The stagehands strike is over on Broadway and the crowds have returned to midtown Manhattan, where I live. A little discombobulating, the comeback of the throngs. I was enjoying the quietude, even though I knew it was hurting business for restaurants and actors and souvenir shops. I wonder how many other denizens of my neighborhood secretly savored the unexpected peacefulness of the barren streets of a temporarily shuttered and picketed Broadway?

Now that the hordes are back, I noted tonight how so many people in New York walk as if you're supposed to get out of their way. Maybe it's because I've retained my Midwestern belief in compromise, but when I walk along a crowded sidewalk I'm always ready to shift in concert with an approaching person, if necessary. But I get the feeling many people expect the waves to part for them. Is this because maybe they sense subliminally that I will move aside, and that they really don't have to alter their course? Still, it annoys me. Makes me feel submissive to them, which I don't like. Feeling submissive is something I only enjoy in erotic fantasy with a playfully aggressive female, but not in the real world. I hate to feel submissive to anything or anyone in the real world. At my core, I am very anti-authoritarian and rebellious. Other people got this out of their system in their hippie twenties--I never did. I was never a hippie, anyway. Maybe it's extremely arrogant of me, but I often look at people and ponder, "What makes you think you're better than I am, you stupid fuck?"

Maybe it's a good thing I'm not physically imposing, because I might regularly want to beat the shit out of people who cross me. On the other hand, maybe if I was physically imposing, I would know that I very well COULD beat the shit out of people who crossed me, and I wouldn't feel intimidated and resentful of them.

But, angry as I am, I position myself as a man of peace.

Ah, maybe I'm missing the feminine touch in my life! My soul is hardening because of the lack of pretty women sitting on my lap. I went out tonight with the express purpose of giving myself a little entertainment at the strip joint, but I decided to have dinner instead. And dinner seemed to have quelled my hungers--gustatory, existential, and otherwise. I started thinking about spending forty dollars to have some girl who couldn't give a shit about me writhing on my lap for six minutes, and I thought, "Wouldn't I rather spend that forty on volume two of the collected works of Italian filmaestro Mario Bava?"

It all boils down to cold, hard cash. If I didn't worry about the money, I would go for the dance. As it is, I didn't go for the Bava boxed set of DVDs either, but just walked home through the windy, cold night.

Last weekend I finally caught up with a movie I'd read about here and there over the years called The Killing Kind, starring Ann Sothern, John Savage, Sue Bernard, Luana Anders, and Ruth Roman. I found it on a low-priced DVD compilation of psycho-thrillers, and it's a mark of the film's riveting and disturbing power that despite the low-grade digital transfer, this 1973 film really kept me watching. Then, when I opened the New York Times on Tuesday 11/27 to read Dave Kehr's always interesting DVD review column, I discovered that Dark Sky Films has just released a brand new edition of this film on disc, so I'm going to have to get that one to check it out in a better condition than the DVD I watched.

The Killing Kind is about Terry (John Savage), a shy young guy who reluctantly participates in a beachside gang rape with his aggressively moronic pals, and gets sent to prison for two years. When he gets out he goes home to his mother Thelma (Ann Sothern), an ex-dancer and model (now pudgy and fiftyish in her housedresses) who manages a boarding house populated mostly by dotty old ladies, but also by an aspiring model (Cindy Williams). It quickly becomes clear that not only is Thelma overly doting on her son ("You want some chocolate milk?" she keeps offering) but her interest in him borders on the voyeuristic and incestuous. She loves to take pictures of him, even surprising him in the shower with her camera. Terry, meanwhile, although passive on the outside (strumming a guitar constantly, blankly staring out into space), is actually a proverbial seething cauldron of twisted rage, and he takes vengeance for his incarceration (and who knows what else in jail) on the glib and floozy-like lawyer (Ruth Roman) who couldn't keep him out of prison, the raped girl (Sue Bernard) whose testimony sent him there, and even on the aspiring model (Williams) when she dares to question not only his manhood, but his very sanity. Even Terry's next door neighbor, a frustrated spinster-type (Luana Anders) feels his fury when she attempts to seduce him by the outdoor pool next to the boarding house.

Yes, this is one creepy movie. Ann Sothern is terrific in her role, by turns poignant, pathetic, and perverted as she brings the sickly possessive Thelma to life. John Savage is scary as hell with his brooding silence and demented smile. The boarding house is an American Gothic special, full of cats and, in one scene, even a rat that is utilized to full disgusting effect. The ending is shocking but seems inevitable, as all the neurotic/psychotic passions between mother and son, and son and the world he encounters, explode in a final murder and grim release from life's burden of madness.

What adds poignancy to the movie is seeing 40s and 50s movie goddesses like Ann Sothern and Ruth Roman in the roles of these particularly unsavory middle-aged women, their beauty decayed into flab and wrinkles and harshly dyed coiffures, their once-glistening pinup gloss long gone, with their characters' psyches wreaking havoc not just on others, but ultimately on themselves.

Trivia bonus: I've read that Ann Sothern's gorgeous 1940s eyes inspired the work of pinup artist Bill Ward, whose cartoons of dark-eyed leggy temptresses are currently on view in beautiful books published by Taschen and Fantagraphics.

But back to the movie: it was so creepy I had to turn it off in the middle and resume watching it the next night. Although not especially bloody, its psychological violence was bluntly delivered, and this is a film that belongs on the shelf next to similar classics like Hitchcock's Psycho.

So check it out if this is your cup of grue. Here's a link to Dark Sky Films for more info on The Killing Kind. I don't work for this company or anything, I'm just passing along the word to lovers of fascinating films!

DarkSkyFilms

After I wrote my last grumpy post on Wednesday bemoaning the onrush of the holiday season, I decided to get my mind off it by attending to an ever-present problem in my life: the clutter of books and magazines in my studio apartment. I bought an interesting device at Staples, the office supply store: a kind of collapsible cart with a large box. When you open it up, you can wheel around seventy pounds of stuff, but when you collapse it, you can carry it like a briefcase. So I filled it with film buff magazines and took a walk over to my storage space to put them away. Once there, I filled cardboard boxes with the stuff. It made a teeny dent in the clutter, not visible perhaps to the uninformed eye, but noticeable to me.

On Thanksgiving I walked around the fringes of the Macy's parade, which passes only a couple of blocks away from where I live, and snapped some photos of Shrek and other giant balloons. And although I was alone on Thursday, by choice, I didn't deny myself a nice turkey dinner. I went to a coffee shop I've been patronizing for twenty years, where they had a very nice feast for twenty bucks. I brought along a paperback novel from 1954 entitled So Wicked My Love, written by someone whose work I'd never been able to get into before, Bruno Fischer. I started reading it over my salad, turkey and stuffing, potatoes and corn, white wine, and coffee and cherry pie.

The book turned out to be a spellbinder, and I finished it last night. It tells the story of a guy in Brooklyn named Ray, who has a fight with his fiancee. He goes to the beach at Coney Island to forget his problems, and runs into a trampy girl named Cherry whom he knew back in his home town in upstate New York. On an impulse, he gives Cherry the twelve-hundred dollar diamond engagement ring he got back from his fiancee, not to marry Cherry but just to get rid of the ring. That ring becomes a symbol of Ray's inability to shake Cherry throughout the book, and also a symbol of Cherry's desperate desire to hook up with Ray despite her tawdry, violent nature. She's a real femme fatale, a redhead in a tight one-piece yellow bathing suit, and it turns out she was involved in an armored car robbery and has eighty thousand dollars in a suitcase. Only problem is that she's being pursued by her colleagues in the crime, and she pulls Ray into her orbit of murder and deception. Interestingly, the story takes place over a year, as Ray intermittently gets away from Cherry and back with his fiancee, Florence. The events get very complicated as Cherry keeps popping back into Ray's life, with Ray feeling responsible for Cherry who, although she's a dish, is a sorry victim of her bad childhood too. What made the book unique and unusual in the femme fatale noir genre is that Ray resists her charms throughout and prefers to stay with his wife, and Cherry grows more and more pathetic in her downward spiral. The book has some good action scenes when Ray, a Korean War vet, takes on the thugs who are menacing Cherry (and from whom she then extracts more than her pound of flesh), but it's actually more an offbeat story about motivations and responsibility, about a guy who feels compassion towards, and obligation to, a fearfully screwed-up dame who could ruin his life if he's not too careful. But once he marries Florence, he finds an unexpected ally in his struggles with Cherry. The book ends tragically--really, Cherry has no place to go but down, down, down--and her last act of self-destruction can't help but leave a damaging stain on Ray and Florence too.

This is a book that deserves to be reprinted in a contemporary edition. I found it for a blessed two bucks (!) at a recent memorabilia show, but there are many copies cheaply available online, especially at alibris.com.

On Friday and Saturday I resumed my clutterbusting, and it took me two days to organize and get together two more boxes of magazines to cart over to the storage space, but it felt good once I did. I watched a couple of movies, too--Inferno with Robert Ryan and Rhonda Fleming was a good one, an early 50s noir about a genteel but scheming wife (Fleming) who plots with her lover (William Lundigan) to leave her husband (Ryan) with a broken leg in the middle of the desert. But Ryan's character turns out to have a lot more gumption than the illicit lovers expect, and he survives and brings about the downfall of Fleming and Lundigan. A suspenseful film which I saw on a videotape somebody made from a showing on American Movie Classics. The movie included the obligatory cheesecake shots of Fleming, a gorgeous redhead who looked great in shorts or bathing suits; in the case of Inferno, she lay stretched out by a hotel pool.

Because of the stagehands' strike, which has shut down many of the main Broadway shows, it has been rather quiet in the midtown theater district all this weekend, which is traditionally one of the busiest and most crowded of the year in Manhattan. I know it's not good for business, especially for the actors or restaurants, but I have to say the quietude in the area has been a delightful change of pace this weekend, at least for this one harried inhabitant of the area. And I'm sure it's shown the tourists, who were certainly disappointed at not being able to see the shows they'd bought tickets for, that there are many other things to do in New York City besides theater.

I went out for a walk last night to Times Square to the Virgin Megastore to browse for a little while, then came back later to watch some more movies. Overall, it's been a fairly relaxing Thanksgiving weekend for a change. I don't mind solitude when I'm not doing a number on myself in my head--in fact, I like being alone--and by mixing up reading and movie-watching with the physically strenuous cleaning and carting of magazines to my storage space, I kept the demons at bay.

Ah, the holidays are here and frankly I wish they weren't. I'm in full curmudgeon mode. I'm not in the mood for the financial pressure or the emotional stress or the teeming crowds. And I am mediocre at wrapping gifts.

This orneriness is why in the past I always tried to have a stripper friend whom I could hang out with in the clubs during the holidays. Girls like Lily, whom I wrote about here extensively in late 2005 and early 2006. But the money situation has been so tight lately for me as a freelance worker that I can't spend enough time or money in clubs to establish a real rapport with anyone.

In their absence, I'm only now starting to see how important such ephemeral relationships were, and obviously still are, to my emotional health. I have been basically in a continuously rotten mood. It might not seem like much in this culture of ours which is saturated with all sorts of stereotypes and expectations about the value of hearth and family and so forth, but to us noir type loner guys, a warm stripper to share a drink with on the night before Thanksgiving is a prize not to be sniffed at.

Well, I do have an invite to hang out with my film buff buddies tonight, and that'll be fun, but it does not take the place of a cute girl purring platitudes in my ear.

Platitudes are like fast food--you know they're not really nutritional, but they taste good going down.

Well, I've got a lot of movies to watch, and that'll take up some of the slack. Some. In the endless war between my strippers and my DVDs, the DVDs are only winning now by default.

The daily cartoon strip Non Sequitur has a funny panel today, the day before Thanksgiving, about a turkey drowning his sorrows in a bar, and a human barfly trying to cheer the turkey up by saying, "Whoa, buddy, remember, tomorrow is another da--" Then stopping in mid-sentence. Hey, I'm ready to buy that turkey another drink. He's my kind of turkey. I feel his pain.

Or maybe I'm just losing my friggin' mind...

Anyway, here's a link to the cartoon, although after November 21 the link may show a different cartoon. But that's okay, because it's a great and funny strip worth looking at everyday.

NonSequitur

I just got my desktop computer back, and I'm writing this on it now. I guess the desktop is just more comfortable for me, although my back-up laptop offers a certain intimacy when I use it, as I sit on my couch and hunch over the screen...so I think I'll use the laptop for some work-related tasks now, and not just keep it on the shelf for emergencies.

I had a pleasant belated birthday dinner with my writer friends Moe and Betty last night, down in Greenwich Village. It was the high point of the day, as I was feeling blue yesterday. We ate Italian food in a joint that always has a friendly, cheery atmosphere and serves good vittles. I had my favorite, spaghetti puttanesca--"whorehouse pasta," invented in the brothels of Naples as an easy, aromatic, and tangy dish for the girls to enjoy between customers. The food and conversation picked up my spirits. We talked about Moe and Betty's current project, a self-produced CD of her songs which they're promoting and selling on the Web. Betty is a good singer, although she doesn't do it as her regular gig. But maybe this CD will help turn her avocation into her day job someday.

On the train on my way to dinner and coming back, I saw two really attractive Asian women in their twenties. They had very shapely stems and showed them off in knee-length skirts. One girl sat with her legs crossed, one knee over the other. She didn't look at me but I got the feeling she was aware I found her pretty damn alluring. It takes a lot of willpower for me not to stare. I look down at the subway car floor, or at other less attractive passengers, and feel the sadness of being in the presence of the unattainable...

Like I'm not worthy of even thinking about these gals. My gloom is getting a little extreme. Lately I've felt so down on myself, it's kind of scary.

The poet Robert Burns had the famous line about if only we could see ourselves as others see us. I wonder if other people look at me as negatively as I sometimes see myself...maybe they see me in an even worse light. I better not dwell on this too much...

Maybe I get some kind of thrill out of feeling "not worthy," especially of beautiful women. But I don't think so; although I am attracted to women who can act strong or powerful or teasing, it's only a game to me; in reality, I like those same women to actually be gentle and demure, and their "strength" or "power" only an expression of their erotic playfulness...

When actresses on tv or in the movies talk about how they like to play "strong women," I see that as the equivalent of male performers enjoying roles as boxers or cowboys or detectives, three equally "strong" types of character...

Yes, I see "strong woman" just as a stereotype. Sure, there actually are strong women in real life, just as there are detectives and cowboys, but they're full of flaws like other humans and that strength is hardly monolithic, but tempered by weakness and less noble qualities. Unstoppably strong and uncompromising women are kind of terrifying to me on a very primal, gut level, like something out of a monster movie, and I'm sure a lot of men feel the same way. And a lot of women, too.

I guess the desktop is a better location for me to write, and to blog...look how I've gone on and on again at the keyboard!