Tumgik
#must be some type of admiration towards american cowboy culture
businessliveme · 4 years
Text
Ford v Ferrari depicts a generation of car guys that’s best left behind
(Bloomberg) –Ford v Ferrari, which opened Friday, Nov. 15 starring Christian Bale and Matt Damon, follows British racing driver Ken Miles (Bale), and hot-rodder Carroll Shelby (Damon) as they build a special race car to help the Ford Motor Company beat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966 and 1967. The goal was to break Enzo Ferrari’s stronghold on international racing that had his Scuderia Ferrari winning everything throughout the 1960s.
They strike an odd-couple pair: Miles is a wiry, eccentric Brit; Shelby is a square-jawed, cowboy-hat-wearing Texan. Neither much like the corporate pressure exerted by Ford chief Lee Iacocca and his marketing goons, who themselves were humiliated by Ferrari’s Old World gravitas after a bungled buyout attempt. And there you have the necessary tension for a movie.
It’s a beautifully shot film that will be enjoyable for modern car buyers and enthusiasts alike—engines rev, tires squeal, stopwatches click. But what I saw is a devastating picture of the lack of diversity that permeated the industry in the 1960s.
Read: Christian Bale & Matt Damon racing drama finishes first at box
If automakers want any hope of relevance in the next decades, as they face the most radical changes and challenges they’ve experienced in 150-odd years of automotive history, they would be wise to contemplate it closely. Because Ford v Ferrari shows a generation best left dead and gone.
It’s a Man’s World
Picture this: During all 152 minutes of the film—which, for those who love vintage racing cars, will feel as good as an ice cream sundae on a summer afternoon, and you can read all about that here—men dominate the screen for 98% of the time, by my unofficial count. They are in the executive suites at Ford and Ferrari, in the workshops and garages in Venice, on the track out at Willow Springs Raceway. (And when I say men, I mean white, straight men.)
No fraction of the storyline is devoted to parsing the thoughts and feelings of any female who appears, even peripherally, on screen. Instead, Caitriona Balfe, who plays Miles’s wife, Mollie, is presented as the doting mother: She smiles mildly and nods her head indulgently as her husband struggles to gain traction in the race world. She clucks and scolds like a schoolmarm when Miles and Shelby come to blows on her front lawn—then brings them each a soda pop.
Other women waft through the film like smoke: Secretaries in wood-paneled offices handing manila folders to men in navy suits; corporate wives smiling silently, always positioned one step behind their husbands’ shoulder; young racing fans that serve as pretty décor on racing podiums. To the victor go the spoils.
The critique I heard most often about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood could easily apply here: This is a film celebrating those nostalgic golden days when white men ruled. It’s pretty to watch if you can suspend thinking for two hours about what that world must have been like for any ambitious or creative folks who didn’t fit that demographic.
Behind the Shiny Exterior
The central message of Ford v Ferrari—that the answer to the question,Who are you? is what really matters in life—is delivered in the beginning, middle, and end of the film by Shelby.
The biggest problem with that is Carroll Shelby. The man who was responsible for turning the Ford Mustang into the epitome of American muscle occupies a godlike status in car culture and embodied everything the red-blooded American male of the era was supposed to hold supreme.
Some of it is admirable: A former chicken farmer from Texas who pulled himself up by his own proverbial bootstraps, Shelby wore overalls when he raced and built his own cars with Ford-tough V8 engines. He beat the Europeans at their own game at Le Mans. In his later years, he established a charity that helped provide organ transplants for children.
Most of it was not: Shelby was a notorious womanizer who blew through six marriages and was heading toward divorce from his seventh when he died. He spoke to everyone with language so blue it was legendary; ask any car journalist or professional driver who knew him, and they’ve got plenty of descriptive words to describe the way he treated anyone within earshot. Many of those words are unprintable here.
For fun, he shot lions, elephants, and rhinoceroses on animal hunts in Africa. He filed so many lawsuits—against Ford, against local car builders, against online forums, and, ironically, against the company that later would supply all of the Cobras for the film—that he become more known and reported on for that in his later years than for any feats of automotive genius.
In fact, after his blast of success with the AC Cobras in the 1960s and his hot-rod take on the Ford Mustang, Shelby didn’t have a single real hit. Instead, there were claims he falsely represented many of the cars he sold. He left Ford for Chrysler, where he helped develop some special-edition Dodges. Ford fans brought up to adore him as a brand hero shouldn’t have been so surprised he left; this was not an individual known for loyalty to anyone or anything other than himself.
It gets worse: One of his former personal assistants, Angelica Smith, sued Shelby for sexual harassment in 2011. The suit included information about an alleged rape that happened at Shelby’s home by one of his employees, and that she was fired, partly in retaliation, after she reported it. (Shelby called the allegations “wild and fantastical” at the time; he died less than a year later.) But that particular anecdote has been washed almost entirely clean by the same boys-club car culture that idolizes Steve McQueen, a decent actor who died conveniently early and had a habit of hitting his wives.
Read: The Electric Cars Are Here. Now How About Selling Them
“Who are you?” is rich, coming from Shelby. We know what kind of man he was: The type we all are better off for no longer holding the keys to any automotive kingdom.
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
It’s no surprise to survey this patriarchal wasteland—but it’s no less depressing to see it, nonetheless. The epic portrayed remains uncomfortably close to how the car world is today. We still have to look hard to find women of consequence.
There’s Laura Schwab, the president of Aston Martin of America. Katya Bassi, Lamborghini’s chief marketing officer. Susanne Klatten, who, with her brother, owns nearly half of BMW AG.
But only one major automaker in the world has a woman in control of it all: Mary Barra has led General Motors as Chief Executive Officer since taking the helm in 2014. Last year she named Dhivya Suryadevara as GM’s chief financial officer; Suryadevara is the first woman to hold that job at GM and is now in line as a possible Barra successor.
Six of GM’s 11 global board members are women, an admirable percentage. But the numbers are worse elsewhere. At Toyota, just 13% of board members are women; Hyundai and Kia have no women in any position as high as vice president. The auto industry lags behind the rest of the world: women in corporate America at large occupy 21% of C-suite offices, 30% of VP-level roles and 38% of managerial roles, while the auto industry places women in 13% of C-suites, 18% of VP-level spots, and 20% of managerial positions, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit that advocates for women in industry.
This isn’t good enough. Today car companies face difficult questions about brand identity and mobility—concepts they’ve never had to contemplate before now. They are evaluating who they are—there’s that question again—in a world increasingly oriented toward mobility rather than mechanical transport, electric motors rather than V8 engines.
Ford v Ferrari puts in stark relief the stunted mentality of previous generations. Carroll Shelby, crystalized by Hollywood like a mosquito in amber, is its totem artifact of generations dead and gone. For those who are serious about making brilliant, thrilling, innovative vehicles in the modern age, he’s best left behind.
The post Ford v Ferrari depicts a generation of car guys that’s best left behind appeared first on Businessliveme.com.
from WordPress https://ift.tt/2raBKCC via IFTTT
0 notes
junker-town · 7 years
Text
When them Falcons gon get here: Atlanta unites as it waits
As the Falcons make one more charge into the postseason, the college football capital and transient, diverse Southern hub is finally bonding over its NFL team.
This article was originally published in 2013, ahead of the Falcons divisional round game against the Seahawks.
"Ay breh," he said, "Fuck with me, now."
He was selling weed, walking beside me in a way that made clear this was an A-okay location for broad-daylight drug sales despite a clogged North Avenue just feet away. I don't smoke, but had to admire the enterprise.
He was wearing a Brian Finneran jersey, a regulation dopeboy uniform in fabric color (road white) only. If Finneran, former Atlanta Falcons possession receiver from Villanova, had been there, he would've been the only white person in the area besides me.
***
Atlanta is one of the NFL's few majority-black cities, along with Detroit, Baltimore, D.C., on-field archrival New Orleans and possibly St. Louis by now*. The city proper's residents are 54 percent black as of 2010, though that's been dropping over the years as black families move to the suburbs and whites move inside the perimeter, defined as the I-285 loop that surrounds the city. The perimeter is now only the perimeter in a transit sense.
* Apologies if I missed a city. I'll admit I didn't check Green Bay.
Atlanta's arguably the gayest NFL city. Something must be done about our continued slide in these rankings, though still only Seattle and D.C. top us there. When Joey Harrington took over as temporary quarterback in 2007, a portion of Falcons fans swooned.
Atlanta's the NFL city most likely to turn up fans of 31 foreign teams, I'd wager. People move from Wisconsin, Ohio and Buffalo to Atlanta. They don't move from Atlanta to Wisconsin, Ohio and Buffalo. When they come, they bring allegiances with them, then show up at games. So nobody writes pieces like this about braving the Georgia Dome. That's cool -- you underestimate how fun it is to watch disappointed Cowboys fans stream out of your own building.
Racially and otherwise, Atlanta has as wide a range of sports fans as anywhere in the country, maybe anywhere anywhere, plus respectable attendance for its home teams (look it up!) and undeniable college football bona fides.
I think Atlanta is a great sports town. Or a good enough sports town. Or a town you might not understand.
***
This has brought to mind one of four things for you: Turner Field going ghost town during the MLB playoffs, Hawks fans sounding outnumbered when the Celtics or Kobe are in town, hockey or that time Falcons fans all rose their voices as one and turned on the team to revere rival convict Michael Vick.
The first is a myth, the second is adorably true and what is hockey?
As for Vick, I was at that game, in a red No. 7 and surrounded by tealy algae-funk green 7s. I bought my ticket the day he joined the Eagles, then rooted for the Falcons along with the far majority of the Dome. Vick scored in the second half of a blowout and got a pop from the crowd. A viral Atlanta soundbite was born.
You need to understand Vick was briefly our Jordan, or more accurately our Elway, since Chicago had had Payton and Butkus and Ditka and Sayers and probably some baseball guys before Jordan. (What is baseball?) We'd had to share Hank and Deion and Dominique and Dale Murphy and most of those 1990s Braves with other cities, and in Vick's first year Chipper hadn't played half his Atlanta career yet. Whom were we supposed to ride for instead of Vick?
For a year or so, he made our insignificant Falcons the country's most exciting and interesting pro team, bringing us within a few plays and a bullshit holding call away of a Super Bowl trip.
He was our first star quarterback and our black star quarterback, and he signed a 10-year contract.
That cheer, overstated by people who weren't there as it was, wasn't a betrayal of the Falcons. It was a goodbye to the only reason we'd ever mattered.
Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
Until the Falcons became something like those '90s Braves, with prolonged success out of nowhere. The Thomas Dimitroff and Mike Smith regime posted back-to-back winning seasons for the first time in franchise history, then made it five in a row. Four of the franchise's 12 all-time playoff trips have come in the last five years, which have included two of our five all-time division titles and two of our three No. 1 seeds. Roddy White, Matt Ryan, Michael Turner and others have already taken over the club record books, and we're not talking about guys who've been here forever.
But, yeah ... '90s Braves. The Birds have also gone 0-3 in the playoffs during this run, becoming the league's most reliable Super Bowl springboard.
It's our golden age. But local gold monitor Trinidad James has to scoff.
***
We're a musical fan base, and a specific flavor of music.
The 1998 Super Bowl run had a bass soundtrack, T.I's "Bring Em Out" provided the best intros in city history at the height of the Vick years, Big Boi is lobbying for "In The A" to replace that Godsmack-y stuff they play at the Dome now, "Whoomp! There It Is" is still a completely unironic team anthem and James Brown and MC Hammer were Elvis fan Jerry Glanville's sideline mascots.
You can't have rappers rap about the NFL without having rappers rap about the Falcons. There's currently a song using Julio Jones and company as a drug-dealing metaphor. Our locker room freestyler is better than yours. Ray Buchanan and Deion Sanders also technically released rap albums.
No other city produces coverage quite like this.
***
In many ways -- because of Arthur Blank and Vick and, back among the ancients, the Dirty Bird -- this is a fan base aged 10 or 15 years or so. Except for spurts of oddity like 1991, 1980 and ... that's about it. That's our history.
Considering college football reigned here for more than 70 years before we got any pro team of any kind (save the Atlanta Black Crackers, whose field was once stormed by my hammered, 120-pound great-grandfather) and a full century before any of them got good, I think the Falcons are doing fine.
Especially since nobody is actually from here, as the phrase goes.
***
As a California native and a white guy who was surrounded by black coworkers while a Falcons wide receiver from 2000 to 2010, Finneran's a total Atlantan. He's now a co-host of 680 The Fan's morning show.
"Lord knows I wanna get back to California, when I'm old and gray, to sit on the beach," he says. "But Atlanta is my city. I adopted all the home teams as my teams. It's just one of those places were once you get here, there's no reason to leave."
Nobody settles down in Atlanta quite like black NFL players, whether they play for the Falcons or not, with Finneran listing friends Rodney Harrison, Kordell Stewart and Jamie Dukes among the many who've done so.
"Atlanta is great for young, black professionals," he says about the Falcons using the city's demographics when recruiting free agents. "I definitely think it's a lure."
Finneran's best known outside of Atlanta for two things: the playoff punt block against the Packers in 2002, which sparked Green Bay's first-ever home postseason loss* and his emergence as the sneakiest cheap weapon in Madden history. His 2004 rendition was tall and could jump, the perfect sidekick for that year's virtual Michael Vick, the most unfair video game athlete since Tecmo Bo.
* Of the current Falcons crew's playoff problem, he says, "This is the year they can do it, and it's not gonna be an easy task against Seattle, but this team is loaded. If they're gonna do it, this is the year, and they need to do it. You talk about a must-win for an organization, this is it. A sigh of relief will be breathed around this city if we can come away with this victory."
Finneran still calls former locker room neighbor Vick a friend despite their cultural differences, which inspired Jim Mora to nickname the duo "All-American Dad and Hip-hop Nation."
He describes the Atlanta he arrived in as "a baseball town," attributing Arthur Blank's legit hometown concern (the Falcons are one of the few NFL teams to contractually stipulate multiple community appearances for each player, "from Matt Ryan to practice squad guys," every year) and wins provided by Ryan and Vick for "turning it toward the NFL."
"You build that fan base by having the team winning, and having those players in the community, doing those five or 10 events every year."
Finneran, told of the kid at a rap show wearing a white possession receiver's No. 86 Falcons jersey, says, "Those type of stories, minus the weed part, give me chills. I get tweets from young black males who tell me, 'You were my favorite receiver.' You think people forget about you ... my head doesn't get too big, but it gives me the ability to be proud of things I did and reminds me to be a role model for young adults, white or black."
***
The two biggest moments from that Goodie Mob show, other than Big Boi rocketing out of nowhere during "Dirty South," were when Pastor Troy performed in a Volunteers jersey a week before Georgia-Tennessee (deemed a confrontational choice during a show that had been one big tribute to Atlanta, until the crowd realized it was a jersey of Eric Berry's, a local) and when a shirtless dude in leather pants and a top hat played Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" through all of "Cell Therapy."
Here we had a paranoid rap song about inescapable poverty and impending global race war performed alongside a chugger by a blues-turned-metal band about a behemoth, powerful creature that finally snaps.
Skinny black dudes in the crowd threw up devil horns and headbanged. I don't know how else to explain it other than it was really, really Atlanta.
The point is Atlanta, more and more, is this place that's not for white people over there and for black people over here. There will always be parts of the city forbidden to people who look a certain way, but this city is becoming the melting pot of the melting pot.
And I'd bet there's no major gathering place in America more consistently black-and-white than the Georgia Dome on NFL Sundays.
0 notes