Sunday, August 7, 1994Hygiene is vastly overrated, and should be seen as mostly optional.
Brush your teeth before kissing someone, and take a shower before you
start stinking. That’s enough.
♦ ♦ ♦
It’s Stanley Kubrick week at the Castro, and today’s double feature was excellent. The Killing is about a race track heist, with the wonderful
Elisha Cook Jr as a dopey everyman gone bad, and Marie Windsor as a
classic doublecrossing dame. There’s campy dialogue by Jim Thompson —
“After all, if people didn’t have headaches, what would happen to the
aspirin industry?” — and hokey narration, and as an added bonus, one of
the bad guys looks exactly like Patrick Buchanan. It’s top-drawer noir,
well worth seeking out.
Killer’s Kiss was Kubrick’s feature-length debut, and it
remains an absolute knockout. A washed-up boxer gets beaten silly in the
ring, and then he rescues his pretty blonde neighbor from her sleazy
boss, and she tells the boxer about her tragic life, and then she gets
kidnapped, and then it gets complicated. It’s a story that works better
on the screen than trying to type about it a few hours later. It works great on the screen, though.
The story behind Killer’s Kiss is almost as enjoyable as the
movie itself. According to the Castro’s program notes, Kubrick — very
much a rookie — wanted to make a movie that would prove he could make
movies. What he did was, he compiled a list of set-piece scenes he felt
confident he could film with style — a boxing match, a ballet, young
love, a back alley murder, a rooftop chase, etc. After making his list,
he then wrote a script tying all those scenes together. It’s a
crazy way to make a movie, but it sure worked. Some of the
cinematography (also by Kubrick) is stunning, like the shot of the boxer
looking at his goldfish, and the goldfish looking back.
♦ ♦ ♦
I had a bowl of chili from a can for dinner, and found a long blonde
hair in it. My own hair is brown and short, and I live alone, and since
I’ve lived here there have been no blondes in this apartment. There’s a
blonde working the assembly line at the Dennison’s factory, though.
♦ ♦ ♦
There was a brief phone call with Maggie. It was a meandering
conversation that neither thrilled nor bored me, and I’m becoming more
and more certain that she’s an ex.
Then we hung up, and I took a dump, and that was the weekend. It’s
over already. Damn, that was quick. Tomorrow I have to go back to work
and do stupid things all day, surrounded by stupid people, or people who
aren’t stupid but pretend to be, like I do, 40 hours a week, because
that’s the only way to survive the job without losing your mind.
This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The
opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions
now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance
is advised.
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