Top Gear, The Italian Job, and My Strange Relationship with Sports and Cars (Redux)

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about my dad's love affair with the automobile, and I indicated that I didn't get it. That it didn't rub off on me. I just didn't "get" the whole car thing... and that was a bit of a fib. For my readers from outside the United States, that must've seemed a bit disingenuous since as everyone knows, American doctors, by law, inject petroleum and galvanized rubber into the base of your skull at the moment of your birth. Probably some grass from a baseball infield as well.

America is a curious cocktail.

This is my Mini Cooper. There are many like it, but this one is mine

The truth is, growing up where and when and how I did, it would've been a bit impossible not to come away with some slightly perplexing affection for anything with four tires and a steering wheel. It's as ingrained in our culture as questionable sausages and baseball games. So it's a lie to say that I don't have any appreciation for things automotive. But I feel much the same way about the automobile as I do about baseball: I love the mystique of the thing, the history and the pageantry, and the mythology. I even love playing the game, but for most of my life, I would've told you I'd rather be shot at dawn than watch it from the sidelines.*

Driving, like baseball, is something best experienced from the field of play. Anything else bored me silly.

So when I said I don't "get" cars, what I really don't get is the love affair with watching from the bleachers. Memorizing statistics and reading about the new players for the coming season, and following and vigorously defending a favorite team despite their shortcomings... that's what I will never quite understand. But it is nevertheless in my blood, and even if it didn't come in a syringe in the birthing room, it did get there when I was too young to understand what was happening.  If I implied that the sight of a Corvette Stingray or a '57 Chevy doesn't get my heart racing a little in much the same way as watching a baseball sail over the outfield wall, that was a fib.  I may not know much about the players or the game, but I know when something exciting is happening and I can enjoy the shared excitement of a world of people who are recognizing it with me.

So it goes.

I watched the Italian Job (the original one, mind you) with my dad back at an age when my mom would probably have rather I was watching Nickelodeon. I also watched Smokey & the Bandit and Cannonball Run at a similarly premature age and got away with it because they were "Car Movies" and that somehow made it okay. I didn't really come away from Smokey & the Bandit with an affection for the Trans Am (I was more entranced by the "Big Rigs" if I'm honest) or from Cannonball Run with any real affection for Ferrari.

Though, I did come away from them with a weird respect for Jackie Gleason and Dom Deluise... probably the outcome my mom was most worried about.

The original, official "Italian Job" Mini
(Car shown actual size.)

The same cannot be said for the Italian Job. Partly because I was too young to really understand the movie, (and I could barely understand Michael Caine anyway) what I came away from with that movie is a deep affection for the tiny cars they used to pull off the job: I was hooked on the original Austin Mini. I can't speak for my sister. I'm not sure if this played into her yen for the car, or if she just got in the driver's seat of one of the BMW-built revivals and just flat-out fell in love with it. It's an easy thing to do; God knows it happened to me a couple of weeks ago.

Which brings us back to my weird arms-length affection for automobiles.

For a long time, I've been a quiet fan of the show Top Gear, which is ostensibly about cars, except not really. It is and for a long time has been a show about the hosts being cartoonishly goofy. And it's becoming more of a cartoon with every passing season until cars are less and less the core of the show and more and more a vehicle (cough) for slapstick hijinks.

That's all fine as far as it goes, but when I was car shopping, what I wanted was honest advice about cars. I went to Netfllix and watched a few episodes of Top Gear that were tangentially related to the FIAT 500 and the MINI Cooper (we test drove both) but didn't find much there to illuminate my quest for information. Host James May raced some kids on bicycles through an Eastern European city in a FIAT and Richard Hammond tore up the track in a MINI Cooper S. Jeremy Clarkson came ashore with a Royal Marine landing party in a Ford Focus and then was chased around a shopping mall by "baddies in a black Corvette."  None of which really gave me much information pertinent for making a decision about buying one.

The guys did mount rockets on a MINI and send it over a ski jump, which is fun if not really enlightening.  Ditto their "review" of the Ford Focus, and just about everything else they've ever touched. Like I said, it's a cartoon.

Being enlightening about cars is not really what that show is for.  For that, you have to turn to the Internet, and there I found information in abundance. I was put in mind of Neil Gaiman's quip about drinking from a fire hose. Consumer Reports is dry and businesslike and will put you to sleep. I was bored to tears, to be honest, until I stumbled across a different group of British car buffs who are doing what Top Gear used to do, and quite frankly, doing it better than Clarkson's boys ever did. They talk about cars.

This is their review of the 2015 Mini.


XCAR is affiliated with the website CNET, owned by CBS Interactive, and they are simply brilliant at what they do. Their review of the 2015 MINI didn't sell me on the car (we bought a 2013 anyway) but their defense of the new MINI against the naysayers who whine that it isn't the old Mini did sell me on their show. It was rational. It was rooted in the mythos of the brand and the reality of bringing it into the litigious and safety-conscious 21st century.

I know what you're thinking and let's be honest, that picture up there of me holding the Mini Cooper HotWheel is not far from the truth. I was standing next to one yesterday at a dealership and I swear I could've smuggled it out of there in my pocket. The original minis were... well... mini. They were surprisingly roomy because of their peculiar geometry, but I'm 6' 2", a height which is complicated by the fact that an unusual percentage of it is in my torso. I'm actually a bit taller sitting down, if you'd believe it, and that makes for a frustrating time with cars. All cars, not just miniature ones. This is part of the reason I've always favored trucks and SUV's, but we live in a time when cars are getting smaller and at the same time it's becoming more and more ethically problematic for me to keep chugging along in the largest thing I can get my hands on just to get through a commute without a crick in my neck. My wife is 5' 4" and we share cars, carpooling to work every day, so that further complicates the issue. There's no "Her car/My car" dichotomy, everything is "Our Car" and that's how we like it.

After driving everything from Mini to Camry, it turned out that the best fit for my peculiar geometry was, in fact the Mini. It was also the most economical, strangely enough. You could've knocked me over with a feather.  And my sister was right, it's astonishingly fun to drive.

But back to watching cars on TV... er... Youtube (like there's that much difference these days).

As I allowed the XCAR playlist to unfurl in front of me, I felt my longstanding antipathy for appreciating cars from the sidelines eroding with each passing moment. By the time I got to this video of one of the hosts enthusiastically playing with the Morgan Three-wheeler, I was a goner.


Seriously, how can you not love that?

I was watching car videos, enjoying vicariously cars I'd never own, some cars I've never even heard of. Not a cartoon masquerading as a car show, mind you, but a proper car show. I almost wished I'd kept all my dad's car books... kept them where, I don't know, as there's no room in the library, but I had this strange yearning to read about a bunch of cars I'd never own.

And lest you think my appreciations are limited to the far side of the Atlantic, this is an excellent summary of the mystique of the Corvette that my dad always tried and failed to impart to me.

So there you have it. I went right out and changed the alternator in my Toyota. Grease under my fingernails, barked knuckles... I even received an invite to a local racing club.

Heck, I might even watch a Mariner's game...

...

...

Well, let's not get too crazy.

~ Scott


*Americans who moan about how boring soccer/futbol is should check themselves because our "national pastime" is a game with no time limits and often hours-long stretches during which NOTHING HAPPENS (follow that link, it'll make you cry). I'm going to get in trouble for saying this and I truly have a deep affection for baseball I can't honestly explain. It defies logic. Soccer is the rest of the world's baseball and frankly, they're the better for it because at least in futbol, something's always happening.

More random thoughts on writer's block and giant robots...

Did you realize that it's possible to have writer's block in one area of your writing life but not another? I didn't either. In fact, I've (over)confidently stated before that I don't even believe in writer's block. And in terms of this impenetrable wall that makes writers drink, that's still true. But my brain does enjoy a sort of line-item veto sometimes that nullifies specific projects that it feels have gone a bit stale. For instance, until recently I found myself uninterested in blogging and unable to come up with anything I was willing to put on paper relevant to the things I was watching crawl past on my Facebook and Twitter timelines.

Maybe I was a little afraid that I've already said all I have to say about the processes of writing fiction. I'm not generally interested in repeating myself.  Even if I had been interested in posting long reflections on the matters that matter most to me, I've already delved as deeply as I think I should into gender politics and sexism in nerd culture, I've ground my ax on matters of book banning, Amazon's antics, and the slow-motion murder of bookselling.

Those are stories I've told so many times I wonder if anyone cares to hear them one more time. There's a thin line between blogging and boorishness. If I can't find something fresh to say, I tend not to say anything. So I ignored the modern world and worked on teaching myself shoemaking instead.  That was new. That, I had no trouble writing about.

I saw someone at a writer's conference awhile back who was wearing a tee shirt that claimed "Writer's block is when your imaginary friends refuse to talk to you."  That's clever, but it's not how it works for me. For me, the problem isn't my imaginary friends giving me the silent treatment, it's when I've heard all their stories before. It's like being at a dinner party with long-time friends & realizing you've all heard each other's stories already.

With real life friends, this leads to in-jokes and companionable silences. In fiction, it leads to stagnation.  And when what you write is already difficult to sell because it's a bit zany, you're already on your back foot. As hard as zany and original might be to sell, zany and stagnant is something no one wants to read, much less buy.

For my money, writer's block is more like hand-written social awkwardness than it is anything else and there's only one cure for the "All the stories have been told" syndrome: Go out and get some new stories.

Or to put it in Howard Carter terms: When the old robots rust, go out and build some new robots. Bigger ones. Better ones. It's hard to save the world without them.

If I'm telling the truth, one of the things that scared me about Howard Carter Saves the World was how quickly it came out of me. If someone was willing to pay me to do so, I'd happily tell those stories for the rest of my life. It's a type of story that allows me to posit a scenario and then completely let go the reins and give the story its head. In a world that madcap, I can follow the story wherever it leads and not be worried I wouldn't have something to say no matter when it went.

And I'm not saying that in case any of the publishers or agents currently entertaining then notion of picking up that book will be convinced by my sincerity. I just enjoyed the heck out of writing it, as you might recall if you were around when I was posting fresh chapters three times a week.

It's a popular conceit that writing is socially-acceptable schizophrenia (I think that quote belonged to EL Doctorow, but don't hold me to that) which gives rise to my compatriot's tee shirt.  Not that the tee shirt or Doctorow are necessarily wrong. I myself have noted that if your inner voices tell you to do stuff, you're crazy, but if the voices just tell you stories and make you write them down, you're a writer.

The trick isn't getting the voices to talk to you. The trick is getting them to tell you stories that someone else will want to hear, stories that you and everyone around haven't already heard a thousand times before.

But then, that's always been the trick, hasn't it?

~ Scott

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This blog post was, in part, inspired by this TED talk given by Sting...

Four Things

1. Car shopping still kinda sucks; buying a house was less annoying.
2. I finally got that car-related frisson I was talking about.
3. My sister was right about everything.
4. Does anyone know how they got off the cliff at the end of The Italian Job? I'm asking for a friend...

Fake Geeks? Again? Yes, but this time we use our powers for good...

This video that I missed when it came out last year asks the important and gender-bending question: are all those muscly dudes at Comicon... Fake Geeks?

Brilliant and pointed satire.




So say we all.

Running on borrowed nostalgia...

This is about cars. I am not a car guy per se, though I do enjoy an episode of Top Gear now and then.

My dad was a car guy. Sorry, I should say my dad was a Car Guy. He collected books on the history of cars, he collected model cars, he took pictures of every interesting car he ever saw (often from multiple angles) and kept binders of these photos to refer back to. He could rattle off specs and production dates and designers and engine sizes like other kids' dads could rattle off baseball statistics. He could tell model years apart by the shape of their taillights and tell you what someone got wrong on a restoration. He wasn't a gearhead, mind you, he couldn't repair one if his life depended on it, but my God, did he love the automobile. For him it was about aesthetics and culture, a trip through an art museum held less for him than a walk through a car show. And oh my, did he take me to car shows.

Not just old cars either, dad loved cars, period. Every year when the new models came out, he would send me into the showrooms of the local dealerships while he waited out in the car to collect the new pamphlets for the coming models of Ford, Dodge, and Chevy and Toyota and whatever else came through town. More than that, I sat beside him more than once while he dickered with car salesmen just for the fun of it over some car he had no intention of buying.

My dad's Karmann Ghia looked exactly like this one, except

it was brown. Even I can see what he saw in it, I think...
Source: Wikimedia Commons

 Personally, I'd rather have a voluntary root canal than go through the process of picking out and purchasing a car.  It would be cheaper for one thing...

In case you ever wondered why I don't write much about the cars my characters drive, this would be it.

Amusingly (to me at least) it wasn't me, but my sister who finally caught the car bug from dad.  But I'll get back to her in a minute, because how she caught the bug is important to this story.

My first car was a 1985 Nissan 4x4 pickup. I was 16. It was chocolate brown with a gold-fleck in the paint and a roll bar bolted in the back. It was awesome. I was proud of it as any 16 year old would be. And I crashed it in the middle of a Valentines Day ice storm a week after we bought it and dad was livid, as you might imagine, but we got it fixed and back on the road and I drove it all through high school.  Most of the vehicles I've owned since have been small pickups by Nissan or Toyota, but never was quite as much fun or saw quite as much mud and gravel roads as that one. Partly because I moved to a series of decent-sized cities, and partly because I got it out of my system early.

That truck was fun, but it wasn't ethereal. Even when I was jouncing down a rutted path or bogging through a muddy field or driving a freshly-waxed and vacuumed version of that same pickup with a pretty girl in the passenger seat on a date... even in those moments, I never had that "It doesn't get better than this, I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS CAR" moment.

My sister's Mini looked not very much like this one, but 

isn't it cool?  She probably felt like she was pulling the
Italian Job every day on the way to work...
Source: Wikimedia Commons

My dad would speak wistfully of his favorite car, the one in which he fell in love with the automobile. He had a scrapbook's worth of pictures of it, naturally: It was a brown convertible Karmann Ghia that his dad bought for him at an auction. Karmann Ghia, I was informed, was an Italian-designed sports car maker, who basically built a roadster on a Volkswagen Beetle chassis. It was oddly beautiful, with rounded fenders and swooping lines of the sort you just don't see anymore. It was just the thing for bombing down the winding back roads of rural Missouri.

Then, as the story goes, he woke up one morning and his dad had traded it for a tractor (I told you we were from rural Missouri). Dream over. Move along. Nothing to see. Chores to do. Carry on. But his feelings about that car were so strong that I still feel a whiff of borrowed nostalgia every time I see one.

But I've never felt that. Not firsthand. Not ever. Today, I was talking about cars with my sister because our old Nissan is about to give up the ghost and we need something more fuel efficient and earth friendly, when she told me she'd felt it when she got in her 2004 Mini Cooper for the first time. Which gives me hope that some day, a car might be something other than a means of conveyance from point A to point B.

But I won't hold my breath.

In the mean time, I have a root canal to schedule... er... I mean I need to find a car that won't fall apart half way to work in the morning.

This is the definition of "First World Problems", I guess.  Ah well, maybe I'll spot an old Karmann Ghia at the back of the car lot and get a whiff of my old man's nostalgia once again. Might tide me over through the interminable cultural dance that is car purchasing in America...

The In-Betweener

I recently had a meme cross my desk that defined a book hangover as the feeling a reader gets when they finish one book but cannot yet start another because they’re still living in the last book’s world.

If readers think they’ve got it bad, they should try writing.

No book is ever finished until someone pries your fingers off the keyboard and forces you to type “The End”, and after you type that terminal sentence, it’s good to take a bit of time to catch your breath. I suppose if you’re writing series characters or a shared world, that’s not as necessary, but when your worlds vary as widely as the madcap flights of Howard Carter’s fancy and the always-grounded and very adult world of AJ MacLeod, it’s enough to give anyone whiplash.

These are the in-between times.

While I’m never writing only one thing at a time, I do tend to pause at the end of a piece and take some time to cleanse my palate, to clear my head of the rules and mores of that world to lay the groundwork for another. Sometimes this means finally taking the time to plunder any lingering ideas that didn’t fit into the completed work as short stories, burning the last stubs of the old candle until there’s nothing left, no dangling threads to call out to me. Sometimes it means a Big Crazy Project, throwing everything I have at teaching myself something like shoemaking.  Sometimes those projects snowball into a Whole Other Thing, and sometimes they’re just fodder for future stories or background for future characters, but mostly they just take my mind out of fantasy world mode and ground me back in the here and now.

Whatever I end up doing to pass the days, be it short stories or shoes, at the end of a writing jag is when I finally have the time to read something unrelated to whatever I’m writing. Sweet release! Research might be my favorite intoxicant, but even so, it is sheer heaven to give myself lease to devour every book I can get my hands on be they drawn from fact or fiction.

Book after book piles up and gets absorbed. News stories too, and conversations, and daily interactions all get thrown into the hopper to be pulped and blended and spat back out as lessons on What Not To Do or notes about roads not taken that give rise to new characters and ideas that will some day carve out stories of their own. Wherever it comes from, it’s all fair game and it’s all fuel for the next fire.

Some writers will tell you that all writing is rewriting, and that may be true for those writers, but for my money, all writing is pre-writing. Even if it’s what happens after you get the ideas down on paper that makes the writing good, it’s what comes before that makes the story good. Because while all the grammar lessons in the world cannot save a bad story, a good enough story is Teflon.

This is an unfortunate truth that we all try to deny, yet there’s no other way to explain the number of mediocre writers that ascend the bestseller lists without devolving into conspiracy theories. The idea that some stories are going to resonate even if they’re handled poorly isn’t a terrible thing because it means that when you do pair a great writer with a great story, it’s unstoppable: Hilary Mantel and Wolf Hall, John Green and The Fault In Our Stars, Carlos Ruiz Zafon and The Shadow of the Wind, JRR Tolkien and The Hobbit, JK Rowling and Harry Potter et al…

Read the stories any of the aforementioned writers tell about how they arrived and those stories and you’ll hear tales of the Between Times, of pieces long held falling into place because of some quirk of fate that happened when they were open to it, whether it’s John Green meeting Esther Earl at a Harry Potter convention or Tolkien finding a blank page in a student thesis he was grading and jotting “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit…” These are stories that were formed in the Between Times, moments when something coalesced that the author had long been thinking about, such as Green’s long-simmering novel about teens in a cancer ward, or Tolkien’s bedtime stories finding purchase in the languages he taught at Oxford and his rose-coloured memories of a more pastoral England.

This most recent in-between has been rather longer than I’d intended, but I think it’s about to end. 

I always think in stories, but there’s a qualitative difference between the stories I’ve been forming recently and the ones that have been coalescing recently around a single idea.   I’ve stopped getting distracted by the trees I’ve already climbed or others have tried to cut down and started seeing the forest.

It is time to come out of the in-betweens and start writing things down again.

Sorry I was gone so long and also that I’ve thrown so many writing metaphors at you in a single post. I had a few pent up, apparently.

Scott