Armagideon Time

Did I mention I bought a new car last week?

The Dugites – In Your Car

Toy Dolls – Tommy Kowey’s Car

Jonathan Richman – Roadrunner

The Clash – Brand New Cadillac

Because I totally did.

August was the month when I needed to get a new inspection sticker for Super Lumina. I’ve never found the renewal process to be a pleasant experience, but my dread had increased geometrically over the years as the forces of entropy dug their hooks deeper and deeper into the inner workings of the venerable family sedan.

My customary process for defying the odds and squeezing another twelve months of life out of the car involved bringing it into the local Chevy dealership a week before inspection in order to take care of the various issues that might lead to a rejection sticker. One year it might be some brake work, another year a new set of tires, and so forth. 

When I rolled Super Lumina into the garage last Wednesday for this year’s go-round, I had a small laundry of real and possibly imagined problems that needed to be seen to — squeaking from the rear brakes,  a small oil leak with some engine ticking, a couple of lost muffler clamps, a slight smell of gas around the fuel intake, and a check engine light (which I assumed was tied to one of both of the previous two issues).  I didn’t think my wallet was going to get off lightly, but I was banking on dropping grand and a half, tops, for the repairs.

As it turned out, the muffler problems required a new catalytic converter, the gas smell was caused by a fuel leak which had corroded a brake line, and the oil leak was a symptom of Super Lumina’s third blown head gasket.  In addition, parts of the electrical system around two of the indicators had rotted way without my noticing it. 

The total estimated cost of the repairs?  Somewhere in the vicinity of five grand, on a twelve year old car that I paid nine thousand for seven years ago.   Rather than go into hock for a shitbox I was considering replacing one the last of my student loans had been retired, I moved up my timetable by a year and traded in the Super Lumina’s corpse (for a whopping three hundred bucks) for a gunmetal gray 2007 Chevy Malibu.

Besides the budgeting thing, the reason I wanted to hold on to Super Lumina for another year was that I was hoping to score a deal on a later model Malibu with a slick-looking split grill and a built-in mp3 player dock.  Beggars can’t be choosers, however, and given the choice between diving around in a time bomb on wheels and settling for something slightly less sexy than anticipated, I opted for the latter route.

And to tell you the truth, I’m really happy with the new ride.  It’s the first car that I actually picked out for myself, rather than having it passed down to me by a relative or was forced into by financial circumstances.  (Super Lumina was a case of “Hey, I know your grandmother, so I can cut you a deal on this recent trade-in that falls in your price range.”  It served me well, but damn it was a fugly hunk of automobile.)

It’s only a four-cylinder, but gas prices are high enough and my sense of manhood is adequate enough to make it a non-issue.  Besides, considering the hassles I’ve had with Super Lumina’s GM six-cylinder engine (again, three blown head gaskets in seven years of ownership), I welcome the change to something simpler and hopefully less problematic.  The smaller weight displacement also means the Malibu handles easier and has better pick-up off the line than the Lumina ever did (though – like my old four-cylinder Cutlass — its acceleration curve plateaus once you hit 70 MPH).

It’s also nice to once again have a car with air conditioning (the Lumina’s was a victim of an earlier blown gasket) and a functioning CD player (the Lumina’s shit the bed during a particularly damp winter a few years back). 

After a long stretch of static-distorted tunes pumped by first generation Zune through a gimped radio adapter and complete silence (after the Zune finally bricked on us a few weeks ago),  it was nice to get back into the process of cobbling together a driving music mix CD full of mutually acceptable tracks.  While the wife and I have been spoiled by random playlists of drawn from a multi-gigabyte song library and will likely eventually return to an mp3-based system (once I find a replacement early generation Zune somewhere), right now we’re enjoying the eighty-minute all-killer, no-filler disc-based selection.*

*And you might be able to, as well, providing you check the first comment before Sunday evening.

Beyond the WHIZ studios magic-powered superheroes scream down the boulevard.  The talking tigers groom their tails in rearview mirrors and the boy reporters try to look so hard.

I dunno. It smells like a death trap or a suicide rap to me. I’d advise Billy to get out while he’s young.

Our second trip to the April 28, 1975 Newsweek well yields this rather timely ad clipping from the fine folks at General Motors:

While it might be tempting to see the above rogues’ gallery of lemons as the point where Detroit went hopelessly off the rails, the seeds of the American automobile industry were planted a quarter-century prior, when Harley Earl’s vision of populuxe opulence won out over Raymond Loewy’s aesthetic of elegant simplicity.

It was not the physical manifestations of Earl’s design philosophy that were the problem. Tailfins and chrome tits (a.k.a. “Dagmars”) may have been quaint and perhaps silly examples of vehicular greebling, but they were symptoms of a larger issue — an overwhelming focus on transitory fashion over enduring functionality in automotive design and marketing.

This approach to engineering was codified to an astonishing degree. The decision to shift toward, say, smaller grilles was plotted in incremental arcs and carried out over the space of years, and operating under the prevailing (and correct for the time) assumption that the typical American consumer would purchase a new vehicle if not every year, then every other year.

This disposable attitude toward automobiles had other benefits besides turnover for the manufacturers and dealers. Outright clunkers and misfires — like the Corvair or the Edsel — might pose an embarrassment and source of financial loss, but the effects (outside commercial mythology) were largely short-term in duration. Long-term maintenance issues were also moot when dealing with a effective vehicle life of under twenty-four months for the initial buyer. Used heaps and beaters were the provenance of teenagers and folks either determined enough or desperate enough to take on the uphill challenge.

The system functioned well enough within the economic climate that prevailed in America from the early 1950′s to early 1970′s, where labor shortages, coupled with a massive expansion in consumer spending power, gave rise to a large (if unevenly) prosperous middle class willing to buy into the marketing-driven myth (and implied class hierarchy) of the automobile. The problem is that this unique set of circumstances was assumed, by consumers and producers, to represent a perpetual status quo…

…which, in true Sophoclean fashion, ran up against the wall of harsh reality in the early 1970s, when an economic shitstorm struck. A weakening manufacturing sector, the massive influx of baby boomers into the labor pool, and skyrocketing fuel prices caused income levels to stagnate (right through the present day, actually, though that has been obscured with periodic infusions of imaginary revenue from debt and speculation bubbles).

The American auto industry responded to this shift in the economic paradigm with denial born of two decades of comfortable complacency, followed by tone-deaf efforts to adapt. One minute you’re fat and basking in the Cretaceous sun, the next you’re trying to pass off a mid-sized sedan with a fucking 8-cylinder engine and SUV-level MPG ratings as the definitive answer to soaring gas prices.

The arrival of hard times made reliability and durability a consumer priority, especially in a landscape transformed by the post-war growth of suburbia and underinvestment in public transportation. The “car as status symbol” mentality didn’t fade away, but the “car as necessity” one took on a greater importance, as did acute awareness of the associated costs — maintenance, fuel, repairs. When “every year or so” gives way to “when I need to replace it,” it becomes even more crucial that the car you purchase doesn’t turn out to be a temperamental money siphon. Yet whether out of resentment, arrogance, or outright ineptness, Detroit saw fit to unleash a series of models — Vegas, Novas, Gremlins, and Pintos — that weren’t just badly made cars, but enduring black marks against the companies’ reputations for quality.

So the situation remained up through the early 90s, with Detroit coasting on a sad mix of vestigal brand loyalty, base patriotism (pay no attention to the plant closures and outsourcing, folks), and the popular assumption that imports were either too expensive or too shoddy in comparison to domestic vehicles.

When the empirical evidence knocked out the third leg of the above tripod, the whole decrepit facade should have come crumbling down then and there, but the dawn of the SUV craze provided a short stay of execution. Once again, Detroit confused short-term contextual trends with long-term demand, and once again a jolt to the global economy caught the manufacturers completely flat-footed.

The executives show up cap in hand to the government in a plea to save the “American” auto industry, even as their restructuring plans involve the decimation of domestic manufacturing jobs, additional outsourcing (to the point where “American” no longer applies), and squirreling out of contractual obligations with the auto workers’ union.

Meanwhile, I’m tooling around under Super Lumina’s hood and wondering if I’m going to have to spend five hundred bucks to replace the head gasket for the third time in six years.  

God bless the Yew Ess of Ay.

When it comes to racing videogames, I lean toward the “arcade” end of the spectrum, where wild stunts and crazy drifting take precedence over “realistic” physics and micromanaging things like tire balance and gear ratios. I deal with enough car hassles in real life. (For example, I recently discovered that a 1998 Chevy Lumina can operate for three months with no oil in the pan.) When it comes to chilling out behind the virtual wheel, I just want to cut loose and enjoy some consquence-free automotive thrills…which, as it turns out, Burnout Paradise delivers in spades.

The fifth installment of Criteron’s Burnout franchise took the hyper-aggressive driving model (think a next-gen version of San Francisco Rush) of the previous installments and transplanted it into the free-roaming vehicular playground of Paradise City. The psuedo-SoCal metropolis and its environs are filled to the brim with events (time trials, races, chases, stunt runs), hidden shortcuts, smashable billboards and other ways to fulfill one’s need for speed.

Burnout Paradise is immersive, in a way that a good open-world game ought to be. Completing events and working one’s way up the tier of licenses used to mark player progress is a blast, but I have just as much of a good time simply burning rubber down I-88 or doing some insane mountain road drifting in my ride of choice…

…the Carson Annihilator, an aggression-oriented analogue of the 1971 Plymouth Road Runner. (My version has been customized with a midnight blue gloss finish and white detailing.) The difficulty of later game events have forced a reluctant upgrade to the Carson GT Concept neo-muscle car (modeled after the current Chevy Camaro), but I still take the old girl out when I’m freeburning with friends in the incredibly entertaining online multiplayer mode.

On a side note:   One’s choice of vehicle in Burnout Paradise can be very psychologically revealing. I have my vintage muscle car. Kevin Church — who has recently assembled a killer mix of house tracks — prefers JDM drift rockets. Chris Sims — currently celebrating the release of Solomon Stone — has an unwavering preference for the unlicensed General Lee analogue from the premium “Legendary Car” downloadable content. (My brother Greg is also a fan of the Annihilator, because that shit is hardwired into the Weiss genome.)

As per prevailing trends, the Burnout Paradise features an in-game “radio station,” Crash FM, complete with licensed tracks and snippets of wisdom from the relentlessly helpful DJ Atomika. (“Hey, drivers, remember to wipe from front to back! DJ Atomika, Crash FM.”) Some nods were made toward inclusive eclecticism, with welcome appearances by Adam & The Ants’ “Stand and Deliver” (which reminds me — FUCK YOU, GWEN STEFANI) and Faith No More’s “Epic.” Overall, though, the playlist is dominated by bland indie rock from soon-forgotten acts, and insufferable atrocities from Avril Lavigne and Guns ‘N’ Roses…because it’s Paradise City, see? (No amount of ironic or temporal distance will ever make GNR palatable to my ears.)

Burnout Paradise does let you choose which tracks will cycle as you play, but in a game where it’s all too easy to lose oneself, hearing the same three songs on repeat over the course of three hours isn’t really an option.

Thankfully the Xbox 360 supports custom soundtracks. Okay, maybe “supports” is too strong a word given the Byzantine methods required to import one’s tunes onto the console. Direct ripping from a music CD to the hard drive works, but can be time-consuming and a bit messy when you’re putting together a mix of tracks. Zune owners (such as myself and the four other people out there) can sync to the 360 but not transfer music files (as far as I’ve been able to tell, at least), nor can users shift files from mp3 CDs.

What I ended up doing was burning a compilation disc on my computer, then ripping it to the 360′s internal storage. Here’s the track list:

It kicks off in style with the (arguably) first truly “punk” track ever recorded and finishes with a barnstomer of a cover by the Only Band That Mattered, with several genre stops in between.

The problem wasn’t finding tracks I loved, but determining which ones fit the pedal-to-the-metal theme and, more importantly, wouldn’t wear out their welcome after umpteen plays. The final result is a revealing glimpse into the blue collar bohemian id that lurks behind my genteel exterior, my platonic ideal of what driving music ought to be.

There’s classic rock, glam/bubbleglam, ELO’s masterpiece of electric sleaze, a couple lingering vestiges of my metallic youth, Randy Newman’s before-the fact-rebuttal to Mike Davis, a handful of punk anthems, the new wave embodiment of the Summer of ’82, the unofficial Bay State anthem, and some more recent efforts which have tickled my fancy (including a cover of the greatest song ever recorded).

As for the inclusion of the Jim Steinman-penned “Nowhere Fast,” I can only offer this as my defense…

Case closed.