The Deer with the Broken Antler

It had been a thoroughly rotten day. Bad news at work. Worse news from a friend. Bitterly cold and windy. And even though it was payday, much of that money was already spoken for.

So, on my way home and after a stop at my neighborhood currency exchange to pay some bills, I decided that I needed a bit of retail therapy--even of the decidedly economical kind.

Half a block north of the currency exchange is a large resale shop. I visit there often for their wide selections of clothing, books, toys and, at this festive time of year, Christmas decorations, cups, plates and stockings.

As is usual whenever I shop, I went in with one thing in mind--a nice winter coat I'd seen on my previous visit--and came out with a bunch of stuff I hadn't planned on buying: the aforementioned coat (now at 50% off!); a pine-scented jar candle; a ceramic tealight holder in the shape of an angel with "HOPE" written across her gown (goodness knows I could use some hope); and an obviously old but still cool-looking "bendie" of a woman in a cloth red top and peasant skirt (she has no markings to indicate manufacturer or date, but looks vaguely like a brunette Rita Hayworth). Not a bad score, really.

Before departing, I decided to take a quick swing through the Christmas aisle and have a look at what fresh holiday offerings were available. (Like I need more knickknacks in La Casa del Terror.)

That's when I saw the deer with the broken antler.

To be honest, I had seen this ceramic deer before. On my previous trip to the resale shop, it had been standing there amongst the various Santas, angels and snowmen, and I had considered buying it, even though it was a bit too big for my collection. I had put it back down and thought, "If it's still here next time, maybe I'll take it home."

Thing is, last time I'd seen it, it was intact--the antler wasn't broken.

So if I'd taken it home then, maybe it wouldn't be broken now. (I say "maybe" because goodness knows I'm capable of destroying Christmas decorations myself--just last Friday, I broke my Bettie Page ornament, much to my everlasting horror.) So now I felt more than a little bit guilty.

Fortunately, the broken antler was on the shelf behind the deer--stuck into a holiday-themed coffee mug by the guilty party, no doubt--so I scooped it and the rest of the deer up and headed for checkout. The clerk looked momentarily dismayed at the broken antler, but I assured her that I could glue it back on, no problem. She looked doubtful, but rang me up anyway. I wrapped the deer and antler in the freshly purchased winter coat, tucked all my purchases into a plastic bag and wound my way home through streets frequently illuminated by colorful lights, evergreens shining in bay windows and life-sized plastic figures on lawns and porches.

After feeding an insistent Olivia--something I take particular joy in doing these days, since her appetite is so much more robust than it used to be--I sat down at the coffee table, brought out the super glue and reattached the broken antler.

At this point, I noticed something I should have spotted before--the deer's other antler had a fracture line running all the way around it, with faint glue marks leaking out. Obviously, this deer had been broken once before and reassembled.

Now the deer stands beside the lamp in the living room, its newly glued antler looking, to all but the closest inspections, like it had never been broken at all.

If only everything's--and everyone's--hurts were so easily fixed.

Shocktober 10/18/13

Even Bettie Page is dressed up for Halloween (courtesy of the 2013 Olivia calendar).

Every Picture Tells a Story 9/19/12

Every Picture Tells a Story: 9/6/09

2008: The Year in Photos (sort of)

Last Christmas, Mom bought me a digital camera.

This was not what I had asked for. I likely wanted something boring and practical. Sheet sets. Throws. Something like that. And, of course, she bought something else. (This year? I asked for a new electric razor, and she bought one. Wonders? Will never cease.)

Even though I hadn't asked for it, I used the little digital camera regularly. I did not, however, download any photos from it. The software that came with it wasn't compatible with my now-ancient iMac, Polly Jean (she didn't even recognize it as software), and I'd need a system administrator to authorize the installation of the software on my work 'puter (and it's not related to my job, so...SOL). That meant that I had a helluva lot of pictures stored on the camera--216, to be exact--when I finally took it to the Ritz Camera near work and got a CD burned the day after Christmas.

So here, without further comment, are some of the photos from the year that was, such as it was.

Bettie Page

On the south wall of the hallway of La Casa del Terror, there are four framed black & white photographs, all of the same woman in various outfits and states of undress, but all with the same sexy, welcoming, playful, unintimidating smile. In the dining room are two statues in her image, and in the living room is an action figure with that same warm smile.

She was a pinup model in the 1950s who had become a cult figure by the time comic book artist Dave Stevens used her face for the main character's girlfriend in The Rocketeer. Subsequently, she became a pop culture icon, with that face emblazoned on everything from lunch boxes to coasters, from statues to posters.

Stevens died earlier this year. And now, we've lost the lady herself--Bettie Page.

Unlike many cult figures who didn't survive to see and enjoy the appreciation of their ever-expanding fanbase, Bettie lived more than long enough to enjoy the attention, even if, by her own admission, she never fully understood it. She did, however, recognize her influence on society, on attitudes toward nudity and sexuality, and even on fashion--In Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-up Legend (a lavish coffee-table book, whose very existence testifies to her popularity and cultural importance), she commented on the similarity between the bondage gear she wore in the '50s and the concert outfits worn by Madonna.

A few years ago, that book figured into one of my best, sneakiest gift-giving schemes ever. For her 24th birthday, I gave my friend and fellow pop-culture junkie Red Secretary a Britney Spears tour bus, rescued from the discount bin at KB Toys. (She already had the Brit-Brit doll to go with it.) She thanked me for the present, and I suggested that she take the tour bus out of the massive box to make sure nothing was broken or missing. Inside the box, wrapped in appropriate leopard-print paper, was a hardcover copy of Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-up Legend. (I'd picked up a copy off of eBay days before, but the seller was, it turns out, a heavy smoker, so the book reeked of nicotine; I kept that one and gave RS my own copy instead.) RS, herself a huge Bettie fan, was thrilled: "I almost peed my pants!" she later exclaimed while we walked to the Penny Lane Lounge, where her friends toasted her for many hours. That? Was a good day.

Bettie Page had recently been hospitalized for pneumonia and was about to be released when she suffered a heart attack that put her in a coma. She never woke up and, last night, passed away. She was 85.

That's not how Bettie wanted to be remembered, though--The Life of a Pin-up Legend book contains no contemporary images of her as an elderly lady, and she allowed no more than her hands signing autographs to be photographed. She wanted her many fans to remember her as she was, eyes and smile sparkling eternally, soft curves proudly arched in the sun, the very vision of sexy, flirty fun.

And so we will.

I Feel the Earth Move...or Not

Apparently, there was an earthquake last night in Illinois (most specifically West Salem, near the Illinois/Indiana border) that was felt up here in Chicago.

I say "apparently" because I slept right through it.

It's the topic of the morning at work, where it seems like an even split between those who felt it (some thought their dogs had just jumped into bed or that a particularly large, noisy truck was going by) while others didn't hear about it until they got up and turned on the news. I fall into the latter category--when the first words I heard out of my radio this morning were "We'll give you an update on the earthquake in a few minutes," I thought I'd need to shoot an email to my peeps on the Left Coast to make sure they're OK. (Instead, some of them might be shooting emails to me this morning.)

Superbadfriend said the earthquake woke her up, that her kitty, Ernie, was acting weird just before it happened, that at abround 4:38 a.m. the apartment shook for about 40 seconds.

Me? I was in the middle of a pleasant-for-a-change dream in which I was a mouse locked in a warehouse full of cheese--just me and wheels of New York white cheddar and crates of grated Parmesan. For once, I was awakened by the alarm clock, and I felt like I'd gotten an actual night's sleep.

After the report on the radio, I took a quick tour of La Casa del Terror. The photos of Vampira and Bettie Page were still on the walls, all the DVDs and books on their respective shelves. Even the precarious stacks of various "things" on the coffee table were still in place, ready for my ass to knock them over as I brush by on my way in from work.

The only thing in the whole place that seemed out of place was the Mego-style Eddie Munster figure on the shelf in the dining room--he had tipped over to his right and was now resting comfortably on the ass of the Abraham Lincoln figure next to him.

Did the earthquake knock Eddie over? Or did ms. Olivia reach up and swat him in the head? Guess I'll never know.

Dave Stevens

Yesterday, horror comic writer Steve Niles sent out a very sad bulletin on MySpace, reporting that writer/artist Dave Stevens had died on Monday.

Stevens is probably best known as the creator of The Rocketeer, the irregularly published 1980s comic book (set in the 1930s and very much an homage to that era's serials and pulp novels) that nonetheless garnered enough of a following to merit a big-budget motion picture adaptation, which tanked at the box office even though it was actually pretty good. Stevens also produced a lot of "good girl" art; many of his scantily clad ladies graced pinups and covers of books, magazines and comics over the years.

I'll always remember Stevens for his contribution to the revival of interest in '50s pinup queen Bettie Page. Stevens used Bettie face for the hero's girlfriend in The Rocketeer (though her figure was provided by Stevens' ex-wife, B-movie actress Brinke Stevens), thus fueling widespread interest in photos of the real Bettie--including interest from me.

There are now four pictures of Bettie hanging in La Casa del Terror's hallway, along with a small, as-yet-unpainted statue of Bettie sitting on a shelf in the living room. The artist of that sculpture? Dave Stevens.

Dave Stevens died of congestive heart failure after a long fight with leukemia. He was only 52 years old.

Review: The Notorious Bettie Page (2006)

Like most people who have websites, I'm fairly obsessive about checking my site stats--I check how much traffic this small, dark corner of the Internet draws, from whence the traffic comes and what exactly on my site people are visiting most.

The results never fail to surprise, bemuse and confuse me. For example: Do you know what the single most visited page on this blog is? If you guessed that it's any one of my essays on Vanishing Chicago, my account of 9/11 or movie reviews like the one before you now, you'd be wrong. If, on the other hand, you guessed that it was one of my poems, you'd be right--but not because I'm such a brilliant wordsmith.

No, it's because that poem happens to feature, amongst other photos employed to illustrate verses, a shot of '50s pinup model Bettie Page.

I came late to the cult that swirls around Bettie Page. It was 1990, and I was in a comic shop--don't ask me which one, because I don't remember--when I saw a small magazine called Bettie Being Bad, which consisted of a three-part essay by longtime comic-book production man John Workman that spoke of pop culture in general and, in particular, Page's place in it and impact on it, and numerous (if poorly reproduced) photographs of the woman herself. I recognized the face--comic book writer/artist Dave Stevens had used her visage for the girlfriend of the lead character in The Rocketeer--and thought, "Wait...she was real?"

Workman's essay was an eloquent, thought-provoking piece, to be sure, but that wasn't why I bought Bettie Being Bad. I bought it (and still have it to this day) for the same reason many men (and more than a few women) have purchased magazines, books, comics, paintings and sculptures of her over the decades since she vanished from sight (until she resurfaced several years ago, perfectly willing to talk about her days as a model, but not to be photographed again).

There was something about her, an intermingling of sexuality and playfulness--sure, she was posing naked much of the time and looked damned fine doing it, but more than that, she looked like she was having fun doing it--that made Bettie Page more alluring and less intimidating than any of her contemporaries. And the number of hits that photo of Bettie on this site gets attests to her continuing popularity, nearly 50 years after she last posed.

That popularity may explain why, after so much time, we have a big-screen biography in The Notorious Bettie Page--a title which, perhaps intentionally, comes off as ironic, given the downright tame way director Mary Harron and cowriter Guinevere Turner approach their subject. If it weren't for the occasional nudity, this could easily have been a made-for-TV movie (and maybe The Notorious Bettie Page really was one at one point--it was produced by HBO).

The story Harron and Turner tell is relatively straightforward: Page (Gretchen Mol) has a rough early life (sexual abuse at home is implied; gang rape is outright stated, though not shown), just misses making valedictorian of her high school class and marries young to an abusive lout, all before she moves to New York and tries her hand at acting. There, she is invited to pose for "photo clubs"--gatherings of men and women with cameras who like to take pictures of girls in lingerie. Once Page steps in front of the photographers, she truly comes to life, and she winds up doing fetish shoots for Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer) and his sister, Paula (Lili Taylor, in a funny supporting performance), which leads to some unwanted attention from Congress in the form of hearings conducted by Estes Kefauver (David Straithairn, wasted in a tiny role) .

Eventually, though, Page rethinks her career choice and gives her life over to religion. (There is no mention of Page's later mental breakdowns or subsequent revival as a pop-culture icon.)

What makes The Notorious Bettie Page more interesting than the average biopic is the visual approach Harron and company take: Much of the movie is shot in crisp black and white, with later scenes set in Florida suddenly bursting into postcard-vibrant color, making for a movie that is at least never dull to look at.

Then there's Mol's performance in the title role. More than merely matching Bettie Page's look (both in and out of clothing), Mol captures the spirit of Page. When she takes all of her clothing off in front of the camera for the very first time, her smile, her eyes, the language of her body all express the ecstacy born of absolute, uninhibited freedom that I saw in those photos reprinted in Bettie Being Bad more than a decade and a half ago. But Mol also gets across Page's intelligence--she may have made her living taking her clothes off, but that didn't make her stupid or vacant, and Mol shows in small glances and gestures Page's growing discontentment with how she's perceived. It's a remarkably subtle performance worthy of Oscar consideration, though it's unlikely that the Academy would ever take either the actress or the subject of her performance that seriously.

That's no surprise. Maybe it's even just about right. The cool kids always "got" Bettie Page, and wherever she is today, she knows she was (and is) appreciated well beyond what she would have expected of her "posin'." The Notorious Bettie Page may not be an in-depth analysis of Page or her place in history, but it's certainly an respectful appreciation of the woman and her work. And considering how well-remembered most models of that era are--i.e., not at all--maybe that's enough.