Don't worry, Dan Neil, Nate and I are coming
Difficult news in the last week on the Dan Neil front. As you may have heard, this blog's favorite columnist is leaving the Los Angeles Times for the pay-walled and increasingly USAT-competing Wall Street Journal.
Jalopnik may have put it best: "Pulitzer-Winning Auto Writer, Explorer of Sexual Positions Heads to WSJ." Friend Nate, a resident of greater Los Angeles and creator of Facebook's Dan Neil Fan Club (44 members and counting, join today), were texting about the news this evening.
The upshot? Don't worry, Dan Neil, we're coming.
Sure, you're headed to Carolina — back home — with the family in tow. The WSJ can also give you play the LAT had begun to lack. Along with, probably, some money. The "Free Dan Neil" movement was likely right. If you love Dan Neil, set him free. If he goes back to Carolina, well…
I don't know how, but we're going to liberate you from that pay wall. Your adjectives, hyphenations and extended ledes yearn for freedom.
Neil's last LAT column is now online. He travels to Italy and drives the 2010 Ferrari 458 Italia. "The effect on the human body," he writes, "is like biting into your neighborhood electrical substation." And the lede, the lede… pardon my quoting at length, but you won't regret reading:
Snow is a beautiful thing.
Snow wraps a pretty white scarf around the sordid and everyday. It's the stuff of Cascade watersheds, the frosting on Kilimanjaro, the secret ingredient in Telluride daiquiris.
Snow is to be cherished.
Yet it's not snowflakes that I see drifting into Ferrari's brick courtyard on the Via Abetone, the Temple Mount in this, the Jerusalem of Red Cars. Instead, I imagine I see tiny, confetti-like news clippings from Corriere della Sera, each one telling of an American journalist who managed to plunge a Ferrari 458 Italia into a snowy mountain suckhole. If I did that, it would be the biggest weather related-accident since Dallas Raines bought his wardrobe.
I kid you not, young lovers. As I turn the red enamel key in the ignition, and the V-8's devils begin to dance on the drumhead – KeWhe-drummmmmmmm — I am genuinely concerned.
Alas, the timing is what it is. I have a chance to drive Ferrari's newest mid-engine V-8 Berlinetta, a car that's quicker than the legendary Enzo (less than 3.4 seconds to 60 mph), with 72 horsepower more than the mind-frying F430, with a top speed in excess of 202 mph. A car with a wicked, scything aerodynamic shape, a bloody knife like never haunted Lady Macbeth.
And so the table is set: pounding snow, icy roads and a 562-hp, mid-engine reptile on stone-cold tires. An Italian hurt locker.
Via Romenesko this morning, Neil's LAT farewell note is here. "It's been a rough few years here, mainly because of the jackasses in Chicago who own us. To them I say, with as much gusto as I can muster in an email, fuck you. On a happier note, there's not a person in this building I do not like, if not love. The paper has more greatness ahead of it, and I'll be watching from the east coast and rooting you on."
February 12th, 2010 at 11:03 PM
[...] Don't worry, Dan Neil, Nate and I are coming » February 12, 2010 11:00 [...]
March 27th, 2010 at 8:29 PM
[...] As Neil wrote in February of the Ferrari he auctioned, "The 458 Italia is spooky fast without the haunting of mortality." Strange, scary forces. [...]
May 7th, 2010 at 2:45 PM
[...] on Facebook, but here's the video for the rest of you. Friend Nate — a fellow Dan Neil fan, creator of the Waiting for Bruce storyboard and co-creator of our imaginary 2002 comedy about the [...]