Dressing Up the Old Art of Seduction

“I’ve noticed that people have been a little down, what with terrorists, the recession, the war,” purrs the formidable-looking woman at the end of the catwalk in a corset and fishnets. Miss Astrid flicks her cigarette holder and fixes the packed house at the El Rey with one kohl-rimmed eye, the one not covered with a patch, then continues in her languorous Marlene Dietrich plaint. “Well, cast yourself back before all that--you were miserable then too.” She registers only feigned fatigue at hoots from the crowd. “Tonight I’d like to introduce you to a little three-letter word. It’s called fun.”

The joke, of course, is that she doesn’t say the three-letter word that is on everyone’s mind, sex. This show, the Velvet Hammer, is a “new burlesque,” and the waft of curling pheromones is clearly the draw. So when a French mignon named Ursuline floats onstage in circa-1789 a pannier and headdress, escorted by the men of her court and two snotty maids named Fifi and Mimi Poubelle, the crowd of a thousand or so roars its approval. Knowing how the skit will end only makes it better. Suddenly, the two men tear away her hoop skirt. Then, as the turban-clad house band pumps out the timeless bump ‘n’ grind, Ursuline slowly shows us the real French Revolution, peeling down to pasties and G-string with a libertine flourish.

At the Velvet Hammer, it’s the entertainment itself that is naked. It’s live music, bad jugglers, the sinister Miss Astrid and cardboard props. It’s a hootchy-kootchy show, a tease, a vaudeville throwback. And as corny as that might sound, given the many flavors of live erotica available in Los Angeles, a capacity crowd jammed the November 2001 two-night stand at the El Rey eager to be part of the show. Women in the audience are poured into Chinese gowns, affecting looks from ‘40s gun molls to ‘60s casino dolls. Their besuited and greased-back men are looking their speak-easy and hot rodder best. Everyone’s drinking (something you can’t do in fully nude clubs in California) and living out their own version of club land.

But the new burlesque that’s taken root in Los Angeles is more than just a sexed-up celebration of retro camp. The new burlesque is about the age-old art of seduction, about a glamorous mix of costumes, music and titillation that’s putting the sexiness back in sex shows. And it’s proving a popular reprieve from the mainstreaming of serious sleaze. The Velvet Hammer, a semiannual event at the El Rey next due in town March 29, along with the monthly Moulin Rouge nights at Jumbo’s Clown Room in Hollywood and other shows around the country, are reclaiming live sex shows that have been overly commercialized--almost corporatized--by porn.

“That’s the real conflict: commercialism versus the arts of seduction,” says Legs McNeil. The author of “Please Kill Me: The Oral History of Punk” is writing a book about the porn industry. “The burlesque girls are pushing back against pornography, because everybody knows that pornography isn’t sexy.”

Adam Gopnik, writing last year in the New Yorker, was generally unimpressed with the burlesque revival in that city, which he found combined “elements of downtown art and uptown stripping--or, according to certain skeptics, the tawdriness of topless dancing with the tedium of performance art.” In Rudolph Giuliani’s smut-free New York City, shows like the Va Va Voom Room, run by Miss Astrid in her New York incarnation, take on more of a sly wink.

In Los Angeles, however, there’s less irony in the act. Porn is exploding here, busting straight into youth culture, reducing the mystery of seduction into a stultified formula. As stripping devolves into a kind of mean-spirited, predatory shakedown and porn becomes MTV, burlesque’s timelessness offers a more fun, and female-friendly, brand of sexy that’s not so structured around body type or franchise fantasies. As a result, these shows have become as popular with women and couples as they are with men.

The Velvet Hammer’s three-hour production rolls by like a delightful cavalcade of camp. Tall, blond Ming Dynatease escapes from a tower by climbing down her own hair, then frees herself from her clothes. The amply endowed World Famous *Bob* brings down the house with her pendulous shimmying. Spiderwoman Valentina Violette comes on with eight arms to hold you. Dirty comic Phil McCrackin’ spouts a stream of expletives so foul they’re funny despite themselves. Film and stage star Ann Magnuson puts on a special guest appearance dressed in a space stewardess suit from the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” and belts out an “only girl in space” rendition of Ann-Margret’s “13 Men.” Through it all, the Millionaire and his Maharajahs of Melody (including members of the band Combustible Edison) hold the transgressive acts together with a type of old-timey film-house music that reminds you when to laugh.

Meanwhile, audience members lounge in their costume finery at darkened tables, indulging in a slightly self-conscious reenactment of club land. Under no pressure to even tip the dancers, the crowd responds enthusiastically to the details of the tease, jumping to their feet at an exposed length of thigh and howling for that final flash.

Farrah Lynch, 25, who’s seen the Velvet Hammer twice here and once in New Orleans, tries to explain the appeal. “Burlesque is like a dance, like an art... almost more like performance art. It’s about costumes and the way they’re presented as a whole character, not just about taking your clothes off.” But most of all, she says, burlesque is “about leaving something to the imagination--which strippers don’t do.”

The new burlesque has come to mean a lot more than post-punk retro fadism, but a visit to the Chinatown home of Velvet Hammer creator and producer Michelle Carr reveals its thrift-store roots. The 1920s Craftsman bungalow is a virtual museum of kitsch, with red-and-black Chinese-motif walls and chandeliers, ‘50s furnishings, tiki masks and dolls, and a dozen or so prints featuring the doe-eyed characters of W. Keane, the artist who has come to define retro gold.

“I am a big ol’ thrift-store gal,” says Carr with a chuckle. She’s playing her Cruella DeVil-as-beatnik look to the hilt, with Betty Page bangs contained by a beret, intense black swooshes for eyebrows and blood-red lipstick. A red and black striped jersey covers the huge goat’s head tattoo on her chest, which was revealed during her strip as the spiderwoman.

“This comes from the whole punk rock thing,” says Carr about her collection. “Which was about growing up broke, so you make up your own style in the thrift stores.”

Though only 32, Carr was entrenched in the ‘80s L.A. punk scene, working at La Luz de Jesus gallery on Melrose. La Luz featured shows by popular artists who exist largely outside the fine-art world, including Robert Williams and Zap! Comix artists like R. Crumb and Spain, Rat Fink creator Big Daddy Roth, and painters Joe Coleman and the Pizz (who illustrated the latest Velvet Hammer program). Along with the B-movie aesthetic of slasher films and John Waters’ trailer-trash champions, this school of hot-rod and comics-inspired work is often called “Lowbrow.” Carr also co-owned a bar called Jabberjaw, near the edge of Koreatown, that was a hit with indie rockers. During the early ‘90s, she performed as a go-go dancer at a trend-bending fetish dance club with an unmentionable name, and with the band White Zombie.

Carr and a cadre of like-minded gals, including fellow La Luz employee Rita D’Albert, who now co-produces the Velvet Hammer, fantasized about doing a show based on men’s magazines from the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Both had come across aged copies of Playboy, Nugget, Modern Man, Monsieur and especially Cabaret in thrift stores and flea markets. The mainstream porn of their day, these magazines featured photos and bios of burlesque dancers. “I just fell in love,” says Carr. “The women in them looked very fierce and like they were having fun.”

Between L.A. and Las Vegas lies a lot of burlesque history. Until a few years ago, legendary dancer Lili St. Cyr had a lingerie store on Santa Monica Boulevard. Dixie Evans holds an annual show at her Burlesque Museum in Barstow, home to costumes and archives from burlesque’s most famous names, Gypsy Rose Lee and Tempest Storm. Though there were plenty of links to the past, Carr found no one doing a modern show.

The update, really, came in treating the form as folk art, celebrating the different eras of burlesque from ‘50s glamour girls to turn-of-the-century carnival vaudeville to Paris floorshows, then giving that form lavish production, with sets, music and supporting actors. Each dancer essentially makes her own show. Since the costumes range from balloons to ornate French gowns, many of the dancers spend the last few weeks of rehearsals with empty bank accounts and fingers ravaged from sewing. The spider costume that Carr hand-sewed for the last show, for instance, cost more than $1,000. Show proceeds go mostly toward paying hired professionals for sound, lights, music and for theater rental.

Many of these acts are only used once and then retired. Carr now spends all year producing these shows for one or two nights of glory. She’s not a trained actor or production specialist; she donned her first set of pasties in a performance piece by L.A. artist Vaginal Davis. D’Albert fronts a band, the Buxotics, which plays regularly in the area, and in 2000 produced and starred in the Andy Prieboy production “White Trash Wins Lotto.” Pleasant Gehman, a dancer with the Flowers of the Desert, a popular belly dance troupe, is an actor and writer and was in rock bands the Screaming Sirens and the Ringling Sisters. The one thing none of them have been is a stripper. This was the key to their vision: Being sexy had nothing to do with looking or acting like a porn star.

Carr had seen a version of what she wanted to do in the early ‘90s at Jumbo’s. This classic Los Feliz hangout, which opened in 1970, is a small room that bartender Nancy Butterfly likes to call “‘Cheers’ with strippers.” The girls there strip to pasties and G-string, choose great music like the Cramps or Nick Cave or the Clash, and put more emphasis on tease than cheese. But even there, Carr says, “I would fantasize about being up there doing a number, wondering, ‘What’s with the Day-Glo thongs and the white pumps?’”

“The Velvet Hammer is like our dream club that we’d love to go see,” says D’Albert.

For their first show, on Valentine’s Day 1996, they brainstormed together on character names like Dirty Martini and Starlet O’Hara. Their band was composed of members of Royal Crown Revue. Then they brought in a ringer, Kitten Natividad, as the headliner. The star of Russ Meyer’s cult classic film “Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens” and 1973 Miss Nude Universe, Natividad, who has a 60-plus-inch bust, was still a draw even at age 48.

Their first show sold out Pedro’s Bar & Grill, a 400-seat restaurant on Vermont Avenue. The crowd was composed of hot rodders, indie rockers, vintage freaks, drag queens and hipsters--not your usual sports fans and businessmen who pack the strip clubs waving their dollar bills. A whole new sexy beast had been born.”Fifties B-girl, that’s the aesthetic,” says Ann Magnuson. “But it’s also a reaction against the notion of Barbie Doll perfect.”

“I have a couple of rules when I look for new recruits,” says Carr. “1. No professional strippers. 2. No fake breasts. 3. No porn stars. 4. No bad attitude. It’s a very simple formula, and it works.”

For the burlesque tease to work, a standardized erotic body type has to be erased. In a way, it requires returning to a time when shapes weren’t so rigidly defined. Audiences seem to agree. The Pizz says that, as he sat at the first show with Robert Williams, “We both felt like our stag party pinup obsessions had come to life.”

“Today, that whole art, the subtlety and seduction is just cut out to go to the chase,” says Greg Escalante, editor of the outsider art magazine Juxtapoz. “The [Velvet Hammer] is the thing that brought it back.”

Carr says she’s not trying to change what happens in the strip clubs, “but we’re doing our own thing.” She also does not want to see her show transformed into something mass-produced, but demand is increasing. The Velvet Hammer was featured during 2001 Outfest and the show went on the road for the first time in 2001, first to headline a burlesque Tease-O-Rama in New Orleans in May and then to play the Street Scene music festival in San Diego in September. A documentary about the show, “Welcome Sinners,” showed to standing ovations at the 2001 Silver Lake Film Festival, and someone snapped up the film rights. It seems the show could tour.

“But part of what makes it sexy is that it’s not polished,” Carr says. “What if it gets to be routine? I want it to stay fresh.”

At Moulin Rouge Mondays at Jumbo’s, a version of the club atmosphere fetishized by the Velvet Hammer show exists on a regular basis. It’s slightly downscale from a dinner-theater vibe, but there’s a friendly bar jammed with regulars who are not afraid to participate in the show. On Moulin Rouge night--the next is Monday--the room is alive with hooting and wadded-up dollar bills flying past tattooed necks and a pair of tiki torches set up at the front of the stage. Jumbo’s thrives in a rollicking middle ground between theater and strip club. It’s a topless bar, but the dancers aren’t dangling the lure of sexual contact.

At Jumbo’s, when women do their Moulin Rouge show, it’s really a show. As the lights come up, four gorgeous gals named Lola, Pepper, Coco and Gypsy come up in hot pants, bikini tops and feather boas. They kick into a rendition of a song made famous by the late Peggy Lee, “Hey Big Spender.” All trained dancers and performers outside their work at Jumbo’s, their floorshow number devolves into a campy bit of choreographed accident where they all pull off each other’s tops. Since life is a cabaret, old chum, they wear pasties. Hoots ring out and the dollars rain down. Nudity’s the punch line, but the point is the tease.

“Now there are so many nude clubs and they’re so explicit, so it’s like, what new can you do?” says Jumbo’s owner Karen Taylor, daughter of the original Jumbo. “Everyone is interested in sex. We’ve got the new angle.” The night’s funniest moment, by far, is a hillbilly feud by Bridgette and Pepper in full beards and suspenders to the bluegrass hit “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” from the film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

In a world of nude entertainment disdainful of the half measure--where exotic dance and porn are now merging into new kinds of sex work--the burlesque angle isn’t just frustrating frottage. The whole act may be an inside joke, a retro modern, an irony referencing only itself, but the laughter is real and the payoff is a good night out. The erotic resides in the imagination, and doesn’t it seem like a good idea to submit to a room full of women who aren’t hounding you for your money, but just want to massage your imagination for a couple hours? As Carr put it, “This is fun for us. If it’s not fun, then what’s the point?”

*

Dean Kuipers is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.