As I wrote a few days ago, in anticipation of seeing Diane Lane in Hollywoodland--that's the new movie about the mystery surrounding the death of 1950s tv Superman star George Reeves--I just re-watched The Big Town, a movie Lane made in 1987, when she was about 22. She played a stripper in that one, and was not shy about showing off her lovely body doing a striptease, or clinching with Matt Dillon. I have not seen ANY of her other movies that I can recall (which is not a slight on Lane, because I'm simply not that much into contemporary films), so when I saw Hollywoodland last night, it was a real "fast forward" experience because she's now 41. It was definitely freaky to observe her at first. She was very good in her role as Reeves's lady friend, and she's obviously still very attractive, but it was bizarre jumping from seeing her raunchy ripeness in a g-string to watching her now seasoned self in the elegant wear of a Hollywood socialite. What made it all the more unsettling was the fact that both movies are set in the same decade--the 1950s, so in a way Diane Lane is almost a 1950s movie star for me. All I've seen her in onscreen is 1950s clothes, and being the fine actress she is, she is also able to actually evoke the 1950s manner of female movie acting, which is not quite as loose and frenetic as contemporary distaff thesping. When you see her in Hollywoodland (and I hope you'll see this excellent movie), you'll notice how many of the other actresses in the film sound just like girls of the 21st century, despite their retro clothes and hairstyles--because it's very hard to evoke the thespian rhythms of the past. People moved and spoke differently fifty years ago, or least they did in the dramatic venues of film and television--and what other evidence do we have to go on now?

I'm going to write more about Hollywoodland, but not tonight; after a long day of commuting to and from New Jersey for my freelance gig, I'm too tired for any extended critical thinking. Anyway, it'll give the movie more time to marinate in my consciousness, and I'm looking forward to jotting down my thoughts about it. It really is a fine piece of work.

A few days ago, I mentioned I was reading a novel called As A Man Grows Older, by the Italian writer Italo Svevo (1861-1928). It was written in 1892 and got such a bad reception at the time that Svevo didn't publish again for something like twenty-five years. Instead he worked for his father-in-law's business. He was based in Italy, but as the business expanded he had to spend time in London, so he hired a young Irishman to help him with his English. That Irishman was the upcoming writer James Joyce, who was then unknown. He read Svevo's novel, liked it, and when Joyce became famous he helped Svevo publish a new novel which finally brought Svevo the fame he deserved. (These biographical facts come from the introduction by James Lasdun in the edition of As A Man Grows Older that I read, published by New York Review Books; www.nybooks.com.)

This is the kind of book that is so good it almost spoils you for anything of a lesser quality. The writing, the characters, the insight--all phenomenal.

Now, it's hard to imagine this fantastic novel being ignored or disdained by critics, except for the fact that the story gets so painful and sad that it probably didn't get good "word of mouth," as we say now about books and movies. It's about a thirty-five year old man named Emilio who falls in love with a beautiful but totally amoral young woman named Angiolina, who lies to him about her many other lovers and even tries to seduce his best friend. The erotically inexperienced Emilio tends to idealize women, and he does so with Angiolina, much to his psychological detriment. His behavior becomes totally distorted with jealousy and resentment, and in trying to pretend that he's not a jealous fool, he does irreparable emotional damage to his relationship with his lonely sister, with whom he lives since the death of their parents. The book examines in minute but fascinating detail the inner workings of all its characters, leading to a tragic ending.

The book was funny in parts, however. Emilio is so neurotic--almost Woody Allenesque--that even after he finally has sex with Angiolina, he can't help driving himself crazy with his twisted thoughts. But these laugh-out loud moments fade as it becomes clear how Emilio's inability to see Angiolina for who she is--and himself as well--creates a tangled forest of lies on his own part, which lead to disaster.

The book ends on an uplifting note, as Lasdun notes in his informative introduction, but it's not so corny that it undercuts the realism of what preceded it. The inspiring quality comes from the compassionate knowledge that the characters genuinely gain through their final ordeal, when Emilio's neglected sister is revealed in all her hidden pain and becomes seriously ill. And the climactic scene between Emilio and Angiolina is almost operatic in its violent drama, although Svevo ends it on an image of Emilio's weakness that brings it down to earth.

It's amazing to realize the book was written in 1892, because although it's not explicit in details, it is certainly up-to-date in its understanding and depiction of sexual desire and behavior. And one thing that author Svevo really nails is how men can simultaneously idealize women even when they know those women don't deserve it. He captures the male ability to imagine a beautiful, even virginal goddess, when the reality is actually something far more mundane, or even sinister.

The introduction by James Lasdun (a poet and short story writer whose fiction has been filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci) calls Angiolina's depravity "superb," but that seems to put a gloss on the girl's antics. Starry-eyed Emilio may have been stupid to pretend she was something she was not, but he pretty much nails it in their last encounter when he calls her a whore over and over. This scene reminded me of my own feeling that the definition of "whore" is not so much based on the amount of sex a woman has, but in how she utilizes those notches on her belt in her dealings with her lovers. It's not so important what a woman does with her body, but how she uses her sexual accomplishments to wield power over others. There is something fearsome on a primal level about the image of a totally uninhibited and unrestrained woman like Angiolina...or at least that's the opinion of this bachelor--Sir Cranky.

Today is the fifth anniversary of that day...I am grateful that nobody I knew perished. My heart goes out to those who died, and to those who have suffered.

I remember riding the bus out to New Jersey about eight a.m. that day...about forty five minutes before the first plane struck. It was a day like today...sunny, blue sky, with a touch of autumn. Oftentimes, once the bus had gotten through the Lincoln Tunnel and over to Jersey, I’d make a point of turning around in my seat to admire the Manhattan skyline, gazing across the Hudson from the Jersey side to see the city. This is the Midwesterner in me, forever a tourist here. But that particular day I felt tired from lack of sleep and I thought, “I don’t have to look at the skyline now; I’ll look at it tomorrow.”

So I was in New Jersey at the office of one of my freelance clients on September 11th, unable to get back to New York until September 12th. One of my co-workers kindly put me and another New York colleague up for the night. This other colleague was so freaked out that she determined to move out of Manhattan, and did so for awhile; but she eventually came back. I myself could not wait to get back to the city.

I know I’ve told the following anecdote before. I remember when I returned to a favorite stripclub for the first time towards the end of September 2001, I saw a look of great relief on the face of one of the dancers when she noticed me. I wasn’t her customer, and in fact I’d thought she was a bit of a snob and didn’t like me--she was an exceptionally beautiful girl with her pick of free-spending, champagne room clientele, and had never come over and asked me for a dance. Now, however, she said hello to me from the stage for the first time, with a nervous grateful smile that made her usually-haughty temptress face suddenly look vulnerable. Maybe I was only a familiar piece of the wallpaper to her, and just to see my face was reassuring to her on a gut level...the gut level we were all living on, to greater and lesser degrees, in the immediate days, weeks, and months after 9/11.

She eventually danced for me one evening--the first and only time before she left the club for good--and it was quite nice. She was warm, affectionate, and sexy. I don’t know if 9/11 had changed her attitude towards me or other people, or I had just misread her all along in my narcissistic, insecure way, and had been incapable of seeing her as a person and not as a fantasy goddess...

I said yesterday in my entry that today I would talk about a stripper who had treated me poorly, and was probably one of the reasons why I started writing here. In July 2005, about two months before I started writing this blog, I met a dancer in a club who was very friendly, chatty, and attractive. She sat down at my table and we had a pleasant, flirtatious, humorous conversation, and then she asked if I wanted a lapdance. We went to the banquettes in the back of the club. It was quite enjoyable. I had her dance three times, or sixty dollars worth. But once she got my money, her warmth turned to absolute ice and it was as if I were a piece of nothing to her; she immediately took out the sheath of bills from her garter and, after adding my sixty to it, began to count her thick and substantial wad like a bookkeeper. She didn’t even look up as she said, “Have a good night,” as if she were dismissing me from her company. It seemed clear that she did not expect me to linger at her side for another moment, now that I had turned off the financial spigot. It was such an abrupt and cold switch from her previous conviviality and smiling laughter that I felt as if she were dismissing me. I felt I had done nothing to deserve this. Her attitude filled me with incredible rage and depression as I picked up my Bud Lite and walked back to my table.

Shortly after that, the incident still fresh in my mind, I wrote a short story which depicted the scene I’ve just described, with the climactic literary addition of a confrontation that never happened, where my fictional counterpart went berserk confronting the girl about her rudeness. I worked on the story for a couple of weeks, edited and polished it, and it was certainly well-written enough; but I kept feeling it didn’t do justice to the subject matter.

I said to myself, “No, it’s not just a matter of yelling, ‘I’m a human being, I treated you nicely so don’t treat me like a piece of shit.’ Maybe she loathes her job, and my treating her courteously meant nothing to her; maybe she deliberately wanted to make me feel bad, or maybe she didn’t; but whatever HER story is, and MY story is, they need another kind of treatment.” You see, with my penchant for pulp fiction, I had cast the incident into a lurid noir mode when I wrote it as a short story (I thought I might send it to a crime fiction magazine); but I came to realize that I had a more complicated tale to tell. I couldn’t write that stripper’s story, but I could write about a solitary man who sits in stripclubs, why he’s there, who he is as a person, and the spectrum of feelings and memories he experiences...for whatever it's all worth. So on September 16, 2005, I started writing this blog.

It's funny how the mind works, or my mind at any rate. I woke up this morning thinking about Angela, who was my favorite stripper and lapdancer ever, and whom I haven't seen in over two years since she quit dancing. I thought about how sexy yet simultaneously ladylike she could look in her long gowns which both showed off her impressive natural cleavage with a plunging neckline, but which also gave her an air of elegance. I still contemplate with zeal some of the very sensual dances she gave me, and treasure and replay the titillating comments she whispered into my ear.

Man, she was the best. I'm so glad I committed her image and voice to memory. I hope she's happy wherever she is now, and whatever she's doing.

Now, I know there were times when I felt annoyed with Angela over the fourteen or so months that I was her steady customer, just like I get annoyed with other people in my life from time to time; but I can barely remember those negative experiences. My recollections of Angela are generally positive.

When I think about my parents, however, a good deal of my memories are negative. I literally have to imagine that there were positive moments too; I mean, I grew up successfully, I got an education, I've always made a living on my own, and I generally navigate my way through this human existence in a reasonable manner. Maybe not perfectly, but I am a decent citizen. But so many of my most vivid recollections of my parents, particularly my mother, are negative.

I wonder why this is...

Last weekend I read an article in the paper about "social intelligence" wherein the writer said that research shows that people tend to readily remember negative comments from employers or bosses, and so managers have to be careful and diplomatic about the way they phrase criticism and praise. I began to consider how this principle might be applied to other relationships. I guess in the case of a stripper I really liked, I hold onto the positive and discard the negative; Angela treated me with respect, friendliness, and awareness of who I was as an individual--meaning, as a professional erotic performer she made it her job to learn what my fantasies were, and catered to them, rather than just doing a generic lapdance to collect her twenties. But in the case of my parents, who never stopped making unfair value judgments about me and my interests, judgments which I internalized and which damage me to this day, I hold onto the negative memories.

My positive recollections of Angela are a kind of reward to her for being nice, even though she is not aware of this reward (I don't even know if she still lives in New York); and maybe my negative memories of my parents are revenge for their being harsh in subtle but very destructive ways. Yes, they gave me and my sisters a home, food, schooling, but they undercut this achievement by trying to tell us what to do in a very infantilizing way...in their own perpetual immaturity, they didn't understand that children must grow up and become their own people; to use an astronomical analogy, they didn't understand that children must become planets on their own, rather than orbiting moons of the mother and daddy planets.

So that's how one stripper whom I only knew superficially, and two flawed parents whom I knew all too well, stand today in my mind. Tomorrow, I'm going to write about a stripper who didn't treat me well at all, and who is probably the reason why I started writing this blog almost one year ago.

I had an okay evening. I had a beer and then I went to Whole Foods at Columbus Circle and got myself a fruit salad to bring home for dinner. However, I resisted the temptation to linger at Columbus Circle and girl-watch in the dusk; I did it Thursday night and it only got me into a bad mood. Sometimes it's hard to appreciate the passing parade of beauty and feel like your appreciation is never appreciated, much less acknowledged, by the women who walk by with cold expressions and pretend nobody is noticing them. In fact, I'm getting in a bad mood again just writing those last couple of sentences, so let me move on to something else.

I mentioned in my last entry that Diane Lane played a stripper in the 1987 melodrama The Big Town, available on DVD. Lane is on screens this weekend in the new biopic Hollywoodland, about the life and death of 1950s Superman actor George Reeves. I've seen The Big Town three or four times. It's an enjoyable flick because it has good 1950s atmosphere and a fine cast of actors, but the script is a bit weak. Diane plays the wife of a gangster (Tommy Lee Jones) who runs a stripclub and backroom dice game in downtown Chicago in 1957. Diane's character gets involved with Matt Dillon who plays a young gambler. Both Lane and Dillon were about 21 when they made this movie.

In the middle of the film, Diane does a very uninhibited striptease with big pink feathery fans. Her number is several cuts above the usual weak-kneed impersonations we get from mainstream actresses when they play strippers. Diane looks as if she could really have been a peeler back in the day. The number only lasts for about two minutes of screen time, but she is socko. I haven't seen a movie of hers in many years (although I'm going to see Hollywoodland on Tuesday), so I don't know what her body is like now, but in 1987 it was curvy and soft in the 1950s way I most like, and she sure was happy to show it. In one love scene she rides bare-breasted on top of Dillon. What a job that guy has! For her striptease she's clad only in pasties and the thinnest of g-strings, flashing her butt at lovestruck Dillon while giving him a teasing smile. It's definitely the highlight of the movie.

Parenthetically, it's interesting to note how just with one song, Diane projects a bold eroticism that many dancers of today's Neo-Burlesque strive to avoid in their single-song routines. With a few exceptions, the Neo-Burlesque strippers I've seen prefer to be satiric or humorous, rather than sensual and seductive, as they disrobe. But Diane Lane achieves a lot of heat with just one number in The Big Town, which only proves that it's not the amount of time a stripper is onstage that contributes to her heat, but what she does with her time.

In the acknowledgments at the end of The Big Town, the filmmakers thank "Mr. Paul Valentine." My guess is that this was the Paul Valentine who was a dancer and film actor back in the 40s, and who was married for a time to the great stripper Lili St. Cyr. I wonder if he gave the filmmakers input about the burlesque scene back in the 50s? Lili was a huge star on the nightclub circuit of that era.

In any case, it'll be interesting, and a mite strange, to see Diane Lane again at age 41 in Hollywoodland right after seeing her in The Big Town. I know she's a popular star, but I really don't think I've ever seen her in any other films, so it's going to be like watching her age overnight. But everybody says she's really got that MILF (Mom-I'd-Like-to-Fuck) thing going on now. She certainly looks fetching in her photos.

Speaking of Hollywoodland, in one of the newspaper reviews of the movie, a critic refers to George Reeves as a "bad actor." But can Reeves be considered bad if created a character as lovable and ingratiating as his Clark Kent/Superman, the leading role of a tv series that continues to delight viewers and sell DVDs? They say that Ben Affleck is terrific in the part of Reeves in Hollywoodland, and he too has been accused of being a bad actor. Well, I haven't seen many of Affleck's movies either, but I always thought on the basis of Chasing Amy that he was just fine. I'm looking forward to seeing him bring George Reeves back to life in Hollywoodland.