The Best of Playboy - April '69

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.

Love this suit jacket!

Make sure you buy the matching shoes with the matchless suit.


The pin-wheel of guns wins for being the most ridiculous home decoration ever.



Rad light.


playmate of the month


Brigitte Bardot



Where the hell would you put all those socks anyway?

Silk scarves = SO IN

Check out more man fashion from this issue here.

The Best of Playboy - January '67

The beginning of 1967 was all about pop art and parties, Fidel Castro, sex and scotch.

A lengthy interview with Fidel Castro is featured in this issue:

"I believe that the United States, with its imperialist foreign policy, is accelerating the radicalization process of revolutionary movements not only in Cuba but throughout the world."

"An enemy of socialism cannot write in our newspapers- but we don't deny it, and we don't go around proclaiming a hypothetical freedom of the press where it doesn't exist, the way you people do."

"If you ask me whether I considered myself a revolutionary at the time I was in the mountains, I would answer yes. If you asked me whether I considered myself a classic Communist, I would say no."

There were quite a few garments with Playboy bunny logos including sweaters and shirts

playmate of the month

Salvador Dali

Andy Warhol

Larry Rivers

George Segal

Roy Schnackenberg

Tom Wesselman

Alfred Leslie

Frank Gallo

Discotheque

The Best of Playboy - June '64

Lately I have been interested in checking out vintage Playboy magazines, and since this is the month of L'Amour I'll be featuring my highlights from a few mags. If you can get past the endless booze and smoking ads and the distastefully sexist comics you can find some intellectual and soulful stuff lurking in the nooks of the pages. For example there was a great interview with Ingmar Bergman in this issue:

Playboy: You've been widely praised for your sympathetic depiction of, and insights into, the feminine protagonists in your films. How is it-

Bergman: You're going to ask me how it is I understand women so well. Women used to interest me as subjects because because they were so ridiculously treated and shown in movies. I showed them as they actually are- or at least closer to what they are than the silly representations of them in the movies of the Thirties and Forties. Any reasonably realistic treatment looked great by comparison with what was being done. In the past few years, however, I have begun to realize that women are essentially the same as men, that they both have the same problems. I don't think of there being women's problems or women's stories any more than I do of there being men's problems and men's stories. They are all human problems. It's people who interest me now.

Keep in mind Bergman had five wives and nine children in his lifetime, interestingly enough most of his children became filmmakers.

In the issue prior to this one Playboy interviewed Ayn Rand. Groovy, eh? One of the readers in this issue responded to an article written by Hugh himself. He quotes Ayn Rand from Atlas Shrugged on the subject of sexuality:

"A man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself. The woman whose surrender permits him to experience- or to fake- a sense of self esteem... There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body... Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives- and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy. One proceeds from the other. Love is our response to our highest values- and can be nothing else. Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration, but of charity, not in response to values, but in response to flaws- and he will have cut himself in two... Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom, and sex- nothing but shame... Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love."

Now for pictures

playmate of the month

and the award for the most ridiculous hair goes to Mamie Van Doren!

The funny thing is that the sexist caricatures in Playboy aren't flattering for men or women. Men are old, cruel, brutish beasts. Women are young, pert, and daft. Every month they feature a page on "what sort of man reads Playboy" and it always describes these roguish, uncreative bread winners. An oppressively high-standard if you ask me. Yet, the playmates of the month usually tend to be assertive. educated women. Playboy is so full of fascinatingly endless contradictions, but I think that is what makes it interesting.

One great thing about Playboy is it encourages men to be stylish! Take note, boys.

WOOO

Wu

I love the sheer look! Nipples are so IN!