I'm spending too much time idly surfing the Web lately...I looked up the obituary of Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira, who was the first tv horror host, and achieved a kind of cinematic immortality in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space...Ms. Nurmi died in January, but I didn't see an obit here in New York. Somebody told me about her passing so I looked it up on Wikipedia...also when I was looking up information about Madison Lacy, a glamour photographer back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, I stumbled across a blog called Six Martinis and the Seventh Art, which has images of the Busby Berkeley films Lacy did the still photography on...there are beautiful shots here of Berkeley's bizarre tableaux of dancers, presented on a striking black setting that accentuates the images' essential mysteriousness...check this site out...it has a lot of material related to films, so I'll be returning often...there's also one section that has photographs of the Art Deco architecture in Sacramento, California that really caught my eye...I love to check out buildings myself and I'm always looking up here in New York as if I were a tourist, and not a resident since January 1973...

The title "Six Martinis and the Seventh Art" comes from a pretty famous 1950s movie that for some reason, despite my wide knowledge of films, I've managed to miss...but check out the blog, the explanation of the title is there.

SixMartinisAndTheSeventhArt

I was so incredibly in the dumps yesterday I thought I was in quicksand...the only respite was when I was doing some writing here on the blog, and on a freelance project, and during a pleasant Japanese dinner with my writer/bodybuilder friend Rexx, who also gave me a belated Christmas present of a portable DVD player...but when I went home I fell back into the funk...

As it turned out, I was just in the throes of a form of mental labor. You see, the frustration I've been feeling in trying to complete that damned novel had poured over into my perceptions about my freelance work...I was trying to put together a project and it felt like I was going in circles...I finally had to tell myself to turn my damn brain off about two a.m. and just to go sleep...

Well, the project came together after about three hours of "in the flow" type work this morning, as it revealed itself in a serviceable shape which had been eluding me...I was afraid the muddle I'd gotten into with the novel was spilling over into other things too...thus does a lack of confidence seep into my other endeavors. Fortunately, I persevered, and seemed to have brought the freelance project to a satisfactorily creative conclusion. Maybe I was on the right track all along, but as with the novel, I was impatient, judgmental, and ready to flee the scene of what I mistakenly perceived as my ineptitude...

Thus under the placid exterior of a gray bald fifty-six year old man rages a maelstrom of...of...whatever.

At least I saw a pretty Asian girl on the street today, with lovely cherry-like lips...

I've been seeing a lot about this Diablo Cody, former stripper-now-screenwriter of the hit movie Juno. Haven't read what I've seen, though, or very little...too annoying. Makes me too envious. She wrote a blog, did a book, wrote a script, and now the movie has made more than a hundred million dollars...

This isn't what strippers are supposed to do. They're supposed to entertain Sir Cranky and his ilk, not live out HIS dreams...

I'm from the generation that thought women were supposed to be nurses, teachers, housewives, B-girls or strippers...well, maybe that's my father's generation, but this particular wormy apple didn't fall far from the tree...

I once got a dance from an Ivy League-educated stripper who thought she was hot stuff... she wasn't, and I think it was partly her education that got in the way of her dancing...in my experience, the best strippers are the ones who strip for their supper and know that's the only thing they can do well enough to buy the vittles and make the rent...anyway, Miss Ivy League was a published fiction writer who told me that she was going to be "one of the major voices of her generation" even as she took my money with a particularly smug demeanor...gee, I thought I was going to be one of the major voices of MY generation, and here I was, my voice but a whisper in the teeming throng of anonymous men, handing over Jacksons into her avaricious garter...to her credit, she did publish at least one novel I know of, and a book of stories, and to MY envy I once saw her interviewed about her writing on the very television screen hanging near the stage in the damn stripclub! I thought, "Fer crissakes, why is SHE on tv, and not me...?"

Because that's just the way it was, I guess...

Sometimes I think I try to justify all my behavior by writing as well as I can about it...and fifty years ago, people were interested in reading about the scamp-like behavior of men. Not so much anymore...women have become the scamps, and their exploits capture the "zeitgeist" like ex-ecdysiast Diablo Cody obviously seems to have captured it with her script for Juno...

Oh well. I soldier on. Maybe someday I'll get another lapdance and have something juicy to write about again...meanwhile, in the next few days I have to finish paying off last year's freelance taxes...so I don't think I'll be getting any dry-humping any time soon.

Just the other day it was the fifty-seventh birthday of the gal I moved to New York City with, way back in the day...I wonder why I remember dates like that, but I do...we drove here in a U-Haul van from our Midwestern college in early 1973. Our relationship only lasted until mid-1974...the last time I saw her was briefly on the street in June 1976, although I think I may have seen her in passing on the street a few years ago--but I didn’t feel like saying hello.

Back in ‘73, when “living together” was still equated with the “shacking up” of our parents’ Depression and World War 2-era generation, our families were shocked that we were sharing an apartment in Manhattan without matrimony, and they both informally sent emissaries to see what the deal was. I met her mother and uncle, and she met my father...later, she met my entire family when they visited New York to visit my father’s family in Brooklyn and New Jersey. My father was originally from Staten Island and Brooklyn, and moved to Chicago when he went to professional school...

My paternal grandmother, in Brooklyn, was angry that I was living with a non-Jewish girl...we didn’t talk for awhile because of this...

Anyway, that relationship came apart. I guess we just weren’t right for each other, or ready to stay together...she considered me a “male chauvinist” in the lingo of the time...this was when women were really feeling their oats as far as feminism was concerned...and I guess I didn’t like her sense of independence and lack of domesticity...I mean, I didn’t tell her to cook or clean, I really didn’t care much about it--I just wanted a little more warmth and less anger. What really bothered me was her constant preaching about how men were oppressing and subjugating women. We went to a very liberal college where that type of speechifying was in vogue...still, while what she said made sense to me intellectually and historically--only an idiot would have denied women have had a hard time getting a fair shake--her positions also had a crummy effect on my desire for her...I began to have problems getting it up...not good for the ego of a twenty-two year old...and this is when I first really became interested in going to strip clubs, then known as “topless go-go bars.” Those girls, dancing on the bar, sure didn't treat me like a cruel minion of the patriarchy...

Still, I guess I am a male chauvinist...I do think men are superior to women in certain ways...I think the world is both a good and shitty place, but I don’t think the shitty parts are necessarily because men per se have botched the job...it's more than human beings collectively have a hard time getting on together. I think much of the world’s created beauty comes from the male imagination, and the expression and sublimation of the male sexual urge through art, music, and literature...if that makes me a male chauvinist, so be it. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever treated women without respect, unless writing this qualifies as being particularly snotty. I also vaguely recall getting great praise for my cunnilingus...haven’t practiced that in awhile, though...

Coincidentally, I rarely got to go down on that girl I moved to NYC with. She had a perpetual yeast infection, and didn’t want me to put my mouth down there...in many ways, that relationship was a real turn-off. When we split up, I patronized hookers for awhile--and it was much more fun.

I hope this wasn’t a case of too much information...but I just felt like rambling...meanwhile, let me hurry down to the supermarket before they run out of that "three for ten dollars" Super Bowl special on six-packs of Natural Lite. A man's gotta save money when he can!

Well, I tried to work on my novel again today but the feeling of dissatisfaction and near-repugnance for the damn thing was still there from yesterday...so, since it's Saturday and I had a kind of trying work week (couldn't seem to concentrate much on that either), I cut myself a break...what did I do today instead? Went out for the breakfast special and got my daily dose of the city's tawdriness from the New York Post...emailed a couple of my friends...talked on the phone to my writer/bodybuilder friend Rexx...talked to my mother on the phone (she lives in Chicago) about the presidential primaries...went to Staples and got a cartridge for my printer...and soon enough it was dusk...

I watched the new DVD release of El Cid the other night. The story of the great leader and warrior of 12th century Spain who lead the fight against invading armies from North Africa, it was released in 1961 and starred Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren. I would give the movie a B+ for its story, and an A+ for its production. The B+ comes from the fact that the script had an epic stateliness and pacing which made it a bit on the chilly side emotionally, but the A+ is for the otherwise fluid direction by the late great Anthony Mann. He guided the enormous cast through crowd scenes, battles, duels with broad swords, as well as the intimate encounters between Heston and Loren. The sets are amazing in their detail, and the stirring and lyrical music by Miklos Rosza is magnificent, a score that I've listened to perhaps a thousand times over the years on vinyl, cassette, and now CD. I also liked Herbert Lom, one of my favorite character actors, as the head of the invaders, and Frank Thring as one of his more decadent henchmen. (Thring also memorably played a particularly unctuous Roman aristocrat in Ben-Hur, and the cruel chieftain who chops off Tony Curtis's hand in The Vikings. But I digress...)

The two-disc set has a great menu of extras, including a documentary about the making of the film, which dishes fascinating gossip about the tensions between Heston and Loren; a biography of Samuel Bronston, its producer, who was a visionary of new methods to hustle up money for independent productions; a piece on the career of Miklos Rozsa from his beginnings in Hungary to his triumphs in Hollywood and on the concert stage; and a featurette about Anthony Mann, full of affectionate anecdotes from his daughter. I have seen many of Mann's films in the last ten years, and he's up there with Hitchcock and Welles in my estimation; but I had never before seen or heard him interviewed, and it was wonderful to observe that the energy, creativity and vitality of his films were a direct expression of his gregarious, charismatic personality. Just from watching these clips of him, taken a few months before his sudden death in the late 60s, it was easy to see how much Mann loved his job. He also came across like one hell of a good guy whom his co-workers, and his daughter, adored. In his rough-hewn but sincere manner, much like something out of one of Jimmy Stewart's characters in a Mann western, I could sense Mann's own clarity of purpose. So if you want to see great vintage films, check out Anthony Mann's: Westerns like Winchester 73 and The Man from Laramie; films noir like Raw Deal and T-Men; and of course, El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire. And that's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his filmography--there are also his more obscure early gems which are all worth seeing out: titles like The Great Flamarion, with the foxy Mary Beth Hughes teasing Erich von Stroheim into murder and mayhem; Strange Impersonation, a bizarre plastic surgery thriller; and Railroaded, with the always feisty John Ireland, and Hugh Beaumont before he became an exemplar of American fatherhood in tv's Leave it to Beaver!