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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The Book
of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them) by Peter Sagal |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Armchairs Peter
Sagal has done the hard work about some vices so we won’t have to. His new
book, The
Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them) reports on the
fieldwork Sagal did, often with his wife, to tell the rest of us about seven
vices. The writing is consistently crisp, but not nearly as funny as Sagal’s
NPR sbow, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. Armchair
vicarious exploration of vice doesn’t quite have the same pizzazz as the real
thing, although after reading The Book
of Vice, most readers will want to take a pass on the real thing after
learning that what seems naughty is often boring. Here’s an excerpt, from
the end of Chapter 3, “Strip Clubs or Sure They Like You, Really,” pp. 97-99: Our final destination for the evening was
Forty Deuce, the latest outpost of the New Burlesque empire created by
impresario Ivan Kane. As we entered, I realized the club was a strange,
black-lacquered updating of that long-ago anonymous rip-off joint in New
Orleans. Seats and tables on risers, facing a bar: above and behind the bar,
a catwalk stage. We were joined at our seats at the bar by a friend of James's
named Dayvid Figler, who was, he told me, both a justice at the Clark County
Superior Court and an amateur expert on the "sexual underground." As
we walked in, he high-fived a bouncer, who towered over him by a least a
foot. "I went to his bar mitzvah," said Judge Dayvid. We
bought more drinks from the equally attractive bartenders—the women were just
as gorgeous as they had been at Mix, but here there were also model-level
men, so the back of the bar looked like an Abercrombie catalog as hallucinated
by a dipsomaniac. Eventually, the lights dimmed, and the packed club roared
in anticipation. A wall above the bar, emblazoned with the Forty Deuce logo,
spun around to reveal a rotating dais, on which was a jazz trio playing
saxophone-heavy bump-and-grind jazz. And then, emerging from stage left, wearing
a full cocktail dress and gloves, came the dancer. With
the jazz pulsing and beating and the saxophone wailing in a way I thought
didn't exist outside of fifties-era pulp fiction, that dancer proceeded to
put on a show that had every single person in that bar, male and female,
myself included, reduced to animal howls. She removed that dress, piece by
piece. She swung from the beaded curtains, upside down. She did the
splits—but demurely, her back to us, with a wink over her shoulder. With
every garment she removed, she seemed more alive, larger—it was as if the
clothing were some sort of restriction on her inner sexual demon. Striptease
wasn't the word—this wasn't a tease, this was the real thing, not some cheap
simulacrum. It wasn't sex; it was rarer. Some asshole ran up to her—while she
was doing an extremely difficult upside-down move, hanging from a railing
six feet above the ground—and tried to put a dollar bill in her garter. The
bouncers wrestled him away, and I would have gotten up to pummel the jerk if
I hadn't been too busy hooting and shouting. She wasn't doing it for your money. The
dancer, reduced to pasties and panties—but still wearing pasties and
panties—bowed, blew kisses, and disappeared. The band, with some last beats
of a bass and wails from the sax, swung back into the distance. And for the
next hour, until the next dancer commenced her act, the bar just burst with
sexual joy. Women danced on tables. Men cheered and danced with them. I would
have swung from a pole if I could have found one handy. Thus,
what strip clubs need to lift them above the grind house, make them more than
just an expensive housing on a basic mechanism, truly worth the time and
money: Expertise. Strippers
of the world, hear me now: If you dance for money, we will pay you, but you
will always be objects onto which we can project the contempt we feel for
ourselves. If you want to control us, if you want to make us yelp and throw
our bills onto the stage wrapped in our very hearts, you have to dance as if
the money doesn't matter at all. We are but men, and we think with our souls.
We are all helpless in the face of art. The
art in The
Book of Vice will deliver smiles and chuckles, at least if you read it in
an armchair. Steve
Hopkins, December 20, 2007 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the January 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Book of Vice.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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