One of History’s recent ironies is how the Bush Regime’s failings are helping to gestate an internal American culture of Babylonian decadence. One must say so far it is a gloomy Babylon without much fun.
Fashion is its own theater, and cabaret took center stage on the fall runways. While L’Wren Scott raided Marlene Dietrich’s closet, showing sharp-tailored suits and slouchy men’s trousers — “a girl should always have a corset in her closet,” says the designer — Dolce & Gabbana added a little S-M, strapping models down with patent leather belts, their eyes hidden behind black masks. Otto Dix could have painted the louche ladies at John Galliano with their rouged cheeks, blood-red lips and smoky eyes. Not to mention the chorus line of feathers, hats and lacquered Sally Bowles-style pageboys that traipsed down the runway . . .
For more degenerate art and artifice, the Box on the Lower East Side serves up enough naughty fare — led by M.C. Raven O, a modern-day Joel Grey — to frighten the neighbors who have threatened to shutter it. “This place makes people feel liberated at a time when we are back to 1950s political correctness,” says the Box’s co-owner Simon Hammerstein, who takes a stand against the city’s current buttoned-up no-smoking, no-trans-fat mood. Political correctness hasn’t deterred Spiegelworld, either, a cabaret theater that is bringing its risqué show “Absinthe” to Miami this December. “It’s just sexy entertainment,” says one of the Spiegelworld performers, Julie Atlas Muz, who does a topless number in a very large bubble. “It’s a lot better than watching porn by yourself.”
To be sure, these remain isolated pockets, experientially distant from most Americans — like stars on the galactic rim, separated by millennia of cultural time debt. Nascent decadence at best; it has not reached Peoria, as they say.
Perhaps it doesn’t have to. American culture and technology is so distributed that there no no central nexus for transmission anymore, no means — for good or ill — for instructive signaling. America, unlike Weimar, never had High Kultur to attract talent or to define our times. No matter how encyclopedic,pronouncements from the Met can not compete with the Home Shopping Network or Cartoon Network. And even those modes are disintegrating as younger Americans abandon “channels” altogether and search for content ad hoc. Structural breakdown like this may well be a harbinger. Even so, one can not escape noticing the milieu is more about exhaustion and resignation than transgression.
