Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* Enjoy the latest offering from Charlton Griffin, frequent 2Blowhards visitor and producer of some of the classiest audiobooks available.

* Big Hollywood's Matt Peterson continues his series about conservatives and literature.

* Cullen Gallagher reads and enjoys "Pick-Up," by the pulp master Charles Willeford.

* Whatever became of sexy-trashy blockbuster novels?

* Gerard Jones takes stock of how things are changing for book authors.

* Thanks to Bryan for turning up this excellent interview with the great, and very down-to-earth, Elmore Leonard.

* Here's a downside to the Kindle that I hadn't thought of before.

* Why doesn't the opinion-making class appreciate light verse more?

* MBlowhard Rewind: I praised the sly and satirical work of the popular novelist Ira Levin.

Best,

Michael

at July 2, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* What role did the ventromedial prefrontal cortex play in causing the current economic crisis?

* Have Americans fallen out of love with McMansions?

Best,

Michael

at July 1, 2009 | perma-link | (7) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

I spent the first year or two in college as an Industrial Design major and retain a casual interest in the subject. Besides a concern for ergonomics in product design, graphical interfaces for computer software as well as in problem avoidance during everyday activities, a continuing subject of interest is design evolution and the related concept of a Platonic-like ultimate general form dictated by a variety of constraints.

I treated product evolution of passenger aircraft here and that for automobiles here.

The present posting deals with the interesting case of a class of product that has varied comparatively little over time in terms of its general appearance -- the refrigerator. True, there have been important changes over the last century and more in terms of the means of refrigeration as well as the materials used in construction. Nevertheless, in essence, a refrigerator is simply a box with one, two or a few doors taking up most of one side -- pretty much what ice boxes were a hundred years ago.

Information on the refrigerator's predecessor, the ice box, is here, and a history of the refrigerator is here.

Jeffrey L. Meikle in his book about the early days of Industrial Design offers an amusing treatment of the refrigerator and its relationship to design salesmanship as practiced in the 1930s. On page 104 of the1979 edition, he notes that while Henry Dreyfuss' General Electric refrigerators remained little changed from 1934 to 1939, Raymond Loewy's Sears Coldspot refrigerators changed details from year to year during the late 1930s. He writes:

A "case history" written later in Loewy's office rationalized the continued redesign of the Coldspot. Sears executives "might have been dubious about the possibilities of a new and better looking box" because Loewy had presumably designed "a 'perfect' refrigerator." But the designer himself did not see his design "as a masterpiece, but as a step in the evolution towards perfection."

What Loewy failed to realize -- or was afraid to admit -- was that refrigerators already had essentially reached their ultimate general form and that he, Dreyfuss, and any other refrigerator designers were mostly playing around with incidental details. Such an admission would contradict a "perfection" sales pitch common in the early days of the profession when the concept of bringing in an outside designer was still controversial. I should note that the ideal of perfect or ultimate forms emerging on the basis of an item's function and component materials was part of the ideology of modernism during the early 20th century.

Below are examples of refrigerator design.

Gallery

Ice box - ca. 1900
A block of ice -- typically 25 or 50 pounds -- would be placed in the upper compartment. Foods that needed to stay frozen or nearly so would be there too. The lower compartment would be for items such as milk or vegetables that needed only to be kept cool.

G.E. Monitor Top - 1928
These were common in the 1920s. The mechanical bits are in the cylindrical attachment on top of the main box. Those gaps make for dust traps, so keeping this part clean was a chore.

Sears Coldspot, designed by Raymond Loewy - 1935
This is an early example of a refrigerator formed by an industrial designer. The mechanical parts are now at the bottom of the box -- where dust collects unnoticed.

Recent Kenmore Side-by-Side
Refrigerator design changed little for decades. Recent models have features such water dispensers on the outside and placing the freezer compartment to one side, rather than at the top.

Recent Kenmore Elite 4-Door
More doors and features bring greater profits. This Kenmore has four doors. Some current refrigerators have the freezer compartment at the bottom instead of the top or side. I regard variations in doors and the addition of outside dispensers as relatively minor variations on the functional theme established years ago by ice boxes.

Seen in Lyon, France - June, 2009
I took this from the balcony outside our hotel room. The refrigerators in the window have the classic shape: all that's new are the colorful paint jobs, some based on national flags.

Later,

Donald

at July 1, 2009 | perma-link | (6) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

This guy writes that he can think of little that's more un-American than discussing secession. Meanwhile, Patri Friedman and conspirators are celebrating July 4 with a series of "Secession Week" postings. They seem to think that there's little that's more American than serious consideration of secession.

Secession, eh? Was it an issue that you saw coming from long ago? I certainly didn't. The gang at the Volokh conspiracy treat themselves to a fun yakfest about the topic.

The most interesting person I've read on the topic is the Emory University prof and Hume specialist Donald Livingston. His take on American history generally is really startling -- I found it downright eye-opening. Here's a small collection of Livingston's writings. Here's a collection of talks that he's given.

Best,

Michael

at June 30, 2009 | perma-link | (22) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* Agnostic has been much struck by the low-carb and Paleo critique of conventional nutrition advice, and has started a new blog to pass along his thoughts and discoveries. Good to see him linking to Tom Naughton, the director of the documentary "Fat Head." Tom's a fantastic blogger as well as a very gifted filmmaker.

* A fun and sophisticated new blog on the theme of eating well while eating cheaply.

* Have the French lost their food knack? If so: What a cultural tragedy!

* Was the invention of farming the biggest mistake in the history of humanity?

* Mark Sisson gets a shock when his blood pressure is checked. I'm midway through Sisson's new book, and I recommend it enthusiastically.

* The top food trucks in America.

* What -- if much of anything -- is really being measured when you get your choresterol levels checked?

* Have food manufacturers captured our neuro-reward systems? The very interesting commentsfest is here.

* Grape Nuts breakfast cereal has been around for 111 years, but it sounds like it isn't going to be around for much longer.

* Has the fried food at chain restaurants been striking you as weirdly taste-free recently? Tom Naughton says that there's one particular guy to blame: Michael Jacobson, of the do-goodin' Center for Science in the Public Interest.

* The world's oldest man shares the secrets of his longevity. (Link thanks to Charlton Griffin)

Best,

Michael

at June 30, 2009 | perma-link | (5) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

If you wanna draw or paint faeries -- what you read about in childrens' stories -- then here is a book for you.

How about wizards, witches and warlocks? Check here. Or here if you need dragon-drawing help.

On the other hand, if a commission for a portrayal of goblins, orcs and "other dark creatures" flies over the transom, then you might want to get a copy of this book.

As nearly as I can tell (you might disagree), there are no such things as faeries, witches, warlocks, dragons, goblins and orcs. So painting them plein-air or posed in the studio might prove frustrating. Thank goodness those books exist and can come to the rescue.

What I find interesting is that there is enough agreement about the appearance of non-existent creatures that such instruction books are possible.

Later,

Donald

at June 30, 2009 | perma-link | (1) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Lit-fict vet Alice Hoffman shows how to respond classily to a negative review: here, here.

Best,

Michael

at June 30, 2009 | perma-link | (10) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Confession time again.

I can't remember the last time I bought for myself a non-fiction book on a best seller list. I know that I bought autobiographies of Lee Iacocca (the Ford and Chrysler honcho) and Chuck Yeager (the guy who broke the sound barrier), those books from 25 years or so ago. But after that....

As for fiction, I did buy every Harry Potter book. That's probably because I've always had a soft spot for science fiction where another world/civilization is made fascinating thanks to the imagination and skill of the writer. The Potter books aren't sci-fi, but they had the quality I just mentioned. In other words, I didn't buy them because they were ultra-hyper-mega best sellers: that factor was incidental.

I've mentioned before that I read little fiction, this largely because I don't like getting hooked to the point my sleep suffers. So the Potter books aside, I can't even guess what the last best selling novel I read was. I did read Drury's "Advice and Consent," Michener's "Hawaii" (because I'd just visited there for the first time) and Heller's "Catch-22." Oh, and I did read "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" for a reason I no longer can begin to comprehend. These were read when the books reached paperback. I'm not counting classical fiction written many years before I got to it such as Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" or Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" series. To summarize, as nearly as I can tell, I read my last non-Potter best selling novel before I turned 40.

I do read a lot of non-fiction. But not best sellers. More precisely, I now never buy a book simply because it is on a best seller list. I might have read some books in recent years that might have shown up on one list or another, but that would have been happenstance. Why is that?

It's because I buy books to get information in greater depth than can be provided in magazine articles, internet postings and outlines. Yet many non-fiction best sellers strike me as beefed-up versions of what I just mentioned or else deal with subjects I'm not deeply interested in. If I've already gotten the basic information in concise form elsewhere, it makes no sense to buy a book on the subject. If I'm not presently interested in a subject, taking time to read about it deprives me of the time I would spend learning about things I deem more important or interesting. We are far past the point where an individual can be conversant with everything, so I feel little guilt about ignoring Things I Should Learn About. This doesn't mean I'll never again buy a non-fiction best-seller, it's just that the odds against doing so are high.

On reflection, what I've been discussing is really about life cycle stages and how they can affect one's behavior. Between my mid-teens and mid-thirties, I felt it was important to stay au courant. That might have had something to do with ego and self-esteem as well as for social reasons (being "with it"). At the same time, I was reading plenty of non-best seller material. In both cases, I was building what might be called intellectual capital.

Nowadays, I have a good deal of that intellectual capital in place and my need for more is selective. Also, I don't feel a strong need to be au courant when dealing with, say, twentysomethings. I deal with them as adults and believe that if I tried really hard to be as hip as them, I'd be pretty ridiculous in their eyes.

So ends my soul-searching for today.

What's your take regarding best-selling books, be they fiction or not? Life cycle observations are welcome as well.

Later,

Donald

at June 29, 2009 | perma-link | (9) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Yes, I'm aware that I've been tending to write about artists active 50-150 years ago and largely ignoring artists who are alive and painting or who departed fairly recently. As a corrective, I'll do some postings about painters whose work I see in magazines such as American Artist, American Art Collector and Art of the West.

The downside is that I've seen little or none of their work in person and mostly rely on reproductions in those magazines or on the Web. That's because their paintings are mostly in the artists' studios, private collections or art galleries rather than in major museums. (Note to self: compile a list of artists and their main galleries and take it along on future trips to California, Arizona and New Mexico. Galleries here in the Seattle area mostly skew modernist.)

The subject of the present post is Casey Baugh, a guy still in his twenties who has impressive technical skills. His Web site is here. An article about him containing useful background material is here.

Below are examples of his work. All show women, but he sometimes paints men; dig through his site to find examples.

Gallery

Ambiance
Interesting use of cool light on the subject's hair and body planes. I find the treatment of the oriental rug impressive: compare to the rug in Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.

Blue Earring

Kate

Red Scarf
This is a demonstration painting. A report on the demonstration is here. Most demonstration paintings I'm familiar with tend to have an unfinished look that's understandable, given the circumstances of their creation. Baugh brought the subject's face to a considerable degree of finish. This also shows that he doesn't painstakingly copy photos -- or doesn't need to, anyway. This guy's skill seems to be for real.

Nonchalant
As well as any, this illustrates Baugh's practice of creating smooth faces while leaving backgrounds and clothing treatment looser, more "painterly."

Shades of Yellow

Erubescent

I think it's safe to conclude that Baugh can create knockout babes. But he's young enough that it's hard to tell how his work might evolve.

For instance, he might simply become another Pino, who I wrote about here, an artist of high ability who tends to crank out similar works year after year to make a good living. As I've stated more than once, artists need to make livings just like the rest of us, so I don't get very bothered when I see similarity across works: one often has little choice but to paint what sells.

If an artist is fortunate enough to attain a good income stream, I think it might be nice if he'd once in a while, on his off-hours, try something different. Many artists probably do just that, except those "private" paintings usually don't get seen in public. So we have no way of telling whether Pino and Baugh are beavering away on new styles, themes or whatever they might potentially be up to.

Pino turns 70 this autumn, so his career is pretty well set. Baugh is very young and, I hope, has plenty of time to work on maturity and wisdom. It might be interesting to check back in a few years to find out where his talent is taking him.

Later,

Donald

at June 28, 2009 | perma-link | (8) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* Razib wonders why the Andean highlands are still dominated by indigenous people.

* Did modern humans eat Neanderthals? (Link thanks to ALD)

* Richard Wrangham talks about cooking and evolution. (Link thanks to Razib)

Best,

Michael

at June 26, 2009 | perma-link | (1) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

In this posting from about a year ago I included a photo of a bumper sticker clad Prius.

Since then, a lot of political water has gone over the dam including a presidential election and the first five months of a new administration. I thought it might be fun to discover what effect these events had on that same Prius' sticker collection, so I swung by the street in northeast Seattle where it's usually parked and took an update photo.

Last year's and this year's photos are shown below.

There seem to be three additions and no deletions from a year ago.

To the immediate left of the license plate is a white square that probably once had a message but now appears to be faded away. Opposite the plate is a round "EU" (European Union) sticker with small member nation flags forming the outer edge of the circle.

Below the yellow "War is Terrorism sticker on the bumper is a small, mostly red sticker for the Democrat candidate in the race for Washington's 8th Congressional District. The Prius' home is not in the 8th District -- that's mostly across Lake Washington in the Bellevue-Redmond area. But it was one race that was competitive for both sides; as it happened, the Republican won.

My interpretation of all this? The Prius' owner is both satisfied with the state of the world and too lazy to strip off stickers that are politically obsolete.

He's not alone. Nearly five years after the campaign, I still see "John Kerry" and "Kerry-Edwards" stickers a few times a week. I can understand leaving them on during Bush's second term as a form of protest. But why not remove them now that there's a Democrat in the White House.

Later,

Donald

at June 26, 2009 | perma-link | (14) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Relatively few plays written by women are produced. Can we take this as definitive evidence of discrimination against women? Research has been done:

• More men than women write plays, and the men are also often more prolific. Taking these numbers into account, plays by men and women are in fact produced at the same rate.

• Plays by women do seem to need to be better (or at least more commercial) than plays by men in order to receive productions. But who enforces this state of affairs? As it turns out: women artistic directors and women literary managers.
  

Best,

Michael

at June 24, 2009 | perma-link | (68) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

A favorite sport hereabouts is bashing modernist architecture, which we do for reasons that make good sense to us, at least. Much of that glass 'n' reinforced concrete 'n' metal cladding strikes us as pretty sterile and not people-friendly.

Aside from one brief jab, the focus of this posting is on an alternative: buildings and townscapes with lots of visual interest due in part to materials and ornamentation that creates a textured surface -- usually with a partly random pattern or effect. The following photos were taken on my recent visit to France.

Later,

Donald

at June 24, 2009 | perma-link | (15) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* Toby Young wonders why he's become such a grump since he turned 40.

* Meet the real 40 year old virgins. (Link thanks to Randall Parker)

* Where does empathy come from?

* Lily Burana reviews two biographies of the legendary stripper (and popular-culture figure) Gypsy Rose Lee.

* Tony Comstock remembers that, back in the 1970s, New York City "smelled like sex."

* Curious to hear what the "Game" crowd makes of this study. I have a hunch that Game doesn't take into enough account that there might well be a difference between the gals a guy enjoys fantasizing about and the gals he actually enjoys spending time with. But what do I know?

* Tantric sex is back in the news.

Best,

Michael

at June 24, 2009 | perma-link | (6) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* Reid Rosefelt confesses that he tried to persuade his boss not to produce "My Dinner With Andre." Great to see that Criterion is bringing out a classy new DVD of the movie on June 23. That'd be today. Hey, Andre Gregory is one of the people who have given The Wife and me a blurb for our raucous and satirical audiobook.

* Cool demo.

* A time-does-pass note: "Purple Rain" was released -- get this -- 25 years ago. And I still haven't made up my mind about Prince ...

* Good lord!

* British advertising vs. American advertising, a comparison.

* Jeremy Richey notices that Cinema Libre will be issuing some slick new DVDs of movies by Jean-Jacques ("Diva") Beineix. Check out that trailer for the director's cut of "Betty Blue." Mad love, baby!

* MBlowhard Rewind: I raved about the work of the filmmaker Robert Siodmak.

Best,

Michael

at June 23, 2009 | perma-link | (14) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

David Apatoff over at his Illustration Art blog posted some interesting thoughts on artists "selling out" to commerce.

You should read the whole thing here. But I can't resist his discussion of Claude Monet, who refused to sell out during hard times early in his career. Instead, he begged and borrowed relentlessly. Eventually, as Apatoff notes:

Because he couldn't afford medical care for his family, his wife Camille suffered through a long illness with tuberculosis before dying painfully at the age of 32. Some say she died of pelvic cancer, but others say she died of a botched abortion because she and Monet could not afford to have a third child.

Don't think Monet's artistic dedication was compromised by Camille's tragic death; he told a friend that he was interested in the way Camille's face changed color after she died, so he recorded the change in a painting ...

Now that's what I call principle.

Later,

Donald

at June 22, 2009 | perma-link | (21) comments

Friedrich von Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards,

I’ve written before about the role light entertainment plays as a stimulus in my mental economy. Given that I’m naturally something of a depressive, I use regular doses of light entertainment to keep me at an even keel.

Over the years, this has often translated into a taste for detective fiction. Perhaps surprisingly, in the past six months or so, this has translated into a taste for reading philosophy.

And perhaps more surprisingly, I find that I get very much the same sort of pleasure out of philosophy that I did out of detective stories.

The pleasure I’m talking about does not lie in proving that I’m smarter than the authors of detective stories, at least if that implies attempting to figure out the guilty party before the book’s denouement. On the few occasions I’ve been tempted to do this, I’ve learned two things: (1) few authors are so dense as to fail to scatter three or four red-herrings about their plot and (2) few authors actually provide enough clues to logically (or in philosophical language, necessarily) eliminate all but one of the potential suspects. Hence, the actual solution often ends up striking me as arbitrary, being at the whim of the author.

Occasionally, when dealing with authors who are fairly relaxed about their standards of plotting, I strongly suspect that the decision as to whether this suspect or that suspect is the guilty party wasn’t made by the author until the final chapter of the book was being written. Under these circumstances, my native laziness (or perhaps a spirit of methodological economy) bids me to abstain from such pointless problem solving, and to wait patiently for the solution to be revealed while sipping a glass of red wine. After all, I’m paying the price of the book for the fictional detective to do the work, not me!

No, the pleasure I get from detective stories usually boils down to appreciating the interaction of the characters, often with some witty dialogue tossed in, as they attempt to solve a problem. When I decide to buy additional books by the same author, I inevitably ask myself if I care to spend more time in the company of the characters of the last book.

Now, the situation in philosophy strikes me, being a seasoned consumer of light entertainment, as closely parallel. I’ve read enough philosophy books and encyclopedia-of-philosophy articles at this point to notice that the same basic problems keep coming up over and over again. Even when one philosopher explicitly argues against the views of another, they often share more ground than they fight over.

Just today I spent a leisurely morning examining a case of this occluded commonality when I read that Kant, in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, trash talks his Scots contemporary, Thomas Reid, for failing to “probe more deeply into the nature of reason,” and for "putting on a bold face without any proper insight into the question, by appealing to the common sense of mankind." Apparently Kant somehow neglected to note that Reid, like himself, (1) wrote to refute to Hume’s skepticism while appreciating it profoundly, and (2) asserted that because the very structure of the human mind dictates the metaphysical assumptions that will be used to interpret our sensory data and our view of the world around us, further metaphysical speculation is likely to prove pointless or even harmful. I dunno, maybe Kant was jealous of the fact that Reid could get to the more-or-less same conclusion as the author of Critique of Pure Reason with a much less elaborate philosophical apparatus and was suffering methodological economy envy.

In any event, because various philosophers keep hashing out the same problems and coming to different conclusions, we have a situation which seems to me quite analogous to the lack of a necessary villain in most detective story plots. The philosopher walks you up to a mystery, analyzes it (hopefully without too much technical language and with a little wit) and then proposes an ingenious but essentially arbitrary solution.

So why do I read philosophy, if it’s not for the, ahem, insights? Because I’ve found a few philosophers who I am happy to spend time with. Chief among these is Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), progenitor of Pragmatism, father of semiotics, and all-round logical whiz (who understood that electrical circuits could model logical operations 50 years before that insight started the development of the modern computer). Many consider him the most significant American philosopher. But of course, that’s not the real reason I read Peirce -- heck, I read him for his prose:

Do you think, reader, that it is a positive fact that

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again;

Or do you think that this, being poetry, is only a pretty fiction? Do you think that, notwithstanding the horrible wickedness of every mortal wight, the idea of right and wrong is nevertheless the greatest power on this earth, to which every knee must sooner or later bow or be broken down; or do you think that this is another notion at which common sense should smile?

Who could not want to spend time with a guy who could write like that, and could crack some pretty funny jokes on philosophical topics as well (not to mention one who was ingenious enough to use probability theory to attack Kant’s doctrine of synthetic a priori judgments)?

And the best part is, I’ve got over two thousand years of this stuff to read in a hot bath or in the middle of the night. Not much chance of running out.

Cheers,

Friedrich

at June 21, 2009 | perma-link | (9) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

I recently wrote about General Motors' Saturn brand, which appeared to be on its way to oblivion. Since then, ex sports car racer turned billionaire Roger Penske has begun negotiations to take over the brand name as the keystone for the strategy of creating a "virtual" automobile company. From what I've read, the concept is to market cars built by actual -- not virtual -- manufacturers and badge and sell them in the USA under the Saturn banner. This is a step beyond the 1920s practice of creating "assembled" cars whereby a company would buy most of a car's bits from companies specializing in chassis, motors, bodies, etc., and then assemble them at a factory, selling the result with the company's brand name(s). Examples are Moon and Jordan.

Another GM brand on the extinction list is Pontiac, and all evidence to date suggests that it will go the way of its departed sister Oldsmobile, presumably at the end of the 2010 model year. The Wikipedia history of Pontiac is here

I confess to having a soft spot in my heart for the Pontiac brand. That's because my family has had three or four of them (depending how one counts -- see below). The first family car I remember was our 1941 Pontiac that I wrote about here. My father bought a 1951 Pontiac the day they were introduced and I bought a 1995 model. Truth is, that '95 wasn't my first choice. But I was getting a supplier discount on GM cars at the time because they were buying my data. As a result I could get more car for the money by buying GM -- which I did on three occasions (the other cars were a 1990 Chevrolet and a 1996 Oldsmobile).

Here are photos of examples of Pontiacs from those model years, the '96 shown being nearly identical to the one I owned.

The first Pontiacs appeared in 1926, the make being a "companion" brand to GM's Oakland line. My grandfather bought a used Oakland of 1920 vintage, so I suppose that might count as the fourth "Pontiac" my family owned. Oakland was named after a county abutting Detroit's northern boundary and Pontiac is its county seat. Since the city of Pontiac was named after an Indian chief, the cars were given Indian symbology (a chief's head hood ornament, for instance, and one model was dubbed "Chieftain"). All this was dropped in the late 1950s (before political correctness took hold, though for what it's worth I remain puzzled why it is shameful to honor ethnic groups by naming cars and sports teams after them). In the case of Pontiac, the brand was given a big makeover during those years, and the Indian connection didn't fit the performance image management desired to create.

The Great Depression saw the end of weak car makers and the tightening up of operations for the survivors. General Motors had four companion brands -- most newly launched before the Crash: Oakland's Pontiac, Oldsmobile's Viking, Buick's Marquette and Cadillac's LaSalle. The Viking and Marquette were killed quickly along with Oakland (in 1931) which had proved less viable than Pontiac; the LaSalle continued through the 1940 model year.

Thus, by the mid-1930s GM had a range of car makes representing a price/prestige ladder with some price overlap allowed. Omitting LaSalle which served as an entry-level Cadillac, GM's line from bottom to top was: Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac. The concept, which I consider brilliant, was that buyers could work their way up or down the spectrum depending on their ability to pay and perhaps their desire to impress friends and neighbors. For instance, X dollars could buy one a top of the line 6-cylinder Chevrolet or else an entry-level Pontiac six. X plus N dollars meant one could afford a "straight-eight" (cylinder) Pontiac or a cheap Olds. And so on. Therefore, if your neighbor pulled a brand-new mid-range Buick (the Super line) straight 8 onto his driveway and what you owned was a lousy Oldsmobile 88, you, your wife and most certainly all the teenage boys in the neighborhood knew pretty much where you stood economically. This, even though your hot V-8 Olds could easily whip that Buick Super in a drag race.

This marketing nirvana began to break down in the 1960s pressured by growing sales of small foreign-made cars such as Volkswagen and the compact-sized U.S.-made Rambler. GM, Ford and Chrysler added smaller sized cars into their lineups. By 1963, for instance, one could buy a standard size Chevrolet, a compact Chevrolet (the Chevy II) or the small Chevrolet Corvair. Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick lines included "compacts" along with standard sized models. Eventually, most American brands included cars from a variety of "platforms" -- standard, compact, minivan, SUV and so on. The result was a drastic weakening of Alfred P. Sloan's price ladder concept and a parallel weakening of brand images.

Truth is, Pontiac didn't have much of a brand image before 1960 other than its place on the GM continuum. In the late 40s, one of its advertising slogans was something like "the 100,000 mile car," implying what in those days passed for great reliability. There were other slogans, but Pontiacs were basically dull cars that served as stepping stones between low-priced Chevrolets and the technologically experimental and, by the early 50s, hot performing Oldsmobiles. Whereas Olds got its "Rocket" V-8 motor in 1949, Pontiac had to make do with an obsolescent straight-8 through the 1954 model year. (A straight-8 had eight cylinders in line, making for a long motor that required an impressively long hood. This was a big deal in the 1920s and 30s and expensive makes such as Buick and Packard boasted of them. But the V-8 was the road to really high performance, and the crop of new V-8s introduced around 1950 by Chrysler, Cadillac, Olds and Studebaker killed off the American straight-8 motor -- the last of which were built during the 1954 model year.)

At the end of the 1950s Pontiac management got rid of the famous "Silver Streak" styling cue and extended the axle lines so that the outside edges of the tires were nearly at the sides of the car, a feature touted as "Wide-track" and is found on virtually all cars today. In 1963 its new Grand Prix model was given a significant restyling. It had clean (for that era), yet distinctive lines that made it a gotta-have car. Then came Pontiac's version of the "muscle car," the GTO, based on a compact platform. This was followed by the Firebird that appeared in 1967 model year. It went through several design iterations before disappearing after the 2002 model year. These cars led to Pontiac's long-used slogan about "building excitement."

In recent years, Pontiacs have not been very exciting. True, a hot Australian Holden was tricked out with left-hand drive and Pontiac trim and called "GTO" but most potential buyers never believed that it was a real "Goat" and sales were weak. The Aztek crossover SUV was oddly styled and became a laughingstock and sales flop. The current G6 and G8 models, whatever their other virtues, are poorly styled (see below). Its Solstice sports car is a niche model that failed to influence sales of the rest of the Pontiac line.

So Pontiac began life as a sort of nothing brand that owed its existence to its place in a price hierarchy. Then it had ten or 15 years of truly distinctive glory followed by 35 years of living off that glory while it became once more a nondescript car of no special appeal.

The Pontiac brand has been around for about 70 model years (there were no 1943-45 models due to the war), and I can't illustrate all the interesting examples here. But below are a few to supplement the Pittenger family ones shown above.

Later,

Donald

at June 21, 2009 | perma-link | (6) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Here is a link-index of my posts about artists as of mid-June, 2009. It updates a list posted early this year.

Please let me know of any errors or omissions.

Anglada-Camarasa, Hermen
Bama, James
Bastien-Lepage, Jules
Beaux, Cecilia
Bischoff, Franz
Boldini, Giovanni
Casas, Ramon
Chéret, Jules
Curtis, David (England)
Detaille, Édouard
Dewing, Thomas Wilmer
Edelfelt, Albert
Frazetta, Frank
Foujita
Fuchs, Bernie
Gajoum, Kal
Gallén, Axel
Goldbeck, Walter Dean
Grün, Jules-Alexandre
Herter, Albert
Henry, George & Hornel. E.A.
Hohlwein, Ludwig
Kline, Franz
Lambert, George
de Laszlo, Philip Alexius
Leffel, David
Levitan, Isaak
Leyendecker, J.C.
Macchiaioli (Italian group)
Malczewski, Jacek
Mathews, Arthur
de Neuville, Alphonse
Pino
Putz, Leo
Schjerfbeck, Helene
Serov, Valentin
Situ, Mian
Sloan, John
Sloan, John (update)
Solomon, Solomon J.
Stuck, Fanz von
Thayer, Abbot Handerson
Thompson, Tom
Tiepolo, Giavanni Battista
Vettriano, Jack
Vrubel, Mikhail
Zorn, Anders

This list will be updated from time to time.

Later,

Donald

at June 20, 2009 | perma-link | (0) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* New England architect Katie Hutchison conveys an awful lot in one simple sentence when she writes, "To me, residential architecture extends beyond the built structures of our homes to the spaces around, in between, and within sight of them." Now that's the kind of architecture theory I respect and resonate to. Her blogposting is a lovely, short appreciation of a very moving space. Fun to see that Katie is now selling prints and notecards of her photographs. She shows the same love of natural materials and processes, simple and direct experience, and the varieties and qualities of light and color in her photographs that she shows in her building-design work and her blogging.

* Large office towers -- that's "skyscrapers" to you civilians -- are doing as poorly in the recession as McMansions are.

* Nicola Linza explains beautifully why he's committed to architectural classicism.

* What a mess.

* Time's Richard Lacayo offers a well-done visual tour through Renzo Piano's new addition to the Art Institute of Chicago. Lacayo is impressed, and for all I know the place works well. But to me Piano's structure looks like a genteel version of a 1960s airplane terminal. Here's a talk with Piano.

* Has the building frenzy in Dubai finally come to an end? (Link thanks to Charlton Griffin)

* Nathan Origer takes a walk through his beloved hometown and wonders why so many of the newer buildings are so awful.

Best,

Michael

at June 18, 2009 | perma-link | (6) comments