DANCING THE DANCE (old 42nd Street)

22. DANCING THE DANCE (old 42nd Street):

'If you've got the smarts to take it off you should take it off to be smart' was the motto over the doorway once at a strip club I went past in the mid-40's off Eighth Ave. and it was back at a time when it was still pretty unusual to see nudity played so publicly - of course all that has now changed and maybe since Oh Calcutta! and all that stuff it has become perfectly normal and acceptable in theater parlance to move the 'show-portion' of the activity towards anything that shows skin - totally naked or otherwise - and in fact just the other day I was sitting at a diner in nearby Newark and adjacent to me in another booth were two people - a film-student sort of guy and a girl of the usual 'art' outlook - and I overheard him matter-of-factly speaking of film as he said "when you're watching a film you WANT to see shit - the reason you're watching is for explosions gunshots or naked people" and he went on from there but I thought it pretty interesting to hear that from one of today's young people working through film as a craft and it all just showed how different everything has become - until today's situation wherein anything goes and goes so much as to have already been brought out as pretty jaded and tired for simple nudity and naked situations to appear - like the old attitude always went 'how much of that can you see and still care?' or something like that but in any case everyday is a first day for someone and you have to consider the reams of thirteen or fourteen year olds or less just starting now to become aware of this stuff on a regular basis - and they become aware of it in lieu of everything else too so eventually it really does stunt their outlook and all but I'm not sure that's any different from the old days when someone just arriving in the Army or something like it would get their first exposure to naked playing cards or girlie magazines (as they were once called) and to view a naked opposite-sex was really once considered a big deal - oh well - that was what made old 42nd street so daring I suppose and what made that motto I opened with so weirdly enticing even in its non-sensical outlook - after all WHAT the hell does it mean? or what is it trying to say anyway? - but the theater world (as was said before) has always been mixed in with the underworld and that of course is where pornography and nudity and such all come together because the best way for anyone especially a girl to get started in the film industry or theater is to be perfectly explicit and open and experimental about her sex-life (and this means guys too whether or not homosexual) and accepting of most any sort of coitus or sex-abuse which comes her way and if that means paying dues by taking off her clothes or submitting to whatever - filmed or not - then so be it for the carnal aspect of the entertainment industry is its means of generating money and first and foremost MONEY is what it's about and it's that which accounts for the massive abundance of its vulgarity abusiveness bad humor and filth and the ways it uses abuse and mockery to depict everyday life and people - IT DEMANDS a distancing of itself from any form of perfection and it does this through peddling a strange form of nervous filth which eventually degenerates the people who either enact it or take part in it or view it until they become no more than ciphers addicted to returning to the scene again and again - thus the money generation and the debased currency of quality and life which is brought forth - and it's like that or was all along the central section of strip bars and porno palaces which once lined both the street and avenues around 42nd where upstairs from many of the establishments there were veritable mills of debauchery - whorehouses captive young girls forced to perform sexually and be filmed doing so pay-for-use rooms for masturbation film-viewing voyeurism peeping or watching and all the rest and an entire INDUSTRY thus formed went from here to California doing same and making money over and above any of the almost self-flaggelant propensities of reformers and law enforcement (read 'pay-offs') to stop it AND in the end (no pun intended) everything failed and everything gave up and even today it has simply moved somewhere else.