Plato's Retreat

The Ansonia Hotel

There are some people who dream of a sensual state that will be the cure for all their problems. Life is an eternal gray February day on the late 60s West Side with biting Hudson winds rattling icy windows. Only invoking the image of Plato's Retreat and the famed redoubt, The Ansonia Hotel, breaks the ice. Fill the emptiness with the ultimate erotic dream! But is free access to naked bodies the cure for lassitude? The Orgy is the title of a novel by the poet Muriel Rukeyser. Rome is a civilization once associated with indulgence. Caligula is the emperor whose name is most associated with an excess whose essence lay in the subjugation and exercise of power over his subjects. Caligula was a madam, classical civilization his brothel. He was also one of history's greatest Johns which poses the question, can a slave owner be a consumer of the very property he owns? The reciprocal love of women was memorialized by Sappho. La Grand Bouffe the 1970 movie starring Michel Piccoli anticipated Bob Guccioni's failed Caligula (1979). Gore Vidal, who wrote the script  along with Malcolm McDowell, who played the emperor, both abandoned the project. But the set itself exemplified the  excesses of an iconic institution which is now only a distant memory and footnote to the history of the upper west side in the disco era. 

read "Removing Your Unconscious" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "Boogaloo Down Broadway" by Johnny C (1967)