rafael pyton

The young duke has done it again.

Oh, affirmative! My youngest brother has invested in yet another Chevy! However, it certainly is not yet another. It is unique, cool, black and very big - a mint Chevrolet Caprice Classic Brougham Le Sabre 1988, the plushest, most de-lulu-luxe Chevy Caprice the General ever made. It must be the smoothest ride you never could imagine.

But imagine this; it is big boss Pekka Vennamo’s old car! At the time junior Vennamo was CEO of Posti in Finland, he had this particular Chevy specially ordered from the USA, via Metro-Auto.
I say damn, that is how you managed companies in the great and greedy days of the eighties [still the best decade ever made].
The leaders were feared old men, fat not fit, wore ill-fitting suits and sported ugly ties, grunted from behind massive oak desks, groped secretaries, ate well and drank more than a lot, went real early on Friday. And they drove black American cars, for that final flourish of boss-image. It was such a beautiful time.

On Monday, in Turku, it was also time to go for a cruise.

O, when you ease your ass into the soft pillows of the interior - burgundy velour, ladies and gents, more burgundy velour than in a brothel - and curl your fingers around that thin-rimmed steering wheel, you immediately notice how incredibly effortless every part of every thing is - including life.
It only gets better when you crank up the 5.0 litre V8; it simply purrs with satisfaction - or is that me? Heck, if you are not a sucker for the sound of a V8, please check for pulse! Quick!

Put the lever in D. It stands for de-stressed, surely. You see, driving this car is a relaxing affair. There is hardly a sound around that you don’t want to hear, and probably not a bump yet made to rock this cradle.
Pimping, pimping. You feel like Midas himself when you flow down the river that is the street, guiding the huge hood along the canals that are the roads of Turku.

Soon, you think you own everything you see. This must be what Herra Vennamo felt like, watching the little people vanish underneath the chrome grill as he roared home from the Posti headquarters.
Because the Brougham can roar, too. Step on the pedal like you mean it, and two tonnes of heavy metal shift at a very comfortable rate.
Of course, it goes without saying that the young duke complained vigorously about his fuel bill every time I tried to burn rubber…

How can you get this much for so little? Shiny chrome, soft vinyl roof, burgundy velour like you’re Snoop Dogg, factory-tinted windows, white walls, water-bed-love back seats, air con, all electric, all the amenities you could wish for… and a picture of the car on my blog. [More & better pics to follow at a later stage.]

Pity the fool who spends megamoney on a new puke-bucket of plastic. Sure, a new car runs well… but that’s all they do. They just run. And run. And run. And in the end, you barely give them a second thought. They become means of transportation. Like the shopping cart at the supermarket mall. Eventually, you yawn so hard you dislocate your face.

On the other hand, should you brave the norm, and put your hard-earned on a classic, you are rewarded in spades upon spades. Every short journey is an event, and a long drive turns into a quest to find Timbuktu. When the ladies want to know who you are, you reply: “Well hellou there, I’m Adventure, Dangerous Adventure”.

Naturally, you need to choose wisely. Most old cars are SHIT. But if it is spelled Porsche, or if Pekka Vennamo used to own it, chances are you got it right.

The weekend was awash in sport, the only sport: motorcycle sport.

First, the Motocross Des Nations took place in Budds Creek, Maryland, USA. This, the Olympics of motocross, returned to the USA after a 20 year hiatus, and, well, as everyone expected, the Americans were greedy hosts, winning the event in the dominant fashion of a demi-god dictator.

Let’s face it. American motocross is the killah. If you make it here, to paraphrase Frank, you can make it anywhere. Personally, I’ve always been bursting at the seams with respect for the Yankee dirt bike heroes, and no less so today.
This race marked the final mx race for the GOAT - Greatest Of All Time - Ricky Carmichael. RC is practically undefeated in dirt bike history, and has the biggest heart of anyone that ever walked the earth.

I shall write a proper ode later this fall. For now, I’ll settle for stating that there will never be another one.
Truly, he is the only man in the world I would consider changing lives with.

This year’s edition of the MXdN was also special because latest super action figure Ryan Villopoto - that would be RV - won both his motos on a 250F, against bigger bikes. While I’m certain only 2.3% of you know what this means, it has never been done before, and should reduce you to a gasp.
RC gone, enter RV. In the MXdN, it will be shit being another country for years to come.

MXdN results 2007 [Shame on you, Finland!]:

1. USA – 8 points
2. France – 34 points
3. Belgium – 35 points
4. Italy – 57 points
5. Great Britain – 63 points
6. Spain – 68 points
7. Japan – 77 points
8. Switzerland – 84 points
9. Germany – 89 points
10. Canada – 90 points
11. Estonia – 91 points
12. South Africa – 93 points
13. Ireland – 109 points
14. Sweden – 122 points
15. Latvia – 125 points
16. Brazil – 131 points
17. Czech Republic – 132 points
18. Chile – 161 points
19. Portugal – 168 points
20. Australia – 179 points

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Motocross is not the only sport in the world, even if I sometimes mislead you. But no ho ho, there is also MotoGP, oui oui.

*Chanting* Two - not four, two - not four, two - not four!!!

Last Sunday at Motegi, Japan, Casey Stoner wrapped up the MotoGP championship on his blood-red Ducati. Kudos, millions of kudos. Can I be your friend? Can we hang out together?
Besides, Casey might just have the coolest surname I have ever heard. Imagine if his name was “Valentino Stoner”! Oho oho!

In the class below MotoGP, history was also made. And for the first time in 34 years, in the 250cc class, the blue cross on white flew the highest. Teuvo Länsivuori [Imatra GP, 1973], meet Mika Kallio [Motegi GP, 2007].

Miiiiika Kallllio, Mika Kallio! Sing his praises! All of us with flaming gasoline in our veins thought it was impossible forevermore, but there is a real dream in the making now - Mika Kallio in MotoGP? 2009?
Oh ye gawds, I don’t know what I’ve done when faith and destiny treats me this well!

Thought I’d pay my two cents and weigh in with extremely biased but incredibly intelligent opinions on crime and punishment, and why crime must be punished according to the particularity of the crime instead of politics.

Right, rigmarole. Guy at Ferrari gives guy at McLaren a massively fat file of secret information. McLaren is now in possession of stolen property - and it filters down to many in the organization, even to the drivers, a fact later proved by Fernando Alonso’s laptop. Crime!
They could have gotten away with it - surely you don’t think they would suddenly have developed a guilty conscience? Luckily, guy at McLaren gets his wife to copy the 700 pages of top secret stuff at a copy shop - and promptly gets busted by hero copy shop owner. Time! For punishment!

First hearing: Nothing? Lack of evidence? Oh, that is brutal. I lose faith in the judicial system all together, and blame bad luck as usual. Kick the proverbial rusty can as you walk along the proverbial dusty road and shake your fist at the world. That is all you can do; you have the exact same power the chicken-fetus inside the egg has.

Naturally, we all swallowed hard, because the pill was a bitter one.

However, the end was not the end as shitstorms started brewing in the rotten McLaren camp. Soon, the stink spread throughout the pits.
The McLaren drivers shout j’accuse to each other. Thin-skinned and ego-bruised Fernando Alonso stands up to the kingpin idiot - aka the worst team manager of drivers ever - Ron Dennis. Alonso threatens to leak incriminating material to FIA. Dennis panics, tries to cover tracks with usual meaningless blabberspeak that few understand and no one believes.
Finally, new evidence is unearthed from somewhere… underneath a stone, probably.

Second hearing: £50 million fine, minus financial losses, and McLaren loses all points in the Constructor’s Championship. But am I happy? No! Because the crime does not fit the punishment, and if you listen I’ll tell you why.
Sure, it’s an astronomical amount of money - but this is F1; they have deep pockets. Thus, fines do not work.
No, point deductions sting a whole lot deeper - which is why McLaren gets the sum of zero points out of 2007. Tragically, the F1 police was merely half-brave… really, did you ever know anyone who cared about the Constructor’s Championship? Neither did I - because the über-obvious truth is that no one on Planet Real does! This championship should, in my opinion, immediately be disbanded.
If the factories want to keep internal scores, be my guest - but let us never forget that F1 is about the heroes who drive circles around death at violent speeds.

Man, I hate it when fools consider F1 a team sport. Tss. Football is a team sport! F1 is a tank of sharks! The driver - and there is only room for one in his vicious shark car - who eats the most, wins.
The driver, dammit, is the one and only one we - us fans - care about. Mano y mano, wheel to wheel.

In the end, the second hearing proves beyond doubt that McLaren is as guilty as OJ Simpson. But much like OJ, somehow they received a get-out-of-jail card. Id est, they lost not a single point of the double lead in the omnipotent Driver’s Championship - a lead they earned while guilty of industrial espionage - which serves purpose most only to make the cars faster - which the McLarens have been.
It matters little how much they gained from it [although, logically, it can't have hurt], no, what matters is that they cheated and got caught, thus should be punished accordingly.

Enter good-looking and sweet-talking Lewis Hamilton, everyone’s favorite rookie, the first black driver in the history of the sport. Oh, holy commercial suicide, there is no way anyone would harm a hair on Hamilton! The ultimate truth is that moral justice can not prevail in a sport built on crass cash.

But I think it should. Because, for this once, I stand high and mighty on the shoulder of morality…

Godspeed, Colin McRae.

I spent another long weekend in Tallinn. What can I do - I’d travel to Baghdad just to taste the skin on her neck.
As it were, we spent most of the time in bed. On the 13th floor.

Naturally, that is not to say that Tallinn is not without its glitzy charms. Far from it; the city is fast moving into my top ten - yes, I have a top ten for everything - and we did sample the nightlife in big gulps that tasted like tequila and methylenedioxymethamphetamine.
Frankly, who doesn’t like going out with great people who don’t have to queue?

Saturday, yes, Saturday night’s alright for fighting. We also managed to get out of bed to catch Elton John in action, playing his greatest hits! The man is still standing, still singing like a rocket man, still playing the piano like… he’s GOD. He gives it life. And the piano roars of approval, gallops to his touch, squirms and skids and shoots and shit, it’s so g’damn electrifying that I almost lose my mind!

And I think I do. I lose my mind. I vanish. All that’s left is a tingling body. Tiny Dancer! Is it one of the greatest songs ever sung? Or is it? Because, blue jean baby, L.A lady, seamstress to the band, when Elton John hits the fifth section about two minutes and thirty seconds in…

Hold me closer tiny dancer
Count the headlights on the highway
Lay me down in sheets of linen
you had a busy day today

… ah. I am hurting so unbelievably bad - and it feels so insanely wonderful.

This week, half a decade ago, On The Road was published. 50 years of sad beat beauty, man. How the world owes Jack Kerouac!

How I owe him! For me, it hasn’t even been 15 years since I first read it, but it moved me forever - perhaps for the worse, but who cares about useless irrelevance like that when this book opened up my brain to a world of such dreamy style that I still feel as though I pass the days watching everything happening outside from deep inside my body instead of through my eyes.

I know where I bought the book. Tower Records, Piccadilly, London, £6.99, a Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition. I remember the bed underneath me, where I read it with prickly fever and jazz feet. Waterloo, London, 5 square metres with a small window to a parking lot. I can still taste the pages, the smell, the sweat, the sad joy of the dusty road, the rebirth of once-lost hopes, so much flow, always passion and rhythm just coming at you from somewhere you had never been but instantly wanted to find. Ah, there was so much longing searching for outlet. The book was glowing when I read it, swear.

Jack loved the word. He loved it more than anyone, above all adjectives & superlatives, and it showed, in torrents and torrents of hot romantics, the coolest kind of semantics. I’d love to hate the hepcat, because he raised the bar to the star in the sky - you gotta ask yourself, how do you jump that high?
Since then, I’ve been trying, but also yearning, searching. I want to read and weep with furious joy; sometimes it feels like everything else is gutter lit in comparison. Sure, plenty of great writers out there, constructing great books equipped with excellent structure & plot - but something’s missing and… I’ll be damned if I didn’t almost say soul, the whole soul, the hole in the soul - well, anyways, I can’t help to think that those well-crafted things are not books of magic, but merely long articles on architecture. Yes, I sneer.

Yass indeed, would love to hate Jack. By huge contagious force, he made me write the way I write - by sound & echo. No wonder I may never get anything published… books are not supposed to “sound”. There is music for that, and people in general do not read with their ears. But they oughta! Yes, I mutter something insulting about people in general.

On The Road is not Jack’s best book. First impressions, however, can cut to the bone and be impossible to shake. I can actually pinpoint the actual sentence that made me want to be a writer. This sentence, which is the last sentence of the book, has turned into a magnificent nuisance, because every single time I go to the book store to get a fresh supply of fiction, I always feel the need to look at the ending. If there is no orgasmic passion or divine intervention of beautiful language, chances are I leave it on the shelf.

Can you see what this book did to me? Nothing short of tall, it changed my life. I could have been a contender; instead I turned into a defender of the poor pretender. Vivacious congratulations to the one who knows what that means - in the meanwhile, I give you the sentence that was my Archduke Franz Ferdinand:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all the raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding sparkler dims on the prairies, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Now you know so much about me. Now you know why I always race towards the sunset in mad exuberance.

In yet another horrifyingly Orwellian episode, the state of Finland introduces a zero tolerance policy on speeding. You sneeze while you drive, you’re busted. Oho. Pay up. Well, you can suck my sock.

The pitiful pencil-pushing person who came up with this insane idea - and had the audacity to think it was a good one - and had the impudence to present it to the board of decisionmakers - you, that person, you, you are as creepy as they come, mister. I am not going to ask you if your mama breastfed you, because I already know that he didn’t. Let’s not even talk about your childhood. Just because you are inconceivably miserable does not mean that you have to make everyone else suffer.

Granted, the zero tolerance policy is only an experiment, only on the Karis - Helsinki road, only for a month…

Oh yeah? It reeks of “temporary tax” - the sneaky politician’s favorite trick. Well, you can’t fool me. I bet my big toe this lunacy is here to stay. Perhaps not in October, but someday, and when it comes, far too soon.
You better be prepared. See, they will come at us with heavy propaganda evidence in hand, try to prove speed this and death that. In fact, I bet my other big toe that someone is, right now, working hard on a paper called “speeding leads to hard drugs.”

The MAN always bully the driver. Always. Naturally, it is simple bully logic - pick the easiest target; the driver will go quiet, the driver will pay and pay.

Don’t mess with the middle classes, dammit! They built this thing called Finland. It’s like hacking away at the backbone of the country - someday, it will collapse. Then who you gonna call? The fucking hippies?

Speeding is winning & smoking is cool. Catch me if you can, MAN.