NoirCon

Noir: The Not-so-shy pornographer, Samuel Roth

2013-05-17T16:41:00.000-04:00

Written by Jay Gertzman, author of Bootleggers and Smuthounds- 1920-40: The Trade in Erotica, as well as an excellent essay on David Goodis, Infamous Modernist is the story of poet, novelist, pamphleteer, magazine editor and outlaw publisher Samuel Roth. But it's also the story of an era that stretches back to the early days of the 20th century, when the lower East Side of New York was a haven for Jewish immigrants- poets, Yiddish actors, trade unionists, journalists, with more than its fare share of anarchists, socialists and Marxists. Over the years that world has been documented by such disparate writers as Irving Howe, Luc Sante and Ed Sanders. But, to my knowledge, Roth has so far escaped scrutiny.

NoirRiot is coming soon! Get ready to revolt!

2013-04-30T19:43:00.003-04:00

Noir: America, The Land That Noir Built.

2013-04-24T19:46:00.002-04:00

America: #1 In Fear, Stress, Anger, Divorce, Obesity, Anti-Depressants, Etc.

Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse
April 23rd, 2013

The United States is a deeply unhappy place. We are a nation that is absolutely consumed by fear, stress, anger and depression. It isn’t just our economy that is falling apart – the very fabric of society is starting to come apart at the seams and it is because of what is happening to us on the inside. The facts and statistics that I am going to share with you in this article are quite startling. They are clear evidence that America is a nation that is an advanced state of decline. We are overwhelmed by fear, stress and anxiety, and much of the time the ways that we choose to deal with those emotions lead to some very self-destructive behaviors. Americans have experienced a standard of living far beyond the wildest dreams of most societies throughout human history, and yet we are an absolutely miserable people. Why is this? Why is America #1 in so many negative categories? Why are we constantly looking for ways to escape the pain of our own lives? Why are our families falling apart? There is vast material wealth all around us. So why can’t we be happy?

Just look around you. Are most of the people around you teeming with happiness and joy? Sadly, the truth is that most Americans are terribly stressed out. Yeah, many of them may be able to manage to come up with a smile when they greet you, but most of the time they are consumed by internal struggles that are eating away at them like cancer.

So why is this happening? Is modern life structured in a way that is fundamentally unhealthy?

Below I have posted a short excerpt from a message that one of Charles Hugh Smith’s readers named Kenneth Daigle recently sent to him. I think that it does a good job of describing the incredible stress that many people contend with on a daily basis…

Think about how our culture is now structured for the average adult: STRESS, everywhere you look–commuting in horrible traffic, as you want to scream in frustration–money stress, to pay rent/house note, tuition, utilities, gas, insurances, vacations, cable bill, rising food costs, and on and on and on–stress from family problems, divorce, delinquency, drugs, crime, infidelity, keeping up with the Jones, etc.

People have too high an expectation of what they should have out of life, and get overly stressed over it all. How does all of this manifest itself? A prescription drug culture (Zoloft, Xanax, etc.) that tricks people into thinking a pill will knock back the stress, when these drugs, in my opinion, only make things worse.

I am hearing more and more that people just want to drop out from it all, as they are reaching a breaking point, and have decided less income and dependency on entitlements will reduce their stress, and is not so humiliating, so giving up working becomes more acceptable, to KEEP ONE’S SANITY.

I know I am correct, from the feedback I hear every day, and the financial media does not see this like I hear it every day. People don’t want to admit that they are too weak to deal with stress, so the financial pundits are not aware of this critical factor because they don’t talk to Joe Sixpack.

Most Americans live lives of “quiet desperation” that are punctuated by moments of great crisis. We spend our prime years working for others (making them rich) in order to pay off debts that we have foolishly accumulated (thus making the banks even wealthier). When most Americans reach the end of their lives, they look back and wonder what they actually accomplished.

James Altucher published an incredible article the other day entitled “Why Do People Hate Their Jobs?“ It did a great job of describing what life is like for the modern worker in America. The following are a few of the reasons that he says people tend to hate their jobs…

-Jobs are modern-day slavery. We are paid just enough to live and not more. You are punished if you ask for more.

*****

-We are often verbally abused on the job and we take it because we think it’s normal that people would yell at us.

*****

-The government gets up to 50% of your paycheck and then 10-20% of that goes to kill people on other parts of the planet, including our own children.

*****

-From 7am to 7pm you are either A) going to work, B) at work, or C) coming back from work. Hence, the times when you can be most creative are garbage-compacted into your cubicle.

*****

-When you are paranoid at a job, you are probably correct. THEY are, in fact, talking about you and backstabbing you right now.

*****

-You realize that all the dollars you spent on degrees to get you a job that will make you happy were completely wasted. You were scammed but you can’t let the next generation know how stupid you were so now you become part of perpetuating the scam.

*****

-Your spouse is tired of hearing about your job after six months. And you couldn’t care less about hers. Ten years later you wake up next to a total stranger. 40 years later you die next to one.

*****

-When you were a kid you liked to draw, and read, and run, and laugh, and play, and imagine a magical world. You’re never going to do any of that again.

*****

-Over time everyone is getting fired and being replaced by younger, cheaper, more temporary, more robotic, versions of you. You see this but are afraid to do anything about it.

And of course when we get home from work there is even more stress. In America today, we are witnessing a breakdown of the family unlike anything we have ever seen before. The United States leads the world in divorce and in single person households. We are having an increasingly difficult time relating to one another, and many of us drown our sorrows in our addictions. We are addicted to pills, to alcohol, to food, to entertainment, to sex, to gambling, to shopping and to anything else that will make us feel good and forget about our problems for a while.

The following is a collection of facts and statistics that prove that America is being absolutely consumed by fear, stress, anger and depression…

-Suicide has now actually surpassed car accidents as the number one cause of “injury death” in the United States.

-More U.S. soldiers killed themselves than were killed in combat last year.

-As I mentioned in another article, Americans will spend more than 280 billion dollars on prescription drugs during 2013.

-Nearly one out of every four women in the United States are taking antidepressants.

-The percentage of women taking antidepressants in the U.S. is higher than in any other country in the world.

-In 2010, the average teen in the U.S. was taking 1.2 central nervous system drugs. Those are the kinds of drugs which treat conditions such as ADHD and depression.

-Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants as children in Europe are.

-According to a recent article by David Kupelian, “one-third of the nation’s employees suffer chronic debilitating stress, and more than half of all ‘millennials’ (18 to 33 year olds) experience a level of stress that keeps them awake at night, including large numbers diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorder.”

-Tens of millions of Americans use alcohol and drugs to numb the pain that they are experiencing. In the United States today, there are about 28 million Americans with a drinking problem and about 22 million Americans use illegal drugs.

-More people have been diagnosed with mental disorders in America than anywhere else on earth.

-There are also tens of millions of Americans that try to deal with anxiety and stress by eating. Of all the major industrialized nations, America is the most obese. Mexico is #2.

-Back in 1962, only 13 percent of all Americans were obese. Today, approximately 36 percent of all Americans are obese.

-Many people try to escape from the pain of reality by getting lost in entertainment. Incredibly, the United States is tied with the UK for the highest average number of hours spent watching television each week.

-The United States has the highest divorce rate in the world by a good margin.

-The United States has the highest percentage of one person households on the entire planet.

-According to the Pew Research Center, only 51 percent of all American adults are currently married. Back in 1960, 72 percent of all adults in the United States were married.

-At this point, approximately one out of every three children in America lives in a home without a father.

-For women under the age of 30 living in the United States today, more than half of all babies are being born out of wedlock.

-The United States has the highest child abuse death rate in the developed world.

-In the United States today, it is estimated that one out of every four girls is sexually abused before they become adults.

-The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the world by a very wide margin.

-The United States produces more pornography than any other nation in the world.

-If you can believe it, there are 20 million new STD infections in the United States every single year.

-The U.S. has the highest STD infection rate in the entire industrialized world.

-It is estimated that about one out of every six Americans between the ages of 14 and 49 have genital herpes.

-Sadly, one out of every four teen girls in the U.S. has at least one sexually transmitted disease.

-The United States leads the world in eating disorder deaths.

-Nobody in the world gets more plastic surgery done than Americans do.

-Americans spend more time sitting in traffic than anyone else in the world.

-America has the highest incarceration rate and the largest total prison population in the entire world by a very wide margin.

Fear is one of the primary things that motivates the American people, and that is a very powerful weapon that can be used against us.

As I wrote about yesterday, those that commit acts of terror want to get attention and they want to create fear.

And that is exactly what the Boston Marathon bombing accomplished. It captured the attention of the nation for days on end, and it absolutely paralyzed the entire Boston area with fear.

When we allow ourselves to be terrorized, we actually encourage more terror attacks. When we give terrorists what they want, it just encourages more psychos to commit acts of terror. If you don’t believe me, just check out the following links that I found posted on The Drudge Report on Monday…

*”3 Alabama hospitals evacuated after bomb threats“*

*”Connecticut Courthouse Evacuated After Bomb Threat“*

*”South Hills Village Evacuated After Bomb Threat“*

*”Rock Island neighborhood evacuated after bomb threat“*

*”Bomb threat forces evacuation of Seabreeze office building“*

The appropriate response to a terror attack is to refuse to be terrorized. Yes, we should also work to expose and punish the individuals, organizations and governments that are behind terror. But we should also not let terror change how we live our lives, and we should definitely not allow terror to be used as an excuse to rip our liberties and freedoms away.

Sadly, as Ron Paul has detailed, some of our politicians are already calling for “tighter security” in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing…

Sadly, I expect this week’s tragic attacks in Boston to be used to justify new restrictions on liberty. Within 48 hours of the attack in Boston, at least one Congressman was calling for increased use of surveillance cameras to expand the government’s ability to monitor our actions, while another Senator called for a federal law mandating background checks before Americans can buy “explosive powder.”

I would not be surprised if the Transportation Security Administration uses this tragedy to claim new authority to “screen” Americans before they can attend sporting or other public events. The Boston attack may also be used as another justification for creating a National ID Card tied to a federal database with “biometric” information. The only thing that will stop them is if the American people rediscover the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin that you cannot achieve security by allowing government to take their liberties.

But no matter how much liberty and freedom we give up, we will never be 100% safe. Bad people are always going to do bad things, and unfortunately we are probably going to see some pretty nightmarish things in the years ahead as the world becomes even more unstable.

If we allow the bad guys to get us so frightened that we throw out the U.S. Constitution and abandon our liberties and our freedoms, then we are the ones who lose.

Yes, the years ahead are going to be tough. The economic collapse is going to accelerate greatly, there will be tremendous natural disasters, there will be war in the Middle East and there will be other problems that we cannot even conceive of right now. At the same time, the American people will continue to become even angrier and even more frustrated. According to a recent Pew Research survey, the percentage of Americans with a favorable view of the federal government is now at an all-time low. As the economy crumbles, there will likely be great civil unrest as people demand solutions. Unfortunately, our problems took decades to develop and they will not be solved overnight even if we did have good people in office.

So why am I saying all of this?

And why am I constantly warning about the coming economic collapse?

Is it because I want to create fear?

No, just the opposite of that.

I am a watchman on the wall.

In ancient times, a watchman would warn the people when the enemy was approaching.

When you receive the warning, there are a few different ways that you can respond to it…

#1 You can become consumed with fear and run away from the enemy. Unfortunately, cowards never get the victory in the end.

#2 You can dismiss the warning and pretend that the enemy is not approaching. But then when the enemy comes you will be completely unprepared.

#3 You can do everything possible to get prepared to face the enemy that is coming with strength and courage.

And that is how I would encourage all of you to approach the coming economic collapse and the other great problems that we will soon be experiencing as a nation.

Do not be afraid.

Instead, be strong and courageous and prepare well for the storms that are coming.

Delivered by The Daily Sheeple

Contributed by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse.

Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream , The Truth and Economic Collapse Blog.

Noir: PINE BOX FOR A PIN-UP, the cover!

2013-04-22T18:10:00.001-04:00

PINE BOX FOR A PIN-UP

by Frank DeBlase

Noir: PINE BOX FOR A PIN-UP by Frank DeBlase

2013-04-22T18:03:00.000-04:00

She was nude with arm stretched out over her head. One leg was crossed over the other as if she was running in place. Her head was cradled in a ravens nest of hair. She stared vacant and wide-eyed at the ceiling as if she was about to say something then suddenly forgot. I crouched down to look. Her skin was cold and blue-ish. I felt mine turning greenish and damp; I couldn't breathe. I stood up too quickly and nearly blacked out. Yup, it was Vick Hayes. She had been strangled. And my tie was wrapped tightly around her neck.

PINE BOX FOR A PIN-UP by Frank DeBlase

is now available at fine stores everywhere. Don't walk to get your copy of this book, RUN!

If you do not know who Frank DeBlase is then shame on you!

If you do know who Frank is then you will not waste one minute more by not having this DeBlase classic. The cover of the book by Jason Smith can be seen HERE along with the first four chapters of the book.

If you crave writing the way it was meant to be written then you will love this book!

Frank DeBlase showing some serious ink at NoirCon 2012

Noir: Signs of the times

2013-04-21T19:30:00.003-04:00

Noir: DO YOU THINK YOU KNOW DAVID GOODIS? READ THIS!

2013-04-21T15:30:00.000-04:00

From Hollywood “Treatment” to Depression on North Broad St: The Career of

The Blonde on the Street Corner

click on above

By Jay A. Gertzman

Noir: New Boobs, Old Boobs

2013-04-21T13:21:00.001-04:00

“An Artistic Exploration of Vice and Other Things That Make Your Heart Race”

Porn and Asian Kids

Things We Try Not To Think About And Jews

Noir: Got what it takes? Swierczynski Style

2013-04-14T12:20:00.000-04:00

In this four-week workshop, learn to write a breakneck, no-holds-barred, addictive story, all in service of keeping a reader turning the pages—even if his or her house is on fire.

Your Instructor: Duane Swierczynski, author of the Charlie Hardie trilogy, Expiration Date

Where: Online — Available everywhere! Lit REACTOR

When: June 20, 2013 - July 18, 2013

Enrollment: 16 Students

Price: $399

Week One: Developing Your High-Octane Story Germ

Week Two: Starting With a Bang

Week Three: Tumbling Down a Hill in a House That Is On Fire

Week Four: Kicking In Windows, Slamming Shut Doors

* Assignments will be critiqued by Duane and fellow students.

Class Description

If you want to you grab your reader's attention, you have to write like your life depends on it.

Because it does.

If a reader puts your book down, you’ve failed.

Your goal is to do everything in your power to keep that book in his or her sweaty little hands.

In this workshop, you'll study the art of writing a breakneck, no-holds-barred, addictive page-turner, including exercises on pitching, pacing, structure, editing, writing action scenes and crisp dialogue—all in the service of keeping a reader turning those pages, even if his or her house is on fire.

You'll be lead to that goal by Duane Swierczynski, who has been lauded for writing "breathless action" (New York Times Book Review) and been compared to "Elmore Leonard on adrenaline and speed" (New York Journal of Books).

And by the end of this class, you'll have the tools you need to hook your fingers into your reader’s eye sockets and drag them into your book.

Noir: The Torture of the Ortolan Bunting - Emberiza hortulana

2013-04-14T09:50:00.001-04:00

Noir: Harrington takes Crimespree by storm with Dia De Los Muertos

2013-04-13T14:06:00.004-04:00

One

Tijuana, Mexico / November 1—2:00 P.M.

It was Tijuana’s knack at getting back at you that worried Calhoun. Looking like a sun-savvy reptile in his chic, wraparound dark glasses, Vincent Calhoun stepped off the curb into the traffic that circled the central plaza; immediately, car horns began to blare and brakes slammed. Calhoun shot his hands up, signaling halt. The drivers saw a big American in a foreign legion-style hat and white summer suit. Calhoun crossed in front of them, ignoring the barrage of ugly looks from the drivers. Somehow, the drivers knew they didn’t want to fuck with him. There were people in Tijuana you just didn’t want to fool with. The ones who looked like Calhoun—the players, the reptiles from the desert—you stayed away from.

Once inside the cool ring of shade that bordered the plaza, Calhoun heard the offers for the city’s most popular products from its front line businessmen. “Pussy, pot or pills… Got some young pussy, brother… She’ll suck your dick till you think you’re dead,” a kid sitting on a bench, the shade darkening his face, said to him. Calhoun left the offer behind him, crossing into the open stretch of plaza, the no-man’s land of pavers and sunlight. The heat was penetrating, alive, walking next to him like a madman. It radiated off the stark white concrete. He could feel it through his shoes, as if he were barefoot on a beach. He realized for the first time that there was something absolutely cruel and quintessentially Indian about the plaza, the sheer enormity of the space cut from the heart of the city, ceremonial. It conjured up human sacrifice. Maybe the city was really still Toltec, he thought. Workmen were hanging bunting and lights on the plaza’s bandstand in preparation for the upcoming holiday.

At the other side of the plaza Calhoun stopped at a kiosk on the corner and bought the Diario de la Sierra, which gave race schedules and odds at Caliente. The paper’s front page shoutedPolice Search City for Frank Guzman in a banner headline.

“When were you born?” Calhoun asked the newspaper vendor, peering at him inside the messy interior of the kiosk. The man looked at him from his shell of clapboard, the only bit of shade on the noisy street. The vendor saw the big white man looking at him. A spotless white cotton suit. The ball of sun caught in the yellow tint of his dark glasses.

“¿Como…?” The man’s face was framed by girlie magazines, girls in short shorts with big asses. A municipal bus roared by the kiosk, leaving the street behind it showered with black exhaust.

“Amigo… what day were you born?” Calhoun repeated the question over the grinding of the bus engine. He tried to smile but it was hard. “I need a lucky number,” he explained. “For the races.”

“On the day they ripped Jesus Christ down from his cross to get at his wallet,” the man said and laughed. He pounded the counter for emphasis, thinking it was funny.

Calhoun made his way down the sidewalk toward the Playa Azul. He knew suddenly that Tijuana had won. That nothing he could do would restore his luck. He’d exhausted his suerte—his good fortune. It was obvious. It was over. Everyone gets so much suerte and that’s it. His was finished, used up. In the restaurant Playa Azul he took a clean handkerchief out of his suit pocket and wiped down his face. Today the heavy canvas havelock he wore hadn’t been enough protection from the heat. Even through the clean starched handkerchief his face felt wet and dirty. He pulled it away. It was soaked and he was worried. Nothing wrong, he told himself. Nothing wrong at all. No past, only future.

Noir: Beaver Fatale

2013-04-11T18:54:00.000-04:00

Beaver Bites Man To Death In Belarus Attack

(Thanks to Noir Naturalist, Cullen Gallagher)

The beaver pounced as a man went to take its photograph after spotting the animal on the side of a road during a fishing trip.

Beaver teeth are sharp enough to cut down trees

Beaver attack filmed in Russia by Alexander Targon

Video: Beaver attack filmed in Russia by Alexander Targon

Enlarge

A fisherman has been bitten to death by a beaver after trying to take its photograph.

The man was on a fishing trip at Lake Shestakov in Belarus with two friends when they spotted the animal on the side of the road.

He stopped so that he could take a picture but as he approached the beaver it pounced on him, biting him in the thigh.

His friends attempted to stem the flow of blood from the wound but the animal’s bite had severed a main artery and the man, who came from Brest, bled to death.

Beaver attacks are rare and according to experts those animals that do go for humans are usually rabid.

However, they are not unheard off.

Earlier this week a video was posted on YouTube showing a man in the Tver region, northwest of Moscow, running away from a beaver who charged at him as he was filming in the area.

Last year in the US two girls were mauled by a beaver in a lake in Virginia as they swam. They suffered serious bite and scratch injuries. A man was also attacked in New York and an elderly woman in Washington.

In 2003 in Belarus a farm manager and farmhand were bitten by a rabid beaver as they tried to chase it from a barn. They survived the attack.

Beavers are the second largest rodents in the world.

Noir: Jay Gertzman on David Goodis

2013-04-05T09:14:00.000-04:00

From Hollywood “Treatment” to Depression on North Broad St: The Career of The Blonde on the Street Corner

Gertzman turns his analytic eye to the life of David Goodis and the evolution of THE BLONDE ON THE STREET CORNER at www.noircon.com.

If you are a Goodis fan, you do not want to miss this. Gertzman writes with the skill of a surgeon and delivers the medicine like no other.

R.I.P. Roger Ebert

2013-04-05T09:07:00.000-04:00

Noir: The Chill Reaper Cometh

2013-04-01T08:28:00.000-04:00

Noir: Pastor Have Sex With Congregation, Claims His Sperms Contain Holy Spirit

2013-03-27T17:49:00.000-04:00

Brazil: Pastor Have Sleep With Congregation, Claims His Sperms Contain Holy Spirit

Sobrino Valdeci Picanto, 59, was arrested in Apore, Goiás, Brazil, for raping several women attending his church. He gave as an excuse that his penis had been consecrated with “divine semen of the Holy Spirit.”

A 23-year-old young woman, who prefers to remain anonymous said, “He has convinced us that only God could come into our lives through the mouth.”

“Often, after worship, Pastor Valdecir take us to some of the funds back to the church and asked us to do oral sex on him until the Holy Spirit comes through ejaculation”.

Valdecir came to abuse some elderly, and defends himself by saying that ‘he had an encounter with Jesus in a brothel and gave him the mission of spreading the sacred semen throughout the state, beginning with the faithful Apore Assembly, of which he is responsible’.

According to the Pastor, “You have in your hands the servant of the Lord and do not regret it yet. I hope to continue my wonderful job within the prison”.

Denise Pinheiro, delegate of the region, said, “Valdecir was caught red-handed while rubbing his penis in the face of a local merchant, which promised to make more sales in her business due to the divine liquid. When we act Valdecir offered no resistance and even asked if I wanted to be part of the kingdom of heaven on the way to the police station. He is not ashamed of such acts and thinks they are the most normal things in the world.”

Valdecir posted bail and was released

Noir: Breaking Bad Elmo

2013-03-27T17:33:00.003-04:00

A Pennsylvania man claims he had crystal-meth-fueled sex romps with former Elmo voice Kevin Clash when he was just 16 — and filed a lawsuit against the puppeteer to “save other children.”

Now he is going after Clash in federal court, claiming that starting in 2004 the world-renowned puppeteer lured Stephens from Harrisburg, Pa., to New York to engage in “lurid, crystal-meth sex parties.

New York Post/Chad Rachman

Sheldon Stephens

Reuters

RED MENACE: Sheldon Stephens, in New York yesterday, claims that “Sesame Street’s” Elmo voice Kevin Clash (above) enticed the then-16-year-old youth into wild sex parties.

“On one occasion, a male chauffeur drove Clash and Sheldon to the chauffeur’s apartment, where they had a crystal meth sex party,” said the lawsuit, filed in a Pennsylvania federal court.

“While in the apartment, Clash smoked crystal meth while engaging in sexual activity with Sheldon.”

“It disgusted me inside because I knew what had happened to me,” Stephens said. “That motivated me and my parents to reach out to ‘Sesame Street’ and kind of warn them against Kevin Clash and about him potentially harming other children.

Clash resigned from “Sesame Street” on Nov. 20 after Stephens and another young man claimed to have had underage sex with the man who had voiced Elmo for 28 years.

pedro.oliveira@nypost.com

Noir: R.I.P. Nascar's Greatest Fan

2013-03-27T17:22:00.002-04:00

Tim Hopkins

Timothy Wayne “Tim” Hopkins, 54, went to be with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and Dale Earnhardt to contribute his building and painting expertise to the constructing of many heavenly mansions on Saturday, March 23, 2013, in Memphis. Tim was born on July 16, 1958, in Zion, Ill., to Aaron and Elaine Hopkins. He had a personality that could make anyone laugh and affected everyone that came near him.

Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal - Obituaries March 26 2013

Noir: Goodis's THE BURGLAR with Omar Sharif

2013-03-26T22:26:00.000-04:00

posted by Yara Jishi, Bryn Mawr, '14 on March 26, 2013 at 9:30 am

The Cinedelphia Film Festival is on its way, taking place from April 4th to the 27th! The exciting program has tons to offer- from screenings, musics, talks and more. While there’s a lot to choose from, I’m recommending you check out The Burglars, a screening taking place on April 12th from 7:30 to 10:00 pm.

The film is based off of noir-novelist David Goodis, who besides spending a portion of his time in New York City and Los Angeles, was born and raised in Philadelphia. French director Henri Verneuil made a second adaptation of Goodis’ novel The Burglar, aka Le Casse. Verneuil’s version stars Omar Sharif and Jean-Paul Belmondo, where a police inspector pursues a gang of burglars who are out to get a cache of emeralds. This euro-crime film is famous for its car chase scene through the streets of Athens.

Whether you’re a film buff or not, the festival will be a ton of fun, and this is a great way to jump right in. Check out an outline of the details below, along with website info and how to get tickets. Enjoy the show!

When: April 12th 7:30 to 10:00 p.m

Where: International House, 3701 Chestnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

Tickets: Click here, $7 for students with ID

You can contact Yara at yjishi@brynmawr.edu

Noir: An Old Twist on The New Diogenes

2013-03-26T10:29:00.000-04:00

The Old Diogenes

The New Diogenes

AP Officer DePrimo's act of kindness made headlines around the world after a passerby snapped this pic on his gift on a frigid winter night.

As was reported by the New York Post in December 2012, http://www.noircon.info/2012/12/anti-noir-human-kindness.html, Diogenes is alive and well in New York City.

COUNTING HIS BOOTY: Jeffrey Hillman, who was given a pair of boots by a kindly cop last year, counts his day's haul on the subway Sunday after begging — barefoot — in Midtown.COUNTING HIS BOOTY: Jeffrey Hillman, who was given a pair of boots by a kindly cop last year, counts his day's haul on the subway Sunday after begging — barefoot — in Midtown.

What a heel!

The barefoot beggar who made headlines when a kindly cop gave him a pair of boots has an apartment and a preacher paying his bills — but he still pretends to be homeless and hides his shoes in a garbage bag, The Post has learned.

Jeffrey Hillman was spotted at 9:20 p.m. Sunday counting a huge wad of bills with the dexterity of a bank teller while riding a No. 2 train from Times Square to his home in The Bronx.

Just days earlier, the alleged grifter was confronted by another Post reporter on Sixth Avenue in Midtown. Mooching cash from passers-by, he was barefoot and wearing a sign on his back that read “HOMELESS.”Wetting his thumb and glancing warily at his few fellow passengers, Hillman, 54, deftly counted out a stack of bills, placed it on the seat and started counting another as a Post reporter shot video.

Asked about his boots, he replied, “I choose not to wear shoes” — even though a New Jersey clergyman who has been paying Hillman’s utility bills said the man owns at least 30 pairs.

“I have the shoes. People always ask me where are the shoes? I tell them they’re in the bag,” said Hillman, who apparently wears shoes to and from home but sheds them for his Midtown homeless act.

“I choose not to wear the shoes. Is that a crime? No! My feet haven’t fallen off yet,” the defiant panhandler declared, dragging a large black garbage bag behind him.

Asked about the $100 all-weather boots NYPD Officer Larry DePrimo gave him on Nov. 14 in Times Square, Hillman said he had hidden them away because “they are worth a lot of money.”

Hillman insisted that he never asks anyone for cash or gifts and that people simply fork the money over when they pass him as he trudges barefoot through Midtown.

And he shamelessly admitted he has a place of his own, despite the hand-lettered sign on his back.

“I got my own apartment. I cook for myself,” he said.

On Sunday, Hillman started counting his haul shortly after hopping the subway train in Times Square ,and was still counting as it approached a stop at 152nd Street and Westchester Avenue not far from his apartment on Prospect Avenue in The Bronx.

The cash appeared to be mostly singles — but still added up to several hundred dollars, judging from the size of the pile.

And, despite his lucrative scam, he insisted he wasn’t doing anything wrong.

“I’m not robbing anybody. It’s Wall Street. It’s the people in these buildings,” he said.

But the Rev. John Graf of Bedminster, who pays Hillman’s utility bills and buys him phone cards, said it’s wrong to pull the wool over people’s eyes.

“I don’t want him conning me,” said Graf, who has known Hillman since they were in fourth grade. “He promised me that he wouldn’t do that.”

Graf admitted his buddy has a history of working the streets.

“He’s done it 10-plus years. He can make 1,000 bucks a day” even though “he’s got 30 pairs of shoes at home,” he said.

Hillman — an Army vet and the brother of a college professor and a church administrator — has rap sheets in New York and Pennsylvania that stretch back to the early 1980s.

He was most recently busted in New York City in 2008 for possession of a controlled substance.

He had a similar drug bust in 2003 and a number of charges in 2002 for harassment, menacing, criminal mischief, reckless endangerment, possession of stolen property and resisting arrest.

In 1998, he was pinched for public lewdness after allegedly masturbating in front of a crowd in Hamilton Heights.

DePrimo — who put the boots and socks on Hillman’s feet himself — could not be reached.

rfredericks@nypost.com

Noir: Sam Roth - Poet, Pirate, Pornographer

2013-03-25T13:57:00.001-04:00

Sam Roth, right, in his Poetry Book Shop in Greenwich Village, 1920

Sam Roth’s daughter knew her father was unusual. How many teenagers are told how to respond when an FBI agent, or a process server, comes to the door? What does a pre-teen son or daughter do when a classmate taunts them with “your father’s in jail”? How does a 14- and 16-year old avoid fearing they have betrayed their father while testifying that they worked with him, opening, sealing or addressing packages in his office? Family life revolved around defending him and coping with the reputation which with he had burdened himself and his family. Roth spent about of one-ninth of his adult life behind bars. He was a bold literary “pirate,” issuing unauthorized editions of magnificent sensations such as Ulysses, My Life and Loves, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He was the chief mail order distributor of borderline erotica during the 1940s and 50s. He had been vilified by the literary community of two nations in the 1920s for the Lawrence and Joyce publications. In the absence of an international copyright agreement and because works deemed obscene could not be copyrighted, what Roth did was not illegal. It was in violation of the protocols of mutual fair dealing between publishers and authors. The Ulysses “piracies” got him drummed out of legitimate professional standing in a way that had never before happened: an International Protest signed by over 160 fellow writers. Even more infamous was a book he wrote in a fit of spite at booksellers and lawyers after his bankruptcy in 1933. It was titled Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on all the Frontiers of Civilization (1933), and offered the Nazis a serendipity when they most needed it. A generation later, Roth was again held up to widespread public ridicule, by a Senate investigating committee, Walter Winchell, the FBI, the Post Office, and the legendary New York D. A. Frank Hogan, for supposedly inciting juvenile delinquency by targeting teenagers for his book and magazines.

He spent nine years in jail on state and federal obscenity convictions. His contribution was exceptional, and not recognized for why it was. The liberalizing first amendment decisions of the 1960s assumed that books published without a prurient intent were literature not obscenity. Roth, on the other hand, prepared people who did not have cultural bona fides, whose motives could not be verified by guardians of culture. As William Burroughs and Henry Miller knew at the time, that was preferable.

In his youth acknowledged as a promising poet, he returned to this form of very personal expression with his own version of the Psalms of David. Despite the venality and self-aggrandizement, and despite the self-hatred of Jews Must Live, he had an intense personal relationship with God and the Hassidic eastern European pre-modern perspective.

Samuel Roth INFAMOUS MODERNIST

By Jay A. Gertzman

University Press of Florida

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

One: 1893-1916: From a Galician Shtetl to Columbia University

Two: 1917-1925: Prelude to an International Protest: A Rising, Pugnacious Man of Letters

Three: 1925-27: “Damn his impertinence. Bloody Crook”: Roth Publishes Joyce

Four: 1928-34: Roth Must Live: A Successful Business and Its Bankruptcy

Five : 1934: Jews Must Live. “We Meet Our Destiny on the Road We Take To Avoid It”

Six 1934-39: A Stretch in the Federal Penitentiary

Seven: 1940-1949: Roth Breaks Parole, Uncovers a Nazi Plot, Gives “Dame Post Office” Fits, and Tells His Own Story in Mail Order Advertising Copy

Eight: 1949-1952: Times Square, Peggy Roth, Southern Gothic, Celine, and Nietzsche (pp.462-512)

Nine: 1952-57: The Windsors, Winchell, Kefauver: Back to Lewisburg

Ten: 1958-74: “It Had Been a Long Time since Someone Like You Had Appeared In the World”: Roth Fulfills his Mission

Appendix: Samuel Roth’s Imprints and Business Names

Bibliography

The first deeply researched and sustained biographical treatment of a man who has become recognized as a significant figure in American publishing, transatlantic modernism, and the development of obscenity law. Gertzman’s wide-ranging knowledge of Roth and the startlingly diverse contexts in which he lived and worked makes this a penetrating and unsurpassed portrait not only of Roth but of the country he inhabited."--Robert Spoo, coeditor of Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945-1946

"Gertzman is to be commended for braiding together so many underappreciated strands of twentieth-century literary, legal, and cultural history."--Paul K. Saint-Amour, editor of Modernism and Copyright

Samuel Roth is known to most literary scholars as a bold literary "pirate" for issuing unauthorized editions of modernist sensations, including Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
In the absence of an international copyright agreement and because works deemed obscene could not be copyrighted, what he did was not illegal. But it did violate the protocols of mutual fair dealing between publishers and authors. Those publications provoked an unprecedented international protest of writers, publishers, and intellectuals, who eventually vilified Roth on two continents.
Roth was a man with an uncanny ability to recognize good contemporary writing and make it accessible to popular audiences. Ultimately, his dedication to the publication of these works broke down many of the censorship laws of the time, though he suffered greatly for his efforts. His story portrays a struggle with literary censorship in the mid-twentieth century while providing insights into how modernism was marketed in America.

Jay A. Gertzman, professor emeritus of English at Mansfield University, is author of three books, including Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940.

NOIR RIOT

2013-03-24T10:56:00.001-04:00

NOIR RIOT

coming to NoirCon 2014!

Noir: Mary Perry Stone "All For Money"

2013-03-23T11:21:00.000-04:00

The Evil of the 1930s told on a single canvas.

If you abhor injustice, greed and inhumanity,

do not miss the work of Mary Perry Stone.

www.maryperrystone.com

Noir: Brothers Bound in Crime in the City of Brotherly Love

2013-03-18T20:52:00.001-04:00

Meet the Brothers Wishnia

WOODEN SHOE BOOKS & RECORDS

704 South Street, Philadelphia, PA

on Thursday, March 28th at 7:30 PM

Steven Wishnia - author of WHEN THE DRUMMING STOPS

Bass player and rapidly aging punk rocker Underend Vicodini is an unlikely hero. He loves New York City like nobody's business but does it still love him despite his lack of affluence and influence? His former band, The Gutter Astronomers, was riding high in the 1980s, releasing albums and touring across the country playing to packed nightclubs filled with eager fans, but the Great Recession finds the band members middle-aged and struggling not to drown in the seas of gentrification and disillusion. When lead singer Mickey gets an offer to reunite the band, he jumps at it. But can the old bandmates overcome their acrimonious break up? Can they get back into it without shredding their lives? Can Underend Vicodini find inner peace and, more importantly, a reasonably priced apartment below 14th Street or in Brooklyn?

Steven Wishnia is a New York-based musician and journalist. Born on the Lower East Side, he grew up in Brooklyn, New England, Edinburgh, and Long Island. He has played in numerous bands, including the False Prophets, an eclectic punk group that recorded two albums released by Alternative Tentacles. After the False Prophets broke up in 1987, he earned an MA at New York University's School of Journalism, writing for failing newspapers before working for many years as news editor at High Times. Recipient of two New York City Independent Press Association awards, he currently works as a freelance writer and editor, most often for AlterNet.org andJunior Scholastic, and often performs musically with artist Mac McGill.

Kenneth Wishnia - author of 23 SHADES OF BLACK and THE FIFTH SERVANT

NYPD cop Filomena Buscarsela has pretty much seen it all in her five years on the force. But after she recognizes the victim of a fatal toxic leak, her instincts tell her that something is not what it seems to be. From her run-down Spanish Harlem apartment to the way-out clubs of the Lower East Side, Filomena's investigation leads her to suspect that a group of high-powered corporate executives has turned to murder as a way to protect its bottom line. 23 SHADES OF BLACK is K. j. a. Wishnia's first novel featuring Filomena Buscarsela.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune called this "One of the most distinctive series in mystery fiction.." "Filomena Buscarsela [is] a Latina heroine with the epic appeal of Everywoman. . . . The world's a mess, but Filomena's still fighting. It's that perspective that sets Wishnia apart-there's nothing else out there remotely like his books." Rocky Mountain News

In 1592, Prague is a relatively safe refuge for Jews who live within the gated walls of its ghetto. But the peace is threatened when a young Christian girl is found with her throat slashed in a Jewish shop on the eve of Passover. Charged with blood libel, the shopkeeper and his family are arrested, and all that stands in the way of a rabid Christian mob is a clever Talmudic scholar, newly arrived from Poland, named Benyamin Ben-Akiva. Granted just three days to bring the true killer to justice—hampered by rabbinic law, with no allies or connections, and only his wits, knowledge, and faith to guide him—Benyamin sets off on a desperate search for answers. Following a twisting trail from the streets to the shul, from the forbidden back rooms of a ghetto brothel to the emperor Rudolf II's lavish palace, he will dare the impossible—and commit the unthinkable—to save the Jews of Prague . . . and himself.

Noir: The Monkey's Paw haunts Toronto

2013-03-10T10:07:00.000-04:00

MARCH 7, 2013, 4:00 PM
Andrew RowatThe Monkey’s Paw owner Stephen Fowler, with an atlas of Korea published in 1967.

An Oddly Modern Antiquarian Bookshop

By JODY ROSEN

A tiny shop in Toronto, specializing in the arcane and the absurd, may just be publishing’s great new hope.

In the late 1930s, the Women’s Printing Society, in London, published a slim book with a curious title: “Life-Spark Stories for the Intelligent Young.” Attributed to the author “R. K.,” it tells the story of a “bright little Life-Spark living in the heart of the great Lord-King of the Sun,” who comes down to earth and embarks on a series of adventures. The Life-Spark meets Mother Earth, Nurse Destiny and other deities; it changes form, inhabiting various plants and animals — a pansy, a dog named Gipsie, a little boy. The book is an unusual literary hybrid, an illustrated children’s story and an occult tract: “Harold and the Purple Crayon” meets Aleister Crowley. To be precise, it’s a work of theosophy, offering lessons in karma, reincarnation and other precepts of that esoteric spiritual movement to its intelligent young readers.

This little hardbound edition of “Life-Spark Stories” isn’t just weird — it is exceptionally rare. You won’t find a copy in Barnes & Noble; it’s not in the catalog of the Library of Congress or the British Library. “Let me put it this way,” says Stephen Fowler, owner of the Monkey’s Paw bookshop. “This book is more rare than a Gutenberg Bible. It’s more rare than Shakespeare’s first folio. If you want to see a first folio of Shakespeare, you can just go to the Huntington Library and see one. But where can you go to see this book?”

You can go to Fowler’s shop. The Monkey’s Paw specializes in oddities like “Life-Spark Stories”: printed matter that has fallen between history’s cracks and eluded even Google Books’ all-seeing eye. There are Victorian etiquette handbooks, antique sex manuals, obscure scientific treatises. There are forgotten 19th-century travelogues with sumptuous chromolithographs and leather-bound correspondence courses on fingerprinting. There are medical books (“Hewat’s Examination of the Urine”), how-to guides (“Safety in Police Pursuit Driving”) and historical studies: “Drug Adulteration: Detection and Control in 19th-Century Britain,” “The Water Closet: A New History,” “The Puppet Theatre in Czechoslovakia.” There are books whose accidentally poetic titles alone are worth the asking price: “Prospecting for Uranium,” “Magnetic Removal of Foreign Bodies,” “South Australia From Space.” A sign in the Monkey’s Paw window dryly sums up the inventory: “Old & Unusual.”

The BIBLIO-MAT from Craig Small on Vimeo.

“This isn’t the store where you’ll find the book you were looking for,” Fowler says. “It’s the store where you’ll find the book you didn’t know you were looking for.” You may find something else surprising at the Monkey’s Paw, too: a glimpse of the future, a way forward for the old-fashioned bookstore in the age of the iPhone and the e-book.

Andrew RowatThe Monkey’s Paw.
1229 Dundas St. West,Toronto, ON M6J 1X6
416.531.2123
wish@monkeyspaw.com
www.monkeyspaw.com

The Monkey’s Paw occupies a small storefront next to a coin-operated laundromat on a rambling commercial strip a couple of miles from Toronto’s downtown center. It’s a narrow 500-square-foot space, lined with dark wooden bookshelves and display cases. There are Oriental rugs underfoot; overhead, rickety ceiling fans whir. In 2013, the publishing industry is locked in a permanent state of crisis, and the desperation of booksellers is palpable; even fine used-book stores are hocking scented candles and chai lattes alongside old hardcovers. The Monkey’s Paw is a throwback. It feels like something out of Charles Dickens’s London — a Victorian British bookshop, teleported to 21st-century Canada.

“You have these hip 26-year-old downtown Toronto kids — they’ve actually literally never been to a bookshop,” Fowler says. “They come here and they’re like: ‘It reminds of a scene in “Harry Potter.” ‘ My wife put it nicely: the Monkey’s Paw is like someone’s idea of a bookshop.”

Andrew Rowat‘‘Magnetic Removal of Foreign Bodies’’ by Dr. Murdock Equen, published in 1957; a series of 1920s mail-order Little Blue Books.

You could also say that the Monkey’s Paw is an idea masquerading as a bookshop. It’s a cross between a retail establishment and a conceptual art installation, which upends traditional book-trade values and views the literary canon through a cracked lens. It’s a bookstore that argues that bookstores are, by definition, Dickensian old curiosity shops. “Most booksellers can’t adjust to the postprint era,” Fowler says. “The only way to sell books in the 21st-century is as artifacts. I’m a 20th-century person myself, but with Monkey’s Paw, I’ve tried to adapt. This place is a church of print. It’s just that the old rules are a bit scrambled.”

Fowler, 48, knows those rules well. He dropped out of college at age 18 and moved from his native Kansas City to San Francisco, intending to become a poet. Instead, he got a job at Albatross Book Company, a used-book store in the Tenderloin. Fowler has stayed in the book trade ever since. He eventually relocated to Toronto with his Canadian wife, and in 2006 opened the Monkey’s Paw on a shoestring. “I’m not qualified to do anything besides sell books. I don’t have a résumé. I don’t have an education,” he says.

Fowler looks the part of a bookseller. He wears brown corduroy blazers and checkered shirts, buttoned to the top; he twists the tips of his mustache into little handlebars. The look is quaint, but in the antiquarian book world, Fowler is a renegade and innovator.

Historically, booksellers have selected their stock for its salability, and, in the more rarefied end of the trade, for its intellectual prestige and first-edition pedigree. But few of Fowler’s books have prestige or traditional market value; the Monkey’s Paw books are rarities, but almost none qualify as “rare books,” or command rare-book prices. “I look for books that speak to me,” he says. “Interesting treatments of unusual subjects. Books that marry substance and artifact value in a pleasing way. It’s hard to describe or quantify, but I know a Monkey’s Paw book when I see one — a book-object that possesses a certain magnetism.”

Fowler has other curatorial rules of thumb. He boils down the Monkey’s Paw formula to a cheeky acronym, B.A.M.A. — beautiful, arcane, macabre, absurd — and his definitions of those terms are expansive. (“If a book exudes an aura of tragic nostalgia or irretrievable loss, I consider it macabre. I remember an Avon products catalog from the 1940s. It was printed in fading pastel colors, and still had the scent of powdery old-lady perfume. The book’s presence was just eerie — it conjured up a long-dead Avon lady in the doorway.”) Another dictum: most books are nonfiction, the more specific the nonfiction book, the better. A general survey of British history is not an interesting book. A history of transportation in England: better. A monograph on Elizabethan toll roads in Kent? That’s a Monkey’s Paw book.

The result, packed into the store’s shelves, is a dizzying jumble of titles, genres, eras, ideas. Fowler arranges his displays to accentuate dissonance. An outdated work of political philosophy sits beside an edition of Sherlock Holmes written in Pitman shorthand and a trippy 1970s book about holograms. It’s a transfixing, bewildering mix. In 2013, it is also familiar. The book industry is under siege by digital technology, but the Monkey’s Paw has made peace with the Internet — has, in its dowdy analog way, replicated it.

“The experience of Web browsing makes it possible for a shop like this to exist,” Fowler says. “The randomness of the book displays, they’re like the Web — masses of unrelated information popping up next to each other, their context pretty much wiped out. Basically, the Monkey’s Paw is a celebration of old print culture, presented in way that resonates with digital-age people.”

Recently, Fowler unveiled his splashiest experiment in randomization. In the rear of the Monkey’s Paw, you’ll find the Biblio-Mat, a vending machine the size of an industrial refrigerator, created for Fowler by the designer Craig Small. A customer drops a Canadian $2 coin into a slot; the Biblio-Mat makes a buzzing noise, a bell rings, and out pops a book. Fowler calls it the “the iPod shuffle of books.” But behind the stunt, there is a theory: the idea that the most marginal books can offer the pleasure, the value, we associate with canonical literature.

Andrew RowatClockwise from right: Fowler’s one-of-a-kind Biblio-Mat; medical and criminal justice books published circa 1960s by Charles C. Thomas; a display of vintage Penguin paperbacks.

“Traditionally, the job of a learned bookseller was to preserve the important printed documents of his culture,” he says. “But we have libraries that are the repositories of those books, and they’ve all been scanned by Google.” If there’s an “important” book in any field, Fowler adds, it’s been saved.

Fowler grabs a book off the pile on his desk: “Elixir of Life,” published in 1935. “This isn’t about the elixir of life,” he says. “This book is about preventing constipation. To a librarian, a bookseller, this book was dross. But now that print is no longer the center of our culture — now that culture is on my iPhone — we can step back and really see print. And you know what? ‘Elixir of Life’ might say as much about American culture, and attitudes towards health and the body, as anything published in 1935.”

Spend a day at the Monkey’s Paw and it’s hard not to be seduced by Fowler’s vision. One chronicler of bibliophilia put it well: “A glance at the backs of the books which lie so untidily on top of each other shows that an old novel of Sir Gilbert Parker is next to the Temperance Almanack for 1879, which evidently finds itself uncomfortably close to its other neighbor, an out-of-date textbook on brewing. . . . Here and there will be some little volumes which may prove a treasure to one man, even though to the rest of his fellows it may be quite useless.”

Those sentences could be describing the scene at Fowler’s shop. In fact, they were written a half century ago by Robert L. Collison in “Book Collecting: An Introduction to Modern Methods of Literary and Bibliographical Detection” (Ernest Benn Limited; London, 1957). You can buy the book at the Monkey’s Paw, for $25.

NoirCon

Noir: The Not-so-shy pornographer, Samuel Roth

NoirRiot is coming soon! Get ready to revolt!

Noir: America, The Land That Noir Built.

America: #1 In Fear, Stress, Anger, Divorce, Obesity, Anti-Depressants, Etc.

Noir: PINE BOX FOR A PIN-UP, the cover!

Noir: PINE BOX FOR A PIN-UP by Frank DeBlase

Noir: Signs of the times

Noir: DO YOU THINK YOU KNOW DAVID GOODIS? READ THIS!

From Hollywood “Treatment” to Depression on North Broad St: The Career of The Blonde on the Street Corner click on above By Jay A. Gertzman

Noir: New Boobs, Old Boobs

Noir: Got what it takes? Swierczynski Style

Week Two: Starting With a Bang

Week Three: Tumbling Down a Hill in a House That Is On Fire

Week Four: Kicking In Windows, Slamming Shut Doors

Class Description

If you want to you grab your reader's attention, you have to write like your life depends on it.

Noir: The Torture of the Ortolan Bunting - Emberiza hortulana

Noir: Harrington takes Crimespree by storm with Dia De Los Muertos

One

Tijuana, Mexico / November 1—2:00 P.M.

Noir: Beaver Fatale

The beaver pounced as a man went to take its photograph after spotting the animal on the side of a road during a fishing trip.

Noir: Jay Gertzman on David Goodis

From Hollywood “Treatment” to Depression on North Broad St: The Career of The Blonde on the Street Corner

R.I.P. Roger Ebert

Noir: The Chill Reaper Cometh

Noir: Pastor Have Sex With Congregation, Claims His Sperms Contain Holy Spirit

Brazil: Pastor Have Sleep With Congregation, Claims His Sperms Contain Holy Spirit

Noir: Breaking Bad Elmo

Noir: R.I.P. Nascar's Greatest Fan

Noir: Goodis's THE BURGLAR with Omar Sharif

Noir: An Old Twist on The New Diogenes

Noir: Sam Roth - Poet, Pirate, Pornographer

NOIR RIOT

Noir: Mary Perry Stone "All For Money"

Noir: Brothers Bound in Crime in the City of Brotherly Love

Noir: The Monkey's Paw haunts Toronto

An Oddly Modern Antiquarian Bookshop

From Hollywood “Treatment” to Depression on North Broad St: The Career of

The Blonde on the Street Corner

click on above

By Jay A. Gertzman