RADAR 7 - Structure Infrastructure Publication Date: September 1, 2003 The Block and the Gayety Theater The Block provokes odd nostalgia and instrumental loathing. For the preservationist crowd that interprets decay as vestige of character, the remnants of the block evoke the memories of Blaze, the 2 O' Clock Club, and the glory days of Charm City. For the downtown development crowd, it is simply an eyesore that stands in the way of real or imagined hollow glass towers. But the truth lies somewhere in between. What remains of the glory days are facades, neon lights, and namesakes only. What the Block provides today are the services of a true "red-light" district, with a variety of narco-erotic possibilities proffered by strung out strippers and disaffected bartenders. On a Wednesday night, the main strip looks like a well-lit ghost town. Patrons are few and far between; the bars I wander into are filled with edgy strippers culling dollars from a sparse and oddly disinterested clientele. A woman that agrees to talk for twenty bucks says venomously that she'll be working at county clubs soon, rather than deal with "this crap." As I make my way down Baltimore Street, a fight erupts in front of the Stage Door Club. Five fairly beefy young women wearing battle Lycra string expletives together into a semantic barrage at bouncers or patrons-it's difficult to tell which. I ask what the fight is about, the response a subtly evasive "none of your fucking business." Wondering if all this tension had anything to do with the apparent lack of customers, I query one of the stupefied doormen. He shrugs, "if it's slow here, it's slow everywhere." Perhaps. But it seems to me that the Block could use a little bit more marrow. Eroticism doesn't have to be so banal. Watching the rail-thin dancer lean against a sweat-stained mirror, inventorying her tattoos to the rhythm of Metallica's "Fade To Black," I'm incited to yell Paul Virilio's edict from Speed and Politics, "REVOLUTION IS MOVEMENT, MOVEMENT IS REVOLUTION!"-which is misinterpreted as laudatory, and costs me a dollar. Enter Larry Flynt, the free speech advocate-cum-corporate white knight who's reportedly building a new club, Deja Vu, on the top two floors of the old Gayety Theater. Flynt offers decadent economies of scale, one hundred dancers instead of ten, and a three hundred-foot gleaming bar with new fixtures instead of the less clean alternative that already exists in twenty other rundown establishments nearby. Touting millions of dollars worth of leasehold improvements, including valet parking, beefed-up security, and VIP sections, Mr. Flynt's answer to the block's decay is high class: a glitzy partition, a thicker, less socially protean velvet rope. When asked if he had considered using a theme to spice things up, such as, say, a Sumerian temple of the Goddess replete with ancient fertility rites, the voluble Flynt replied, "That's not part of theHustler brand." Not a surprise, given that the revered Babylonian goddess of fertility, Astarte, probably still owns the franchise. Factor in Astarte's power and centrality to matriarchal religions, and it's doubtful she'd bestow divine benevolence on a decidedly male-dominated enterprise. Flynt's approach is just another variation on the "bigger is better" theme, passing up the chance to address some of strange incongruities of the sex and money game. While episodes of real ("consensual") sex play nightly on HBO, and a woman can legally expose her inner gynecological splendor onstage, sit on a lap and offer every imaginable precursor to sex for money, the act itself for hire is oddly illegal. Taking a culturally expansive view of the idea of perversity, this means to a unsatisfying end makes the American sex industry a solid number one for two hundred puritanical years running. Our incapacity to reconcile bodily desires with commerce gives characters like Flynt the upper hand, at least in the public arena. Blue chip companies like AOL/Time Warner won't open a chain of strip bars or publish Hustler magazine, but they will pump pornography into your hotel room or fund extravagant Las Vegas theme shows that are little more bifurcated lap dances for RV crowd. It is an elaborate and illicit bait-and-switch that blends commercial interest with disingenuous legal rituals; all in defense of a primitive instinct to disavow woman the right of primacy over their bodies. Or perhaps it's just the rise of the "simulacrification" of all our Dionysian impulses. If Disney can conjure a better, more translucent version of everything from world travel via Epcot Center to Las Vegas' simulative evocations of Paris and New York pureed into hotel themes, sex can't be far behind. One can only surmise that beneath the brocade façade of plastic Maxim porn lies the next "almost-real" thing in the making. Perhaps Flynt is simply offering an intermediary step between VR sex and VIP decadence. In this sense the old Block still has integrity. It is no secret that anything goes, depending on the bar-there are back rooms and closets, secret nooks hidden from view, bathrooms and even obscure bar stools. Each dancer is as a sort of free agent, offering whatever services she deems fit. And although the police invariably walk across the street to check on the activities, there hasn't been a concerted effort to intervene since Governor Shaefer's undercover Waterloo in January, 1994 that ended with undercover Maryland state troopers allegedly bedding dancers and purchasing drugs. For now, both dancers and patrons will have to suffer with Flynt and his ilk, and a set of regulations that works to his advantage. Until Astarte rises from the dead and reclaims primacy over the rituals of sex for money, or we imbue our transactional habits with a little more respect for the value of feminine beauty, we're destined to be caught somewhere between steroid-inflated bouncers and a pair of silicon breasts. Perhaps to some, that is as close to the temple of pleasure they'll ever get, or can afford. Stephen Janis