1999-2010

Friday, December 12, 2008

Here's a nice Bettie Page pinup that's safe for work


It's funny how the "mainstream"-- let's call it "old" from now on-- media is reporting the death of nudie pinup model Bettie Page without using the word "fetish." Bettie became "notorious" not because she was as wholesome as her smiling face and healthy naked body implied, but because she did loops that showed her putting on nylons or heels or getting tied up and spanked. Bettie was a perv doll, posing in studios for gangs of amateurs in raincoats, not merely, as the LA Times would have it, "the brunet pinup queen with a shoulder-length pageboy hairdo and kitschy bangs whose saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s." Bettie wasn't an airbrushed Playboy cutie. Bettie was a she devil who projected an innocence in the most kinky situations. Everything else is revisionism and whitewash. Give the lady her due.


The Bettie Page revival was in full swing in Los Angeles when we arrived in 1990, like the night The Blazers played King King and all the rockabilly girls were made up to look just like her. We'd worked at NBC at the Eighties with a producer who would be the first journo to track her down. Sometime in the Nineties. Anyone remember his name?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Faron Young had all this figured out way before me.

I wanna live fast love hard die young and leave a beautiful memory
I wanna live fast love hard die young and leave a beautiful memory
Don't want slow walkin' or sad singin' let 'em have a jubilee
I wanna leave a lot of happy women a thinking pretty thoughts of me
I wanna live fast love hard die young and leave a beautiful memory
I got a hot-rod car and a cowboy suit and I really do get around
I got a little black book and the gals look cute and I know the name of every spot in town
I wanna find 'em fool 'em leave 'em and let 'em do the same to me
I wanna live fast love hard die young and leave a beautiful memory
[ steel - fiddle ]
I wanna live fast love hard die young and leave a beautiful memory
I'm a wampus cat let me grab my hat and baby come along with me
We're gonna do some fancy stepping we're really goin' on a spree
I wanna live fast love hard die young and leave a beautiful memory
Now you may not approve of the things I do but it really don't bother me
But don't ever think you can tie me down I'm gonna stay footloose and fancy free
So jump back make tracks move out and let the pretty gals at me
I wanna live fast love hard die young and leave a beautiful memory