Happy Easter to everyone...hope you're having a warmer Easter than we are! It's cold in NYC. It was my excuse to stay inside most of the day.

Last night, I watched a DVD of a 1999 HBO movie called Lansky, starring Richard Dreyfuss in the role of the legendary organized crime financial wizard. Dreyfuss was muted and restrained, given the apparently buttoned down nature of Lansky's character as depicted in David Mamet's script, and it was an interesting movie if not a great one. Still, it had two highlights that made it worth seeing: the late Stanley De Santis as fabled gambler Arnold Rothstein, and Eric Roberts as gangster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. They most reaped the benefits of Mamet's dialogue in two scenes that really gave them an opportunity to shine. Roberts conveyed both Siegel's manic energy and his vision for Las Vegas as the ultimate money-making machine. Too bad his role wasn't bigger.

De Santis's portrayal of Rothstein joins that of the late David J. Stewart, who played Louis "Lepke" Buchalter in 1960's Murder Inc., in my personal pantheon of truly great cinematic incarnations of Jewish-American mobsters. It's too bad both of these actors, who died young in their fifties, didn't get a chance to do these characters in films that focused on Rothstein and Lepke as the leads.

Before I watched Lansky, I treated myself to a 1960s nudie cutie flick called My Tale is Hot, which featured a dance by the late Candy Barr, who was as famous for her friendship with West Coast mobster Mickey Cohen as she was for appearing in a classic stag film called "Smart Alec" and for being one of the sexiest strippers of the 50s and 60s.

In this flick, released on tape by Something Weird, Candy delivers a hot writhing solo. I've already watched it three times. But as alluring as her classical "womanly" figure was, in that ultra-50s "stacked" way, it was her face that made her irresistibly sexy: a face that combined innocence with worldliness and a teasing nonchalance. The rest of the film wasn't too good, but Candy was fantastic.

So last night was indeed a festival of "great performances" in the Sir Cranky household--De Santis, Roberts, and Barr!

I was reading in the New York Times today about a 96 year old writer who just published a memoir of his British-Jewish childhood. His name is Harry Bernstein and he lives in New Jersey now. His book is entitled The Invisible Wall.

He wrote the book after his wife of 67 years passed away. It was rejected by a number of publishers before it finally found a home after sitting in a slush pile for a year. Just the idea of a nonagenarian's book sitting in the slush pile for that long before being read is enough to give this 55 year old the jitters. Well, I guess it was "meant to be" that The Invisible Wall would eventually be read, accepted, and published, and now the author is working on another book and being interviewed by reporters.

According to the Times, Bernstein had a start at the literary life in his 20s, getting published in top journals, but a novel he eventually published didn't bring him great acclaim or success. He worked as an editor at a trade magazine for awhile, as well as reading scripts for a film studio. He has finally found wider recognition with this memoir, which was reviewed earlier in the week in the Times quite positively. It sounds like a memorable depiction of the struggles of growing up Jewish in England in the early part of the 20th century. I'll have to check it out at the bookstore.

My Romanian grandmother, who passed away at 90 in 1993, would have loved this story. She was always cutting out clippings about people who accomplished interesting things in old age, and when I would go to her apartment in Brooklyn for lunch on a Saturday afternoon, she'd occasionally show me some of the clips. She herself once said, "If I had an ocean of ink and a sea of paper, I couldn't tell my whole story." I tried to get her to open up and tell me that story, but other than a few anecdotes about how she never got much of an education because she wanted to go to work to buy herself nylon stockings back in the 1920s, she wasn't forthcoming. She was laconic...unlike her grandson Cranky, who spills all kinds of stuff on his blog.

Last night, I re-watched one of my favorite movies from the old "grindhouse" days on 42nd Street. Although Hard Times (1975) had a top Hollywood cast with Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Jill Ireland and Strother Martin, it had a gritty and unpretentious feel that made it a perfect fit for the fleapits on 42nd Street, where I saw it a number of times on the big screen.

Bronson plays Chaney (no first name), a drifter who gets into the bare-knuckle fight racket in New Orleans as a way to make money in Depression Era America. Coburn plays the promoter he teams up with, Martin is the non-licensed doctor who looks after Bronson's cuts and bruises, and Ireland plays Bronson's love interest, a hardscrabble dame looking to crawl out of the gutter.

Bronson was in amazing shape when he made this movie at age 53 or 54. It looks like he did his own fight scenes, and some of them get pretty violent. The film is colorfully packed with scenes in seedy nightclubs, pool rooms, gambling dens, whorehouses, and late night cafeterias. All the minor characters are vividly limned by little known actors who nonetheless achieve immortality through their work in this film. Particularly good are Robert Tessier and Nick Dimitri as two of Bronson's opponents, and Bruce Glover as a lone shark.

I first saw this movie when I was 24, and its fantasy of the laconic man with no ties, traveling through the country making a buck where he could, was very appealing to my own wordy, sedentary, and anxious personality. At age 55, I still find the fantasy appealing. For the ninety or so minutes of the film's running time, I could imagine myself as Chaney, that battler of few words. I think Bronson's drifter in Hard Times stands along with Toshiro Mifune's rootless samurai in Yojimbo as one of the truly tough guys in all cinema. And although they're both tough as nails, in the final analysis they have good hearts.

Hard Times is available on DVD from Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment.

I went out last night after almost three weeks of indifference to the whole stripclub thing. I needed a little break from all the stress...the work stress, the tax stress, the stress over stress...yes, I specifically went out with the intention of getting a lapdance or two and temporarily shedding my now-habitual thriftiness.

I keep on hand a small sum of "fun" money, my "stripper fun fund" so to speak. It's just eighty bucks, to be used if I really, really need to go out and blow off some steam. The first twenty is for admission to the club, coat check, and my first beer; the remainder can allow me to tip the dancers and get two lapdances. Mind you, I almost never use this money, since I almost never get dances nowadays because of my currently tightening financial situation as a freelancer; but I carry it when I go to the club so that if the occasion arises, I can spring into action (or, rather, let a dancer spring into action).

Well, I spent $69 of those dollars last night...honest, that was the total. Had a beer at home first (Natural Lite, 66 cents a can, versus $9 plus $1-2 tip for a Bud Lite in the club), then headed out. Went after 8 p.m. to catch the night shift, to see some new faces (I usually go during the late afternoon and know the earlier lineup by heart). When I entered, a tall and voluptuous black girl was dancing onstage, and she definitely was eye-catching. Let's call her Claudia. I made it easy on myself. When Claudia came over to my table after her set and jokingly asked if I wanted her to fog up my glasses, I answered that her stage set had already fogged them but I was willing to go for more fog on the next song. Whatever perfume she was wearing, it sure smelled good as she gave me two lapdances. She was a big sturdy gal, amazing thighs and butt. I noticed how when we chatted she had an amiable smile, but when she danced she put on this intense semi-glare that was erotic in a dominant way but seemed almost like a performance mask than her real personality. But who knows? Maybe the smile was the mask, and the glare is the real Claudia. Or maybe both are real, and masks, and are used to appropriate effect.

Ah, I'll never stop deconstructing the behavior of my lapdancers...

Claudia pitched me to go into the champagne room but I passed on that as I always do. When our two dances were over, she seemed mildly surprised but pleased when I told her they were "fun." Doesn't anybody else ever use that word in the clubs? She told me she would come back after a spell and that I should "stay put" where I was, but I didn't want to sit alone on the banquette and have all the other girls hitting me up for lapdances which I could no longer afford to buy. With the two dances from Claudia, my beer, the coat check, and a couple of tips to the dancers onstage, I had already spent $55 in fifteen minutes. So I got up and sat by the stage for about twenty minutes finishing my beer and tipping the girls up there.

I was amazed by a dancer with a startling resemblance to the actress Gretchen Mol. It wasn't Mol, obviously, but this girl could very well have been her stand-in on a movie set. She was a slender chick with a pink/ivory complexion and wavy blonde hair. She was cute in her own right, although her face's combination of innocence and knowingness again reminded me of Mol's; and watching this dancer made me think back about how good Miss Mol was in last year's movie The Notorious Bettie Page, and how memorably sensual. I might have to get a dance from this Mol-lookalike sometime, because she not only looks like her, but she moves like her, smiles like her, and although she doesn't have the same bountifully-sized breasts that Gretchen Mol has, she has the same type of small, button-like nipples. I guess you could say I've watched Gretchen Mol's nude scenes closely...

I wished I could have stayed longer, but by the time I finished my beer, all I had was eleven dollars left of my "fun fund." Well, perhaps fun is better in these measured doses. I left feeling mellow and with some nice images to contemplate with fondness and zeal, from Claudia's lush thighs to the Mol lookalike's pink little toes on her high platform heels.

There is a Thai restaurant in my neighborhood that recently opened in the same space that a Chinese restaurant used to occupy. It is a fairly small space, but contractors worked for several weeks to make something more expansive out of it. Even the ceiling looks higher now.

In its previous incarnation as a Chinese eat-in and take-out, most of the space was used for tables, including a small cubby hole near the corner window. The walls were white then, which gave the place a stark, almost medicinal feeling; but the food was pretty good, if not great.

The Thai restaurant darkened the walls, and chose instead to place a small circular reflecting pool of water with floating candles in that cubby hole. When I would walk by the restaurant while it was under construction, I wondered why they would use that space for the pool instead of another table, because the place was so small. But now that the restaurant is open, and appears to be doing lively business, I understand the wisdom of that design.

The pool adds an exotic and dreamlike touch to the space, inviting the curiosity of a passerby to check out the restaurant, which has been filled up with sleeker tables arranged in a far more efficient manner than the way the Chinese restaurant had theirs.

I picked up a menu last night which not only looks interesting but economical too. But having not tried the food yet, what most impresses me at this point is how by using that cubby hole for something not useful in the serving sense, but striking in the aesthetic sense, the place will probably more than make up for the profit they might have made by having a table there. The pool catches the eye and I'm sure it will catch many a customer.

If the food is as good as the design of the restaurant, it should be a nice addition to the neighborhood. I'll have to stop by one evening after a lapdance to try their pad thai...