Customer Reviews

Striptease: From Gaslight To Spotlight

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Appreciated for its lengthy and detailed account of its American origins the book manages to dry out just where you thought it would be most interesting - the post war scene. The photography from this period is also dissapointing whereas the early imagery is very good.
I found its international references strangely lacking. Occupied west Germany had a huge industry as did France and of course the famous Windmill Theatre of London could and should have been dealt with.
Even Australia in the sixties especially had its lively clubs in the major centres (and even country shows), so this history missed the opportunity of presenting the universiality of stripptease, in this fairly dryly written history. In style this book is sadly missing the point of stripping!
Lets hope a better history gets done someday.

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.

If you walk up to a random person on the street and simply say the word, "striptease" to them, they're going to conjure up a wide variety of conflicting images. Some of the more tawdry amongst them will instantly connect the word with strippers, probably because the word "strip" is in both terms. Others will equate striptease with something archaic. An ancient form of entertainment now banished from contemporary respectable life. Still others might be on the ball enough to understand that "striptease" is a burlesque art that is going through a revival like never before and, with the publication of books like, "Striptease: From Gaslight To Spotlight" scholars everywhere are starting to banish some of the myths previously associated with this form of dance. Author Jessica Glasscock, costume scholar and current employee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has written a history of striptease that does away with the myths surrounding it, the incorrect terms that swamp it, and manages to give it its due. For the laymen amongst us (like myself) the book is not a titillating romp with sexy pictures (though in this respect it does not lack) but rather a thoughtful history that will introduce ignorant schmucks to what striptease really was and is. If you're looking for a classier version of Playboy for your coffee table, look elsewhere. If you want a fabulous encapsulation of this history for the average joe, stop here.

The book offers a full history of the roots of striptease, giving quite a lot of attention to the shifting morals of early America and climaxing with the death of striptease and its subsequent rebirth. After a quick introduction and explanation that the striptease heyday in America was in the 1950s, we zip back in time to the 1860s. At that time there were Victorian mores to deal with and female performers at that appeared on the stage were sometimes referred to as "skirt dancers". Which is to say, if they showed so much as a glimpse of their "nether limbs" they earned themselves that term. We see the heyday of the concert saloons, the birth of the American dime museum, and, of course, burlesque. The book spends an awful lot of time giving a very detailed and in-depth history to striptease. The truly ridiculous tableau vivants appear, fooling people into equating nudity with classical nudes (and giving striptease artists an artistic excuse for years to come). In comes Orientalism and when the Little Egypt scandal hits the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 all hell breaks loose. Striptease is born in the wake of such artists as Isadore Duncan and even Sarah Bernhardt. Add in the marketing of Ziegfeld and the entrepreneurial spirit of the Minsky brother and before you know it women are doing complicated and truly amusing routines upon the stage. They're training white pigeons to cover them tactfully. They're employing exploding couches and staged special effects. But when Playboy came around and striptease artists gave way to the less talented and not amusing in the least strippers, the heyday was over. Killed with a mighty blow. Today, there's a resurgence in the art, but whether this is mere nostalgia for a new generation or the start of a whole new trend, it will depend on today's jaded audiences to attest.

The heroes of this book turn out to be the great Ziegfeld, his common-law wife Anna Held, Gypsy Rose Lee, the Minsky brothers, and the countless women who knew how to perform in the purest sense of the term. Glasscock effortlessly makes the very real distinctions between the merely charmless (not to say disempowering) stripping and the witty, fun, and altogether amusing striptease. There's no getting around the fact that it all boils down to women taking of their clothes, but there's a world of different between a headlining performer dancing a complicated routine in a very natural (often less than ideal) body and a breast-implanted gal with a pole who has to interact with her audience in a degrading way, get them to buy her drinks, and makes money only through the club and not on her own terms. If you cannot see the difference then this is not the book for you.

"Striptease" is obviously very well-researched though I was disappointed to find that there wasn't a collection of Source Notes in the back. The accompanying Bibliography is certainly very fine and I was delighted to find the New York Public Library's Library For the Performing Arts specifically thanked by Ms. Glasscock, but I sometimes wished I could see where precisely she had culled a particularly interesting quote or statement. Nonetheless, Glasscock makes an excellent use of the materials she has on hand. The photographs, reproduced flyers, posters, movie stills, and paintings break up the never-tedious text perfectly. For the newbie striptease enthusiast, Glasscock's book is a necessary read. It is also a far more intelligent take on a now classic (and deeply amusing) artform than most of the literature out there.

It's interesting to read reviews of this book on Amazon.com. On that site, supposed striptease "experts" lament the fact that Glasscock makes short work of current performers and, in their eyes, spotlights the wrong ones. Due to the fact that figuring out who the currently best in the business is is completely figurative, not to mention personal, such criticisms aren't exactly noteworthy. Besides, this is not a book about the neo-striptease movement. There are only four pages of written text discussing it, after all. This is a historical and well-researched title, taking into account how dances of the past fit into the current striptease movement. If you want to know the current headliners I'm sure there are plenty of nice up-to-date websites where you can spout off your opinions. If you want something with history and scholarly insight, "Striptease" is your best bet.

I'm not claiming that "Striptease: From Gaslight To Spotlight" is the only book on the subject you should seek out. Just the same, if you want a single go-to source for a rough history of dance leading up to and encompassing the striptease movement, you could not ask for a better book than this. Amusing, intriguing, and often more intelligent than it has any right to be, "Striptease" is the ideal gift for the burlesque curious or the striptease scholarly.

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.

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.

I have to agree with the other reviewers who have said this book is cobbled together from too many other books on the subject. I saw too much emphasis on the history of modern dance (Ruth St. Denis?!?) and not enough on the history of the real strippers.

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.