There was an article in the New York Post yesterday criticizing the actress and singer Beyoncé for the way she's been posing for the cameras lately at various red carpet events. Seems she's been lifting up her arms in retro, cheesecake types of poses and showing off her armpits. The article consulted some chap named Mac Folkes who teaches models how to walk and move, and he said "she should most definitely know better."

But she does know better, Mr. Folkes. That's why she showing her armpits.

In my opinion, women posed for cameras better in the 1950s and 1960s. The cheesiest men's magazine in the 1950s had more interesting poses than any five thousand issues of current fashion, men's, or erotic magazines.

The photographers really worked those dolls, and the dames rose to the occasion.

Furthermore, the female armpit, when shaven, is actually a rather erotic sight to behold. And Beyoncé's look quite fetching.

I volunteer to shave them for her any time she feels too tired to lift the razor herself.

No charge.

Pro bono.

So you and the Post have gotten it all wrong, Mr. Folkes. Beyoncé, keep raising your arms. Maybe you'll start a trend where models actually have to position their bodies in interesting ways again, instead of just walking down runways like scallions with legs, and standing in front of cameras like potatoes with lipstick.

Which brings me to something I read in the new issue of the excellent magazine Films of the Golden Age, issue #47. Olive Sturgess is an actress who did a lot of period tv shows back in the 50s and 60s, and had a major role alongside Karloff, Price, and Lorre in Roger Corman's 1962 horror comedy The Raven. In her interview, she makes the point that modern actresses don't know how to "carry" the gowns that they wear. Eureka! This explains why so many modern actresses strike me as lacking in the glamour and finesse that would make them addictive eye candy to the true connoisseur, such as yours most cranky. Most of the actresses today look as if they'd rather wear jeans or sweat pants, and their "glamour" seems strictly put-on and not truly "felt" in the way the movie queens of the past felt it...lived it...BELIEVED IT. (Paging Lana Turner.) Miss Sturgess had a lot of experience learning how to wear clothes for the historical programs she was in, so she knows whereof she speaks. Yes, the glamour of the past cannot be brought back until today's actresses basically learn to move with the correct postures to best present their clothing, instead of worrying how much money they're going to earn for wearing and promoting some designer's creation on the red carpet.

Geez, next thing you know, I'll be putting out my own yearly Best Dressed List...

God, I'm tired tonight, but it's a "good" tired. I just basically finished a project that I worked on for two months, which came out well and which I hope will also help me find new and profitable avenues of freelance work. This financial anxiety has been wearing me down...

There are a few little details to be tweaked, but the work on this project is essentially done.

I put a lot of myself into it, and I had the support of a good friend and colleague who encouraged me to pursue it. I thank you, signore.

Emotionally, the contrast is stark: I actually feel happy for the first time in months. My first impulse is to eat a big juicy steak as soon as possible! Have a bottle of wine and get myself a beautiful call girl!!

When I first lived in New York during the summer of 1971 while I was still in college, there was an older Greek guy I knew who ran the local grocery store. He impressed me talking about how sometimes he'd get himself a hooker, then afterward have a big dinner, a cigar, and a bottle of retsina. I'm chuckling as I'm writing this, remembering how impressed I was at his leisure routine...which I have to admit I adopted in my own more thrifty way: a trip to Brew 'n Burger for all the beer I could drink with my burger ($3.95), and a thirty minute session at a walk-in massage parlor. The cigar was usually a cigarillo called Erik, which had something to do with Vikings. Oh, New York was something in those days...

Did you ever see the movie Zorba the Greek with Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates? I'm not unlike the nervous Alan Bates character, influenced by the lusty Quinn.

Anyway, I just took a shower, shaved (I was saving these rituals today for when I was done with the project) and now I'm going to go out for awhile. A nice Japanese dinner, some sake, and I may even hit the club and spring for a rare lapdance. What the hell--I've earned it.

Or maybe I'll get some Greek food? As one of my favorite writers, Harry Mark Petrakis, once had a Zorba-like character exclaim: "Look at life with the eye of a tiger! Let your spirit be a flame, a torch, a fiery dart!"

Right now, this tiger needs some grub!

Tomorrow the academy announces the nominations for the Oscars, but so far I haven't heard any buzz at all about a possible nom for Gretchen Mol's performance as the 1950s pinup model Bettie Page in the biopic The Notorious Bettie Page. Which is a shame, because it was a fine interpretation.

Although the movie was publicized last spring with interviews and photos of Mol as Page, it vanished quickly from the public eye. It's been on DVD for awhile now, though.

The problem, I believe, was that the film itself was not worthy of Mol's performance. The movie was too short, too simplistic, and with too much of a modern "female empowerment" axe to grind that, quite frankly, was a lot of hooey.

I think it also hurt that the DVD release features a three minute silent clip of the actual Bettie Page, doing a brief striptease for an anonymous filmmaker in some unidentified location.

Page seems like a much different person than the one Mol portrays in the feature film.

Which isn't to say that Mol's interpretation was off. She created a complex character whether or not it was exactly like the real Bettie Page. The movie was not a documentary. I just don't think the screenplay gave her enough dimensions to explore. At one point in the silent clip, the real Page seems peevish and bored as she strips down to her lingerie, just as a real model might be when disrobing for some camera club joker in his basement studio. However, I'm just guessing about this--the DVD never identifies who made this short film or where. In any case, Mol never got to really portray that side of Page. But in the sections where she was given some real meat--where she is born again in a revival service, or the scene where in the middle of a bondage photo shoot she theorizes about what God thinks of her work--Mol created an indelible impression. She was GREAT! Just great. Jared Harris, portraying fetish photographer John Willie, was also terrific in that same scene, but he too was shortchanged by the script.

Like I said months ago on this blog, if the Bettie Page story had been filmed by Martin Scorsese, an idea that had been bandied about at one point, we would have gotten a film, as well as a lead performance (presuming Mol played Page for Marty) that would have really stood out.

So, regrettably, Gretchen Mol seems to have been shuffled to the side this Oscar season, but her work as Bettie Page was easily the equal of Helen Mirren's acclaimed performance in The Queen, which won Mirren a Golden Globe last week.

Maybe another enterprising filmmaker could give Mol another shot at the role of Bettie, just as James Cagney got to portray George "Yankee Doodle Dandy" Cohan in two films, and James Mason got to limn World War 2 German general Erwin Rommel in two different pictures. It's an idea worth pursuing.

Anyway, here's thinking about you, Gretchen!

Sometimes I wonder if writing this blog helps me indulge my more neurotic habits of mind...

Although I am Sir Cranky, Sir Cranky is only part of who I fully am...

Yet when I go through my days lately, I sometimes feel as if I'm falling into this limited Sir Cranky role, and seeing my life through his increasingly melancholy eyes...

He is a truthful expression of who I partly am, but like any literary expression of character, he is edited so as not to be an unwieldy sprawl of characteristics.

He is me, yet he is a character too.

I believe that just as no "reality show" is a completely accurate portrayal of so-called reality, so no blogger's identity can be completely true to the blogger's full personality.

So. Sir Cranky is the 55 year old romantic customer of strippers who has lived in New York for 34 years. He is the eccentric, quasi-black sheep of a middle-class Midwestern Jewish family; the loving brother; the detached and wary son; and the hardworking but financially anxious freelance worker.

Yet it just doesn't seem to be all of me...

I dreamed last night of a small-time actress I knew slightly from a trip I took to California. I met her in 1984 when she was 18 and I was 33. She was very beautiful and I was smitten, but nothing ever happened other than we did some work together at one point. (I worked on a script that she performed.) She would be 41 now, I think. I last ran into her several years ago, although ours was never more than an acquaintanceship.

Yet I dreamed about her last night, completely out of the blue, very vividly, and in the dream I was extremely bold in asking her to go to bed with me...not very Sir Crankyish at all.

She accepted.

Still, it didn't happen (in the dream) because I was being pursued by gangsters who were out to kill me. I cried out, "I'm going crazy," then snapped awake at the sound of a gunshot in the dream. I had thrown the covers off, and I was shivering in my bed. Even with the heat on, my apartment is drafty during the cold weather.

Gangster imagery in my dreams is usually symbolic for my late father, who wasn't a criminal but boasted of knowing shady characters who might well have been. I sometimes feel as if my father's habitual coldness toward me always inhibited me from feeling as if I truly became a man. In the dream, I am prevented from being with the actress because gangsters (my father?) are trying to kill me...or drive me crazy.

Perhaps I want to get more in touch with that aggressive "me" in my dream who asked this actress to go right home and have sex...over the last fifteen, twenty years, I seem to have lost (or abandoned) the edge of my masculine aggressiveness, which every man has whether he uses it or not.

Perhaps I dreamed about this because I watched a movie last night in which a mild-mannered man (who is alternately referred to in the story as a "wimp' or a "doggy") beats to death a thug who threatens to kill him.

I mean, he really beats the living shit out of this thug, with the car jack the thug intended to use on him.

The camera focused not on the thug's body being bashed, but the now-rageful face of the mild man, finishing the job...asserting his true position of "top dog" over the thug who called him a doggy...

Spoiler alert: the title of the movie was Red Lights, and it was based on the terrific Georges Simenon novel I read last week. Interestingly, in the book, the wimp's violence is expressed differently; the movie made it more overt. In the novel, the violence is only implied in a clenched fist, and then a stammered "I'm sorry" as the wimp pulls back from striking the thug.

Of course, in the novel, the thug (after putting the wimp through hell) is in custody between two FBI men when the wimp confronts him; and in the movie, the wimp is trapped out in a deserted forest clearing with the thug alone.

In a dark forest, other measures are clearly called for.

Yes, a lot of stuff here for the brooding mind of Sir Cranky to absorb...

So much of so-called masculinity seems just an exercise in self-absorption and self-justification.

Still, maybe that's what's called for if the world is to move ahead in significant ways. I don't know...

Nice guys don't get into the history books. But I would rather be a nice guy. I just want to be a nice guy with money...

Maybe I'm just too guilt-ridden to seize the reins and ride vigorously ahead...

Thinking about stuff like this is like contemplating what's behind the universe...meaning, the human mind simply can't figure it out. Or my mind can't.

Although you might think from some of my writings here that I am somewhat cynical in my view of women, the truth is, I don't have a very high opinion of most men either.

I increasingly feel that the best part of people is expressed through art--writing, painting, films, acting, music, and so forth. You can take the rest.

So here's another side of Sir Cranky: the gnarly misanthrope.

Well, living in New York gives you plenty of material for such a point of view.

Like one of the take-out restaurants I go to. The rudeness of the cashiers is almost comical. They almost never say "thank you" for your money or your order. In fact, they act as if you're lucky they're serving you at all, barely looking at you as they hand over the food. If the chow wasn't tasty and cheap, I wouldn't go there.

It's little things like this that make me almost loathe humanity...

It's not only Blanche Du Bois from A Streetcar Named Desire who sometimes has to depend on the kindness of strangers.

Small kindnesses make life bearable for us all.

I'm trying to take it easy today, so I'm just going to post briefly. I think my eyes need a rest from the computer screen.

The memorabilia show was fun this afternoon. I bought some some cool items and they weren't too expensive. One is 1938 book called Striptease: The Vanished Art of Burlesque. What makes the title of this volume funny to me is that on this blog I frequently bemoan how classic striptease and burlesque no longer exist in the clubs (as opposed to the specialized Neo Burlesque shows, which are really performance art), and I look back to the mid-twentieth century as its golden age, but here was a journalist writing in 1938 that burlesque was all washed up! But it looks as if he's referring more to the legal crackdowns that drove burlesque out of New York City just before World War 2, rather than the actual disappearance of the genre. I also got some old magazines which have transcriptions of burlesque skits, which I often find as funny to read as to see performed in the vintage burlesque films.

It's really cold outside tonight, and kind of drafty in my apartment, so I think I'll just stay in and peruse my books. My gloom from yesterday seems to have lifted for the most part; I'm glad for that.

Hope you're all having a nice weekend.