I was just about sit down to blog about thirty minutes ago when I thought to myself, "Maybe afterward I'll check out that DVD my writer/bodybuilder/streetfighter friend Rexx recorded for me." He gets cable and I don't, and he very kindly recorded a couple of my favorite noir films when they were playing on Turner Classics. So I figured I'd have the disc at hand when I finished blogging.

Well, guess what...

It wasn't at the place where I recalled putting it, the spot where I always put the discs he makes for me, and naturally I could find every other disc but the one I was looking for. So the word for what I was feeling was...Eee-aaa-gaahhhhhh!!

I spent thirty minutes moving stuff around, looking in bags, shifting stuff about, to no avail.

I know it's here. (You're here, you little disc you!) And it may even be hiding in plain sight. (Come out, Jerry. This is your friend Tom.) Well, I have a lot of stuff in my apartment...books, videos, magazines, mostly. And I usually know what's on the top layers...yes, I know I'm starting to sound rather archaeological here but the allusion is apt..I'll find it as soon as I stop looking for it, no doubt, or stop obsessing about it...

I'm pretty tired. I commuted back and forth to New Jersey for my freelance gig today. You'd think I went to Mars and back, the way I feel stretched thin tonight...so I don't need the disc right now anyway. It's just that he mentioned it during dinner this evening, and I thought, "Gee, I meant to watch it, maybe I'll check out a bit of it later..."

Actually, I can't really do much of anything at this moment, and I'm not thinking too well either. I did finish that book The Deadly Percheron, which I mentioned yesterday, but my discussion of it will have to wait for a day or two. I want to help spread the word about this fascinating novel, and I will, but when I can talk about it clearly.

Why was such a nightmarish story a compulsive pleasure to read? To read about a man going from a life of respect and professional success to utter and complete torment and amnesia? That's one of the questions I want to explore.

So I'm going to call it quits for tonight and go to bed. Now let me just muster up the energy to put the sheets on my futon...and untie my shoes.

Come out, Mr. Energy, wherever you are!

I had planned to go out to my freelance client in New Jersey today, and went to bed early so I could wake up and catch an early bus...but I couldn't get to sleep for hours last night. My mind was swirling with all sorts of stuff...perhaps it was just textbook insomnia. Finally about 1 a.m. I got up, turned on the light, drank some Diet-Pepsi and had a piece of chocolate. I turned off my alarm clock because there was no way I could get up at 6:20 a.m...when I was younger, I could get by on four hours sleep, but now I can't. I figured I'd just wake up and see if it was worth commuting out to Jersey, or going tomorrow instead...

One advantage of being a freelance worker is that I can make my own hours, of course. Since I am very organized, I can shift my days when I have to. But it's ironic, because I really felt like going out there today and working around other people...but I woke up too late to make the commuting feasible and get back in time for an appointment I have this evening.

The downside of being a freelancer and self-employed, of course, is that I have to pay my own taxes and health insurance, and it can be very costly. Still, it is a kind of wealth to be able to be able to manage my own time. It would be hard to give it up after all these years and take a nine-to-five job...I don't think I would want to do that.

Maybe one reason I couldn't get to sleep last night is that I am reading a very excellent but nightmarish novel from 1946 about a man who gets amnesia. He starts the book as a respected psychiatrist, and then...well, I will be writing about this book here when I'm finished reading it...it's called The Deadly Percheron, by John Franklin Bardin. I'd been wanting to read it for several years, and it was recently reprinted. I found a copy at the St. Marks Bookshop in the East Village a couple of days before the turn of the new year.

I don't often get spooked by books, but this one seems to have struck a nerve...after I drank my Diet-Pepsi and ate my chocolate, I read another two chapters before drifting off to sleep...

In the last couple of years, I've read a number of books that were unforgettable. Hangover Square, by Patrick Hamilton...In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes...A Touch of Death, by Charles Williams...and now The Deadly Percheron.

A "percheron," which I didn't know, is one of those big horses that pull wagons, like beer wagons for example. I guess the word is fairly obscure, since I couldn't find it in my desk dictionary. Just to give you an idea of this book's bizarre quality, a percheron is found near the scenes of murders...

I may try to finish the book when I eat my lunch today. It's that compelling.

My writer-editor friend Mr. Stetson used an interesting phrase last night. We were talking about our respective lives, and he said he was "very semi-content" with his. It struck me as a funny term but also a realistic, down-to-earth one. Maybe when you reach your fifties, as we have (actually we've more than reached them--we're deeply IN them), it's hard to feel totally content with all the various issues we have to deal with; but "very semi-content" is a workable goal...I just wanted to share his off-the-cuff bit of wisdom with you...

I got a good amount of freelance work done today at home, and to reward myself I stopped off for a beer at my favorite stripclub. I got there just before rush hour and for a little while it was empty except for myself, another customer, and the dancers onstage, who only went up one at a time. I've still continued to stick with only tipping the girls onstage and not getting lapdances, which has made it possible for me to stop in once or twice a week without messing up my budget. The girls don’t seem to resent it since I tip everybody when they’re up there, although maybe they’re all waiting for me to break down one day and get lapdance-happy with a big wad of bills. I wouldn't mind it, actually...

One of the girls gave me a kiss goodbye when I was leaving, and I didn’t realize she was wearing such heavy lipstick. So when I went into the new Dallas BBQ restaurant on 42nd Street near 8th Avenue and got a table, I was unaware I had a huge lipstick kiss on my right cheek. Nobody from the hostess to the waiter said a word, but after I ordered my food I went to the men’s room and happened to notice the “kiss of the stripper” on my mug. It actually struck me kind of funny that I’d been walking around with it for about twenty minutes (including a stop at a newsstand to browse), so I just wiped it off and went back to my table.

By the way, Dallas BBQ, which is a chain of eateries around town, features one of the tastiest and most economical menus in Times Square and elsewhere--you can’t beat their half-chicken dinner with baked potato and cornbread for $6.99. The new location they opened on 42nd Street is huge, too, and has a nice view of the street as well as a nifty rotating sign that evokes the flames of a barbecue pit. I enjoy the chicken and ribs there.

Anyway, I did a lot of work today on the computer so I think I’ll keep this entry short and pithy. Time to rest my eyes for tomorrow’s tasks when I commute out to my freelance client in New Jersey...

Have a good evening.

At the newsstand this afternoon, I was looking at the covers of women’s magazines and it finally sunk in that my concept of female beauty is truly and irrevocably rooted in the standards of fifty or sixty years ago. On the basis of their looks and the way they are photographed, most of today’s actresses wouldn’t have had a chance of fifth billing back in the Hollywood of the 40s or 50s, when the studios really had an eye for glamour. Indeed, with the covers of the women’s mags laid out in a row next to each other, I was startled to see how plain most of the “big names” are made to appear--made even more plain by the flat makeup and bright lighting, which creates masks of “averageness” and “accessibility” on their faces. Of all the celebrities I saw on the covers, including Beyoncé, Rosario Dawson, Naomi Watts, Lindsay Lohan, Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johanssen, Mariska Hargitay and Jennifer Connelly, only Christy Turlington on the cover of the January 2007 issue of the British mag The Tatler looked beautiful in the truly cosmic way of the old cinema goddesses. The sensual and glossy heaviness of the magazine was a poor substitute for not being able to take Christy in my arms that instant...her husband Edward Burns sure is one lucky mug.

I imagine that the strategy of most women’s magazines is to sell copies by emphasizing the down-to-earth qualities of their cover celebrities, so that the readers will feel they are in some ways on the same level as the stars, or the stars (when not on-screen or cashing their multi-million-dollar paychecks) are just “real,” ordinary gals. But this realness is about as real as the “realness” competitions in female impersonator pageants. Just as the whole point of a man’s impersonating Madonna is to call attention to the fact that he is still a man--and isn’t it amazing how well he can seem like Madonna!--these celebrities lord their very celebrityhood over us by acting as if they are “real” just like Mrs. Jones next door. No, they’re not real like Mrs. Jones, but real as celebrities--and they know we know it.

This ploy of our modern star culture, which keeps celebrities on pedestals while making them stoop metaphorically until they are just about at the level of the ordinary person’s head, is phoniness of the most depressing order.

Women sometimes laugh at men getting bug-eyed over the models in Maxim or Playboy. At least those models don’t pretend that they are regular girls, accessible to the average dude. Oh, they might spout nonsense about what kind of pickup line will get some ordinary joe into their pants, but that’s all malarkey to fill empty editorial spaces, and almost everybody knows it. These models date athletes and movie stars and other varieties of rich guy, and I daresay most of them display their bodies as models in order to gain greater access to those males.

Generally, magazines oriented toward men display women in a way that maximizes the feminine potential for beauty, while allowing the models to subliminally convey the honest message that they are fully aware they are performing for guys to whom they wouldn’t give the pus out of a pimple in real life.

In a conversation we had earlier this evening, my old writer-editor friend Mr. Stetson affectionately described me as cynical. He was right, but I also recall the ancient saying that scratch a cynic and you’ll find a disappointed romantic. I qualify on both counts.

I think I’ll have to add that Christy Turlington cover to my collection...

I woke up with a headache, although my cold feels better...

It's sixty-four degrees outside, and just going out to pick up some breakfast, I worked up a sweat because I wore too heavy a jacket...

I watched another sword-and-sandal movie last night, Goliath and the Sins of Babylon. It was part of that Warriors DVD set I wrote about in my last entry. The story made little sense; it mixed up motifs from Greek, Roman, Babylonian, and European Middle Ages history in a bizarre visual stew...BUT...it was worth it for one image of a beautiful princess approaching the camera through lights and shadows--you can tell the cinematographer lavished care on that shot, and it was gorgeous; the princess looked like one of those little idols of wasp-waisted fertility goddesses come to life...there was also a solid chariot race that was clearly influenced by the 1959 Ben-Hur. Not in the same class, but what made this race memorable was that the princess was one of the charioteers--and the shots of her long black tresses blown back in the wind as she whipped her horses were fantastic...bodybuilder Mark Forest was good in the role of Goliath, too. He looked as if he could break chains, and he was noble, charismatic, and likable as he defended the downtrodden...so, although the movie was a dramatic mishmash, it had some good action scenes, vigorous sword fights, and that princess of course...

After I watched the movie I read for awhile in a book called The Ancient World in the Cinema, by Jon Solomon, a professor of classics...it extensively covers the history of the genre...hundreds of movies are discussed, and it's got loads of great pictures. His chapter on the Hercules "sword-and-sandal" genre is affectionate and hilarious too, and totally accurate in how he captures the absurdity of the movies and their entertaining charm. I kind of skip around in this book, but it's fun to read. Somebody once said there are two types of critics: one type likes to absorb the work into him or herself, and the second type likes to be absorbed by the work. Solomon strikes me as the second kind, which I prefer...he takes the various films on their own merits and does not have a rigid way of judging them. He accepts when a film makes changes in the historical record, if it serves a solid dramatic or artistic purpose...he clearly loves these types of movies. His analysis of the 1954 Edmund Purdom/Gene Tierney epic The Egyptian, which I saw years ago and only thought was so-so, makes me want to see it again. I want to re-evaluate it after reading how Solomon pointed out how accurately it depicted the ancient world of the Nile...so if you're interested in this genre, look for his book. The revised edition was published in 2001 by Yale University Press.

Ah, I wish I didn't have this headache. I took an Advil but my eyes hurt. I am typing with my eyes closed, only opening them periodically to check that I am not making gross spelling errors...

I saw a great picture of Lucy Liu in the New York Post this morning...what a gorgeous girl...these beautiful actresses have spoiled my ability to appreciate ordinary women. I am ruined.