Posted on 05/20/2007 3:22:39 PM PDT by GMMAC
The eco-joke is on Hollywood
By Rex Murphy
Toronto Globe and Mail
Saturday, May 19, 2007 – Page A21
Jay Leno is not a global warming skeptic. The blandly humorous host of The Tonight Show is at one with the Hollywood ethos wherein no fashionable cause can fail to be embraced. Entertainers and those who feed most directly off them may not be climatologists, but they are wonderfully precise barometers of what is hip and trendy.
Thus Vanity Fair magazine put out its "green issue" last month. Vanity Fair could offer reasonable competition to Vogue as being the slickest, fattest, glossiest trumpet of most that is wasteful, ephemeral, trivial and ostentatiously luxurious in Western culture.
When the indictments come to be written over how one fraction of the world lived in vapid splendour and vast excess while whole multitudes spent their minutes trying to find kindling for a fire or water for a pot, a few issues of Vogue and Vanity Fair may be all that is necessary to make the case.
If then someone were to throw in any instalment of a Fashion Cares benefit, or some Make Poverty History public relations one-off, the jury will not have to leave the room. The superrich in their mink-lined careless cocoons air-kissing the conscience of the world. Cry me a river of Château Lafite Rothschild.
I'll get back to Jay Leno in a moment, but it would be an injury to your Saturday morning not to call attention to the issue's superb Annie Leibovitz photo of Leonardo DiCaprio ("stepping forward to take the baton from Al Gore") in the prow of a boat in front of the "Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon in southeast Iceland." It's an image of eco-piety every bit as kitschy as the dashboard Jesus that was a minor rage with the pickup set a few decades ago.
Leno will never be the poster-magnet that DiCaprio is.
Don't look for a photo of him throwing synthetic herring to a hungry whale, or posing in front of some stunted redwood. There are some compositions that defy even Annie Leibovitz. And besides, Jay is a motorhead - which for those of you blissfully unacquainted with the stale slang of the hyperacquisitive is the term for those who love cars so much they own fleets of them.
Hollywood types in general own more cars than they can ever use, and they own as a rule the biggest, the most expensive, and the most customized. Anyone who has degraded a half an hour of their life by watching Pimp My Ride needs no further corroboration on this point.
Leno has so many cars he has a 17,000 square foot garage just to keep some of his toys in. It's called the Big Dog Garage, and we are told from its online site that it has its own gourmet kitchen (may we hope it's organic?) in addition to a C&C Mill (I have no idea), a water jet cutter, sheet metal equipment, a lathe, a regular mill, and welding equipment.
A sample of his cars includes an Oldsmobile Toronado, a Buick Roadmaster, a McLaren F1, a Dodge Hemi Coronet, a Jaguar XK120, and a 1935 Fiat Topolino. I stress this is just a sample, and I ignore altogether what appears to be a fleet of monster motorcycles, a few buses, and for all I know a scattering of supercharged bulldozers.
If it's got an engine Jay owns it. But it's worth even more than Vanity Fair's enhaloing of Leonardo DiCaprio at the glacier lagoon to see the photo of Leno's toyshop in Popular Mechanics under the stultifyingly absurd headline: Jay Leno's Green Garage. Cry me a river of 10/30 motor oil.
If you are one of those who feels the planet is about to drift into uncontrollable and devastating global overheating - stay those thoughts of apocalypse. For Jay, like his Hollywood confreres has, I quote, "been looking hard at his footprint on the planet." With all these cars - does he have a footprint?
Does he even know how to walk any more?
But Popular Mechanics goes on to inform us that Jay has learned that the solvents used to clean "greasy, grimy automotive parts" are toxic, and "toxic chemicals harm the environment." So Jay has put in a new eco-friendly parts washer recently that does the job without the negative impact. The new washer "essentially uses microbes that consume the oils and grease."
Cancel Kyoto. It's redundant. Jay has microbes working to clean his parts. Hollywood cares. The immense farcicality of owning more cars than Madonna has had boyfriends, and claiming in a 17,000 square foot garage (with its own gourmet kitchen) that you are eco-friendly is evidently lost on the blandly humorous host of The Tonight Show.
Jay Leno's one good joke. And he doesn't get it.
~ Rex Murphy is a commentator with The National and host of CBC Radio's Cross-Country Checkup
Thanks for posting this. That Leno is an automobile collector is an old story - he talked about it in a concert I saw in L.A. back in 1988. Streisand, too, collects old automobiles.
I had a chuckle at Leno’s “green” garage — but, to be fair, he doesn’t drive all those cars and bikes at once. He’s essentially creating a world-class automobile museum. I’d love to go on a tour.
it's not C&C... it's CNC. it's a Computerized Numerical Control - Milling Machine.
“The immense farcicality of owning more cars than Madonna has had boyfriends”
I think the author has it backwards.
Sounds to me like Rex Murphy, whoever he is, is one of those who bought a Yugo a decade or two ago...
Oh, and Rex? “CNC” is not slang for “C & C”, it’s an acronym for “Computer Numerically Controlled,” as in a machine tool that runs on xyz coordinate instructions.
so long as it understands APT, i can make it make just about anything anything...
I thought he jumped the shark with the Chupacabra.
He had one of those "talks to spirits from another dimension" people on the other night, and went totally crazy about "global warming" and how we're all going to die in a week if "we" don't fix it. I too think he's lost it.
But the author's argument is illogical. It does not matter how many cars Leno owns: he drives only one at a time.
Socialists make the same mistake about the "rich," forgetting that what the rich own they do not consume: their capital creates jobs, innovation and, ultimately, improves welfare of all.
Ownership and consumption are two different things.
GMMAC has it right about Rex.
It appears that Rex got his information from Leno’s official site for his garage — wherein the term “C&C mill” is used.
http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/garage/index.shtml
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