🎀 on cheesecake cinema & my pink playgirl pad
life updates from a Cinderella of the third world gone lady about town 🎀🎥
i.
i’m basing my first academic paper on the nude calendar shots of marilyn monroe and their publication on the inaugural issue of playboy (airbrushed with canonical voluptuousness, she was labeled the magazine’s sole “sweetheart of the month” in december of 1953). i may have failed all attempts at fashioning a theoretical essay around «cheesecake cinema» for this substack, but at least humboldt universität enables me to play pretend as bunny-girl-of-our-dreams scholar (for another class i also crafted video art out of assorted pink glimpses in old x-rated pictures 🎀👙). in a draft dating back to january i had described how my ideal entry in the genre…
…would reek of home tiki bars and pastel ruffled panties ordered from a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue. Of budding Casanovas whipping up baked pineapple Alaskas as illustrated in the glossy pages of Thomas Mario’s 1961 The Playboy Gourmet while their darlings, bikini-clad and in a fur rug by the fireplace, loll about to the exotica of Les Baxter (as a prerequisite, these rabbity lassies would *not* enlist themselves to help with the drudgery later).
a titillation like the aforementioned simply does not exist. playmate-of-the-year films either verge too on the froufrou like the ann-margret romcom THE SWINGER (in which she charades as a dotty writer hellbent for smut stardom — her novella submission to Girl Lure magazine is about as steamy as an Our Gang two-reeler, though) or just blatantly rollick in the tasteless like r-m’s MONDO TOPLESS (which lays bare the romps of bosomy babes-next-door yet without the sense of coquetry and leisureliness integral to the pinup). maybe i ought to come around & direct my own nifty cheesecake film sometime !
ii.
gossip columnist, party planner & lesbian socialité elsa maxwell penned the script for HOTEL FOR WOMEN in 1939 and, in my mind, i too live down Mae West Avenue in a pensión para señoritas full of shopgirls in nylon stockings & cedric gibbons designs rather than at a drab student residency in a drab pad. i accuse my domicile of “drab” because for all my determination to live in high-swank, just jaeckin style, i seldom feel at home here. there is no Bardottiness to my mess when i once again delay the kitchenette chores (egg-encrusted pans never prompted hysteria before?) and i can’t sleep a wink most nights even after 8-hour doldrums. there is a malign spectre running amok in here, i gather, but unless her skin is powdery green & her mouth painted in red Max Factor lipstick à la Kay Hammond in BLITHE SPIRIT, she ought to flee from my digs ASAP.
as for the philosophy in my boudoir[‘s decor], i’ve vaguely concocted one out of chapter 7 of «sex and the single girl» although i have *yet* to put my buck into opulent satin cushions that connote “this girl is chic. this girl has expensive taste. this is an apartment wonderful things happen in”. penny-pinching budget notwithstanding, my walls are graced by two glamorous eBay posters for vintage pornos CANDY GOES TO HOLLYWOOD and INSIDE MARILYN (+ one for Radley Metzger’s sexploitation CARMEN BABY) and a nudie cutie-calendar that i myself designed with aplenty of pink photos & 1940s Vargas pinups.
on the extremely low-priced side i also have a pink teddy bear, pink sheets, pink placemats, pink napkins, 3€ soup plates with pink floral patterns, a heart-shaped pen & three Filmkuriers for glittering UFA productions (most recently for noirish musical STERN VON RIO) that my movie nerd of a boyfriend gifted me. while akin to a candy box, home is still elsewhere & scattered all over the city so as a rule, i only pop in after dark. at first the lack of rapport with my own place drove me nuttier than a fruitcake but the ritzy HOLLYWOOD HOTEL (‘37) lifestyle also means i plan ahead & thicken my days with dashing lady-about-town-ness and softcore screenings on my bf’s projector ((suffused with the glow of his fluffy pancakes)) while limiting the drudgery to only once a week for, like, laundry.
leisurely at-home ““activities”” i love, though, include lolling to the official r&b, disco and Hollywood-soundtrack-style jazz playlist of my cheap yet chic domicile (attached below!) and munching potato chips with ice-cold vanilla coke while delighting in one of jean negulesco’s widescreen three-career-girls pictures in Color by Deluxe (which i ironically grew QUITE fond of whilst inexcusably unemployed during my first few months). amidst the promises of a big city and with my visa renewal not being guaranteed in the slightest, i might as well get a taste of THE BEST OF EVERYTHING (as in the film adaptation from 1959) instead of greasy bacon and cheese sandwiches i could also whip up in peru….. helen gurley brown herself once doled out the pearl of thought that “if you aren’t overbooked and overcommitted, there’s a very good chance you aren’t getting half enough out of life or out of you” and i LIVE according to her pink trash prose, so… that is where i’m at right now
