Monthly Archives: February 2012

The Beauty of Your Youth: Clara Bow Receives a Kindness.

20 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by in Golden Age Hollywood, Sex Symbols

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Clara Bow

Hello, You Must be Going! Coop’s in the Armoire, and Gilbert’s at the door!

A while back I wrote of one tragic sex zombie, and referred to Clara Bow
as having written the script of that now all-too-familiar scenario:  Girl from unsettled family with ambitious/crazy mother and absent/worse father ends up in Hollywood and ignites the screen.  She becomes the hot ticket in town, going through the A-list men like tissues but somehow never finding affection– while her insecurities and anger slowly sabotage her career, ravage her beauty, and finally subsume her life force. Continue reading →

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Noir (et Blanc): Weegee and “The Loving Story” on HBO

11 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by in Documentary

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The Loving Story: HBO on Tuesday at 9

I spend my nights the way most New Yorkers do, embracing my apartment’s quietude, clutching its peacefulness to me the way an emphysematic does their oxygen–the nights are precious because the days are filled with so much noise and shouting and crowded sidewalks and no seat on the subway and people richer than anyone needs to be and those poorer than any nation should allow.  You learn a lot of zen, walking around this town.  My nightime quietude is also fragile; it’s nothing more than a decision reversible at any time, which renders it lovelier.  There’s loads I could be doing out at night, in the Naked City.  My apartment is on the 16th floor, and sometimes the night skyline beckons brightly.  Sometimes I remember Updike’s quote about New York being the only city which, even when you’re in it, glitters at a distance.  Sometimes I grab my coat and go out to see the creative, the fabulous, the city’s blind rush towards the future and (far more interesting to me) its reflection on the past. Continue reading →

Twentieth Century Tweets, Part II: Writers, Politicians, and the Telegram

05 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Authors

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Hunchback 1939 PosterA quick one today, as is suitable for the subject (content follows form as casting follows couch), though nothing as quick as ol Victor Hugo could apparently be, when paying per word.  . . but more on that later.

Politics make strange bedfellows, we always hear, and of course writers are strange just on their own.  The former set loves to stand in the center of a room making bold pronouncements while having nothing to say, while the other group tends to creep around the fringes, offended that no one notices their astute (muttered) asides.

Politicos retire and make millions drawling reductive tales into microphones, while authors are lucky if they grab sufficient shekels to support their bar tab. Bar tabs that are created by the author having to review books like, say, Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, knowing that out in the world people are doing more pleasant things.  Things like having hornets inserted in their nostrils, or bathing in raw sewage while Newt Gingrich leeringly massages their scalp.

“More sage oil, please!”

Continue reading →