My Log 511 April 10 2016 I take in a piece of Americana: a Texan Motor Show full of hot rods and vintage cars, and rock and roll bands, and lots of noise

Steve Wertheimer
(picture by John Anderson, Austin  Chronicle)

Yesterday I attended an event that I think could be called a piece of real Americana, or to be more precise, of Texicarna. It was the annual Motor Show in Austin, Texas. It is an event I witnessed a few years ago, on what I remember was a stifling hot day as we walked across the hills on the outskirts of the city, on which vintage cars from all over the United States had been gathered to be admired by the populace.

I am not interested in vintage or any other cars, but my son has an interest in this event because it is staged by a man he has known ever since he moved down here 12 years ago, a man who owns a famous Austin nightclub, the Continental, and who helped Ben and his band, Grady, in many ways over the years.

This man, Steve Wertheimer, could also be described as typically American, a self-made capitalist who moved into a depressed area of the city when he bought his nightclub, and who has since, by judicious investments in this and that, not only become extremely wealthy himself, but has been agent for uplifting the entire neighbourhood until today it is a thrusting, successful area for business and entertainment.

The stereotypes that would spring to mind for me of such a man would be mostly negative ones. But Steve, a restlessly energetic man, sort of defies most of those stereotypes. He is, of course hard-headed in business, as which businessman isn’t, but if his nightclub is anything to judge him by, there seems to be a real human being operating in that effervescent body. The Continental, as I have written many times, is still a grungy sort of dark hole entirely suitable for its mission, as laid down by its owner, that of playing live music on every day of the year, opening at 4 pm, and playing until closing time, usually around 2 am. Or maybe 3 am, if the gig is rocking.  He sticks to that mission so punctiliously that every Christmas Day there is a traditional gig by one of Austin’s favorite musicians, Dale Watson, who for four or five hours without a break just keeps playing some of the thousands of songs in his vocabulary until any reasonable man would be more likely to collapse than to keeping singing on.

There are said to be 150 such clubs in Austin that have live music, but certainly the Continental must rank among the top three or four: it is a music scene that enables Austin to claim it is the music capital of the United States. But the city is increasing in size --- up to 950,000 from 250,000 in 1970 --- at a rocketing rate, accepting as many as 100 new residents every day who, some say, are threatening to overwhelm the traditional Austin life style, of which music is probably its central core.  There are certainly still many wonderful musicians, great bands, in Austin, superb instrumentalists of the jazz, rock and pop variety. And Steve Wertheimer is one of those who bestrides this world ---- and I think I could use this word --- relentlessly. Anyway, since he got his start many years ago in a nightclub run by an old black man, now deceased, he has recently opened a smart new club named C’Boy’s Heart and Soul after  C’Boy Parks his ancient benefactor. It’s the sort of gesture that one might almost expect from a millionaire who  in his struggle to the top has managed to stay more or less a regular  guy (underneath that ruthless business exterior).
As Steve said, quoted in the Austin chronicle, "I think of him every day," of C'Boy. And the newspaper concluded. "Help people.  That's what Henry Wertheimer (Steve's Dad) and C'Boy Parks taught their boy Steve. You help people to help yourself. Fill a room with music and folks who love it, and sometimes it becomes a palace. You've just gotta walk through that door." I like that: it describes more or less how I feel about the Continental, which I have visited dozens of times.

So Steve’s motor show is part vintage cars, and part music. Vintage car guys, hot rodders,  love to make a hell of a racket as they whoosh, rumble and vroom  their engines while the car remains stationary, but needless to say in a show mixing cars with live music, some timetable must be established to allow the sublime to make its itself heard alongside the whooshers and swooshers.  In this environment the bands are as loud as the cars, and the audience, accustomed to the racket of American life, seem to eat it up. In fact, in the evening, at a musical gig attached to the Motor Show that took place in the Austin Speed Shop, I am told that one of the world’s loudest bands was playing as  a vintage car was wheeled into the auditorium, whooshing,  roaring and snarling so loudly that the music was completely drowned out.

I suppose similar events must take place in Canada, but when I remarked on how many overweight people were in attendance, whoever was with me remarked simply, “This is Texas.” That is the response given for almost everything down here. Texans think of themselves as exceptions to whatever rules govern the rest of the country, but to be fair to the state,  interlopers like me are more likely to remark on the obesity, the redneck politics --- “the odious Ted Cruz,” as I saw the Presidential aspirant called in a European journal last week --- the serving of food on greased brown paper, even in popular restaurants, the roughneck boastful posture so often adopted, than we are to remark on the magnificent art galleries, the multifarious universities, the splendidly effulgent public buildings, all of which are equally marks of Texan life.

Well, to get back to the Motor Show. I am sure events similar to this are held in Canada as well, but I am never likely to go to them, and I was astounded by the evidence of the devotion obviously lavished on the restitution of worn out old cars that, when restored, shine and glisten in their new paint, their spotless, gleaming, usually silver, engines, to such as point that I began almost to think of them as works of art. Certainly they are evidence of lives spent in which probably every spare moment and every spare dollar is devoted to the task. Some of the old beauties were for sale, with price tags for a 1931 roadster, for example, of $65,000, a rather impressive sum to pay for a vehicle the actual use of which must be minimal.  From restoration it is usually just an object to sit in the museum and be looked at.

And in the surrounding tents, where the businesspeople who serve this underground industry had their stalls, the things that people have made a hobby or a business of saving, and converting into cash are of almost indescribable variety. One item that struck me was a totally rusted out old chassis from a 1930s car, no wheels, no steering wheel, no seats, sitting on a tow truck with a price tag of $2,000. Imagine getting it home and beginning the task of converting it into an exact copy of its original designation! Imagine the bits and pieces required to make the thing whole again, pieces that must have to be bought from these small-time guys running their own businesses, each one specializing in a particular part, this one the number plates, this one the carburetor parts, this one the piece that ran along the outside of the car joining the axels to the engine pistons, and so on ad infinitum.  There were lines and lines, tables groaning under old licence plates, dating right back to the first plate ever issued in Texas in 1917, now up for sale for $550 each.  I even noticed some authentic 1932 equipment, listed as “brand new”, the part having been manufactured recently. Wow! I really do find it tough to get into the minds of these sellers and buyers,  prostate before their immense hobby.

Well, it takes all kinds to make our world. The whole exhibition was lined with food stalls, dozens and dozens of them, not unexpectedly purveying what is customarily called junk food --- chips, burgers, beer ---the impact of which seemed to be clear from the immense pounds of wobbling flesh being carried around.

Well, we are far from immune to that Canada, either. But maybe we carry it off with less bravado than the Texans. Which is, I suppose, what makes them unusual and noteworthy on this continent.

Thomas Piketty

Yanis Varoufakis

Link of the Day: April 5 2016:  Here is a link to a review of two books, one by French leftist economist Thomas Piketty, the other by Greek leftist economist Yanis Varoufakis, which each posit a way to a united, democratic Europe that, the reviewer (from The Guardian, London) says, offers a correct analysis of the situation, that is never likely to be adopted. More’s the pity, one might say, if, like me, you view the world from a leftist perspective, and are alarmed by the right-wing, neo-Nazi or fascistic movements becoming popular throughout Europe. Read the review, by Paul Mason, here.

My Log 510 April 4 2016: Three plagues: nationalism, racism, religious fundmentalism: Kapuscinski as a guide to the intractable problem of Nagoro-Karabakh and its religious certainties

The newspaper headlines today record that Armenia and Azerbaijan are continuing their hostilities over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, each claiming to have ceased fire, and each claiming that the other side is carrying on firing.

Their previous war finished without resolution in 1994, in the early years of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and it happens that yesterday I read an amazing chapter in a book by Ryszard Kapuscinski about how he entered the region during that first war when hostilities were at their height. (The book is Imperium, first published in 1993, a tale of his travels through Russia and its empire).

Before leaving Moscow he was able to contact an Armenian member of the Supreme Soviet, Galina Staravoytova, who said she would meet him in Yerevan, the Armenian capital. “Maybe we will be able to help you, but I don’t know. We will see,” she said enigmatically.

Azerbaijan is a Moslem country, Armenia Christian, and Nagorno-Karabakh is a Christian enclave in Azerbaijan that was insisting on joining Armenia. The region was completely sealed off from outside by the Red Army and local militias (“they guarded all passages, highways tracks and paths, guarded the rocky clefts and faults, the passes, precipices and peaks. There was absolutely no question of forcing one’s way through this vigilant, tightly woven net.”) It would be no easier by air, for people had been camping out in the airport in Yerevan for weeks hoping to get on to a plane to Stepanakert, the capital of the enclave.  This seemed an equally hopeless task to Kapuscinski, because to buy a ticket required a Soviet passport with proof of residence in the enclave, or a permit from the general army staff in Moscow, neither of which he had prospect of obtaining. He waited all day in his hotel hoping to hear from his contact who eventually phoned to tell him, even more enigmatically. “Wait patiently until a young man comes to you.”

This, it turned out, was the instruction he received from then on as he was handed from one young man to another, given a Soviet passport  taken from a dead soldier, and shuffled into backrooms, little bigger than cupboards, where he was fitted out, in the utmost secrecy,  in the uniform of an Aeroflot pilot, which got him on to a plane along with Starovoytova, but with instructions that he must not betray he had ever met her.

Typically, this amazing observer and journalist, Kapuscinski uses his experience of this bizarre war to generalize its meaning in such a way as to make it relevant to the lives of everyone of us.

“Three plagues, three contagions, threaten the world,” he writes.

“The first tis the plague of nationalism.

“The second is the plague of racism.

“The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism

“All three share one trait, a common denominator --- an aggressive, al-powerful irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that awaits only its sacrificial victims. Every attempt at calm conversation will fail. He doesn’t want a conversation, but a declaration that you agree with him, admit that he is right, join the cause. Otherwise you have no significance in his eyes, you do not exist, for you count only if you are a tool, an instrument, a weapon. There  are no people --- there is only the cause.

“A mind touched by such a contagion is a closed mind, one-dimensional, monothematic, spinning around one subject only --- its enemy. Thinking a bout our enemy sustains us, allows us to exist. That is why the enemy is always present, is always with us.”

And he adds, further down the page, that the Armenians and Azerbaijanis are to be envied, because they “are not beset by worries abut the complexity of the world or about the fact that human destiny is uncertain and fragile.” Theirs is a world  of  “an unambiguous law of exclusivity,” and he concludes, rather sadly, that “they never ask themselves, am I right?.... They need to be left in peace so as to thrash each other all the more thoroughly.”

We are a quarter of a century on from when those words were written, and the world today makes them seem like prophecies. Certain militia, inflamed by religious fundamentalism, are carrying out barbarities that were recorded 2500 years ago, and before, suggesting that human nature has never changed or improved.  But even the modern nations, armed to the teeth as we are, wrapped in our science and advanced knowledge, trapped by the same plagues of nationalism and racism (and others that he didn’t mention, pride, greed, cruelty) even we  are using our science and  sophisticated knowledge to introduce new barbarities, executing every day, at the push of a button, people who are thousands of miles away from their executioners, and who have never been given any hearing, any trial, and against whom any proof that might exist is entirely circumstantial.

What is this terror to kill that so besets us? How can it be that the United States, often referred to as the wealthiest nation that has ever existed, spends such a disproportionate amount of its income on preparing to kill, and then actually killing? How does it happen that  this very subject is one of those about which it seems impossible to hold a conversation, is beyond discussion?

I remember I started out as an idealistic youth wanting to work for the United Nations, to bring peace to the world, a dream from which I was rudely awakened as I saw how the United Nations was manipulated by the wealth-owners in their own interests. So now, in my sere years, my work done, with little left to do, I find myself signing petitions, one after the other, presented to me by eager young activists determined to change the course of human affairs.

Hope springs eternal, goes the old saying. Might one even hope that we can eventually open a conversation with those entombed in their certainties?