraction of cool.

Half the time, we can't even agree on what "cool" is. In most of what we do, the coolness is rigorously disputed. Are cars cool? yes. Is knitting cool? no. and again, it gets complicated. are, say, computers cool? no, they're "nerdy", cool's difficult little roommate. And if all the scholars of cool are of like mind on one thing, it is that nobody wants nerdy. the weird thing is, nerdy is more useful than cool. nerdy gets things done while Cool wafts around uselessly, flipping his collar up then back down, again and again, undecided.

But no, coolness will prevail each time to permeate the hearts of men. Don't let the history books fool you, either. whatever reason they give for most of those events were really just to be cool. What really happened was stuff like "Shall I paint this cave? yes, then it would look cool!" or "Hey, let's hang around that Jesus guy, he seems quite cool." Napoleon was desperate to be cool and he was short, and thus spent his life overcompensating. Hitler's ideals and his slaughtering of thousands was so severely uncool that the globe erupted in probably the coolest war ever, just to make up for it. people will die for cool.

Bearing all this in mind, the ultimate coolest of cool things has to be, without question, the Caper.

And I don't know why.

I Cannot begin to explain the allure of watching or participating in a convoluted heist so intricately woven that the slightest deviation from the set plan would be devastating to the participants; the..I dunno, Caperists. and the more complicated the better. if you have 14 parts of the plan I need 46 scenarios of potential failure and 5 solutions to each of them.

Such is the case with Ocean's 13. With the previous two installments, we took the time to learn about the motives and quirks of each participant and the dangers of failing such a complicated and risky venture. we watched them assemble the first time, unsure of their capabilities or limitations and sat with held breath until the very end where we sighed in relief. we then saw the crew being pursued and tested from seemingly everyone. would they get the money to save their lives? would mysterious dancing frenchman show them up in the end? would Michael Gambon magically appear? we were clueless. This, however, is not the case with the latest adventure.

By now, we know that Danny Ocean and his numerical accompanists have pretty much thought of everything and will have, as if by magic, planned for any scenario, no matter how unlikely. so well do we know this, that we're not teetering on the brink of a theater seat, we're lying back, comfortably, with our feet up and casually eating twizzlers, just waiting to see what happens.
the filmmakers know this and that's why they've done away with the story almost completely, and wisely I think. Why wrack your brain attempting to create conflict to seemingly impervious wizards of happenstance and forethought? just harness the dizzying allure of the heist and weave a complicated plan with back-ups and back-ups to the back-ups, and conspire against conspirators while triple crossing the double crossers.

The end result is an hour and a half long Rube Goldberg Machine. One incredibly long and complicated set-up that leads to an inevitable and obvious result. you know what will happen, but the route they're taking to get there is just so outlandish and ridiculously convoluted, you enjoy just watching all the pieces work together. this is why I enjoyed this movie, the attraction of the complicated and ultra cool Caper.

Or maybe it's just Don Cheadle.

-Alex-