hot stuff

    '... from a sticky and hot NYC, in a sweltering room
    Kafka -- or perhaps Sgt. X -- would have appreciated....'

    ... and certainly Sqn Ldr Bowman.

    After unnumbered old black & white films, the idea of
    New York in the heat of August retains the most powerful
    grip on my imagination. I can't say now how many hours of
    my youth I spent in the back row of the Regal Cinema,
    Waterford, staring out at the lovers & murderers as they lounged
    on the firesteps & galleries of the neighbouring NY tenements
    during those endless, breathless summer nights.

    And nothing ever equalled the opening sequence of 'Laura'
    (with the incomparable Gene Tierney in the title role). While
    the unseen narrator (Dana Andrews playing the detective)
    evokes the blanketing heat of the afternoon, ('the sun like a great
    burning glass in the sky...') the camera slides into the interior
    of an Upper East Side apartment, the shades drawn against
    the heat, moves past all the objèts gleaming dully in their display
    cabinets, past the tapestries, past the Bechstein, across the Turkish
    killems & into what looks like the bathroom of a Sultan ...

    .... where we find the aesthete Clifton Webb in a, cool, marble
    bath, a Royal typewriter propped on a board, working away
    at his latest chef d'oeuvre. Some considerable distance from
    Zooey's lavabo.

    I knew then that if I couldn't be Ernie Hem sitting in trenchcoat
    drinking pernod on the terrace of the Select I wanted to be
    Elliot Whateverhisname penning in the rewrites while gazing
    out over Central Park under the milky light of August.

    In those days, of course, no one had heard of JDS - other
    than one or two of his neighbours in those self same apartments.

    Scottie B.

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Received on Sat Aug 17 07:01:20 2002