I AM STEVE MCQUEEN

"Being an actor is a gas.  Being a movie star is a pain in the ass"--Steve McQueen

Wednesday I finally got to Dr. Hassan's and got my prescription renewed.  Then I went to the Olivia Chow HQ and let Tsering talk me into dropping some more leaflets in the area south of Davisville Avenue.  But then I left the prescription pages there and only today did I get them back and get the new pills!

This evening I saw the documentary I am Steve McQueen.  There was something Peter Pannish about McQueen's persona:  when his motorcycle cleared the barbed wire in The Great Escape, it was almost like he was flying!

I read online about a gay teenager in South Dakota who says his supervisor at Taco John's made him wear a name tag saying "Gaytard." He's now suing the place, with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union.  This is about more than GLBT rights:  it's about the right of workers not to be bullied! (This is why we need labor unions.) I say that everyone should show him support by wearing a "Gaytard" label themselves, even--and especially--us straight people.  One of the comments I wrote was "Thank you, Anita Bryant."

I noticed online Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 best singles of 1984. (They claimed, dubiously, that this was the top year for pop music.) I resolved years ago not to let the prostitute of the counterculture get to me, but it's happened again!  This list included several singles from 1983 (Elton John's "I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues") and 1985 (Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round")!  This is one magazine with no excuse for sloppiness about pop music history.

The problem here is that no year has produced enough outstanding singles for a "top 100" list.  The alternatives were a list that was actually composed of 100 1984 singles, but some of the choices would have been transparently dubious; a list of the top 50 singles of 1984, which would make sense to me, but they evidently decided that the top 100 has a greater obvious appeal than the top 50; or a list of the top 100 singles of the mid-1980s, but again that wasn't as obvious as a single year.  This is what happens when a once-great magazine gets dumbed down.

(In addition, it displayed what Beatrice would call some "interesting" judgement.  Steve Perry's "Oh, Sherry" has a nice intro and not much else, while Genesis' "That's All" is less deserving of mention then the same group's "Mama" and "Illegal Alien.")