The vid I’ve just shared is more of a short composition than a song. It’s a contemplative mood piece that includes clips by actor, anti-hero and racing aficionado Steve McQueen.
I have a new phone and it has inspired me to start fiddling further with BeatLab. There’s a free but with ads version of the music production site. I haven’t gotten that flying car I was promised, but the future is here and present in many other ways. Who would have thought I could carry a complete music studio and even film company in my hand.
In that respect, though the news cycle typically runs from grim to horrifying nowadays, we are living a utopia. Creation has never been cheaper.
It’s been about 10 years since I spent a year or two making music in between news writing assignments at a local newspaper. And so, it sounds clumsy even to my ears. But it’s something, whole, complete. There is a mood.
And, it is, of course, an homage. I have a dude side to me, hard to explain. I love a lot of dudes, not in that way, but their art, their culture. I get dude culture.
I don’t claim to know my way around a transmission. I plead girl when it comes to taking out dead mice my cat has caught and when the car “made a weird sound and then shut off.” My husband is good with cars, so you can see why I’d leave it to him.
I do, however, love muscle cars. I love Steve McQueen. I read the book “Papillon” probably a dozen times as a teenager. Morrissey is my patron saint. James Dean is in the pantheon of people I admire.
I’m the kind of woman who got into Sylvia Plath and grasped first-hand the bell jar. But when it comes to who I want to write like, It’s Jack Kerouak.
I believe that James Dean is an actor of such importance that his very existence, even today, props up an escape hatch in the Matrix.
I can quote The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I dig Charlton Heston to the point that I just last night watched “Soylent Green.” (Read the Epstein files, or go back to Wikileaks. Turns out it’s a documeentary.)
So here’s to Steve McQueen, who, handsome devil, appeals to both the woman and the dude in me. He was fast and slow, deeply contemplative and yet, always and ever, ready to go fast on anything with wheels.
And now I’ll light up my long cigarette and share a true Hollywood story about Steve McQueen, one I’ve read from many a source.
So Steve McQueen had an unusual stipulation when he starred in a movie. He always asked, as a perk, for large quantities of thins like shaving razors and socks and other toiletries. Turns out, he donated them to the same boys home he lived in as a time when he was a teen, Boys Republic. Back then, they called it a reform school. Now it’s known as a “treatment center for troubled youngsters.”
Whatever you call it, it takes a real hero to remember his roots, especially when those roots were painful.
–Sarah Torribio
See more songs of the day curated by Sarah Torribio HERE
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