Friday night I went out to my favorite stripclub after about a five week hiatus. Everybody from the manager to the bouncer to the waitress had a friendly word for me, "how ya been, haven't seen ya for awhile," but I couldn't seem to relax or enjoy myself. I felt so distracted...maybe the place is too full of memories of good times past...I dunno. Or maybe the dancers the other night, most of whom were unfamiliar faces, were just not inspiring to me. This is where I used to hang out with Lily, one of my faves way back in the winter of 2005, early 2006.

If the right girl had been there, I would have been susceptible; I had about eighty dollars in my pocket and felt it would be a good thing to enjoy myself with a little conversation and a dance or two, because it had been so long and I've been feeling kinda...cranky. But nobody caught my fancy, so I didn't stay very long. It just wasn't exciting or tantalizing.

I went out to a favorite video store yesterday to check out the new releases, hoping that would get my juices flowing. It did, but there were so many DVDs that caught my eye that they ended up canceling each other out. The only one I really, really wanted was sold out--a 1946 western called Canyon Passage with Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward, which had gotten a rave review in the New York Times on Tuesday in Dave Kehr's DVD column.

I went out today for a walk up to Lincoln Center and stopped in at the Barnes & Noble to see if they had Canyon Passage, which has been unavailable on disc but is supposed to be a really fine film. It's actually part of a four-movie collection called Classic Western Roundup Volume 1. But no dice...well, at least my urge to browse got me out of my apartment for awhile. Walking is good exercise, so even if I don't find a movie I want, at least I'm doing my cardiovascular system a favor.

A colleague of mine, a photographer, told me she's decided to leave New York after living here for many years. She's a native of a European country, and although she loves New York, it's gotten too expensive for her, so she's moving back to her homeland permanently. She just decided abruptly, fearing burn-out.

Expensive is definitely the word, and burn-out too, yet the town is in no way as interesting as it was when living here was cheaper. It's become commercialized and plastic in many ways, and has lost its gritty edge. Or maybe that's just my weary perception of things, after thirty-three years of living here and finally starting to fear that I'm just another mug in the crowd after hoping I'd turn out to be something special?

Yes, I suppose I would have less to complain about if I were making better money or I were famous and hobnobbing with the glitterati. If I got to put my hand on some tabloid hottie's knee, I might feel less gloomy. For creative people in particular in this town, fame and fortune are, strangely enough, not merely to be sought for their own sake, but as an antidote to the continual stress of New York, its wear and tear on the ever-aspiring personality.

So, not having fame or fortune here, after dreaming you'd get it, is like not having access to one's medicine, one's tranquillizer.

Who wants Prozac? Just put Jessica Simpson on my lap...

Speaking of tabloid personalities, Vanessa Mannillo, who is now seeing Simpson's ex, should never be seen in public without makeup. There's a shot of her in the current OK magazine that shows her strolling on the beach with a well-scrubbed face. Ye gods! She is plain. What a disappointment. I guess she needs the paint.

All right, so I'm being catty...spank me if I deserve it...alas, my nose is pressed up to the candy store window, but I don't have the money for a treat! I just have a bagful of sour grapes instead.

Moving along...

When I was a kid, I used to read mostly Marvel and DC Comics, but my sisters would read Archie and Betty & Veronica. So I'd check out B&V, whose images had been perfected to a pinup-like gloss by the late artist Dan De Carlo. Betty & Veronica represent the yin and yang of my sexual personality. I'd like a nice girl like Betty, who could act bitchy like Veronica in the bedroom...

Anyway, I was at the newsstand today and I see the Archie company is trying out a new style of art for Betty & Veronica. Allow me to say "Ye gods!" again. Comparing this new art to the old style is like putting thrift store art next to views of Japan by Hokusai...meaning, you really appreciate the graceful beauty of the original Betty & Veronica style when you see the "contemporary" mode, which looks like the kind of art they used in subway advertisements about getting young people to practice safe sex. It tries to be relevant and modern, full of trendy details, but ends up looking bland and stodgy.

My guess is that the "New" Betty & Veronica are going to eventually go the way of the "New" Coke as Betty & Veronica Classic asserts its immortality, just like Coke Classic did.

A site called Akira Kurosawa News and Information linked to my last entry about film directors Kurosawa and Ed Wood, and writer Vili Maunula agreed with the connection I made between these two diverse talents. You can check out the link below to see what he had to say.

Interestingly, although I've seen Kurosawa's samurai classic Yojimbo a number of times, I watched it for a similar reason to why I viewed the Ed Wood films the other night. As I said yesterday, I've been a little down in the dumps about things, and I used the Wood films as a cinematic "comfort food" distraction. I also watched Yojimbo to pick up my spirits.

The basic plot of Yojimbo is how Sanjuro, a wandering, masterless samurai played by Toshiro Mifune, comes into a lawless town and cunningly sets two factions of gamblers against one another. Mifune is magnificent fun to watch from the very first frame when, underneath the credits and accompanied by the striking soundtrack music, he scratches and saunters his way into the story. Just watching the opening minutes helped lift my gloom.

Gruff in manner, but with a heart of gold, Sanjuro works less for money (although he needs it) and more for the simple virtuoso indulgence of his skills both as a manipulator of fools and as a master swordsman. He gets the gamblers' heads spinning with his sly bargaining to work first as one group's bodyguard (yojimbo), and then the other's. But he's not invulnerable, and at one point even they get him scratching his head when they momentarily befuddle him with a move of their own. Towards the end of the picture, a slight miscalculation with a thank-you note from a beleaguered family ends up getting Sanjuro the beating of his life. And this pummeling leads to the image that spurred me to watch the film this time.

When I face adversity both big and small, I like to think of Sanjuro overcoming his. Smashed to a pulp by a giant thug in the employ of one of the gamblers, Sanjuro recovers his samurai timing while sitting in an isolated hut. The camera shows a leaf blowing through the hut, and then suddenly a knife nails it to the wooden floorboards. Sanjuro pulls the knife out, the leaf blows around the room again, and then he throws the knife and nails the leaf once more. That striking image represents to me the regaining of strength after defeat, and it's given me comfort at various times. A few years ago when I had to do some physical therapy because of an injury to my hand, I kept thinking of it. When my sister Jenny had to undergo a very intense treatment for her cancer last year, I thought of it. The leaf blowing across the floor, and the knife nailing it down. Strength returns.

Of course, Yojimbo is a great movie for many reasons. Its mix of action and comedy, of poignance and cruelty, make it one of Kurosawa's most memorable films. Mifune is just about the coolest guy in the whole world in this movie, and I loved when in the early 70s he got to team up with Charles Bronson in the East-meets-West western Red Sun, a very enjoyable action film in its own way. Mifune and Bronson made a great team.

But it's that leaf blowing across the floor in Yojimbo that's like a visual mantra to me. Keep throwing the blade, keep doing the right thing, and eventually your aim will be true again.

AkiraKurosawaNews&Info

Edward D. Wood Jr. has long been called "the world's worst movie director," a label which perhaps has been great for getting him and his films posthumous recognition, but is most assuredly not true. The poor guy died alcoholic and impoverished in 1978, about two years before his movies started to find audiences again, audiences that were entertained by his penchant for weird dialogue, off-kilter editing rhythms, peculiar performers, and crackpot plotlines that were half-dream, half pulp fiction.

I was feeling blue the other day and picked up a budget two-disc set called The Ed Wood Collection, A Salute to Incompetence, on a label called Passport Video. I thought the subtitle was on the cruel side, since for all his so-called "incompetence" he managed to write and direct movies that people are still enjoying almost thirty years after his death. Truly "bad" movies are boring, and Wood's are not. So for ten bucks I got six movies and bits of interviews about Wood and his circle. I figured it might cheer me up to see Bela Lugosi in Wood's Bride of the Monster, which is always good for a chuckle or two.

I have to say that Bride of the Monster, which is about Lugosi trying to create a race of "atomic supermen" in his laboratory with the help of his barefoot assistant "Lobo," perked up my spirits with its general silliness. Lugosi is fun to watch, never for a moment slumming in his standard mad doctor role, and it's enjoyable also to see the rest of the cast gamely go about their business. There is of course an important plot element involving angora, for which Wood had a fetish, and the actresses also wear those sexy 50s bullet bras under their blouses.

I felt so much better after watching Bride that I stayed on to watch Jailbait, which is about a criminal getting plastic surgery so he can elude the police. The only "jailbait" in the film are the guns that thugs illegally carry, risking arrest. Once again, threadbare sets, dialogue that seems to recall older and better movies even as it assumes a Woodian ring of its own, and an interesting cast of actors including old Hollywood pro Lyle Talbot, a young pre-Hercules Steve Reeves, and Wood's then-girlfriend Dolores Fuller, made Jailbait a diverting viewing experience. The ending of the movie, for example, is supposed to be a surprise, but it is so telegraphed that its lack of surprise almost becomes a bizarre asset, as you savor Wood's delight in thinking his O. Henry twist really couldn't be foreseen. Wood seems to have loved the movies of his youth in the 30s so much that all he really wanted to do was make them again himself, so films like Jailbait and Bride of the Monster, in imitating the old styles and scenes of 1930s Hollywood, seem older than when they were actually made, the 1950s. Or maybe they're the first examples of "retro" culture in the cinema?

I've seen some of the greatest films ever made and I appreciate them. For example, the night before I treated myself to a repeat viewing of Akira Kurosawa's 1960 samurai classic Yojimbo. But although I wouldn't class Wood with Kurosawa, I will say he is as much a solid part of our world film heritage as the late "emperor" of the Japanese cinema is. They both clearly loved the medium in which they worked, and a love for filmmaking is one of the things that motivates and makes their films memorable.

True, Kurosawa's films challenge us, while Ed Wood's are perhaps more comfort food. So what? Nobody can subsist on filet mignon alone.

Today is the 56th birthday of a gal I had a crush on in junior high school and high school. The last time I saw her was at our twentieth reunion, when we were both around 38.

When you're infatuated with somebody, especially when you're a kid, you try to find out as much information about her as you can. I learned that her birthday was May 14, 1951. Then, with my seventh grade ingenuity, I went to a special calendar in the Chicago phonebook that told me what day of the week any date in the past fell on, going back a hundred years or so. So I knew not only her birthday, but that she was born on a Monday.

I had such a crush on this girl but was too inhibited and unconfident to ever ask her out. She was a very popular girl too (though not a "mean girl"), and since I was not in that golden group, that was another reason for its social impossibility. But she always seemed like a good-hearted person, and eventually she married a guy from the neighborhood who had been more on my level in the school hierarchy, although he wasn't a close friend of mine but just an acquaintance through other pals. She still lives in Chicago.

I felt such a connection to this girl, thinking of her over the years and wondering about her, that when she became pregnant with her first child in the late 70s or early 80s, which was already by the time I was living in New York, I had a dream of her standing in a farmer's market, surrounded by colorful varieties of fruit. Then a few days later a Chicago friend told me he'd heard that she was going to have a baby--he literally ran into her going to the doctor. My dream really struck me as strange then, almost psychic, as if I sensed her fecundity, her fruitfulness. I believe she eventually had two children.

It's funny to still think about her after all these...decades. Anyway, I hope she has a pleasant birthday.