Notes On Redevelopment
by Rick Moody
September 12, 2006
Your honor, these are my introductory notes, and though I don't need to tell you, let me add that of course they are being composed against the backdrop of the secessionist movement here in our newly partitioned country. These notes are further to how we, as municipal executives, might redevelop the crumbling Giuliani Way and environs, the neighborhood formerly known as Times Square. That is, for the betterment of civic programs generally, with special attention to the problem of diverting significant monies to the education budget and to the Abolishment of Homelessness Project, I do hereby propose the Pornography or Salacious Entertainments Relicensing Act.
The first and most obvious point follows. Now that the voters of the Mid-Atlantic States, along with the New England region, have made the commitment to sunder ties with what was formerly known as the United States of America, we are no longer bound to observe restrictive federal statutes relating to tie-wearing, overt signs of belief in the risen Christ, ankle-length dresses, and the necessity of reserving sexual congress for reproductive means.
Accordingly, as one of only four transgendered members of your administration, as an adventurer in the twin arenas of gender and human sexuality, I feel I am now in a unique position to recommend certain kinds of businesses that will attract to our city a great number of visitors (and tourist currencies) via the newly restored Port Authority Bus Terminal, the Bloomberg Heliport, the 42nd St. Pier, Westway and so forth. First, as you know, transgender businesses flourished in the area during the highly regarded period known as the First Great Decadence, and I would therefore like to propose some expansionist licensing along these thematic lines, such as the TV Makeover Hut, in which people are encouraged to stop into a storefront and have themselves made over, in particularly provocative ways, in the opposite sex, whereupon they will be filmed (in the performance of exotic dances) by local webcasting operations. Since the female-to-male transvestite impulse has now become so commonplace as to be "practically" normal, it would be easy to promote such a business as especially family friendly. Off the record, I am more than capable as regards the solicitation of seed monies for any "trans-related" businesses.
Church-related sexuality has become incredibly popular lately as well. We estimate seven or eight deconsecrated churches along Giuliani Way, and these could easily be turned into businesses that cater to this very popular fetish. Orgies or one-on-one encounters on the altars of these churches, with voyeurs encouraged to pay for the right to serve as witness to these sessions could be popular. Moreover, returning to the transgender theme, it's obvious that many of the people who have led extremely constricted "heterosexual" lives during the theocratic governments of the early Twenty-First century could now have the opportunity both to wear the vestments of church attire to pursue their experimental sexual encounters. It is, these days, practically a superstitious belief that defiling a priest's cassock while making a baby out of wedlock will insure the baby's longevity and his/her robust engagement in physical love in later life.
The "amateur pornography" studios that have begun turning up in Balkan and Central European pornographic markets in recent years have not been attempted here with the sort of marketing oomph that they really require, so I have an additional proposal along those lines. We all know that the old Single Room Occupancy hotels of the midtown area served ably as sets for pornographic films, and we know that the more tawdry a pornographic film the better its postprandial glow, so it should be possible to convert one or more of these dormant hotels back into "self-guiding pornographic production stations," where people who are above the reasonable new age of consent may feel free to film themselves performing the exercises of love with anyone who happens by, as long as these people or persons have had the de rigeur on-the-spot STD swabs. Imagine "self-guiding pornographic production stations," or SGPPs, as common or easily accessible as the now ubiquitous automatic-teller machines (ATMs). Again, there may be crossover revenue streams available to us here, especially in concert with the office of Internet Projects, which is eager to license filmmaking operations in the city in larger numbers than we saw after the G-Rated-Only Family Film Act of 2012.
I also have an idea for a World's Fair of Perversion at some of the theaters of Giuliani Way. The model here is the old Disney "Small World" exhibit so popular at those discredited theme parks. Now that the former United States of America is a third-rate economic power, a lap dog of the new China (as I have said in other reports, this we can in part blame the New Shepherding Movement that took hold in the South and West, etc.), we are already beginning to fetishize the sexual charge of the countries that are the powerhouses of the new age. In the World's Fair of Perversion, international visitors, with their all-important international currencies, would be able to sample the wares of local actors dressed as foreign dignitaries from these nations. I'll give you one example, just off the top of my head. Indonesia, that Asian economic miracle, was known in the past to punish boys who engaged in homosexual activity with dismemberment, after which the boys in question were devoured by the villagers. I suggest an Indonesian display in which we simulate group copulation with Indonesian nationals, after which we serve modest helpings of steak tartar.
Your honor, I'm well aware that businesses related to the Pornography or Salacious Entertainments Relicensing Act could be construed by some as a little too novel even for our forward-thinking community. Maybe some among your estimable retinue of thirteen wives, for example, will consider them tasteless. If my suggestions are too excessive, we can just return to our earlier idea for all-pornography-all-the-time Clear Channel video billboards on Giuliani Way. Now that the entire outside of that ancient architectural masterpiece, the Time-Warner Building, is being used as a video billboard for web-based broadcasts, it would of course be possible to have gigantic outdoor pornographic broadcasts, wherein the relevant parts of the bodies of the actors and actresses would be so gargantuan and so realistic in their high-definition rendering that it would be difficult not to swoon over them. Who would not want such a thing, such a gigantic depiction of sexual longeur? Would it not stir up all their inert and melancholy molecules of the dispirited human body? And I don't need to tell you, your honor, how gigantic broadcasts would give us fine opportunities for gigantic product placement and endorsements.
Upon enacting any portion this legislation, we could then tax the resulting businesses liberally, as I have said. The revenues could then serve elsewhere. Health care, education, housing, pension insurance for employees public and private (in lieu of the abolishment of social security that took place on 2018), sex education, arts programming, etc. If you need anyone on staff to begin the process of sampling the buffet of Salacious Entertainments that might serve as anchor businesses, so that we might proceed with the campaign I'm outlining, let me be the first to volunteer.
© 2006 Rick Moody and hooksexup.com