I feel better now than I did yesterday when I wrote my ranting entry. The encouragement of my friends on the 'Stream, a decent meal, and a couple of helpful conversations, one with a friend at my freelance gig, as well as a phone chat with Alice, an old high school girlfriend (whom I took to the senior prom and with whom I've stayed in touch) got me back on the track.

I haven't had a break in awhile and I guess it's showing. I'll have to figure out some kind of getaway...or maybe at least a massage at an Asian spa! "That's it, Machiko...just a little lower..."

Seriously, I am a little backward when it comes to taking trips. You'd think I was Hannibal, assembling an army of elephants to cross the Alps...

I'm tired tonight. I've been up since six a.m. (I always get up that early when I have to commute to New Jersey). Maybe I'll just chill out and call it an early night.

See you tomorrow, my friends.

I feel lost today...tired of strippers and DVDs and everything...working in the city today at my freelance stuff, but feeling at loose ends; full of ideas, but no energy. For the last nine days, like a previously childless couple determined to make a baby, I have been copulating with my brain to procreate an idea for a book project...but sometimes I wonder why. What's wrong with just sharing my thoughts on a blog? It suits my short attention span and my anecdotal temperament. Who needs to bring another fucking book into this fucking world?

The upcoming Quentin Tarentino/Robert Rodriguez movie Grindhouse is getting a lot of press this weekend, and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the best way to view this faux "double-feature" of new retro-style exploitation flicks might be to see it from the middle. I've always had fond memories of just walking into a 42nd Street theater regardless of the running times of the movies, and entering the auditorium in the middle of some ridiculously violent or crazy scene. It didn't really matter when you sat down; the movie wasn't about the intricacy of plot, but the continuity of sensation. So if a girl was being menaced by a maniac, or a gang of thugs was chasing a kung-fu warrior, you knew that sooner or later you'd catch the drift of the storyline, and if you didn't, there would always be some good action to see or some jiggly tits to admire.

So maybe the best way to see Grindhouse will be to show up in the middle of its three-hour running time, to catch the mock previews for upcoming faux epics like "Thanksgiving" and "Werewolf Women of the SS," then settle in for Tarentino's half of the film, Death Proof, and then sit in the theater to catch the first half of the flick, Rodriguez's Planet Terror, on the next show.

I still remember how I first saw the 1960 movie Spartacus: my family and I went to the theater on a Sunday afternoon, and we entered the film during the shot where gladiator Woody Strode is hanging upside down in the prison after being slain by the cruel Roman general played by Laurence Olivier. What an image to start on. I wonder if it made the film all the more powerful to the nine year old kid that I was then?

Spartacus is a great film no matter what scene you start with, but of course it's best viewed from the beginning. But maybe some other movies would be improved if they brought back continuous non-stop shows, and you could watch from the middle and stay for the beginning.

A busy day. Went to a movie memorabilia show and hung around with my fellow film buffs and DVD collectors. Bought a couple of videos and magazines and generally had a pleasant afternoon. But it just goes by so quickly, darn it! I was looking forward to the show all week just like a kid waiting for Christmas and then, bam, it's over. These shows are a fun escape from my workaday stresses. I need them but they're not as frequent as they used to be. I guess the older we get, the more we need to indulge our passions to deal with all the other un-fun stuff.

There's a magazine I read called Scary Monsters that, despite the juvenile sounding title, is actually aimed in good part at baby boomers who first fell in love with horror and monster flicks back in the 50s and 60s. The magazine also puts out a yearbook called Monster Memories which is filled with reader-written articles in which fans discuss seeing these films back in the day. There are articles about collecting short 8mm versions of old Universal monster flicks, or pictorials of vintage advertisements for drive-in movies and spook shows, or just reminiscences about how people first got interested in Karloff, Lugosi, Hammer Films, and so forth. The writing varies in quality but it's a fun and unpretentious magazine that brings stimulates a lot of nostalgia in me for the less hi-tech days of moviegoing when we were kids and teenagers...when it didn't matter if the monsters looked like papier mache, as long as curvy B-movie beauties like Beverly Garland were fighting them off.

I remember when I was a college student that I had a disagreement with my father about the whole subject of nostalgia. He had enjoyed the movie Summer of '42, which I reviewed negatively for my college paper (I was the film critic for a spell). My father's feelings seemed hurt that I didn't understand why he enjoyed this (to me) schmaltzy movie, which depicted characters who were exactly the same age as he was in 1942. I just didn't get nostalgia then, imbued as I was with the tunnel vision of youth and arrogant dreams of my own potential artistic greatness. In fact, my father died before I ever really understood the value of nostalgia, so I never got to tell him that now I understand, and I'm sorry I was such a wiseass about the whole thing.

Anyway, if you'd like to learn more about Scary Monsters and Monster Memories, here's a link to their site.

ScaryMonsters

A grindhouse was a theater, generally in the dumpier sections of town, where films were shown continuously hour after hour. The films were usually low budget, violent, and sexy, and presented usually double or even triple bills.

I'm looking forward to the new movie Grindhouse by Quentin Tarentino and Robert Rodriguez, because like many a New York cinema buff, I have fond memories of the fun times watching exploitation movies on the old 42nd Street back in the 70s and early 80s. Part of the mission of Grindhouse is to recapture the non-stop excitement of the double feature programs by having two complete films packed into a three hour running time. I hope Grindhouse is fun enough to get the audiences hootin' and hollerin' like they did on the old Deuce when the action on-screen got outrageous. I guess Rose McGowan with a machine gun for a leg, in Rodriguez's half of the film, qualifies as outrageous; although I believe Quentin Tarentino's half happily lets us see both of her pins in toto. That makes sense; to judge by his camera's past worship of Uma Thurman's and Bridget Fonda's and Salma Hayek's tootsies in various films, Tarentino comes across like a foot fetishist, and certainly wouldn't let one of Rose's lovely feet go to waste!

The old 42nd Street theaters were dilapidated, but tickets were cheap. It was important not to sit in front of the balconies, but underneath them, as the audience upstairs used to throw their lit cigarettes down to the orchestra seats. You'd see these little red glowing missiles descending. I don't remember anybody yelling up, though; maybe the point was to throw the butts down but not hit anybody. Maybe it was a game of skill.

Parents would take their children into the goriest horror films on 42nd Street. Nobody questioned that. I remember sitting through some psycho killer epic and glancing down the row to see two little kids staring up at the carnage on the screen while eating the ice cream their mother had just given them.

The funniest experience I ever had on the Deuce was a showing of 1972's The Thing with Two Heads. Ray Milland played a bigoted scientist whose head is grafted onto the body of a black guy, played by Rosey Grier. I can't remember now exactly what the audience said back to the screen, but it was hilarious. Too bad I didn't have a tape recorder with me. Unfortunately, the theater also smelled like cat piss. It was the Anco, one of the grungiest.

I think what people are really nostalgic for is not so much the scuzzy downtown theaters and the occasionally creepy clientele, but for the days when people didn't take movies so damn seriously...when directors cranked out genre flicks for a paycheck and to meet hot chicks, when most actors were primarily people who had a fun job instead of vaunted icons of a nasty and narcissistic celebrity culture, and when films of all stripes, no matter how different, weren't lumped into the same demeaning weekly race to the top of a financial chart.