Today's visit to the podiatrist went okay, so I suppose I should have been in a good mood about that, but for some reason the gloom I felt during yesterday's rainy and depressing Tuesday hung over today, despite the absolutely perfect weather.

I frequently get depressed around the Jewish High Holidays, which start tonight, as I am not observant and feel little connection with the rituals now. Yet I feel guilty about that on a kind of gut level. I wrote about this topic extensively in the first couple months of doing this blog back in September/October 2005.

I guess I'm a sort of pagan at heart; I worship feminine beauty in its many manifestations. It is, for me, the proof and the personification of some semblance of universal order, but I feel very much like an outsider as a Jew for having these feelings, although I am nonetheless proud of my heritage in a cultural, historical, and philosophical way.

I well understand the King Solomon who was obsessed with Sheba, or the King Ahab who was seduced by Jezebel.

Anyway, I got work done in the morning before my doctor's appointment, but afterward I was restless and couldn't (or wouldn't) concentrate on my freelance work and finally gave up and went for a walk. I sat at Columbus Circle drinking a coffee and reading a book until the skateboarders there became so distracting that I had to leave. There is supposed to be no skateboarding at the fountains at Columbus Circle (there is a sign to that effect), yet it goes on all the time with these guys doing stuff like trying to leap up the steps under the Columbus statue and invariably making everybody nervous (or at least jittery moi) with their clattering boards and clumsy falling.

Still, it was nice to sit there for awhile, and then I picked up a Caesar salad at Whole Foods for dinner. I came home, sat down at my computer, and suddenly had a burst of concentration and got some work done. I ate my salad, then sat down again and completed more work. So I felt a little better.

Speaking of the worship of feminine beauty, I saw a very cute Japanese girl going up the escalator as I was leaving Whole Foods in the Time-Warner Center. She wore a short skirt which came about three inches above her fetching knees, and had short black spiked heel boots with red socks coming out of them to warm her calves. She also had an interestingly patterned and bulky pocketbook on her shoulder. Are women these days still aware, in these post-Freudian times, that purses are symbolic of their vaginas? And an argument could be made, but only verified through extensive field research, that such purses are also as revealing as Rorschach tests of their outlooks on sex.

Alfred Hitchcock brilliantly used the purse as a vagina symbol in his fascinating film Marnie, naughty man that he was.

It was a rainy, nasty day, and it was 9/11 too, always an atmosphere of sadness in New York about that; in general, I was feeling kind of blue. Trudged around the apartment, did some of my freelance work, tinkered with the query letter to send to agents about the suspense novel I just finished, daydreamed a little about a sexy Asian gal I saw on the street...but finally knew I had to get out of the apartment and have a decent meal for a change. I've been living on cheap sandwiches the last few days...

So I went to a coffee shop that's full of the chatter of local characters, and took a book along to read over my chow: another Charles Williams paperback from the 1950s. I've written about A Touch of Death here, reprinted by Hard Case Crime, and Williams is definitely one of my favorite writers. The way he describes the interplay and the dialogue between a Man and his Femme Fatale is peerless. And the cover of the book I'm reading now, Talk of the Town, makes it a double treat: when I take a break from the novel, I can look at the babe on the cover, and just daydream away...

This is the way paperback books should be marketed, not like they do nowadays with just the author's name and the title! Hard Case Crime knows better, and they put some cool original art on their books. Anyhow, just looking at the gorgeous vintage cover of Talk of the Town picks up my spirits, so I thought you might like seeing it too--just click on the Wikipedia link below.

Tomorrow, I'm off for another podiatrist appointment...think I'll take this book along for company. My adult version of a teddy bear, I guess...

TalkOfTheTown

I went to Borders last night at Columbus Circle, and Kirk Douglas was signing copies of his latest book, called Let's Face It. I hung around just to see him and hear what he had to say. He's 90 years old, his speech affected by a stroke, but he's still pretty spry. He got up on the podium, cracked a couple of funny jokes that put people at ease with his speech difficulty, and said that the bookstore offered to bring the books to his hotel room so he could sign them--but he felt that it was better if people could actually see him do the signing in person. There was a pretty nice crowd, and a lot of people bought the book. I didn't, though, because it was just enough to see him. I've seen him twice before, once about twenty years ago at an awards show, and another time when he was signing his second book at Barnes and Noble at Rockefeller Center. My friend Sid, also a huge fan, was with me the second time and practically on the verge of tears at seeing the Man in person.

Along with guys of the same era like Burt Lancaster, William Holden, Gregory Peck, and Robert Mitchum, Kirk is one of the icons of my consciousness. He's already given me so much through his great movies like Spartacus, The Bad and the Beautiful, Lonely Are The Brave, Champion, Young Man with a Horn, The Juggler, Strangers When We Meet, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Last Train to Gun Hill, Man Without a Star, The Brotherhood, and The Vikings that I don't need his signature on a book. I already have his signature on my brain.

I was thinking last night about how great he was especially in The Vikings, where he made his character, Einar, into a charming but villainous warrior/swashbuckler as exuberant in his physical daring as silent star Douglas Fairbanks, who'd thrilled Kirk as a kid and inspired his stage name.

Kirk Douglas, a nice tough Jewish boy from Amsterdam, New York, was born Issur Danielovitch Demsky. Happy Rosh Hashanah, ole buddy!

And...

HAIL, EINAR!! Long may you reign!!

As I knew it would, a single visit to the stripclub on Wednesday night set off a craving in me to go back again. However, I don't view it as an "addiction," because I don't feel the craving for comely company is pathological. It is natural, normal. I like showgirls, saucy and exhibitionistic; showgirls work in clubs; ergo, I like to go to clubs. If I liked librarians, I would go to libraries. (Would be more cost-effective, I do know that.)

I use the word "showgirls" here specifically because it's not their toplessness or near-nudity that's the point with me, but their uninhibited "show" of sexiness. They could be wearing bikinis or one-piece bathing suits or lingerie, the effect on me would be the same.

But it comes down to a question of money these days. I took a shower last night, shaved for the second time, and was figuring on going out, but while having a beer and watching an old John Ireland movie on DVD, I changed my mind. I'd already spent money at a memorabilia show earlier (getting the aforementioned DVD and others), so I knew I really couldn't blow more dough on entertainment.

Giving up on the idea of a Saturday night chat and lapdance with some cutie, I switched into my pseudo-intellectual mode, and I think I finally figured out last night why John Ireland never became a major movie star. (I know the world has been awaiting this answer with bated breath.) Although a solid thespian, handsome, and with a good sense of humor, his acting had a very oblique, ambivalent, mysterious quality too, which didn't fit into the standard hero molds of the 40s and 50s. He was perfect for character parts and villainy, but more opaque as a hero. So it must have been hard for him to generate much sympathy or empathy in the audiences of that era, and his tenure as a leading man was brief, except when he played in lower-budgeted schlock movies as he did later in his career.

On another, unrelated, note, I had a strange encounter this morning when I went to the drugstore to buy toilet paper. I was grumbling because my favorite brand was out of stock, when suddenly a somewhat attractive woman about forty, her decent figure clad in snug blue jeans and black top, comes over to me and starts talking, out of the blue, about a friend of hers who used too rough a toilet paper and developed a serious illness as a result. Just what you want to hear when you're contemplating purchasing the cheapest and, probably, most sandpapery brand on the shelf. Shaking her head and making her black ponytail sway, she went on, not looking directly at me but not looking away from me either, "But he doesn't take care of himself, he's always smoking and mistreating his body...so maybe it wasn't just the toilet paper..." At first I thought she was talking to somebody else, but then I realized it was me. I looked at her and thought, "Why does this nice looking gal have to be so bizarre?" Why do I always attract the oddballs? Maybe because I'm odd myself? Why couldn't the real world equivalent of luscious January Jones in Mad Men come up to me with gently offered maternal advice about the best toilet paper for my tender masculine hindquarters? No, I have to run into Miss Bizarre of 2007...

Maybe it's the humidity that brings out the characters, or at least gets them chatty in drugstores. It's getting sticky outside again.

Part of my freelance work involves dealing with issues of a geriatric nature...I become painfully aware of the aging process, seeing how time works its cruel way on the human body, eroding the vibrant suppleness of youth and replacing it with the marks of physical decline and decay...

This is one of the things that has always propelled me to stripclubs, and it propelled me there a couple of nights ago after a three and a half month hiatus...

I needed to see young and firm women, and have at least one of them give me a dance.

It didn't seem as if I'd been away from the scene for over a hundred days (my last visit was in mid-May), as it was all familiar...except the faces of the dancers. They were almost all new...and not particularly scintillating, either.

But one girl caught my fancy and I chatted with her a little and had two dances.

It was funny, though. She was not very aggressive as a saleswoman--after the first dance, she assumed we were finished, when in fact I was ready for another one and had to suggest it myself! But then after the dances, she complained about how she doesn't make much money. I wanted to tell her to try to be more attuned to her customers, and to ask them for a second dance and never assume anything...but I could tell she was clearly locked into a negative frame of mind, that she felt it was the club that was the reason for her not making much money, and not her attitude. Well, I wasn't in the mood to give a tutorial on topless saleswomanship, I just wanted a little entertainment. And her dance was pleasant enough, so after I finished my beer, I left, pleasantly reminded that life is not just about getting old.