You know, when I'm not working, I feel like a mess. Discombobulated. Full of doubts about everything.
I guess that makes me a workaholic?
Yet I don't work all the time...although I think about work, or my various projects, a lot of the time.
Work gives me a focus. I'm very organized and pretty efficient. When I'm not doing it, I feel lost in the miasma of various befuddling emotions...
Okay. Sigh. What did I do today? I took a walk down Ninth Avenue. It was cold and sunny, a nice day for a walk. Even though I seem to have pulled a muscle in my right leg, and walking is intermittently uncomfortable.
Ninth Avenue from 57th Street to 42nd Street is fairly gentrified with nice restaurants and shops; not glitzy, but not dumpy either. On the other hand, Ninth Avenue between 42nd and 34th Street has a nice, rundown, seedy quality that I find comforting.
I walked past the Papaya Dog at 42nd and Ninth, where you can get 2 franks and drink for fairly cheap; and further down, there is a pizza stand with slices for a buck. People were lined up for that bargain. Between 41st and 40th there were a bunch of down-and-outers getting food from some sort of missionary truck, right under the overpass that leads into the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It was a scene out of the old urban photos of the Great Depression.
I kept walking. I passed a Moroccan restaurant that has belly dancing...I've never eaten Moroccan food, but I watched James Stewart and Doris Day eat it in Hitchcock's Man Who Knew Too Much. Maybe I should try it, or maybe I'm just interested in seeing some belly dancers...
I walked past a place called the Cupcake Cafe that seemed to be bustling with people in a leisurely coffee-and-pastries mode...and across the street, a couple of dive bars (real dive bars, not the "retro" kind)...an existential looking diner right near the Port Authority that calls itself DINER...further down there was a flea market on 39th Street, but that was pretty uninteresting, nothing but old clothes and shoes and vases, hardly any books or mags...further down on Ninth I saw a guy with his own display of secondhand (or fifth hand) stuff, everything from vinyl to books to clothes to DVDs...I saw a movie I've wanted to buy, Scaramouche with Stewart Granger and Eleanor Parker, but I don't know, the copy lying there on the pile with the broken DVD case looked kind of dumpy...so I passed it up.
I walked by other small restaurants and shops...the old three and four story buildings, brown and rusty looking in the sunlight, had that beautiful Hopperesque look...I wondered about the people living in those old apartments. I pictured women running clandestine massage businesses, and guys like me walking up rickety steps to get a rubdown and relief...also, I was struck by how many excavated lots there were near Ninth Avenue. They are doing so much building here in this area, one day soon nothing seedy will be left...
The subliminal message of every enormous yet faceless and ugly new building going up in New York is: lowly citizens, you too can be replaced. And will be.
I walked down Ninth specifically to go to the Skylight Diner, a large, airy, and unpretentious coffee shop at 34th and Ninth that has an inexpensive and tasty egg-and-sausage sandwich...comes with decent cole slaw and a pickle on a roll. I had two cups of coffee with cream and then I started walking east.
I stopped in at a movie memorabilia store on 35th between Seventh and Eighth because I wanted to see if they had any stills from Queen of Outer Space, a movie I watched last night...I didn't find anything as good as the shots I found on the Internet, which I'm linking to below...
I had never seen this silly 1958 movie with Zsa Zsa Gabor before. I enjoyed it. It was totally ridiculous, about space explorers trapped on a planet of women, but I liked the 50s color and Cinemascope, and some of the actresses were gorgeous...
Like Barbara Darrow, whom I had never heard or seen before. What a doll...she plays one of the Venusian women, and she hooks up with one of the earthmen, portrayed by Dave Willock. He was always playing goofy comical character types in 40s and 50s movies, and this had to be some kind of high point in his career, getting to actually kiss this incredible babe on screen...I got some good biographical info on her from a cool site called Glamour Girls Of The Silver Screen, and a good shot of her from Queen of Outer Space from a site called Spooky Tom's.
According to what I read, Barbara Darrow is or will be 77 this year...but I'll always think of her fondly in her mid-twenties, in a short interstellar skirt, proving that the planet Venus was very inhabitable, and most hospitable!
SpookyTomsGlamourGirlsOfTheSilverScreen