Ashley Huizenga is a fiercely intellectual singer and performance artist, who has a hard time keeping her clothes on. Tonight, at a Valentine's Day show at Cheetahs strip club in Hollywood, she saunters onstage in a thong and a red bra, draped in a piece of white, translucent fabric, which she slowly claws through.
6555 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028
Category: Music Venues
Region: Hollywood
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Backed by self-produced beats, an electric guitarist and a synth player, Huizenga launches into her "porn pop," as she calls it, full of clean, catchy riffs reminiscent of '80s radio hits. It's literally made for fucking. "Feel the power," she sings. "You're a man/You used to pay, but now it's free." She lies on her back, kicking her legs into the air and clapping her stripper heels together. Then she rises and swings around the pole before sliding her ass up and down it.
The crowd, composed mainly of art kids — Ariel Pink is out there somewhere — is enraptured but also giggling at the spectacle. The club's regulars also are feeling the vibe, though they're not quite sure what to make of Huizenga.
Five-foot-9 barefoot with a curly mop of bleached-blond hair, she has chipmunk cheeks and the heart-shaped mouth of a Dutch farm girl. A former member of L.A. synth-and-guitar-driven bands Hard Place and Wet Look, she won't reveal her age but is likely in her mid-20s. She performs under the name Actually Huizenga, and her body recalls the curvy figure idealized in the '80s, when her mother, Wanda Huizenga, was appearing in Playboy.
Her father, Robert Huizenga, meanwhile, is a Harvard-trained sports medicine physician who examined O.J. Simpson shortly after the infamous murders and now serves as the doctor on the NBC series The Biggest Loser. He seems to have mixed feelings about his daughter's work. Though he was at her Cheetahs New Year's show mingling with dancers, he kicked her out of the house for filming explicit videos.
Trained as a classical pianist since childhood, Ashley Huizenga has been producing invigorating dance-pop for a decade. But it is her recent foray into strip clubs and porn shoots that is drawing increased attention. This is not surprising, of course, and it's all part of her plan: As much performance artist as traditional singer-songwriter, she navigates the boundaries between music, fine art and porn, specializing in provocative video pieces that are artistic enough for Paris' Pompidou modern art museum — if they weren't so smutty. (In fact, two video art pieces featuring her having sex on camera were chosen for a film festival there, until they were scuttled at the last minute by the museum's directors.)
Huizenga's electro-tinged, as-yet-unreleased debut solo album, Wet Look, named after her last band, is atmospheric and genuinely sexy, and stands in contrast to all the tarted-up girls on Top 40 radio going through the motions. "You're giving it/I'm taking it," she sings on "Driving." "Who's driving this car?"
It also can be quite funny. Huizenga mixes the highbrow with the lowbrow, and nowhere is she more successful than in her monthly Cheetahs show, which also features artists like Geneva Jacuzzi, who performed at the Valentine's show with a giant phallus around her waist before a pair of blood-soaked, loinclothed women draped over crosses.
Huizenga is a highly proficient, inventive musician whose voice has remarkable range, but her greatest talent might be as curator of a highly sexualized musical subculture focused on the ecstatic, the masochistic and the absurd. Having sprung from a sexually idealized mother and a supermacho father, she's obsessed with the dark side of lust. "I like to take sexuality as far as it can go," she says.
Huizenga's grandmother was a model in Boston, and her mother, Wanda, was still in her Playboy heyday when Huizenga was a toddler. When she was a year old, Wanda put her into high heels, joking around with some of her Bunny friends.
Huizenga herself didn't want to model, but that doesn't mean she isn't concerned with her image. She calls her body her artistic medium, and sometimes consumes nothing but fruit and alcohol for days at a time in an effort to slim down for shows. "When I don't eat, I just get dizzy," she says. "I think it feels kind of good."
Huizenga's body-image fetish likely also stems in part from her father, whose tousled hair and strong jaw line evoke David Hasselhoff. A former All-American wrestler at the University of Michigan, he pushed his daughter to excel at sports in school. She had success in cross-country and — having taken piano lessons since she was 8 — joined a band with a high school boyfriend. But she had a troubled academic career, bouncing around schools before landing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to study painting. Returning home to attend Art Center, she focused on performance and music and video production.
She moved into the basement of her family's Los Feliz mansion. The home proved an ideal set to shoot her music videos, including one involving a dozen nearly nude gay boys circling around Ashley as she lay, also almost naked, on top of a grand piano. Unfortunately, these types of antics mean she's now looking for a new home. Her parents have split up as well, and the mansion was recently put up on the market. Morrissey came by for a tour.
I think a big part of what she is doing is evident in an interview question that didn't make the final piece. For those of us that need it to be illicitly stated:
On rules:Everything is related to sex. The rules are always related to sex, against sex. Rules about movies, rules about society, the law, the side-saddle. They're trying to keep life in check and control nature. Control the female. It goes back to the rib. Too much emotion and too much power.
i still fail to see the "intelligent" part. her body is her "artistic medium" and she doesn't eat for days to slim down for shows? cherry pie and a shower? and what's this about "self-made beats"? i thought that other guy in hard place was the one who made all the music. i guess it must be "art" because, you know, for all her blatant sexuality, it's not very sexy at all. it just seems like another rich, art school drop out and her mindless, attention-seeking, extremely ego-fueled pet project.
Another bombshell who sings music that's "made for fucking" or "porn pop", who proceeds to prance around a stripper stage and act as a whore; who also admits to not eating much of anything for days at a time and thinks the dangerous side affects feel good. "When I don't eat, I just get dizzy," she says. "I think it feels kind of good." Just the perfect new role model we need, but hey, she's an intellectual.
She's an artist- not your fantasy role model, CricketBoogie. A sense of humor would probably increase your understanding of this artist as well as your general enjoyment of life.
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