A friend of mine gave me a link to an article from Britain about the first lapdancing club for female customers in Birmingham (apparently the lapdancing capital of the UK). Male dancers will do a lapdance for a token that costs ten pounds, which I believe is roughly about what we pay for a lapdance here in New York (twenty dollars).

The article wonders whether the club, Tricky Dick's, will catch on, and get single women coming in for some solitary thrills, rather than only in groups of gals out on the town for "hen night" action.

Since women act in so many unpredictable ways, I wouldn't venture to play Nostradamus about whether the joint will succeed. But since in my learned opinion the lapdance is more suitably performed by, and more suited to, the sinuous curves and motion of the female figure rather than the male physique, I consider the entire thing basically a stunt.

Whether Tricky Dick's is a success or not is irrelevant to what I feel is the basic incongruity of the lapdance as an art to be performed by the masculine body. I think what women would enjoy more would be the "David Dance"--where a guy stands there like Michelangelo's famous statue, and the female customer worships him from any angle she wants. But I'm curious as to whether women will agree with my theories...

For your interest, there's the link to the British article. Thanks for my buddy Sexeditor for the tip!

Do women really want male lapdancers?

Summer is holding on. Way to go, summer!

Sometimes I wish breakfast on Sunday mornings could just go on and on...reading the papers, drinking my coffee, watching people in the coffee shop...it is one of the very best things in my week.

The bonus this particular Sunday in New York is the beautiful weather, so I took my "Tower Video Constitutional" up from midtown, where I live, to Lincoln Center, and browsed for awhile. Didn't purchase anything, though, because I spent enough at the memorabilia show yesterday buying movies. Last night I watched one of those DVDs--an obscure 50s British thriller called Impulse, starring Arthur Kennedy. A fine character actor who passed on a few years ago, he was engaging whether playing a good guy or a villain. Impulse was only a mediocre thriller about a married man who gets entangled with a female diamond thief, but as always Kennedy had those moments where his wit and charisma shone through, delivered in his very distinctive voice, so overall I enjoyed the flick.

You can see Kennedy at his best in 50s movies like The Man from Laramie, with James Stewart, or Some Came Running, with Frank Sinatra. He's also Lizabeth Scott's sucker of a hubby in the juicy 1949 film noir Too Late for Tears.

As I walked up to Tower Video, smoking a cognac-dipped cigarillo, catching eyefuls of girls in their low-cut cleavage, I felt pretty good. It's nice to occasionally NOT feel dissatisfied every waking moment of the day, and just take my life as it is; but I have to work at this, make a conscious effort not to surrender to what seems to be my congenitally negative disposition. Today I did this by jotting a few thoughts in a notebook. I've kept these "notebooks" since 1973. I don't record things that happen to me, but just observations about my behavior. Unlike here, I don't worry about the niceties of sentence structure in the notebooks. I just write to clarify my thinking.

Anyway, as I was walking this afternoon, I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt with the slogan, "Time is an invention." That gave me pause. I had to think about it, and I realized I disagreed. Time is NOT an invention; time is a fact of nature; but the way we MARK time, denote its passage, or describe it, those are the inventions. No matter where you are as a living being in the universe, time moves along. Of that I'm sure.

Some t-shirts should remain in the drawer. What if an impressionable kid saw that thoughtless slogan? It might ruin his life...

With the coming of autumn, the collector conventions begin again here in NYC, and today I went to my first movie memorabilia convention since June. I picked up three interesting old movie magazines from the 60s and 70s, a couple of videos including a femme fatale-themed noir thriller starring one of my favorite American character actors, Arthur Kennedy; and a great old pinup digest with shots of Jayne Mansfield. As befits my tighter budget these days, I spent less than I used to, but couldn’t help but feel anxious that I even spent the amount that I did. Oh well, it’s been a beautiful day, the sun is out again, it’s warm, and I’ll make more money again on Monday--to paraphrase something my late father used to say when he'd been in a free-spending mood.

It was a year ago today that I started this blog, although if you look at the history of my posts, for some reason, it's listed under 9/28/05. When you see the actual entry, it's dated correctly at 9/16/05. A lotta words under the bridge...

Allow me to indulge the self-important side of my nature for a few paragraphs, as I commemorate this past year of writing...

The original premise of my blog was to discuss my admittedly trivial but ongoing conflict: as a middle-aged bachelor living in Manhattan, should I spend my leisure-time dollars on lapdances or DVDs? The blog evolved into a mix of things: a memoir of my life, my attitudes towards women, discussions of my favorite films and books, and observations about living in New York. I've always had the feeling, though, that if I didn't write about strippers, I wouldn't have attracted as many readers. On top of the handful of personal friends who know about this blog and read it regularly (I otherwise keep it anonymous), I seem to get about forty or fifty other visitors a day: other Blogstream members, or folks from other places on the Web.

I've encountered some interesting people here on Blogstream, and enjoy reading their blogs and learning something about their lives. Some also gave me support via their messages and comments during some rough times I had earlier this year, when my kid sister became ill. I am happy to report that, knock wood, she seems to be on the mend thanks to a rigorous course of treatment.

Over the year I've written the blog, my financial situation has grown tougher as a freelance worker, and in the last five months I've visited stripclubs and written about dancers somewhat less. But I've also become a fan of "Neo-Burlesque," a far less expensive form of entertainment that evokes the striptease and comedy styles of the 40s and 50s, and I've written about the dancers who work in those venues.

I just love watching women take their clothes off onstage, whether in a stripclub or Neo-Burlesque show. I know that sounds infantile, but it’s just a fact about Sir Cranky...

Over the last few weeks I’ve socked away a few bucks from my weekly budgets so that I can hit a stripclub soon and not have to pinch pennies when I’m there. The funny thing is, when I have to make a real effort to save up money for something as ephemeral as going to a tittie bar, I start to feel reluctant to blow the money in the hour or so it will last me in Manhattan clubs. And hence I keep putting off going to the clubs, and instead stay home and watch a DVD, or content myself with the erotic spectacle of girl-watching on the street...

Indeed, I’ve seen more than one incredible beauty on the boulevards who has stirred quite a response in my very imaginative brain...and later, in the privacy of my chambers, I contemplate with zeal the visual memory of those striking gals...

But my pulling back from the clubs has not just been a matter of money, and I've tried to describe the evolution of my feelings toward dancers in the last year. I think I’ve become more cynical, but again, that may just be my wallet talking. When my checks as a freelance worker are heftier and I don’t have to budget myself, I am generous with the dancers and more ready to surrender to my illusions about them...

Like many people, I am a paradoxical combination of self-awareness and self-delusion...

But there is one constant in my blog: the melancholy--and it is most definitely that--of a ordinary-looking fifty-four year old guy, “Sir Cranky,” who is still thoroughly intoxicated by the beauty of younger women--whom he often feels are now out of his reach for a number of complicated reasons that are examined in various posts.

I've also written about my relations with my family, and how my life in clubs and watching movies is fueled by the anxieties I live with.

Basically, then, I've just tried to give you a picture of one of those anonymous customers you always hear about, or see photographed in shadows in articles or on television programs about "gentlemen's clubs"--to show you what one customer thinks and feels, how he relates to the eroticism of the clubs, and its emotional attractions and distractions. And how he sometimes feels he gets a lot more out of the DVDS he sees...and sometimes less.

Which brings me back to the battle of "strippers versus DVDs." It's definitely a draw...

Sometimes I wonder what I could learn about myself if I re-read my entire blog, which I haven’t done. Sometimes I wonder what YOU’VE learned about me that I might not be capable of seeing...

I don’t think I’m finished writing this yet...

Thank you for reading.

Hollywoodland is the new film that partly focuses on the life and mysterious death of 50s Superman tv actor George Reeves. After seeing the film on Tuesday night, I watched a few more episodes of the fourth season of Superman, newly released on DVD from Warner Home Video, and I particularly enjoyed "The Wedding of Superman" wherein Lois Lane finally gets her dream man. One thing is evident when you watch this old series: George Reeves had a lot of charm and charisma, and it just may have been bad breaks that prevented him from becoming a major movie star rather than a television sensation. Or he may just have found the part of his life on tv, and that's what finally made him shine the best. Having seen him in other roles, I do feel he was never quite as memorable in them as he was when playing Superman, but then again, he never got a role as memorable as Superman before.

These are just the mysteries of how creative people work and finally achieve something lasting in their careers...mysteries that finally as unknowable as what exactly happened to George Reeves the night he died. Was it suicide, as the official verdict declared? Or was it murder?

I had a hard time starting this entry about Hollywoodland, finding myself overwhelmed because I closely related to the film’s subject of people wanting to be more than what they currently are in terms of success or ambition; I am well-aware that one of the themes of my blog is my “wannabe-ism." I wanna be younger again, I wanna be handsome; I wanna have hair again, I wanna have the most beautiful girls as my lovers; I wanna be wealthy, I wanna be recognized as a fine writer. So Hollywoodland pushed more than a few of my buttons with its focus on people who wanna be...whatever.

Yet what I most liked about Hollywoodland is PRECISELY how it uses the subject of Reeves to examine how some people deal with lives of thwarted ambitions! Is that masochistic of me? I think it's just introspective. While it has its fill of retro atmosphere, full of folks in cool 50s fashions smoking cigarettes and driving neat-o cars, it’s really about the psyches of people who feel inadequate in probably the worst place in the world to feel that way--Hollywood. (New York is a close second, or maybe it’s first and Hollywood is second. No matter. Feeling like a wannabe sucks.)

Adrian Brody plays a fictional character named Louis Simo, a low-rent private eye and unhappily divorced dad. He clearly wishes he were a player on the Los Angeles scene; instead of following around the wives of suspicious husbands, Simo wants to be a brilliant and acclaimed sleuth who discovers the truth behind Reeves’ mysterious death in 1959. Simo becomes so absorbed in trying to solve the Reeves case that he can’t readily handle other desperate situations in his life, like his relationship with his young son who seems very depressed over the death of Superman (as some kids actually were back in 1959--something I personally remember from being seven years old at the time).

Reeves’ life is shown in flashbacks that parallel Simo’s investigation in the present day. So was he a suicide, or was he really knocked off by someone else? There were people who could have had motive to kill Reeves, like the powerful movie executive husband of Reeves’ longtime older girlfriend; or Reeves’ volatile golddigging new gal pal. Or did Reeves, frustrated by the limitations of playing Superman on tv, shoot himself in a moment of despair? Detective Simo tries to hunt down every lead, risking the wrath of some very powerful Hollywood people.

The movie is smart enough to know that it cannot definitively solve this mystery, but can present the different possibilities and let the viewer decide. Simo is a fictional character, partly standing in for all those fans who have wondered for almost fifty years about what really happened to the beloved Reeves. But most of the other characters in the film are historical: Reeves (played by Ben Affleck), his older girlfriend Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), her husband Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins), Reeves' mother (Lois Smith), and Reeves’ younger girlfriend, Leonore Lemmon (Robin Tunney).

In the Hollywoodland flashbacks, Reeves is portrayed as an actor whose career starts out well (with a small role in Gone with the Wind) but stalls after World War 2. He still wants to be a star like Clark Gable, so even though he achieves worldwide fame as Superman, it’s not enough for him. His older girlfriend Toni recognizes and respects his very real accomplishment in playing the lovable and ingratiating Clark Kent/Superman, but Reeves is restless and wants to go further--which leads him to dump Toni for the younger Leonore, who makes him feel youthful and still on the upswing of his career in his middle forties (Reeves was 45 when he died).

All the actors are excellent in their roles, but the ultimate star of the show is the script by Paul Bernbaum, smoothly directed by Allan Coulter. Hollywoodland made me think of a great noir like 1947’s Nightmare Alley, where the male protagonist “reached too high” to the detriment of his life, but even more, Hollywoodland reminded me of tender films about parents and children like the Italian Neo-Realist classic from 1949, The Bicycle Thief. Wisely, Hollywoodland ends on a quiet and moving note as Simo learns to quit trying to be a tabloid detective hero, and instead tries to be a good father to his melancholy son. Avoiding the seductive trap of trying to be a modern film noir, Hollywoodland manages to stay true to its own thoughtful, sensitive self. I'm sure I'll see it again.

A rainy morning always makes me feel sluggish. At least I'm doing my freelance work in New York today instead of getting on a subway and bus to commute out to New Jersey to a client.

Crazy dream last night. Two twentysomething women seemed to have taken over my apartment--stealing some of my books and generally making the place a total mess, instead of the mere clutter it now is. And I didn't even get to have sex with them in the dream! It was PLATONIC badgering--the worst! Then, when I finally managed to get the two gals out of my place, I noticed that they'd written poems all over the inside of my door with a black marker pen, so I'd have to work up a sweat scrubbing it clean again. The poems seemed to be very political, like something concocted by Eve "Vagina Monologues" Ensler. Hmm...before I went to sleep last night, I read about Ensler's newest play in the papers, and they were bad reviews. Maybe reading about her had some effect on my dream?

I also wonder if the dream came from browsing the "women seeking men" personals on craigslist earlier in the evening. I get the impression that a lot of the young women who place ads there are kinda wacky--just playing with guys' heads. And, in general, I'm starting to see women in their twenties (unless they work as strippers and I can semi-relate to them) as strange unpredictable creatures almost out of a 50s sci-fi movie, speaking their own language (though it superficially appears to be English) and in general taking over the world. The Creatures Walk Among Us!

On the other hand...not having been to a regular stripclub since the end of July (although I saw a few Neo-Burlesque shows this summer, an entirely different entertainment form even though flesh is exposed), maybe I'm starting to experience the symptoms of severe lapdance withdrawal, and I am getting a bit nutty...

Perhaps to celebrate the first anniversary of my blog on Saturday, I'll actually hit a club again! The only problem is, I've gotten in the habit of NOT spending my money on strippers...and I'm starting to like that habit.

Yet...yet...yet...

To paraphrase the title of Carson McCullers' novel, which I was required to read in high school--the lap is a lonely hunter.

And it might be nice to see that cute Asian dancer Daisy sitting on it again...

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I have not forgotten about the fine new film Hollywoodland, and as I promised, I plan to write about it in the next day or two, for those who are interested in my thoughts about this noirish semi-biopic about the late actor George Reeves, who memorably played Superman on tv in the 50s. Ben Affleck plays Reeves and Diane Lane is his lady friend in this evocative tale of Tinseltown in the 50s. Stay tuned!