Layers Of Earth

This is a repost of a blog I posted on rowdy.com back in November…. enjoy!

I am the luckiest race fan in the world. At least that’s what I think when I look back at my time working at what is now called the Homestead-Miami Speedway. It’s lived under many names over the past 12 years; The Homestead Motorsports Complex, the Metro-Dade Homestead Motorsports Complex, the Miami-Dade Homestead Motorsports Complex, and finally,  Homestead-Miami Speedway. I used to have to type all of those names out because between 1995 and 1999, I ran the official website for the race track, racemiami.com.

In 1995, I was developing websites for the new frontier called the internet. Nobody really knew what it was back hen. Email was really an AOL thing. So, I had a new company and I needed a feather in my cap, as it were, so I gathered up my courage and made an appointment to meet the promotions director at Miami Motorsports L.L.C. I pitched him the idea of making a website for the new Indy-styled oval they had built in Homestead. I bartered my way into the job, which helped me get my career building websites off the ground.

More importantly, at least to me, was the unfettered access I got to the track, the garage, and eventually even Victory Lane.

I won’t bore you all with the technical stuff, you know, the website development junk. It would have been limited to that if the PR guy at the time didn’t ask me for a favor. He asked if I could make these little print out sheets that updated the top 10 every 10 laps or so. Some girl would come up to where I was set up in timing and scoring and pick them up and bring them down to the media center for distribution. In exchange, I could spend the race weekends for NASCAR, CART and the AMA fully credentialed. What race fan would refuse. So pretty much for every event from 1996-1999 (when the track was sold to ISC), I was living the dream of every race fan.

So now that I’ve set the table, let me relay some of my treasured memories of racing at Homestead.
WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, DAVE REZENDES?

The first time I went through the process of picking up my credentials for a race was a real eye-opener. There I am, standing in line at the Registration center outside the backstretch of the track, when I find my self standing next to none other than one Bobby Allison. This was the first of many conflicted moments where being a fan AND acting as a professional clash. What do you do when you find yourself in the presence of one of your heroes, but you are also credentialed as a “Media” member. Those media types, I soon learned, don’t always enjoy the best of reputations amongst the competitors. Maybe some do, those like Poole who they know. Me, I am a nobody. I am a small fish who looks like a freaking hippie with hair down to my butt, but who also knows his racing in spite of his appearance. So there’s Bobby Allison. There’s me. I am nobody. I am supposedly professional. What do I do?

Nothing.

I found this is my lot in this gig. I am the outsider looking in, a fly on the wall, unable to summon up the courage to approach my heroes. Over the course of my Homestead gig, this scene repeats itself many times. With Terry Labonte. With Kyle Petty. With Earnhardt the elder, Jeff Gordon, Richard Petty and a NASCAR rookie named Tony Stewart.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, This is 1996 and now I am in the garage area heading for timing and scoring with my little red wagon stuffed with computer gear and a digital camera. Oh, that camera. An ancient thing by today’s standards. a Kodak number that took like a full second to actually take a picture from the time you hit the button. I think it was the only one in the garage at that time. All these full on photographers with their Nikon’s filled with real film and lenses the length of my arm would look at my digital apparatus and furrow puzzledly. What is that? A digital camera. Really? Looks like a toy. Maybe, but I’ll be published by 6pm.

I load in and find myself immersed in the social equivalent of a traveling circus. Everyone seems to know each other, there are inside jokes, innuendo, Slim Jims and ashtrays for everyone. Most of the folks in timing and scoring are related directly to the race teams. Some are wives, some are girlfriends, some are sisters, all connected to individual race teams which they are assigned to score. There is a computer system in place along with transponders in each race vehicle, but these humans are the backup, the cross reference for settling discrepancies.

The ringmaster for timing and scoring for the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series was a woman named Betsy. Her face was lined with years of sun and tobacco. Her tone was very, very firm and when she said jump, you asked which bridge you should use. On my first day there, I saw her make a race team repaint their truck because she couldn’t read the numbers clearly. It was a nice looking truck from an independent team who had obviously spent some time on the presentation, but she didn’t want any gradient color schemes on the actual numbers. They fussed. She parked them for the first practice session. It was repainted by noon.

The race itself was the typical Craftsman Truck race of the time. A couple of Cup guys, Geoff Bodine (who had the pole), Joe Nemechek and Ken Schrader showed up. In the end, it was a duel between Jack Sprague and Ron Hornaday , who beat and banged their way out of a win on the last lap, with Dave Resendez making his way sideways through the smoke to claim victory.

Wait a minute…. Dave Rezendewho?

Yup, Dave Rezendes. Kinda faded away over the following seasons, but he ran well before the marketing reality caught up with the New Englander. He won like 2 or 3 races that year and that was that. Someone will tell me where he is now.

My lasting memory of that weekend was leaving the track the first day I was there. The garage was closed and a handful of mechanics and track officials were stillaround. There was the wonderful smell of diesel and onions lingering in the air. It was a beautiful Florida sunset making all the sleeping trucks tinged orange. I smiled. I couldn’t wait to be back.

NEXT UP: Tragedy& Triumph

I am first generation MTV. That of course means I’m in my 40s now (41 actually) and although I normally am not a sucker for nostalgia, I have fallen victim recently to the joys of streamed internet video and it’s seemingly infinite archive.

ILoveMusicVideo.net is one time hole of a place for such journeys. In this music directory, you can pull up videos seemingly from anywhere, anytime. Much of it points to YouTube, so it begs the question why not use YouTube and bypass the step? Well, ILoveMusicVideo.net lists videos by artists on a single, complete page that triggers your failing memory. For instance, I was looking for a video from The Specials, “A Message to Rudy”, and there on the list was another video from them I had totally forgotten about, “Ghost Town”. Also, ILoveMusicVideo.net pulls from data sources beyond YouTube, including last.fm, which has many songs in streamable format. Sometimes, it’s great to just hear a song again once or twice to tickle the nostalgia gland, so free streaming is fine (who needs to actually OWN a copy of Haircut 100 anyway?).

Now, to geek out further, I actually pre-date MTV a little bit. Around 1980, there was this cable show called Video Concert Hall. Now, you want to talk about crappy early music video production? You gotta see The Brothers Johnson lip-syncing to “Stomp” (one of the best funkotech songs EVER, imo). Or how about The Cramps doing “Garbage Man”. Talk about pure, unadulterated shyte! But, VCH really was responsible for introducing me to David Bowie (Ashes to Ashes), Genesis (Turn It On Again), and of course Gary Neuman.

One could say that without Video Concert Hall, I would have done better in school and never been inspired to make music. Inotherwords, it changed my life.

Unfortunately, in all of its vast, all-encompassing glory, places like ILoveMusicVideo.net and YouTube have still failed. I have yet to track down a clip of Spider doing “New Romance (It’s a Mystery)”. Until that happens, this whole internet thing will be deemed by me an abject failure…

I have a new song called The Electro-Gods of Methane Blue. You can listen to it here.

To contextualize the song, several years ago, my brother was arrested. From what I understand, he was drunk and driving through the hills of North Carolina in a pick-up truck adorned with activist bumper stickers like “End the New world Order now!” etc. My brother is, for lack of a better description, a hippy about 10 years my senior. He doesn’t share the same father as I. His father died in a plane crash off the coast of pre-Revolutionary Cuba in the mid-50s. A very enlightened person on many subjects as my brother is, I don’t think he really ever came to terms with this. So, as the police officer shines his flashlight in my brother’s face during this traffic stop, my brother replies with one of the more classic lines I can remember:

“I fail to recognize your Constitutional authority.”

He then drives off, leading the police on what was termed a three-countywide low speed chase. He bounced off a couple of guardrails and ended up against a pole. They arrested him.

Of course, it didn’t end there.

As luck would have it, one of the cops involved in the chase died of a heart attack during the incident. The law automatically comes on the accused like a ton of bricks at this point, upping a relatively simple DWI and fleeing the scene charges to second degree murder or manslaughter or whatever. Prison sentences become real. My brother was convicted on all counts and sentenced to 9 years in prison.

For most people, this would be the end of the story. But not when it’s MY brother. No. He gets real indignant to the point where he is put in solitary of sorts. What limited access he has to legal materials is bolstered by a strategy of taking advantage of the laws in North Carolina at the time, particularly the laws that allow citizens to put private leans upon the property of others. My brother made headlines as he proceeded to put leans on the property of the Governor, the Police Chief and other officials whom he accused of falsely imprisoning him or whatever the justification. The assets of the Governor were frozen, credit was cut off, and there was a big hassle. Beautiful! Gotta love his ingenuity.

Of course, they eventually broke him. The legal foundation of his case was scuttled, and eventually the psychological effects of being in solitary took their toll and he began to change his insubordinate ways. He took classes, educated himself in electronics, read lots of philosophical ponderings and was released after several appeals.

Through all of this, I was unable to reach my brother. I had my own shit to go through during that time, and to be frank, I didn’t know where his head was at. Still don’t. I imagine if he were to read this, he would correct the inaccuracies and offer his perspective.

So who  or what are The Electro-Gods of Methane Blue? The cops with their flashing blue lights, of course…

GZ

In recent months, I have kinda migrated much of my babbling off of here to other sites such as MySpace and Rowdy.com . The reason for this is that there are more eyeballs on those sites than on here, and well, what good is writing shit if no one reads it! But that doesn’t mean that I am abandoning this space, just that I will be writing here far more infrequently. If you really want to keep up with my meandering ponderments, you should check out some of the links on the right sidebar there and look up my MySpace (for music) and Rowdy (FOR racing) pages.

As a general update, I will tell you that all is well. Family is great and friendships are sprouting up in forgotten places. Musically, I have been busy keeping my own creative endeavors afloat. After the Shawn Snyder project, I creatively challenged myself to a schedule of recording a song per month. Now, I do tend to get lost in production sometimes, especially if I like the song I am working on, so that really means a song every 5 weeks. My intentions are good, you know? I initially started crafting songs as I felt like it, but now I think I have sent myself on a path of finishing the “Dust of the American Pixel” project. I don’t know the final form this project will take, but it will definitly be different. Maybe hndcrafted CDs, or maybe even vinyl. We’ll see.

Speaking of Shawn, he is back in South Florida for a semi-permanent stay as he helps his mom fight off the montherfuckingcancer. Hate that shit. But, as he is here, we are making the best outta the deal. I will be performing with him for several dates around South Florida in March, as well as embarking on recording some more material. We both have been wanting to meld his “Kharma in a Can” track into a pure pop song for shits and giggles. It’s a great, marketable piece and as such we figured what the hell. Bring on the drum loops and synth pads!

I pretty much am totally dumping out of the racing topic on here since I have been posting on Rowdy at bunch. It’s kinda cool, not as conservative as some sites I have seen, but I still have to temper myself on there. I won’t go into my problems with pre-race innvocations there - yet. When I decide my bridge there is broken enough, I’ll let them have it and move that topic back here

So that’s the update. I will endeavor to update the music page here as soon as I get a sec. Meantime, check out my pages on MYSPACE and ROWDY if you need a more frequent Zhen fix…

GZ

So I have an idea. There are all kinds of caveats to it, asterisks and potential problems with it, but I want to share it anyway. Think of this as a big brush on canvas thing, where the devilish details still need to be fleshed out.

I think NASCAR could use a good “fuel war”.

Imagine a race day where there is no “official fuel of NASCAR”, but several suppliers. NASCAR would set a maximum emissions standard and leave the chemistry to the fuel suppliers. Suppliers and teams would have to choose between power vs. efficiency, between exclusive deals and flexibility. The on and off track intrigue would be interesting at the least.

But this fuel war would be more than simply an additional competitive variable. If properly executed, it would transform the sport and capture the imagination of the public.

The underlying purpose would be to fuel innovation. I’m not talking about hydrogen power or anything that experimental. The world’s reality is that fossil fuel burning vehicles aren’t going anywhere. Even if America at large changed its way of powering its transportation, there is the rest of the world. What needs to happen is development of alternative fuel formulas that can be used in current cars. And that’s what makes NASCAR the perfect testing and marketing platform for that movement.

As the governing body, NASCAR can progressively incentivise fuel companies to make better, cleaner adaptive fuel technologies (whew, that sounds pretty corporate speak). Seriously. All NASCAR need do is police the emissions. Then, they can even go to the point of using weight-reduction incentives to push the emissions lower. Say that the NASCAR emission standard was “X”. If a fuel supplier made a fuel that burned with an emissions level of “x -3%”, teams using that fuel could reduce their running weight by say, I dunno, 30 pounds or whatever. More strategies, more choices for crew chiefs and race teams. Could be very interesting.

The positives here are that NASCAR could go back to using motorsports as a test bed for innovation. That is what racing has historically been, from seat belts to anti-lock breaks. NASCAR could be at the forefront of “green” development, which is becoming a trend that the entire automotive industry is embracing. The positive publicity that NASCAR and the participating fuel companies would get would far outweigh the amount of money NASCAR currently gets from its exclusive supplier.

The downside is outright cost. NASCAR would have to open an emissions study lab and have a few chemists added to the payroll. All those aero template inspectors rendered obsolete by the COT would have to be replaced with other types of inspectors. But the key here for NASCAR isn’t to get into policing the chemistry per se, just the emissions.

The big cost factor would fall to the teams, one which would hopefully be offset by the fuel companies. Aerodynamicists of the old car age would be replaced on the payroll by more engine tuners and chemists and such. Again, hopefully the marketing positives for the participating fuel companies would warrant some spending that would end up at these teams.

I think that’s it in a relatively big nutshell. I know there are holes, incomplete thoughts and whatnot in here, but I hope it would bring about some discussion. Fuel wars… what do you think?