The descent to perfection

Last evening as Leonard Cohen entertained with his words of wit, wisdom and timeless truth I came across an article bemoaning the demise of printed magazines. The claim was made that it was largely caused by "influencers" who attracted advertisers budgets to their online sites. Now, I confess, I have no idea what an "influencer" is but I do know what makes a good magazine. Specifically, quality prose and visually arresting art. This led me to a consideration of a couple of tall piles of magazines in the small bedroom upstairs.

Decades of Car, years of Supercar Classics

In the days when Car Magazine was a much anticiated monthly event the longed for parts were written by George Bishop, who may have mentioned a car or two as he wrote mainly about the cuisine he encountered on his journeys to collect said cars. But the highlight was always LJK Setright. As well as road tests he had two monthly columns, "Handlebars" which focused on motorbikes and "Any other business" which didn't. The piles of Car are supplemented with interspaced Supercar Classics. The latter was eagerly awaited for the quality of the artwork, the Car photos were excellent apart form a little overuse of graduated filters but Supercar Classics were something else, and by far the best parts of it were the pages containing illustrations by Bob Freeman.

In the early hours of this morning I was thinking of LJKS, died at least 15 years ago in his 70's but the finest automotive writer to have ever written. I read tomes of engineering books, magazines, papers, anything, but to mis quote The Boss, I learned more from a 10 minute consideration of LJKS than I ever did from them. He was erudite. He knew stuff. Not just car stuff, an engineer, a musician, a conisseur of everything fine in life and he could write. His writing flows, it caresses, it is to be savoured. It's only words on paper but it's a bit like a toasted tea cake and butter. Apart they're not a big deal but together the butter melts into the cake and it visbly gets better before your very eyes, the anticipation of it is a delight, the eating of it an end in itself. It leaves you wanting more, just like articles by LJKS.

I remember he once did a piece comparing a Rolls to a Bentley and in describing their suspension characteristics he likened landing a Rolls to his old Linn Ittok tonearm, it landed, he said, gracefully and under control with only the very slightest rebound as the stylus took up its position but if observed carefully from head on it was possible to discern the slightest sideways movement, the Bentley landed like his new Ittok, the one I have, landed with a little less vertical rebound than the former but looked at from head on no matter how studiously observed you could detect no latertal deflection whatsoever.... You've got to love that. Yumping RR's and Bentleys. Mind you he once remarked after taking a 3.8 E-Type Mk1 from London to Great Malvern via Oxford and Cheltemham parking up one was aware that the previous 105 miles were covered in just under 90 minutes .... on crossplies!

On another occasion he described his VW Scirocco Storm as unsuited to this tyre, suited to this but best suited to that before going into an explanation of rubber hysteresis, slip angles, spring rates, damping and the iniquity (his word) of ever thicker anti roll bars. From that moment on I have never had a car with anything but seriously decent rubber on each wheel. Indeed, just last week when a friend with a Jazz, newer than ours, came over he was bemoaning its tendency to run wide on corners. Fit such and such Bridgestones I said. We have and ours holds its line like it was on rails, bearing in mind that a Jazz is probably incapable of overwhelming a decent tyre anyway. Our old Lexus had some amazingly grippy Bridgestones fitted when we had the suspension optimised .... just a little bit! The Merc has Michelin Pilot Sports on and we had them on a previous Jazz and our old Rover GTi. I suppose LJKS was an influencer.

By far the most eloquent piece I remember him writing got me into trouble as I once used it in a personnel report when I described a person as approaching perfection in an engineering environment, not terribly wise, or clever, me. LJKS stated that in engineering terms the closer one approached simplicity the nearer one approached perfection. KISS, keep it simple, stupid but he's right. A good engineer will make a machine perform using the minimum of components. I have applied that to many things, a fixie bike, a Lancia Strato's, my Fuji x100. It doesn't call for minimalism, it calls for the most efficient use of materials and space needed for the item to do its job well and reliably.

Thus in the silent darkness of the early hours I was thinkling of my descent toward perfection. After all, what is the minimum I need? A bit of strength and control to draw air into my lungs and a heart to pump the oxygenated blood to my brain. Pretty minimal, eh? Just not much fun. The lungs are strugling, almost vainly at times, the heart seems OK and once the drugs wane a bit the brain livens up. Even going upstairs last night someone inside tried to cut their way out with an assegai stinging into my lower right side. My right neck, shoulder, upper arm hurt. My belly ached. It's like a broad belt being inexorably tightened which in turn aggravates the breathing. It's not nice. Enduring it is not nice but the thoughts engendered are worse. But the most horrible part is responding to the one beside you when asked a question. What comes out is not very nice and apologies are called for just as soon as you realise what you've said and who you've said it to.

Fortunately my cogitation of the descent into perfection was interrupted by the need for relief. Under the influence of whatever morph is most potent the desire manifests itself hastily which is OK if you can move fast. Our toilet at the other end of the landing is adorned with picture rail. Over the years I've restored the picture rail to all our rooms bar one and the offcuts are fixed in the toilet. Adopting the manly position one is left face to face with a framed Bob Freeman. It depicts a detail water colour and ink drawing of the left hand bank of a Maserati V8 complete with Bob's annotations. Like the magazines it was a bequest from my colleague and dear friend, Justin, at whose funeral I should have eulogised but I was in Singleton Hospital, Swansea in the ICU for babies, our grandson having been born the day before 3 months premature.

I learned how I ought to see from a book called The art of seeing by John Berenger but a day with Bob Freeman taught me how to see. Even if that engine, perfectly depicted had never worked it remains a thing of beauty. Indeed, what I learned most from my time with Bob was how nice a bloke he was and how to see what is truly beautiful. He called it the ABC, the Accidentally Beautiful Consequence. Anything well made (and he was specifically talking of the Curtiss Aero engine in The British Museum) and made to work well will be beautiful. It is not made to be beautiful, it's beauty comes from being able to do what it's designer intended. The Maserati on our toilet wall is a thing of beauty.

I can still think, write this nonsense, enjoy music, even Leonard Cohen, I can speak albeit a bit quietly at times, I must apologise, I can still engage D and my right foot still dances on the pedals, albeit a little slower but everything about my life is.

Magazines are not going bust beacuse of their advertising revenue going to influencers, they are going bust because their writers and graphic artists are just writers and graphic software users. There is poetry in Bob's Maserati as there is in the writing of LJKS, there's information, too from a life lived not a jobsworth writer, there's romance and erudition, learning and all together these make the joy of reading LJKS or looking at Bob Freeman's work a delight in themselves.

Indeed, that's what art is all about, taking you somewhere, preferably somewhere better somewhere you want to be. So much currently displayed is the product of angry minds, disturbed by life, rightly filled with injustices, cruelty base human characteristics but I know anger, I know pain, I know distress, I know injustice but I want to be taken somwhere else, I don't want to engage with the mind of a distraught artist with an agenda to shock. Indeed, when so many try to shock it becomes commonplace, unable to shock it ends up being ignored which is surely the worst outcome for any artist. Maybe that's why I was so grateful to Princess Kate for her holocaust portraits in full on Rembrandt lighting. Shocking subjects, beautiful art. Bravo, Kate.

Even at its' most indivisible there's beauty. I have become aware that when tired I've been shuffling, surfing the furniture and doorways. My feet have noted the thresholds that they never noticed before so at the threshold I look down to see it and there's a beautiful piece of polished oak. It brings a joy, a delight and removes the thoughts blighted by recognising increasing inablities. Art literal, visual, aural, when it can take you somewhere nice, fill your mind with pleasue, displace the pain of reality is doing it's job, making statements of the obvious can be done by anyone, seeing beauty is only for those with minds open to it.

I shall shortly go up and dig out some of Justin's old magazines again and reread bits of them just for the thrill of reading them, after all they're 60's, 70's, 80's and a few 90's so not exactly current. But as Keats said, a thing of beauty is a joy forever. I don't expect many magazines in Smiths this morning will be kept for weeks, let alone cherished for decades.

So the descent to perfection is not yet complete but I'm on the way and one day I shall be made perfect, but not whilst still living in this world.