Well, dear readers, here it is, Friday, the end of yet another work-week or, at the very least, the end of another week-work. As per usual, this week just flew by, like a gazelle doing the ten yard dash. Yesterday began with a visit from Leo the Art Dealer. Leo is a favorite of mine – he mostly carries original illustration art that was used for nourish paperback and pulp covers. He always has the most amazing stuff. Since there were quite a few items in my own collection that I don’t have wall space for in the new home environment, we ended up doing a little trading. So, I was able to get three brand spanking new pieces and he took away a lot of stuff I don’t really care about. I must say that I have made money or come out well in trades with every single piece of illustration art I’ve ever purchased. My three new pieces are very interesting and I’ll be posting photographs of them as soon as the two I had to get framed are back on Saturday afternoon. The best of the lot is a Redbook magazine illustration by the great Walter Baumhofer from 1945 (I now have to hunt for that issue) – it’s a beautiful image of a red-headed babe and a man. Next was a wonderful and very interesting Dell paperback book cover from 1958. The book is entitled A Bullet for a Blonde. The cover tagline is: She died the way she lived – hard and fast. The image of the blonde is so unusual and so unlike the cover illustrations of that era (especially on Dell paperbacks), that I had to have it. I think you’ll agree that it is very striking. The third is a cover from an unknown paperback, quite a large painting of a girl sitting on a beach. He had another great cover painting by Mort Kuntsler, but I didn’t want to put out any cash, so I passed on it – it was a babe on a bed with a gun. Really great painting and the book it’s from is so lurid the cover tagline invokes murder, rape and incest, not necessarily in that order.
After Leo, the Art Dealer left, I shipped off my script to the producer, and then picked up my friend, Miss Barbara Deutsch and her son’s girlfriend, Natalie, and we went off to see the taping of her friend Kevin Spirtas. He was doing this taping to use as a promotional tool for his nightclub act – to get bookings. He sang five songs and I must say, he has a powerhouse voice. One song was from The Boy from Oz, the show in which he stood by for Mr. Hugh Jackman and never got to go on once. I have no idea what his club act actually is, but if he gets a good director to work with him, I think he could have quite a good show. I then came back to the home environment for a few minutes, then went off to ship some packages. This weekend I have to send out the few hard-copy invites to the New York party and book signing (for people whose e-mail addresses I don’t have) – the rest of my folks will get them via e-mail. I ate some foodstuffs, and then tried to watch My Little Chickadee on DVD. I enjoyed what I saw of it (about fifty minutes worth), but I found my concentration drifting so I figured I’d finish it tomorrow night. I must say it was not the laugh riot I was expecting – maybe I’d like it better if there was an audience. W.C. Fields is funny, certainly, but Mae West seemed very subdued and her one-liners didn’t seem especially racy or funny to me. I’m looking forward to seeing The Bank Dick and It’s a Gift when I’m done with that. Also checked out the new Gone with the Wind DVD, and the image is truly lovely – not necessarily what you’d expect in this modern age of color, but very true to what three-strip Technicolor looked like back in 1939 (happily, they had an IB Tech print that Technicolor had used as a check print back then, so they were able to have a really good reference to match to). I was disappointed that the highly-touted two-hour documentary was the same old documentary we’ve all seen, made back in 1988. But, there’s plenty of other extras to take your time up with. I shall endeavor to slog through the film and maybe I’ll even enjoy it this time.
Well, why don’t we all click on the Unseemly Button below because I have many things I must attend to today, don’t you know.
Now wait just a darned minute – I do believe we’d all just better put on our pointy party hats and our colored tights and pantaloons, we’d all better just break out the ham chunks and the cheese slices, we’d all better just dance the Hora or the Locomotion because I do believe we’ve got us a birthday to celebrate here at haineshisway.com. Yes, it’s the birthday of dear reader Jason. So, let’s give a big haineshisway.com birthday cheer to dear reader birthday boy Jason. On the count of three: One, two, three – HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR READER BIRTHDAY BOY JASON!!!
Last night I ate some halvah. I have halvah very infrequently, and when I do I always get nauseous. I like it, but then I get nauseous. Therefore, I shall eat no more halvah. That shall be the new watch cry of haineshisway.com: No more halvah (havlah, spelled backwards). Or, as our beloved Miss Joan Crawford would have said, “No more wire halvah, ever!” Yes, Virginia, we are banishing halvah, we are putting the kibosh on halvah, we are saying verboten zie halvah, we are putting halvah out to pasture, we are saying halten zie halvah. In other words: No more halvah.
Well, that was a paragraph all about halvah. All About Halvah – is that the sequel to All About Eve? “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy halvah.” I dare you to find any other site on all the Internet that has an entire paragraph about halvah for no reason whatsoever.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must drive about in my motor car, I must do errands, ship packages, make decisions about where each new piece of art will hang, and I must have no more halvah. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s Friday – what is currently in your CD player, and your DVD/video player? I’ll start – CD, the Hungarian Cast Recording of My Fair Lady, courtesy of a certain Hungarian, the soundtrack to Beyond the Sea, with Mr. Kevin Spacey singing the hits of Mr. Bobby Darin, the soundtrack to the new Almodovar film and several other things. Video, the first Broadway preview of Grand Hotel. DVD, the W.C. Fields collection, then Gone with the Wind. Bedroom DVD player, my homegrown DVD of one of my favorite French films of the sixties, Sundays and Cybele. Your turn. Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst we chant “No more halvah.”