There is a good article in today's Parade magazine (the national supplement that comes with the Sunday New York Post) about "social intelligence." It gives scientific backup to some of the things I bitch and moan about on this blog.

I quote from Daniel Goleman's article: "A study at the University of London found that when a woman whom a man finds attractive looks him straight in the eye, a specific circuit in his brain releases dopamine, delivering a dollop of pleasure. But this only works when their eyes lock. SIMPLY LOOKING AT BEAUTIFUL WOMEN, OR EYE CONTACT WITH SOMEONE A MAN DOES NOT SEE AS ATTRACTIVE [my emphasis--Sir Cee], fails to stir this pleasure circuit."

This explains why I felt like Mr. Hot Stuff a couple of months ago, when I was at a party chatting with a pretty and vivacious woman who clearly LOOKED IN MY EYES as she smilingly responded to me. She was a type I really like, in the mold of the sensual Italian movie actresses of the 50s and 60s like Gina Lollobrigida. Regrettably, her longtime "significant other" was nearby so she wasn't a pickup possibility, and she also flirted with other guys; but I felt markedly witty and attractive during my conversation with her.

Later, when another woman whom I DID NOT find attractive locked orbs with me, my main thought was that I wanted to get away from her when it was reasonably courteous to do so.

Goleman's quote also explains why I find it both ABSORBING AND DEPRESSING to see the parade of gorgeous women on the streets of New York, who take no warm-eyed notice of me in return.

In the perverse way some human minds adapt themselves to the environment and available conditions thereof, I have found myself aroused by the seeming indifference of these Manhattan women--or rather, I have told myself that their lack of interest in me is somehow a sign of their superior allure.

In effect, I have turned their aloofness towards me (and towards most men on the street, I might add) into an aspect of their beauty. This is a masochistic element in my sexual personality.

There is another point that Daniel Goleman's article makes, and I quote: "When we feel rebuffed or left out, the brain activates a site for registering physical pain, neuroscientists at UCLA report. TO THE BRAIN, SOCIAL REJECTIONS STING THE SAME AS A BODILY INJURY." [My emphasis added--Sir Cee.]

Hence, there is not just a neurotic basis for my grumpiness about the delicious but aloof dames I see on the street, but a very real organic cause--I become extra-cranky because I am aching in my neurons, or wherever those social rejections sting.

Ouch! Mommy, it hurts!!

I have sought my self-applied Band-Aids in strippers, DVDs, chocolate, and too much sweet soda, Cheetos, pretzels, Triscuits, Wheat Thins, BBQ potato chips, and Doritos.

Daniel Goleman wrote an intriguing book ten years ago called Emotional Intelligence, and his new one, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, comes out at the end of September. In this brief article for Parade, he also discusses why the average students in high school sometimes go on to success that would seem startling on the basis of their earlier mediocre academic standing: it's because they nonetheless have superior "social intelligence" and ability to interconnect with people. As Goleman reveals, it's the ability of people to interplay with others that can serve a person far better than a high grade-point average. I've known this just from observation for many years (it became evident at my 20th high school reunion in 1989), but it's always nice to see it explained with scientific facts.

One final curiosity, though. I took the mini-quiz in the article to test my own Social IQ. I got a perfect score. I didn't even have to hesitate to answer the questions correctly. Why then have I become such a loner, and find myself reluctant to connect to people in recent years? Maybe I have to read the book to find some answers...

What a gloomy rainy day...but I guess it was okay because I need to take it easy. I feel guilty just hanging around my apartment, like it's my duty to go out and about the city or I'm somehow wasting my leisure time, "not taking advantage" of the great plethora of activities available to me as a citizen of this mighty metropolis; but the fact is, I can entertain myself pretty well at home...

Books, videos, burlesque DVDs, daydreaming...everything except a flesh-and-blood stripper is available at Casa Cranky.

Sometimes I think New York is composed of many millions of little New Yorks, people making their own worlds in their own spaces...with as much New York as they need, and they can bear, within their own four walls. Yes, it's necessary sometimes to retreat to one's rabbit hole as a defense mechanism to the intensity of living here, the crowds, the noise, the expense, the din of the media and the level of the bullshit...

I did go out for awhile in the mid-afternoon and walked about half a mile, but then it started to rain and I said, "Homeward bound." I was hungry anyway, and since I had sandwich fixings at home, didn't want to needlessly spend money in a restaurant.

One final thought: it constantly amazes me that women can walk around in flip-flops in the rain and chilly weather. What's that all about?

I mentioned in my last entry how I like to write descriptions of the various girls I see on the street, and wish I could draw or paint them rather than having to be satisfied with verbal portraits.

There is a painter with whose work I fell in love when I first moved to New York named Reginald Marsh (1898-1954). I found a large book of his paintings and drawings which was too expensive for me to afford at the time, the mid-70s. I had little money, and the volume was $25.00, which is what I paid each week for my rent in a residential hotel (in other words, my monthly rent came to a little over $100 a month). I loved the book so much, though, that I asked the bookstore to let me give them $5 a week for it until it was all paid up. That book became the cornerstone of my personal library and I can see it from where I sit as I write.

I felt an immediate affinity with Marsh because of the way he painted women on the streets of New York from the 20s through the early 50s. His style had roots in older methods of art, and he brought a sense of Baroque drama and mythology to his imagery of girls at Coney Island, girls on the street, and one of his favorite subjects, burlesque dancers. He would go into burlesque shows and sometimes have to sketch discreetly with his pad and pencil in his coat pocket.

I felt that Marsh saw women much as I see them, and so I recognized in him a kindred spirit. Even if they were shopgirls walking down the avenue or along the waterways, or holding a flashlight while waiting to usher you to a seat in a darkened movie theater, they were larger than life, mysterious, awe-inspiring.

I've included a link below to a site by Erik Weems that has examples of Marsh's paintings. Since Labor Day weekend is traditionally one (at least in New York) when people catch up on the art exhibits they neglected to see during the summer, here's a chance to view Marsh's work on the great museum that is the Internet.

I've linked specifically to the artwork page, but Weems' site also has a biography of Marsh and other material. If you'd like to see the world through Sir Cranky's eyes for a moment (perhaps that's a dubious proposition?), then click on these specific images on the Artworks page: Battery Belles, High Yaller, Onstage, and Usherette. Each of these paintings is a favorite of mine, capturing not only the very real qualities of New York women in their beauty and self-absorption, but also (particularly in Usherette) their almost threatening combination of power and allure. I don't know what Marsh was feeling when he made these paintings; all I know is that they capture for me essential qualities in the women of New York.

I love the proud stride of the woman in High Yaller; the strength of the girls' legs in Battery Belles as they stand against the wind of the harbor; the aloofness of the woman in the burlesque comedy sketch in Onstage (I feel as if I'm the one entreating her); and the barely hidden dominatrix almost bursting out of the uniform in Usherette.

This city and its women are fantastic subjects, and Reginald Marsh did them proud. And although the settings and dress styles may have changed, to my eyes, Marsh's paintings timelessly portray these subjects as they still look today.

ReginaldMarsh

Where did the summer go? It's rainy and chilly tonight. I went downtown earlier this evening with three possible goals: pick up a couple of books I'd seen at the Strand Bookstore and the St. Marks Bookshop the other day, have some chili at a favorite diner, and possibly hit another Neo-Burlesque show in the East Village. I did the first two, and decided to pass on the burlesque show.

One of the books I picked up was Black Friday, a new British-edited paperback collection of stories by David Goodis, a melancholy noir writer of the 40s, 50s, and early 60s. I grab his books whenever I find them, because they tend to appear and then go out of print since he is more a "cult" favorite rather than a more widely read name like Dashiell Hammett or Jim Thompson. I read a pretty good story while I ate my chili, about a young guy who gets involved in a heist that is stopped by his own policeman father. His father gets shot by one of the other hoods, and the young guy goes after him. The revenge plot wasn't much, but the way Goodis told the story you felt the young guy's affection for his father, and a real connection between the two of them, even though the son didn't follow the same path in life. It was a good mood piece.

I like Goodis especially because he captures the lonely qualities of city life. He wrote largely about his hometown, Philadelphia, but as I walked the shadowy windswept streets tonight, surrounded by the massive old buildings, I felt as if I were in Goodis territory.

Goodis wrote the novel that was the basis for the top-notch 1947 Bogart film Dark Passage, with Lauren Bacall and Agnes Moorehead.

The chili was good, meaty and spicy, topped with cheddar cheese in a fair-sized bowl. The waiter was an upbeat sort of chap, and that cut the solitude of eating alone. It's not that he said much to me, but it's good when a waiter makes you feel he's glad you're coming to the restaurant, and that you're ordering one of the best items on the menu.

I sat in the diner looking at the students from NYU who also patronize it. Momentarily I saw a young woman who reminded me of someone else I knew way back in college myself, but I kept seeing her in profile as she was getting ready to leave the diner and couldn't get a full view of her face.

On the train uptown afterward, I saw a cute Asian girl wearing a pink hoodie that didn't quite reach down to the two inches of bare midriff above her low-riding jeans. Sexy. She also looked like an NYU student. She got off near Herald Square and I wondered if she were perhaps going over to the row of Korean restaurants that line 32rd St. between Broadway and Fifth. She had on high heels with her jeans, spikes that just peeked out of the longish cuffs.

Ah, I sit in the restaurants and in the subways and I feel a disconnect between the fifty-four year old man I am and the alluring sights I see around me. Sometimes it just doesn't compute in my head, that I am thirty years older than most of the females who catch my eye.

I must sound like a broken record talking in yearning tones about all these gals I see on the street, but I like writing these little verbal sketches of them. I wish I could draw and bring them to life that way, but my artistic abilities are rather limited.

As I said, I had been thinking of going to another burlesque show, but I decided I'd had enough entertainment last night. Anyway, seeing that cutie in her hoodie tonight was entertainment. The show around town has been pretty compelling for me this summer, surprisingly so; and definitely easier on the wallet.

I thought I was going to take the whole weekend off, but nooooo, some work-related stuff "kept pulling me back in!!!" as Al "Michael Corleone" Pacino cried in Godfather 3, when he couldn't leave his own work behind...

All right, I resolved the situation as best I could, via phone and email. Onto the weekend, once again, Sir Cranky!

I started it off with the Starshine Burlesque last night in the East Village. Because the New York Burlesque Festival is in town this weekend, with performers from all over the country and the world, the Starshine had a lineup of talent from New Orleans, Toronto, Los Angeles, as well as New York.

My favorite dancer of the evening was La Cholita, a voluptuous blonde from L.A. who did a Mexican-themed dance. At a peak moment she threw two miniature sombreros, which had been covering her breasts, out into the audience like Frisbees.

The show was fun even though it was standing room only and I had to stand (arghh)...I might have gotten a seat if I wanted to pay $15.00 for the earlier admission seating (yes, the Starshine has gotten more popular in recent months, and more crowded), but I think the show is more fun when I only pay $5.00 for it, plus a few bucks extra in the tip bucket for the performers, a couple of singles in the garter of the pre-show go-go girl (last nite it was Pookie Patookie), and six clams to the bartender for a beer and tip...

The revered New York performer Julie Atlas Muz did a weird number, coming out with her upper body wrapped in rope, her wrists tied, and a blindfold on her eyes, out of which she writhed, Houdini-style. Muz is known for the "performance art" quality of her approach to burlesque, which is more serious than a mere disrobement. She has quite a body, very toned and strong-looking. I'd love to see her do a classic, traditional strip sometime with no underlying socially provocative subtext whatsoever.

Albert Cadabra did his ever-humorous magic act, essentially the same one I saw the week previously at the Sugar Shack Burlesque, but since what's funny is his timing rather than the particular trick, it was fun all over again.

Other performers were Lux La Croix from L.A., Natasha Fiore and Rev. Spooky LeStrange from New Orleans, Sauci Calla Horra from Toronto, Little Brooklyn from NY, and the zany "boylesque" star Tigger was emcee with lots of mock-bitchy humor. You had to be there for his reference to his "leather Cheerio" as he bent over and showed off his butt in a thong, with NY written on each cheek. Neo-Burlesque can be a very pansexual scene.

Anyway, the important point for me this Labor Day weekend is that I just take it easy and have a few laughs, as my mind has felt like a well-stretched rubber band between my freelance job and writing thousands of words every week in my blog.

The one thing that occurs to me about the Neo-Burlesque scene, however, is that because the performers do only one number each (at least in all the shows I've seen over the years), they really don't get a chance to emphasize the sensual and erotic aspects of their personae. Only when they have the benefit of the shorthand of being so knockout gorgeous that they inspire instant arousal can they really grab Sir Cranky (in a manner of speaking) by his nuts. It's almost as if the acts end just as they're getting started...as if the format is to present erotic symbolism and motifs without ever really letting the audience get aroused.

For arousal, Sir Cranky has to go to a regular stripclub, where the girls dance three songs a set onstage. There he can revel in the full marinating effect of their performances on his horny brain...

By dancing only one number apiece, Neo-Burlesque essentially keeps itself in the entertainment rather than the erotica realm. Which keeps it more "respectable," perhaps, but which also makes it somewhat less compelling. I have yet to find a Neo-Burlesque dancer who inspires in me the same kind of awe and loyalty that I have felt for Lily or Angela, to name two of the stripclub dancers for whom I became a truly dedicated customer and fan.

It's becoming clear that while Neo-Burlesque is fun, it will probably remain just another entertainment option for me, rather than the less expensive alternative to stripclubs I was hoping it might turn out to be. But we'll see. Nothing is written in stone.