Speed

 Photo By Alex Zhao

My land speed record when I used to drive cars ,which was a long time ago (I take a taxi if I really need to now), was 156 mph down the German Autobahn in a Brand new 1993 Corvette, notable for it's incredible torque during acceleration with a 405 break horsepower 5.7 litre V8 engine, platinum tipped sparkplugs, power inflatable adjustable leather recarro seats and most importantly the digtal speedometer readout which explains the exact speed rather than rounding it up to 160 mph which is what I'd normally do as an advertising professional referring to an analogue display. 

This all took place on the Autobahn between Giessen and Hanau on a beautiful crystal clear early Sunday morning. The traffic was quiet, there was no speed limit and my mate the General Motors dealer Geoff Sanders, who I believe still lives in Germany but may have since changed his name for reasons of privacy loaned me the keys for once. 23 years old and and an all American muscle car is a very heady intoxication I can tell you. I feel young just thinking about it.

Anyway it was quite unusual for me to get those keys because between him and the other member of the Giessen Airborne Division (so named because we always took off, literally flying ,over a hump back bridge on the way down to Frankfurt), I was the youngest of the troika, and had to wait my  turn for everything including the Suzuki Vitara which was the preferred Sunday evening cruise-about-town and which because of the removable top  and being an early SUV was quite a chick puller when we pulled up at Der Zwiebeln Pub for an evening of German cultural studies.

I say that tongue in cheek but actually I did attend the Volkshochschule classes which are evening language studies. I wanted to try my very best for a country that I was not only born in but have come to love very much. I also want to come back to that SUV and I will because out of the Troika I mention, it's only me that has not disappeared into the mists and yet only in Bangkok a few weeks ago I spotted someone who I hadn't seen for thirteen years and who I tipped heavily because I wanted them to know how I felt the mighty had fallen. And I also realised staring at that face which had aged exactly as I would have imagined, that I really endured quite a lot around that time.

Anyway getting back to cars, it is with some authority that I can say, of all the visceral and thrilling experiences of my life including say, sex or the youthful folly of pharmaceutical recreations where I left no stone unturned, that the most thrilling feeling I've possibly ever had was that Corvette barreling down the longest and straightest stretch of German motorway heading south until I'd lose my nerve because the horizon catches up in seconds at a certain velocity. Even though it was unlikely I couldn't handle the thought of the next car, in the middle lane, far away in the distance suddenly pulling out for unexpected reasons. I'm OK about dying, but at 23 years old with 405 bhp on the accelerator I was always much more about living. I still am, but the point I'm trying to make is if there is a war on drugs that really needs to be thought about it's the addiction to cars because there are quite a few powerful ways that car culture is addictive and speed is only one of them.

I confess also to feeling both ashamed and smug. The Corvette, a showroom new vehicle started to make a serious crankshaft banging noise at about 125 mph because as I later learned, brand new engines are supposed to be broken in slowly (and baby I ran that bitch ragged) before quietly returning it to Geoff's lot to be sold I think to a Staff Sergeant (E5) who memorably wanted to drive it to London but flipped out when we advised taking a ferry (before Euro Tunnel days) because he didn't now there was any water between the European continent and the British Isles. 

An E5 is responsible for up to twelve soldiers lives in a war situation and I don't know why they don't pull out a globe for middle ranking enlisted soldiers but that's just the way it is.

Anyway here's some car porn. It's very good and makes me think DC Shoes and Subaru have got it going on.

Via marketear

Car Logic

This piece of film is possibly as good as it gets in being controversial, inspirational and compelling.

It's via Faris and it's awesome. Will it do the trick? That's up to us not the corporations. It's about personal decisions to run, walk, cycle or take public transport if the car or more accurately the internal combustion engine is ever to be sidelined as the single most extravagant commitment to our own demise in the history of history and remainder of future.

What is Honda doing about this? They're making provocative film, which is to be applauded because it does at least encourage people to reframe their relationship with 20th century technology that is mostly stationery (parked) and then when being used is mostly empty.

So we're stealing from our children. But they may not have anything to look back at and moan about if that pricks your conscience.

I don't know if we have 80 years because the whole point of the Long now project is we stopped dreaming about the future as we may have tipped the carbon scales against us while snorting the fossil ones that are evidently so addictive.

But I tend towards optimism. 

In any case like I wrote back here, we built our cities around cars instead of around people and it seems like Honda have recognised that's a bad thing although they could start by mentioning the Toyota Winglet if they weren't so self obsessed. No doubt Toyota would be just as solipsistic. It's how greed works.

But I'm also somewhat pessimistic  when it comes to specifically car culture because even though there are clearly some awesome dudes in this piece of film (the Alpha male? - you rock) the best way Honda et al could change the world would be for the automobile manufacturers to collectively lobby government in a self imposed manner and clip their wings by imposing HUGE penalties unless they make standard, low emission, tax incentivised hybrid plus NPD mobility. 

But that's a bit like the collective self determination of many Japanese males (XX Generation) recognising that the future of the salary man was a bit of an intellectual con job that largely fostered a culture of bullying against women. XX Generation decided to disappoint their fathers and now still live with their longer living mums and wear lipstick for reasons that seem related to their rejection of getting laid. I've made that up of course. Or have I?

It's a collective decision for the better in that example, (and historically not exceptional). Yet any cretin can see that the corporation is all about those fathers, maximising the quarterly report for ever quicker and larger earnings velocity without really addressing the urgent and pressing issue that it only hastens us faster and faster and faster towards our own demise. (There is a role for socialised communications in all this by the way)

Top of mind as a throw away solution for a disposable society is slowing down the Corporations quarterly report to a bi-annual one. I'm sure you can think of better one's, but the greedy guys at the top aren't going to dig that are they? They're too busy digging our own graves.

So anyway, even though the environment singularity (where nature teaches us a big lesson) is tumbling ever closer and ever quicker than the insanely quick technological one, demanding we need tomorrows consumption today; we're still kind of relying on the stone age equivalent of fossil fuel combustion to be moved around, which I can't help but think is about rubbing two sticks together while surrounded by powerwindows, a sense of empowerment through acceleration and some decent subwoofers to drown out the drone of other cars ouside, because it isn't noisy kids that anymore and that's not because of the paedophiles but because of the car.

All that pace of change and we're stuck with corporate Cro-Magnon. You should watch this movie, but if you rely on Honda to get it right in 80 years time you might as well be honest and sphyxiate your children now.

You probably are if you're dropping them off at school.

Coco Chanel

I haven't watched television in years really apart from a little Olympics in Beijing I guess and since I've removed the box from my last few places of dwelling it's the first annoying thing I notice in other people's houses. A big blaring screen that disturbs conversation and if it's pumping out that Fox news sewage I find it quite upsetting in so much that it's a pretty good hate making machine. Not that I can tolerate the banal faux authority of CNN either. (Sorry Guys, I know some of you read my blog)

Anyway, I used to have BBC World on in the background for years, so I'm not trying to be too judgmental about television per se, but I really notice the whole monologue engagement media process. If I sit and watch something without commenting on it via crowd curation or just community utility then invariably it's really good by my subjective engagement metric(s).

I'm really fussy about Hollywood and think most is just rubbish and don't mind walking out of a cinema if I've made a mistake or indeed I have a 3 minute rule that if a gun is pulled out in any script within that time it's definitely a shit movie because good screen writers don't rely on rubbish tactics. Actually a gun in 15 minutes is unacceptable but less than that means it's unwatchable.

I had a long conversation with Noah yesterday about many things including veg-out stuff, which I aim to write up here as currently I'm really really enjoying watching Family Guy (made by Fox, remember what I said about binary thinking) on my iPod on the ferry over to Hong Kong Island from Fantasy Island where I'm staying. It's really funny and I'm making a fool of myself laughing out loud at some of the heavily contrived but beautifully animated jokes. The best one yet is the Moose that get's into the car while visiting a natural beauty spot and pimps himself to the driver saying "I can do Moose things like stand outside and you can take photos or (nice pause) we can have sex" Peter opts for Moose sex and I think it's wonderful that we can laugh at these things even though it's clearly a deviant idea. I'd also like to share the Bill Clinton "boy you are really good" lines but I should get back to the movie.

So after my impromptu Ferragamo shopping thing which is worth a post in itself to see how luxury brands need to work to sell me stuff (not the way 95% of you patronizing bastards think you do in the luxury branded goods sector) I passed a poster for the Coco before Chanel movie and I'm aware that she shut down the house for the war years. Also aside from Prada I think Chanel is one of the most distinctive and beautiful fashion houses while currently under the masterful direction of Karl Lagerfeld, although everyone thinks that so I'll write about who is kicking ass in the fashion world elsewhere at some point too

I lucked out as the movie was just starting so I bought a ticket thus preventing me from spending more money on stuff I don't really need but at which Hong Kong is brilliant for tempting me with.

The movie starts of with her life as a seamstress or pattern cutter in a small shop with a sideline in what I'd describe as semi penny opera French cabaret. Quite bawdy for it's time and it quickly becomes evident that by the standards of the day Coco (or Gabrielle) Chanel is what we now call a liberated woman which is actually an unfair moniker for a woman who chooses not to settle for any man she meets but likes. Guys are allowed to be promiscuous and woman aren't but of course it's a nonsense to suggest that there is an imbalance in activity. Mainstream gender interdependency logic sorts that one out.

Moving on the movie is in French so it kind of scored a few points just being foreign for me  and I even quickly got to the point where I didn't really need to read all the subtitles, but  anway it's a classically and delightful, poignant, quintessentially French style that I haven't seen since La Chambre des officiers which is a must see movie about the early experimental years of plastic surgery for injuries incurred in the First World war by French officers. Tragic and compelling.

Actually the movie is hardly about clothes and it was just delightful watching a portrait being painted of a woman who left her mark on the world. Even more unusual is the somewhat low involvement in the whole clothes thing. One get's the impression that Coco Chanel would have been brilliant at whatever she chose to apply her unusual vision to. I liked her. She was sexy, beautiful, unconventional, difficult bordering on truculent at times and wonderfully portrayed by Audrey Tatou who has that ability to convey authentic happiness with eyes that shine beautifully unlike the jaded and ill informed spinsters of modern corporate life.

Coco, is convinced that love is not for her and so is qualified to have sporadic relationships based purely on sexuality which I'm sure was heresy for the time but seems reasonable to me now. I had no idea that she eventually does find love in the shape of a wealthy French aristocratic figure who plays a man that is both patron to her intelligence and increasingly aware of his growing feelings for her as she drifts away from socially imposed neglect. Coco also falls in love with a remarkable English character who for reasons I wont spoil both inspires her work and wraps up the movie. Who knew the English played such an important part of her life?

Here's the great thing though. Coco has a certain style throughout the movie. At first it's unremarkable but different. Puritan, simple, unfussy and there's some playfulness as she dismisses the ugly and extraneous feathers that festooned the dresses and hats of the era. I could go on about women that dress appallingy because unlike men there's so much more opportunity to look really good and yet I'm shocked how many woman really get by on what's underneath than the style on top. But that's another post. What makes this movie really good are the costume changes where it becomes evident that outside of the hats that Coco develops a reptutation for excelling at, her idiosyncratic style emerges in a deliberately drawn out and visually punctuated manner until the denouement of a post war Chanel house complete with walls of mirrors and refreshing sparkle of light bounces around the fashion house while she takes the applause from the models of her latest collection in a modest manner. It's a great ending that we are more used to seeing from movies of that era. Abrupt but happy. They work for me but might not for everyone.

Without mentioning brands or even really talking about clothes it's exactly what separates a spreadsheet business from one that is about outcomes and not incomes. Go see it and figure out why it's people that make up Brand DNA and values not the bullshit that passes for link testing and lowest common denominator safety and predictability.

Bravo Coco.