THE STRIP CLUB

 

The chief (and perhaps the only genuine) charm of women is seldom mentioned by the orthodox professors of the sex. I refer to the charm that lies in the dangers they present. The allurement that they hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating. To the average man, doomed to some banal and sordid drudgery all his life long, they offer the only grand hazard that he ever encounters. Take them away and his existence would be as flat and secure as that of a milch-cow. Even to the unusual man, the adventurous man, the imaginative and romantic man, they offer the adventure of adventures. Civilization tends to dilute and cheapen all other hazards. War itself, once an enterprise stupendously thrilling, has been reduced to mere caution and calculation; already, indeed, it employs as many press-agents, letter-openers, and chautauqua orators as soldiers. But the duel of sex continues to be fought in the Berserker manner. Whoso approaches women still faces the immemorial dangers. Civilization has not made them a bit more safe than they were in Solomon's time.

H.L. Mencken, The Incomparable Buzzsaw

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American writer and journalist [Henry Lewis Mencken]

    I have heard it said, but don’t remember where or by whom that every generation thinks that history began the day they were born and that they invented sex or at least its enjoyment.   My response, 43 years ago at 20, and with my biting sarcasm was: “it didn’t?"  Mencken is correct. Technology has never altered the dynamic between a man and a woman.  I define historical progress as a steady if uneven reduction of risk.  That 18 year old kid shipped off to Japan in 1942 only to return in 1945 and find his true love betrothed to a stranger felt the same pain as a similarly situated soldier during the Peloponnesian War.   

    Which topic  brings me to a most unheralded institution in American culture:  the strip club.  Call it a "tittie" bar, gentlemen’s club, topless bar, go go bar, or whatever.  Non-existent is the American man who has never ventured into one of these fantasy emporiums and not walked out under the delusion that the flirtatious smile coming from the model on stage was anything but sincere.  If you meet a man who claims otherwise, you have met a bald faced liar.  Time has done nothing to alter this naïveté.  I remember my introduction to the genre.  1975.  The Admiral Wilson Boulevard.  The Oasis Motel.  Next to Camden, New Jersey, a perfect backdrop for this prurient imagery.

Minnie’s was across the street.  

                                    

It’s claim to fame was hosting Miss Vicky sometime in the mid ‘70’s after Tiny Tim married her on the Johnny Carson show.  It was one of the most viewed farces of the decade.  And after the inevitable divorce, she appeared here as a “celebrity.”  Her 15 minutes of fame.

These places were seedy and cheap.  But boy were they fun.  At least the dancers were real.  Unlike the dolled up girls and glitz palaces of today, getting “up close and personal” meant sucking on a left tit that tasted like a cheap cigar butt along with a whiff of stale Old Spice after-shave worn by the guy who stood next to you 20 minutes earlier pissing in a urinal.   And the girls had lives.  Instead of a silicone goddess lying to you about being a poor struggling single mom a la Striptease,

 

 you got a story about a biker boyfriend who shared her with his outlaw friends Hell's Angels style in some shitbox trailer home next to a blasting site.  All while they drank cheap vodka and smoked pot.  And unlike filmdom's nouveau strippers, she admitted she loved it.  Call it authenticity.   I prefer the no bullshit brand.  Honest.  Sincere.  Don’t pretend to be something  you are not.  So here's a salute to yesterday in all its bawdaciousness!

 

I prefer the no bullshit brand.  Honest.  Sincere.  Don’t pretend to be something  you are not.  So here's a salute to yesterday in all its bawdaciousness!

   

 

MIAMI NOIR: NOT ALL GLITZ AND GLAMOUR

 I wrote two previous posts about Miami and railroads.  Not the kind of stuff you will find in Variety or GQ.  Railroads are not the only dark side of the Magic City that is kept from the public eye.  Here is a collection of what you will find west of Biscayne and south of Wynwood after the sun sets.

Not pretty but better off being honest than selling something that does not exist.  

SEX APPEAL AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

 Sex appeal went out of style years ago.  As with most cultural trends, pinpointing an exact date and time is not easy.  However, I think I can give this one a good guess.  December 1953.  And why is that?  It is easy when you think about it.  Counter-intuitive even.  Too much of anything is a bad thing.  Vices are only fun when they are consumed in limited quantities and with a healthy appreciation of the dangers that lie in overindulgence.  

Yup.  That is when Playboy came out and, pardon the pun, stripped away what should have stayed in your head and put it all on paper.  

And that is when things started to go bad.  Pop historians, almost by unanimity, will tell you the opposite.  The narrative goes something like this:  America was a sexually repressed society. The censors were peeking through bedroom keyholes to enforce conformity and punish the libertines.  Hollywood censored movies all in the name of protecting the young and innocent from the depredations of pornography and bad manners.  The Catholic Church had a list of forbidden movies.  The entire panoply of illicit literature and conduct was secreted in an underworld of seedy whorehouses and dangerous bars.  There was a code of conduct that most “decent” Americans were expected to follow.  Anyone not towing the line was labeled a sexual deviant.  Think Lenny, The Night They Raided  Minsky’s, and The Music Man.   There are many others.  The Kinsey Report is a required appendage to this historical fantasy.  Only with the end of the Eisenhower presidency and the advent of JFK and his Camelot propaganda machine were Americans freed from the shackles of sexual constraint and their Babbitt like existence.  What was better kept between one’s ears was now bombarding TV, movies and music.  About that there can be no dispute.  It happened very slowly and then very quickly.  Playboy morphed into Hustler which brought us pornography that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.  Ditto music.  Think not?  Check out the lyrics to Brown Sugar, The Rolling Stones classic and you wonder how it every made it past the censors.   No way could that song ever get past the PC police in this supposed enlightened era.  Let's compare some choice videos from the old era.

        I submit the thoughts passing through any man’s mind while listening to this music were more erotic than anything some cheap peddler of smutty lyrics could ever conjure up and throw on a music sheet.  The date when music started the descent?  It is easy to say Woodstock but that event, more memorialized after the fact than celebrated during the event.  But it was more of a warning of what lay ahead of the era of cultural nihilism:  overdoses, violence, and sickness, all in an orgy of drugs, sex, and rock and roll.  For me, the transitional moment, caught so perfectly on tape, was sometime in 1971.  I was babysitting for a neighbor and turned on something called Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert.  It was a regular feature every Saturday night at 11:30.  And here is what forever changed my attitude towards black women.  The only word I can think of is RAW!  

  Don’t get me wrong.  I love Tina Turner.  One of the greatest entertainers of all time.  Proud Mary was a classic.  It pushed the envelope of music, video and sex to a very appropriate edge but the progression of what followed was a bathos of musical pornography with no redeeming virtue.  Check this out and imagine your daughters or granddaughters being inundated with this trash non-stop. 

And the same could be said of movies.  There is (or at least was) a certain shock value of seeing a woman butt ass naked in front of you.  But novelty very quickly turned to boredom which generated more graphic images of violence and sexual depravity.  But this bottoms out as the senses are dulled to the point of indifference.  What was once left to the imagination has been cheapened.  Sex appeal was never about raw sexual acts free of any moral constraints.  Quite the contrary.    Check Rita Hayworth out on this clip from Gilda

And this one.  

Or Jon Hamm playing the dapper Don Draper of Mad Men fame

Ask yourself.  What is sexier?  Engaging in this dialogue with a curvaceous women or watching her prancing around naked in front of you with her tongue hanging out and $20 bills in her thong?  Correct.  It’s  not even close.

And, of course, the  TV ads of the era.  

The operative word here is restraint.  Knowing when to say when.  Better to have 3 ounces of brandy and a nice cigar than chugging a whole bottle and suffocating yourself with 5 While Owls.  The point can be summed up perfectly with this dialogue.  I can’t remember the movie or the actors but I remember the words:

            Man:  What took you so long?

            Woman:  I was putting on my make up.

            Man:   But you do not look like you have any makeup on.

            Woman:  That is why it took me so long to do it.

Touché.

THE NOIR SIDE OF RAILROADS PART II (MIAMI EDITION)

 Miami is not known for its dark images.  When one thinks of railroads, the Sunshine State is not on the list.  And that is the way the Chamber of Commerce wants it to be.  When the average rust belter thinks of Florida, and more particularly, South Florida, these are the preferred images or, ahem, propaganda.  

Contrary to popular conceptions parroted by the media, there are people in Miami who do not own $100,000.00 sports cars or live in mega million dollar manses along the ocean.  

Better to believe the illusion than experience the reality.  And a hard, cold reality it is.  Forty years ago, Miami Dade County or "Dade" County back then, built or created what every large American city thought was the panacea to a perceived urban problem:  congested highways.  Why not provide a rail system from the suburbs to the city and persuade (i.e. hoodwink) gullible taxpayers into paying for such  a boondoggle.  The local, state, and federal government would provide a small subsidy and the fares would cover the rest.  Optimism was high.  After all, every mass transit rail project in America has become a rat hole down which is sucked trillions of dollars so why let the truth get in the way.  So Metro Rail became Metro Fail.  And with good reason.  Americans love their cars.  Almost as much as government planners love to control people's lives.  There are of course secondary and tertiary benefits to mass transit not reflected in the raw costs.  But Miami's version of mass transit provides some images not normally associated with the Magic City.  Let's face it.  Can you imagine Don Johnson in the '80's or the Miami Heat of recent vintage posing around these lovely railway visuals?

THE NOIR SIDE OF RAILROADS PART I

Railroads present an interesting portrayal of the American landscape.   Danger, grime, loneliness, isolation, anomie, and a sense of foreboding are all themes one sees in pictures, movies, and music.  There are, of course, happy scenes:  The Little Train That Could comes to mind but for every child like cartoonish song, there are ten Strangers On A Train,

The Commuter,

or Union Station

that bring it all back to fear and murder.  Even cartoons are not spared.  

And for every Chattanooga Choo Choo sung at a 1940's high school re-union,

there is this melodic descent into hopelessness and despair:

Nothing destroys your inner fortitude more than knowing you are locked up for the next 20 years while watching a train full of rich people drinking coffee and smoking cigars as they chug past your 5 X 5 prison cell oblivious to your existence.

         Ditto the literary side.  One of my favorite novels ever is The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton, he of Jurassic Park and Andromeda Strain fame.  

And the most famous name associated with high finance is not JP Morgan or David Rockefeller but Jesse James.  

Go figure.   

    I am sure there are positive images of railway mode of transportation but you have to look for them.  Here are a few sampling and you see why happiness and trains are not often if at all uttered in the same breath.  

No matter.  The message is clear:  something bad is about to happen and there is nothing you can do about it.  Call it fate.  But all is not lost.  

About as beautiful a woman as you will ever see!  The railroad tracks are the second most dangerous image in this picture.  And I like it that way.  (yelusworkout.com).