Like many people, I have a separate email account which I use for my business. I usually don't check it on Saturday, so I can attempt to give myself a day off from thinking about work (not easy when you're a freelancer). But I made the mistake of checking my work email this morning on a whim and was aggravated by something I received. What it was about is irrelevant here, but I'm just pissed at myself for checking the email in the first place and opening myself up to the unnecessary stress, which could have waited for tomorrow or even Monday morning.

All right, wipe the slate clean, Cranky. It's a crisp autumn morning. Take a deep breath. In and out. You can deal with this stuff in a day or two.

Still, my annoyance is exacerbated because I didn't sleep well last night--only got five and a half hours--so I am feeling exhausted and edgy at the same time.

I wonder if what I was reading last night contributed to my unplanned early wakening. I get the AARP Bulletin--you know, info for people over fifty--and there was a section of articles about saving for retirement and related matters (not that I'm planning to retire or could afford to). It was informative but not good for late night reading, I suppose.

One of the articles, "Spending More, Enjoying Less," by George Loewenstein, discussed the problem of spending more money than we can afford in our budgets. It seems that a part of our brains called the "insula" sends out signals of guilt and fear when we're tempted to spend more dough than we should. And even if we go ahead and spend the shekels, the insula gets worked up, subtly taking away from our enjoyment of what we just purchased, perhaps by giving us a vague feeling of self-dissatisfaction or even depression. I know this feeling well. Sometimes I'll convince myself to buy a DVD that I don't absolutely need, and even as I'm walking out of the store, happy that the disc in my possession, I can also tangibly feel a little gloom that I gave in to the temptation when the reality is I have enough DVDs to keep me going for the next five years.

In fact, I think my insula has become more powerful in its influence on me in the last year or so, because I have definitely cut back on my expenditures. Sometimes at night when I'm sitting in my apartment and feel loathe to go out, I remind myself that I'm staying inside not because I'm becoming one of those people who never want to leave their apartments, but for the very real reason that I don't want to be tempted to spend money. I go into Borders, I buy a book or a DVD; I go to Starbucks, I buy a special drink for five dollars; I go into a stripclub, I buy beers and dances, or at least beers and give tips to the girls. Clearly, I have to find less expensive forms of amusement. I must train my feet to take me to different destinations.

So, with the persistent nagging of my insula, I am basically adjusting to a declining quality of life. And that is why I am pursuing the novel-writing, because although it is a crap shoot about whether I can sell my fiction or not, if I ultimately CAN make money writing fiction I can possibly raise myself back up to a more comfortable financial position.

INSULA! It sounds like the name of a forty-foot scaly monster from an old Jack Kirby-drawn early 60s Marvel comic book like Tales to Astonish. "Beware the tread of...INSULA! Crushing pleasure from the souls of men!!"

I have a sudden image of all the strippers I've ever known amassed behind me like a semi-nude female army as I face off with...INSULA! "The dread colossus that sprang full-grown from my brain!"

Ah, for the days of my youth in the early 60s, when all I had to worry about was having 12 cents to afford the latest Jack Kirby thriller like "Fin Fang Foom!"

Well, I sent my little lamb out into the world today, meaning I emailed one copy of my novel manuscript to an editor of my acquaintance--a very nice guy and a good writer himself. He asked me to just email it to him instead of printing out a copy. Wow, that was easy, I saved about fourteen bucks on Xeroxing and it was simple enough, but also kind of like putting your firstborn in an envelope and mailing him to kindergarten.

Actually, it's not even my firstborn. I wrote three novels before this that didn't really satisfy me so I didn't do anything with them. No, that's not totally true--excuse me, I'm operating on two glasses of shiraz, a very tasty red wine--I sent the first one out in the 80s (how time does fly!) and got some good responses, but no sale. The second one (from the 90s) I didn't send out because it never seemed like much of anything, and the third (from 2002-2003) was so damn personal I felt too embarrassed to put it out there. This blog, in a way, is a more palatable (to me) distillation of the materials of that third novel. And my new one, the fourth that I finished over the summer, seems to strike a more successful balance between the personal and fictional, so I'm putting it out into the driving snow and wind. I also hope to make some money from it too so I can spend said money on wanton living, which I've been missing for the last year or so.

Wanton living...that's what I want.

I told you, two glasses of shiraz! Big glasses! A friend and business associate took me and another friend out for dinner tonight at a steakhouse, and it was a great dinner for which I am grateful and now slightly tipsy.

Anyway, I also gave a hard copy to a friend today (the other dinner companion, my friend Vicki) who has worked as an editor and loves fiction, and with whom I have also had a professional association for many years. She is really a cheerleader for my efforts to move in a new direction career-wise, and I hope she likes the book and it doesn't let her down.

But at least I know that it is a professionally done piece of work, come what may.

Shiraz is good wine, all right. Goes well with a New York strip steak and a baked potato loaded with butter. Yum.

I should eat like that more often. A well-cooked steak sure beats the chicken chow mein combo I get a few nights a week, along with a side order of attitude from the gorgeous but surly Chinese cashier at the local take-out joint!

I went to a paperback collectors' show yesterday in Manhattan, which was a lot of fun. I love to walk into a hotel ballroom and feel surrounded by a sea of beautiful old books, so many of which lure and seduce the eye. In some ways it's better than going to a stripclub, because the books don't walk up to me swinging their hips and I don't have to feel bad if I say, "No sale." Not that I don't want to buy half the books in the joint, just like I want to get lapdances from the half the dancers in a club!

My particular collecting passion is for the books of the 50s, with their fantastic covers. There were also plenty of books at the show from the 40s and 60s and upwards, but the 50s is what interests me primarily because of the period's dramatic depiction of voluptuous, seductive, pinup-like women luring men into who knows what.

I've been there. I've been lured. I empathize.

The paperbacks of today are so bland in comparison to the old days that it's pathetic. Occasionally I will see a current, usually larger-sized paperback, with striking art, but not very often. But in the old days, every drugstore and newsstand that had a revolving rack of books was literally like a museum of great illustration! I didn't start hanging around drugstore book racks until the 60s, so I missed the golden era. Unfortunately, few people appreciated all this back in the day, and the books were viewed as disposable except by those wise souls who put them away for themselves and later generations to enjoy again and again.

The 50s are viewed as a "repressive" decade; if so, many of the repressions were put aside by the predominantly male artists who painted those paperback covers, which were bold in their colors, their melodrama, and their blatant appeal to the libido of the penis-bearing book buyer. Some of those artists were veterans of the even wilder and more uninhibited pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, which frequently depicting drooling madmen menacing scantily-clad maidens. Now, however, we live in an "enlightened" era when women supposedly buy many more books than men, and cover art for the most part is influenced by the political correctness and post-feminist rectitude of the gals who are at the helm of the mainstream publishing companies. Their idea of a sexy cover is to show a woman's bare legs or feet in closeup, printed with a soft matte finish that feels like a bed sheet. Bare legs and feet comprise one of the most familiar motifs on the covers of women's contemporary fiction. Believe me, I am a leg and foot appreciator, however, these images lose punch for me because I can't see the whole woman.

In any case, ninety percent of paperback covers today are boring to me. The only regular paperback company that does dramatic painted covers in the classic old style is Hard Case Crime, about which I've raved on this blog before. They have the right idea. Check out the link below to see what I mean, and read the sample chapters of some of their books, which are just as vividly written as their covers are painted.

HardCaseCrime

I haven't felt like blogging lately. My freelance job requires me to do a lot of writing, so it's not like I'm slacking off at the keyboard...but recently I find that the only things I really like to blog about are "safe" topics like movies or books. I read the newspapers and I get so riled up at the crap that's flung around in our society like dog shit on a centrifuge, and when I'm worked up I can't think clearly...I get so disgusted at the idiotic things people say and do, the blatant hypocrisy and lying, the political correctness that doesn't for one moment disguise the true content of people's thoughts and emotions...people are making a big deal out of the word "bitch" these days here in New York, saying how much of a slur it is. My opinion is that you can take "bitch" out of a bully's vocabulary, but you'll never wash it out of his brain...

I used to feel I was neurotic for wanting to escape into books and movies, but I don't feel that so much anymore. Now I believe that the best parts of humanity are to be found in books and films and music, and other forms of art as well...science and medicine are forms of human glory as well...and in my opinion, the most overrated (and over-rewarded) form of human creativity is athletics.

Yes, I certainly can't look at people's behavior and feel very cheery...although an oddly nice thing happened to me yesterday, took me by surprise. I was at Rockefeller Center, browsing at a newsstand, when one of the girls who worked there, a chick about nineteen, twenty years old, opened a storage closet next to me that was camouflaged as a blank wall. She was stacking it with t-shirts. I said, "Oh, that's where things are stored. There must be lots of little nooks like that here." "Yes," she said, "and I wish I could climb in and just sit in here for awhile and watch tv. Like my personal Bat Cave." "Well, you could probably just move that shelf up and climb in there," I said. "Hey," she replied with a smile, "thanks for helping me figure that out." "Nothing to it," I said in my best aw-shucks manner, and she laughed. "I like customers like you," she said, "who aren't uptight like some of these other people." I was so surprised by her compliment that I was left speechless. I thought about it later and realized, yes, I have a very playful turn of mind when I encounter somebody similar...and I'm glad that young gal appreciated it and was kind enough to say so.

I finished Robert Bloch's The Scarf (see my previous entry), and the serial killer protagonist does NOT find redemption at the end. But he does discover the one woman whom he loved--and ironically, it is the gal who sets him on his mad road of killing and his obsession with using a scarf for his crimes of strangulation.

The ending was a little too neatly wrapped up, with a kind of unreal 40s Hollywoodish symmetry, but overall The Scarf was an exciting page-turner, well worth reading, that gives an early peek at the fictional motif that would one day make Robert Bloch world-famous through Psycho: destructive mother figures ala Mrs. Bates whose sons turn into killing machines.

Continuing on my tour through noirish books and films, tonight I watched a 1950 movie called The Second Face, starring Ella Raines. She had a career that lasted from the early 40s to the mid 1950s, but she made many memorable films: Phantom Lady and Impact are two of her others, classic films noir. The Second Face is not really noir, or even a suspense film, but rather a story about a homely woman (Raines in heavy makeup) who has a talent for fashion design, but whose appearance is perceived as so unattractive as to hinder her career. The movie is filled with mid-20th century "heel" types, pencil-moustached older men taking advantage of younger women; in fact, the way some of the male characters objectify women in this movie reminds me of how the current AMC show Mad Men depicts similar behavior in the advertising agencies of 1960. Not so ironically, The Second Face takes place in an advertising agency too, where the Raines character gets a job as a secretary when she can't get a job as a designer because of her supposed wallflower appearance.

The movie is balanced, though; there are also two older men characters of considerable complexity who are NOT heels, well-played by character actors Bruce Bennett and Paul Cavanagh (the latter was also memorable as Joan Crawford's cuckolded hubby in Humoresque).

The twist in The Second Face is that Ella's character gets into an accident and has plastic surgery which enables her to become as beautiful on the outside as she is on the inside. But this description makes the movie sound dopey and mawkish; actually, it's quite tart and blunt as women talk about aging, the value of appearance, and being independent of manipulative men. It's quite ahead of its time in this way, and Raines was very much an actress ahead of her era, portraying the kind of natural beauty, as opposed to cosmetic glamour, which has now become the standard in our contemporary screen actresses.

Speaking of tart dialogue and blunt emotion, Rita Johnson is also in the film, playing Raines' friend, and she was a wonderful actress who is probably most famous as Charles Laughton's doomed mistress in the Ray Milland 40s classic The Big Clock. Johnson is really fine in this film, portraying an independent-minded businesswoman with a weakness for, yes, another one of those slimy heels, this time played by Roy Roberts--who was great around the same time as a gangster in the John Garfield classic Force of Evil, and sleazy as the carnival owner who gives Tyrone Power a job as a geek biting the heads off chickens in 1947's Nightmare Alley.

After she gets her face changed, Raines' character learns the meaning of life and love, but the screenplay by Eugene Vale and the direction by Jack Bernhard keep the corn at bay in a tight 77 minute running time. This is a movie to watch again for the dialogue and character interplay. Look for it on cable.

Ella Raines died in 1988 at the age of sixty-seven, but she remains a fave with film buffs. You can't go wrong with The Second Face, and if you haven't seen Ella before, look for her also in 1944's Phantom Lady, where she plays a crusading secretary out to save her falsely accused boss from the electric chair. The scene where she goes undercover at a jazz joint, dressed up as a finger-snapping "hep kitten" in a black satin dress and ankle-strap platform shoes, all to vamp Elisha Cook Jr.'s horny bug-eyed drummer, is one of the great moments in all of film noir.

Here's a link to a nice pic of Ella at the cool web gallery at SilverScreenSirens.com:

EllaRaines