Steve McQueen

I was washing the car the other day and my next door neighbor, the former fighter pilot, came over to reminisce about the muscle cars he's owned over the years. The topic brought to mind a fast bike I once owned. Not a racing bicycle, tho I've owned some, but the Triumph Bonneville I had through most of my college years.

I'd bought it from the boyfriend of my cousin Jo, my older and urbanely slender cousin Jo who was overfond of martinis. He'd bought it new and found it inconvenient to keep it in Manhattan. I myself had no storage problems.

I thought about the bike today on seeing this photo in a favorite microblog.

It shows Steve McQueen on the set of The Great Escape. He's not riding a Bonneville but a similar model, the TR6 Trophy. (I don't think anyone minded that the Trophy didn't look much like the German bikes of the '30s and '40s.)

This Bonneville is just like the one I tore around on.


McQueen was a bike racer, bike builder, and collector of old bikes. In a photo essay which Popular Science did on him in 1966 he said the Bonneville was production bike of its time for high speed and manoeuverability. In 1962 a Bonneville set a land speed record of 224.57mph. This photo, from that shoot, shows him on the one he owned.


This shot shows him on a bike he'd hybridized himself. It's a Rickman-Metisse with a BSA fork-crown, Ceriani forks, and many customizations.



The article gives a helpful table comparing the bikes in the test.


Here are some stills from the movie.

One of the movie's most memorable scenes shows this trick. For insurance reasons the film studio forbid McQueen to do it himself. Instead it was performed by his friend the stuntman Bud Ekins.


The wikipedia article on McQueen says "According to the commentary track on The Great Escape DVD, it was difficult to find riders as skilled as McQueen. At one point, due to clever editing, McQueen is seen in a German uniform chasing himself on another bike."

{These shots come from IMDB}

McQueen's biography makes interesting reading. He got himself into and out of trouble while struggling to grow up under trying circumstances. As a kid he was a thief and gang member who took punishment again and again for his major aversion to following anyone's rules. Bounced from household to household by his turbulent and troubled family, he survived stints in reform school, the merchant marine, and the US Marine Corps, ending up a bonafide and decorated hero for saving the lives of other Marines by pulling them from a tank that was sinking into the Arctic Ocean. Pretty much fearless and highly skilled in racing cars and motorcycles, he subsequently supported himself partly by competing in weekend motorcycle races and was able to buy his first motorcycle with his winnings.

This wikipedia photo is a mugshot taken following a DWI arrest in Anchorage, Alaska, 1972.


For more on Bonnevilles, see:

Significant Motorcycles in Triumph History

Triumph Bonneville by Soren Winslow

Triumph Bonneville wikipedia article

----

{Note: I've reproduced photos on this page under fair use provisions of US copyright law. Let me know if you'd like me to remove any shots that belong to you.}

Kanzi, Cheeta, & J. Fred Muggs

I just closed the book on Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.  It's good of its kind: a popsci accumulation of evidence, both strong and weak, for very early discovery of cooked meals in humanoid evolution.   The best of this quick read lies in its observations of practices among modern-day hunter-gatherers and among our near-relative ape species.  My favorite is the one about Kanzi, a bonobo chimp who's been brought up at a research center in Georgia State University. 

Wrangham says that it's highly likely our ape-like ancestors stumbled upon ways to prepare food for easy digestibility; it's hard otherwise to explain their evolution into the small-toothed, upstanding, large-brained creatures we became.  He says scientists have wrongly assumed that food preparation came along much later in the evolutionary timeline, after more human-like people came to be. As part of his argument he gives evidence that cooking was a much more significant breakthrough than other types of food preparation (such as pounding meat with a stone to tenderize it or drying it for preservation).  

Here's Wrangham's brief mention of Kanzi:

Almost all the methods hunter-gatherers use to improve the nutritional value of plant foods involve fire, because heat is needed to gelatinize starch. Until fire was controlled,  habilines [an early humanoid species] would have been stuck with eating raw plant foods whose caloric value could not be much improved by cold processing.

The breakthrough could have been simple, because it did not require that fire be made from scratch. If fire could be captured, the tending would have been relatively easy. Among hunter-gatherers, children as young as two years old make their own fires by taking sticks from their mothers' fires. Even chimpanzees and bonobos can tend fires well. The bonobo Kanzi is famous for his ability to communicate with psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh using symbols. During an outing in the woods, Kanzi once touched the symbols for "marshmallow" and "fire:' He was given matches and marshmallows, and he proceeded to snap twigs for a fire, light them with matches, and toast the marshmallows. By the time of habilines, brain size had roughly doubled compared with the relative brain size of great apes. It is very likely that habilines were mentally capable of keeping a fire alive.
 --  p. 190, emphasis added

One of the nice things about this anecdote is its use of a scientific observation in a way that's opposite to the norm.  Where Wrangham tells us that our humanoid ancestors must have been at least as bright as the apes with which they associated, the norm has been to show that our evolutionary development hasn't taken us as far from the apes as we've thought.  I think the inference we've been expected to draw from the ethnographic studies of recent decades is that humankind has been absurdly arrogant in assuming dominion over the dumb beasts of God's creation because, they say, many of these beasts — chimps and other apes, dolphins, whales, etc. — are hardly dumb.

Wrangham reminds us that this romantic view of fellow creatures can easily be taken too far. 

His corrective brings to mind the many TV chimps of my youth.  Cute, human-like chimps were a staple in popular entertainment beginning with these TV shows of the 1950s.   There was, for example, J. Fred Muggs on the Today Show, beginning in 1953 and many more to follow.  I think the fad began with the appearance of Cheeta in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and '40s (who's been in the news lately). 

{J. Fred Muggs with Dave Garroway on the Today Show; source: sfgate}

{Buster Crabbe and Cheeta from one of the earliest Tarzan films in which Cheeta appeared, Tarzan the Fearless (1933); source: imdb }

{Maureen O'Sullivan, Johnny Weissmuller, Cheeta from Tarzan Escapes (1936); source: imdb}

{Cheeta with Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O'Sullivan, and Johnny Sheffield (I think), from Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939); source: fileeo }

{Cheeta, Johnny Weismuller, Maureen O'Sullivan in Tarzan Escapes  (1945); source: smh.com.au}

I suppose, since I've shown so much of Cheeta (and O'Sullivan's legs), I should include Bonzo as well:


Here are some Kanzi links:

A TED talk by Kanzi's trainer:
Susan Savage-Rumbaugh on apes

A lecture by Prof. Jeffrey Elman at UCSD:


Speaking Bonobo in Smithsonian mag

Kanzi: Conversation with an Ape in Cricket mag

Speaking Bonobo - The Language of 'Kanzi' on a blog

swell party

I like to wear my tux New Year's Eve & I'm donning it tonight for a wedding reception that's also a new year's party.



At the end of the piece, Satch says, "Now we're get'n warm."

Here's a bit of Anthony Lane's piece on Grace Kelly in the New Yorker:

It is customary to denigrate “High Society” by comparing it with its parent, “The Philadelphia Story,” but I knew the child first, when I was a child, too, and nothing can undo the movies that we are led to in our youth, or the skein of impressions that they leave. I remember my mother explaining to me, drawing on who knows what store of apocrypha, that Prince Rainier had watched the scene of his wife-to-be, droopy with drink, being lugged through the moonlight in Sinatra’s arms, both of them in towelling robes, and that His Serene Highness had bridled at the outrage and declared that her works be outlawed, henceforth and on pain of death, within the bounds of his kingdom. This struck me as precisely how a jealous monarch should behave, and the twin sense of Kelly as both sovereign and subversive was planted in my brain. I was told how remarkable it was that Kelly had deigned to sing, and therefore how natural it was that her yacht-borne duet with Crosby, “True Love,” should have sold a million copies on record. She fondles the end of his squeezebox as they harmonize, but that, I suspect, went over my head, as did their bizarre exchange beside the swimming pool:

“Gee, I didn’t know that you wanted a husband who would be kind of a high priest to a virgin goddess.”
“Oh, stop using those foul words.”

Best of all, my mother pointed out that when Crosby sang “I Love You, Samantha” he did everything—folded his handkerchief, tied his bow tie, wound his wristwatch, filled his cigarette case, and donned his tuxedo, crooning all the while—without a cut. I had never heard of a cut before, or a take. (And, if there is any actor alive today who could reach that extreme pitch of relaxation, I’ve yet to see him.) When the cut finally comes, it is to Kelly, listening at the window of her bedroom. She walks away, overwhelmed; we follow her, then pause, and pull politely back, as she turns and stands there, sheathed in her Oriental robe of yellow-gold. Downstairs, Louis Armstrong laughs and says, “Now we’re gettin’ warm.”
-- Two sides of Grace Kelly

High Society intro part 1

High Society intro part 2

High Society - Well, Did You Evah?

What a Swell Party this is

Who Wants to be a Millionaire

Now You Has Jazz

True Love

Original Trailer 1956

You're Sensational