The sun came out again, but yikes! it is so damn cold. It was nice to know, then, that I could warm myself in a starlet’s fury as I read that Jessica Alba threatened to sue Playboy for putting her on its cover with a promotional photograph from one of her recent flicks.

As veteran readers of this scroll of lechery will know, I have admiration for Miss Alba even though I’ve only seen her in one movie, Sin City--but I have contemplated many of her lovely photographs. The gigantic billboard for her Cosmopolitan cover, which temporarily adorned part of the construction site of the new Hearst Building on 57th Street, was one of the few justifications for assembling that glassy monolith and foisting it on the eyeballs of a helpless public.

I have to admit I was suckered into buying that new issue of Playboy sight unseen--meaning, it was shrink-wrapped and I couldn’t inspect the inner contents before purchase. But when I saw Miss Jessie on the cover, I figured there would be more good stuff inside, not necessarily nude or topless--she could be wearing a burlap sack and I would look at the pic! She’s got a “shayne punim,” or beautiful face as they say in Yiddish. At least, I figured, there would be a few more good photos. Instead the cover turned out to be primarily a come-on for their pictorial about sexy celebrities. There was no exclusive Playboy pictorial of La Alba.

I’ve been ogling Playboy since about the age of twelve (does it show?) and I have to admit that this issue caused a major chink in my perception of their invincibility in providing “entertainment for men.” This is the best they could do, a promotional shot from Into the Blue? At least they didn’t have Paul Walker on their cover too, like the posters for the movie, which seemed to hedge its visual pitch about whether it was cheesecake, beefcake, or bothcake.

Jessica Alba flummoxes me, however. She makes a big deal about not getting nude in photographs, but it was okay for her to be hung up by her wrists in a skimpily dressed condition and get whipped by a paunchy troglodyte in Sin City?

Well, I’m sure there’s some complex rationale behind it all. And as long as she keeps posing in a wide variety of settings and costumes, I’m happy...

Meanwhile, what’s with my CD players? I had two admittedly cheap portable ones--Duane Reade drugstores are my audio supply centers--and they both conked out at the same time! Did they have something against the Andrews Sisters? Is it a crime for Sir Cranky to repeatedly listen to Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy and Apple Blossom Time while he works?

And then, as if in a show of unity, the D batteries in my Aiwa CD boombox--purchased at the late great Nobody Beats the Wiz audio/video stores--seem to have expired, and I have to go out at lunch and get more of those so I can listen to Mambo Fever as I shave later while getting ready to see my favorite stripper Lily...

Liz Smith in the New York Post recently wrote about the new movie V for Vendetta with Natalie Portman, and Miss Smith predicted that V would turn out to be the “big movie” that King Kong wasn’t. Well, you know how I feel about the new King Kong if you’ve read my earlier post “The new King Kong drives women mad--literally!” But I want to emphasize that no matter how big or small Peter Jackson’s movie turns out to be (and it had some brilliant stuff in it), kudos go to Mr. J because most probably thanks to his flick, the 1961 giant ape movie Konga was released on DVD by MGM in a great new print. I've mentioned Konga here before, but those who missed my analysis: here is richly demented entertainment! Michael Gough as a strident, neurotic middle-aged mad professor with a yen for a Busty Blonde Coed is a character straight out of today’s tabloid culture. In fact, Gough’s creation of a serum to cause gigantism in his pet gorilla, Konga, takes second fiddle to the movie’s bizarre melodrama of him being nasty to his longtime fortyish girlfriend and lab assistant--who takes revenge on his attempted infidelity with Busty Blonde Coed by making Konga fifty feet tall. Busty Blonde Coed’s arm gets caught in the snapping jaws of a mutant Venus Flytrap, and Gough gets carried around London in Konga’s paw ala Fay Wray. More fun than the new King Kong, and way shorter too...

It’s Friday and I guess my mind is wandering a bit. I hope that’s okay with you...

I was happy last night because the blog Gawker, which covers doings in Manhattan media, was kind enough to spotlight my blog again in their Blogorrhea section. If you haven’t seen Gawker, it’s full of interesting tidbits on a daily basis. I have their URL on my Sites I Like list, but I’m providing a link below to the special mention of strippersversusdvds...thank you, editors Jessica Coen and Jesse Oxfeld, for helping me get my musings aka ravings further out into the world...your rating of “Ewww” I take in the most affectionate way! I hope you peruse some of the other very excellent blogs here at the ‘Stream, too...

Well, it’s already past twelve and my breakfast has digested itself, so I think I’ll take break, eat some lunch (Blimpie versus Subway?), do some work, and then come back here a little later for more Friday ramblings, particularly about Lindsay Lohan’s breast-teasing dress, and my hopes to see Lily tonight...so enjoy your afternoon!

GawkerBlogorrhea

Back to the dreary weather. It makes my apartment dark, even when I open up the blinds. To take the edge off the solitude--I'm working at home today--I took myself out for a nice breakfast at my favorite coffee shop. Lots of bad stuff in the newspapers, though, about awful crimes and other tragedies. Even as I write this, there are the blaring sirens and horns of the firetrucks zooming by on the street outside...

I shouldn’t be writing here now, but doing work first, but I was anxious to get some things down.

After I finished writing last night, I took a shower before going to bed. The heat of the water was relaxing. I had worked at top concentration out at the office yesterday--I call it "going into hyperspace"-- and I was exhausted, yet wired too. Also, as I stood under the needle spray, I realized that I was inaccurate in a couple of things I said in my last post, “I need both my strippers and my DVDs.”

Firstly, I think the strippers are winning over the DVDs at this point, judging by how much I’ve been writing about the peelers and thinking about my favorite dancer, Lily; I don’t think it’s a draw, as I mistakenly wrote last night. Not that any “victory” is irrevocable in this duel between ecdysiasts and cinema for the heart and mind of Sir Cranky--nor is a “victory” to be desired. The aim to have a life balanced between my different interests. After the pleasant times I had with my uncle and cousins in the last few months, I may also add more family time into the mix of my life.

The second inaccurate thing I believe I wrote last night was that I’m not in love with Lily. Well, I think “in love” is too strong a description, but to say I just “like” her and “enjoy hanging out with her” is too weak. Let’s say I’m "smitten" by her, that’s more on the mark.

When I left her in the club earlier than usual last Friday evening, the reason wasn’t only that I didn’t want to spend more money. As I sat with her, our conversation flagged a few times and that made me uncomfortable. I don’t enjoy silence with people in general, although I can tolerate it when I’m with a friend I’ve known for years. Sometimes the conversation just runs dry and you hang out in companionable quiet. But when I’m sitting with Lily, whom I'm still getting to know, I like to keep up a constant flow of chatter.

Most of the time we talk about her, her work as a dancer, her studies at school, her family background, or about movies or interesting stuff in New York. I don’t have an overwhelming need to talk about myself, as I certainly do enough of that on my blog, but I like to be asked questions about what’s going on in my life too. I’ve told her about my freelance work and my other interests such as movies and books (although I haven’t told her about the blog), and when she doesn’t ask me much about what’s new in those areas I feel she isn’t really interested in me even as a casual club friend. So when the conversation hit a few lulls last Friday, I didn’t really want to want to hang around much longer to see if our time together (other than the lapdancing) would descend into boredom for me.

I would say that I love conversation as much as I love dancers and DVDs.

One of our fellow Blogstreamers asked me in a private message if I’ve ever asked Lily out for a meal. I have in a general way twice (“Maybe I can take you to such-and-such restaurant sometime?”), but she didn’t seem enthusiastic about the idea either time. Because I have gone out to dinner with other dancers in the past, and it’s usually not been very much fun--and I had a six or seven week sexual affair with one, which turned into a total nightmare--it takes a lot for me to jump over the self-protective wall I’ve put up around myself, and feel I trust a dancer enough to ask her out. Stripping is not a regular type of job, and some of the women are genuine flakes. Stripping calls into mind so many complex issues and feelings both for dancers and their admirers. Even the more normal dancers can get warped by the weirdness of it, by exhibiting themselves freely in a society still hampered by a puritanical world view, and by the occasionally cynical act of using their allure to manipulate men’s emotions and lust. So when Lily didn’t seem keen on seeing me outside the club, even for dinner at a special restaurant she’s never been to but would like to visit, I actually felt DEFEATED in my attempt to rise above my anxieties and fears. Not defeated by her, but by circumstances like the job and the difference in our ages.

I have the fear--which came from experiencing just this with the stripper I had the affair with almost eighteen years (but it feels like yesterday, believe me)--that the beautiful surface of a dancer will turn out to hide severe problems that I won’t be able to deal with, and will engulf me.

I already feel engulfed on an ongoing basis by having to deal with my narcissistic mother, who is in her late seventies but whose emotional approach to other people is firmly based in the concept of the childish tantrum, succinctly summed up as: “I WANT THINGS ONLY MY WAY!!!”

Sometimes I wonder if I indulge my emotions by doing this blog, but in truth the blog is similar to what I’ve done for thirty-five years in private diaries and journals as I’ve attempted to get a handle on various things in my life.

I think my passion to put things down in words is in direct inverse proportion to my parents’ secrecy about their inner emotions and past lives.

It’s ironic to think that if I had just stuck to my original plan to visit Lily tomorrow, I wouldn’t be writing all this, but having shown up at the club twice on her scheduled nights and not found her there has brought up once again my complicated feelings for her.

I dreamed last night of going to a gift shop on 34th Street, near Macy’s--a shop that went out of business a couple of years ago--to buy Lily another gift. I had bought her a pretty but inexpensive bracelet for Christmas, which she obviously liked. In the dream, I found a matching headband and earrings that would go with her new hairstyle, and are in her favorite color. I also found a small pin which had changing pictures on it, like those little movable images that used to come as premiums in gumball machines or cereal boxes--except that this pin didn’t simply have an image that flickered back and forth between two positions, but was rather a continuing little movie of New York in the 1940s. I awakened from the dream only to discover it was too early for me to get up, considering when I went to bed, and I also had a slight headache.

As I think about the dream, still feeling achy after breakfast, I realize it was a visualization of what I’m feeling, and what I’ve just been writing about here. The headband and earrings were clearly chosen to give her pleasure, to see her smile, to see her adorn herself in small tokens of my affection. The second gift--the pin which shows images of 1940s New York--is a symbol of myself, as expressed by my interest in history and old films. So I also want to give her the gift of who I am. Accept the gift, Miss Lily, of Sir Cranky, with his own hair (however gray, however thin) freshly cut for a neat and tidy presentation.

When the cocktail waitress noticed and complimented Lily’s new hairstyle last Friday, she then turned to me and said, “Hey, you got yours cut too!” And indeed, I cut it to look swell for Lily...or as swell as a balding, paunchy, middle-aged bookworm can!

I guess underlying my resolve to hang out with other dancers, which I also wrote about in last night’s post, was my anger, disappointment and worry about why Lily was not in the club when she said she would be, and also my anger at myself for feeling foolishly attached to a girl who, for all her good qualities and all the illusions of our being compatible, remains sequestered from me in a nightworld universe I only seem capable of visiting as a customer.

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Anyway, having explicated what’s been on my mind since I was in the shower last night, I’m going to get down to my day’s work. Enjoy your afternoon, and thank you as always for reading.

I realize I haven’t been writing much about movies lately. I’ve been preoccupied with either my favorite dancer Lily, or family stuff.

I’ve been watching flicks, certainly, but nothing super-memorable. Still, I enjoyed Anne Francis, most famous for being in Forbidden Planet (1956) and the 60s Honey West tv show, playing a prostitute in psychoanalysis in the ahead-of-its-time Girl of the Night (1960); James Mason playing a man tormented both by his fear of being biracial and of being cuckolded by his wife in Island in the Sun (1957); and Dorothy Patrick (who? a B-movie starlet) playing a naive country girl depressed over her bad luck in falling in love with a bigamist in The Blonde Bandit (1950). She then rebounds by getting involved with big city racketeer Gerald Mohr, and gets herself framed for grand larceny.

Anyway, the title of my blog being “strippersversusdvds” you might wonder how this mighty battle is proceeding. I would answer that it’s a draw for the time being. I know I can get a DVD of a cherished movie for the same amount of money I spend on a couple of three-minute lapdances, yet I still get lapdances too. That’s because strippers and DVDs are like apples and oranges, and I enjoy them both.

Last night I again felt like dropping by and seeing Lily, even though when she asked me last week when I would be returning, I had told her it would be this Friday. But it’s been a stressful work week, and there’s been a lot of depressing news in the papers, and I needed to have some fun pronto. When I checked with the club last night, they said Lily was scheduled to perform, but she didn’t show up yesterday either. Maybe those personal matters she’d mentioned made her unable to come to work.

I asked a friend of hers in the club, whom I’ll call Nina, if Lily was okay; but Nina said she hadn’t talked to her. She said she’d call today to find out.

Nina seemed to figure that since Lily wasn’t there, she could make some dough in Lily’s place and dance for me. Actually, she’d danced for me once during the period when Lily was still on vacation, but I didn’t like it much--and I think she knew it. Nina is very aggressive and self-assured in a way that makes me feel diminished and uncomfortable. Yes, I know you think you’re gorgeous, I know you travel all over (and I don't), but you’re not gorgeous to me and I don’t care what countries you’ve seen (I would rather have seen them myself).

In trying to get me to buy a dance from her last night, Nina said that as we got to know each other, the dances would get better and better. I felt her tone was patronizing. Some of these dancers act as if men check their brains along with their coats when they enter the club--and sure, some guys do. But I don’t, at least not as much as I did when I was younger. Lily is not making me spend money on her; I spend it because I like her company. So of course, to get to know Nina better, I would have to spend my time and money on her, instead of Lily--unless Nina assumes I could spend freely on both her AND Lily. Maybe she does assume that...well, I guess Nina was just trying to make a buck last night; and if I liked her more, I would have taken a dance in Lily’s absence just to pass the time. But Nina just doesn't do it for me, as I've said.

Another girl--let’s call her Chrissy--came over after I tipped her onstage a couple of times. She was attractive and friendly, so I had a couple of dances with her. She had a nice figure and moved it well, and it was a sexy dance. Her perfume in particular was potent, and I could still smell it on my sweater this morning. Chrissy wanted me to buy her a drink afterward but I fibbed and told her I had to go back to work. I just didn’t want to spend too much money; even if I’d seen Lily, I had planned to keep it lean last night.

Chrissy asked how long I’d been coming to the club and I told her almost since the day it opened. She asked if I came to see any particular girls, and I mentioned Lily. She asked if I was in love with Lily, but I just scoffed and said I liked Lily and enjoyed hanging out with her.

I would like to be in love with Lily--there are a lot of things about her I really like--but it’s not going to happen if only for two reasons among many: she is roughly twenty-eight years younger than me, and she doesn’t seem to want to hang out with me outside the club, even to have a meal. I am old enough, then, to take a hint and keep it real. Real as in: she is a dancer and I am her customer.

So I’ve come to think it’s good that I hang out with other dancers again as well. For three months I only really visited Lily. But the object is to have some fun, relax, chat. If Lily doesn’t show up at the club on a night she tells me she’s going to be there, I’m going to talk to the other strippers and get a dance or two if I feel so inclined. Lily is still number one, and when she’s on duty, I’m her acolyte; but it’s ridiculous not to socialize with the other gals when she’s unavailable and I want to have a little entertainment. Lily is my favorite dancer, but not my girlfriend.

Another long day working out of the city, but I got a lot of stuff done and will work back in Manhattan for the next few days. Good timing too, because the roads are supposed to be awful tomorrow with rain, sleet, and snow.

For the last two days, as I've commuted, I've gone to a different place than usual to get breakfast. A combination grocery and food shop far uptown near the train station, rather than the coffee shop near my home. At this grocery, they really know how to make a good buttered roll.

Does that sound funny? You'd think a buttered roll would be easy to make. You take the roll, cut it, put the butter on, close the roll, and wrap it. But a lot of places just slap on too little butter, or it's concentrated in the center of the roll or on one side, and then you have to re-butter it yourself so it's spread properly. Or other places use butter that's a little rancid from standing too long during the short order rush. My point is, to find a buttered roll that's fresh and crisp, with good butter properly spread, is to locate a pleasurable thing, something to savor and appreciate. And the person who prepares buttered rolls like that is doing a kindness to everyone who eats it.

I don't want you to think that I enjoyed this roll more because of who served it to me, but today it was prepared by a very attractive dark-skinned Hispanic girl. Yesterday the server was less gorgeous but equally skilled at food preparation. But today's gal was quite sexy to me, so that was a bonus. She wore blue jeans and a white t-shirt, and the t-shirt rode up a little from the waist of her jeans, so there was about two inches of tawny flesh exposed when she leaned over to the bread box to get my roll. She wore a small apron with a red and pink flower pattern, and her hair was covered by a baseball cap with her ponytail hanging out the back. I love ponytails on women. She had full lips and a slightly broad nose, which made her look strong, but her eyes in contrast had a soft and sweet look. She was very courteous as she put my roll in a white bag and handed it over the counter: "Here you are, sir." "Thank you."

Hmm...I think as much as I love looking at women, I like to WRITE about how I love looking at them...have you noticed?

I have a feeling the owner of the store instructs his employees in a certain way to butter the rolls, because although they were done by two different girls on two succeeding days, they were prepared with exactly the same quality. I believe the owner is the man at the register, and he too is always unfailingly friendly every time I've gone in there--previously, many times, but just to buy coffee. And the coffee too is quite good. But now that I am converted to his buttered rolls, I'm sure I will expand my exploration of his breakfast menu.

When I got to the office, I enjoyed my roll at my desk and it promptly put me in the mood for a good day of work. I don't have to commute tomorrow, so I won't travel uptown to that grocery to get my breakfast--but I look forward to having another one of those fine rolls next week!