Lately I feel as if my mind has been stretched as thin as a rubber band pulled between two horses. Certainly, I've been detailing my anxieties here about work and finances. And maybe it's the time of year, too, that makes me tense, what with the extremely cold weather and anticipating not the glorious thaw of spring but the stress of paying my freelancer's taxes in April.

My economy-minded trips to the stripclub are more necessary than ever, just to distract myself. I need this mindless activity, although now that I only get lapdances on rare occasions--almost never--my typical stripclub visit is a mostly solitary pastime with little interaction with the dancers. Occasionally girls will sit down to chat for a few minutes, but I believe they sense my discomfort that I don't want to spend money on drinks and dances, and they quickly wander off.

Nonetheless, if this is a lesson in anything, it's how the mind adapts itself to altered circumstances. Although it would be nice to have someone gyrating against me, twenty dollars for every three or four minute song is just too expensive now (because one dance is rarely enough), so instead I let my mind amble and daydream about the girls as they move across the stage.

There was one stripper last evening who really caught me by the imagination. I tipped her three bucks during her sets--and if you think that sounds cheap, she thanked me gratefully and pointed out that I was the only one in the club who WAS tipping--and as I watched her move, I suddenly began to imagine her in disrobing for me in a motel room instead. Earlier in the day, I had spoken to my platonic friend Diana on the phone; she had just gotten back from a road trip with her band to Canada, where she had stayed with her female bandmates in a small room at an isolated motel during a snowstorm. I suddenly imagined instead the stripper in that room, lit by a couple of lamps, her sexy naked body moving against a background of knotty pine walls, then inviting me to get on the bed with her...

So it's funny. Although I miss the lapdancing for the physical contact, as well as the conversation that comes with it, just watching the dancers do their thing onstage has forced me to employ my fantasy mechanisms right there in the club to amplify the experience.

You know the saying. When you have lemons, make lemonade.

The recent movie about George Reeves' death, Hollywoodland, just hit DVD, and I rented it last night even though I'd seen it in the theater.

It holds up pretty well, and perhaps plays even better on television, which lends itself to the story's intimate scale.

The main thrust of the script is to follow a fictional private investigator, Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) as he looks into the circumstances of Reeves' death by gunshot in 1959. The LAPD ruled it a suicide, but Simo examines questions about whether that was a hasty judgment.

The character of Simo partly represents all the Baby Boomer fans over the years who have wondered how the beloved actor who played Superman on tv in the 50s could have killed himself. They wonder if he could have been murdered.

The screenplay frames Reeves' story with Simo's own personal problems. Simo is, like Reeves, a man who has not achieved the stardom in life that he craves (in Simo's case, to be a famous investigator of sensational cases).

What stands out in a second viewing of the movie is the fineness of the acting. Diane Lane is both sexy and vulnerable as Reeves' older girlfriend, Toni Mannix, wife of a powerful studio exec played with menacing melancholy by Bob Hoskins; Lois Smith is affecting as Reeves' mother, who carries guilt over her problematic relationship with her son; Ben Affleck is solid as Reeves, although he played his scenes as Superman a bit too broadly (just a glance at the old tv show will demonstrate how straight Reeves played it); and Brody is compelling in a complex role that requires him to be more pathetic than strong as the wannabe tough guy Simo.

But the performance that really stood out for me on this viewing was Robin Tunney as Reeves' younger girlfriend, Leonore Lemmon. She is a perfect femme fatale, making the character simultaneously sexy and frightening. Raven-haired and shapely, she wears the 50s clothing with intoxicating panache, and the way she purses her lipsticked mouth and spits out her words with a New Yawk accent and a streetsmart (or streetfoolish?) arrogance, boldly demonstrate the appeal she has to the Reeves character, who is tired of being kept by his older mistress and is looking for a feeling of renewed youth with the younger Leonore. It is clear that Leonore is a cobra from the first moment we see her, and that nice guy Reeves is out of his league. In the scene where they meet, he's a tv celebrity and she's just another nightclubbin' babe, but she rudely addresses him as "Junior!"

Yes, Tunney's performance as Leonore Lemmon is yet more evidence for Sir Cranky to ponder the strange alliance of danger and destructiveness that makes some women so appealing...

Like the character of Nisida in the novel I discussed yesterday, Wagner the Werewolf (see the previous post). In the section I read last night, this ultra femme fatale dresses as a sixteenth century cavalier, complete with deadly blade, to steal out into the night and stealthily confront in a Florentine garden a young girl she believes is her rival...it was thrilling to read of Nisida's impetuous cruelty, but horrifying too...she attacks the girl without asking for a word of explanation...

And by the way, the scene where Wagner first transforms into a werewolf was brilliantly handled. His entire body becomes wolflike, and in a long passage of remarkably propellant prose, he vaults across the Italian countryside creating fear and havoc as he bounds through village and wood, through a procession of monks and a family gathering...

Wagner's abandonment of Nisida when he realizes he's about to transform is what makes her jealous enough to confront the girl she thinks is her rival.

What dark melodramas they are, 2006's Hollywoodland and 1846's Wagner the Werewolf!

The other day I went to the Strand Bookstore, famous in New York for its "8 miles of books" (recently updated to 16 miles). I was looking for a Victorian novel about ancient Rome and gladiators which one of the readers of my blog told me about. Before I try to purchase it online, I thought I'd see if I could find it at the Strand. If you're a booklover and you travel to New York for a vacation, check out the Strand at 12th St. and Broadway--you can't help but enjoy it.

Anyway, I didn't find the book I was looking for, but instead found something I had never heard of but which looked interesting. It's called Wagner the Werewolf, and it was written in 1846-1847 by George W.M. Reynolds. It's published by Wordsworth Editions (www.wordsworth-edition.com), a British firm. The introduction describes it as the first werewolf novel. I read the first page, and what attracted me to it was how quickly the writer, using slow-moving, gingerbready, antiquated prose, quickly pulled me into the story of a ninety-year old man who kinda sorta sells his soul to be young, rich, and brilliant. Only drawback--he also becomes a werewolf.

I don't know if I'll finish the book--it's almost 500 pages long--but so far I've read about sixty pages and despite stilted dialogue, it's filled with alluring descriptions and a cliffhanger narrative that makes me want to keep going. And it doesn't hurt that a prominent character is a mysterious, beauteous, raven-haired femme fatale named Nisida, who's a deaf mute but who nonetheless can express the deep and relentless passions of her heart through eyes that practically emit lightning bolts when she gets worked up. Mm, my kinda woman...

The characters talk in pretentious language that sounds just like the narrator's voice, but no matter; what they talk about is vivid and dramatic, and it's easy to see why Reynolds, a Brit, although forgotten today, was something like the Stephen King of his time in terms of popularity and sales. Fame is fleeting, but what remains on the page so far seems like pretty good entertainment. His novels were published serially, week by week, in British newspapers and magazines, designed to be read by the masses for cheap thrills that would take them away from the stresses of their lives.

I've just come to the scene where Wagner, now a handsome and vastly wealthy fellow living in Florence in 1520, has to flee from Nisida's arms because the sun has set and he's about to become a wolf. We'll see what happens next...

I spent time earlier today writing a post that was full of crankiness, but by the time I was finished with it, I said, "Why? Why am I always so pissed off about this or that? And is the getting pissed off and expressing it only making me more pissed off?" I'm getting tired of the whole thing...I deleted the post. I'm getting tired of reading some of my more exasperated words.

I frequently start Monday mornings feeling disappointed that my life is not in a better place, that my dreams have not been fulfilled, that I don't know HOW to fulfill them or even exactly what it is I still want to fulfill...and so my blogging often reflects that.

Still, I think I've reached the point where I may just be settling into some bad habits of curmudgeonliness.

I'm starting to doubt the validity of my opinions, based as they are so much on my tides of emotion...

Or maybe this is just a bluer Monday than usual...

I watched a DVD last night of two B-movies from the late 40s starring George "Superman" Reeves. He's alway fun to watch even when the material isn't great. He's such a likeable actor.

The double feature is available on a disc called George Reeves Double Feature, from VCI Entertainment and Kit Parker Films.

One of the movies is called Jungle Goddess. George and his co-star Ralph Byrd (who was famous for playing Dick Tracy in serials) here portray two flyers searching for a girl who disappeared in the African jungles in 1939. It's now 1948, and they find her, but she's now the "White Goddess" worshipped by a tribe. Unfortunately, Ralph's impulsive, nasty, and violent character gets both flyers in hot water, and with the help of the White Goddess, they have to flee for their lives.

It's pretty cheesy stuff overall, but there's one scene where George and the White Goddess, who hasn't been near Western Civilization in awhile, discuss the current state of ladies' hats there (and remember, this is the 1940s when women's hats were a very big deal). It's a nicely written scene, and George gets to really employ his light comedy chops with Wanda McKay, the beauteous B-movie actress who plays the White Goddess. When a scene had some sophisticated flair, he could rise to the occasion, and this vignette really hammered home how his potential as a Hollywood leading man was never fulfilled on the big screen.

On the disc, there are commentaries and insights from various George Reeves experts and admirers, and as always I was struck by the tremendous amount of good will and sheer love George engendered in his fans (including me). Bela Lugosi is the only other actor whom I can think of from that era for whom fan adoration is at the same level. Both men were exceptional presences on film, both often had to work with severely limited material, and yet both never stinted in giving their all. Take a peek at George Reeves' one or two line bit part in 1949's Cecil B. DeMille spectacular Samson and Delilah, where he just plays a messenger (he would take small roles in A films at the same time he got leads in B films) and you'll see an actor ready to squeeze the last bit of juice out of even the tiniest part.