Wednesday Open Thread: Motor Trend Courts Dougie Fresh,The Masculine Argument, Epiphone Continued

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Unless you’re Christian Horny — er, Horner — chances are this hasn’t been a particularly exciting week for you. I don’t think we’ll be able to rectify that with our relatively tame set of topics for Wednesday, but we can try! And remember, this is an Open Thread so if you want to talk about the F1 drama, or anything else your heart desires, go right ahead.

Is this a writer audition… or an owner audition?

If there’s been anything consistent about Motor Trend in the past four decades, other than their rumored willingness to sell awards to the highest bidder, I think it would have to be their relentless focus on getting the worst writers available. This is not as easy as one might think. “To be a really bad writer takes energy,” as Clive James once wrote. The best of the bad MTers combine a total ineptitude behind both wheel and pen with a sort of giddy arrogant excitement at merely being a part of the whole thing.

Doug DeMuro isn’t a bad writer in that Swan/Lieberman tradition. However, his unique combination of audience pandering and fantastical narratives was always going to be a good fit with Motor Trend’s subliterate audience. No surprise, therefore, that he’s finally made the leap with a clunky bit of troll bait titled “Basically, No Good Cars Came From the 1980s.” I’m a bit saddened but in no way surprised to see that Doug’s half-decade-plus digression into YouTube clowning and Caddyshack-esque new-money desperate social climbing has not exactly sharpened his pen. Bradley Brownell would have been a safer pair of hands for this “hot take”, and that’s saying something.

You've seen the headline, you've seen the photos we've selected to go along with my molten hot take—a take so scorching it's like one of those fires involving exotic elements that are too hot for firefighters to even put out, so they just let it burn—and you've arrived to tell me that I have approximately the same level of intelligence as a stepstool. You're here to loudly proclaim I've used my very first column here on MotorTrend as a conspicuous, desperate attempt to assert controversy for engagement and clicks. Oh, those sweet, sweet clicks… All of this is true, including the part about the stepstool.

Perhaps someday one of ACF’s valued subscribers will take me aside and explain this phenomenon of people with eight-or-nine-figure net worth debasing themselves in public to free web readers and YouTube viewers. The last thing in the world Doug needs is the $200 payday that accompanies writing something like this for Motor Trend. Why do it? Is he that desperate to be liked? What Sarlacc-style gaping maw of emptiness inside him is filled by writing an article with sentences like

There are exceptions to everything, and the biggest exception here is that the late 1980s churned out some cool cars—and, for the rest of this column, I plan to rely on that exception with the same effort as I rely in my day-to-day activities on gravity.

?

The fellow who sent me the link to the DeMuro article is a bit smarter than I am, however, particularly in matters of business, and he suggested it presages something more interesting than Yet Another Example Of Doug Licking The Asphalt To Be Liked By Teenaged Boys — namely, that we are witnessing a genuine flirtation here between a down-on-its luck media outlet and a potential purchaser. Makes a bit of sense, if you think about it. The Hearst/Bring-A-Trailer mash-up might have been a bit, ahem, enthusiastically priced, but the synergies of having an online auction company and a few reliable, search-engine-prominent online hucksters for the merch have been remarkable.

Doug could do it the other way ‘round. He could buy Motor Trend and use it to advertise Cars and Bids listings. What’s MT worth? Five million bucks would be a lot; it’s a business that probably doesn’t make any money once all the bills are paid. Ten million if you’re feeling frisky. The Chernin Group, Doug’s new daddies, probably spend more than that every year on jet travel. They spent $263 million to be part of Funko Pops, for God’s sake.

With a few notable exceptions, the MT audience is a lot like the Cars and Bids audience; they’re people who consciously or inadvertently choose something other than the best. They’re susceptible individuals. Anyone who takes MT seriously is probably also willing to buy from, or sell with, Cars and Bids. It’s a brilliant idea, really. Don’t expect DDM himself to run the magazine. He’s busy selling third-tier auction meat and trying to be accepted into a coastal society that will always see him as “the weird guy from YouTube”. However, I have it on good authority that a well-respected senior-level auto media leader with time at the head of at least one and a half major publications has been dirtying his knees personally soliciting Doug and his masters for a job at Cars and Bids. He’d be a great choice for MT E-I-C — one might say that he’s always been a Motor Trend guy, he’s just never admitted it to himself.

And now for a more serious topic

Normally we’d save this sort of grownup talk for the Sunday threads but in this case I think it’s worthwhile having everyone’s input. I want to discuss something of greater importance than any particular political or social issue — namely, how we talk about these issues in general.

This was brought home to me by a conversation I had last week with a genuinely intelligent, thoughtful, and financially successful ACF reader. He’s what we call a “PoC” nowadays, although I despise that phrase like I hate ants in the kitchen, and he’s also very much a non-flyover person at the moment. While discussing the omnibus subject of “white privilege”, I suggested that what he knows as “white privilege” is really something enjoyed exclusively by wealthy whites in the right social circle. I mentioned the distinct lack of employment opportunities available for young white men in the Midwest now that the factories are gone, the farming is corporate, and the most eager employer is the United States Army. His response, in a nutshell, was

“Shouldn’t they move to the city, then, if they want more opportunity than that?”

My response — and I’m editing for clarity and conciseness — was something along the lines of, “Well, any individual 20-year-old white male high school graduate from heartland America would have more opportunity if he moved to Williamsburg and became a bartender… but how many bars are there in Williamsburg, anyway?”

Foursquare says: 118 bars, by the way. Which is a lot, but not enough to solve the problem.

I was lamenting my friend’s inability to see the forest for the trees when I realized that Brother Bark and I used to suffer from exactly the same misapprehension. 25 years ago we were regulars on a Columbus-area discussion board and our invariable response to anyone talking about systemic inequality was a stern lecture on “anyone can succeed if they are willing to…” This was eventually satirized by a mutual friend as

BOOTSTARPPS!

after the phrase “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”. Nowadays, I frequently see the BOOTSTARPPS mentality in Boomer and Xer “traditional conservatives”. There’s some truth to it — on the individual level. Any single Black kid in a dangerous school or neighborhood can probably figure a legitimate way out of that school or neighborhood, but that’s not a license for society to ignore those issues.

Let’s extend the conversation a bit. How many of you respond to individual news events — school shootings, “teen riots”, the death of Kate Steinle, a polar bear floating on a lonely ice floe — with demands for general policies? Half of my friends reacted to the Kyle Rittenhouse incident with “they should put him in the electric chair and confiscate every gun in Wisconsin” and the other half wanted to have him lead a sort of armed Eagle Scout troop to fire at protesters like the British did when solving a colonial “emergency”. What if the incident had no greater meaning? Did anyone stop to contemplate that?

Toledo, Ohio just posted an all-time high temperature for a single day in January. Does that make you want to take action on climate change? What if I told you that the previous all-time high was set not last year or the year before, but in 1883? Does that mean climate change isn’t happening?

I’m sure you’d be willing to agree that the same emotionally manipulative techniques used to sell consumer products are now used to sell news and political opinions — even if it’s far easier to see that manipulation when it’s used by “the other side”. But most of you — most of us — are still far more susceptible to those techniques than we are willing to admit. That’s why we’re not willing to have vigorous and thoughtful discussions with the people who oppose us. It’s why we prefer to consume media that slants things in our preferred direction.

Last but not least, it’s why my friend is no sure that he can be a subscriber to ACF — in subscribing, he feels that he is “giving air” to opinions that offend him. The sad part is that if we had a week to sit down and discuss the issues without emotional manipulation, I would likely adopt a couple of his cherished opinions, and vice versa — but that outcome, in and of itself, is worrisome to anyone whose “Team Blue” or “Team Red” sympathies have come to define who they are.

My goal, both at Avoidable Contact Forever and in the First Principles meetings, is for us to have discussions that are as free of emotional manipulation as possible. I’ve offhandedly referred to this as “the masculine argument”, not because women can’t do it (believe me, they can) but because it reflects the most admirable virtues of our male ancestors. The men and movements who set the foundations of the Western mindset: Greek philosophy, Roman discourse, Pauline theology, English common law, American individual liberty. Their goal was to think this way. God knows they didn’t always get there. There’s an Eastern tradition, of course, but it’s not mine to assume, any more than I can speak for women. I have to stick to my particular knitting.

All that said, don’t mistake “lack of emotional manipulation” for “lack of emotion”. Be as strident and passionate as you want in furtherance of your cause. But don’t expect that I’ll take any argument seriously if it rests solely on “look at this sad picture” or “this one thing happened so” or “You’re a Nazi/Commie if you don’t agree that” and so on. Those are the tactics of children and people who don’t know any better. Save them for Facebook.

Some positions, of course, are beyond any hope of logical support, such as your humble author’s deep and abiding love for Seventies GM sedans. We’re here to talk about that stuff, as well. In matters of serious import, however, I’d prefer we not substitute emotion for reason. At the very least, try to be self-aware about it.

Alright. Thus endeth the lecture. Let’s all go out and do our best. Let me tell you the most frightening fact of all: if you want “adults in the room”, you’re going to have to be the adult.

Epiphone, continued

the way it was

The story of my 1989 Samick Epiphone Les Paul Custom restoration continues! All of the important pieces arrived earlier in the week — the pre-owned Seymour Duncan Slash humbuckers, the JonesyBlues kit, the new Gibson knobs — so it was time to take the guitar apart and change all the wiring out.

It wasn’t really a surprise when I opened up the back and saw how cut-rate the Samick stuff was. Call it racism or stereotype or whatever: most Americans think that overseas guitars have terrible wood but great electronics — aren’t Asian people really good at the electronics and the doodads? In practice, the reverse is always almost true. There’s some decent “tonewood” in Asia, and it’s subject to far fewer restrictions about its harvesting and use than we have on similar stuff here, but pretty much every overseas guitar prior to Tom Presley’s arrival at St Louis Music and Fender’s explicit surrender to FujiGen aka “Fender Japan” had just awful wiring and components.

So it was with this Korean ‘89 Les Paul, which suffered from El Cheapo potentiometers, piss-poor little half-cent capacitors, and pickups that, when removed from the guitar, fell apart in my hands. No wonder it sounded so dead when it was plugged in.

Taking it apart was one thing, and accomplished quickly. Putting it back together was another. Epiphones are metric, so the five holes on the front of the Les Paul all had to be drilled-out a fraction for the SAE-scaled USA-made pots and switch. The trick is to mask the hole then run the drill in reverse, which prevents a “skip” across the finished wood. Also helps to have USA-made Cle-Line drill bits, which are much truer and easier on laminated wood than the Harbor Freight “Titanium” ones.

I had to outsource the soldering to a female college-physics student whom I’ve known since she was eleven years old. “Now, this is braided vintage wire,” I told her, shoving the detailed JonesyBlues diagram between her nose and the Les Paul’s vulnerable back cavity, “so you’ll want to be careful to —”

“—Done,” she interrupted. “That was easy. You should try soldering a microprocessor board some time.”

“Bet I won’t,” I replied. After some ham-handed adjustment of the shaft heights by yours truly in which I managed to crack a small piece off one of my brand-new Gibson knobs, the Epiphone was back together.

First impressions: the Slash humbuckers are hot. There’s no setting available in my Mesa Mark V amp that doesn’t feel a bit crunchy and overdriven. Switching to my real 1965 Princeton Reverb calmed matters down a bit, but it’s still like you have a bit of a boost pedal turned on permanently. Perhaps I’m overly sensitive since I’ve spent the past two weeks playing my PRS Modern Eagle Quatro with its chimey and much-sought-after 53/10 humbuckers, but this Epiphone feels completely hot-rodded. Not always a good thing, especially for tired old jazzbos like me.

I’m still missing a couple of pieces: the “poker chip” switch plate and a back control cavity plate, which will likely be 3-D printed by the same person who bailed me out on the soldering. The thing about “copy” guitars is that they’re never really that close. The back plate on a real Gibson Les Paul could be any one of 20 different dimensions. Japanese Lesters are another shape. Chinese Epiphones? Different again. Nobody makes the back plate for the Korean ones. I want to preserve and not use the one that came with the guitar because it has the original price sticker on it.

Having sold my Collector’s Choice Les Paul to finance the house move, I don’t have a first-rate pre-1975 Gibson or Custom Shop R9 to play this against. But I’ll round up a few suspects and do an A/B once the plates and “poker chip” are on.

Total cost, for transparency and comparison with other options:

$400 for the guitar itself (maybe $300 depending on how much you value the other stuff that came with it in the deal.)

$195.20 all in for the Seymour Duncan set, off Reverb

$164.60 for the wiring harness, switch, and output jack

$48.18 for the poker chip and truss rod cover

$6.38 for the new 60/40 solder

for a total of $814.36. Is that a value? A new Epiphone Les Paul Custom from Matt Emick at Sweetwater (always ask for Matt, tell him I sent you) would be $852.94 with tax and free shipping. That’s for a guitar made soup to nuts in Epiphone’s sorta-exclusive Qingdao factory. Both guitars will be made from multiple pieces of body wood and a laminated top; if you want a guitar built the old way from a one-piece back and solid maple top, you’ll need to buy a Heritage, a Gibson Custom, or a PRS. It was once widely known that Samick built better guitars than Epi Qingdao but in recent years the Chinese factory has improved quality, likely in response to the good stuff coming out of Indonesia for PRS and other manufacturers.

One thing is for certain: a Chinese Epiphone will not have pickups and wiring built to the standards of Seymour Duncan, Switchcraft, CTS, and David Jones. What I’ve done is basically a heart transplant from a $2500 mainline Gibson into an Epiphone. There’s also a lot to be said for 35 years’ worth of drying and stabilization in the wood of this Korean Les Paul, which feels “vintage” when you play it.

The real proof of the pudding, of course, will be in the playing. See you next week on that!