(The following rockabilly/blues tune is playing on a Hi-Fi during a scene of Baby Doll that consists of Mr. Vacarro chasing Baby Doll around the decaying Southern mansion.)

Shame shame shame on you Miss Roxy
Shame shame shame on you Miss Roxy
Shame shame... shame on what'choo done

Well... you made me sweat and talk
'Til I was skin & bones
You cause your lovers grief
Oh... look at me now

Shame shame shame on you Miss Roxy... that's right
Shame shame shame on you Miss Roxy
Shame shame... a shame on what'choo done
You know what ya done
You wanna bump
You wanna what
You wannna... ay ay ay

Yeeeaaahhh... well I was offered dice
I gav'em a touchin' hymn
But then the game broke a loose
Oh... you were the reason

Shame shame shame on you Miss Roxy
Yeah... shame shame shame on you Miss Roxy
Shame shame... a shame on what'choo done... ay ay ay ay

And now you're talkin' back
Well I can tell your plan
You oughta eat my words down on your knees... aar

Shame shame shame on you Miss Roxy
Yeah yeah yeah yeah... shame shame shame on you Miss Roxy
Shame shame... a shame on what'choo done... wellll...

Shame shame a shame on you Miss Roxy
Shame shame shame shame
Shame shame shame shame... yooh shame on you...
Shame on what'choo done... yeah
Shame shame... shame on what'choo done... who yeah who yeah... yeah...

I'm watching Baby Doll, a film written by Tennessee Williams, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Karl Malden, Eli Wallach, and Carroll Baker. It's about a twenty year-old woman who left school after fourth grade and now lives with her much older husband, although she sleeps in the dilapidated Southern mansion's nursery. The subject line is spoken by Baby Doll, herself, to the interloping visitor of Sicilian extraction, a Mr. Vacarro, from Corpus Christi.

The Catholic Legion of Decency succeeded in having the film withdrawn from release in most U.S. theaters because of their objections over its sexual themes. The movie was banned in many countries like Sweden, due to what was called exaggerated sexual content. The film was also condemned by Time, which called it the "dirtiest American-made motion picture that had ever been legally exhibited" (from Wikipedia)

Yet another excellent poem from The Writer's Almanac:

My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing

by William Kloefkorn

I have seldom loved more than one thing at a time, ( Read more... )

From The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of cartoonist and children's author William Steig, born on this day in New York City in 1907. His dad painted houses and his mom was a seamstress, both of them were socialist immigrants from Eastern Europe, and they thought it was great that he loved to draw and encouraged him from the beginning. He graduated from high school, then went to three separate colleges and dropped out of each of them. In 1930, when he was 23 years old, he wanted to help out his family who were having a tough time during the Depression, so he sold a cartoon to Harold Ross, the founder and editor of The New Yorker. Ross liked his style so much that he hired him as a staff cartoonist, and William Steig kept drawing cartoons and covers for The New Yorker until 2003, when he died at age 95, which made him the longest-running contributor that The New Yorker has ever had. He drew 1,600 drawings and 117 covers for the magazine.

And his work changed many times throughout those years. When he started, he chronicled everyday scenes of young kids fighting or playing or getting in trouble. For a while, he drew heavily symbolic cartoons of strange figures meant to represent the human condition, and then he went through a period of lions and dragons and mythical creatures. And then, in 1990, he wrote a book called Shrek!, and 11 years later, that book was made into an incredibly popular movie.

He said, "I enjoyed my childhood. I think I like kids more than the average man does. I can relax with them, more than I can among adults. … I think I feel a little differently than other people do. For some reason I've never felt grown up."

And, "I often ask myself, 'What would be an ideal life?' I think an ideal life would be just drawing."

art by Virgil Finlay




( more art by Virgil Finlay )

I looked at a supplementary disc that came with a DVD of The Silence of the Lambs. I bought it cheap last week at Office Depot, of all places. The supplements include a feature about the production of the film, most of which--something I didn't know--took place in Pittsburgh, or in nearby locations. One of the people who chose sites for filming observed that this city is full of idiosyncracies, hills, trees, and old houses. I had known part of it was filmed here, but one factoid that I find most impressive is that a horrific scene of Dr. Lecter locked in a cage and then escaping from it, was filmed in the middle of a large gallery at the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum, adjacent to the University of Pittsburgh campus. See movie-locations.com for more details.

I didn't like Rachel Getting Married. Too many boring, rich people in Connecticut, doing pretentious things. They don't seem real. They seem devoid of imagination, humor, and originality. Everything is a product, or consumer service to them. I suspect them of being Republicans, even the black characters, even the artsy types. I kept expecting Joe Lieberman to show up at the reception.

From The Writer's Almanac:

On this day in 1973, school officials in Drake, North Dakota, burned copies of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Kurt Vonnegut had served in WWII, and he was captured by the Germans and held as a prisoner in Dresden when the Allies bombed the city. For years, he tried to find a way to tell his story. Meanwhile, he went to graduate school in anthropology, worked at General Electric, got married and had three kids and adopted three more, and struggled to find his voice as a writer. His stories kept falling flat — too serious and straightforward. But finally he wrote his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, which was published in 1969. It was extremely popular and for the most part it got great reviews, but it has been banned many times, for being obscene, violent, and for its unpatriotic description of the war. ( Read more... )

(click image to enlarge)

My bedtime reading last night was Pete Hamill's 1994 A Drinking Life: A Memoir, opening with his Brooklyn childhood in the late 1930's and continuing through his middle years as a New York City journalist. I'm not that far along, up only to 1946 when Hamill was eleven years old and had taken a job delivering The Brooklyn Eagle to homes in his Park Slope neighborhood. He writes about coming home on his first day to an empty apartment--his laid-off father was out drinking and his mother was working at a hospital as a nurse's aide--and sitting down at the kitchen table, looking at the comics in his first, free newspaper. One strip that caught his eye was Invisible Scarlet O'Neil, who sounds pretty keen. I was so interested in finding out more about this disappearing woman that I slipped out of bed, slipped into sweats, and turned on my aging PC. And then I found Scarlet. Here's the first strip that ever appeared.

The book is quite good, and will also be my reading on the 41B and tonight again in bed.

Yes, I've been watching a lot of movies, lately. Good Dick is one recommended by Netflix after their database wizards analyzed my rental patterns and decided I might like it. And I do. It's about a youngish woman living in an unnamed American city (LATER: Make that Los Angeles.) who has a habit of visiting a neighborhood video store and renting numerous erotic films, day after day. A youngish male clerk working there is intrigued by her, and finds his way into her life. Both are sexually and emotionally stunted, but they do manage some degree of a relationship with each other. It stars Scottish filmmaker Marianna Palka and Jason Ritter (son of John). It's also directed by Palka. Recommended.

I'm watching Million Dollar Baby for the first time.

Hilary Swank's character of a boxer girl is from Theodosia, Missouri, which seems to be a real place.

LATER: This movie was good, but not great. I found it overly sentimental and the the lead characters to be overly desexualized. I also found the portrayal of the boxer girl's family from rural Missouri to be way too stereotyped as ignorant hillbillies.

Joe is such a great-looking kid.

Fantastic whiskers.

And he holds down papers on my grading table.

Even if they are chain bookstores, it means that thousands of more people will not have a place to go and peruse, and hopefully buy books: Waldenbooks scheduled to close by January 2010.

This is a very odd story, so far. It's sounding like there was more than shooter--but that's still not clear.

(CNN) -- Eleven people plus a gunman were killed and 31 were wounded after the gunman opened fire at Fort Hood in Texas on Thursday, a Fort Hood spokesman said.

The gunman was a soldier, and two other soldiers have been detained as suspects, said the spokesman, Lt. Gen. Bob Cone.

Cone said more than one shooter may have been involved.

(For the full story from CNN, click here.)

LATER: It's being reported that the one shooter who was killed was an Army major, and also a psychiatrist.

I'm pleased that Natalia Rudiak will soon be my new representative on the Pittsburgh City Council. She seems to be a good one, and I think we will be hearing from her for a very long time.

I've put together a new poll but I'm getting the following error message when I try to preview it:

Poll Creator
[Error parsing poll: Text inside an lj-pi tag must be between 1 and 255 characters. Yours is 256.]

What is the lj-pi tag? I'm confused. My poll is ready to be posted, but I can't get past this error message.

A Serious Man has arrived in Pittsburgh.

I plan to see it.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose is really quite good. Tom Wilkinson as an exorcising priest and Laura Linney as his defense attorney make it close to great.

LATER: Someone should crop a userpic out of this picture.

Poll #1478487 When Vegetarians Make Out with Omnivores - An LJ Poll
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35

What is your current meat-eating, or non-meat-eating status?

If you are a vegetarian or a vegan, would you make out with a person who eats meat?

If you are an omnivore or absolute carnivore, how considerate are you of a make-out partner who happens to be vegetarian or vegan?

I'm amused that an ad for Science Diet for Dogs appears on the same page as Ambrose Bierce's short story, Oil of Dog.