A busy day. Went to a movie memorabilia show and hung around with my fellow film buffs and DVD collectors. Bought a couple of videos and magazines and generally had a pleasant afternoon. But it just goes by so quickly, darn it! I was looking forward to the show all week just like a kid waiting for Christmas and then, bam, it's over. These shows are a fun escape from my workaday stresses. I need them but they're not as frequent as they used to be. I guess the older we get, the more we need to indulge our passions to deal with all the other un-fun stuff.

There's a magazine I read called Scary Monsters that, despite the juvenile sounding title, is actually aimed in good part at baby boomers who first fell in love with horror and monster flicks back in the 50s and 60s. The magazine also puts out a yearbook called Monster Memories which is filled with reader-written articles in which fans discuss seeing these films back in the day. There are articles about collecting short 8mm versions of old Universal monster flicks, or pictorials of vintage advertisements for drive-in movies and spook shows, or just reminiscences about how people first got interested in Karloff, Lugosi, Hammer Films, and so forth. The writing varies in quality but it's a fun and unpretentious magazine that brings stimulates a lot of nostalgia in me for the less hi-tech days of moviegoing when we were kids and teenagers...when it didn't matter if the monsters looked like papier mache, as long as curvy B-movie beauties like Beverly Garland were fighting them off.

I remember when I was a college student that I had a disagreement with my father about the whole subject of nostalgia. He had enjoyed the movie Summer of '42, which I reviewed negatively for my college paper (I was the film critic for a spell). My father's feelings seemed hurt that I didn't understand why he enjoyed this (to me) schmaltzy movie, which depicted characters who were exactly the same age as he was in 1942. I just didn't get nostalgia then, imbued as I was with the tunnel vision of youth and arrogant dreams of my own potential artistic greatness. In fact, my father died before I ever really understood the value of nostalgia, so I never got to tell him that now I understand, and I'm sorry I was such a wiseass about the whole thing.

Anyway, if you'd like to learn more about Scary Monsters and Monster Memories, here's a link to their site.

ScaryMonsters

A grindhouse was a theater, generally in the dumpier sections of town, where films were shown continuously hour after hour. The films were usually low budget, violent, and sexy, and presented usually double or even triple bills.

I'm looking forward to the new movie Grindhouse by Quentin Tarentino and Robert Rodriguez, because like many a New York cinema buff, I have fond memories of the fun times watching exploitation movies on the old 42nd Street back in the 70s and early 80s. Part of the mission of Grindhouse is to recapture the non-stop excitement of the double feature programs by having two complete films packed into a three hour running time. I hope Grindhouse is fun enough to get the audiences hootin' and hollerin' like they did on the old Deuce when the action on-screen got outrageous. I guess Rose McGowan with a machine gun for a leg, in Rodriguez's half of the film, qualifies as outrageous; although I believe Quentin Tarentino's half happily lets us see both of her pins in toto. That makes sense; to judge by his camera's past worship of Uma Thurman's and Bridget Fonda's and Salma Hayek's tootsies in various films, Tarentino comes across like a foot fetishist, and certainly wouldn't let one of Rose's lovely feet go to waste!

The old 42nd Street theaters were dilapidated, but tickets were cheap. It was important not to sit in front of the balconies, but underneath them, as the audience upstairs used to throw their lit cigarettes down to the orchestra seats. You'd see these little red glowing missiles descending. I don't remember anybody yelling up, though; maybe the point was to throw the butts down but not hit anybody. Maybe it was a game of skill.

Parents would take their children into the goriest horror films on 42nd Street. Nobody questioned that. I remember sitting through some psycho killer epic and glancing down the row to see two little kids staring up at the carnage on the screen while eating the ice cream their mother had just given them.

The funniest experience I ever had on the Deuce was a showing of 1972's The Thing with Two Heads. Ray Milland played a bigoted scientist whose head is grafted onto the body of a black guy, played by Rosey Grier. I can't remember now exactly what the audience said back to the screen, but it was hilarious. Too bad I didn't have a tape recorder with me. Unfortunately, the theater also smelled like cat piss. It was the Anco, one of the grungiest.

I think what people are really nostalgic for is not so much the scuzzy downtown theaters and the occasionally creepy clientele, but for the days when people didn't take movies so damn seriously...when directors cranked out genre flicks for a paycheck and to meet hot chicks, when most actors were primarily people who had a fun job instead of vaunted icons of a nasty and narcissistic celebrity culture, and when films of all stripes, no matter how different, weren't lumped into the same demeaning weekly race to the top of a financial chart.

With the financial crunch I'm in, I have to branch out in new directions for extra income. Alas, I hate new directions...give me a nice, comfy status quo.

Anyway, I've spent the last few days mulling over some ideas for book projects, making notes and even writing a couple of sample chapters. However, I consider book writing a "pie in the sky" proposition, and no reliable source of income. As I've noted here before, although I am a freelance worker, I do not make my income primarily from writing although writing comes into it. Anyway, some of my friends have recently gotten agents for their projects, and so maybe it's not so outlandish after all to attempt this.

I sometimes think of doing a non-fiction book, perhaps along the lines of what I've written on this blog. But I've already written the blog...and I don't like to write things twice. And why would people want to pay for something that they can get for free?

Writing fiction is an even bigger long shot than non-fiction. On the other hand...writing fiction is fun, even when it doesn't sell. I've written novels that I didn't sell, and I enjoyed every minute of the process.

A friend was urging me to try to write a mystery, but although I like to read mysteries and psychological thrillers, I've always had a hard time writing that kind of material myself; never had success at it, and didn't even particularly enjoy writing it.

My mind simply is not too devious, and I feel you need a richly devious turn of mind to write thrillers in today's market. Not only that, you practically have to be a polymath with the ability to absorb many different disciplines to create an authentic-sounding fictional world for a thriller. In the old days, if you could describe a blonde in a tight skirt with a .45 in her mitt, twenty-five percent of your job was done; nowadays, at least judging from some of the recent novels I've read, you need to know everything from forensics to computers to finance to sociology to the history of religion to the twists and turns of international relations...whew...

So here I am, like a million other dreamers in New York, contemplating writing a novel yet again. It would be my fourth; I've written three over the last twenty years that were never published.

One of my favorite novelists is Georges Simenon, the French master of mystery and psychological suspense. He wrote his rather short novels in about eight days each. Maybe if I try that approach, I could limit the amount of time I waste if the thing turns out badly...

Really, when you think about it, why should it take people so long to write books? Jim Thompson, one of the greatest noir novelists, cranked his out in a month each, I believe...and they've more than stood the test of time.

Have you ever read A Hell of a Woman? That's the book that opened up a whole world of noir pulp to me. A crazy, crazy novel. Long after I've forgotten the plot, I remember the feeling of craziness it induced. Or check out Thompson's The Getaway. A taut heist novel, until it becomes a completely insane surreal whack-job in the last chapters.

Actually, Simenon's eight days is long compared to something that a friend of mine did back in the 70s. He wrote a porn novel in 24 hours. True, it was larded with sex, but it did have a plot and good atmosphere in the jazz dives of New York. Then again, my friend was a rather intense character, so he could pull off the 24 hour stint...

Balzac wrote almost a hundred serious literary novels in twenty-one years, his Human Comedy. That's a lot in a small space of time. Then again, he died at 51 with his insides rotted out by the black coffee that kept him going...

I've said it here before, and I'll repeat myself: if you can get a copy of Stefan Zweig's old biography of Balzac, you are in for a treat. It is one of the best books I ever read. Poor Balzac...the ending is so sad you cry for pages. But what a life he lived while he lived it!

He always wanted to be a playwright as well as a novelist. He got a contract to write a play, and waited until a few days before the opening to gather his friends together. "You write Act One," he said to one buddy, "you write Act Two, and I'll write Act Three..."

He didn't take it as seriously as his novels, obviously. Or maybe he just took the gig to pay the bills. The man had DEBTS.

Anyway, I write on this blog about ten hours a week. It's gotten me in top shape for cranking on another project. I just have to figure out what it is.

I watched a pretty weak 1953 Biblical drama last night called Sins of Jezebel. It was on another double-feature DVD from VCI Entertainment, under the heading of "Movie Bad Girls." It starred Paulette Goddard as the evil queen who turned King Ahab into an idolator and generally brought bad things upon ancient Israel. Goddard, who starred with Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Bob Hope, and Charlie Chaplin in her heyday of the 30s and 40s, was clearly on the downslide in her career when she made this very cheesy film. At 43, she hadn't aged well, making her seem silly in the role of irresistible temptress; and her voice had started to sound a little raspy, more like that of a chain-smoking saleswoman in a chic New York department store than the consort of a Middle Eastern monarch. (Goddard was, in fact, born on Long Island.) It was kind of sad to see her in this flick, but they did pay her $20,000 to play the part, which adjusted for inflation comes to well more than $100,000 in today's dollars; so that was a nice payday for her. According to the DVD's notes, she left twenty million dollars in her will to New York University, where they named a freshman residence hall after her; so she obviously knew how to save her dough. You might say that the sins of a pagan queen now indirectly contribute to the comforts of NYU students.

Goddard might not have been convincing as Jezebel, but in her personal life she was involved with some very talented men: besides being with Chaplin for many years, she was also married to the actor Burgess Meredith for awhile (he gained his widest fame in his later years playing Rocky's trainer in the Stallone films). She also married the author Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front. So she must have been pretty alluring in private. She was in the Ziegfeld Follies in her youth, and was a finalist for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind.

One apocryphal story I heard about her was that she got a role in a Cecil B. DeMille film partly by putting her pretty bare feet on the director's desk during an interview. DeMille was known for having a foot fetish, and the rumor is that somebody supposedly told Goddard that showing her feet was a way to get on his "good" side. Indeed, only six years before Sins of Jezebel, she starred with Gary Cooper in DeMille's 1947 epic Unconquered, and in 1942 she was in DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind.

Although Sins of Jezebel isn't a good movie, some of the supplemental material included on the DVD is interesting, like the pressbooks promoting the film. The exhibitors of the time were encouraged to emphasize the "bad woman" angle to lure in the customers. Well, it certainly worked with Sir Cranky!

The second feature on the disc is Queen of the Amazons from the late 40s, about a girl looking for her lost fiance in the jungle. She finds him, but he's fallen in love with a white goddess who rules a tribe deep in the interior of Africa. That always happens...I could only watch this flimsy epic in bits and pieces...but Patricia Morison stars. She never became a movie star, but several years later became a big hit on Broadway in Kiss Me, Kate. Actually, although the movie isn't good, she makes the most of her role, not wasting the opportunity to practice her craft in a scene where the Amazon Queen explains how she won't give up Miss Morison's fiance. Miss Morison says almost nothing, but her concentration and expressions show that she wasn't looking down on her role in this half-baked film, and was intent upon doing a good job.

Is Mackenzie Dawson the New York Post's go-to gal on the subject of gams? Previously she wrote an article about pantyhose that inspired some musings on my part (see the link below), and in today's paper she has an article cleverly called "Thigh Anxiety" about women facing the dilemma of whether or not to wear today's fashionable minidresses.

The article was accompanied by photographs of a lovely model who definitely should! Her stems shine! Although I much prefer her in platform heels than t-strap sandals. For some reason, I find t-strap shoes very unsexy on women. I have no idea why. Perhaps I should go to a seance and try to conjure up Herr Doktor Wilhelm Stekel, the late expert on sexual quirks. Perhaps he could help me find the reason for my t-strap aversion.

Anyway...

Because I am trying to save money by not going to stripclubs as often, I am in favor of more minidresses more of the time on more of the women in Manhattan simply because it will keep me on the streets enjoying the scenery, which is cheaper than going into a tittie bar and spending nine or ten dollars on a beer just from the git-go!

I also think it would be nice if strippers would discard the often-tacky gowns and shortie outfits and come onstage in pretty street clothes, which they could peel out of! I positively know that other customers would enjoy this. A stripper dressed like the model in the "Thigh Anxiety" article, coming onstage in black peep-toe pumps and a patterned minidress, would look great as she walked around fully attired before disrobing!

Anticipation is fifty percent of satisfaction!

Another thing I like about minidresses on women, especially the long-sleeved patterned one on p. 43 of the article, is that if they have high collars they combine a demure quality with the revelation of the thighs! It's like you see purity and sauciness simultaneously. Irresistible!

So, when I'm standing out this spring and summer around Union Square or Columbus Circle, enjoying a coffee and taking in the sights, I hope to see many minidresses on the merry minxes of Manhattan!

HowWomenCrossdressByNotWearingPantyhose