Tangerine

Sean Baker’s Tangerine is a little like some of the creatures it describes the chicks with dicks who hangout at a place called Donut Time at the corner of Santa Monica and Highland in Hollywood. Remember Algebra I where you plotted graphs made up of equations in two variables or unknowns, x and y, plotting their coordinates. Tangerine is a mishmash of plots, one major  thread having to do with a pre-op transsexual Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) who is looking for her lover and pimp, Chester (James Ransone) who has run away with “a real bitch vagina and everything” and the other, the story of an Armenian cabby Rizmat (Karren Karagulian) who likes to go down on ladyboys and is unmasked by his mother-in-law, Ashken (Alla Rumanian). But the movie is also like the evolution of our attitudes towards transgenderism. The bizarre, perverse and in case of the movie’s form, crude and improbable yesterday may be understood as normative or even inspired tomorrow. Tangerine titters on the line where found objects become Duchamp’s “Fountain,” both literally and metaphorically since one of the most touching scenes in the film occurs in a restroom. Chester functions a little like Hickey in the Iceman and also like the lost bicycle in the De Sica’s masterpiece. Tangerine, of course, owes a good deal to Italian neorealist cinema which used non professional actors (people playing their own lives) and to cinema verite and there is a bit of Midnight Cowboy in the settings with their pantheon of down at their heels hustlers whose fleshy commodification is underscored with street signs like the one which reads “collateral not always necessary.” But is Tangerine, the end of the line or the beginning of a new life? Just when you think the film’s besotted pair have reached the lowest rung on the food chain, on Xmas Eve in LA, they rise mightily for the occasion. By the way, speaking of new devices and techniques sexual and otherwise, the film was shot with iPhones.

A Modest Proposal to Return Unemployed Sex Workers to the Deuce

Photo of 42nd Street in l985 by JG Klein

If everyone gets mentally healthy and poverty is eradicated where will the prostitutes come from? The world’s oldest profession will come to a halt. What will politicians like Eliot Spitzer do when they need to destroy their careers? But the problem is even more profound. Sexual trafficking is being attacked by writers like New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and someday it may even be eradicated and then what will happen? Will the whole world become like 42^nd Street. Once the Deuce, as it was called in its bawdy heyday, was a magnet for human degradation. Flesh was cheap and perverts had their pick of cathouses and XXX peep shows. The human cost was tremendous, but is what replaced it any better? Is there a latter day Damon Runyon who will record the sites and sounds of what has become essentially a New Jersey mall situated in the middle of what was once the most cosmopolitan city in the world? Midnight Cowboy recorded the squalor of 42^nd Street in its prime as did Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. But malls in New Jersey are now open season for carjackers and snipers and let’s just hope that the price for the suppression of one form of human misery isn’t something even worse. Once prostitution is finally eliminated, let’s employ all the unemployed streetwalkers to simply prowl the neighborhood and protect it from terrorists.

Moonstruck

Venus de Milo

Mooning is looked at as adolescent behavior. What is the point of putting your ass in the windshield of a car—something which could cause an accident? Even streaking seems to have lost its popularity. Princeton used to have a streaking team, but it was done away with several years ago. Exhibitionism is now looked at as clownishness, as is the case with the Naked Cowboy in Times Square who has become as sorrowful as the Midnight Cowboy played by Jon Voigt in the film classic of the same name.. But when you come down to it nudity plays a function that's rather profound. When you take off your clothes, you are rehearsing for the spiritual strip tease by which you remove the veils, the lies, the subterfuges upon which you hide. Nudity is to honesty what the Zen bench is to meditation. Know thy self is the expression and what better way to know and be known than to undress. What are we besides the adornments that identify us as adherents to this or that rung on the ladder of this or that position on the food chain? Get naked and find out. A law should be passed where one day a year those who wish to take their clothes off and parade around in public are given immunity from indecent exposure. One thing is certain, in our materialistic age, no one is likely to have the imagination to praise the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Diasporic Dining: Episode II

The one-time peep show gardens, with their topiaries of prostitutes and porn palaces, like Les Gals and the famed Triple Treat Theater, with its mesmerizing XXX sign, are all gone now. In the halcyon days, there was the GG's Barnum Room, where pre-op transsexual prostitutes swung from trapezes. There was Legz Diamond, which still exists in neutered form, where totally naked lap dances led straight to the VIP room.

Peep show booths with their smell of disinfectant; the change belt of the shills; tokens going in the slot; girls there for the asking twenty-four hours a day; women with lactating breasts. The antecedents reach further back, to Depression-era America with its travelling carnival—bearded women in cages, phrenological singularities, prodigious dwarfs whose feat was to hoist their own monstrous heads.

Evenings ended at the Terminal Bar opposite the Port Authority, with its Fellini cast of zoot suits and collagen lips.

The deterioration of Times Square is complete. The hookers and hustlers are gone. There are no gay movie theaters populated by characters from Midnight Cowboy, no world out of which Martin Scorsese could steal the immortal lines of Travis Bickle.

42nd Street has been overrun with chain stores, the New Jersey mall at the intersection of Routes 4 and 17 transplanted into the middle of Manhattan, clothed, depersonalized, stripped of its stripping. This is one transplant that the body politic has not rejected.

The girls no longer stream into the Port Authority, Joyce Carol Oates characters from upstate ending the journey at Phoenix House. Now the streets are so crowded with glazed-eyed gawkers it’s impossible to move. Junk is what they called heroin back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but now there aren’t enough rehabs to accommodate all the junk food addicts wandering the streets on their trans fat highs.