Steve McQueen: You Gotta Move

You may be high

You may be low

You may be rich, child

You may be poor

But when the Lord gets ready

You've gotta move- Fred McDowell & Rev. Gary Davis

McQueen at home

Seems there’s an inherent romance to moving…just being in motion…You might be On the Road...or getting Kicks on Route 66. And there goes The Wanderer and exactly one million songs and books about that ribbon o’ highway.

Because... to move is to quest, and to quest is to discover... yourself… eventually, or the Big Man, or whoever is going to drag you legs jangling over the final finish line.

Cool is about failed romance, about the impossibility but yearning for an unbreakable trust, for love, for eternity, for that lasting embrace that lasts for as long as forever is, and you don’t get cooler than Steve McQueen — for he was the ultimate moving machine, a man

Go Baby Go

head back and handsome, passing the galloping Knights of Old, switching a horse for motorcycle, a holy grail for a moto-cross trophy. McQueen was a loner in the most hallowed sense of the word, sensing at a young age the inverse relationship between distance and love.

 Maybe he was racing from a rough childhood of alcoholic/absent parents and reformatory school. (It was said he had been raped while in school and later worked as a prostitute). There was drive, but there was baggage... Could be he never hold the mirror to his dyslexia? What about the wife beating? The drugs? The serial adultery? Nobody ever asked him because you know he wouldn't have an answer — for anything. Answers weren't his thing. Nor explanations. 

Just being cool

When asked about film acting, he replied the ‘bread’ was pretty good. That’s cool. Don't go too deep because the deeper you go the darker it is — and desperate ghosts wait in the shadows, so anxious to drag down the blue-eyed boy.

Better to hunker in a ’68 Shelby Mustang careening through the zigzag streets of San Francisco. Or to snatch up a beautiful Faye Dunaway from a pointless chess match and tell her ‘let's play something else’. Because in the end, it’s all a game. He would repeat that more than once. It's all a game.

Not even sweating in the sauna

The faster you go, the less you belong to earth, to all this, because speed always lifts you up and doesn’t have to explain anything to anyone ever again. You don’t need the job and the wife and the house because they have no role in the pounding sex thud of torque and raining chain sparks as you skid off Coastal Highway # 1 by Big Sur, up and over the haphazard cliff and moving now thru sweet wet clouds with a high-pitch velocity unknown by anyone to that day.

In November 1980, the King of Cool was gunning a Husqvarna 400 Cross full bore when he jumped The Gates... and a thousand angels, taken by surprise, twirled like feathers in his winding wake.

Federico Fellini: Life is a party. Let’s live it together.

A black & white study of color

Someone once said of Charles Dickens that with all his plot contrivances, his silly character names, his terrible coincidences and reliance on low-end melodrama, he should be bad. Really bad. But he’s great. And he’s great because through it all his over abounding love for life shines through like a summer sun.

Love for life. Love of life. When you consider Federico Fellini, consider love and life. It will get you through the often meandering story structures, the over-reliance on the grotesque, and the unsatisfying conclusions.

You see the colors, the emotions swirling up like kite tails, unpredictable and playful. You see the people, who often seem to belong to a kind of theatrical troupe, argumentative but rarely mean, cheerful but foolish, wounded but dancing into tomorrow.

Fellini takes off the makeup

As Guido says — his greatest character in his greatest film — “What is this flash of joy that's giving me new life? … I feel I've been set free. Everything looks good to me, it has a sense, it's true. How I wish I could explain, but I can't... I'm not afraid to tell the truth now…what I'm seeking... Life is a party, let's live it together. I can't say anything else, to you or others. Take me as I am, if you can... it's the only way we can try to find each other.”

‘Felliniesque’. Few people have had their surname metamorphosed into an adjective, but how else to define this indefinable parade of glistening souls.

“Life is a party. Let’s live it together.” Federico, we try, but unlike you, few of us dream in color.