Drawn Dolls: The Best of Playboy

Ah. 1969. All about free love, man. Love your fellow man. Touch your fellow man. Lower.

So of course the highlight of this magazine is an interview with Allen Ginsberg, who Playboy describes as "the hippie-guru poet laureate of the new left and the flower children". I loved reading this, Ginsberg doesn't sound like someone I'd want to be my best friend, but rather party with. You can read most of his works online. If you've never heard his stuff before, I think the best way to introduce yourself would be to lie on the floor with your eyes closed, a doob in hand, and listen to him read Howl, his most famous poem. Interestly enough I just discovered that a movie came out last year called Howl about the poem, starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg (which is weird because Franco is way way hotter, but that's Hollywood, turning freaks into studs). So many Ginsberg-isms in the interview. I'll quote a few of my favourites:

When the participants in the Berkeley Free Speech movement were sentenced to jail terms in 1966, Ginsberg was there- not carrying a placard, like the other protesters, but clanging finger cymbals and droning a Hindu chant, in order to "soothe and calm the heart of the judge".

Playboy: How do you see yourself?

Ginsberg: Not in a word or image: I see myself as a being who is being and being more and more. Sometimes that looks heroic, sometimes fucked-up heroic because of having to be at all. Such a bad Karma!

Ginsberg: It's like the old shamans who are often androgynous or homosexual: Since they're outside normal social routine, they're specialized social critics and have sensitivities that others don't have; they're men who see aspects of male history from a woman's point of view. That spectrum of experience is a useful information bank of supplementary intelligence that can be of real value in community self-understanding and awareness. Anyone in that position has enough troubles fulfilling such heavy duties to society without being hit on the head for being a fairy; he should be kissed instead. In fact, innumerable young men ought to offer their bodies to him in order to recompense him for the suffering solitariness of his freaky prophecy-hood. And they should come up offering their bodies before I get too old to enjoy it.

So you can watch this movie called The Killing of Sister George on youtube. It's actually a really powerful film about showbiz and lesbians. It is hard to watch because the main character, although superbly acted, is a raging bitch. Lots of fucked-up-ness abound, including nun-molesting and cigar-eating. Sadly the sex scene in the movie was banned from youtube, which is ridiculous. In fact most of the sex scene is shown in the above pictures. It is interesting that the film is as controversial today as it was in the sixties.