Posts tagged: Photography
Thelonious Monk. “I don’t know what other people are doing - I just know about me.”
Steve McQueen. Let’s face it, the guy’s nickname was “The King of Cool”. You will never be Steve McQueen.
But lets put aside his acting for a little bit. Steve McQueen grew up committing acts of petty crime whilst involved in various gangs. He was abandoned by his father, who was a stunt pilot for a circus, when he was just six months old. McQueen eventually ended up in a juvenile reform program in Chino, California. His childhood wasn’t pretty.
In reform school, he started to mature, and was elected to a leadership position on a council within the school. After his stint in reform school, he went tackled various jobs such as a janitor in a brothel, an oil rigger, a trinket salesman in a carnival, and a lumberjack.
Then he joined the military where he saved 5 men from a sinking tank, and guarded then President Harry Truman’s yacht. Then he moved to New York and started racing motorcycles. And winning. No bullshit.
But why am I telling you all this? What does his background have to do with anything and why does it make him cool?
Well, if you’ll shut up and listen, I’m about to get to that part.
After catching the acting bug, McQueens first breakout role before eventually going on to become the highest paid actor of his time was in a movie called Never So Few alonside Frank Sinatra. McQueen ended up taking home most of the critical praise from the movie and I quote from his biography, “McQueen’s character, Bill Ringa, was never more comfortable than when driving at high speed—in this case at the wheel of a jeep—or handling a switchblade or a tommy-gun.”
Switchblades? High speeds? Tommy guns? These things ring any bells with McQueen’s background? The point I’m trying to make is, if you’re willing to set aside all the Hollywood beauty pageant bullshit for a moment, maybe the reason McQueen became such a sought after character was because he was able to, thanks to his own real-life experience, pull off incredibly genuine performances.
And that’s big when it comes to cool. Being genuine. Not faking it. This is why you’ll never see George Clooney on here. If you do a little research, you’ll find that George Clooney’s early life is pretty vanilla when you compare it to McQueens. Son of a beauty pageant queen and an anchorman/game show host, George Clooney was born into show business. Born to fake it. Hell. Even I’ll admit it, George Clooney looks good in a lot of movies, and he manages to pull off that smoothness and ease which seem to be characteristic of ‘cool’.
But he ain’t no Steve McQueen. He ain’t cool.
Cary Grant. Ever seen North by Northwest? No? What’s wrong with you?
I didn’t include him here because he was a good actor, or because he was handsome, had a nice voice, and knew how to pose for a picture.
The fact that Alfred Hitchcock was once quoted as saying that Grant was “the only actor I ever loved in my whole life” is awesome, but still not what I chose to post this.
Little known fact (courtesy of wikipedia): Grant was the first actor to “go independent” by not renewing his studio contract, effectively leaving the studio system, which almost completely controlled what an actor could or could not do. In this way, Grant was able to control every aspect of his career, at the risk of not working because no particular studio had an interest in his career long term. He decided which movies he was going to appear in, he often had personal choice of the directors and his co-stars and at times even negotiated a share of the gross, something uncommon at the time.
Cary Grant wasn’t just a pioneer, but he was a pioneer in the field of ‘My way or the highway’, and that’s what makes him Cool in my book.
Bill Evans. ‘Nuff said.
No wait. I’ll elaborate. Here’s a man who’s been titled as the most influential jazz pianist of the post-World War II era.
There’s a word you’ll probably find in common with a lot of the cool people or things I end up blogging about, ‘influential’. It’s not as if I’m saying you have to change the world in some way or the other if you want to be cool. There are plenty of people who are wicked cool flying under the radar, and for that exact reason I can’t exactly list out examples you would recognize, but back to my point.
It’s not that you have to be influential, it’s that by virtue of being influential, you are not simply one of the mindless sheeple regurgitating whatever else is out there, i.e. current mainstream pop music artists. So it’s not so much being influential, but it isn’t exactly being devoid of influence either. After all, Bill Evans toured and learned from the best, such as Billie Holiday and Miles Davis. But the important thing is that he took those influences and turned them into his own unique work, which then went on to become ‘the next step’ in the the evolution of jazz.
‘Nuff said.
