Stockholm isn't Miami

09/01/2010 | WesternCulture

[WesternCulture]

Why waste your money on a 2006, used-up Maxum 4200 SY?

Or yet another boring Lexus that lets you down?

Over here in Sweden and elsewhere in Scandinavia, a lot of people are crazy about restoring old (wooden) yachts and veteran cars of the 1930s-1970s, even if nurturing such projects often set them back way more than buying new cars and boats would.

Why is that so?

Perhaps life was better around 1950?

Or perhaps not.

Personally, I'd say life always has involved hardship and seldom been carefree, but that didn't exactly bother people like Virgil Exner, did it?

(Click links below to find out more)

[WesternCulture]

On leisure boats of the past:

http://svtplay.se/t/136952/battokig

The average second car of many Swedes are not yet another Volvo (perhaps not even their first one is):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8nhwqfQrxQ

Virgil Exner:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_Exner

[mnehring]

Appreciation of the craftsmanship of the earlier vehicles that isn’t found often today. It is like preserving art.

[Cacique]

What links?

[1rudeboy]

There’s a great film (I think it’s Swedish) about two patients in a mental hospital who are sent out into the real world to complete their rehabilitation, with hilarious results. There’s a scene where another character gets stopped by the Swedish police while driving a vintage American car, and the scene cuts to the policeman and the driver looking under the hood and having a pleasant conversation.

[WesternCulture]

“What links?”

- Sorry, this is it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6r1GrApjiM

[WesternCulture]

“There’s a great film (I think it’s Swedish) about two patients in a mental hospital who are sent out into the real world to complete their rehabilitation, with hilarious results.”

- Sounds like a manuscript that would've worked in the days of Ingmar Bergman.

Today, few people would understand such a playful, artistic approach to the world that surrounds us all.

Something has been lost.

Look at the 1970’s.

MC5 and Johnny Rotten and their followers were all insane, but at least they had some funny ways of using their high IQs compared to your average entertainer of today.

This could never happen in the age we live in:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJm97o-4qYI

Today, we get shocked by the likes of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

I was born in 1969.

As the 1970s turned into the 1980s I could sense my very own awareness being leveled down to a lower level of functioning:)

(- Why did it take me so long to write this reply?)

On the other hand, the Internet actually constitutes a light in the dark.

[WesternCulture]

“Appreciation of the craftsmanship of the earlier vehicles that isn’t found often today. It is like preserving art.”

- The closest to a genuinely “hand crafted car culture” accessible to all in World history was that of the 1950s before machines and routines took over.

I've toiled at one of the largest car manufacturing plants over here in Europe (by actual size and net value output); the main Volvo plant here in Gothenburg, Sweden. I loved every minute of it and believe me, to me the buyer of that single Volvo, whether be it a guy in Bremen, San Diego or Yokohama mattered to me as I know what it means spending a fortune on something.

But sadly enough, even if I know I performed well at the assembly line, there never was any such thing as workers building homes and apartments for each other involved.

I'd say humanity still is in progress, but having generation after generation never getting to know the meaning of true craftsmanship is a great loss.

If that is the case.