G-String Horror

Yes, I want to see The G-String Horror, sort of. I mean, who wouldn't? But I don't see many movies, nor am I an aficionado of low-budget grunge, so I probably won't.

What interests me for this particular ten-minute period is that it was shot at and is about a former Grauman's movie palace built on Market Street in 1912 that I visited in the 1990s during its heyday as one of the City's more infamous strip clubs. It's apparently haunted and the movie takes it all off from there. I like old buildings. I like ghosts. I like weird.

Come to think, I'm not highly motivated to see this thing.

The Market Street Cinema was shut down last year after years of wrangling with the authorities over the fact it was a weird sort of brothel. I only saw a stage show once, sometime around 1993, but later that decade I was reading the strip clubs newsgroup and understood the place's staff to offer just about anything if you were up for it. The newsgroup was highly literate considering the subject matter but the advent of binaries and spam killed it right about the time I found misc.writing.

My trip through its doors led to a useful epiphany about sex in America. Some grotesquely enhanced starlet was bouncing about on the stage -- it still had movie theater seating and an old-style movie theater stage, just no screen-- and using her fake flesh melons to extract dollar bills from the mouths of pervs while I sat in the dark watching people. There were a lot of unhappy men in there, staring at naked ladyparts with the same expression I use when theorizing a diagnosis for engine trouble. Women at various levels of moral corruption were trolling them for gropes and cash. I was trying to figure them all out. But then an attractive middle-aged couple approached the front, the woman bearing the rapt expression and movements of an acolyte approaching a goddess. She performed the ritual and floated back to her seat and suddenly I understood the ancient fertility religions whose followers the children of Abraham slaughtered so effectively (and still do given a chance). Ancient drives and needs never went away, I realized. They were just pushed into the shadows and perverted into odd and less healthful forms.

Well and good, but apart from the shadows and perversion that has nothing to do with a dead movie palace turned whorehouse being used as a horror movie setting, I think my ten minutes of interest have expired.