Bettie Mae Page (April 22, 1923 – December 11, 2008)
In her own gentle, playful way, she was a revolutionary. Maybe she never meant to be when she started modeling, yet there’s no denying Bettie Page’s impact, resonance, or relevance, even half a century later.
In her portraits, we recognize the purity and uncomplicated joy of nudity. We are encouraged by her bearing, her beauty, her humor, her sweetness (yes, even in those Klaw photos… especially in those!) to regard sensuality as one of life’s purest gifts, rather than something immoral or wrong.
It isn’t just her beautiful body or her iconic style that continues to captivate us all these years later. It’s her spirit. When we look into her face, her eyes seem to tell us that it’s going to be all right; we can relinquish our shame.
It is her smile that sets us free.
(Several portraits and quotes from Bettie Page after the jump. Under the circumstances, I really wish I didn’t have to say this, but…NSFW.)
There is a decent read on MSNBC about the way our society’s ballooning vanity has affected the post-mortem beautification process. Example: “Silicone implants will explode [during cremation]. They’re like little bombs.” What actually gave me pause was the attached video.
“Everyone in Harlem knows I’m the guy that puts a smile on your face. Other places you just look.. dead,” says Isaiah Owens – owner of a Harlem funeral home. The video itself is a series of stills from his practice. He specializes in post-mortem sprucing, but we’re not just talking the usual wax and paint treatment. No, this man genuinely delights in making the deceased look as cheerful as possible. The slides show Owens romancing a cadaver with his magic until she smiles an almost-Giaconda smile.
There are no demure neutrals for the ladies here – hot pink nail polish, generous helpings of subdermal injections and blush are this man’s passion. Isaiah’s reputation is that of making the dead look better than the living. The funeral home’s website refers to his style at “panache” and calls Isaiah a “rare individual”. After listening to the voice over a few times I have to agree – Owens is invested. There is a touching sincerity to his voice as he describes his work, step by step. To him, death is a beautiful release from earthly pain and he’s helping the dead obtain proper presentation for what lies beyond. Also interesting is the broad array of names he gives the bodies: remains, ashes, people. Despite this dichotomy I find myself liking the way he talks about death and admiring his certainty about what it means and what comes next.
When I die, I want a modest ceremony: my brain [or soul, if you like] is to be transplanted into a superior shell and launched into space. For my body I want a shrine of candles and flowers, followed by a few weeks in a crystal coffin somewhere public and a Viking cremation with my ashes let loose over Moscow. For all the young breathers to choke on.
Forrest J Ackerman: literary agent, magazine editor, writer, actor, producer, archivist, curator, and so much more, too much to pack into a brief obituary. He was a crackpot visionary to the max, to be sure, and deeply loved by millions of fellow freakazoids the world over. Tip o’ the iceberg: he discovered Ray Bradbury, represented Isaac Asimov, Ed Wood and L. Ron Hubbard, founded Famous Monsters of Filmland and is widely acknowledged as the man who coined the term “sci-fi.”
Ackerman cultivated one of the most enormous private collections of science-fiction movie and literary memorabilia in the world, cramming his hillside “Ackermansion” with 50,000 books, thousands more science-fiction magazines, and such priceless collectibles as Bela Lugosi’s cape, actual Star Trek tribbles, and original props from War of the Worlds.
He sold off quite a bit of his collection back in 2002 and moved to a smaller place, but schedule permitting, continued to open his home to strangers every Satuday afternoon to view his remaining treasures. He greatly enjoyed sharing his many colorful stories and anecdotes with fellow Hollyweird aficionados. Speaking to the AP during a lively tour of the Ackermansion on his 85th birthday, Ackerman said “My wife used to [ask] ‘How can you let strangers into our home?’ But what’s the point of having a collection like this if you can’t let people enjoy it?”
In Heaven Everything is Fine: The Unsolved Life of Peter Ivers and the Lost History of New Wave Theatre by Josh Frank and Rabbi Charlie Buckholtz (New York: The Free Press, 2008)
Every decision you make is the chance to become a hero.
– Peter Ivers
Political correctness notwithstanding, some people are born with a creative pulse and an innate set of skills that set them apart from the rest of us. In Heaven Everything is Fine: The Unsolved Life of Peter ivers and the Lost History of New Wave Theatre is the oral history of one of those people – Peter Ivers – and the cultural milieu he helped create. It’s a celebration of the bizarre, a story of love, and a tale of the magic of creative combustion set at Harvard in the early 1970s and in Los Angeles for the duration of the decade and into the early ‘80s. It ends in murder.
Who was Peter Ivers and why should we care? He was the epicenter of some of the most influential American artists in film, theatre, music, and television of his day: David Lynch, Devo, National Lampoon, Harold Ramis, Francis Ford Coppola, Saturday Night Live, as well as perfomers in the burgeoning Los Angeles punk scene. More than just a lynch-pin, Ivers brought a dazzling array of talents and sensibilities to his work: he was a blackbelt in karate, a yoga enthusiast, and a habitual pot smoker. And it was none other than the great Muddy Waters who called that Jew boy “the greatest harp player alive.”
45 Grave performing “Evil” on New Wave Theatre.
Ivers’s accomplishments and collaborations included: writing the theme of Eraserhead (for which this book was named), dating Stockard Channing, working with John Lithgow on college theater, recording five albums of distinctly strange music for unappreciative major labels (Epic and Warner Brothers), performing in diapers and bunny slippers at Lincoln Center, and, as opener, on separate occasions, for the New York Dolls and Fleetwood Mac (whose fans booed him off the stage). Most of all, Ivers is known for championing all things genuinely queer as the puckish host ofNew Wave Theatre, an early cable access program showcasing the efflorescence of musical talent then found in the Los Angeles underground.
While some people are takers – they take your ideas, they take your time, they take lives – others, like Peter Ivers, the tragic hero of this tale, are BUILDERS. New Wave Theatre began on Los Angeles cable access and was soon picked up by the USA Network as part of its “Nightflight” programming, making Peter Ivers the Johnny Appleseed of American alternative culture. New Wave Theatre simultaneously created a space for people to shine and projected the generated light into the American living room, inspiring a thousand flickers of oddness across the country.
Ivers interviews the Castration Squad on New Wave Theatre. (Photo via Alice Bag, thanks!) L-R: Tiffany Kennedy, Elissa Bello, Dinah Cancer, Shannon Wilhelm, Peter Ivers and Tracy Lea.
While this merely reminds me of a playground, I’d love to see this idea fully realized. My ideal cemetery is now one giant playground: everyone that’s buried has their own swing set or slide, in all different colors. Rich people who’d normally have mausoleums could have treehouses and jungle gyms. Cremated people get to be a sandbox.
Here’s an excerpt of Wallace discussing Infinite Jest and what drove him to write it during an interview with Valerie Stivers in the late 90s. It’s as resonant a statement today as it was then, and far more heartbreaking:
I wanted to do something sad. I think it’s a very sad time in America and it has something to do with entertainment. It’s not TV’s fault, It’s not [Hollywood’s] fault and it’s not the Net’s fault. It’s our fault. We’re choosing this. We are choosing to spend more time sneering at hype machines, [while still] being enmeshed in them, than we are living.
[My] secret pretension…I mean, every writer wants his book to change the world, but I guess I would like to know if the book moved people. I assume that the future the book talks about, while it might be amusing, wouldn’t be a fun future to live in. I think it would be nice if the book could maybe make people think about some of the choices we are making, about what we pay attention to and give power to, so maybe the future won’t be quite that…glittery but cold.
Mission accomplished, man. Wish you could’ve stuck around. The future still needed your help.
Model wearing one of René Cigler’s apocalyptic adornments.
Sad news from BoingBoing: artist René Cigler has passed away. Cigler’s many talents included illustration, sculpture, costuming, toy design and running her own shop, Strange Monster, with partner Cameron Smith in Portland. My favorite works by Rene were always her apocalyptic costume designs, many of which were worn by dancers in Ministry’s stage performances, as well as in the film version of Tank Girl.
Cigler does a great job of creating a strong field, a believable fiction, around her work. Even though this type of industrial/post-apocalyptic/Road Warrior art has been done to death, René’s work still seems fresh and interesting. One saving grace is that her sculptures have a sense of humor – they don’t seem to take themselves too seriously … hub cap necklaces, hats made out of barbecue grills, purses made out of cereal boxes and rubber car mats. This is the kind of high fashion one might imagine wearing after the world has run out of oil, the rainforests are gone, and the local supermall offers nothing but mountains of rubble (fashion accessories?) and lurking blood-thirsty mutants.
Among her many publications (which ranged from Penthouse to People to Heavy Metal), there is one very striking cover:
Return from exile, 1994. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation. – Solzhenitsyn
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner and Russia’s voice against Stalinist regime’s brutality, has died at 89. The caustic prose of Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich exposed his fellow countrymen to the truth about inhuman suffering in secret slave labor camps, stirred the nation and ultimately cost him his citizenship.
After 20 years spent in exile, Solzhenitsyn was living and working in Moscow again, remaining vocal about his strong political views well into old age. In his recent years he briefly had his own TV show and wrote several political works condemning communism, Russia’s rampant nationalism and war as a whole.
Solzhenitsyn’s death is a tremendous loss and his work deserves special attention here at some point. Until then I suggest you pick up all 3 volumes of this and tell us what you think.
Video of Putin awarding Solzhenitsyn an award last year; a rather strange event as even the reporter points out.
A short autobiography written for Le Prix Nobel books.
He said that he wanted to find a way to recycle everything, and that life was fleeting. Hence the dinosaurs. John Payne turned prehistoric and poetic terrors into lifelike (and eerily inhuman) machines he dubbed “kinetosaurs.” Then he’d let children take the controls, or leave the beasts to shock unsuspecting passerby strolling through his studio.
But life is fleeting. I was shocked and saddened to find out that on July 17, Payne died tragically at the age of 58, following a massive stroke. A deeply thoughtful, compassionate man and one of the founders of Asheville’s arts community, his work was capable of conveying incredible energy or sublime peace.
I met Payne once in passing when he was showcasing his work in his studio, located in The Wedge, the old industrial building down by the river that he bought and turned into a warren of rooms for artists of all stripes. He’d come there after stints in Chicago and the Northeast (the kinetosaurs had formed the core of museum exhibits in Chicago and Pittsburgh). I’d been drawn in by the mechanical dog that suddenly sprang up and nipped at my heels before shaking itself and settling down for a nap.
Inside was the full menagerie. I marveled as The Crow struggled to escape its perch and The Raptor leered. I felt about five years old, stepping in to some great adventure. The kids in the place were naturally ecstatic. Watching him play at the controls, I could see the same feeling.
She died before I was ever born, but she’s been with me all my life. Nadya Rusheva was only 17 when she succumbed to a brain hemorrhage in Moscow. She left behind ten thousand drawings – a fragile, incomplete catalogue of her teenage fascinations with Greek myths, Pushkin’s life, Bulgakov, Byron’s poems, War and Peace, and other bits and pieces from history and literature.
L: Pushkin and Goncherova. R: The Transfiguration of Margarita
She once said that she lived the lives of the people she drew. Her drawings are simple, impulsive – some might even say they’re amateurish – but there’s something to them, a spark, a keen insight, a visible love. For example, when she illustrated The Master and Margarita (which Zo and I blogged about), it turned out that her drawings of Margarita bore an eerie resemblance to Bulgakov’s wife – whom Rusheva had never met.
L: Saying good-bye to Fox. R: Self-portrait.
She’s virtually unknown in the West – not even a real Wikipedia page – but in Russia, she’s beloved by generations for her combination of tragedy, whimsy, youth and the adult-like insight that sometimes appeared in her work. Young fans still visit her museum and leave behind poems and drawings. On her Livejournal fan community, people swap scans of her drawings and write dedications. And a new film about her called “Secret Signs” recently came out in Russia.
Rusheva was born in 1952 in Mongolia to a Bolshoi theater designer and a ballerina (both of whom, I believe, are still alive today), and died in 1969. Some say that she was exploited to make the Soviet education system look good. I found two translations of the same document that claim that, upon being discovered, Rusheva was forced to produce artwork at a grueling pace so that the regime could hold her up as a paragon of Communist artistic training. One translation outright states that she was worked to death, but other (and better translation) doesn’t imply this. I’d never heard this before, even though I knew her work since childhood, thanks to my parents’ immense book collection. I could see it being true – despite the irony that Master and Margarita, one of her favorite books to illustrate, was banned when she drew it.
After the jump, my favorite Rusheva drawings (there’s lots!) and more.
