Last night I was hanging out with some friends of mine from the movie memorabilia scene, watching clips from old Elke Sommer movies, sword-and-sandal temptress Chelo Alonso's belly dance in Son of Samson, and an episode of the original Outer Limits called The Duplicate Man. The host of our little gathering last night lives in an apartment similar to mine, crammed with books and videos. One of the guys brought along a bottle of a butterscotch liqueur, which was tasty but rather potent. I'm glad I only had one glass...the Advil I took an hour ago is only now starting to kick in.

The new movie entitled "300," about the ancient battle between the Spartans and the Persians in 480 B.C., is stirring up some pleasant anticipation amongst us fans of the sword-and-sandal genre. Maybe I'll try to see it this weekend. My writer-bodybuilder-streetfighter friend Rexx already saw it at an advance screening and liked it a lot. I hear there's a female oracle who does some kind of topless dance in the flick, so I'm looking forward to that maybe even more than to all the stylized battle scenes.

My writer friend ZP, who looks like a tall Kafka, uses a funny malapropism to describe these gladiator movies I like--he calls them "toe and sandal" films instead of "sword and sandal." I'm chuckling even as I type this. He also came up with a title for one: "Isosceles vs. the Sphinx." I shared this with my movie friends last night and it got a big laugh. Of course, if you remember your high school geometry, you'll recall that "isosceles" is the name of a type of triangle, which is what makes ZP's title funny.

But I guess "isosceles" must come from the name of some Greek, right? I should look these things up on Google before I write my posts...who knows, maybe Isosceles was a warrior as well as a brainiac, and could have gone up against the Sphinx? Why should Oedipus have all the fun?

As I was getting ready for action this morning, I sat down on my futon couch, just dressed in my t-shirt, and looked at my bare legs.

I usually sleep in a t-shirt and sweat pants. The futon couch on which I sleep is near the window and my feet get cold, so I usually wear a pair of socks too. Anyway, I took off my "sleep socks" and sweat pants, and then sat down, still in my t-shirt, and looked at my pale white legs. I ran my hands over my knees and my thoughts drifted.

I mused on how powerful women's legs can be as a visual statement, and how female legs so easily elicit my admiration. A woman can feel herself as really sexy when a man looks at her legs, or compliments them.

Although I almost never wear shorts during warm weather--I really am something from another era, I guess--the few times I've worn shorts, women have complimented ME on the "manliness" of my legs. It's not that I walk so much, although I do walk plenty; but I inherited muscular calf muscles from my father, and I guess they're one of my better features. Yet I don't feel comfortable wearing shorts, I feel self-conscious in them; I prefer long pants except if I'm going to the beach (which is rare in itself).

So there I was on my futon, thinking to myself how we don't think of ourselves as sexy unless other people tell us we are. People might be able to tell themselves they're sexy in a self-boosterism kind of way, but unless they get positive input from their potential audiences, they would soon wonder if they really are sexy at all. You can't feel sexy in a vacuum, unless you're just fantasizing some erotic situation, and that's something different. I'm talking about feeling sexy or attractive in the real world.

The only times I've ever really felt attractive were when women were impressed with things I'd done, whether a speech in junior high school that elicited a note from three popular girls to the effect that I was "really terrif," or the admiring look of a girlfriend who watched me direct short films in college and found me sexy because of that. When I make a woman laugh with some witticism, I can feel sexy, but that's old hat for me. I decided on the very first date I went on in high school, sitting across from the girl in a pizza parlor on Devon Avenue in West Rogers Park in Chicago, that the way for me personally to impress women would be by making them laugh at my jokes.

I can never feel attractive in a stripclub because I am always aware that I am paying for attention...although once with my most favorite dancer, Angela (who left the business three years ago), I felt attractive because we had developed an easy rapport that was based on my lack of inhibition in playing out my submissive fantasies with her. I think there was something about my lack of guile in this regard that made her very momentarily look at me as a man far more formidable than she initially thought.

I was looking at a fashion magazine at the newsstand the other day, which had several pictures of a single model. Her expressions altered minutely from picture to picture, but I found myself recognizing the distinctly different meaning in each expression, as if her emotions were explicitly spelled out in actual words on her forehead. In one shot she was uncertain; in another, she was domineering; in another, she was flirtatious; in another, she was condescending and motherly. Similarly, I remember how Angela looked at me for just one second that day over three years ago, while I was kissing her hand as she stood over me, and I could see that just for a fleeting second she looked aroused, it was as clear as if her face were the picture next to the word "aroused" in the dictionary. I think it is possible to read people's expressions exactly for what they mean, without words being spoken. But then she got back to business, her expression changed to "mercantile," and I was back to being yet one more of the human ATMs that helped her pay back her student loans. As I've written here before, I didn't begrudge Angela this efficient, commercial approach, because she never pretended to be in the job for anything else but money, and she delivered value on the dollar (at twenty dollars per song). If she came back to work and I had the money, I would resume being her customer.

My ongoing interest in stripclubs has long been a question of the chicken or the egg. Which came first: my not feeling attractive and instead settling for a place in the fantasy zone, or has living in the fantasy zone made me feel less attractive in the real world?

Maybe if in my life I had felt more attractive to women in the regular world, or I had learned long ago how to make myself feel that way, I wouldn't have gotten so caught up in the stripclubs. But now the stripclub is the sexual world where I feel most at home. Perhaps I am more a spectator than a lover...because getting a lapdance is really more a form of up-close watching. The dancer merely moves from the stage to the lap.

I haven't been enjoying my recent trips to stripclubs that much. Oh, there are moments of entertainment, but generally it's not as much fun for me lately. Penny-pinching does not go with the territory, but is necessary for me these days when I face the challenge of paying my income taxes as a freelance worker.

Anyway, last evening around midnight, as I was about to scratch off my numbers in the two tabloid games that come free with the New York Post and Daily News, I asked myself what I would do if in the next two minutes I saw that I'd won a significant prize. My answer was that I would have gone out immediately even in the bitter cold and found a nice stripper to spend an hour with, buying her a cocktail or two and having a few dances. I guess I'm easily satisfied...I didn't think, "Oh, I'll go to the Four Seasons and pick up some babe and take her to a swanky hotel room." Instead, I just thought of dropping maybe two hundred dollars on buying the cheap drinks and getting a girl to writhe on my lap...just doing what I used to do only a year or two ago.

Now I scratch the contest numbers off because I sincerely feel I can't pass up any opportunity to make extra dough, however long a shot. But that doesn't include playing lotteries...that to me is an absurd long shot. I'd rather to go Atlantic City and put a hundred dollars in a slot machine.

Anyway, I may be low on dough but I'm rich in books, right? Last night I read a couple of stories from Joseph Epstein's collection, Fabulous Small Jews, which focuses on people from the North Side Chicago neighborhood in which I grew up, West Rogers Park. The stories are both sad and funny depictions of the foibles of ordinary Jewish folks, old and young. Firstly, the stories are very well-written, top drawer stuff, and secondly, it's fun to read about characters who are sometimes teachers at the schools I attended, or live on the streets I myself walked and rode my bicycle over. People who grew up in New York are accustomed to read about their neighborhoods, but there's not too much fiction out there about West Rogers Park. I guess it's partly nostalgia that fuels my pleasure in these stories, but they are full of engaging characters who face the ups and downs of life in a philosophical way I can identify with, a kind of secular Judaic way of seeing the world. Their lives are depicted in meticulous details that call to mind an entire way of life in a specific place. Although Chicago is a big town, people there live in neighborhoods that are akin to small towns. The Jews there seem less cosmopolitan than New York Jews who, even if they never leave their neighborhoods in Queens or Brooklyn or the Bronx, still have a sense of being part of the center of the world that is New York in general. Anyway, Epstein captures this somewhat more insular quality of the Chicago Jews in his stories, and as I read them I see how I am torn in my own personality between my dyed-in-the-wool midwestern provincialism and my hard-earned veteran New Yorkishness--because after thirty-four years, I've been here twice as long as I lived in Chicago.

It's funny, though, after reading these very realistic stories, I rounded out my evening's literary excursion with a few more pages from George W.M. Reynold's 1847 British potboiler, Wagner the Werewolf, a melodramatic novel that takes place everywhere from the Black Forest to sixteenth century Florence to Constantinople. The werewolf character escapes execution in a scene where he transforms in his jail cell from man into monster, then runs rampant through the crowd, only to end up in a shipwreck that reunites him on an idyllic Mediterranean island with his beauteous beloved, the impetuous, murderous Lady Nisida. I tell you, going from Epstein to Reynolds is quite a leap, but fun.

I'm still cogitating over James Bond, and I think another reason I like Sean Connery as Bond is because he seems exceptionally literate. As a bookish fellow myself, and a bit of an Anglophile when it comes to the spoken or written word, I find that Connery's witty and erudite 007 gives me something to identify with, to "bond" with (sorry), and the envy I might feel over the fact that Connery is better looking (in both reel and real life) than I am and can obviously get more babes is softened by the fact that he is the Platonic ideal of Sir Cranky--and I want you to know I am laughing aloud as I am typing this sentence, which strikes me as funny as it is true. Yes, if bookishness could be raised to intrepid, dashing perfection, I see it incarnated in Sean Connery's James Bond. He is also hairy like I am. Pierce Brosnan's comes a distant second, Roger Moore is merely an amusing fellow, I can't remember Timothy Dalton or George Lazenby very well, and Daniel Craig comes across just as a generic 21st century Anglo-Saxon toughie softened by the strictures of feminism and political correctness.

Sean Connery as James Bond--he always seemed to be letting us in on the joke that was the absurdity of the 007 stories, but simultaneously telling us that he was having fun with it and he wasn't going to let our fun down either. I've seen him in films he made before Bond, and he was nowhere near as interesting. James Bond was the material to help him find his greatness as an actor. His 007 transcends the movies and becomes something akin to mythology, a demigod outwitting legendary monsters in the form of supervillains...like a Ulysses foiling the Cyclops.

Can we say this about any other actor who's played Bond?