76 Firebird

I’d gone over my prior attempts to secure a “classic” Firebird.   This is the most recent: a 1976 Pontiac Firebird Esprit, in Firethorn Red (burgundy) with a buckskin (tan) vinyl interior.   The original engine, a Pontiac 350 V8, has since been replaced by an Oldsmobile 455 V8.  The transmission is a 3 speed TH350 automatic.  As an Esprit the hood is plain – no scoops (Formula) or shaker hood (Trans Am). 

I drove it around last weekend.   It takes awhile to start up when cold, but fires right up after it’s been warmed up.  It survived stop-go traffic in the local area and highway travel up and down 95 from Stafford.  The dual mufflers exit out underneath the car without tailpipes, and the front floorpans are peek-a-boo, so the car is very loud.  The 455 gives a nice amount of mid-range oomph, but it looks like the intake, carburetor (Quadrajet) and cam are stock, as are the heads.  It does have headers, though.  The stereo is missing the faceplate, thus no 70s-era tunage (KISS, Zeppelin, GFR, Sabbath, Frampton) – but with the exhaust so loud I’m not sure that really matters. 

The seats are torn up, so it has aftermarket generic seat covers.  The dash is the (fake) woodgrain without the tach – not the famous aluminum turned panel, though I find myself enamored of both styles without a clear preference.  The wheels are aluminum snowflake with no-name tires (225/70R15).  Rally II’s would be nice.

Even though it’s not even a Formula, much less a Trans am – the Esprit was the low-performance luxury model – it still got substantial attention, though most of it male (!).   The ’92 Formula was the same: admiration from mechanics but practically no one else.  The Civic gets no attention at all:  what would someone say?  “Smart choice, man,” with a thumbs up.  You can be cool, or smart, but not both…except maybe in a Porsche.

Obviously it needs work.  What would I do (i.e. what are my plans)?   First off, the paint:  dark blue metallic.   Yeah.  Second, a black interior.  Tan really stinks big time.  The burgundy paint wouldn’t be half so bad combined with a black interior, but with tan?  Tan just ruins everything.  Rally II wheels are the best for Pontiacs, and now they make them in aluminum, so you don’t have to deal with heavy steel wheels.   While I really like the Screaming Chicken hood bird, I can’t accept putting it on a non-Trans Am.  That’s just…King Cobra-esque.  Not good.

Engineering:  it needs a better rear gear with posi, rebuild the TH350, and definitely give it a shaker hood, even if it isn’t a Trans Am.  Edelbrock Air Gap intake, a shiny new Edelbrock carburetor, and a decent cam.  I’d forgo the lumpy idle if it meant off-the-line throttle response.  It needs a rear sway bar, new shocks, and better matched front springs (it's sitting up a little high now).  The overall package would mean a navy-on-black, five-spoked, mellow-toned, beast that can smoke the tires off the line and handle well.  The best of the 70s.  

Heroes For Sale

I’d read the book by H.H. Kirst back in high school, but for the longest time could not find it – it was in storage since 1990.  Finally we went through our boxes and I fished it out and read it again for the first time since then.  My review is below.

            In the meantime, I went looking online for it and determined that a completely different story by the same name, as a movie, came out in 1933 (Kirst’s book dates from 1980).

Movie.  A pair of US soldiers in WWI suffer odd fates.   Thomas Holmes is captured by the Germans and although conscientiously treated by their excellent military doctors, winds up addicted to morphine, which compromises his ability to get work back in the US when he returns.   However, his friend, out of shame – he got credit for a heroic act which Holmes committed, but never had the nerve to tell the truth about what happened, so he feels like a fraud – gets him a job.  A Red, Max, spouts angry revolutionary jargon until he strikes it rich from patents for labor-saving devices, then he turns into the very capitalist pig he once denounced.  Later, the Great Depression strikes, and Holmes winds up as yet another hobo tramping across America in search of a job.  The film is much more cynical, but considerably more realistic, than the overrated Depression film “It’s A Wonderful Life”.  So much crap happens to Holmes, yet he remains a sympathetic character throughout the entire film.

Book.   This was a much later book written by Kirst, who served as a Wehrmacht officer during WWII and wrote many, many stories on that topic.  This book focuses on an extravagant training camp, AFSIC Kampfental, in southern Germany in 1944.  The main character is Corporal Singer, a clever slacker who manages to keep himself from being promoted to sergeant but generally tends to do pretty well for himself without being too cynical.   The story injects situation reports on Germany’s waning fortunes as the war progressed and intriguing biographies of the major characters. 

There’s even an SS officer who is, quite naturally, not portrayed very likeably, and who discloses details about the “Final Solution”; the book seems to imply that most Germans in the Wehrmacht only learned of it late in 1944 after most of the Jews had already been killed.  But Kirst is also honest enough to imply that a substantial element of “hear no evil, see no evil” had been present up until that point.

            My favorite part is when they censor the trainees’ mail and discover one who isn’t impressed with the Fuhrer:  “The man’s just a jumped up corporal, taking it out on the world because the Army, which was commanded by morons and still is, never saw fit to make him an officer….” [FREEDOM!]

Naturally, between the two of them I’m more favorably disposed to the WWII story from a German perspective, but the movie was well worth watching.  While I’m on the topic of Germans feeling sorry for themselves over WWII, there’s also Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer (an Alsatian soldier who was as much French as German), and Legion of the Damned, by Sven Hassel (Danish volunteer in the Wehrmacht).   I’ve already reviewed The Devil’s Guard at length earlier, the true story of Waffen SS veterans fighting the Viet Minh as part of the French Foreign Legion.   

Weird Beard

Normally I tend to be clean-shaven, due to my own preferences and those of my female partners, none of whom have been fans of beards or mustaches.  Occasionally, I’ve lapsed into furriness just out of boredom.  In the past, for brief periods of a few months at a time, e.g. law school and summer 2000, I did have a mustache, but I’ve never been keen on beards, and really can’t stand that affectation of goatees.  Back in the late 90s those were a huge fad, but fortunately not anymore.

After letting it grow for two weeks, I clowned around before shaving it off completely.  First I shaved my chin, which resulted in James Hetfield style mutton chops.  These have an undeniable nineteenth century flavor.  Then I shaved the middle of the upper lip, and voila:  WOLVERINE.  Ok, I’m not as svelte as Hugh Jackman, so in my case it was the SABRETOOTH.  And that lasted only as long as it took to take a cell pic and then shave it off.  While the hair growth I develop on the upper lip is substantial enough to form a real mustache, on the cheeks it’s more of an annoying and unattractive accumulation of reddish facial hair than a real beard. 

As a fad, facial hair has varied considerably.  The nineteenth  century seems to be the time when men were most adventurous about it and really went to town.  Abraham Lincoln chose the Amish-style beard with no mustache.  His hapless General Burnside let the hair on his cheeks grow, thus “sideburns”.  Various handlebar mustaches, Kaiser Bill waxed mustaches, and chin beards also came out.  Baron Haussmann had this bizarre deal of letting it grow under the chin but shaving north.  I really can’t fathom that.  Was Madame Haussmann a fan?  Who knows. 

Baseball player Rollie Fingers has been the most contemporary advocate of handlebar mustaches.

WWI seems to have put paid to the beard fad which had been going on since the second half of the nineteenth century: primarily because the best gas masks wouldn’t seal firmly against the face unless the soldier was clean shaven.  By WWII, mustaches had fallen out of favor, except for Hitler’s square (oddly, I see little evidence that other Nazis copied him!) and those awful pencil thin ones.

I see Kurt Warner has finally kicked the “permanent fuzz” look he used to prefer when QB’ing the Rams back in 2000.  I haven’t seen George Michael lately; but Chris O’Donnell is waving the fuzz flag now on “NCIS: L.A.” 

Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill have kept their long, dwarvish beards:  oddly, drummer Frank Beard (!) is the only beardless one in ZZTop; he only has a mustache.  Hill is only distinguishable from Gibbons by being shorter and missing 2 strings on his instrument.

A few years ago The Edge expropriated the Fu Manchu (mustache extending down to the chin) previously favored by Elliot Gould in the movie version of M*A*S*H but also Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, who has been clean shaven for decades now.  For most of Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi had a thick mustache and probably the coolest specimen thereof.  Nietzsche and David Crosby are the biggest "bushy mustache" examples I can imagine.

Finally, Frank Zappa was the only one I know of – aside from perhaps die hard fans – to keep a Hitler mustache on the chin below the mustache itself.  

The X-Men

I rewatched “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” after having seen the new “The Wolverine” film in IMAX 3D the previous weekend, which means I’ve seen the entire series, some more than once.  They’re all CGI-heavy action films.   They’re based on Marvel comics characters dating back to 1963.

Mutants.  The whole premise upon which the comics and series is based concerns humans with mutations which give them special powers, i.e. mutants.  It’s unclear how these mutations occur, but the mutants are generally born with them.  The powers can be magnified (Cerebro), modified (Wolverine), stolen (Rogue), or even expropriated and aggregated (Weapon XI, formerly Wade).  I’ve yet to see a mutation which is unequivocally BAD for the mutant.  This means that Superman & Thor (aliens) and Batman and Iron Man (rich guys with gadgets) are not mutants, but Spiderman (radioactive spider), The Hulk (gamma radiation), and Captain America (super serum) are, as are the entire Fantastic Four (space rays).  Remarkably, no one has been transformed into a massive, Tokyo-eating lizard – the closest being Dr. Connors (Lizardman from “Spiderman”). 

Naturally, non-mutant humans (hereinafter, NMHs) fear the mutants. I’ve to see any jealousy or envy; if anything, the mutants often envy the NMHs their normality.  So a consistent plot issue in the X-Men stories and movies is this conflict between mutants and NMHs.  This is sometimes clumsily equated with our debate about gay rights (are gays mutants?  Super powers of epicureanism and interior design? Discuss) as in “Last Stand” (see below).  And the conflict serves to divide the mutants into two camps:  pro-human (Xavier) and anti-human (Magneto). 

 

I have scant experience with the comics, but here are the movies: 

X-Men (2000).  This is the first film, but thanks to “First Class”, not the first chronologically.  Magneto plots to channel Rogue’s powers to make the entire world into mutants – using the Statue of Liberty – but Xavier’s team realizes this will just kill everyone (not a good idea, and probably not what Holocaust survivor Eric Lensherr intended), so they (surprise, surprise) shut it down.

X-2 (2003).  Now the tables are turned: instead of killing all the non-mutant humans, the plot is to kill all the mutants, using a brainwashed Xavier in his Cerebro unit to achieve this goal; the criminal mastermind is Colonel Stryker, the consistent nemesis in these stories.  As you can imagine, this plot is also foiled – at the cost of Jean Grey’s life.

X-Men Last Stand (2006).  The “war” between humans and mutants …mutates.  On Alcatraz, a serum is developed which can turn gay people into straights.  No, wait…mutants into normal humans.  The X-Men fight back and defeat this, well, bad idea.  Actually, it’s not such a bad idea IF the mutants have a choice in the matter, but since we’ve yet to see a mutation which is undeniably bad for the mutant, very few mutants would choose this option.  Beast is probably one of them.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009).  A quasi-prequel, because Wolverine is a major character of the three prior films.  The film begins in 1845 with Logan (Wolverine) and his brother Victor Creed, and quickly fast-forwards to the present day.  After a falling-out in Lagos, Nigeria, Logan is tracked down in Canada and persuaded by Stryker to undergo the adamantium treatment.  John Wraith (Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas) and Gambit (Taylor Kitsch) tag along.  Eventually there’s a big showdown at Three Mile Island, wherein Stryker succeeds at wiping Wolverine’s memories. 

X-Men First Class (2011).  The first prequel:  we see a young Xavier (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) initially friends but eventually grow apart.  Mystique is here played by Jennifer Lawrence.  The bad guy Klaus Schmidt/Sebastian Shaw (remarkably free of German accent, just like Magneto) (Kevin Bacon), attempts to provoke a nuclear war between the US and USSR amidst the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The idea is that only mutants will survive, and repopulate the earth with their own kind exclusively.  With only Emma Frost among the female villains (played by January Jones, aka Betty Draper from "Mad Men") it looks like Ms. Frost would be quite inconvenienced with nonstop pregnancy for some time - so why did she sign on to that plan?  Taking up some of the potential burden, Angel (Zoe Kravitz) and Mystique switch sides from Xavier’s group to Magneto’s.

The Wolverine (2013).  Unlike the prior Wolverine film which had a bevy of other mutants, this one brings him to Japan and focuses on him exclusively.  He survived the Nagasaki blast in 1945 – in a small solitary confinement cell underground, not a lead-lined refridgerator – and is invited by the Japanese officer (Yashida) whose life he saved, back to Japan, under the guise of “let me say goodbye to you, I’m dying.”  Things are, of course, not what they seem.  Wolverine briefly loses his regeneration powers, has to protect Yashida’s cute granddaughter, Mariko, and eventually bumps ugly in a final confrontation with a nasty woman (Viper) and the 15 foot Silver Samurai – who is actually pretty impressive.  Think of this as “Lost in Translation – on Steroids”. 

Characters.  There are too many to list, so I’ll focus on the most important.  Many of the movies have characters who only appear in that film. 

Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart/James McAvoy).  He’s psychic and telepathic, but also confined to a wheelchair.  He’s the Papa Smurf of the good mutants, although (in X2) twisted by Stryker’s mutant boy into attempting to kill all the mutants.

Magneto (Ian McKellan/Michael Fassbender).  His power is being able to manipulate steel/metal:  usually he stops bullets in midair and sends them back at the shooter, or flips cars and tanks around.  Since he can raise submarines, etc. there doesn’t appear to be a limit to his power, although Xavier’s telekinesis is almost as strong and not restricted to metallic objects.  If nothing else, the Nazis taught him to be cynical, but the series tries to be somewhat sympathetic to his viewpoint.

Mystique (Rebecca Romijin/Jennifer Lawrence).  Her power is shapeshifting, a Doppleganger effect.  Her natural form is a hot blue-skinned woman, too dark and sexy to be Smurfette [why not get Katy Perry for this role?].  As noted above, initially in Xavier’s camp, she soon defects to Magneto’s.   In “Last Stand” she loses her abilities, apparently permanently.

Storm (Halle Berry).  An African princess with the power to control the weather, which means she makes lots of tornados and lightning.  Nominally she’s one of the top X-Men but no one seems to want to give her a prequel film.

Cyclops (James Marsden).  His eyes shoot energy blasts, so he has to wear special glasses.  He’s kind of an uptight nerd, so mainly he acts as Jean Grey’s frustrated and jealous boyfriend.

Jean Grey/Phoenix (Famke Jannsen).  She’s a psychic, with powers pretty much identical to Xavier’s.  BO-RING. I’ve noted this before:  she’s the only character who doesn’t have a nickname, just “Jean Grey.”  Her reborn character, Phoenix, is a little too powerful:  she can kill unlimited numbers of people with just a thought.  So we go from “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… Ted Johnson” to “GOD”.  As I said, boring.  By the way, I didn’t find her dream-seducing Wolverine wearing a negligee (her, not Wolverine) in the new film to be bizarre, unsettling or inappropriate, but I didn’t find it particularly arousing either. 

Wolverine (Hugh Jackman).  Easily the most badass of the entire bunch.  His retractable claws and natural regeneration have been enhanced with adamantium bonded to his entire skeleton, making him practically indestructible, though the Silver Samurai comes closest to killing him.

Rogue (Anna Paquin).  Generally I can’t claim any appreciable experience reading the comic books, but here I do know something:  the comic book version was considerably older and more mature, more like Tawny Kitaen.  This Anna Paquin “frightened little girl” deal is a step backwards.  I suppose it’s just as well; Rogue’s power is that she can steal superpowers from anyone else, at the cost of draining their life energy:  sex with Rogue would be fatal. 

Beast (Kelsey Grammer + Nicholas Hoult).  A furry blue beast who was a nerdy scientist and remains nerdy even with fur.  Yeah, that’s his schtick.     

My original comic book favorite was Rogue (I even had a button of her) but in the movies it has to be Wolverine.  I’ve noticed that the movies never put him in his older blue/yellow (L.A. Rams) or newer brown/orange (Cleveland Browns) costume.  Either he’s bare-chested in jeans or in the leather X-men suit.  Mystique takes a #2 just because she’s… well…so damn hot.  I look forward to the “Day of Future Passed” installment coming next year, featuring “That 70s X-Men.”  

Breaker Morant

I recently watched this film again for the first time in ages – certainly for the first time since I passed the bar and became a practicing attorney.   Earlier I described it briefly as the best movie about the Boer War, but given that it’s practically the only film about the Boer War, that isn’t much of a distinction.

Boer War.  Actually this was the Second Boer War (1899-1902); the first one was 1880-81.   It took place in what is now known as South Africa.   The conflict was between Britain, using mostly conventional forces, and the local Boers, who were descendants of the original Dutch settlers and spoke Afrikaans, which is a variant of Dutch.  

   At that time South Africa included two countries, the South African Republic (aka Transvaal Republic) and the Orange Free State, which were independent of the Cape Colony, the main English-controlled part of South Africa.  In 1886, gold was discovered there, but there were insufficient Boers to mine it.  So a gold rush of outsiders, “uitlanders”, came in – mainly from Britain – to do this, and eventually outnumbered the Boers.  Johannesburg sprung up practically out of thin air.  The Brits insisted that these uitlanders be given equal rights and status, but the Boers refused, knowing they would lose control of the country.  After ultimatums passed back and forth, the Boers [Transvaal and Orange Free State allied together] declared war on England in October 1899.

In the beginning (1899), the Boers attacked British settlements in the Cape Colony and besieged Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley.   The British forces had been understrength and unprepared despite months of imminent hostilities and large arms purchases by the Transvaal. 

Then (January to September 1900) the British sent many more troops, broke the sieges, and invaded the Transvaal and Orange Free State, which put the Boers on the defensive. 

Once they realized they could not defeat the British by conventional means, the Boers then began a guerilla war (1900-1902).  The British, in the form of the ever-unpopular Lord Kitchener, responded by burning farms and moving the local population into camps.

If you have to put a lot of people together into another place, possibly in the middle of nowhere, you have to concentrate them into a camp:  thus, “concentration camp”, a term which later achieved even more notoriety during World War II, but here it was simply the British attempt to fight what had become a guerilla war by isolating the indigenous population and thus reduce the ability of the “fish” to swim in the “sea”.  However, even without explicit genocidal intentions, the camps were still unhygienic and unpleasant – so this policy engendered considerable antipathy for the Brits and sympathy for the Boers, particularly from the Germans, although in practice, notwithstanding this deluge of “moral support”, the Boers got almost no help from anyone.

            For all its controversy, the policy was effective at stopping the Boers from conducting their guerilla war, and eventually the Boers had to surrender, although offered the prize that the unified country would be given its independence – which it was, in 1910, as the Union of South Africa.

Movie.  Actually based on a true story.  Three Australian soldiers, Harry “Breaker” Morant (Edward Woodward), Peter Handcock (Bryan Brown), and George Witton (Lewis Fitz-Gerald) are put on trial for three separate crimes: 1) killing a Boer caught wearing their dead officer’s service jacket, 2) killing 6+ Boer prisoners, and 3) killing a German missionary.  The three soldiers are members of an anti-guerilla cavalry unit, the Bushveldt Caribineers.  They’re given a hastily assigned defense counsel, Major J.F. Thomas (Jack Thompson, later to surface as Lars Cliegg in “Star Wars: Attack of the Clones”) who has never handled a court martial – or even a criminal case – ever; his practice in Australia was wills and trusts in a small town.   Like in “My Cousin Vinny”, the attorney has to rapidly learn criminal procedure and get a firm handle on the substance of his case, which he very admirably (if predictably) does.  In fact, he quickly ascertains the manifest injustice of the whole legal farce against his clients, and his passion comes out consistently through the trial.

All three soldiers plead not guilty.  Their defense?  1) They were given orders to summarily execute any Boer wearing khaki (English uniform); 2) They were given orders by their captain to execute prisoners as they were behind the lines; 3) the German missionary was a spy, but the soldier in question (Handcock) claims an alibi – an erotic rendezvous with two Boer women (separately). 

The main soldier is Morant, with Handcock a close second, and Witton a distant third in terms of culpability.  Morant and Handcock were condemned and executed; Witton was given a life sentence but freed after three years. 

In particular, Morant invokes the “Rule of .303”, claiming that out in the field, amidst the madness and reality of combat, a different set of rules apply which cannot be understood by hidebound staff officers who never face enemy forces.  Moreover, the Australians are treated as undisciplined renegades, perfectly suited for the unpleasant and difficult task of dealing with Boer guerillas; like most agrarian-based unconventional forces, the Boers don’t wear uniforms and are indistinguishable from other civilians.

More specifically, however, the Aussies had indeed been given orders with respect to prisoners.  Unfortunately for them, the order on “khaki” was vaguely worded, and the order on prisoners was explicitly given by an officer who was killed in combat and thus unable to testify on their behalf.  In fact, it was that officer whose death they avenged against the man caught wearing his jacket. 

Nowadays, or even back in 1980 when the film was made, the defense that “I was only following orders” rings rather hollow.  It didn’t save the Nuremburg defendants, on trial for the Holocaust, from Allied gallows in 1946.  However, these orders seem to stem from common sense military necessity: enemy soldiers caught wearing our uniforms are legitimately treated as spies, and irregular forces operating behind enemy lines lack the logistics to transport prisoners, so enemies captured really have to be shot.  Recall in “Saving Private Ryan” when Upham successfully protests against shooting the lone German soldier – only to see that same soldier later shoot back at them just as Upham’s angry comrades predicted.  Thus, the “Rule of .303”.   

In the middle of the trial, the fort in which they were tried came under attack by a large Boer force, and the three were released to assist in its defense – which they did extremely well.  Then they were locked up again and the tribunal refused to give them any credit for doing so. 

Ultimately, though, the men were victims of a political decision:  the top brass wanted to make peace with the Boers, and felt that executing these Australians would show the Boers their good faith.  Like “To Kill a Mockingbird”, a spirited and conscientious defense – one which would, given a truly impartial trier of fact, have resulted in an acquittal – availed to naught against an unstoppable political reality acting against them. 

A few other topics I might as well cover while I’m here.

“On Location?”  The landscape and scenery of the movie were amazing.  Here I was thinking, “South Africa is a beautiful place.”  Not so fast.  It seems the entire film was made in Australia.  Perhaps the parts of South Africa which used to be the Transvaal were too heavily developed in 1980 to pass for 1900-era Transvaal?  Or they just didn’t have the budget to get everyone on a plane and film in South Africa.  I don’t know.  Presumably they didn’t have any Boer War veterans still alive to tell them if Australian wilderness in 1980 could pass for the Transvaal in 1900.  It’s still eye candy either way.

Kangaroo Court.  We’re familiar with the expression in today’s US:  a farcical legal proceeding with a predetermined outcome unfavorable to one side, probably the defendant.  And since the defendants here were Australian, the term seems especially apt.  But research indicates that “kangaroo” notwithstanding, the expression derives from claim jumping courts in 1849’s California Gold Rush, and has ZERO connection with Australia.  Go figure.