For me, the Thanksgiving weekend is a time of reflection, the reflection that many people seem to save for New Year's Day instead. I find, however, that the four days of this holiday weekend are perfect for creative introspection. Even if I spend Thanksgiving with family or friends, I use the travel time to think about the past year and where I'm headed. I find that I need four days of musing to put things in perspective.

My mood turned somewhat darker yesterday after I wrote here in the morning, and I spent most of the day away from my apartment in restaurants, bookstores, or Starbucks, re-reading a small pocket journal that I keep which has reflections and thoughts going back almost ten years. I went to a coffee bar in the Port Authority bus terminal near Times Square and sat there for about an hour, re-reading my old entries and, as usual, being both depressed and amused by the fact that my attitude towards life never seems to change very much. It's kind of gloom-inducing to see yourself making recommendations for action in 1997, many of which you still haven't been able to check off the To Do List...

I drank my coffee in the crowded bistro, which opens onto the bus terminal and has a steady flow not only of travelers but of the homeless and the mentally ill who wander in periodically, trailing some awful aromas that are at odds with the bouquet of the fine array of coffees...

I sat for a long time looking at my resolutions and suggestions for when I was 45 (in 1996-1997), and finally the lightbulb went off in my head: It's not my life that is problematic, my life is what I apparently like it to be; but it's my attitude towards my life that is the problem.

I always feel I have to "fix" my life, when the real problem is perhaps my feeling of dissatisfaction with it, a dissatisfaction that may well be more neurotic symptom than rational response to circumstances. I regret that I'm bigger on dissatisfaction than gratitude. Anyway, this is what I deduced yesterday, and of course all deductions are subject to change...

Sometimes I think there are other things I really would enjoy doing with my life (if I had the money, that is)--more travel, and making films. When I have dabbled in these activities, I have always enjoyed them and thought, "Why don't I do these things more often?" The answer is, I am addicted to my inertia, and to a steady status quo life on a certain safe plateau...doing my work, seeing my friends, talking to my family, visiting my strippers, watching my movies, and reading my books.

It also might well be that my other ambitions in life (travel, filmmaking) have been unfulfilled because I have been distracted by the insistent need of my loins to be entertained...by strippers, or the numerous variety of floozies I have spent many hours of my life pursuing...

Anyway, after briefly stopping back at my apartment after my cogitation session at the coffee bar in the Port Authority, I left midtown for Union Square and then the East Village, and the bookstores and Starbucks there...

I must have been pretty gloomy, because I could hardly see any pretty women in the vicinity, and for Sir Cranky not to see beauties downtown would be like an archaeologist going to Egypt and not noticing the pyramids...

I ordered a cafe mocha at the Astor Place Starbucks. It gets so frenetic and crowded that the baristas there now ask you for your name when you pay for your drink, so they can call out your moniker with your order so as to not get it mixed up with somebody else's. As I waited for them to cry out my name attached to "cafe mocha," I finally began to perk up as I noticed the beautiful soft white arms of the Asian girl whipping up the drinks. She had a pretty face under her baseball cap and worked with nimble efficiency. Nice hands.

Yes, I told myself as I sat at a table and perused my little journal again, dissatisfaction is the problem--your free-floating feeling of dissatisfaction...because in spite of my ups and downs financially, I basically have work, a place to live, friends and family and (when I choose to spend the money) strippers, movies to watch, books to read, so why am I always squawking?

Because it's a habit. Squawking is something I do...

When I finished my cafe mocha, I went over to Kim's Video on St. Marks Place. Finally I was able to locate the DVD set of the last two seasons of the George Reeves Superman tv series from the 50s, and at a good discount, so I bought it. This show is not an aesthetic experience for me, but more an emotional comfort food as I get older.

Finally I caught the subway home. Solitude may have brought clarity, but now it was time to watch Superman.

I was thinking again about that Japanese movie I saw last week, Exchange Students, the story of male and female high school students whose personalities exchange bodies. I wrote about it in the post, "Switching bodies, Japanese style..."

Anyway, what struck me in particular about the movie was the matter-of-fact tone that the film took towards the physical aspect of the story. The boy realizes he's now in a girl's body; the girl realizes the reverse. There are a few lightly comical moments, and then they try to deal with the situation in its various angles. The body angle was only one of many in the story. We also saw how the switch affected their schoolwork, their friendships, their status in the student pecking order, and their family lives.

And for a few heavy moments, it seemed as if they really weren't going to change back to their proper bodies. The film implied that the boy and girl had to achieve acceptance of what life brought them...

After making this point, however, the script did indeed change them back, to be true to the generally light tone of the movie.

But getting back to the matter-of-factness about the physical angle. Their bodies and souls shared equal importance, and the film paid attention to both. We saw how the switch affected their bodies, and their psyches, but there was no extra emphasis on one or the other.

A sense of balance was maintained. I found this attractive and heartening.

In our Western society, we often see the body at war with the soul, but this Japanese movie seemed to suggest that the body and soul work together in the fulfillment of a person's destiny.

If a male soul switches into a female's body, then he has to deal with it.

It's not the body AND the soul, or the body OR the soul, but the body WITH the soul.

I have, like many people in our society, often perceived of my body at war with my brain and heart. Falling for certain wrong women, or rather falling for women with a talent for doing me wrong (selfish, narcissistic women), I sometimes blamed my body (and the lusts of my body) for not letting my head (or heart) see clearly the traps I was getting into.

Body versus soul.

As in...strippers versus DVDs?

Yes, I perceive my fleshly desires (for strippers, or women or sex in general) as somehow opposed to my intellectual and aesthetic desires (for art as embodied, for example, in DVDs or movies in general). But perhaps if I think of my life more as a Japanese movie, rather than as a frenetic Hollywood one, I will be able to perceive my life not as a battle between my pleasures in strippers and DVDs, but as a tapestry that includes them both.

I need strippers (or just the company of women, period) as well as DVDs.

Since I've been a boy, I've always been fascinated by things that are "versus." Spartacus versus the Romans. Flash Gordon versus Ming the Merciless. James Bond versus Goldfinger. Truth versus lies. Reality versus fantasy.

But maybe things blend together, and the real task I have as a person is to see the place of all these different elements of my life which superficially seem to oppose each other, but actually balance each other out.

Of course, with my taste in the melodramatic, I won't be changing the title of my blog to "strippers and dvds."

It'll be a cold day in hell before I give up my pleasure in the juicy word "versus."

So there will always be playing somewhere in my consciousness the never-ending epic entitled, Sir Cranky versus the Minions of Sanity!

Thanksgiving was a wet one. I stayed home this year, just taking it easy rather than traveling to someone’s house for dinner. Because the weather was so cold and rainy, I passed on going outside to watch the Macy’s parade which passes within close walking distance of my apartment. I was feeling the touch of a cold and didn’t want it to get worse by my standing in the hard rain. However, when it occasionally stopped pouring during the day, I did manage to go out for short walks just to get some air.

I also watched another movie yesterday featuring the late Frances Drake--The Invisible Ray from 1936, with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. It’s available on DVD in The Bela Lugosi Collection from Universal Home Video. Miss Drake plays “Diana,” devoted wife to Karloff’s scientist “Janos Rukh.” Rukh pushes her away when he becomes poisoned by a new element he’s discovered; the merest touch of his hand is deadly. When Diana turns to another man for solace, Rukh, driven insane by his condition, vows revenge. He’s also enraged that his discovery is being used without his approval by fellow scientist Dr. Benet (Bela Lugosi) for medical treatments.

I’ve loved this movie since childhood. I first saw it in the 1960s on a family trip to Brooklyn to visit my grandparents. It was on New York tv’s Million Dollar Movie, a film series which showed the same flick every day for a week at the same time. I saw it five times during the visit, although I always missed the same little section because my grandmother called me to the table to eat my dinner. I gobbled down the food so I could get back to the tv, but it wasn’t until many years later that I finally saw the complete film.

Karloff’s character is a loner, more comfortable with his work than with other people. I identify with him in this regard. I too have a strong streak of workaholic hermit in me, a streak which seems to be increasing as I get older. If it's not heretical to say so, I didn’t mind being alone yesterday on Thanksgiving as a change of pace; in fact, I liked it. I might not like to do it every year, but yesterday it was fine. I did talk to my mother and sisters on the phone, however, in Chicago and Arizona. But getting back to The Invisible Ray--one of the things that makes the film still interesting to me after repeated viewings is that although Rukh is obviously much older than Diana, she admires him and loves him and is heartbroken that he drives her away. The guy she hooks up with seems more normal and suitable for her (age-wise, too), but the movie dignifies the relationship between Diana and Rukh by showing the real affection between them before things go bad, even if that affection is perhaps more companionable than erotic. Still, only a stone statue could not have been moved by the beauty of Frances Drake, so I’m sure Janos and Diana indulged in the pleasures of the flesh together some of the time in the "backstory" of the film...in this way, the movie rises above the frequent two-dimensionality of the horror genre to present a male-female relationship with shading and complexity.

It’s of course also a fun example of an early science-fiction thriller, with the once low key Rukh on a Jekyll/Hyde-like rampage, putting the touch of death on his imagined “enemies.” But last night I watched the movie mostly for Frances Drake. It’s uncanny how her beauty and voice lift my spirits. She’s very ladylike, but very sexy. And the characters she plays in both Mad Love and The Invisible Ray are intensely loyal, almost selfless women, but not angels or saints by any means. Full-blooded characters and all the more lovable for it.

Just look at my previous posts “Candy and Frances, together in my dreams” and “Thanks for things big and small” for links to pix of Miss Drake.

Geez, I sound like Dana Andrews in Laura, pining away for the image of a woman in a picture...

I certainly have a number of things to be thankful for today. Paramount among them is my kid sister Jenny's hard-fought recovery from cancer...her treatments have gone well, and knock wood, she will continue to be healthy.

There are other, smaller things to be thankful for, like the fact that last night I was able to regain my balance when I almost slipped on a manhole cover. I was walking up the rainy avenue to pick up some Chinese food, and if I had fallen in the way I was moving, I would probably have broken my arm. Can you hear a big sigh of relief? I just heaved it.

A cashier at the supermarket was very friendly and polite to me this morning. She used a coupon she had to give me a dollar off my purchases, saying, "It's a holiday, everybody deserves a break." What made this stand out for me is that the other day when I went in to buy a roll for my breakfast, she had been grumpy and sharp-tongued when I asked for a plastic bag as she rang up my purchase. "If you wait, I'll give it to you!" she snapped, and I very carefully replied, "I didn't mean to rush you," which was the truth. I guess she heard the sincerity in my voice. Sometimes the cashiers don't give you a second bag for the roll, but for some ridiculous reason I always feel kind of silly walking down the street with a roll in a clear plastic bag and prefer the store's yellow bag over it. Anyway, the cashier was clearly in a better mood today, which is something to be thankful for when I can so easily be put in a discordant mood by someone else's bad temper.

I watched a fun old movie last night on videotape called Murder at the Windmill, a 1949 British mystery that took place in the famous Windmill Theater. This was a place in London which presented "revudeville," a combination of vaudeville and nude tableaux of girls standing like statues in various timeless themes, like mermaids or ancient Egyptians. The tableaux got around the obscenity laws of the time, which allowed the presentation of naked "living statues" which didn't move onstage. The shows were very popular through the 30s and especially during World War 2. The motto of the theater was "We Never Closed," despite the dangers of the London Blitz. (According to Wikipedia, the motto was playfully teased by folks as, "We Never Clothed.") Anyway, this old movie was filmed in the theater and used many of the performers doing their acts. There wasn't any blatant nudity in the film, although one girl did a fan dance which showed from the side that she was wearing either nothing or a body stocking. The best part of the movie for me was the opening, when the dancers did a majorette style number to some jaunty music, and showed off their legs in cute short uniforms and cowboy style boots, kicking up their gams in unison. Quite fetching.

After that I watched Mad Love, a 1935 MGM horror movie where Peter Lorre plays Dr. Gogol, a demented and very creepy-looking surgeon who has a crush on the beautiful actress-wife (Frances Drake) of a famous pianist (Colin Clive). This movie recently was put on DVD in the Legends of Horror series, and it's been beautifully restored to give you not only the fantastic closeups of the incomparable Miss Drake, but all the weird shudders of Lorre in HIS closeups of murderous mania. It's easy to see why Lorre did NOT become a big horror icon after this movie, but rather a popular character actor in other types of films; he was just too damn real in the role, and didn't play it with the same leavening of mythological boogeyman-ism that Karloff and Lugosi brought to their great horror parts. No, Lorre's Dr. Gogol is just a little too authentic for comfort in Mad Love. Still, it's definitely worth a watch.

And this gives me a perfect opportunity to direct you to yet another picture of Frances Drake from shillpages.com's great assortment of actress photos, like I did a few days ago in another post, "Candy and Frances, together in my dreams." So click the link below to see Miss Drake as she looked in Mad Love...and then go enjoy your turkey!

FrancesDrakeAtSHillPages

I read the obituary of film director Robert Altman in the New York Times today. I recently saw his 1974 film California Split again at a revival showing at the Film Forum in Manhattan. Starring Elliott Gould and George Segal, it's a film about gamblers that I saw a few times when it was first released, and it holds up marvelously well today. Seemed as fresh as ever, which may well be partly because movies haven't advanced all that much in the last thirty-two years. Oh yeah, they've advanced technically with special effects and so forth, but not in the nimbleness of the realistic storytelling and improvised acting Altman oversaw in his 1970s classics.

But one film that was missing from the New York Times' Altman filmography was one of my top favorites, 1964's Nightmare in Chicago. It's a black-and-white police procedural about the search for a serial killer, and takes place mostly on the expressway in Chicago. Since I grew up in Chicago and have never lost my hometown pride no matter how many years I've lived in New York, I love movies that successfully capture the burg's ambiance--and Nightmare in Chicago does that in spades while telling a creepy story about a strangler (Philip Abbott) pursued by a gruff detective (Charles McGraw) who's being pressured in turn by his pompous, politically ambitious boss (Ted Knight).

The film has great location scenes in the sleazy downtown stripclubs of 60s Chicago, venues long since razed and which I only managed to visit myself in the late 70s. In one scene, the killer strangles a victim close to the stage while the girlie show is going on! Later, the pursuit of the killer through the rest stops and restaurants along the expressway make the movie look and sound like a prophetic forerunner of today's cop reality shows. When the killer is finally cornered, he's trying to make his escape in a truck he's hijacked along with a waitress he's kidnapped. Through his skilled direction, Altman was able to make you feel both compassion and horror at the killer's behavior. As the murderer is lead away blubbering and babbling in his complete insanity, dawn breaks over the expressway and it's a new day in Chicago.

The movie, of course, earned extra points by having film noir favorite, gravel-voiced Charles McGraw, playing the chief detective.

So if Nightmare in Chicago ever pops up on tv, check it out! And in the meantime, I hope everybody has a good Thanksgiving.