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Fine Fetish Dining at the Hellfire Club West
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A dominatrix whipping the hell out of a shirtless senior citizen is the perfect thing to enliven the salad course...just one of the many lessons AVNInsider learned by attending the Hellfire Club West dinner at the Passive Arts’ Studios in Inglewood.
The first Hell Fire Club was started in the 1700s by Sir Francis Dashwood, and served as debauchery-central for aristocratic libertines like Benjamin Franklin and my personal hero, the Earl of Sandwich. Dashwood was a gentleman of leisure with a estate in England and nearly unlimited funds to conduct evil rituals, skeez hoes and get drunk with his wealthy, amoral friends; the modern Hellfire Club Dinner’s location and purpose is a little less ritzy and Gothic grande guignol. It’s held in a warehouse-space/dungeon across from the airport. Still, the planes roaring only a few feet above our heads and the traffic of the nearby 405 Freeway lent an appealing apocalyptic feeling to the evening as we entered the space, even if it wasn’t quite as impressive a locale as the underground cave complex within which Dashwood and friends enjoy their black rites.
Inside, the joint is all red and black and dramatically lit. The main room is cavernous, with cocktail tables, a bar, and a stage at one end. The dining rooms each featured a couple of tables and various pieces of arcane equipment: Massage-style tables, trapezes hanging from the ceiling, cages, stocks and plenty of mirrors. As you would expect, the wait staff were dressed in leather, vinyl and fishnets.
Thrown bi-monthly, the dinner is the brainchild of Passive Arts head John Lavine, who used to cater before he switched to running a business where drooling pervs get roughed up by scantily clad sex-workers for $160 an hour. Lavine’s catering experience definitively shows...the Hellfire Club’s food, prepared by the a chef on-loan from The Saint Regis, was much better than a meal served amongst medieval torture implements has any right to be. The Salmon and Roe eggs was delicious, and my dinner companion, Bridgitte, reports that the Chicken in Suspension was pretty rad as well. We were hanging out with fetish-fashion designer Simone of Exquisite Restraint and all the ladies were carefully examining her elaborate, hand-made corsetry and making small talk. That’s another lesson learned: Fellas, bring ladies with you to the fetish club, and the dominatrixes will talk to you. The single guys sniffing around the mistresses had to pay five bucks to get any love at all, and even then, it was love in the form of spankings as opposed to conversation. Which I guess they prefer, but speaking of conversation, the evening’s on-call domme, Mistress Victoria Talon, was fascinating. The statuesque, commanding Native American waxed philosophical while seated on her freshly flogged slave (who we’ll call Tyrone, for fun). "I have a massive amount of respect for the people who seek out my services," she said. "Most people who have these kinds of interests keep it hidden, keep it to themselves out of fear. My clients are brave enough to come see me. They have a lot of courage."
After watching the truly vicious smackdown Talon laid on Tyrone with her assortment of leather floggers, I totally agreed with the courage part. Dude was roughed-up. It was almost enough to put me off my food. Although Simone pointed out that a vigorous flogging like that is as hard on the giver as the receiver. Mistress Talon did look like she was getting a terrific upper body and cardio workout.
After dinner, owner Lavine was kind enough to lead us on a tour through the cavernous Passive Arts space. The dungeon features a variety of rooms furnished and decorated to supply fetishists with exactly the setting they need to achieve their own vision of sexual fulfillment. You want to get beaten up by an Amazon while running around in a Vincent Price style dungeon room? You got it. If you prefer a strict caning session in a classroom setting, you can check out the schoolhouse room. If you’d like to re-enact that episode of The Brady Bunch where the Bradys are imprisoned by Jim Backus, there’s even a jail cell for you to enjoy.
Lavine let us in on his plans to shoot fetish videos at his place, and I for one, can’t wait for them to be released. It’s a perfect backdrop for just about any kind of kinky sex movie a person might want to shoot, and going by his years of involvement with the fetish scene, Lavine will know just the right content to capture as well.
After our tour, we wandered out to the main hall, where the club’s DJ spun the kind of records you'd hear at a school dance circa 1987. The drinks were generous, and the crowd seemed to be composed of real fetish-scene players as opposed to club kid posers. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing depends on your point of view. Good in terms of sincerity. Bad in terms of eye-candy and musical choices. (I thought I’d never hear The Thompson Twins for the rest of my life, but the DJ insisted on spinning "Hold Me Now.")
The evening’s entertainment, provided by "Bullwhip Artist" Brian Chic, was a fascinating demonstration of whip technique, like a deranged lion tamer, taming a slinky, doe-eyed brunette instead of the king of the jungle. Chic was rockin’ a conservative, double-breasted suit and sunglasses. He looked like Peter Sellers in Kubrick’s Lolita, which is an awesome look for a whip expert. And he was an expert--his deadly strip of leather cracked like a gunshot, then delicately wrapped around the neck of his fearless assistant. Inspiring work, fraught with danger--a miscalculation of a few inches and honey loses an eye! That’s entertainment, baby.
We left the place as the "play party" was starting. I guess working in porn has spoiled me; I’ve seen a lot of people naked, and though they were all very nice, I wasn’t interested in seeing any members of the Passive Arts Crowd naked and playing, so we split back to the mundane world. Awesome dinner, though, and a fun evening. For more info, to make reservations at the next dinner (July 17th), or just to pay your respects, check out Passive Arts’ Website.
Stephen Ochs is wasting his life playing videogames and writing for AVN Online Magazine. Send him an email why don’tcha?
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