I was over at a friend's house last night who shares my passion for exotic actresses like Chelo Alonso. He had a video about the late Steve Reeves, the bodybuilder and actor who co-starred in some of Chelo's movies like Goliath and the Barbarians and Morgan the Pirate. Reeves seems to have had a good life. When he was playing Hercules and other similar heroic characters in the early 1960s, he was one of the very biggest box office draws in the world. He only ended up making fifteen movies before he retired by choice, to concentrate on ranching, fitness, and horses.

The video had some good clips of his old films, and in an interview he shared some fun memories of the late Sylvia Lopez, the beautiful European actress (I believe she was actually Austrian, despite her Hispanic surname) who wonderfully embodied the dominant but lovesick Queen Omphale in 1960's Hercules Unchained. Steve said she really got into their kissing scenes...! Lucky guy.

Lopez was phenomenally glamorous in her films, but there was a photo of her in this documentary that showed her without all the makeup that transformed her into a magnificent vamp. Without the warpaint, she had a nice face, not glamorous so much as warm and open (and she definitely looked Middle European rather than Hispanic); but it's obvious that she really was a great canvas for the makeup artists who transformed her into a stunning red-haired vision in other films such as Herod the Great as well.

Sylvia died young of leukemia, shortly after she made Hercules Unchained and her other sword and sandal and swashbuckler epics with actors like Edmund Purdom and Lex Barker, but she is yet another immortal example of the "gold standard" I have in mind when I compare the actresses of today with the goddesses of the past. Hey, here's a link to another shot of Sylvia from WOmWAm, that cool site which is also under my Sites I Like list. Enjoy.

SylviaLopez

I heard that Scarlett Johansson has been voted the #1 Sexiest Celebrity by Playboy magazine. I can only shake my head in total disbelief. Her biggest virtue is her big bosom. Would this girl be a big celebrity if she didn’t have those knockers? I ask you, pallie. Lots of girls look good in lipstick. And if she didn’t have that evocative name? Do you think Mindy Throttlebottom would have scored as high at Playboy? Wow, as far as I’m concerned, Playboy has officially lost its mind. This is the magazine that gave us China Lee, Jo Collins, Cynthia Meyers, Barbie Benton, Liv Lindeland, Dede Lind, Stella Stevens, Ursula Andress, Angela Dorian, Yvette Vickers, Bettie Page, Pamela Anderson, and that gorgeous blonde with the hair down to her ass, Debra Jo Fondren. In my considered opinion, Scarlett Johansson is weak in sex appeal, her voice can be grating, and her acting is often blah. She would have qualified for bit parts in the Golden Age of Hollywood, like as a Victorian can-can girl in the background of a Jack the Ripper picture.

Why do I get so worked up about this stuff? Who the fuck am I, this cranky unknown dude living near Times Square and parceling out his pennies for lapdances? Well, from thirty-seven years of going to stripclubs...and from a lifetime of watching and absorbing classic Hollywood...and from knowing inside and out the glories and beauties of glamour and pinup photography and illustration...I know what qualifies as beauty better than most of the “experts” in the media today. Call me an egomaniac, but review the women I’ve praised on this blog and you’ll see I do indeed know what I’m talking about. I’ve extolled such true goddesses as Candy Barr, Chelo Alonso, Mylene Demongeot, Mary Beth Hughes, Jane Greer, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, and the Jessicas Alba and Biel...with a mention here and there of Japanese beauties like the adult video star Sakura Sakurada, who actually IS the kind of beauty people THINK Scarlett Johansson is...yes, I think folks in the psychologically emasculated media are victims of "worship-women-as-they-are" feminism and are afraid of identifying true beauty, the classic symmetry that pleases and exalts the eye with no need for explanation, qualification, or justification. By electing ho-hum honeys to these positions of public relations puffery such as “Sexiest Celebrity,” the “experts” attempt to bring beauty down to the level of the common types who are accessible to THEM. Hey, if Scarlett Johansson is the sexiest celebrity, then Joe Blow’s girlfriend has a shot at the title next year.

The writer Ayn Rand expressed a variation of this problem in her story The Fountainhead through a character who praises a bad architect in order to discredit and bring about the ruin of a great one. I don’t agree with everything Ayn Rand said, but she hit the nail on the head with this one. When you finally accept a Big Mac as the new filet mignon, you might not bother with the real thing.

The media used to talk about “defining deviancy down,” meaning more extreme behavior became acceptable to society; well, these days the media have “battered beauty into the basement.” The world has sunk to a low level of aesthetic appreciation if someone as flimsy as Johansson can be regarded as a paragon of allure...or in Playboy’s words as quoted by the News, “the apex of beauty and sensuality.”

I see hotter (and certainly more underpaid) chicks than Scarlett on the subway when I go down to the East Village...or to the Chinese take-out joint.

Another thing that’s damn annoying is reading about this Jennifer Hudson broad. USA Today had an article that basically implied how it looks as if it’ll be okay for Hudson walk the Oscar red carpet despite the fact that she has “curves” and wears a size 12.

“Different body types are gaining ever-greater acceptance, both in fashion spreads and on the red carpet,” goes the article. Isn’t there something insulting about this? Our society doesn’t dare discriminate openly about race, gender, or religion anymore, but to contemplate that, wow, a zaftig girl is actually going to walk on the red carpet...gasp!! Will the pillars of fashionable society be able to bear it? Hey, am I the only one seeing something insulting here, not to say ominous? Who runs the media, grown-up “mean girls” humiliating the wallflowers in a high school cafeteria? Oh excuse me, there are no wallflowers in our world anymore, because isn’t “ugly” the new “beautiful”? In what world? Not my world. I refuse to live in such a world, at least in my mind, and will resist it with all the power of my curmudgeonly will! All hail Aphrodite!! And women wonder why men NEED to go to stripclubs!! And sometimes it seems to me that the media uses the word “curves” instead of saying that a babe is hefty. Jennifer Hudson doesn’t look fat to me, just a mite zaftig, but then again, she also doesn’t look as if she has real curves, at least in the stodgy and pretentious fashion photographs I’ve seen of her. Curves are based on the GOLD STANDARD of Marilyn Monroe...Jayne Mansfield...Anita Ekberg...Sophia Loren...etc. Beyoncé has curves...but I see no startling curves on Jennifer Hudson. So it looks like they’re rating curves on a sliding scale now too.

Speaking of “ugly is the new beautiful,” here’s a suggestion for that tv celebrity Vanessa Minnillo, who likes to go "undercover" in a fat suit: instead of putting on makeup and artificial flesh to see what heavy women experience, why don’t you do a plumper a real favor and let her get banged by one of your high profile studly boyfriends? That would be a real act of sisterhood, dollface!

Another quote from the USA Today article: “There’s now an abundance of celebrities who resemble the average American woman who, according to 2004 figures from the CDC, now weighs 164.3 pounds.” Yeah? What celebrities do they mean exactly, and are their P.R. people sending out press releases with their body fat ratings? And what A, B, C or D-list are these celebrities on? In the Bizarro world?

A few days ago I wrote here about the absence of quicksand scenes in current movies. What the current world is really sinking into is bullshit, so maybe that’s why there’s no time for quicksand anymore.

There's a line in the movie Citizen Kane: "It's not hard to make a lot of money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money."

Sometimes I think that's true, other times I don't. But I think the point is that if your entire focus is on the accumulation of capital, you might have a pretty good chance of making it, because you won't be distracted by other things.

From time to time I realize that I am not primarily interested in making money. Oh, I need and want money like everybody else, but the chief pleasures of my life appear to come from things which don't garner financial remuneration. I like to read, and watch films, and look at art, and listen to music, and think about the books and films and art and music I encounter and where they all fit into the larger scheme of things; and I have always made sure that a good share of my time could be spent in these pursuits.

I've definitely worked hard enough to make a reasonable living in the thirty-four years I've lived in New York; although perhaps I could have worked harder to make a better living, I don't know...but that might have meant sacrificing too much time I would otherwise have used for reading, viewing, thinking, daydreaming, and of course contemplating with zeal the undraped female form on the stripclub stage, in erotic photography, and elsewhere.

In my own way, I realize I have really lived the life of a womanizer, if you don't think of a ladies man necessarily as someone who always has to get the women in bed. Sex per se, I've come to realize, has not been my chief goal in the thousands of hours I've spent with strippers, particularly over the last twenty years. I haven't gotten sex from them, except for one short and disastrous six-week interlude with a rather unstable young lady in the late 1980s. From the others I've gotten titillation, yes; spontaneous satisfaction through enthusiastic lapdancing, occasionally; but sex itself, no.

On the other hand, what I have always enjoyed getting from women, and very avidly wanted, are the warmth of their smiles, their laughter at my frequently good witticisms, the ups and downs of their personal stories, and the sensuous pleasure of their company, both physical and emotional; and these things I have gotten in spades.

Perhaps I'm old enough now to read the memoirs of Casanova? Unless I'm being delusional, I think I might have something in common with the old boy.

At any rate, I have the vague and not-unpleasant feeling that I am about to embark on a new and interesting adventure...

Or maybe all the romantic Viennese waltzes I've been listening to on my CD player are putting ideas in my head.

As I was waiting for a work file to download on my dial-up connection today, I passed the time by browsing in Harry E. Wedeck’s 1962 Dictionary of Erotic Literature, a volume I mentioned in a post a few days ago. I learned that in ancient times there was a goddess for bald women, Venus Calva--Venus the Bald. A plague caused women to lose their hair, but it grew back eventually and they credited this to the divine help of Venus Calva. I hope that this deity is looking out for Britney Spears, too, since she shaved her head over the weekend.

This was one of my laziest Sundays ever. After a replay of Saturday's French toast breakfast, I went to a small memorabilia show focused on photographica, everything from people's old snapshots for a few bucks apiece (now classified academically as the genre of "vernacular photography") to vintage cameras of all makes and models. I just go to browse through the cheap photos to see if I find something interesting and inexpensive, but I didn't this time. The most memorable snapshot I saw--a black-and-white of a smiling and portly middle-aged guy dressed up for a costume party in a devil's outfit complete with cape, horns, and pitchfork, and standing in his 1950s living room--was way too costly for me. But it was funny to see.

What I did find for a reasonable price was a mid-1940s issue of Paris-Hollywood, a French movie magazine that was a combination of gossip and news about upcoming productions, as well as pinup style photos of European and American stars. A remarkable closeup portrait of the actress Jennifer Jones, in her South-of-the-Border vixen role from 1946's Duel in the Sun, was on the cover; it almost looked like black-and-white retouched with color, with her reddish hair tumbling down to her bare shoulders as she clutches what looks like a multicolored Mexican blanket to her body. Inside the issue I was delighted to find two pages of large pictures of Marie Windsor, the great femme fatale of film noir; two pages of Ava Gardner and the recently deceased Yvonne De Carlo, in their early twenties; and finally a two page spread of corny but catchy publicity photos of the great character actor (and leading man in many films noir) Edmund O'Brien, working out in the gym with his gorgeous wife, the actress Olga San Juan. I've always liked O'Brien tremendously, and although I believe he and San Juan eventually split, for quite some time they were a very social couple in Hollywood and much in the spotlight. I find it poignant looking at these old magazines with their stories of couples in their long-ago youth.

When I left the photographica show, I placed the Paris-Hollywood magazine for protection inside my New York Daily News. The magazine is fragile and I didn't want to bend it inadvertently. Ironically, Britney Spears with her freshly shaved head was on the cover of the tabloid; and Jennifer Jones, on the cover of the magazine, was known in her own youth as an emotionally fragile person. More so than in Jones' era, the media of today sometimes seem to judge celebrities by the standards of average life; but stars are not ordinary people, and great volatility often goes with creativity.

Well, I didn't go to get spanked by a Chinese dominatrix, a prospect I mused on in yesterday's post; but I did go out to the stripclub last night and had a pleasant encounter with a Japanese-born dancer. Let's call her Kaya. I haven't been getting lapdances lately but I made an exception and got two from Kaya after we amiably chatted for about fifteen minutes. Her manner was demure in the classic Japanese style, yet she was not a shrinking violet in expressing her thoughts and observations as we talked about her work as a dancer and her life in New York. Two waitresses came over to ask if I wanted "to buy the lady a cocktail," but I opted instead to ask Kaya to dance for me. We went to sit on the couch in the back and she leaned over me, enveloping my face both in her long black hair and the subtle scent of her flowery perfume. I could still catch a whiff of the perfume on my sweater this morning. She has a lithe and graceful body; a few times during the dances she lifted up her legs in the pinup style, a move which was very sexy indeed because her legs are long and shapely. Two songs was just enough to be enjoyable without becoming frustrating to me, or too costly.

The cold weather broke for a little while yesterday and today, but it seems to be getting windy and harsh again tonight. But last night's lapdances were a good reminder that the spring is not too far in the future, with all the gals coming out to bloom on the avenues.