“Composer Artisan” ISFP. Socially and economically libertarian for reasons having nothing to do with Ayn Rand. Current fields of study:Playboy, A Course in Miracles, building a new life in Humboldt County.
Hollywood, California, is my spiritual hometown. I actually grew up in three other communities in California, but it hardly seems to matter which three. How could my heart take root anywhere under the tyranny of American public schooling?
I don’t have to work for a living. After my father died in December 1997, my family and I won a legal settlement.
The Blog About
Nothing: Sudheer of Hyderabad, India, is a big fan of Playboy and an
even bigger fan of Seinfeld. In this blog, he composes humorous
dialogues for the show’s characters.
Hit & Run: the official
blog of my other favorite magazine, Reason: Free Minds and Free
Markets; winner
of the 2005 Weblog Award for Best Group Blog; “the best
libertarian blog” according to the October 2005 issue of
Playboy.
Scoobie Davis Online: a self-described “filmmaker, surfer, and party crasher” in southern California. He’s also a Playboy fan, a left-leaning political gadfly, and a connoisseur of Jack T. Chick religious tracts.
The Search for
Health in Decadence: poetry and philosophical writings of Will, who has
engaged me in lengthy, good-natured debate through comments on my
blog.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven
Pinker. With stylistic flair, a Harvard cognitive scientist
refutes myths about human nature underlying a multitude of political
beliefs—including many of those that would either favor or
oppose the sexual revolution.
God in Popular Culture by Andrew M. Greeley. A liberal Catholic
priest sees quasi-Christian messages of grace abounding in the
allegedly soulless realm of commercial pop culture. For all I know,
Greeley is not necessarily a Playboy fan. But his
interpretation of Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin” has
influenced my impression of Playboy. (In case anyone wonders, my religious heritage is Lutheran on my father’s side and secularist on my mother’s.)
Folks, if you don’t find it hilarious to shout “Plop!” at the end of this Tammy Wynette/Naomi Watts/Peter Jackson fan video by YouTuber Peter Warkentin, you have a heart of stone. (But I’m not totally unsentimental. I admit my eyes misted during WALL-E.)
Ysabella Brave is a smart enough performer to understand the relationship between silliness and sexiness. True to her name, she takes rather bold risks in this arena that pay off marvelously. I’ve never seen anything quite like this next video in all my research on the history of pinups, cheesecake, exotic dance, and glamour (the song is one of her own):
Please crank up your computer’s audio before visiting my MySpace. Since I first added music to the page the other day, I’ve been intending the musical selections to complement my status messages.
At Hit & Run, Radley Balko reports that the Federal CommunicationsCommunist Commission has fined ABC $1.43 million for showing an “indecent” episode of NYPD Blue five years ago.
Be sure to consult your physician before viewing this YouTube of the offending portion of the show, in which a woman’s bare buttocks are clearly visible:
FCC indecency investigations begin when the agency receives a viewer or listener complaint about a program and can drag on for months or years. The lightly staffed FCC enforcement bureau must go up against broadcasters, which have more legal and financial resources to battle the proposed fine and have a vested interest in dragging out the proceeding. After the enforcement bureau makes a finding, it must be voted on by the FCC’s five commissioners, who were occupied with cable television and wireless spectrum issues through much of 2007.
Never mind that the FCC is violating ABC’s First Amendment rights under a crypto-Marxist rationale of “public ownership of the airwaves.” Never mind that the government is acting on behalf of a tiny number of Church Ladies to punish a television network for placing adult content in a characteristically adult—and very popular—evening drama. Never mind that the authority of the FCC to impose the fine at all depends shamelessly on a time zone technicality (only ABC affiliates in the Central and Mountain zones are being fined, because that’s where the show ran at 9 p.m. instead of 10). In spite of all this, the public-morality bureaucrats are the underdogs in this fight.
Defenders of the FCC policy seem to fear that, some Saturday morning, TV networks might suddenly replace kids’ cartoons with pornography if they weren’t threatened with fines for indecency. On this particular issue, conservative culture warriors resemble the left-wing Adbusters crowd with their talk of amoral corporate greed. But networks have no more economic incentive to make stupid programming choices than a supermarket does to put wasabi in my milk.
If you’re as pissed tinkled off as I am about the FCC, don’t miss this unforgettable song from Family Guy. (I thank local friend Matt for encouraging me to link to the song here.)
Addendum, January 31, 2008, 9:32 a.m.: Since I’ve placed this post in the “Non-Playboy Hotties” category—and since the scene was obviously shot without a body double—I feel negligent if I don’t mention the name of the actress, Charlotte Ross.
With all due respect to Dr. King’s legacy, I promise that it’s not as much of a non sequitur as you think. As always, YouTube may be lying if it calls the video “no longer available.” Reload this web page and give it another go.
I have to admit that Reflections on Playboy is not necessarily a model of racial sensitivity. When someone in the Bush administration wondered out loud about bringing back the draft, the paraphrase in my post title that day was “18-year-olds are the new niggers.” I still wonder about my own wisdom in using a word that probably disturbs African Americans in ways that I, as a white guy, can never completely understand. Still, this is by far the most appropriate day of the American civic calendar for me to put my two cents in. And if I can’t be a racial saint, maybe I can at least be weird enough to command attention, even a kind of respect, when I share some thoughts on King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
I spend a lot of my time at this blog defending certain cultural artifacts against charges of vulgarity. For an earlier MLK day, I observed that, with all the sobriety inherent in his mission, King was not ashamed to exert influence on frivolous items of pop Americana like Star Trek and Playboy. Nor should he have been. History shows that, whenever human beings are liberated, they invest in frivolity. Suddenly free of the Taliban vice squads in 2001, the people of Afghanistan disappointed Western snobs by going for “shallow,” “materialistic” things like consumer electronics and fashionable haircuts. Wouldn’t you have done the same thing in their position?
King had a noble dream of interracial justice and peace. In their various ways, Playboy and songs like “Barbie Girl” remind us of the “low” dreams of sensual pleasure and sexual satisfaction that seem to compete with the noble stuff for humanity’s attention. Perhaps a sense of zero-sum competition between low and high dreams encouraged King in his socialism. But let’s remember King as a hero, not a god. Even after the scandal of racist rhetoric that has just embarrassed the libertarian movement, let’s all consider the possibility that a free market in almost all goods and services—including education and health care—is the best deal for consumers of whatever color. Maximal realization of King’s dream may involve transcendence of King’s economic prejudices. Please think it over, everybody.
According to the YouTuber who uploaded this, the recording is by Henry Mancini. But “Playboy’s Theme” is a Cy Coleman composition. I’m not a jazz aficionado, but I notice that this music typifies jazz at its best. At once, it’s both sexual and celestial.
Composing a private email to some friends last weekend, I surprised myself with this sentence: I wouldn’t go camping with a steady girlfriend of a year!
The next day, it still rings true. If you can explain it—when every city in the United States and Canada is convenient day-trip distance from a hiking trail or picnic park—please leave a comment here. Blogger.com membership is optional.
Do by-the-hour motels deserve any more shame in 2007? The last big-name celebrity to die in one was Sam Cooke, and that was in 1964. Don’t worry about going there anymore, anybody.
Nature just isn’t that interesting—not even with sex thrown into the deal.
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez [sic] when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
But Cantor’s wisely blurred distinctions do not invalidate all standards of taste as such. Perhaps a good working definition of kitsch is any piece of art, craft, or entertainment too stylized, affected, or bland to be recognizably human. By that standard, John Williams has rescued the “lounge” sensibility of today’s music nostalgia from the kitsch ghetto with the musical passage above.
Until that opening theme music, I was annoyed by lounge’s hooker-and-john rituals of pretending to dislike what one likes by finding elaborate ways to say, “It’s so bad that it’s good. Don’t confuse me with a dork because I enjoy this.” Lounge has always had some true, sincere artists working in it, but the irony has usually been too rich for my blood. Williams rounds the sensibility out by adding a natural, believable sense of menace to it. The result is something timelessly hip.
If science is essentially disciplined curiosity, art and art criticism are disciplined hedonism. Don’t snicker. One thing I mean by discipline is integrity about one’s aesthetic pleasures. A sense of irony is a virtue—in moderation.
How do I know? Because this diabolical musical variation on Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds looks so much like the sadistic glee of the two dipshits who gave me life in teasing me in public on a difficult subject during a difficult time. Not coincidentally, it’s the sadistic glee I take in publishing this post, too. This is a scene of grand-scale science-fiction violence with imagery clearly intended to evoke the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Sensitive persons, you know the drill.
Naturally, Wikipedia can tell you everything you didn’t know you would enjoy knowing about “Yakety Sax” (not to be confused with the less interesting “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters).
For another inspired take on extraterrestrials extra-tyrannicals, read here.
Update, June 15, 2008, 5:37 p.m.: Probably the fourth time all the way through for me, the Spielberg version of the Wells novel is as good as I remember.
The Haitian-born actress and August 2007 Playboy cover girl is a truly deserving candidate for a celebrity pictorial. Her youthful 40-year-old body holds a rare and devastating abundance of both womanly curves and Amazon muscle tone. In an alternate timeline, she could have been a widely celebrated exotic dancer. As it is in our version of history, she now confesses to an underage stint serving guests of the New York Playboy Club as Bunny Garcelle in the mid-1980s. Luckily for all, photographer Stephen Wayda knows how to chronicle by suggestion what might have been.
In most of the photos, Wayda complements the brown tones of the model’s skin, eyes, and hair with plenty of brown in her surroundings (on a ship, by the way, but that’s not so important). As is often said in aesthetic debates about color versus black and white in motion pictures, a scarcity of colors tends to accentuate line, shape, and form. The pinup genre has generally done well by using full color. But devices like this can help photography rival sculpture[not work-safe] as a loving expression of shape. (As the last link shows, we men never change. We’ll always love triplets.)
It’s not the only such trick this pictorial uses, either. By first visual impressions, a completely naked woman might just be a nudist on family vacation. But a mostly naked woman adorned in something very showy and elaborate is obviously out to drive the fellas a little crazy—and is therefore more likely to do so. In one pic, she stands with her back to the camera at a full-length (except for pelvic-level) mirror. Not only do the curves running symmetrically from her shoulders to her thighs identify Beauvais as the avatar of the muse of the Stradivari family. Not only does she tenderly rebuke our greedy eyeballs with an “oh, you dog” look through the mirror. She ensures total victory by wearing a tiny, elaborate, neo-Egyptian set of chains around her chest and midsection. In some photos, she has lost the chains and replaced them with rhinestones glued all over her body from the neck down. This is advanced weaponry, folks.
Erotica, though made just as historically necessary by the human nervous system as music, may always have more difficulty traveling across subcultures of sexual morality in a diverse society like the United States. A very sexual musical form like rock and roll can easily outpace erotica at its almost mildest. Still, in its own way, cheesecake photography may turn out to be as formally complex and precise as tonal harmony in Western classical and popular music. And if it’s such a joy to let Johann Sebastian Bach mess with our heads, why not let Hugh Hefner do it, too?
Since bootlegs of Beauvais’ exclusive Cyber Club shots are all over the internet already, I would feel like a nerd if I didn’t post one of them. I give you the one that Playboy Enterprises’ lawyers will least mind me stealing, of course:
Edward Sanchez of Dearborn, Michigan, probably feels naked after resigning his policeman’s uniform in disgrace. About 90 minutes after he and his wife ate brownies laced with marijuana he had confiscated from criminal suspects, he made a hilarious 911 call:
Sanchez: I think I’m having an overdose and so is my wife.
Operator: Overdose of what?
Sanchez: Marijuana. I don’t know if it had something in it. Can you please send rescue?
Operator: Do you guys have fever or anything?
Sanchez: No, I’m just, I think we’re dying.
Operator: How much did you guys have?
Sanchez: I don’t know. We made brownies. And I think we’re dead. Time is going by really, really, really, really slow.
(Hat tip: Pot TV.) The unabridged audio of the phone call is that good all the way through, starting with an audible “before I wake...my soul to take” while Sanchez waits for the operator to pick up. Towards the end, he asks her to verify the current score of the Red Wings game to make sure he’s not hallucinating. I wonder how he knows he’s not hallucinating her answer to his question at that point. This guy was really, really, really, really unqualified for his essential job as a gun-toting addiction counselor who makes surprise house calls.
Dirty Sanchez faces no criminal charges, except in the court of public opinion. Stand back when Adam-12 takes his first bite of the Fruit That’s So Good It’s Evil, for you don’t know how big his trip is going to get.
Update, July 11, 2007, 10:48 a.m.: Jacob Sullum, who served our public discourse very well by writing Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, has discovered a music video inspired by the 911 call.
Update, September 8, 2007, 7:05 p.m.: For an alternate Dirty Sanchez reference, see this music video from Carlos Mencia.
Sure, ’tis nothing at all like the morn in spring. (Finish the song parody yourself.) “Pornography may lead to masturbation much as a novel or film may lead to tears or laughter,” says the Feminists for Free Expression website. Of course, FFE intends this analogy as part of a political defense of pornography. But I’ve found another, ahem, use for it: to help understand the economics (and aesthetics) of pornography.
I don’t have the background in economics to answer the question of journalist Brian Doherty and economist Tyler Cowen, “Why is there (still) a market for porn?,” in the language of that discipline. But I’ll point out that porn doesn’t fuel masturbation in the exact sense that gasoline fuels a car. Comedies, tearjerkers, romantic narratives, and dirty pictures earn fans by having socially complex but agreeable effects on consumers’ nervous systems. (Remember that all solitary behavior has social implications, because all secrets are fragile.)
If economists still can’t rid their heads of the admittedly hilarious image of millions of Glenn Quagmires beating off surreptitiously in their bachelor pads, I invite them to replace that image with the implied, off-screen female masturbation scene about 35 minutes into I Wanna Hold Your Hand, an underappreciated 1978 farce that does for the psychology of fandom what Dr. Strangelove does for the psychology of war. In a moment of solitude and moral weakness, Nancy Allen’s character falls under the spell of the Beatles’ early romantic narratives.
There now, isn’t that image more fascinating economically?
I regard the Barenaked Ladies as the worst case of false advertising since The NeverEnding Story. But some of YouTube’s most celebrated talents have come together in this BNL lip-sync video that I must recommend anyway. Warning: It’s obviously an advertisement, so it might hypnotize you into buying BNL songs. Or something like that.
What makes YouTube.com’s amateur video star Brooke “Brookers” Brodack so strikingly adorable? I don’t remember how I stumbled on her lip-sync to the “Cell Block Tango” from Chicago the other day. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the performance. With body language, facial expressions, and only a few simple props, the suburban blonde in the Coca-Cola T-shirt, 19 at the time, captures all of the song’s considerable sex appeal.
Brookers doesn’t need to play it sexy to hold my attention, though. Lip-syncing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” she’s just plain cute (if you’ll pardon the oxymoron). Impersonating a she-dork or a paste-eating child, she shows comedic talent. With a few years of practice, she could be the next Carol Burnett. She’s already good enough to have signed a contract with Carson Daly. Go, baby!
I admit I have partly superstitious reasons for posting about Brookers. Some of her good luck could rub off on me. But since my blog frequently explores the mysteries of female charm, I’m not wandering too far off topic after all. How did this young lady so distract me from my self-imposed publishing deadlines? Perhaps a guy can’t help admiring a face he has seen used as such a precision instrument. Sigh.
Update, November 6, 2007: I was reluctant to link to it in July 2006, because there was a completely unjustified adult-content warning on it then, but Brookers also does a very good impression of all the scare stories on the news. And, of course, it will always be fascinating to watch pretty girls with their pets.
Update, November 13, 2007, 12:24 p.m.: Finally, I’ll make the title of this post a shade less creepy by, um, embedding this particular YouTube of hers:
In all fairness, I should also embed this one, which may contain a kind of subtle revenge, although I can’t be sure:
BURWELL, NE—Local hair stylist Pam Nowicki would love to do Julia Roberts’ hair, Nowicki announced Monday at the Mane Attraction Beauty Salon in downtown Burwell.
“Julia Roberts is so gorgeous,” the 41–year-old certified cosmetologist said. “I would just die to get my hands on that luscious hair of hers.”
I don’t. Either I’ve missed the joke, or we’re supposed to think this woman is making a fool of herself by openly admiring a world of glamour that she knows she will never inhabit. If I agreed with Vance Packard, Noam Chomsky, and Adbusters that commercial mass culture has the mysterious, voodoo-like power to put false desires in people’s heads, I guess I might have seen satire in the story. But to my libertarian way of crediting people with free will, the humor is cheap, condescending, and sanctimonious.
For much better artistic treatment of a working-class woman whose reach poignantly exceeds her grasp, listen to the song “Doatsy Mae” from the stage version (not included in the inferior movie version) of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas—which, by the way, was inspired by an article in the April 1974 issue of Playboy. As the owner of a small town café, the song’s title character confesses that she would gladly trade places with the local madam, despite the latter’s serious troubles. The townspeople laugh off the suggestion that a plain, simple, respectable gal like her would ever do such a thing. But after they leave, she sings these words to a slow, tender country-and-western melody:
Frederick of Hollywood’s got these clothes in a movie magazine You send your money, you take your pick You end up like a Playboy queen I wanted to, I wanted to But I never could
Went to the county fair, saw me a show They had a girl up there She wore a diamond stuck in her belly She danced and threw around her hair I wanted to, I wanted to But I never could
Chorus: Doatsy Mae, plain as gray, respectable Doatsy Mae, day by day, respectable Doatsy Mae, the one nobody thinks of having dreams Ain’t as simple as she seems
Some girls have crazy secret thoughts that can really make ’em fly Some girls can even do the things they maybe think they’d like to try I wanted to, I wanted to But I never could
Got me a garter belt, got me a bedroom Sometimes I close me in Dance to the mirror, then I can imagine I’m someone that I’ve never been I wanted to, I wanted to But I never could
Repeat chorus Doatsy’s not as simple as she seems
Carol Hall’s music and lyrics for this song are wistful but never bitter. I think of Doatsy Mae’s path to heaven as exactly 180 degrees from Salieri’s path to hell. Not to be glib or insensitive, but maybe women can keep Playboy from hurting their self-esteem by thinking less like Salieri and more like Doatsy Mae.
Had his life not been tragically cut short, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would have turned 250 this coming Friday. Amadeus is historically inaccurate but philosophically truthful. By implication, Salieri’s mad resentment of Mozart illustrates the folly of blaming images of beauty and glamour for women’s low self-esteem. I satirically explained the parallels in an earlier post.
Addendum, January 25, 2006, 10:45 a.m.: Watch the director’s cut, if you can get it. It has additional scenes and dialogue that give more insights on Salieri’s frame of mind. Plus, Mrs. Mozart is topless in one scene.
To understand the harm done to the female psyche by Playboy centerfolds and other images of unrealistic, unrepresentative, and unattainable female beauty, rent the movie Amadeus. It tells the story of Antonio Salieri, who has the terrible misfortune of being born into a society that glamorizes beautiful music. He internalizes this attitude and comes to base his sense of self-worth on his ability to become as great a composer as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Quite reasonably, he expects this to be the inevitable result of his own hard work. Honor and glory should always be conferred strictly in proportion to a person’s deliberate effort to achieve them, shouldn’t they? This is why beauty contests are immoral: they reward people by the luck of the genetic draw.
Some might argue that the Mozarts in every field are essentially genetic freaks whose oddly configured brains and bodies give them an unfair advantage over the rest of us. But, as we all know, anyone who gives genetics its due in a discussion of public policy or social justice must be a Social Darwinist. We need not listen to such a person.
At least Mozart’s talent is natural. The beauty of a Playboy model is artificially enhanced with meticulous lighting, airbrushing, and sometimes cosmetic surgery. Even though these technologies democratize beauty in some sense, granting more opportunities to choose one’s physical appearance, they still pose an added threat to women’s self-image. Just take my word for it.
The Haitian-born actress and August 2007 Playboy cover girl is a truly deserving candidate for a celebrity pictorial. Her youthful 40-year-old body holds a rare and devastating abundance of both womanly curves and Amazon muscle tone. In an alternate timeline, she could have been a widely celebrated exotic dancer. As it is in our version of history, she now confesses to an underage stint serving guests of the New York Playboy Club as Bunny Garcelle in the mid-1980s. Luckily for all, photographer Stephen Wayda knows how to chronicle by suggestion what might have been.