After having drinks with a friend in the lower Manhattan neighborhood of Soho last night, I wandered up by myself to Greenwich Village. I noted that two fantastic Japanese samurai movies are playing this weekend at the IFC Center there: Yojimbo and Sanjuro, both staring the great late Toshiro Mifune. If you live in or near New York and you have never seen these movies, they're worth a trip because only in a theater can you get the effect of their dynamic widescreen cinematography. I bought the DVD of Yojimbo but the effect is diminished on a regular-size tv screen.

Mifune is the ultimate in cool, particularly in Yojimbo, playing a wandering samurai who pits two rival gangs of hoodlums against each other. It's the same plot that Sergio Leone used in Clint Eastwood's first great hit, A Fistful of Dollars.

Speaking of old movies on the screen, I got schedules from the Film Forum downtown on Houston Street and the coming lineup of movies this summer/early fall is fantastic, everything from a Billy Wilder festival to six days of the Japanese master Mizoguchi to three weeks of classic swashbucklers. I think it's time I sprang for a membership at the Film Forum, which will enable me to go with a guest for five dollars a ticket.

They're also going to show The Girl Can't Help It in late August, Jayne Mansfield's most famous movie which for some reason I have never seen. It's a satire of 1950s media and celebrities, mixed in with early rock'n'roll, and the notes in the schedule made it sound so wild and crazy that I can hardly wait. In the notes, one critic said the movie should have been entitled "The Radioactive Suburb" or "Saturday Night on Mars." I think the movie is already on DVD, but I'll try to hold off and see it on the big screen.

As part of the Mizoguchi series, they're going to be showing Street of Shame, which is one of my absolute favorite films. Its Japanese title means "Red Light District" and it's a powerful story about the lives of several women who work in what was then (1956) a legal Tokyo brothel. I can't recommend this movie highly enough. I always find the last shot in this movie totally heartbreaking. It's playing at the Film Forum on September 21st on a double bill with an early Mizoguchi about geisha, 1936's Sisters of the Gion.

After checking out these upcoming schedules, I walked down a picturesque little street where one of my old girlfriends lived back in the early 80s when we first met. I remember the specific building because it has a small bas-relief on the front, and it looks either like an icon of the Virgin Mary, or just a Renaissance-style sculpted portrait of a saint or holy woman. In any case, back on one summer night more than twenty five years ago, I walked this vivacious Irish-American girl back to her building after we had a three-hour dinner and a very enjoyable conversation. I thought she was somehow out of my class; too good for me, too attractive, too sexy, and I remember standing in front of that building, underneath that icon, and asking the girl in a rather self-effacing manner if she wanted to see me again sometime. She said yes, and that was beginning of a relationship with the kinds of highs and lows that you never quite recover from. I loved her, I lived with her, I broke up with her, and I'm not sure if I am glad that I knew her, or if I regret it. I've written about this relationship here previously but I don't recall the exact name of the entry. I really should create an index of all these posts, I guess, so I can refer back to them without relying on memory.

Anyway, it's funny how a relationship that ended two and a half decades ago can still cause me problems. As I stood in front of the building last night in the balmy night air, looking at the icon on the wall and remembering the girl and how much I had wanted her to be mine, I unwittingly stepped in some dog shit. Ah yes, so my brief sentimental journey concluded with me dipping the sole of my shoe into a puddle and scraping off the remains of canine waste while muttering under my breath. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

I went to the stripclub last night, hoping that my new dancer acquaintance Daisy would be working, and she was. A lovely, uninhibited Asian girl with a cute and humorous personality, she's got a trim figure and is very forthright in her dancing, pressing herself tightly against me. When I complimented her on her very attractive medium-sized breasts (in my silly adolescent-style enthusiasm, I called them her "boobies"), she squeezed my face against them and said, "They're here to take care of you."

Just what I wanted to hear!

Daisy also has very shapely legs and petite feet, and she let me hold and caress them. She held out her gams straight across my lap like a Vargas pinup girl and I playfully planted a kiss on each foot; they were shod in the clear plastic open-toe stripper heels. She said her feet were very sensitive and I told her I wanted to massage them sometime, an idea which she seemed to approve of, at least in theory. I actually do give very good back massages too and more than one dancer has occasionally indulged my talents for twenty minutes at a time, keeping me going with a vigorous kneading of their shoulders and muscles until my hands are almost numb!

As Daisy danced I also let her know that I like it best when she's standing over me, looking down, rather than sitting on my lap facing away. "You like a powerful woman?" she asked, picking up on my erotic pleasure in submitting to a strong gal. "Yes," I said. "You can make me your slave." Then, a few minutes later, when I told her that the next song would be the last, she said with a mock imperiousness, "But you are my slave! You must let me dance for you all night!" I laughed and said, "I couldn't afford it!" "Naughty slave! Naughty!" she replied, crushing her breasts against my face again. What a severe punishment!!

She sat herself down and straddled my lap, bucked up and down, and said, "I want to fuck you! Ride you like a horse!" I chuckled when she said that because she just looked so damn cute and sexy, but that made her pout with only half-seriousness, "You're laughing at me!" "No," I replied, "I just imagined you wearing a cowboy hat over your long dark hair!" A fetching image indeed! I think she then understood that my chuckle or laugh was an affectionate response of delight, rather than of derision.

Occasionally throughout the lapdancing, she suggested that I should go in the champagne room with her. She makes this pitch every time she dances for me, and my reply is always the same. "No, no, too expensive for me," I said. "I like to stay out here in the main room." As she was putting her gown back on after the lapdancing, she asked me where I lived, and when I said midtown Manhattan, she opined, "Then you must be doing well! I think you are only acting humble about money." If that were only the truth!

"Do you like a hard woman or a soft woman?" Daisy asked. "I like a soft woman who can play at being hard," I said. "That's exactly what I'm like!" she replied. That seems true enough about her, and I suppose that's why I enjoy our little conclaves. I don't like real bitches with monotonously domineering attitudes. I appreciate tough women but only when they show that they have a softer side too.

Anyway, when I was alone again after Daisy finished, two other Asian girls came up and asked for a dance. I wondered if they had seen me with Daisy and surmised that Asians might be my preference. If I could have spent more money, I would have been tempted because they were alluring, although truthfully if I'd had more dough in the first place, I know I would have spent it on Daisy! It's curious how monogamous I can feel in a room filled with fifty or sixty beautiful girls of all types and races, but if I like a dancer, I am perfectly capable of being her customer alone. In fact, I felt pretty bored watching the stage before Daisy went on duty, and after our twenty minutes together chatting and lapdancing, I felt bored again sitting by the stage finishing the last of my beer. I guess I'd gotten what I came for--a feeling of connection, and a little fun, with a convivial dancer.

I could easily get hooked on Daisy, just as I did with my favorites before her, but I think my finances are going to limit the visits I make to the stripclub dimension. My previous foray had been on June 9th, so I waited nineteen days to return, with one visit to an inexpensive neo-burlesque show in between, which is a totally different experience than a stripclub. The funny thing is, although I complain about having less money because of the loss of a couple of freelance accounts, in truth my schedule is now less hectic and mentally draining, and in some ways I feel in better spirits than when I was making more dough but had double the stress.

Still, it would be nice to be able to go out and stuff a girl's garter these days without adding up every buck on the calculator in my head!

In Chicago, my sister Jenny went to the doctor today for a checkup, three weeks after a therapeutic procedure that we hope will completely eradicate her cancerous tumor. The appointment went well, and although it is too soon for the doctors to be able to determine the precise results--they won't be able to do that until the end of the summer--they all agreed she is responding excellently.

Although she has her down moments, she is generally upbeat and getting back to her old self. She can't return to work yet, but she's eating better and resuming some of her regular routines.

I talk to her frequently and send email messages, keeping her spirits up when she feels low. But she usually feels quite positive and optimistic on her own.

When this health crisis started, I gave her a gift of the DVD box set of the first season of Leave It to Beaver, her favorite childhood sitcom. I reminded her that laughter is potent medicine! She didn't get around to watching it until this past weekend, but she told me she enjoyed it so much that she didn't even think about her problems the entire time it was on her television screen. I told her there's a lot more of Beaver and Wally coming on DVD, as I believe the show was on for six or seven years, starting the year Jenny was born--1957. It went off the air in the mid-60s, if I recall properly.

I'm relieved her checkup went well, and of course I will be REALLY relieved to hear that she is cured. Meanwhile, the point is not to make this summer into an exercise in suspense, but to just keep on with the things of our lives.

And so I commuted out to New Jersey today to get ahead in my work so one of my colleagues could get ahead in his, and take off for his two week vacation starting Saturday...

And so tonight maybe I will watch another episode of Superman, or a tape of a Mexican game show where girls slap the losers and kiss the winners, or maybe I'll enjoy the last of the Betty Grable musicals in that box set I bought a couple of weeks ago...I sure went through that set fast!

I just deposited a nice paycheck so besides paying my rent and my greatly-increased health insurance premium, maybe I'll even spring soon for a lapdance or two...or three...?

And just a little while ago I treated myself to a cup of peppermint chocolate chip ice cream, to celebrate the sun finally coming out after an overcast afternoon...

And speaking of sunlight, it is brimming through the blinds on my windows, so maybe I'll go take a walk before dinner.

Enjoy your evening!

I haven’t seen Superman Returns yet, but I read the reviews in the major papers this morning. The notices were raves for the most part, giving the movie three and a half to four stars. However, Manohla Dargis snipped out a predictably lukewarm critique of the movie in today’s New York Times.

When you drop the phrase “leaden new film” into the first paragraph, almost everything that follows is anticlimactic, but Dargis continues on for several hundred more words, making it clear that her interpretation of the Superman myth is a distinctly bizarre one. Come to think of it, as a reviewer, she’s not unlike the witheringly high-handed, coldly competitive Lois Lane portrayed by Phyllis Coates in the first season of the 1950s tv series.

“Superman may be a super-creation,” Dargis says, “but it’s his villains rather than his dual identity that have usually given him a kick.” Has Dargis ever seen the George Reeves series, where it’s clear that Superman enjoys being Clark Kent quite as much as being Superman? Reeves may come across mostly as a paternalistic protector when in super-mode, but as Kent he’s something of a bon vivant with snappy double-breasted suits, pinky ring, and sports cars. And has she read the early comics, where Kent obviously relishes his life as a reporter?

Dargis then goes on to analyze the erotic dynamic between the aloof Lois Lane and the lovelorn Clark Kent, explaining how “it allowed [Superman], and by proxy, generations of geeks both creating and consuming the character, to engage ritualistically in a sadomasochistic relationship with Lois Lane.” Dargis likens Lane to a homecoming queen who ignores “the shy guy in glasses on her way to a backseat tumble with the captain of the football team.” Well, folks, forget any rumors you’ve heard recently about Superman being gay! His deeper secret identity is actually that of a willing cuckold who in effect role-plays with his beloved to satiate both her desire for more manly lovers, and to humiliate him further.

Ah yes, it is this kinky scenario, caviar to only a few, which has undoubtedly endeared Superman and Clark Kent to the broadest public and induced entertainment companies to invest millions of dollars in telling and retelling his story. America, we hardly knew ye...

In the new film, parallels are apparently made between Superman and Jesus. And in the final paragraph of her review, Dargis chides director Bryan Singer “for making important pop entertainments that trumpet their seriousness as loudly as they deploy their bangs. It’s hard not to think that Superman isn’t the only one here with a savior complex.” Dargis wonders whether it’s anything more than “the usual grandiosity” that makes filmmakers with “ambition and money” to pump “B-movie material” into something more serious. But if anybody exhibits a savior complex, it’s Manohla Dargis, in reviews which proclaim her supposedly superior taste in movies, and whose nose is firmly in the stratosphere as she gazes down at mortals who don’t share her refined celluloid palate. What, does she think she can leap over Imax screens in a single bound?

Which makes me wonder about how jealous Lois Lane herself is of Superman’s powers...has any “geek” explored the dramatic potential of THAT angle?

Do you ever wonder what is the common thread running through the different types of movies or shows you like, or even if there is such a thread? I do.

Over the weekend I watched: the lurid 1964 melodrama The Naked Kiss, directed by cult fave Samuel Fuller, the story of a call-girl trying to go straight who lands in a seemingly "nice" town that is a swamp of psychological, judicial, and sexual corruption which makes her own misdemeanors seem pale by comparison; Moon Over Miami, a 1941 Technicolor Betty Grable musical that has her dancing her way both literally and figuratively between two suitors, played by Don Ameche and Bob Cummings; the 1960 gangster picture Murder Inc., with Peter Falk in his Oscar-nominated role as Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, a psycho hitman who is like Mr. Hyde without downtime as Dr. Jekyll; the 1967 Roger Corman mobster epic The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, depicting the conflict between Al Capone and rival Chicago ganglord Bugs Moran; and finally, episodes both of the third season of the 1950s Superman series starring George Reeves, and one episode of Dr. Hudson's Secret Journal, a 1955 program about the ethical and spiritual conflicts in the life of a brain surgeon--a series inspired by a book by Lloyd C. Douglas, who wrote the similarly ethically and spiritually focused novel The Robe.

When I watch a lot of movies one after the other it's almost like my DVD player becomes a portal into a dimension where reality is purely concerned with my desires, my concerns, my daydreams, and of course my entertainment. There is something narcissistic in my viewing habits. The DVD player is also like a time machine, since I spent most of the viewing hours over the weekend in the two decades between 1940 and 1960. And although the oldest movie was from 1967, that was set in 1929 (the year of The St. Valentine's Day Massacre).

I guess between the call girl and the hitman, the brain surgeon and the superhero, the pinup girl and the gangsters' molls, I quench my thirst for extreme experiences in various locations without having to get in deep myself, or to even travel.

In other words, it's pure voyeurism on one level.

It's also about admiration for the skill of the filmmakers, especially Fuller and Roger Corman. And I also applauded the fantastic performance by the obscure actor David B. Stewart, who plays ganglord Louis "Lepke" Buchalter in Murder Inc. so well that I could only shake my head at the fact that this guy never became a major star.

Watching these particular movies also turned out to be a study in how people cope when they are denied love. The call girl in The Naked Kiss suffers terribly from her profession and her isolation, and denies her own instincts and picks a bad man to marry. The hitman in Murder Inc., clearly has some deep psychic wound with which he still thrashes; as obnoxious and maniacal as he is in Falk's brilliant portrayal, the hitman can't understand why people are repelled by him; his feelings get hurt when they turn away in loathing. He reminded me of destructively self-absorbed people I've known in my own life...then, in Moon Over Miami, Bob Cummings does not perceive himself as ever winning Betty Grable from Don Ameche; he feels there's something wrong with his approach; handed everything on a silver platter by his rich father, Cummings' character lacks a strong core to effectively wage the battles of life. Ironically, the peppy but self-concerned Betty is the wrong girl for him; he eventually realizes that he prefers (that he needs!) the more maternal Carole Landis, who encourages him to take new risks.

The episode I watched of Dr. Hudson's Secret Journal was about a pastor who was too cerebral for his congregation, and alienated them. He is friends with Dr. Hudson, the brain surgeon. When the pastor confronts the death of a close friend, he learns the value of a simple, more direct approach to talking with people. There was something lonely about this pastor, as if his intellectualism were a defense against an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy. So this too was a story about what happens when people cannot get or give love.

Superman, as interpreted by George Reeves, is on one level a character who gives love to everybody, constantly helps and encourages them, like a Good Samaritan from the planet Krypton; but who has to stand back and be wary of receiving love himself except in a very cautious way because of the necessity to maintain his secret identity. Or is it because Superman, having lost his parents and his home planet, is also reluctant to love because of some very human fear of losing everything again?

Finally, one of the scenes that I find most memorable about The St. Valentine's Day Massacre is the quarrel between the horny thug played by George Segal and his half-dressed chorus girl mistress, played by Jean Hale. He's eating a sandwich and eyeing her leggy body while she tells him about a fur coat she bought. Segal's aghast expression when she tells him she spent three grand is priceless, but how they resolve their differences is both comical and sad--they literally fight over the coat, hitting each other with hands and lamps until he finally throws her out of their apartment. You might say that people who act like this don't exactly know how to love in a rational fashion.

Now, I'm not going to propose I got these movies because I was in the mood to contemplate the nature of love. Far from it. I especially wanted to see the gangster movies--just released on DVDs from Fox Video--because I love that classic genre with a passion, and enjoy wallowing in a vicarious tough guy mode. Factoid: Sir Cranky has owned at least two double-breasted black pinstripe suits in his life, and in his twenties actually wore them with black shirts and white ties...and gray snap-brim fedoras!

Still, I think it's undeniable that at least in last weekend's viewing menu, this theme of "life without love" was undoubtedly present in bold relief. And I couldn't help but identify with many of the protagonists, from the call girl to Superman to the pastor to even the hitman, as I thought about my own struggles to relate to the people in my life. Do I disobey my instincts in love, like the call girl? Do I have a hard time receiving love, like Superman? Do I put up a wall of words to keep myself protected from my feelings, like the pastor? Do I act too self-absorbed and cause people turn away from me, like the hitman--or like my own mother does?

Are we what we watch--and is what we watch what we are?