Staring into Vaginas: Camera Night at the Ivar
by Patricio Maya
Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon, thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light, what obscure brilliance opens between your columns? What ancient night does a man touch with his senses? Sonnet XII, Pablo Neruda
It was probably a Sunday in the 80s.
Three people stand out in the photograph; a man in a wheelchair with his back to the camera, a naked stripper above him on stage, and another man taking a photo. Something about the man in the wheelchair's body language spells out submission. His hands can't be seen, but they could well be clasped. I believe they are. The short man taking a photo is wearing black and has his back to the camera. Then there's the naked woman, the performer. She could be Barbi, Miss X, Silky, Angela, Hell's Angel, Aixa or any of the other girls who worked at the Ivar. She's obviously the focal point of the image, but she's more than part of the image's composition. She's a symbolic as well as an actual conduit for male lust. But this description isn't precise enough either.
Let's put it another way. Do you think the man in the wheelchair has an erection?
Ryan Herz, Ivar Theatre 1982
It's possible that he does, though it's also possible that he doesn't. One thing we know for sure. At that very moment the photo is being taken, as the stripper contorts her body above him, the man is anywhere else but in his wheelchair. He's probably walking or running somewhere in his head; he might even be flying like a crazy bird right above the Hollywood mountains. I believe he is.
That's what this particular stripper is doing for her client. If you look at her body, her hair, and the whiteness of her skin, she resembles a bird or even a cherub more than a stripper. You almost expect her to pick him up by the shoulders and fly away.
It was probably a Sunday in the 80s.
Sunday was Bring Your Camera Night at the Ivar.
The small venue known as the Ivar Theater, built in 1950, is one of those Hollywood buildings with a special allure that has little to do with its rather mundane architecture. The mystique comes from what went on inside. During it's first decade of existence it was a normal playhouse. Then it began to branch out. Elvis performed there in the 1957 film Loving You. Cult poet/comic Lord Buckley recorded a live album there in 1959. In the 60s it became a rock venue. In 1966 The Grateful Dead recorded a crisp live album there. Then came a period when the venue switched owners constantly. In the mid 70s it became a disreputable strip club with broken chairs and, as someone who'd been there put it, "cum-stained carpets."
Over time the Ivar has taken on a kind of mythological life. Tom Waits went there in the 70s and mentions it in a least three of his songs. Playwright Ross MacLean, wrote Follies of Grandeur, a play performed in 2006, about the time he worked there. "A lot of the girls just danced around in street clothes, and took them off with about as much charm as someone undressing in a locker room. Pasties and G-strings were rare pleasures at the Ivar," he told The Tom Waits Library. The Ivar also came up in a 1983 Processed Word magazine essay by Linda Thomas, a former manager. "When someone in the audience started jerking off, the dancer would signal the projection booth and whoever was running the spotlight would focus it on him," she wrote.
So the Ivar was a quintessential Hollywood dump. Fante, Hawthorne, or Bukowski could have dreamed it up. (I bet at some point Bukowski actually found his way there). It was a place for the unluckiest, to borrow Joan Didion's label, dreamers of the golden dream. At the Ivar, those dreamers eventually graduated into bitter survivalists, and the survivalists, into Hollywood filth.
Photography, however, can make literary mythology problematic. Like writing, photos can help fictionalize reality, but unlike writing, photos bring measurable truth wherever they are displayed. That's where "camera night at the Ivar" comes in. Some now famous photographers such as Garry Winogrand shot there alongside the regulars. Because of this, lots of visual records of the Ivar at it's most intimately pornographic exist. These photographs, both amateur and not, redirect the Ivar's mythology in a shocking way. They not only record the place's pornography, which is attractive in itself, but also capture -- empirically so-- fleeting moments of spiritual vigor.
Let's take a step back and look at the venue itself. What does a dark room with some working class men and an economically desperate naked woman dancing on a stage mean? Any meaning will do, be it cultural, economic, historical, or even oneiric. Actually, the oneiric meaning seems most appropriate here as it's the closest to ritual. And, as John Berger said in "Ev'ry time We Say Goodbye," an essay comparing movies to other arts, "theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual return."
A strip club might be crude and sexually exploitative, but it is theater. The drama being re-enacted on a nightly basis is that of the possibilities and perils of coitus, where lust is the story line and the naked female is not the actor, but the stage. The only actor is the male customer. He pays his entrance fee so he can deliver a mute, oneiric monologue to himself.
The customer gets a deal because an erotic dream is a form of freedom.
But a strip club is also a simple inhabited room. And a room, any room, as French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard said in his book The Poetics of Space, is not dead space, but a dream-drawer. In fact, Bachelard thought that places inhabited by people could be read as psychological diagrams. He was particularly talking about rooms as described in certain poems, but the same case can be made about the poetics of photography.
Here are some conclusions I draw from looking at the Ivar Theater photographs:
--A room is a womb; a stage is a window.
--Lusting is daydreaming.
--A naked woman on a state always triggers a dream.
--Daydreaming means escape. Transcendence.
For the human male, staring into a vagina or an anus is always a fascinating and a scary venture. He finds himself staring into a black hole, a bleeding wound, death, the origin and the end of life. There's an urge to touch, to taste and to penetrate. This is physical, of course, but, as the photos show, it's not only flesh the lust-crazed male is after. Whether he knows it or not --whether by way of love, a prostitute or a stripper-- the lust-crazed male is after that which the female flesh holds: empty space, metaphysics.
That's not to say photos ever cease to be historical documents. All the marks of time and the world are there: haircuts, clothes, hair, etc. Exploitation is also there. One can certainly lay out a litany of charges against these men. Many people will look at the Ivar photos that way, and they aren't wrong. But it should also be understood that these photos document more than that. The men in the Camera Night at the Ivar exhibit are so entranced, they may as well have been caught kneeling before an altar. That they have a hard on and are flinging money around to a degraded woman, who probably abhors being there, does not change matters.
Patricio Maya Solís was born in Quito, Ecuador in 1982 and moved to California in 1995. He writes about the visual arts and politics for several print and online publiccations. Literary magazines Mantis (Stanford University) and Verbal Seduction (Syracuse University) have published his poetry. He holds an M.A. in Arts Journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School at Syracuse University and a B.A. in English from CSULA. In 2011, Maya was Visiting Scholar at CalArts' Politics and Aesthetics program. His first book of essays, "Walking Around with Fante & Bukowski" was recenty published by Grady Miller Books. He's currently writing a novel.
copyright © 2012 Patricio Maya