THE TIMES SQUARE STORY

Photocelebration of Times Square at its sleaziest with subfictional lyrical intertexts that sound like Ed Wood writing low-budget pages of Jack Kerouac with a storyline held together by lint about a country guy having his eyes blown out by Times Square’s wattage and going weak in the knees while directors producing grunge films that make Plan 9 from Outer Space sound like la cràme supràme in one 96-page run-on photo sequence and sentence without periods or wide commercial potential offers jaded drug addicts who meet transplanted Corsican mobsters laughing in dark glasses while the producer hustles the no-rent actors in his big stable and makes a thriller almost too glassy-eyed even for Times Square and the reader sits staring into space or at a dying vacuum tube while smoke rings pour from the sailor’s mouth on the Camels sign and snowbirds and used-up dips blackmail small-time perverts for years and freelance photographers peddle to girlie magazines pictures of schoolteachers who have taken up stripping and then when the sun comes up it’s all over and the wide-eyed kid can’t believe it’s over and sits back in his flop in the Dixie Hotel listening to Clifford Brown with Strings. Somewhat less coherent than O’Brien’s The Phantom Empire (1993) but with a hip verve that may appeal to lovers of trasho mondo and hot-wax torture scenes. (50 b&w photos)