Earlier this week I saw a DVD with Tina Louise, the sword-and-sandal flick from 1962, The Siege of Syracuse. I got it from Sinister Cinema. (When I tell you where I got a movie, it's not an ad, just one fan passing info onto others who might be interested.)

Tina plays a dancing girl named Diana/Artemis who falls in love with the scientist Archimedes (played by Rosanno Brazzi!). Talk about meeting cute--she's bathing in a lake when he's testing out a new mirror-weapon to catch the rays of the sun, and when he focuses his solar beam on her little tunic, which she left on the shore, it catches fire! When she comes to complain that he just burned her clothing, they fall in love.

The movie is basically a biographical story about Archimedes and how he helped Syracuse fight off the Romans during the Punic War with Carthage, but Tina is definitely the highlight, and the story of their love is the thread that runs through the whole flick.

Her best scene is a dance sequence on a boat. It's choppily edited, but her figure looks great (great hip-swinging) but what really stands out are the closeups of her flirty face and red hair. It looks like she was vamping the cameraman (as well as the audience) because she looks directly into the lens with an incredible smile and captivating eyes. And with the DVD player, the image can be frozen and well-appreciated. She didn't get to give Archimedes a lapdance but her eye-dance was more than enough for me!

I basically only know Miss Louise as a pinup model, because I never really watched her on Gilligan's Island. I was too busy watching Twelve O'Clock High--and when is that show going to be put on DVD?? Come to think of it, Robert Lansing would have been a better Archimedes than Rosanno Brazzi...

It's Saturday morning. At 7 a.m. somebody started some kind of machine across the street and I woke up after only about five and a half hours of sleep. Tried not to sleep on the right arm so it wouldn't ache so much today. It still aches...

Even as I write now, there are jackhammers tearing up the street...

I am not an emotional exhibitionist. At least, I thought I wasn't. I started this blog yesterday in a burst of various emotions, and with some time on my hands, thought I'd give it a try. But I felt vaguely embarrassed this morning when I thought about all the stuff I'd written here yesterday. I thought of taking it all down. Maybe I still will...

I don't want to write about anybody except myself here and movies and books and other art I love. Any discussions of strippers will focus on their effects on me, rather than who they are personally. I am interested in examining experience rather than gossiping...

That is, if I continue to do this blog or instead delete it completely...

I had Japanese food last night in a favorite restaurant. As I ate my California roll, I read part of an autobiography of a London prostitute in the 1950s. It's called Streetwalker, by Anonymous, a 1961 Dell paperback that I found last week at used book store. It is exceptionally evocative not only of the day and night life of a prostitute, but of the Soho and Piccadilly environs. Anyway, a passage I read last night stood out. On p. 70 she is talking about the hardened attitudes of herself and her colleagues: "Apart from the extremes of fear or weakness of resolution, no softness of any kind must be shown or shared, for softness has no place in our world. It is at once shunned and despised when we come across it, because to be soft is to be constantly shamed and hurt, to lose illusions before others can be built up, to invite trickery, to open the door for the profiteer, the violent or the mad..."

I wonder how much some of the strippers share this attitude. Perhaps their hardness or coldness is similarly a defense against the "trickery...the profiteer, the violent or the mad..." I know in my own life I sometimes act cold without necessarily wanting to, but because I feel I must keep a distance for the sake of personal safety...

Maybe it is even dangerous for strip club customers to be soft, because it can invite trickery onto their heads too...

It is the personal interactions in modern strip clubs that are so confounding. Although the dancers get upclose, I feel they really have no more connection to most of the customers than beautiful actresses in tv or movies have to their fans. The modern stripper sometimes seems like a hologram even as she covers me with her perfume and rubs her breasts across my face, or lets me feel the lovely flowing swell of her waist and hips as she grinds on my lap....

Yes, holograms. And so they might as well be on a stage ten or twenty feet away. And this is why I wish they still had clubs where you could just watch girls perform a show. Yes, I've seen some of the neo-burlesque revues, but my reaction has been mixed. It's more like a night at the theater than the kind of titillating dream-show I still feel striptease is meant to be. Neo-burlesque often seems too much like a celebration of the past to be very erotic in the present. I'd like it better if someone opened a neo-burlesque THEATER with continuous shows, bringing it into the present as a readily accessible entertainment rather than as a special event...a theater where you could go in any time and see girls dancing, and comics doing funny sketches...a theater like the old days but made vital in the present; the kind of theater I am too young to have experienced in its heyday but which I read about or see evoked in DVDs like Something Weird's great compilation Best of Burlesque...

After I ate dinner I decided to come home instead of visiting a club. And instead of watching more of Ben-Hur, I watched Port of New York, a film noir from the late 40s that features Yul Brynner in his first starring role--with hair, no less. He plays a suave gentlemen drug smuggler. The movie was most vivid for its New York location shooting, with some great views of the old Penn Station and the Third Avenue Elevated, both since demolished. A fair amount of suspense. Not a great movie but worth a watch. It's on Alpha Video Classics.

The jackhammers seem to have taken a break...

I don't know why I'm writing so much today...maybe it's because it's a rush to see words up on the Web so fast. I certainly SHOULDN'T write so much today, because I seem to have slept badly on my right arm last night, and my shoulder hurts like hell...

I first saw Ben-Hur when I was nine years old. Went with my father to a reserved seat "roadshow" engagement at the Michael Todd Theater in downtown Chicago. Ever since I've been hooked on these Biblical movies, but this has always been one of my favorites.

Popping a DVD into the machine is like traveling through time. The DVD enables the instantaneous retrieval of an image, especially an image from one's past, which is what a movie like this is to me. I watch the movie now, with its emphasis on early Christianity, and I wonder what I must have thought seeing it back in 1959, a little Jewish kid who'd just started Hebrew school. I watch it today and find it quite moving, but in a way that has less to do with religion than with dramatic style. What must have impressed me about the movie as a child, and made me fall in love with movies and this genre in particular, was the directness of its emotions, the clarity with which the characters feel and express themselves. The steadfastness of Ben-Hur, the ruthlessness of Messala, the kindness of Jesus, the gentleness and firmness of Esther...

Even though much has been written about the so-called homoerotic subtext of the relationship between Messala and Ben-Hur, the characters are forthright and not obscure in their immediate desires and goals. I believe this is much different from the way I perceived life around me at the time, or even now. The surface of things at home, at public school, at Hebrew school, seemed at odds with what was really going on, and with what people really felt. These movies had a simplicity that made them an attractive emotional dimension to visit...

Although as an adult I am fascinated by ambiguity in the arts, I often cannot tolerate it in real life...

I wonder if that is why I now prefer the world of the strip club over the tormenting uncertainty of real relationships with women on the outside. Then, too, the strip club reminds me of those scenes in ancient history movies where warriors or kings sit in rapt attention at lusty banquets as alluring dancing girls writhe to exotic melodies. Sometimes after I finish a day's work, I think, "After the battle, then the revels," and head to an ecdysiastical emporium...though I am as far from a warrior as you can get; I recall Peter Ustinov's line in Spartacus in this regard: "I am more of a civilian than most civilians."

I was thinking of going out tonight to a club, but unless I get there before 8:00 it's going to cost between $25 and $30 just to plant my butt in a chair, between the admission and coat check and first beer. I could buy 5 Alpha Videos for that money--they do those budget editions of great old flicks and tv shows. After all, I'm still looking for a couple of volumes of Racket Squad, Federal Men, and I wouldn't mind replacing my VHS copy of The Manster with Alpha's DVD version...

Then again, I could just stay in and watch more Ben-Hur. The deluxe edition has the silent version too, which I haven't seen. Might be interesting to alternate watching the 1959 remake with the original...

But if desire for dancing girls doesn't drive me out of my apartment tonight, maybe the sirens will. They're frequent on the street where I live. From the firehouse, the hospital, or the police station, they provide a constant noir soundtrack, day and night, night and day...

I'd gone to a club I generally don't care for, because a dancer I like--let's call her Nicole--moved there from a club I frequently go to. However, Nicole wasn't working last night as I'd hoped, and as her absence became clear, I was able to re-experience all the things I don't like about her new venue, a place I hadn't visited in months and which I swore I would never return to...

First, I tipped the waitress who served me $2 for a $10 beer. She walked off without even a thank-you...this had happened in the past...

I don't tip people to be thanked, but it is a courtesy that adds to one's overall sense of well-being, and desire to spend money on the dancers...

Then, as I waited to see if Nicole were on duty (you don't think of strippers as being "on duty" but that's a reasonable enough term to apply, I think), I was approached by a number of dancers. I wasn't in the mood for a dance, but I am always polite in saying no. I usually say, "Thanks, but I'm just going to watch the stage for awhile." If a girl seems nice, I add, "But maybe another time." If a girl isn't to my liking, I never say that because I don't want to lead her on...

Anyway, when I said no to several of the dancers, their faces transformed from penetrating and seductive looks to masks of coldness as they straightened up and looked for other prey. I know I shouldn't take it personally, but I do. First you're offered sweetness or sensuality, then when you don't nibble the bait you get to see what they really think of you: a human ATM machine, a bug. It makes Sir Cranky feel like he's in high school again and had the temerity to approach one of the academy's finest beauties. How dare he...

It seemed that the more attractive the dancer, the harder was her mask of coldness when she got turned down. Of course, when they react this way, they only reinforce my faith in my instincts in saying no to them. What kind of a dance would I get from somebody who could treat me so icily when I was polite and friendly?...

The reason why I like Nicole, even though I certainly don't consider our relationship anything more than that of a customer and dancer, is that she treats me with respect, like a person with feelings. Yes, I do get turned on when she is on my lap, teasing me with those sweet breasts of hers, yes I probably do look like a baby eager for a bottle, silly I suppose when the baby is a fiftysomething man, but is that not the male condition when hormones rise through our systems, beaming our hunger through our eyes? And, at her old venue, she'd sit and chat with me for awhile as well as dance. I'm not a big spender, I don't go in the champagne room, but if I like a dancer I can certainly be counted on to spend enough to cover a reasonable monthly cellphone bill...

In all fairness, a couple of the dancers weren't so fierce in their attempt to cancel me out as a human being when I turned them down, and maybe at some point I'll see them again and give their terpsichorean skills a try...

So, Nicole-less in this dump, I finished my beer and hit the street. And into my mind's eye sprang Dave Kehr's review this week in the New York Times of the new deluxe 4-disc set of Ben-Hur. Mr. Kehr, for my money, is the best film critic on the Times staff; he can whet my curiosity about seeing a film just with one sentence about the meaning or dexterity of some directorial touch. He compared the excellence of the chariot race in Ben-Hur with the awkwardness of an action sequence in the recent Scarlet Johannsen flick The Island. I had no desire to see The Island before, but after reading Mr. Kehr's comment I was curious to see The Island just to see what he meant, to make a comparative study--just for the fun of it--of spacial coherence in action montages...

Tower Records has Ben-Hur on sale this week so I hoofed it over there and picked it up. It was only $30, which is what I would have spent for only one-and-a-half lapdances, and the 4-disc DVD set will last quite awhile longer. I began watching the first half of the flick again last night. Of course, nobody can underestimate Miklos Rosza's contribution to Ben-Hur through his beautiful score. I've listened to it so many times on CD that it almost feels like the soundtrack of MY life sometimes, but then again I also feel that way about Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo...

So, Nicole-less last night, I watched Stephen Boyd's relentless Roman Messala turn serpent-like on his old friend, Charlton Heston's Ben-Hur, and I wondered if I could work up the desire to go back to that club where Nicole is now working. Damn I wish she'd picked some other place...

I'm Sir Cranky, a fan of strippers for 35 years, ever since I saw my first striptease show in the Midwest during my second year of college. It was an old-time burly-cue theater, complete with stage and curtain and proscenium. When you walked through the lobby to the auditorium, you were greeted by huge blow-ups of photos of peelers. The headliner was "Hell's Angel, the Devil's Playgirl." In between acts, a burly middle-aged guy in a blue business suit came out to sell the audience candy bars, a small percentage of which he claimed had some kind of prize inside. Also offered for sale were books of "French" photos. Hell's Angel was a cute dark blonde girl who came out in a black negligee and writhed on a bed onstage. My friends and I had driven thirty miles from our small college into the big city to see this show, and I for one was not disappointed. I became hooked on the experience of watching women dance and disrobe. It was the height of the hippie era, and just to see girls in these un-hippie-ish, femme fatale outfits was exciting. Feather boas, garters, stockings, heels...you didn't see the hippie chicks in those items! However, it was the first and only traditional theater-type burlesque show I was to see, as go-go bars and topless joints were soon to become the dominant venues...I still like strippers, even though I'm graying and paunchy. Yes, I'm getting older, but the strippers seem to stay the same age...I don't know if it's a function of middle-age, but lately my interest in ecdysiasts has been challenged by my interest in DVDs. It's partly a matter of finances. In the old days before lapdancing, it was possible to sit in a bar for hours and tip the girls onstage and have a good time without going broke. Sure, the dancers hustled drinks, but with a little self-control, I didn't spend too much. But now with lapdancing, it becomes a very costly proposition as it is much harder to exercise restraint when a comely girl is hovering over me. Yes, if I have a soft spot for a sweetie--or I suppose the word should be "hard spot"--I am likely to spend far more than I can afford in the long-term. As they say in recovery programs, "One is too many, and a thousand is not enough"...One of my other interests in life, however, is old movies. And with the ever-improving packages offered on DVDs, with all the extras and documentaries and commentaries, I'm starting to sit in the clubs and think, "Do I want to spend $40 on eight minutes of lapdancing, or do I want to get the Ben-Hur deluxe edition for the same price?" Is the average lapdance at $20 too expensive, or are DVDs in the same price range just a better bargain? Well, I do try to get the most out of my lapdancing buck; indeed, I try to get "commentaries" and "bonus materials" with my dances....which I'll explain in a later post. Until next time, I'm Sir Cranky, on the scene (such as it is)...