I thought about going to the stripclub last night, but I just didn't feel like hurrying to get there before they raised the admission price at eight o'clock. It irks me to have to pay an extra ten dollars, but I was hungry and feeling kinda sleepy from all the humidity; so I just plopped down in front of the tv and started eating a bag of pretzels and watching the rest of Betty Grable in Moon Over Miami. The next thing I knew it was nine p.m. and it didn't look as if I were going to hit the club.

Perhaps because of my tighter financial situation these days, I'm starting to examine more what I like about stripclubs and what I don't like. But I'm also examining this because of my new interest in the neo-burlesque scene as well as watching Betty Grable movies.

The ridiculous stereotype of the man who likes musicals is that he's gay--but enjoying the sight of Betty Grable dancing and flirting and singing feels like a solid expression of heterosexuality to me. I find her hot!

The man-woman dance sequences often feel like sublimated sex scenes, as Betty and her partners take joy in the capabilities of their bodies.

However, these Fox musicals of the 1940s seem carefully crafted to downplay her obvious erotic quality--which makes me all the more aware of it. At one point, as she was dancing with Don Ameche and looking up at him with rather lovestruck eyes, I thought to myself, "What would it have been like to see that face next to you on the pillow? What would it have been like to see her body without its colorful costumes, naked under your hands? What would it have been like to caress those legs or, as John Payne does in The Dolly Sisters, give Betty a foot rub?"

In Moon Over Miami, she does this fantastic dance with choreographer/dancer Hermes Pan that not only showcases her legs, but the gracefulness of her body and her happiness in being able to express it. I even like the way she holds her hands when she's dancing. And she also does a movement where she shakes her upper torso and shoulders to a Latin beat (she did it in Down Argentine Way also) that I find very sexy.

Anyway, watching her movies gives me so much enjoyment (for a very reasonable price) that I start to think, "Why can't the dancers in the stripclubs do a little performing to lively music too, instead of basically lapdancing to the same old rock and rap?"

Going to the neo-burlesque shows like the Starshine (click the link on Sites I Like to find out about this show) has also added to my dissatisfaction with the stripclubs. I don't mind the fact that the neo-burlycue-babes only perform one song each, because the number is usually a lively toe-tapper, and the girl disrobes sufficiently out of a clever costume to still give it an erotic thrill even though pasties are worn. I start to think, "Why can't the stripclubs give us some of this as well? They charge enough, after all."

The situation is becoming clear. I have been going to stripclubs (and I am talking about the ones in Manhattan) seeking a form of entertainment that they don't really showcase anymore--solid stage dancing. There is the occasional quality exception, but for the most part these joints are about the lapdancing. My favorite strippers like Angela or Lily or Misty might do a nice little move every once in awhile, but generally their craft is performed over men's laps, writhing and teasing and grinding.

Watching Betty Grable and seeing the Starshine has made me realize how hungry I've been for just the sight of good dancing, and I was seeking it in the wrong place.

I think a large part of the problem in stripclubs is the music, which is only really conducive to hip-rolling and pole-climbing...and most of the girls barely do that. They generally just walk around displaying their bodies, as if they're DETACHED from the music. And with a lot of the stuff the deejays play, I don't blame the dancers at all.

I've noticed how Latin music is rarely played, despite the fact that it almost always gets the dancers into a lively boom-boom mode, whether they're Hispanic or not.

Yes, my interest in Grable and places like the Starshine has put my attraction to stripclubs in bolder relief as an expensive and in many ways disappointing form of physical and emotional contact through lapdancing and drinking. When I add to this the angst that I feel because, for whatever reasons, I can't seem to interest these dancers as anything more than a customer, I start to wonder why the hell I've spent so much time there. I guess my power to delude myself is extreme. I've been going to a hardware store to buy bread...

This doesn't mean I'm going to stop going to stripclubs, but that I feel far more skeptical and cynical about the experience these days, as a result of my new interests, as well as a necessity to watch my spending.

Have DVDs finally bested strippers in my mind? Not exactly...maybe I'm just looking at things with more rueful clarity.

And there are also other forms of pulchritudinous expression with which I can satiate my never-ending thirst to witness the beauty of women--such as pinup art. I mentioned in yesterday's post that I went to a comic book convention. Many other kinds of memorabilia were sold there, and I happened upon a newly published collection of pinups by someone I hadn't been aware of before. His name is Jay Scott Pike, a prolific artist in his early eighties who works down in Florida. I've attached a link to the publisher's site (SQP Inc.) just so you can see examples of Pike's beautiful work from the newly published collection. If only the stripclub girls could convey more of these pinups' sweet appeal, instead of most of them being ever-willing and ever-persistent in draining the wallets of their customers until there's barely a penny left!!

SQPInc.

I don't much feel like writing today, I must admit.

Maybe it's because I had a heavy Chinese lunch special and it made me a little sleepy. Maybe because it's overcast, rainy, and gloomy outside.

Although "gloomy" is the interpretation I put on the weather. If I saw Betty Grable walking under a big pink umbrella through the rain, I guess it wouldn't seem downbeat to me anymore.

I went to a comic book convention earlier today, which was good in that I chatted with my friends for awhile and also in that I picked up two inexpensive volumes of the original Superman newspaper strip from 1939-1941. It was disappointing in that a pinup model I like to see wasn't there as I'd expected. I usually chat with her a little and pick up a couple of her autographed photos.

The actor Robert Vaughn was signing autographs, and nearby a crowd was waiting for the actor Steven Seagal to show up and do the same. There was a long line of people waiting for Seagal. Vaughn had a more modest line, and when he didn't have an autograph to sign, he read the newspaper. He's a cool, calm looking fellow with gray streaks in his hair, very much like his screen image.

Back in the 60s, I liked him in The Man from UNCLE, The Magnificent Seven, and Bullitt, but I didn't know what I would say to him now other than "I like your work," so I didn't go over. I didn't want to spend money on his autograph either, as admirable an actor as he is, and I always feel awkward not purchasing one since that is one reason why these actors are at the show--to make money selling their signed photos.

Yes, I prefer to buy the autographed photos of sexy pinup models, and maybe take a Polaroid with them as they perch over my lap. Yes, my lap has seen a lot of traffic in the last few years, between strippers and pinup models sitting down on it...I guess in some ways my lap is Cranky Central--when it takes over for Cranky Headquarters up in my noggin, that is.

You know, it's the archetypal male conflict between the Big Head and the Little Head...

Ah, I feel depleted mentally today. I even felt taxed reading a few panels of the Superman strip a little while ago.

Too much blood must be rushing down to Cranky Central...

Hmm, I didn't go out for a lapdance last night--but maybe I will tonight?

I'm sitting here at the computer eating pretzels and drinking a bottle of iced tea...the air conditioning is on and I'm cooling off after commuting to and from New Jersey. I had a very productive workday after getting the first full night's sleep in about a week (seven hours).

I got a decent freelance check today which I deposited on the way home. I made a mistake early last week...in my eagerness to repay the loan from my credit line that I took out to pay my income taxes, I paid a little too much and crippled my cash flow...money has been very tight for the last ten days and I've been waiting the check I got today...waiting like one of those guys in the old EC comics, with sweat pouring down his brow into his wide, desperate eyes...well, I am exaggerating...but still, I don't enjoy living from check to check, so I have to sock away a little this month instead as back-up...

But...

I haven't been to a stripclub in two weeks! The Starshine Burlesque show last Thursday was a different thing entirely; affordable entertainment, comedy and dancing and stripping with pasties. A regular stripclub has bare breasts and a hustle vibe and is rarely a cheap experience. But it was fourteen days ago that the sexy Asian dancer Daisy last sat on my lap and made me feel like a big shot...

Yes, I could use a beer and a lapdance this weekend. Maybe I've been in "sleazeball withdrawal" for two weeks with no lapdances or strippers parading onstage before my orbs...and maybe that's why I haven't slept well.

Doctor, what should I do?

"Take two lapdances and don't call me in the morning--sleep 'til noon!"

Sleeping 'til noon--now THAT feels sinful. I must REALLY be getting old to think that...

I like the night(life), but I do like the mornings a lot now...it's nice especially on Saturday morning to get up and have a leisurely breakfast and then do something fun and know that there are a lot more hours left to the day...and a whole Sunday following it...

In fact, I love Saturday mornings between eight and ten, when I'm drinking my coffee with cream, reading the paper, and knowing that the weekend stretches before me...

Yet once I was very much a night person. More so when New York had a honky-tonkish feeling, and when it didn't cost a fortune to hang out with strippers. There used to be a stripclub on Eighth Avenue that had NO cover charge at night--can you believe it? It's lost in the mists of memory...

Well, I think I better get some real chow other than pretzels. Man cannot live on sentimentality and nostalgia alone.

I spent part of this afternoon looking at some other movie-oriented blogs, just to see what other examples of cinemania are being poured into the Web. Whew, it's a mountain of stuff! I moved around, just getting a quick taste of other people's approaches. Many are extremely academic, unlike my own. In fact, when I was in college and thinking about pursuing film criticism as a career, I discarded the idea when I realized that I had no patience, interest, or aptitude for the extremely intellectualized analytical concepts that were popular back in the early 70s, like structuralism, which I was given the impression were necessary to study and understand. I now know that this was an erroneous impression, and that I could have carved out my own view just as people like Roger Ebert and Andrew Sarris did; but in those days I was too susceptible to the furrowed brows of judgmental authority figures. And, I was more interested in pursuing filmmaking itself--at which I took an unsuccessful stab when I moved to New York.

At some point I will write about these blogs and post a few links to the ones that I like. But right now I want to put up a link to just one blog that excerpted an article that very much influenced my own thinking about movies. The site is called "girish," and it has excerpts of, and comments on, an essay by critic Manny Farber about "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art."

Farber basically distinguishes between the kind of art or movies (White Elephant Art) that is bloated by a sense of its self-importance and self-consciousness, its determination to create something worthy of a place in the historical continuum of Cinematic Art; versus Termite Art, which is created in a less pretentious and sometimes even expedient fashion (like for a paycheck) without wondering about its place in posterity. I must have read Farber's essay about thirty years or so years ago (I read it several times), and it made sense to me and alerted me to the pleasures of more obscure, less ponderous filmic endeavors. At the same time, I couldn't completely agree with Farber, realizing that even in pretentious films, or heavy-handed ones, there can be honest pleasures.

At any rate, I'm including the link to this blog and its Farber entry for your own perusal and thought. The full essay is in Farber's book Negative Space. As you'll see, the blog got a lot of response to this entry; I haven't read all the comments, but the entry itself catches the essence of Farber's points.

Enjoy!

girish

I saw a comic book that's an advertising tie-in for the new movie Superman Returns (opening next week). I wonder if the Lois Lane in this comic is what the Lois Lane in the new movie is going to be like as played by actress Kate Bosworth. If so, Lois sounds pretty damn cold and castrating this time around. Yes, it looks as if Phyllis Coates' incarnation of Lois in the 50s tv series was prophetic; the ballbuster Lois has finally landed on top over the warm Lois (as memorably embodied by Noel Neill).

Just a perusal of this morning's newspapers shows how these rough and tough images of women are the very currency of our age, alas. On the front page of the New York Times, there's a photograph of two butch-looking females engaged in "mixed martial arts" battle, which is a combination of wrestling and boxing. I kept staring at the picture, trying to determine if, indeed, both were really women. You know, it wasn't so long ago that images of dames fighting were only the province of tabloids and the National Police Gazette, but now the ultra-respectable Times (aka "The Gray Lady") puts stuff like this on the front page--no doubt in order to advance the cause of women "realizing their potential."

Oh, where is Betty Grable when we need her? Or Alice Faye, Priscilla Lane, June Haver?

Elsewhere in the Times, in a review of a new anthology of thriller short stories, critic Janet Maslin quotes the bio of one of the female authors, which boasts a resume of facing down Russian guns, rumrunning, jewel-smuggling and visa-forging. What happens to a woman's vagina when she does stuff like that? Does it start to emit weird noises like the giant ants in a 50s monster movie?

Yes, you don't have to tell me, I admit it: I feel threatened; I feel simultaneously dazzled and feeble in comparison to the accomplishments of the Gals of the 21st Century. I was reading in the New York Daily News this morning about Triste Lieteau, who's the wife of Dr. Ian Smith, the media personality who's friends with the jock now being sued for divorce--Michael Strahan. Not being a sports fan, I had never heard of Strahan until his marital woes hit the papers, which tells you a little about the nature of fame in today's world, and how niche-like it has become. (If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it really make a sound?) Anyway, Triste Lieteau (I guess she kept her maiden name) not only has a law degree from the University of Chicago, but a medical degree from Harvard! How does anybody manage to get two degrees like that? And I was proud of myself when I completed a course in 35mm photography from the Learning Annex.

Just by accomplishing so much, Dr. Lieteau, Esq. chips away at MY self-esteem!

Also in today's Daily News, in the "Thersday" section (you read that right) there's an article about how women prefer to wear jeans when they go out clubbing at night, even though men wish that women would wear skirts and dresses instead. Instead, the babes complain (as in this article) that it's "hard" to dance in skirts and dresses, and after all, as some chick named Monica is quoted as saying, "when I go out to bars, I'm going with my girlfriends to have a good time. I'm not trying to pick up guys." Well, this crankster is old enough to remember when women DID go out to bars to meet men.

The women interviewed talk about how denim is so much easier to wear, and supposedly sexier to boot, but as in all articles of this type, there is always a psychological blind spot that is never explored, which is: Tight jeans are also a chastity device, like a kind of forbidding "shrink-wrapping" below the waist (like the plastic that encases porno magazines on the newsstand). In fact, it could be argued that women in tight jeans turn themselves into walking pornography.

You know, to my way of thinking, a woman in blue jeans, no matter how beautiful, is only a few steps removed from those butch-looking warriors on the front page of today's Times. I like it, but I also loathe it.

The other day, coming out of my favorite Chinese take-out joint, I saw a gorgeous gal walking down the street in the tightest jeans, so snug around her hips that it looked as if she were trying to deny the curves of her feminine form; her two sacral dimples stood out like beady eyes over the waistband, and she walked with a strut on her pointy toed heels that could only be described as positively evil.

Still, as much as I sound reactionary, you have to understand that I also practice the philosophy "live and let live." Do your own thing; as long as I can get my lapdances and DVDs, I'm copacetic. After all, if I truly assail the progress of women, then I assail the future of my niece, who I'm proud to say just got all A's after her freshman year at a top high school. But I can't help myself from grumbling at the unnerving sights and statements around me. That's why I'm...Sir CRANKY, and not Sir Copacetic.

Speaking of unnerving, last night at the Borders at the Time Warner Center I looked at the July issue of Interview magazine. Kate Bosworth is featured in photos which had a retro 60s feel; kinda lame unfortunately. But what was unnerving was that the issue boasted on its cover of an interview with the beautiful Chinese actress Ziyi Zhang, from Memoirs of a Geisha and Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I eagerly opened the magazine to see the photos accompanying the article--one of the few virtues of Interview is that it occasionally runs provocative images along with its feeble "interviews" (many of which are conducted by celebrities of their fellow celebs). But to my disappointment and, yes, horror, instead of photos of ZZ (I could look at her all day) there were "illustrations" by fashionista Karl Lagerfeld (who always looks like he's about to perform a brain transplant) evoking the style of the Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein (who made huge paintings in the style of comic book imagery). In two words, my reaction to this: BOO and HISS. Lagerfeld's "illustrations" sucked. Ziyi should have been photographed with a camera and the splendor of her beauty presented humbly before us, as designed and created by the greatest pinup artist of them all...Mother Nature.