Wednesday ORT: Papaya Rules, Ulysse Nardin Sinks, Elon Gets Waxed In Brazil, TONTO

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if arista thinks they can come get this “loan” back, they better stack up beforehand

We are the ones / that tie our fathers to our sons. More about that, and the album that contains it, shortly — but first, the Oscar and Lando show!

I told you Oscar was mentally stronger

Formula 1 is often like baseball; it’s a spectator activity where the joy is in the contemplation of potential action, not the action itself. Your humble author attended quite a few ballgames in the various Brutalist multi-purpose abominations of the Seventies — Three Rivers, Riverfront, Oakland Coliseum, Cleveland Muncipal — and what I mostly remember was the idea that nothing would happen too quickly, that the fans would have time to appreciate, and bring their statistical awareness to bear on, each individual play. Similarly, most F1 races of the past three decades have been largely processional affairs with plenty of time for the viewer to consider the next pass, the next undercut, and so on.

Some of think that this Hamlet-esque approach to motorsport is purer and better than the artificial competitiveness of IndyCar, IMSA, et al. where there’s more passing but each pass means much less to the final result. It’s also more relaxing in the sense that you can run to the fridge or garage without missing much. I like it…

…but I’m not getting much of it lately. Perhaps it’s an osmotic process where the sport is unconsciously influence by the presence of the F1 movie being shot during the season, or maybe it’s the Verstappen/Horny/Newey drama at RedBull, but regardless of the underlying reasons, this sport is starting to become almost indecently exciting. The constructors’ championship is well and truly up for grabs; it will likely change hands within the next two races. The drivers’ championship, too, is far from being settled. There are eight races left. The difference between first and 6th is 17 points, so if Verstappen can’t do better than sixth or seventh in the RB20 that leaves 136 points on the table for someone who wins them all. This puts Lando, Charles, and Oscar in legitimate play, with Hamilton and Russell in outlier contention, Sainz likely team-ordered out of contention, and Checo Perez… well, he’s not going to win it.

Lando is 62 points out but if he’d refused to swap positions with Oscar a few races back and McLaren had done team orders at this race, he’d be 52 points out. Which is basically three races of winning while Max gets sixth. Not exactly an improbable scenario. Too bad he’s the worst starter in F1 history, or close to it.

Notes from the race:

• To be George Russell is to be inexplicably shortchanged by your team — why, exactly, was Kimi Antonelli in his car for the FP1 crash, rather than the car belonging to the driver who is quitting? — and also to be your own worst enemy, as he was at the start of the race. If Hamilton is the GOAT, and George is out-qualifying the GOAT 12-4, why is he 8th in the points? Mistakes, all the time.

• When a pay driver can come in and immediately beat your results in the same car, it’s not a pleasant verdict on your career. Let’s hope Logan Sergeant finds peace in IndyCar, or maybe WEC, or maybe coaching Spec Miata.

• Speaking of Russell — it’s not for nothing that he and Leclerc are the two drivers lately who have used discipline and fingertip skill to one-stop their way to victory. One thing I noticed during my brief stint in “pro” racing was that most people could get a similar time out of a car, but that certain people were just far easier on the equipment and consumables. It’s a skill that I’m not sure can be taught, and it’s limited to a few drivers even among the greats.

• I’ve said before that Oscar is mentally stronger than Lando — and we’re really seeing it now. Only his team’s idiot strategy kept him from winning this race and being in basically a dead heat with Leclerc for third overall.

• “Papaya rules”? What kind of stupidity is that? What’s also interesting to me is that Zak Brown clearly doesn’t care much about the driver’s title. By letting his kids race, he ensures they both have maximum incentive to bring home points for McLaren. It will be a great strategy right up to the moment they run into each other and take 43 points off the board in a half-second.

• K-Mag has attained full Chad status: still got points despite 10 second penalty, and is now suspended for a race, making him an official FIA Bad Boy. The latter is ridiculous, because without Magnussen, half of the field wouldn’t deserve to be on camera at all.

• Yuki is having a tough time of it lately, first failing to out-qualify Ricciardo then getting punted out of the race. Still, when you see this photo it’s easy to understand how important his career is to Japan. Once upon a time, Honda needed to put Richie Ginther in their car. Today, they have homegrown talent. Tsunoda is not yet the most accomplished Japanese F1 driver — but that could easily change.

The rest of the season is going to be one to remember.

Corporate welfare for pimp couture

first time i’ve had to use the “redact” feature in substack photos

Here at ACF, we love our Swiss watches. (And our German watches, and our Japanese watches, and our Shinolas, and the 1926 Elgin movement in my Vortic.) We’re also not opposed to a little exuberance in said watches; the only reason I don’t have a platinum Sky-Dweller, or a Sedna gold Speedmaster, is because I don’t have the money. That being said, there are certainly some high-end watches out there that I find to be utterly tasteless — and many of them are from the same company, namely Ulysse Nardin.

Originally a middle-brow watchmaker and marine chronometer provider of not insignificant renown, UN was recapitalized during the “quartz crisis” into the horological equivalent of Pelle Pelle, or maybe those weird shiny shirts worn by everyone in “Idiocracy”. Much of what they do is mechanically interesting, but pretty much all of it is deeply, desperately, tasteless. As with the “Voyeur” in gold or platinum, described by Forbes thus:

Each of the four participants is individually hand sculpted in gold, with appropriately hinged and moving parts. When the repeater mechanism is activated, the couple in the background has the limelight square on them: the man's hips move with each hour strike. However, it is the couple in the foreground that is the true subject of this timepiece. That couple, the woman standing behind the man, have moved a curtain aside and are watching the couple in the back. Hence, the watch's "Voyeur" name.  This "foreground" couple does more than just watch, however, and to the strike of the quarter hours and the more frequent minute strikes, the female uses a particular hand gesture that may not have been used in erotic watches to date.

Want to see it in motion? Here you go. I can see how something like this might have been charmingly risque in certain circles a hundred years ago, but now it’s basically Itchy And Scratchy: The Movie: The Novel, which is to say an unpleasant mechanical shadow of the video original. I also feel compelled to point out that the Swiss have shown themselves to be a bit naive in their eroticism; pretty much everyone under 30 will immediately misunderstand the couple on the right to be “pegging”, rather than merely peeping as is the intent. Always a shame when human perversity runs faster than a $350,000 porno watch can tick.

A combination of sagging demand in China and an uncomfortable upswing in the value of the Swiss franc has taken some steam out of the watchmaking business. Even blue-chip stuff like the more-sought-after Rolexes can be had closer to retail nowadays, and you can get discounts on some mainline Swiss watches like Omega or IWC. This relative market weaknesses bodes very ill for the companies like Ulysse Nardin that basically subsist on the froth of the Swiss watch frenzy. You can now get a used UN for a quarter of retail, or less. When customers see this, they demand a discount on the new ones…

…and that’s why Ulysse Nardin and a few other watchmakers are taking advantage of a Swiss program that pays their labor wages for a while, in the hopes that the Chinese market will pick back up. In the meantime, if you want a “Swiss Luxury” watch for three grand, Chrono24 has you covered with plenty of Ulysse Nardin inventory — but in my opinion, you’d be better off buying a Tudor or Omega. It’s hard not to look at the “erotic” watch above, or any quick-bake-venture-capital-regurgitation Swiss watch at any price, without concluding that “the customer” for it is very well represented on the dial — in the sense that he’s getting “proper f***ed”.

There’s always a bigger fish

is this the map of where the bootay at

The situation thus far: A semi-rogue judge on Brazil’s Supreme Court, who helped engineer the “peaceful transfer” of power from the right wing to the left wing after a 50.9% to 49.1% election via some real thug-life methods, has decided to “save democracy” by “removing misinformation”. When X.com refused to censor “misinformation” to his liking, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a general block of X from the Brazilian population — and imposed crippling fines on anyone who attempted to look at X via a VPN or other evasion.

In response, Elon Musk expanded Starlink availability in Brazil and made X available that way.

In response, de Moraes began seizing the assets of Starlink in Brazil, mostly consisting of the money remitted by 220,000 monthly subscribers. This was despite the fact that no formal order had been issued to Starlink, and that it is, by American standards, an entirely separate company. This even has the editorial board of the WaPo upset!

Rather than babble about “democracy” and “free speech” and other terms that have become so thoroughly soiled and perverted as to be of zero value in 2024, I want to look at the human lessons from the situation so far, in a series of notes.

Note Zero: What if the people don’t consent to tech? As an American, I’ve become accustomed to the idea that “tech companies” can break the law, subvert normal legal processes, hide behind elaborate legal fictions, and use their money to delay justice — all so they can introduce products that make everyone’s life demonstrably worse. X.com doesn’t make anyone happy; it’s a ragebait hate machine. Facebook and Instagram don’t make people happy; they make them envious and sad. Uber and Lyft didn’t improve the taxi or transit situation in cities where they operate. Bird scooters are street trash. Food delivery services demean everyone with whom they come in contact. Yet all of these non-improvements use their endless access to venture capital as a bludgeon. Ordinary people are powerless to do anything against these unwanted intrusions. In that regard, de Moraes is truly serving as the representative of the Brazilian people. He is taking something bad away from them. Yeah, he’s doing it to keep his side in power, but the net effect will still likely be positive. Why isn’t this done more often?

Note One: The whole world isn’t bound to play by our silly rules. One of the greatest Last Psychiatrist posts talks about getting beaten up:

An observation about the middle class: they have it deep inside their psyche that though they are taught to make prejudicial judgments based on hearsay, they are not allowed to show that they made them.  The middle class think they are lawyers… You feel obligated to reply to their words, and not the meaning.

Here in America, you’re not allowed to punish Starlink for what X does, or punish SpaceX for what Tesla does. Why, they’re completely different companies, with different minority shareholders! This mincing mindset carries no weight in Brazil, which sees all of them as different aspects of the same man: Elon Musk. Complaining that Starlink Brazil is not X.com carries zero weight with a Brazilian judge, who operates based on human reality rather than legal fiction. You can deride this as backward or tribalist or uneducated, but is it?

Note Two: Choose Your Own Aristocracy Adventure. Not to get all Jacques Ellul on yo’ ass, but it seems undeniable to me that the net effect of technology is to concentrate power rather than to decentralize it. The United States of America was really only possible in the long run because of the telegraph and telephone; otherwise, you’d have a Stegosaurian disconnect between what D.C. wanted and what San Francisco did, as with governors in the Roman Empire. More recently, think of how banks cooperated with relatively Authoritarian Left governments in Canada and America to freeze the accounts and discover the whereabouts of right-wing protestors. What would it have taken to “de-bank” the Canadian Truckers in, say, 1935?

This Brazilian conflict between two completely unelected power players is a vision of the future. Either Musk gets his way and can beam whatever he wants from Starlink down to Brazilian voters, or de Moraes turns the lights off in the sky. At no point in the process will you, the individual voter, be consulted. The audacious transparency of this particular situation doesn’t mean it’s unique. Ask yourself: Is there a vote that you could cast to keep Israel from bombing Palestine? Can you vote against the war in Ukraine? What about Internet censorship? Can you vote against that? Can you vote to keep your factory from being sent to Mexico, or your job to India? Of course not. All you can really vote on in the upcoming election is how much abortion you want, and how much gun control you want, and how much money printing for Ukraine and Israel you want, and so on.

Children who engage in social media are more likely to kill themselves. Can you vote against social media? Against Grubhub? Sorry for being repetitive, but you get the point. The only “vote” you get in the future is expressing approval for imperial bureaucrats when they “arrest the Telegram guy” or “turn off the Starlink” or “remove the disinformation from Facebook”. There will be serious conflicts between authoritarian governments in the Western world and the tech firms that now make up a significant portion of their stock markets, but you’ll have as much voice in that as a plowman or farrier would have had in the Wars Of The Roses.

I assure you that the whole world is watching what’s happening in Brazil. We will see what the lessons end up being.

TONTO once rode the range

As my Instagram followers know, I’ve been idly fussing around with various synthesizers over the past year, adding a new Prophet-5 synth to my existing vintage fleet of Yamaha DX7 and Korg “clonewheel” CX-3 organ. Currently I’m at a crossroads where I’m either going to indulge further in authentic vintage sounds with a Hohner Clavinet… Fender Rhodes… maybe a B-3/Leslie combo… or just get a Nord Stage to emulate everything. The latter option has the advantage of not taking up my entire music room.

No matter what I do synth-wise, however, it won’t measure up to TONTO.

The idea behind “The Original New Timbral Orchestra” was to allow musicians to play multiple timbres at once. This wasn’t possible with analog synths, which had to apply the same filter across their entire range. Hell, some of them couldn’t play more than one note at the same time — my rather expensive Prophet-5 is named thus because it can manage the difficult trick of playing five notes at once, which used to be a Really Big Deal. And it wasn’t possible at all before TONTO appeared.

TONTO merged Moog, ARP, and other synths into a single command room that could generate an orchestra’s worth of music. All the Stevie Wonder songs that everybody really likes, from the Seventies? Recorded with TONTO at its temporary home in L.A.’s Record Plant Suite B. Hell, even Devo used it!

By 1979, TONTO was old hat, largely because of the Prophet-5 and other polyphonic synths — but it had one more major role to play, as both musical instrument and album cover prop for Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson, who recorded their “1980” LP with it.

Some of you know that I consider the earlier Scott-Heron and Jackson effort “Winter In America” to be one of the finest albums ever made. (Not to be confused with the individual track called “Winter In America”, which appeared elsewhere in the Scott-Heron catalog.) “1980” isn’t quite as focused and powerful, but it’s loaded front to back with brilliant soul music made by two of the best to ever do it. You can’t hear it on Spotify or on most streaming services. TheYouTube video at the head of this section will take you to all the tracks. I recommend them without hesitation…

…but I wanted a physical copy of the album. Which is also hard to find in decent shape. It had a short print run and never got reissued. After a few false starts I just paid what it took to get an early demo copy, as seen above. When it arrived I tossed it on the turntable and treated myself to twenty minutes with the sublime first side.

Scott-Heron and Jackson were in the middle of hating each others’ guts when “1980” was made, largely because Scott-Heron was a junkie and Jackson was an egomaniac who was sick unto death of being the second fiddle in a two-man gig. It was their last album together. I can only imagine what Jackson said when he realized that the lead single from the album would be Yet Another Gil Scott-Heron Song About How Bad Nuclear Power Is. The third one, actually, following “We Almost Lost Detroit” and “Three Miles Down”. I mean, the man really hated renewable energy! Ironically, neither Scott-Heron nor Jackson could accomplish separately what they could together. This wasn’t a Hall and Oates situation. More like Becker and Fagen.

Nothing about “1980” required TONTO; I’m pretty sure my son and I could re-create this whole album from scratch with my three synths, a guitar, a bass, and a very patient drummer. TONTO never dominates these tracks the way that the Fender Rhodes does for “Peace Go With You Brother” in Scott-Heron’s earlier work. The lyrics are often future-facing, but the music itself probably felt a bit vintage by the time it came out. The album cover, with the two musicians as “Afronauts” in sci-fi jumpsuits, came in for a lot of gentle condescension both contemporaneously and in more recent considerations. There’s a lot of timeless thought here, however, as seen in “Willing”:

What my life really means is that the songs that I sing

Are just pieces of a dream that I've been building

Is it pathetic that I feel the same way about my little Substack, and all the conversations we have here? Or is it somehow inspiring? Let’s hope for the latter. Take it away, Gil and Brian!