Forbidden Fruit

Hieronymus Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

Back in the 70’s there was a strip club located in the garment district, on 35^th off Eighth called Forbidden Fruit. That was back in the days when New York was a far more dangerous and wide open city. New York was on the skids and anything went (or goes), It was years before there was money for the kind of development that was the modus operandi behind Rudy Guiliani’s clean up of Times Square. But even by the standards of the time, Forbidden Fruit lived up to its name, with totally naked often inebriated sylphs populating what was essentially an adolescent wet dream. But the name is the point. There were other strip clubs but they had more prosaic names like Diamond Lil’s and Legz Diamond (which still exists). But who ever named Forbidden Fruit was inspired by the biblical story of temptation which led to the Adamic “Fall.” In l990, MoMA would present High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, an exhibit curated by the then New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik in collaboration with Kurt Varnedoe, the director of the museum’s department of painting and sculpture.  But it’s nice when the conjunction of two impulses takes places in a truly underworld, or underground setting. Forbidden Fruit was a far cry from today's Gentlemen’s lap dancing clubs (like say Scores) where sex is highly regulated, expensive and accompanied by fine food and wine. Forbidden Fruit—its name conveying a biblical jeremiad—could have been the second circle of Dante’s Inferno where sinners as varied as Paris, Semiramis and Helen were punished for their desires. It also resembled the lust scene in David Fincher’s Se7en, minus of course the murderous rape device. Forbidden Fruit was painted in chiaroscuro and the action that transpired on the premises called to mind Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

Clint Eastwood’s Jersey Boys

Kumba is what you think about when you see Clint Eastwood’s movie version of Jersey Boys. Everyone but Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen) who talks about T.S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” is from the neighborhood and that’s the problem. The disquisition rendered in intentionally old style Technicolor (which is to say intentionally lacking in the kind of production values audiences are used to today) renders a series of plastic stereotypes, a kind of working class commedia dell'arte. Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young) is clueless, Tom DeVito (Vincent Piazza), is the not too street wise criminal who mortgages the group’s future and Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) the winteriest of the Four Seasons just wants to go home. Frankie’s wife Mary Delgado (Renee Marino) couldn’t have been too happy with her portrait as a demanding alcoholic who forces her husband to pack his bags just as he’s about to make it. Apparently it’s all true, but it also plays as the stuff of a lousy afternoon soap or  reality show like The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Speaking of neighborhoods, the aging demographic of the cranky crowds attending Jersey Boys might remind you of another Italian neighborhood, Dante's Inferno. Marshall Brickman’s script sacrifices believability for verisimilitude. At one point Frankie and his pals try to steal a safe which is so heavy that their car rides on two wheels. It’s a scene that wouldn’t be worthy of a Little Rascals outtake. Sometimes the things that people actually say to each other are neither informative nor entertaining and furthermore Jersey Boys is not cinema verite. It’s a musical, but once the dreary backstory with its god forsaken lounges and hokey songs comes to an end, you get the pay off. “December, l963 (Oh, What a Night),” “Let’s Hang On,” “Candy Girl,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Dawn,” “Sherry,”"Who Loves You," “I’m Working My Way Back to You.” Who cares if the lives of The Four Seasons were embarrassing and deeply sad (one of FrankieValli’s daughters, Francine, a talented singer in her own right died of a drug overdose and his stepdaughter, Celia died the same year from a fall). “You are about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind...” Rod Serling says in his introduction to The Twilight Zone.  That's where those hits exist.