With the financial crunch I'm in, I have to branch out in new directions for extra income. Alas, I hate new directions...give me a nice, comfy status quo.

Anyway, I've spent the last few days mulling over some ideas for book projects, making notes and even writing a couple of sample chapters. However, I consider book writing a "pie in the sky" proposition, and no reliable source of income. As I've noted here before, although I am a freelance worker, I do not make my income primarily from writing although writing comes into it. Anyway, some of my friends have recently gotten agents for their projects, and so maybe it's not so outlandish after all to attempt this.

I sometimes think of doing a non-fiction book, perhaps along the lines of what I've written on this blog. But I've already written the blog...and I don't like to write things twice. And why would people want to pay for something that they can get for free?

Writing fiction is an even bigger long shot than non-fiction. On the other hand...writing fiction is fun, even when it doesn't sell. I've written novels that I didn't sell, and I enjoyed every minute of the process.

A friend was urging me to try to write a mystery, but although I like to read mysteries and psychological thrillers, I've always had a hard time writing that kind of material myself; never had success at it, and didn't even particularly enjoy writing it.

My mind simply is not too devious, and I feel you need a richly devious turn of mind to write thrillers in today's market. Not only that, you practically have to be a polymath with the ability to absorb many different disciplines to create an authentic-sounding fictional world for a thriller. In the old days, if you could describe a blonde in a tight skirt with a .45 in her mitt, twenty-five percent of your job was done; nowadays, at least judging from some of the recent novels I've read, you need to know everything from forensics to computers to finance to sociology to the history of religion to the twists and turns of international relations...whew...

So here I am, like a million other dreamers in New York, contemplating writing a novel yet again. It would be my fourth; I've written three over the last twenty years that were never published.

One of my favorite novelists is Georges Simenon, the French master of mystery and psychological suspense. He wrote his rather short novels in about eight days each. Maybe if I try that approach, I could limit the amount of time I waste if the thing turns out badly...

Really, when you think about it, why should it take people so long to write books? Jim Thompson, one of the greatest noir novelists, cranked his out in a month each, I believe...and they've more than stood the test of time.

Have you ever read A Hell of a Woman? That's the book that opened up a whole world of noir pulp to me. A crazy, crazy novel. Long after I've forgotten the plot, I remember the feeling of craziness it induced. Or check out Thompson's The Getaway. A taut heist novel, until it becomes a completely insane surreal whack-job in the last chapters.

Actually, Simenon's eight days is long compared to something that a friend of mine did back in the 70s. He wrote a porn novel in 24 hours. True, it was larded with sex, but it did have a plot and good atmosphere in the jazz dives of New York. Then again, my friend was a rather intense character, so he could pull off the 24 hour stint...

Balzac wrote almost a hundred serious literary novels in twenty-one years, his Human Comedy. That's a lot in a small space of time. Then again, he died at 51 with his insides rotted out by the black coffee that kept him going...

I've said it here before, and I'll repeat myself: if you can get a copy of Stefan Zweig's old biography of Balzac, you are in for a treat. It is one of the best books I ever read. Poor Balzac...the ending is so sad you cry for pages. But what a life he lived while he lived it!

He always wanted to be a playwright as well as a novelist. He got a contract to write a play, and waited until a few days before the opening to gather his friends together. "You write Act One," he said to one buddy, "you write Act Two, and I'll write Act Three..."

He didn't take it as seriously as his novels, obviously. Or maybe he just took the gig to pay the bills. The man had DEBTS.

Anyway, I write on this blog about ten hours a week. It's gotten me in top shape for cranking on another project. I just have to figure out what it is.

I watched a pretty weak 1953 Biblical drama last night called Sins of Jezebel. It was on another double-feature DVD from VCI Entertainment, under the heading of "Movie Bad Girls." It starred Paulette Goddard as the evil queen who turned King Ahab into an idolator and generally brought bad things upon ancient Israel. Goddard, who starred with Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Bob Hope, and Charlie Chaplin in her heyday of the 30s and 40s, was clearly on the downslide in her career when she made this very cheesy film. At 43, she hadn't aged well, making her seem silly in the role of irresistible temptress; and her voice had started to sound a little raspy, more like that of a chain-smoking saleswoman in a chic New York department store than the consort of a Middle Eastern monarch. (Goddard was, in fact, born on Long Island.) It was kind of sad to see her in this flick, but they did pay her $20,000 to play the part, which adjusted for inflation comes to well more than $100,000 in today's dollars; so that was a nice payday for her. According to the DVD's notes, she left twenty million dollars in her will to New York University, where they named a freshman residence hall after her; so she obviously knew how to save her dough. You might say that the sins of a pagan queen now indirectly contribute to the comforts of NYU students.

Goddard might not have been convincing as Jezebel, but in her personal life she was involved with some very talented men: besides being with Chaplin for many years, she was also married to the actor Burgess Meredith for awhile (he gained his widest fame in his later years playing Rocky's trainer in the Stallone films). She also married the author Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front. So she must have been pretty alluring in private. She was in the Ziegfeld Follies in her youth, and was a finalist for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind.

One apocryphal story I heard about her was that she got a role in a Cecil B. DeMille film partly by putting her pretty bare feet on the director's desk during an interview. DeMille was known for having a foot fetish, and the rumor is that somebody supposedly told Goddard that showing her feet was a way to get on his "good" side. Indeed, only six years before Sins of Jezebel, she starred with Gary Cooper in DeMille's 1947 epic Unconquered, and in 1942 she was in DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind.

Although Sins of Jezebel isn't a good movie, some of the supplemental material included on the DVD is interesting, like the pressbooks promoting the film. The exhibitors of the time were encouraged to emphasize the "bad woman" angle to lure in the customers. Well, it certainly worked with Sir Cranky!

The second feature on the disc is Queen of the Amazons from the late 40s, about a girl looking for her lost fiance in the jungle. She finds him, but he's fallen in love with a white goddess who rules a tribe deep in the interior of Africa. That always happens...I could only watch this flimsy epic in bits and pieces...but Patricia Morison stars. She never became a movie star, but several years later became a big hit on Broadway in Kiss Me, Kate. Actually, although the movie isn't good, she makes the most of her role, not wasting the opportunity to practice her craft in a scene where the Amazon Queen explains how she won't give up Miss Morison's fiance. Miss Morison says almost nothing, but her concentration and expressions show that she wasn't looking down on her role in this half-baked film, and was intent upon doing a good job.

Is Mackenzie Dawson the New York Post's go-to gal on the subject of gams? Previously she wrote an article about pantyhose that inspired some musings on my part (see the link below), and in today's paper she has an article cleverly called "Thigh Anxiety" about women facing the dilemma of whether or not to wear today's fashionable minidresses.

The article was accompanied by photographs of a lovely model who definitely should! Her stems shine! Although I much prefer her in platform heels than t-strap sandals. For some reason, I find t-strap shoes very unsexy on women. I have no idea why. Perhaps I should go to a seance and try to conjure up Herr Doktor Wilhelm Stekel, the late expert on sexual quirks. Perhaps he could help me find the reason for my t-strap aversion.

Anyway...

Because I am trying to save money by not going to stripclubs as often, I am in favor of more minidresses more of the time on more of the women in Manhattan simply because it will keep me on the streets enjoying the scenery, which is cheaper than going into a tittie bar and spending nine or ten dollars on a beer just from the git-go!

I also think it would be nice if strippers would discard the often-tacky gowns and shortie outfits and come onstage in pretty street clothes, which they could peel out of! I positively know that other customers would enjoy this. A stripper dressed like the model in the "Thigh Anxiety" article, coming onstage in black peep-toe pumps and a patterned minidress, would look great as she walked around fully attired before disrobing!

Anticipation is fifty percent of satisfaction!

Another thing I like about minidresses on women, especially the long-sleeved patterned one on p. 43 of the article, is that if they have high collars they combine a demure quality with the revelation of the thighs! It's like you see purity and sauciness simultaneously. Irresistible!

So, when I'm standing out this spring and summer around Union Square or Columbus Circle, enjoying a coffee and taking in the sights, I hope to see many minidresses on the merry minxes of Manhattan!

HowWomenCrossdressByNotWearingPantyhose

Last night I watched a 1951 B-Western called Little Big Horn, which was a story of heroism in the face of overwhelming odds, similar to The 300 Spartans and 300. It's on a new double-feature disc from VCI Entertainment called Western Film Noir Vol. 1; the other feature is a 1949 Western mystery called Rimfire.

Little Big Horn is about a group of cavalrymen who ride 250 miles to warn General Custer about the Sioux, who are preparing to attack him and his men at the Little Big Horn river. This was really a Western war film, when you remember that cavalrymen were soldiers, not cowboys. A terrific cast includes Lloyd Bridges as a stern commander, John Ireland as his second in command--and lover of Bridges' character's wife, played by Marie Windsor. There is also a sterling lineup of character actors including Jim Davis, Wally Cassel, Hugh O'Brian, Reed Hadley and King Donovan. O'Brian, who later became famous for playing Wyatt Earp, is particularly good here in a very tragic role. The film was a solid mix of action and characterization. As a depiction of soldiers and their feelings as they face a bad situation, it was superior to both 300 and The 300 Spartans; and the end was powerfully moving in a way those two other pictures were not.

The other feature, Rimfire, was about an innocent man (played by Reed Hadley, he of the great deep voice) railroaded to the gallows in a corrupt Western town. After his hanging, the men responsible for framing him are murdered, one by one. I kept guessing until the very end about who was the serial killer; and the movie had the great bonus of Mary Beth Hughes in a small role that, while it didn't give her much to do, put her in some nineteenth century frocks that set off her blonde good looks to perfection. This woman was so sexy it's a crime she didn't become a major star; but after starting strong at 20th Century Fox in the early 40s, she ended up mostly in B-pictures at smaller studios. Nothing wrong with B-pix, I love 'em, but it's just that it would have been great to see her do more elaborate productions too and have a more lucrative career and more ambitious filmography. I think I wrote on this blog previously how she would have been an improvement on Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. I wasn't kidding! This gal was a real minx...I was actually getting turned on watching Mary Beth walk around in those high-necked Western dresses...what a dame!! There was eroticism even in her dimples.

VCI Entertainment, in conjunction with Kit Parker Films, did a real good thing by releasing these two obscure but enjoyable movies to DVD.

It was a DVD weekend, not one for strippers. With tax time approaching, this freelancer's money is really tight. Anyway, I caught up with the 1962 film The 300 Spartans, which had a big influence on Frank Miller, the writer of the graphic novel on which the current hit 300 is based. The cinema scholar in me couldn't wait to compare the two...

In contrast to 300, the earlier movie was a straightforward Hollywood narrative about the same battle between the Greeks and the Persian army at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. While The 300 Spartans doesn't have the physical savagery or the bizarre visual hyperreality of the current movie, it does have a more noble characterization of King Leonidas of the Spartans, well-played by Richard Egan. It may well be that Gerard Butler's Leonidas in 300, monomaniacal and dogmatic, is probably closer to what the king may have been like back in those harsh days, but Richard Egan is more accessible as a regular human being, yet still rigidly focused on his duty. And instead of being the near-drag queen of 300, Persian king Xerxes is portrayed by David Farrar in The 300 Spartans as a heterosexual megalomaniac with a taste for dancing girls, a conventional characterization for this kind of film. In the part of the Athenian politician Themistocles, a character who, if memory serves me, was completely left out of the script of 300, Sir Ralph Richardson brings his trademark touch of refined oratory and eccentric thespian detail.

According to the scholarly book The Ancient World in the Cinema, The 300 Spartans was a fairly accurate portrayal of both the circumstances of the battle and its historical context. While it lacks 300's brawny rhythm of sword and javelin into flesh, it provides a sense of what the battle was really like from tactics to terrain. Instead of the brooding and dreamlike near-Gothic mountains of 300, the earlier epic shows us sunlight, water, and grass as the setting for the fight against tyranny. The last images in The 300 Spartans are strangely mundane, but haunting because of it: surrounded at the pass of Thermopylae by the Persian hordes, the Spartans seem like a small bunch indeed as they are summarily slaughtered by the arrows of the Persians. But these images of smallness are ironic, because they belie the Spartans' refusal to surrender and their willingness to face death, a gigantic feat of courage which inspired the rest of the rest of the Greeks to an ultimate victory against Xerxes and his colossal army.

So, although not a great film--some of its dialogue is awkward and its pacing is sometimes lumbering--The 300 Spartans gives us a more documentary sense of the event, whereas 300 is pretty much a fever dream which mixes a dash of history with vistas of visual fantasy.

Some enterprising programmer should schedule both one day at a revival house, although of course when 300 comes out on the DVD, you can view this double feature on your home screen.