Striptease: From Gaslight to Spotlight

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and an easy read.
Review: I am very excited to own this book - its full of amazing photos, cultural references, historical tidbits and more.
As yet another burlesque historian, however, I am going to have to agree that the history is a little off. I began to notice factual errors right away. For the most part, they're nothing major, and if you are not a thorough historian or scholar, this is still a wonderful and fun book to own.
Its worth it just for the photos.

Rating:
Summary: Don't publishers fact check these books?
Review: It amazes me that this book got printed. I collect many historical books about burlesque and vaudeville and follow the actual neo burlesque movement very closely. This author not only merely copied every book I have but she didn't bother to fact check many things. It also seems as though the author is living in denial about who the tops names in neo burlesque are, because the names she chooses to list along side people like Lili St. Cyr and Tempest Storm are names that are so far from these legends it's ridiculous! Are these performers relatives of the author or what? She actually mentions Dita Von Teese and Catherine D'Lish, the biggest names in the movement and says that they are Velvet Hammer Girls, along with many other omissions and incorrect facts that every burlesque afficinado knows! Catherine D'Lish can easily be credited as a pioneer in the resurgence with three Miss Exotic World titles won before 1995, and the author mentions other Miss Exotic World winners from the past two years, but dismisses Miss Delish as being a stripper with a side job! It's absurd. I cannot help but wonder how this woman could actually get a book deal if she didn't bother to research the two highest profile dancers(and three time headliners of Teaseorama, the only burlesque convention in the world!) on the circuit who happened to be the only ones with complete websites that have information on them! How could she screw up that? I wonder if she has ever even seen an actual burlesque show?
This book goes on in my burlesque book collection as a laugh.
For authentic history, try vintage books or wait til an expert on the feild decides to write, because this woman hasn't a clue.

Rating:
Summary: Oh you pretty things!
Review: Living in New York city, I've wandered into, been invited to, and sometimes even sought out new Burlesque performances--and I've always enjoyed the way the performers orbit somewhere between the not-necessarily exclusive worlds of kitsch and homage. Therefore, I was delighted to run across Striptease. It's a beautifully illustrated book, filled with pictures from the late nineteenth century to the present. (Well, not exactly the present. It stops just short of modern strip, so it's safe enough to leave on the coffee table when mom comes to visit.) Just flipping through the pages, it's a marvel to see the beautiful women, some anonymous and others more famous such as Tempest Storm and Lili St. Cyr, who had the looks, the charisma, the act, or all three to make NOT taking it all off something to see.
I also enjoyed the read. The text doesn't seem exhaustive, but I don't think it's intended to be. The book is a rollicking overview of the history of a less-than-legal "art form" with a few larger than life characters, but at the same time there's enough historical meat (and no, I'm not talking about the girls) for anyone who wants seriously connect the dots...or pop the balloons as the case my be. And being a fan of Victorian lit, I liked the way the author connected their tastes and morals with regard art and fashion to the slow emergence of the acceptance of the body-or more specifically, its display in public. Unlike the Amazon Book Description, I think the author makes a compelling argument for the connection of high art and modern dance to striptease-nothing happens in a vacuum. And the book proves to be a nice overview of how thesalacious, the serious, and the kitschy can, if not spring from the same well, at least reach par over time.
I recommend strip tease for anyone interested in the history of this not-so-modern phenomenon, anyone who is interested in the new burlesque and would like a quick course in its history, or anyone searching for something a little racy for dad next father's day.


Rating:
Summary: same old thing...
Review: same photos and same words I have seen in every other burlesque book. It's all just filched from the 5-6 vintage burlesque books you can buy used.

Rating:
Summary: Don't publishers fact check these books?
Review: Striptease, always shocking and amusing, has in addition become, well, quaint. It has been influential in stage, music, and movies, and in the relationship between the sexes. It comes as a surprise, then, that the publisher of _Striptease: From Gaslight to Spotlight_ (Abrams) could boast that the book is the only fully illustrated book available on the history of the subject. If this is indeed so, at least the one history is a memorable one. Jessica Glasscock, the author, has written a witty and fact-filled text that takes the history from the roots of striptease in the nineteenth century to its culmination and dormancy in the 1950's. Guys used to say about _Playboy_, "I only get it for the articles," and one could enjoy this book just for the text, but there are pictures, lots and lots of pictures, to document all the periods covered. All the pictures are pretty, and most are revealing, but none could raise a suspicion of obscenity except within the eye of the most prudish. As any good striptease dancer knows, suggestiveness and refusal to reveal all are hallmarks of a good performance. As Glasscock writes, the response to a properly performed striptease is a physical response, but the stripper has to be more than physically exciting. The stripper reveals herself, or at least parts, and this can be arousing, but she has to do more: she has to entertain. The stripper is a performer, on a stage, with distance from audience members which makes teasing possible. The entertainment has to result in shock, or amusement, and props and costumes and gimmicks are essential; a woman simply taking off her clothes may be erotic, but it isn't a stage entertainment.

The foundations for the stage entertainment striptease which evolved in the twentieth century may be found in the stage performances of the nineteenth, a period that Glasscock covers in satisfying detail. American variety shows were spiced by two seemingly opposite forms of female visual appeal, the static (nudes imitating classic art) and the animated (Oriental dancers). The artistic nude thus became part of vaudeville, which was transformed into the American review performed on the accepted New York stage, most famously produced by Florenz Ziegfeld. From there, burlesque theaters took a synthesis of women in tights or disrobing in some sort of peek-a-boo fashion, as well as the oriental dance transformed into a bump and grind. The Minsky Brothers, purveyors of burlesque on the Great White Way, can properly claim that their organization invented the word "strip-tease" in the 1920s. The Minskys also instituted the runway (borrowed from the revues in Paris) which brought the girls closer to the audience. They took advantage of the publicity from police raids, which inevitably incited curiosity and boosted ticket sales, but eventually burlesque (and thus striptease) was officially banned from New York in 1937.

Of course it didn't stop in New York, where burlesque shows were simply renamed "Follies" and continued to play. Strippers like Gypsy Rose Lee performed without objection at the 1939 World's Fair in Queens, and from the World's Fair the strippers moved out into the heartlands by means of the state fairs and carnivals. More upscale locales for striptease were nightclubs, and such lights as Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm, and more recently Dita Von Teese and Catherine D'lish kept the tradition going. In the 1950s, striptease was the last surviving part of the burlesque tradition, but its popularity meant that club managers wanted strippers to go out and hustle patrons for drinks; the distance by which strippers might tease the audience was thus reduced, and it vanished as "lap dances" became the fashion. Playboy pinups imposed a "girl-next-door" accessibility, and filmed pornography went for frankness rather than teasing. There is a New Burlesque at many clubs now, and an annual Tease-o-Rama Burlesque Convention, so while it may be part of a nostalgic recall, there is little chance that striptease will fade away. Brightly written as a real history of a cultural movement, and gorgeously illustrated, Glasscock's review is a good indicator that striptease has a past, a present, and a future.