I was reading about Hugh Grant yesterday in the paper, and there is one cranky Englishman! He has a new movie coming out with Drew Barrymore as his co-star and there have been a spate of stories about his grumpy outlook on life.

I think he can get away with a lot of the things he says (and does, or did) because he's a handsome guy with a boyish quality, that accent, and of course, a full head of hair.

This is what the New York Post of 2/11/07 quoted him as saying concerning the tv talent contest American Idol: "I like people being humiliated. I like watching freaks. The freakier the better, as far as I'm concerned...I would quite like to see the losers tortured."

I think it would be better to torture the winners! That would REALLY separate the be's from the wannabes. It wouldn't be enough to sing well...my idea of torture would be that they’d have to pull themselves out of a pit of quicksand! Or maybe the contestants could perform their numbers IN quicksand, with Simon, Paula and Randy sitting on the shore holding a tree branch just out of reach! And maybe they could combine American Idol with Survivor, to make a show called The Surviving American Idol!!

A tip of the hat to Hugh Grant, because if I hadn’t read his comments, I wouldn’t have started thinking along these lines. Bad influence, or a liberating one?

More pertinent, can I get away with comments like this without a full head of hair?

You don't see any quicksand in movies these days. It used to be a staple of action-adventure films, with the hero or heroine stumbling into it and having to be pulled out with a tree branch. Or the villain meeting his just desserts under its nasty surface, revealing what a sissy he really is despite his death ray and hook for a hand. What's the real reason for this absence of quicksand? Has the quicksand of the world been depleted? Is it too corny a plot device, or are screenwriters shying away from quicksand because environmentalists protest that quicksand has been getting an unfair reputation, and the stuff isn't just a bad thing, but actually has an important purpose in the balance of nature? In any case, movie fans miss it. I think we could all use seeing a few fetching heroines being rescued from the stuff. So, let's get Jessica Biel in some quicksand in her next movie, only be rescued by Paul Giamatti. Or Jennifer Hudson can be rescued by Simon Cowell. Or maybe Eddie Murphy can get in another female fat suit and rescue himself! One-two-three-PULL!!!

I'm waiting for the DVD box set of Hollywood Quicksand Classics.

So, filmmakers, let's uphold the cinema traditions. It won't win any Oscars, but bring on the quicksand!

A few days ago I wrote about how I am getting weary of my constant crankiness, and how I had declined to post a prickly entry I'd written not so much because it was any more grumpy than others I've scribbled, but because I feel that sometimes I am indulging my negative habits of mind to my personal detriment. A blog gives me that opportunity.

When you live alone, it is easy to get into a constant mental dialogue with the world in which you can pour all your discontent. This is one reason why I guess it's good to have a wife or girlfriend or live-in partner or family--you're more apt to can the crap when you realize you'll get on everybody's nerves. Or not, I suppose; some people just barrel along in the presence of others, poisoning the air with their spewings. I've known people like that...

At any rate, it takes me longer to tell myself to shut the hell up when I'm just talking to my reflection in the bathroom mirror, or sitting on my couch with the bitter cud of too much cogitation in my mental jaws.

So. I'm not saying that I'm going to present a "sanitized" Cranky, but I will pick my rants with more discrimination...if that is possible.

When I present, as I did in yesterday's entry, a mental image of myself "pondering the eternal verities in my library," I am very much portraying myself the way I would like to be.

I prefer to think that the genteel life, lived with frequent breaks for lusty consorting with dancing girls, is the way for me.

I love to read, to muse, to daydream, to observe, to study. I am a very much a product of bourgeois middle class Chicago Jewish life who takes a silly and pretentious pride in being able to say I am more than passing familiar with the works of Latin poets such as Catullus, Horace, Martial, and Propertius, and who feels positively like an Oxford don in my cluttered and dusty apartment near Times Square when I sit on my couch reading aloud the English translations of their lyrics and epigrams in what is known in the acting trade as a "Mid-Atlantic accent," not quite a British accent but not quite American either.

A friend recently suggested I try to get work in the voiceover business.

Indeed, I think I do a decent rendition of Dylan Thomas' Fern Hill, one of the most beautiful of poems. I am also good with Yeats, Dickinson, Auden, Stevens, Dowson, Suckling, Herrick, as well as the more obscure Stevie Smith and Charlotte Mew.

Occasionally I like to shave in the morning while reciting Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," in which the poet expresses doubt that a teasing coquette will find much satisfaction in preserving her virginity unto death. And it's on my plate to someday memorize Marvell's "The Definition of Love," with its climactic description of star-crossed passion:

"Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars."

I relate to figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald's friend and colleague, the critic Edmund Wilson, whose taste for literature was balanced by his enjoyment of such "lowlife" pursuits as burlesque shows.

I see in the lovely strippers the poetry of Botticelli's Venus on the half-shell, and the allure of Venus as depicted by Titian, as well as the danger of the sirens tempting Ulysses in any number of juicy but now-forgotten Victorian canvases.

So I left my "library" last night and went out to the strip joint and I'm glad I did. Not that anything significant happened, but it was pleasant to have a couple of beers, see some new faces and figures, and have a couple of pleasant conversations with friendly dancers who did not begrudge me that program of disciplined economy which makes me forgo lapdances.

In this way, I ponder the verities in this other venue, too...

But how curious is my ambition to become a windbag!

The daylight is fading as I write, but at least it fades later now. March will be here before we know it.

I stayed inside this afternoon, lazily thumbing through a book or newspaper; I drifted off for a nap while the blue sky was still bright through the blinds. It is so nice to doze while the sun is out; not to sleep deeply, but just to graze along the edge of sleep and see the white clouds and sunshine over the tops of the buildings across the street.

Around 4:30 I told myself to go out for a little walk, to get some exercise, but as soon as I got outside, I realized why I had stayed in all day. It is windy and still damn cold. So I decided to go home, but first stopped in Starbucks to pick up a hot chocolate to drink while I write.

The Starbucks was filled with the after-theater crowds getting their skim lattes. That seems to be a very popular drink.

All day I resisted going out not only because it's so cold but because I knew if I did I would just end up browsing somewhere for DVDs or books and I would buy something I don't need. I have plenty to watch and read.

So instead, sitting on my futon couch, I perused "The Dictionary of Erotic Literature," by Harry E. Wedeck, Lecturer in Classics, Brooklyn College, NY, and a Fellow in the International Institute of Arts and Letters. His dictionary was published by the Philosophical Library in 1962.

Among the things I learned:

Two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Ovid clearly had a taste for something similar to what would now be called in stripclubs "tease and denial," wherein a customer is given expectations of pleasures that will be either postponed or never delivered at all--pleasures such as having dinner with one's favorite stripper, or being discreetly brought to climax by her lapdancing. Ovid perhaps would have enjoyed being dangled this way, judging by his quote in the Dictionary's section "Stimulus of Passion":

Thou whom I now adore, be edify'd,
Take care that I may often be deny'd.
Forget the promis'd hour, or feign some fright,
Make me lie rough on bulks each other night.
These are the arts that best secure thy reign,
And this the food that must my fires maintain.

And here's a memorable morsel from an entry on Greek mythology. Do you know why a raven is black? That's because a raven warned the god Apollo that his bride, the Thessalian beauty Coronis, had fallen in love with someone else. Coronis was punished by death, but the raven was also punished for delivering this bad news to Apollo: his feathers were turned black.

What a fascinating myth. It almost seems to suggest that Apollo, like many a mortal, could have lived with the unfaithfulness of his mate had he only not known about it...but having discovered it, lashed out both at the culprit and the bearer of bad tidings.

And here's one last tidbit from this delightful Dictionary. The inscription on a Pompeiian house excavated from the ash of Mount Vesuvius reads: "Lovers, like bees, need a life of honey."

Not even the volcanic spewings of Mount Vesuvius could bury that truth forever...

And I myself once spent a pleasant evening in a stripclub in Queens called--you guessed it--Honey's...

Thank you for these nuggets, Professor Wedeck, wherever you are.

I watched the old James Bond movie Goldfinger as I ate my Chinese take-out dinner tonight. I first saw it in 1964 when I was thirteen. I don't remember the last time I viewed it; maybe twenty years ago on video or at a revival house. I'd probably seen it two times before tonight.

Now, in middle age, I couldn't help but be struck by the brass of it--naming a character "Pussy Galore," the moniker of the henchwoman played by Honor Blackman. It still seems outrageous in 2007, so I can only imagine what adults back in 1964 must have felt. I just remember how cool I thought the movie was back then, when I went to see it in downtown Chicago with a few pals. It played, if I recall properly, at the State Lake Theater in the Loop. Although Pussy Galore was indeed a memorable figure, a blond pilot and judo expert with big tits in tight sweaters, what most stuck with the young Sir Cranky was blond vixen Shirley Eaton, who played the girl who got painted gold all over (and suffocated to death) when she double-crossed the evil mastermind Goldfinger.

I was so stuck on Shirley Eaton's looks that throughout junior and senior high school I carried a little portrait of her in my wallet which I cut out of the Chicago Sun-Times. She was on-screen no more than ten minutes, if that, but her slutty gorgeousness and cheerful amorality had quite a kick for this bar mitzvah boy...

Nowadays, as a pinup aficionado, I can appreciate that "Dink," the girl massaging Bond at the pool in Miami Beach, was played by Margaret Nolan aka Vicki Kennedy, a much-admired British magazine model of the early 60s. In contrast to the dangerous femme fatale she always projected in her photos, in Goldfinger Nolan is instead girlish and submissive.

Sean Connery, of course, is peerless as Bond. And with no socially redeeming value other than delivering sexy entertainment, the movie is still fun to watch, with its ridiculous story treated with the properly light touch. It moves along briskly without the pseudo-realism such a story would be varnished with today. And what is clear to me now that wasn't clear in 1964 is that it's literally James Bond's penis which saves the day, when 007's lusty lovemaking finally converts Pussy Galore from a murderous and icy sidekick of Goldfinger into a yielding female who comes over to the side of good. Yes, I missed that subtle message in my youth.