The Buying a Car Kiada

 

Around 2009 I bought myself a car at Rensselaer Honda in Troy, New York. It was a used Honda Fit with 11.000 miles on it. It was a car I had done extensive research on. I paid cash for it as I had done with the previous four cars I had owned. I loved it. 

Unfortunately, one day in 2013 while driving from work in Oneonta to home in Albany I came up over a hill and ran into a snowstorm and an unploughed freeway, one of the far too occasional “joys" of living in upstate New York at the time. I tried to slow down. However, the car hit an ice patch hidden under the snow, skidded, hit the railing, and died. RIP.

I should have purchased another Honda Fit and would have if I had known that several years later Honda would cease selling the fit in North America. The issue at the time, however, was that I wanted a heavier car than the Fit because the drive over hill and dale and through ice, rain, sleet and snow from Albany to Oneonta sometimes proved to be too much of an adventure. I initially thought about getting another Honda but I, not very deep of me I know, really didn’t like the look of either the Civic or the Accord. Idiotic me. 

My neighbour had a Ford Focus which I liked the look of and the compact met my criteria of a bigger car than the subcompact Fit. So, I started looking at Focus’s. I was able to get what my neighbour said was a good deal on Focus from Crossroads Ford in Ravenna. So I bought it and paid more than half down on the car and took out a car loan for the rest with SEFCU, my credit union, for the rest. It was my first car loan ever.

The Focus wasn’t a Fit. Not even close. Two years after I bought it the brakes had to be replaced. A year after that the motor in the door for the driver window had to be fixed because the chain had gone all wibbly wimey. A year after that the air conditional died. This was partly my fault since I didn’t run the a/c periodically even during the winter. And while I should not have assumed that you treat a car a/c the same way you treat one in your window, I would prefer not to have an air conditioner in the car if the technology requires that it be run periodically including in the dead of winter.

In the winter of 2019 I got a have we got a deal for you mailer from DePaula Ford in Albany. It offered me, or so they claimed in the missive, a great deal on my long in the tooth Focus, which was sitting on 90,000 miles plus at the time, and a deal on a new car of my choice. Given my age and health I had been thinking that I needed a car that was easier for arthritic me to get into and out of and a car with four wheel or all wheel drive given historic upstate New York weather even before the “invitation” arrived. So I got the Escape. Part of the deal was an interest free payment plan so I arranged to pay the Escape off over a five year period.

Just like the Focus the Escape needed new brakes within two years later. A year of two after that it required extensive transmission work. Later in the same year an axle and a bearing had to be replaced. This summer—it always happens in summer doesn’t it?—the air conditioner went bust. 

I almost sold the car to DePaula when the axle and bearing were replaced in November of 2023. I thought I could get a decent amount for it since it had only 8500 hundred miles on it. I tried to find a Fit with less that 50,000 miles on it, one of the neo-labours of Herakles at the establishment I bought my old Fit from. Though Ren Honda said they would contact me if a Fit came in they didn’t when a Fit came in so I sent them packing. I also looked at a Kia Soul. In the end, however, I decided to wait until the car was paid off in full, which just happened this month, before exchanging the Escape for a Soul.

At this point I must say that I have really had it with Ford motor cars and not only for the reason that they periodically break down and have to be fixed even when they have few miles on the odometre. Late last month, to note yet another example of why I am fed up with Ford, I got a letter from Ford Credit. informing me that my title was about to revert to me. A week or so later I received another letter from Ford Credit telling me that my title had been lost or destroyed. 

Now I have, as I said, only bought two cars on credit my entire life and I was naive about how titles and liens worked. When I did not receive my title in 2019 I assumed Ford Credit had it. When I went to DePaula for my annual inspection TODAY, however, I learned that this was not true. DePaula assured me that they did the title and registration work when I bought the car. And admittedly I did receive my registration renewal by email and mail after that so they clearly did get the address on the registration right or they just simply merged it into my already existing Focus registration at the New York Department of Motor Vehicles. As for the title, DePaula blamed the DMV for me not getting the title to the Escape I now own. The DMV, of course—don’t you just love the bureaucratic blame game merry-go-round?—blamed DePaula.

Now it is certainly possible that the DMV is to blame. Did the DMV mess up the address on my title? Did it post the title at all? Did they post it to the wrong address?  I do know that I had problems with my New York State EZ Pass after I had DePaula upgrade my licence plates to the new Excelsior ones on the Escape. I could not link my EZ Pass to my new licence plate number when I tried to do this. On the other hand, it is possible that DePaula somehow messed up the address on my title since I never received it at the flat that I have been living at since 2007. Whatever the reason I had to pay the DMV $20.00 dollars for a car title I never received. Can you say Ron you have been screwed over again?

To make a long sad story short I think I will be looking to trade in my Escape, which now has around 9500 miles on it, for a Soul once I get my errant title. My experience with Ford has not been a good one. I no longer trust Ford vehicles and I am not sure I trust DePaula any more though they have admittedly done a good job inspecting—this took an hour and a half today— and repairing the Escape over the years. 

Such is the absurdity of life.

The Books of My Life: Jacques Tourneur (Fujiwara)

As someone who has devotedly watched films since the mid-1960s—many of them in the company of my sister and my friends—I early on gained a familiarity with the French and Hollywood director Jacques Tourneur, the son of another famous French and Hollywood director Maurice Tourneur. Sometime in the 1960s and 1970s I saw several of his films on television including the famous Cat People (1942), the famous I Walked With a Zombie (1943), the famous The Leopard Man (1943), all of which he made with the noted B movie producer Val Lewton at RKO, the famous Out of the Past (1947), and the famous Night of the Demon (1957). 

When I went to university I broadened not only my cinema going, the number of films I saw, including what were called at the time “foreign films”, and took a few Film Studies classes while an undergraduate. The auteur approach to film studies was still popular at the time, particularly with film critics who wrote critical reviews for the major newspapers. major magazines, many major film journals, and with me though it was being challenged, particularly in the ivy halls of universities, by structural, semiological, semiotic, Marxist, sociological, historical, psychoanalytic, feminist, and approaches to film that mixed and matched all of the above. They to, particularly the structural, semiological, Marxist, sociological, and historical approaches, also impacted my approach to auteurism at the time. 

The auteurist approach, along with critiques of auteurist approaches to directors and others, has impacted scholarly work on Jacques Tourneur over the years. The major question relating to Tourneur in auteurist or authorship approaches to film has long been whether Tourneur or Val Lewton, were the author of the films they made together and which made the name of both with the film going public and with auteurists. For some auteurist critics Tourneur was ultimately the author of the Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, the three films the pair made together. For others Lewton was the author of these and others of his films, a hypothesis given flesh by those who point out the fact that there are many Lewton biographical elements in, for example, Curse of the Cat People and the fact that Tourneur disagreed with some of the decisions made concerning The Leopard Man. For a few, myself included, both were the authors of these films. For Chris Fujiwara, the author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998) Tourneur is the primary author of the films he directed between 1931 and 1966.

In his exhaustive study of the work of Tournier, one that includes not only the short and long films he directed, the television shows he directed, the films he was a bit player in, the films he was a script clerk for, and the films he was an assistant director on, several of these foci a rarity in film studies, Fujiwara argues that one can find consistencies across Tourneur’s films and some of the television shows he directed. These consistencies, according to Fujiwara include consistent themes, consistent character traits, and a consistent mise-en-scene such as his consistent use of decor, his consistent use of sound, his consistent camera movements, his consistent acting strategies, his consistent melding of the real and the supernatural, and his consistent editing strategies, this despite the fact that Tourneur once said that he never turned down a film opportunity offered to him and the fact that Tourneur made films produced by others and written by others.

Fujiwara argues that in Tourner’s work, particularly in the best of it and in the films with which Tourneur was deeply involved intellectually and emotionally whether mystery films, horror films, western films, or noir films, one finds a tight relationship between his themes, his characters, his mise-en-sene, his camera movements, his use of sound, and his use of actors. Tourneur’s cinematic universe, Fujiwara argues, is one in which characters act naturally, in which the mise-en-scene is expressionistic, atmospheric, full of light and shadow, filled with the prominent use of natural light sources, in which camera angles are sometimes odd, in which the editing gives viewers a sense of dislocation, and in which things often happen offscreen. In this they parallel, Fujiwara argues, Tourneur's narrative emphases with their fluctuations, fluctuations between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, and oppositions between human and animal, the living and the dead, the healthy and sane and sickness and insanity, town and country, law and crime, male and female, and the powers of darkness and the power of the mind. Tourneur’s cinema is generally, Fujiwara argues, a cinema of mystery, a cinema of the supernatural, and a cinema dominated by outsiders.

Fujiwara’s analysis of Tourneur’s work will not please everyone. Those sceptical of the auteurist approach to American cinema will not likely find it compelling even though Fujiwara is attentive to historical and sociological contexts and makes use of semiological and psychological theory in his author centred analysis of Tourneur’s films. Those who find an approach grounded in a unitary ideal reader (akin to Chomsky’s ideal speaker) will find much that concerns them in the book given Fujiwara’s unitary interpretations. Those who find the mix of the descriptive with the normative problematic will find much to critique in the book given that Fujiwara not only describes the narratives, mise-en-scene, use of sound in the film, and the editing of the films but also whether he likes them or not. Some may wonder why the book wasn’t an article instead in a book given that it could have been if his extensive analysis of each film had been dropped in favour of a more linked and threaded auteurist approach as in the introduction to the book. Despite all this Fujiwara’s book on Tourneur is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton.