There are no men alive today, save religious ascetics, who are not mesmerized by a women in high heels. I am not talking about the standard one half inch shoe that women wear to work. The fascination is directed at what, by husbands when not in the presence of their wives, are called “fuck me” pumps. Like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography (“ I can’t define it but I know it when I see it”) FMP’s are incapable of an adjective but about as recognizable as a portrait of Winston Churchill with a stogie hanging out of his mouth. And a lot more fascinating.
Be they red or black, the effect is universal. They are to a mature man's eyes what a Playboy centerfold was to a 16 year old adolescent's back in 1964. But it is not the same. Why? What is it about the high heeled vixen that strikes a man's juices the way an electric prod grabs a cow's attention? Bikinis, bras, mini-skirts, lipstick, even full nudity aren't as alluring. In fact, they are downright boring, especially in an age when sexual fantasies, perverse and otherwise, are just a few clicks away.
I think I figured it out if that is the correct way to put it. The woman in FMP's offers something that the naked eye can never provide: mystery. You don't see her naked but your mind does. And that provides more sexual scintillation. Much more. You can imagine yourself looking at those stilettos from the bottom up as they are dipped into your torso. Any woman who adorns them emits an air of danger that is intoxicating to the imagination. She could love you or hurt you but she could definitely chew you up and spit you out and then move on to the next poor soul without blinking an eye. Years ago, probably thousands, there developed an aphorism about women: the weaker sex. How unperceptive. Physically, yes. Psychologically? Never in a million years. Marilyn Monroe said it best: give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world! Touché Marilyn.
The chief (and perhaps the only genuine) charm of women is seldom mentioned by the orthodox professors of the sex. I refer to the charm that lies in the dangers they present. The allurement that they hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating. To the average man, doomed to some banal and sordid drudgery all his life long, they offer the only grand hazard that he ever encounters. Take them away and his existence would be as flat and secure as that of a milch-cow. Even to the unusual man, the adventurous man, the imaginative and romantic man, they offer the adventure of adventures. Civilization tends to dilute and cheapen all other hazards. War itself, once an enterprise stupendously thrilling, has been reduced to mere caution and calculation; already, indeed, it employs as many press-agents, letter-openers, and chautauqua orators as soldiers. But the duel of sex continues to be fought in the Berserker manner. Whoso approaches women still faces the immemorial dangers. Civilization has not made them a bit more safe than they were in Solomon's time.
H.L. Mencken, The Incomparable Buzzsaw
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]
I have heard it said, but don’t remember where or by whom that every generation thinks that history began the day they were born and that they invented sex or at least its enjoyment. My response, 43 years ago at 20, and with my biting sarcasm was: “it didn’t?" Mencken is correct. Technology has never altered the dynamic between a man and a woman. I define historical progress as a steady if uneven reduction of risk. That 18 year old kid shipped off to Japan in 1942 only to return in 1945 and find his true love betrothed to a stranger felt the same pain as a similarly situated soldier during the Peloponnesian War.
Which topic brings me to a most unheralded institution in American culture: the strip club. Call it a "tittie" bar, gentlemen’s club, topless bar, go go bar, or whatever. Non-existent is the American man who has never ventured into one of these fantasy emporiums and not walked out under the delusion that the flirtatious smile coming from the model on stage was anything but sincere. If you meet a man who claims otherwise, you have met a bald faced liar. Time has done nothing to alter this naïveté. I remember my introduction to the genre. 1975. The Admiral Wilson Boulevard. The Oasis Motel. Next to Camden, New Jersey, a perfect backdrop for this prurient imagery.
Minnie’s was across the street.
It’s claim to fame was hosting Miss Vicky sometime in the mid ‘70’s after Tiny Tim married her on the Johnny Carson show. It was one of the most viewed farces of the decade. And after the inevitable divorce, she appeared here as a “celebrity.” Her 15 minutes of fame.
These places were seedy and cheap. But boy were they fun. At least the dancers were real. Unlike the dolled up girls and glitz palaces of today, getting “up close and personal” meant sucking on a left tit that tasted like a cheap cigar butt along with a whiff of stale Old Spice after-shave worn by the guy who stood next to you 20 minutes earlier pissing in a urinal. And the girls had lives. Instead of a silicone goddess lying to you about being a poor struggling single mom a la Striptease,
you got a story about a biker boyfriend who shared her with his outlaw friends Hell's Angels style in some shitbox trailer home next to a blasting site. All while they drank cheap vodka and smoked pot. And unlike filmdom's nouveau strippers, she admitted she loved it. Call it authenticity. I prefer the no bullshit brand. Honest. Sincere. Don’t pretend to be something you are not. So here's a salute to yesterday in all its bawdaciousness!
I prefer the no bullshit brand. Honest. Sincere. Don’t pretend to be something you are not. So here's a salute to yesterday in all its bawdaciousness!
I wrote two previous posts about Miami and railroads. Not the kind of stuff you will find in Variety or GQ. Railroads are not the only dark side of the Magic City that is kept from the public eye. Here is a collection of what you will find west of Biscayne and south of Wynwood after the sun sets.
Not pretty but better off being honest than selling something that does not exist.
Sex appeal went out of style years ago. As with most cultural trends, pinpointing an exact date and time is not easy. However, I think I can give this one a good guess. December 1953. And why is that? It is easy when you think about it. Counter-intuitive even. Too much of anything is a bad thing. Vices are only fun when they are consumed in limited quantities and with a healthy appreciation of the dangers that lie in overindulgence.
Yup. That is when Playboy came out and, pardon the pun, stripped away what should have stayed in your head and put it all on paper.
And that is when things started to go bad. Pop historians, almost by unanimity, will tell you the opposite. The narrative goes something like this: America was a sexually repressed society. The censors were peeking through bedroom keyholes to enforce conformity and punish the libertines. Hollywood censored movies all in the name of protecting the young and innocent from the depredations of pornography and bad manners. The Catholic Church had a list of forbidden movies. The entire panoply of illicit literature and conduct was secreted in an underworld of seedy whorehouses and dangerous bars. There was a code of conduct that most “decent” Americans were expected to follow. Anyone not towing the line was labeled a sexual deviant. Think Lenny, The Night They Raided Minsky’s, and The Music Man. There are many others. The Kinsey Report is a required appendage to this historical fantasy. Only with the end of the Eisenhower presidency and the advent of JFK and his Camelot propaganda machine were Americans freed from the shackles of sexual constraint and their Babbitt like existence. What was better kept between one’s ears was now bombarding TV, movies and music. About that there can be no dispute. It happened very slowly and then very quickly. Playboy morphed into Hustler which brought us pornography that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. Ditto music. Think not? Check out the lyrics to Brown Sugar, The Rolling Stones classic and you wonder how it every made it past the censors. No way could that song ever get past the PC police in this supposed enlightened era. Let's compare some choice videos from the old era.
I submit the thoughts passing through any man’s mind while listening to this music were more erotic than anything some cheap peddler of smutty lyrics could ever conjure up and throw on a music sheet. The date when music started the descent? It is easy to say Woodstock but that event, more memorialized after the fact than celebrated during the event. But it was more of a warning of what lay ahead of the era of cultural nihilism: overdoses, violence, and sickness, all in an orgy of drugs, sex, and rock and roll. For me, the transitional moment, caught so perfectly on tape, was sometime in 1971. I was babysitting for a neighbor and turned on something called Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert. It was a regular feature every Saturday night at 11:30. And here is what forever changed my attitude towards black women. The only word I can think of is RAW!
Don’t get me wrong. I love Tina Turner. One of the greatest entertainers of all time. Proud Mary was a classic. It pushed the envelope of music, video and sex to a very appropriate edge but the progression of what followed was a bathos of musical pornography with no redeeming virtue. Check this out and imagine your daughters or granddaughters being inundated with this trash non-stop.
And the same could be said of movies. There is (or at least was) a certain shock value of seeing a woman butt ass naked in front of you. But novelty very quickly turned to boredom which generated more graphic images of violence and sexual depravity. But this bottoms out as the senses are dulled to the point of indifference. What was once left to the imagination has been cheapened. Sex appeal was never about raw sexual acts free of any moral constraints. Quite the contrary. Check Rita Hayworth out on this clip from Gilda
And this one.
Or Jon Hamm playing the dapper Don Draper of Mad Men fame
Ask yourself. What is sexier? Engaging in this dialogue with a curvaceous women or watching her prancing around naked in front of you with her tongue hanging out and $20 bills in her thong? Correct. It’s not even close.
And, of course, the TV ads of the era.
The operative word here is restraint. Knowing when to say when. Better to have 3 ounces of brandy and a nice cigar than chugging a whole bottle and suffocating yourself with 5 While Owls. The point can be summed up perfectly with this dialogue. I can’t remember the movie or the actors but I remember the words:
Man: What took you so long?
Woman: I was putting on my make up.
Man: But you do not look like you have any makeup on.
Miami is not known for its dark images. When one thinks of railroads, the Sunshine State is not on the list. And that is the way the Chamber of Commerce wants it to be. When the average rust belter thinks of Florida, and more particularly, South Florida, these are the preferred images or, ahem, propaganda.
Contrary to popular conceptions parroted by the media, there are people in Miami who do not own $100,000.00 sports cars or live in mega million dollar manses along the ocean.
Better to believe the illusion than experience the reality. And a hard, cold reality it is. Forty years ago, Miami Dade County or "Dade" County back then, built or created what every large American city thought was the panacea to a perceived urban problem: congested highways. Why not provide a rail system from the suburbs to the city and persuade (i.e. hoodwink) gullible taxpayers into paying for such a boondoggle. The local, state, and federal government would provide a small subsidy and the fares would cover the rest. Optimism was high. After all, every mass transit rail project in America has become a rat hole down which is sucked trillions of dollars so why let the truth get in the way. So Metro Rail became Metro Fail. And with good reason. Americans love their cars. Almost as much as government planners love to control people's lives. There are of course secondary and tertiary benefits to mass transit not reflected in the raw costs. But Miami's version of mass transit provides some images not normally associated with the Magic City. Let's face it. Can you imagine Don Johnson in the '80's or the Miami Heat of recent vintage posing around these lovely railway visuals?
Railroads present an interesting portrayal of the American landscape. Danger, grime, loneliness, isolation, anomie, and a sense of foreboding are all themes one sees in pictures, movies, and music. There are, of course, happy scenes: The Little Train That Could comes to mind but for every child like cartoonish song, there are ten Strangers On A Train,
The Commuter,
or Union Station
that bring it all back to fear and murder. Even cartoons are not spared.
And for every Chattanooga Choo Choo sung at a 1940's high school re-union, there is this melodic descent into hopelessness and despair:
Nothing destroys your inner fortitude more than knowing you are locked up for the next 20 years while watching a train full of rich people drinking coffee and smoking cigars as they chug past your 5 X 5 prison cell oblivious to your existence.
Ditto the literary side. One of my favorite novels ever is The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton, he of Jurassic Park and Andromeda Strain fame.
And the most famous name associated with high finance is not JP Morgan or David Rockefeller but Jesse James.
Go figure.
I am sure there are positive images of railway mode of transportation but you have to look for them. Here are a few sampling and you see why happiness and trains are not often if at all uttered in the same breath.
No matter. The message is clear: something bad is about to happen and there is nothing you can do about it. Call it fate. But all is not lost.
About as beautiful a woman as you will ever see! The railroad tracks are the second most dangerous image in this picture. And I like it that way. (yelusworkout.com).
If you like your coffee black and your scotch straight up and don’t believe
anything good will ever come out of life, this movie is for you. Taut, dark and
foreboding, think Goodfellas without the jukebox hits being piped into the
background and, instead of The Hawaiian Cottage filled with mafia wannabes
wearing dapper shirts, the impetuous violence takes place in a cheap 24/7 coffee
shop that refuses to hand out complimentary cream. It is all mob lore from the
bottom of the food chain.
The premise of the movie is never outwardly stated but
can be figured out very quickly. Nicky played John Cassavetes is a loser of the
first order who, for unknown reasons, has run afoul of the Philadelphia mob and
is on the lam for his life. Peter Falk as Mikey is his supposed best friend who
pretends to be trying to save him but is in reality doing double duty as an
advance scout for the hit man played brilliantly by Ned Beatty. All the players
have no redeeming social virtues.
Thus we start out with Cassavetes hiding out
in a sleazy hotel room in South Philly. He is on the verge of suicide, sensing
full well that his time is up. Falk tracks him down. There the cat and mouse game
begins. Falk is helping Cassavates elude Beatty but in reality is keeping in
phone contact with him but manages to keep one step ahead of Beatty by
misleading him. Remember, this is all pre-cell phones when one had to find a pay
phone and keep track that way. Almost impossible but very convenient if you are
trying to keep 30 minutes between you and your target.
The “window dressing” is
excellent: cheap bars and luncheonettes, big, old, oversized Cadillacs, cheap
perfume infested hotels that are nothing more than temporary shack ups for drunkards, addicts, and low
rent whores and their clientele. The streets are dark and barren.
After all,
what decent person would be roaming the streets of a working class Philadelphia
industrial area at this time of night? To really appreciate the flavor of the
movie, one has to examine Beatty character. A purported hit man. Not! Instead of
a Luca Brasi lookalike or someone who walked out of a Graham Greene novel, we
get Beatty as Kinney.
He represents all that was bad about the 1970’s: bad hair,
even worse clothes, and a personality that was custom made for the era: a middle
aged, overweight divorcee, who looks like he has spent one too many nights in a
cheater’s bar trying to pick up sexually deprived women of his ilk. All without
success of course!
As Mikey and Nicky stumble their way around town, they visit
a neighborhood prostitute, played to almost perfection by Carol Grace. She is
vulnerable, having been used and abused by every low life in the neighborhood.
Her face has fear and loathing of men written all over it. Whatever beauty she
once had has long been drained from her and her eyes reflect it. In other words,
life for her, as with every other character, is an inevitable road to disaster.
For sheer foreshadowing of the unsubtle variety, we have our two protagonists
riding a bus on their way to visit Nicky’s mother’s grave. They discuss life and
death in a banal way, which is the only way they know how.
Of course, the
graveyard is life’s last destination. Another honorable mention about an F word
that was not thrown around: family. Well, Nicky, after having it out with Mikey,
Nicky attempts to force his way into his estrange wife’s house. Fearing him as
much as loving him, she reluctantly lets him in. Good sense grabs her by the
ankles, and out goes Nicky.
His last stop? Mikey’s house, a surprisingly
well-maintained house in a posh section of Philadelphia. There we meet Mikey’s
wife, Annie, played by Rose Arrick. After Mikey gets home, Nicky knocks on the
door and Rose, knowing what is coming and following Mikey’s orders, refuses to
let him in. Beatty is a block away.
Then, there is light! Sunshine! Odd, until
this point I thought the movie was in black and white but color it was. The next
minute is predictable: Nicky gets gunned down in the style of February 14, 1929.
THE END.
Recommendation: A definite thumbs up. The interaction between Falk and
Cassavetes is superb. Not a wasted scene. As a footnote, Elaine May directed the
movie. It still is a rarity to have a female film director.
