Movie Millisecond: Gracious

B @ T’s (Blake Edwards, 1961).

Dip, dive, socialize. Get ready for the Saturday night.

via.

Hitting a luxe banquet with wonderful old friendoh the Axeman tonight (aka Misterr Anndersonnn: say it in the Matrix voice). Free food, open bar — really fun company that he works for. And as for attire, am I Hep-burning it up? You bet your sweet Aunt Fanny I am. It’s the only way to fly.

via.

Have a great night out there and I’ll catch you on the flip!

First B@T’s Movie Moment of 2011. Balloons just fell all over us all.

Burroughs Month and Movie Millisecond: The cake is a lie, but the whiskey is very, very real

The whiskey is not a lie.

Auds as Ms. Holly G in B @T’s (Blake Edwards, 1961).

Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. “I don’t have any whiskey,” may be a fact, but it is not a truth.

(Burroughs, William S. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: Seaver Books, 1986.)

I get this one. And in my case, when I say, “I don’t have any whiskey,” if I emphasize the “I,” I would actually be properly vitalizing the fact with the truth: I positively never, ever have whiskey because I hate-hate-hate the stuff. Can barely stand to think about it, let alone have it around. I don’t have whiskey is a truth. For me. I think I’m getting it right.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: “Your Friend, Holly Golightly”

And I said, “What about Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”

I don’t know how the weather is faring in your town but in my neck of the woods, I’m hot. Once I’ve finished cooking up preliminary materials for an orientation I’m putting on for the Scamps this week, I’m sliding down to C-town to swim with Paolo, Miss D, Gorgeous George and Corinnette — and to wish Corinnette all the best as she goes away for college. Catch you on the flip!

Screw you, Thursday

Thursday actually is my least favorite day of the week, and has been since I was a kid.

I also don’t like the month of November and I hate the numbers eleven and five — especially five. It’s so stupid and five-y. Five, your shit is tired. It’s so smug. Five is a smug number.

The origins of these strong negative associations are lost to me, maybe some kind of childhood thing that is now shrouded in mystery. In any case: Thursday. I hate how it even looks. Screw you, Thursday.

Never throw out anyone

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. — Audrey Hepburn.

We’re having lunch with the o.g.b.d. again today. I really hope it goes well. I mean, it went well last time, actually: the bottle only concerned me because I don’t want him to be feeling dissolute or inconsolable in general, and I know he’d hate to accidentally go too far in front of kidlet. That would hurt her image of him, and I know ultimately he would regret that terribly. I don’t want either of them to have to go through that, but particularly not him, because he does not need to hate himself on top of everything else he must be feeling right now with his breakup with his wife. I don’t want him to have to deal with that and compound any unhappiness he is already having to go through.

I want to tell him that I know what it’s like to have that inconsolable sense that life, taken straight, is intolerable; the feeling that you have to physically “take the edge off” of the knife blades of your thoughts and shield yourself from the “muchness,” the crazy coming-at-you-from-all-sides agony of crushing reality. I know the necessity of the filter: how it is to shield yourself and to see things through a veil in order to keep from seeing all of it at once, because you couldn’t take that because you feel too deeply about all things, and fearing the overwhelming magnitude of the difficult emotions you’re working through.

We have always been two peas in a pod in our way of being lost in this universe, oversensitive and underattenuated to proper socialization, and so of course we have brought suffering on ourselves, and of course we have both of us had terribly abusive relationships with anything that will alter our moods. I understand that alcohol and drugs are a handy, popular, easily attained crutch (long-term health and usefulness: debatable; short-term-pain-dulling and turn-to-able-ness: undeniable) that can help you come at your emotions sidewise, do that little crab scuttle over to them that keeps them from smacking you in the face and knocking you out. I know that.

But I know that it doesn’t work forever. There is always an ugly day that you face on the natch and you have this gnawing desperation and anxiety that mounts and mounts, and everything is unbearable and your eyelids are crawling and you just want to scream — but then that day passes. And then the next one, and another, and pretty soon you get in to the swing of mainly sobriety and it is not so bad, and you have the side benefit of not despising yourself quite so much.

I have no plans and particularly no grounds to get preachy: I just want him to know that I get it, and that he will want to set boundaries for himself around the kidlet, or he will regret it and hate himself all the more later. And I want him to know that I’m here for him. That’s a trite expression that in this case means I am physically willing to go pick him up from somewhere, or spend a long while on the phone, with disregard for personal inconvenience, talking him down from a ledge. I am actually here and present for him in a way that I never was when we were together, and I think that we have chanced in to a situation where we have a unique opportunity for renewal and redemption: where we can truly both benefit from one another’s company.

Please send vibes that I will find the right words and the convincing gestures to express to him my very ardent sincerity and my genuine love and concern without saying anything that turns him away.

NSFW November: Joan Staley, Miss November 1958

Fresh from the pages of Playboy, the lovely and talented Joan Staley is your Miss November, 1958.

Photographed by Ron Vogel and Lawrence Schiller

A model, actress, and all-around good-time gal, Ms. Staley is the Playmate to whom I referred earlier this month when covering Donna Perry (Miss November 1994; if you have been following along, you may remember her as the naked preppie). Joan Staley is Donna Perry’s grandmother-in-law.

So I’m putting this post together, and I keep thinking, “This chick looks really familiar,” and finally, when cruising the imdb, I realized why. She had much darker hair, but she was totally in the classically rad Don Knotts movie The Ghost and Mister Chicken.

Like that alone would not be awesome enough, she had an uncredited walk-on in the unescapable, ubiquitous, widely-known film version of B’fast @ T’s featuring one Audrey Hepburn.

AND, last but never, ever least, Joan starred as Okie Annie (get it?) in two episodes of Batman in 1966: “Come Back, Shame,” and “It’s How You Play the Game” (Season 2, Episodes 26 and 27; original air dates November 30, 1966 and December 1, 1966, respectively).

As Okie Annie, Joan Staley portrayed the hayseed moll for Shame, a cowboy-redneck type villain hellbent on creating a truck so fast that it can outrun the Batmobile. Shame was played by Cliff Robertson, most recently seen as Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben in the new Spider-Man franchise films. Wow! Holy wonderful career in my book!

According to her Playboy blurb, she was born in an airplane between France and Germany. That sounds okay until you consider it was 1940 and she was the daughter of a Navy chaplain, so it was probably not exactly a commercial flight. Crazy.

These days, Joan is a counselor who specializes in outreach programs for troubled teen boys with a group called Chaplain’s Eagles, and she is also very active in consumer affairs. The imdb says that she served 2 years as national director of Fight Inflation Together, which, according to a random book on Google books about Gerald Ford, is a “women’s consumer group.” The book refers to the group in the context of a successful meat boycott mounted by Fight Inflation Together in 1973. No word on if they are still together and fighting inflation today.