Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

63. THE MOVIE FICTION:

'Imperial spaces for democratic man' - I'd heard it said about the grand old movie palaces but I always thought it to be silly - the whole idea having no sense for as I walked the arcades and 'movie palaces' along old 42nd street and its environs they always seemed to be - no matter what else - dwarfed in their presences by the live theater buildings in their same area and all those great names of things and places named after people and stars and old famed ideas had their walks of honor and red carpets and Schubert Alleys and gilded doorways and all of that but it was all enriched by the very idea of LIVE theater and the players themselves walking through and around in all their grand and antiquated presences whereas the MOVIE palaces - whatever they were - were of a far less rigorous glory being useful for perhaps entertainment of the masses or the rubes from Trenton or Tallahasee but always filled and enlivened in their limited way by the awful dreck that passed for movies - monstrous stupid films made by studio characters on the lam from deviltry or death - either one for them being the same - and all those horrid old names of Hollywood people and their hideous pretensions were here to be seen only by their rank product : shilling shit movies produced by fools and made for idiots and the people in droves eating them up and whether in scumbagged old movie houses or the 'grand gilded palaces' we are talking of it was all the same momentary distraction and florid junk projected at screen after screen and the undying applause was stupifying while to just look at the people enjoying this and supposedly aware and enamored of their surroundings made me barf - for I knew there was no truth to the idea of enlightened entertainment and these people were just out for junk and they wanted memories and food and 42nd street - pig stalwart rapscallion that it was - gave them all of that and a bus ride too and the only thing 'imperial' about any of this was the fake gold of the cheap gilding and the false czarism of the autocrat laughing at the minions arrayed below him or the ertswhile movie mogul high up above the audience in a little square room with a concealed viewing window sneaking glimpses at the poor bastards he's just taken the three dollars from (old prices) to watch some sorry spectacle unfold in an ornate drawing room of psychotic hell and if there was ever a dictatorship in America this was it and it was alive and well and only the ad-men who made this crap up had the erstwhile means to stop it but they never did and therefore the fiction went on and on and entertainment like this KILLED absolutely killed America a long long time ago Thomas Edison be damned and Henry Ford be damned and Art Linkletter be damned and George Lincoln Rockwell be damned and Norman Rockwell too for none of that lived anywhere near me and it was all a lie and a fiction and a distortion but one for which people had died and were still dying and 'good for them' I thought since they've already fallen for it they might as well fall for it all!