Betty Bump and Pippy Squeak of Burlesque Bar

“Is it true what they say? Is it all fun and games? Or is there more behind the makeup and the faces full of paint?” - Christina Aguilera, Enter the Circus
. . . . . . .

“Have you fellas been to a burlesque bar before?” laughs the doorman, exchanging fifteens for tickets at the entrance. “It’s very, very naughty…”

Welcome to a world where fun is the number one venture. Welcome to a night filled with whooping crowds, swooping girls, laughter, dancing and adventure. Welcome to the Burlesque Bar, Fitzroy – a slimline cigarette holder of a venue filled with Parisian features and the swinging hips of elegant, deviant sweethearts.

The Burlesque Bar is almost a well known hidden little secret – a Chinese whisper amongst the ether. Within the curtained windows and lamp filled façades, the pretty little wild things of the Burlseque Bar own the night…and they love it.

Firecracker quick, shooting star soon, the lanterns begin to dim and flicker. In a ripped millisecond the tiny one foot high stage whip-crackles and burns, poised to cum with human electricity. The host for the evening, Natalia, erupts strident and eager out of the kitchen and onto the stage wearing black lace underwear and corset singing ‘Bring on the men’ – a song about feasting and munching on men for breakfast, lunch and dinner each day. The crowd roars in aroused approval – this is their kind of kink.

A few moments later Natalia is haranguing and shanghaiing members of the audience, daintily and cheekily mocking them, asking them their names and deviously commenting on “beautiful, voluptuous breasts,” and men named Margaret.

“Anyway, enough of this joking,” snaps Natalia, dominant, curtly and abruptly. “Put your hands together for Betty Bump and Pippy Squeak…also known as Slap ‘n’ Tickle!”

The audience erupts, flares into beauty. Whooping rebel yells fill the arena. Big band music quickly follows to the sounds of liquor inducement as Betty Bump – an enchanting Bettie Page esque wonder – bounds onstage filled with feisty vivacious beauty. She quickly slinks into cabaret, slivering and snaking to the sound of ‘Mein Herr’ by Liza Minelli.

Pretty soon she trades places with Pippy Squeak – a sultry and cutesy Gatsby style blonde – who shimmies and strips to silk knickers and garters…a hit of champagne from a heel to blow out her show.

As the night moves through many movements, licks and manoeuvres, the room becomes louder, electric, blasting with liberation and dynamite. The mood heightens as each girl bounds into the darkened heart of the tiny but tightly wound crowd. Javier, the bar man, dances around – fetishistic, fiendish – slamming his hands on the bar in excitement, feverishly yelling with pure, uncut, walla-walla.

The speed and sound reaches a syncopation of climax and chaos – the devil is dancing, the snake charmer is lancing. Boom! Amplifier interior gunfire, pop-pops of small detonations bounce around the theatre. Snarling radios, echoes, weirdness.

“Frickin’ technical difficulties,” quips Natalia. “Now I sound like I’m talking out of a fish bowl. That’ll teach me to fuck up my lines. Ahem. Anyhow, darlings, it’s time for a little interaction…”

Natalia entices Margaret and his girlfriend onto the stage, dragging Javier along for the ride. A flick and a lick later she’s adding pink feather boas and having them pole dance and play for the room around Javier – much to the whooping crowd’s delight.

“You see, Margaret,” says Natalia. “When you use a woman’s name you get to snuggle with men. But anyhow, here’s the last part of the show for the night…Slap ‘n’ Tickle!”

Pippy Squeak and Betty Bump wander out of the kitchen, Pippy crawling on all fours seamed up like a cat, Betty Bump walking her on a soft, satin leash.

“There’s something appealing about a woman licking up milk,” says Natalia, buzzing with a mischievous grin.

A couple of milk soaked minutes later and the fun is flipped in the opposite direction – Betty Bump is tied to the leash and it’s her turn to walk on all fours through the crowd.

“Ah,” says Natalia. “There’s nothing like a woman in bondage…you should try it sometime…”

Paris, Berlin, 50s L.A. and a little dabble in grindhouse – these girls take you around the world in a whiplash. $15 a hit for a series of blitzkrieg-quick humour-filled striptreats would usually make people feel cheated. But this is burlesque and this is an amyl-nitrate esque funky ride. Fast, kooky, goofy and lusty. A cartoon manoeuvre with a foot and a toe in wild love and darkness, and a foot and a toe in the art of awe and performance.

As the crowd drifts into the murky neon cast-offs of Johnston street, Natalia sits high on the window balancing herself between glass ledge and thin air. Sipping from a beer, she says in leering to the crowd “It’s not the worst thing I’ve had between my legs, darling!”

Idling menacingly between Lonsdale and Little Bourke Streets is Caledonian Lane – a viperous voodoo Valhalla containing the constant feeling of night. The same eerie backstreet ether that oozes out of Taxi Driver, Bringing out the Dead, and William Friedkin’s Cruising. A blackened, anything-can-happen, twitchy kind of feeling, where sounds become ominous and important.

Defiantly counted among Melbourne’s many hidden wonders, Caledonian is the darkened shooting star on the tourist’s lap of the laneways. But where Hosier Lane is the twinkle in the city’s eye, Caledonian is its kool-aid alter-ego – a candied darkness delight loaded with fangs, lip gloss and love in the gutter.

From heaven to earth there is evil heat and adventure: shoes are strung up and hung by their entrails, elderly hookers swish by in vinyl, speed freaks judder and stutter, lobsters decompose in the gutter. If a DJ cut a sample stealing the spirit of the lane, the leering laughter of Screaming Jay Hawkins would justifiably be jammed on a loop with a snuff film beating on reverb.

A simple pick and roll out of Little Bourke Street reveals the fun-bunker of St Jerome’s. Now closed, the bar is famous for not only being a skin-tight haunt of many Melburnians, but also for spawning its travelling laneway festival which plays through cities across Australia every year. St Jerome’s threw a two week wake/street party to signify the end of its five-year era in March this year.

The closure of St Jerome’s is not the only reverse swing in Caledonian. With boarded up barbershops and every store front laying departed, you see for yourself that the bump and bam and right-hook rumble of Myer’s $500m redevelopment of Lonsdale and Ltl Bourke Streets has the laneway on the run.

It is estimated that by final throws of 2012 Caledonian will have been redeveloped and the laneway will no longer exist as we see it today. Instead, it will populated by truck parks and loading bays. No stories, no life, no artwork, no dice.

If Melburnians went nuts and began hanging prosthetics instead of Nike Airs and pairs of stolen T-Lands, Caledonian Lane is probably where it would be. Unfortunately, it may be the life and death of this laneway that the streets could be celebrating.

Reviewed: November 2009

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“This is it.”

- Frank Booth, Blue Velvet

A fierce and furious molotov of motion and agitation, Dennis Hopper is a definitive illustration of a man who could never sit still for more than 2½ seconds. Born in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1936, Hopper’s career has blown holes in the globe via a wild arc of work, involving movies, photography and the world of contemporary modern art.

Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood cunningly captures this collision of interests and outlets into one exciting entity in order to create a ball-tearing, knuckle-dusting look at Hopper’s life spent riding the rails between high life and sobriety. The exhibition at the ACMI is the only one of its kind currently on display in Australia.

Containing both his own abstract expressionist creations and feverishly collected works by artists such as Andy Warhol and Wallace Berman, the journey through the exhibition creates the impression of a phrenologist’s chart of the head of Dennis Hopper. Each painted panel, pictorial portrait and celluloid frame offers elements of brute force, surrealistic vitality, confrontational nature and bruising, jazzy daring. Yet planted amongst this snarling mobocracy is a surprisingly subtle and delicate side – the kind that places great stock in solitude, companionship, strength, resilience, determination, and definitely change and rebirth.

Whichever direction you slide there are images of Hopper looming and leering back at you. Young, old, grizzled, crazy and suave – a caipirinha of screeching, jabbering, swooping and pinballing hyper action.

These self portraits and candids are joined by Hopper’s own photography, many of which depict earnest moments in the history of the United States of America. Yawed and fuzzy black and white images of JFK’s funeral on TV, slick and provoking snapshots of the streets and billboards of L.A., and young and old lions such as actor Paul Newman, musician James Brown and civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King.

As you’d expect, cinematic visual vistas make up a significant amount of the exhibition, each one graphically showing Hopper’s various famous roles and guises. Characters such as the free-wheeling Billy in Easy Rider, the sadistic, amyl nitrate-inhaler Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, and the unnamed stray dog photographer in Apocalypse Now.

These performances are aligned with carefully selected segments from three of Hopper’s self directed features: Easy Rider (1969), The Last Movie (1971) and Colors (1988). In addition, the ACMI has also taken the trouble to include Hopper’s fun-poking and self depreciating Ford Cougar adverts, and the surreal and strange Nike NFL TV spots. Most importantly, Hopper’s 1983 experiment with a Russian dynamite chair at the Big H speedway track in Houston, Texas, is given a chance to grandstand the masses.

“After destruction, how do you rise from the ashes? And how far do you go?”

- Dennis Hopper

After completing rehab for drug and alcohol abuse in the early 1980s, Hopper left his personal wilderness and made a homecoming to his long held love for artistic creation. This rebirth is represented through his fascination with gangland L.A., and the graffiti, climate and music attached to it. His series of pieces titled ‘one of four joiners’ is a particular stand-out moment. As is the previously mentioned motion picture, Colors, starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall.

In some ways Hopper’s collection and body of work is 100% Americana and a summation of the wham-bam motion of the fiendish world we inhabit. An odyssey through the sun-rays and shell holes that life weaves and pock-marks into your skin. Spending time drifting among the back alleys and labyrinths of Hopper’s mind for an hour or two makes you see and appreciate the flip side to his usual public perception. A destruction and rise from the ashes, if you will.

Dennnis Hopper and the New Hollywood runs until Sunday 25 April 2010

Soft self-portrait with grilled bacon 1941 oil on canvas

From young turk and anarchist to self-obsessed surrealist, Salvador Dali’s long strange trip through the artistic arena was a frenetic one. Born in Figueres, Spain, in 1904, Dali’s one-man travelling carnival drifted through Madrid, Paris, New York and Hollywood, before returning to its natural surroundings in Spain in the late 1940s. Liquid Desires is the only Australian exhibition of his work.

Populated by an attraction to crutches, clocks, insects, telephones, skulls and perfectly sculptured breasts, Dali’s creations can occasionally be seen as sweet, dreamlike and a cool provider of the shit-giggles. On a flipside, Dali’s work can commonly be viewed as a thunderclap collision of different styles and influences, and in many ways an experiment in terror. His depiction of skulls – one sodomizing a grand piano, another involving milk, honey and vipers’ nests, are obvious examples.

Along with these recurring themes, Dali’s mind held a deep obsession with the moving image, and this fascination is shown through his work with Alfred Hitchcock. Dali’s set designs and jaw-blasting imagery for Hitchcock’s 1945 movie Spellbound is overdosingly appropriate – frames filled with rolling eyes, contorting creatures, twisted backgrounds and trademark monstrous surrealism.

A testament to his love affair with cinema can also be seen in an adjacent dark-room loaded with a bug’s eye stack of TV screens, each one containing a hallucinogenic combination of bullfights and matadors, propaganda, rantings and ravings. Dali, with his upwards ant-claw moustache, is clearly seen at the centre of almost every reel of the proceedings.

Easily the most edible attraction of the exhibition is Destino, Dali’s collaboration with Walt Disney – slumped gathering dust on the shelves for over half a century. Destino opens with a slender señorita sweeping towards us out of an ocean of sand; every inch a picturesque naked commodity. Over the course of the seven-minute motion picture we witness a sweet love and delicate romance teasingly open and playfully close through many contrasting manoeuvres, each scene more elusive than the last.

With his prolific portrait raid on the retinas containing sketches, paintings and photos warped and mutated, it’s pretty clear that Dali was a natural street freak devouring whatever came by. Whether involved with film, fashion, art, advertising or ballet, Dali slashed cunningly through each field, his Molotov cocktail of art and adventure fully flaming every soul that he passed.

The exhibition at the NGV creates a chaotic and well crafted candy store environment with Dali cast as the conjurer-candyman and the crowd as the kid-eyed candy fanatic.

Loaded with exotic and playful moments, Liquid Desires is a dreamy, milky-way temptation of the senses.

“There’s more to Melbourne than this alley…”
- One man mumbling to another, Hosier Lane, August, 2009

Cool, cluttered and collected, Hosier Lane is one of Melbourne’s most obvious attractions. But unlike many of the city’s hidden or long-reaching laneways, Hosier provides an easily accessible example of how the council allows Melbourne’s minds to wander.

Framed at the Flinders Street end by the minaret of the Forum and lined with piss-addled doorways, the majority of the laneway’s allure arrives from its seductive sangria of street art: cartoons, shrooms, vampire faces, Brixton briefcase, girls, monsters and ninjas, laughing skulls and skeletal hugs. The lassoed layers of filth, tags and rags providing an uplifting array of stories, rhymes and lullabies to paralyse.

The art inside Hosier is part of the skunk works that is Citylights projects; an initiative run by Andrew Mac designed to corkscrew the concrete jungle into a series of street level canvasses fit for free public viewing.

The majority of the artwork is commissioned and/or approved by Citylights, with one of the key elements being the light boxes which are updated approximately every ten weeks. Due to the gonzo nature of graffiti, unauthorized work often appears, but that’s partly the point – without it the lane would be rat trapped and shackled. Citylight’s hard work in Hosier has earned the lane a reputation as one of Australia’s most important cultural attractions.

Halfway along Hosier is Rutledge Lane; a surrealistic Super Mario shoot off that sucks in the soul through a cluster bomb of creativity before cutting them adrift at the opposite end of the laneway. It is here that you find Until Never.

As an additional component of the Citylight’s process, the Until Never gallery regularly displays work from emerging underground artists located all over Australia. The theme is loose, experimental, conceptual, and never cut from main cloth. Until Never is open Wednesday-Saturday afternoons.

Hosier’s only bar, Misty, is one of those all-look and no-touch kind of rooms. Enticing, playful and teasing from the outside, slightly underwhelming on the inside. Tapas joint, MoVida, fills the laneway with saccharine scents of Spanish verandas, and with its señorita artwork, the restaurant and its speed freak kitchen adds a little light to the dark end of the street.

Weekends commonly see the laneway saturated with sound and fury: hot rods running and gunning their engines, drag queens fumbling with cell phones, street carp giggling in leather, bass notes rumbling from rooftops. The lane never tires, never ceases, always advances, always unleashes.

There may be more to Melbourne than the life that lies living and breathing in this alley, but for a newcomer it’s the starting gun for a sprint through the artistic side of the city. A way to engage and acquire, a direction to point and shoot – a tourist’s hand rail to hades, if you will.

One ugly day some greedhead might cunningly decide to glass off the daylight, brick up the entrance, charge a fee for exhibit and gain riches from canned free expression. Until that day, Hosier Lane will continue to marvel.

Reviewed: August, 2009

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