Where are the nice cars?

By Jeffrey the Barak

A walk through the 2009 Los Angeles Auto Show

There are certain cars that just look and feel right. Their design suggests quality and precision. The metal looks solid and the doors close with a solid thunk, and no tinny ring. But other cars look as fragile as tin-foil, with seams that are too wide or too tight. They may have hard plastic where you would expect upholstery, or molded polyurethane where you like to see a softer surface. And then some designs are embellished so much beyond their function that they scream ugliness.

It may be personal preference, and differences in the tastes of middle-America versus those of, for example, the Japanese or the French, but in general, some cars are rolling art, and others are rolling messes. And then there is Steam-Punk, a cartoonish design idea that has now found it’s way onto the showroom floors.

What follows is my personal opinion, and my personal impression, but I at least, agree with myself!

For good clean design that seems functional, well-executed, and just has a quality, precise, expensive feel, look no further than Audi and Volkswagen. Alright, perhaps outside of the USA, their larger SUV’s are a bit bigger than anyone would ever need a car to be, but in general, their designs are elegant and just right. The world loves the Golf, and for good reason. It’s sporty, practical, holds a lot of stuff and takes up little space. The GTI version is as enjoyable on the racetrack as many a six-figure sports car, and speaking of which, the Audi R8 looks so much cooler than today’s Italian supercars.

Also from Germany, the interior of the BMW Mini-E, an electric car, is a beautiful design, with it’s colored swirls and oversized central display. For some reason the fit and finish on the Mini seems to be a step above that of the larger 3, 5 and 7 series, which despite their clever angles are bland, and have orange peel paint, rather like cheaper Chevys.

The new Lexus LFA supercar, has a terrible paint finish that combines a high gloss above the beltline with a visually sticky-looking texture in the same color, and a front-end design that is comparable in style with a Corolla, only with a big gap at the tip of the hood/bonnet. If you search for photos for the front you’ll see it shot from up high, or lit from the side to create shadows, but in real life, it’s a front from Wal-Mart, and yet this supercar costs $375,000. Something does not add up here.

Representing Steam-Punk, the new Morgan Aero SuperSports  was almost a hot car, but is a hot mess. A mishmash of curves and embellishments that should not be shared on one chassis. Steam-Punk can be described as historical future fantasy such as in the visions of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. This ever so ugly Morgan has it down, right down to it’s misguided interpetive brown leather seats.

To understand what is wrong with General Motors, you have to imagine that you are not in Los Angeles, but instead on a street in Rome, Frankfurt or London. You look up and see the grille of a GM SUV coming at you. A big ugly unnecessary jukebox of a grille, stuck onto the front of a primitive oversized hunk of beige metal. To my eye, these vehicles look ridiculous and I would rather have witnessed their extinction than been a part of their bailout with my income tax. Car manufacturing is a competition, and these guys lost that competition. They should not still be here.

Ford got by without a bailout, but what are those big things stuck on the front ends of Mercurys and Fords and Lincolns? Who on Earth likes these grilles?

Design in modern cars treads a narrow ridge path with steep fall-offs on either side into ravines of bad taste. In these ravines, you will see Rolls Royces, Dodges, Fords, and countless other Marques. The traffic on the top will be quite light, even in rush hour.

How Art Almost Killed An Entire People

By Jeffrey the Barak

At times, we wander the galleries and see pieces of art that look as if they could hurt someone, or kill someone, but in a way this has actually happened.

I refer to a place commonly known as Easter Island. This is it’s modern name, given to the place by Christian explorers from Holland in 1722 when they happened to come across this land on their Easter Sunday.

For most of history, This place had no name, and no inhabitants, but at sometime between 400 and 600 C.E. a human civilisation, the Polynesians, found it, and it became known as Rapa Nui.

We know from the surviving Polynesian people here and across Oceana that for at least two thousand years, their relatively advanced society was capable of trans-oceanic explorations by canoe that no modern sailor in their right mind would dare attempt. By contrast, the people of the nations that would later become the world’s explorers, the Britons, the French, The Spanish, The Portuguese, The Dutch were by comparison, quite behind in terms of long-distance seafaring.

Even the Mediterranean traders of the day would have been amazed at the voyages back and forth that the ancient Polynesians embarked upon.

So art came to Rapa Nui with its first people. It is generally accepted that they came from either the Marquesas Islands or Mangareva, which like everywhere else, are very far indeed from Rapa Nui.

The oral history tells us they brought plants, food animals and tools and their mission was colonization. The climate on Rapa Nui was certainly not the tropical paradise they were used to so they had a lot of adaptation to do in order to survive and thrive.

Rapa Nui was covered in trees, palms and other types, and drinking water was naturally gathered in volcanic craters, despite the island’s absence of rivers or streams. The island also had obsidian, great for making cutting tools and weapons, and it had lot of special rock which we call lapilli tuff.

Some say the islanders employed slash and burn techniques to clear land for farming, and others say, they used up all the wood in order to make and transport the huge stone statues that Rapa Nui is now famous for.

With the forest cover gone, the rain and weather eroded the topsoil and famine ensued. But let’s take a step back and focus on the art.

The art of Rapa Nui is divided between two periods. The Moai period and the Birdman period. On other islands in Polynesia, there were statues, (Moai), atop shrines, (Ahu). which were representations of chiefs (living and dead) and the gods in which they believed.

Dead chiefs were sacred, and after their life passed, their representative Moa remained. Rapa Nui has around 900 such moai, either standing, toppled or partially completed, still in the quarry or partway to their final site. There are about 360 ahu. The moai did not look out to sea, as commonly assumed, but they faced away from the sea, towards the villages. Some completed and erected statues had white coral eyes and wore stone hats or top knots called pukao, carved from a rock that was more red (scoria).

There is much debate as to exactly how the heavy statues were moved, assembled, erected etc. They are so heavy, that engineering on a grand scale was definitely needed, but the methods used have passed from memory.

It seems clear that at some point, the statues were worshiped as gods, and were a means of control for the ruling society, called the “Long Ears”. Everyone else, lived as subjects of the ruling Long Ears. However they were not slaves, but simply lowly subjects of the rulers, who would eventually rebel aginst the Long Ears and topple the very statues that generations suffered to construct.

It is said that so much wood was expended on the statue making that the islanders could no longer build canoes, so they became unable to travel to and from other parts of Polynesia. However, it is possible that the forests were burned to clear land, without any understanding of the long term environmental consequences. Without canoes, there was little opportunity to fish offshore, and without the lush vegetation, farming was all that was left.

So in isolation, with the natural resources of the island being eroded, burned and used for making statues, the people sealed their fate. Numbering as high as seven thousand in it’s heyday, the society on Rapa Nui became unsustainable with the resources at hand, and they were unable to leave or go for help.

Eventually, out of this declining situation, a powerful warrior class emerged, called Matato’a. And a change of power and leadership ensued. This also heralded the second art movement. All of the statues were toppled, some face up, some face down, and a new, even sillier religion began to dominate.

This was the birdman cult, (Tangatamenu). Once a year on a small island off the coast of Rapa Nui, migrating birds laid eggs. It was a bountiful annual harvest. The young warriors would hold a swimming race across the rough, shark-infested straits between the main island and bird island. The first man back holding an intact egg became absolute ruler for exactly one year, until this was repeated.

In the time after the upright moai, the art consisted of carvings and drawings on rock, depicting a bird-man character. Again the sheer quantity of this art in the virtual absence of all other, shows us that life at the time was all about the birdman. And a new monotheism emerged, coincidentally featuring a single, creator god, not the Jewish-Christian-Moslem one, but one with the name Makemake.

If the Western sailing ships had never found Easter Island, the natives may or may not have survived to this day, but considering what the sailors did to them, it is amazing that any have survived. The so-called advanced civilizations from Europe murdered, enslaved, kidnapped and infected the people with diseases such as smallpox and syphilis, and those few who survived these horrors were later subjected to forced Christianization.

As a result of the missionary subjugation, at this point there was no more art for a long time. The island was culturally dead until relatively recently when inhabitants of Polynesian decent began to nurture their cultural heritage, which amazingly still has much in common with other far way parts of Polynesia. And so through dance, costume, cuisine and the tatoo, the art of the island survives, but this time it won’t kill them, it may save them, from us.

First Glimmer

By Gregory Nuber

I have a water colored memory of a particular summer day when I was eight or nine years old. It was probably very hot and I must have spent the morning swimming and fighting and playing with my younger sister. On a typical day lunch might be followed by an afternoon of errands with Mom- my hair damp and smelling of chlorine, the air conditioned car a cool refuge from the oppressive, baking heat. This day was not typical. Lunch was followed by a bath, fresh, damp hair was neatly combed and we were chauffeured by Mom (for this was to become her major, practical function in my life) across town to the home of an elderly lady named Flossie McCoy. She was the organist at our church and although I did not know her well, I knew that sometimes the music she played before and after services brought a strange feeling to my gut.

We walked from the cool of Mother’s car through the heat of the afternoon into Ms. Flossie’s serene and welcoming home. We were probably offered a glass of water – perhaps iced tea or lemonade. Mother and Sister settled comfortably into a sofa, Flossie into her familiar hard-backed chair and I, with only slight trepidation, took my place on the smooth, black lacquered bench that felt good on my sun-drenched legs.

“This is a piano,” began Ms. Flossie. “It has eighty-eight keys, fifty-two white and thirty-six black.” My large, hazel eyes probably became even bigger at this point and I began to feel that strange feeling in my gut. I still didn’t know what this feeling was all about. It was an intense pang of yearning, excitement, possibility, fear – a dense composite of thoughts and feelings that moved around inside me like a swarm of bees. I knew what a piano was – we had one at home and I had often pounded out discordant rhythms with passionate abandon, or meticulously picked out simple, familiar tunes. I also knew that some people had the magical ability to draw forth real music from the piano and some of that music made my gut feel strange.

“Right in front of you heart is a key we call ‘middle-C’”. My heart. “It is a home- a safe place and a point of references with a world of possibilities on either side. Is home. “Let’s begin by placing the thumb of your right hand on ‘middle-C’. Your thumb is one and the other four fingers are two, three, four and five. That is all you need to create music.” I was intrigued. Flossie began calling out finger numbers, I began to play, and my Mother sat on the sofa and beamed at my crude rendition of the holiday standard “Jingle Bells”. I was concentrating so hard that when I was through I had no idea what I had just played. Mother commented that it made her think of cold winter days, and what a nice thought that was on a hot summer day. Flossie laughed in agreement, and I became impatient because I still didn’t know what I had played.

“Tell me the numbers again,” I demanded. I needed to know what I was playing. I needed to recognize it and at the same time be cognizant of what I was doing. I wanted the ability to create the music independently without the numeric prompting of my teacher. I was less than five minutes into my first piano lesson and already filled with an intense desire that I had always possessed but had just accessed. I was beginning to understand what the strange sensation in my gut was all about. This was perhaps the first cathartic moment of my young life. I knew that I was given a gift- the chance to learn something that would make me feel special and whole. Although I did not know it at the time, I had just stepped on the path that led toward my future.

Gregory Nuber moved to NYC in July of 1992 from Arizona State University where he was pursuing his MFA in Modern Dance. He immediately began studying on scholarship at the David Howard Dance Center and soon landed his first professional contract with Michael Mao Dance. Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre (now RIOULT (re-you) and finally the world-renown Mark Morris Dance Group. Gregory also played Lord Capulet in Frances Patrele’s full length Romeo and Juliet and danced in the pick-up companies Matthew Nash Music and Dance and Jonathan Appels. A member of Actors’ Equity Association, Mr. Nuber has performed professionally in regional productions of West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof and Cinderella.