think like a ballet dancer

~  I must have you!

~  No, not on the piano.  It's a rented piano.

~  Darling, my darling, my -- Sonja!  Come to my quarters tomorrow at three!

~  I can't.

~  Please!


~  It's immoral.  What time?


~  Who is to say what is moral?  Morality is subjective.  Subjectivity is objective.

~  Moral notions imply attributes to substances which exist only in relational duality.


~  Not as an essential extension of ontological existence.


~  Can we not talk about sex so much?

---------------------- [excerpt from the Woody Allen film, Love and Death.  1975.]


_________________________________

     I was reminded of the attitudes and subject matter in this movie when I was on You Tube reading viewer Comments about Playboy founder Hugh Hefner.

Comment:
"I bet he died with a smile.  Think about it, he was a trail blazer."

Comment:
"He was a demon lol.  Put in place to deculturalize society."


______________________________

Sex is bad.

Sex is good.

Sex should never be discussed openly.

Sex should always be discussed openly.



     Nudity is bad.

     The human form is beautiful but only in paintings in a museum, not in photographs in magazines.


Women's liberation spokespeople:  "Playboy magazine objectifies women!"



Question:  Do women want to be taken seriously and respected as human beings?  Or do they want to be admired and worshiped as beautiful sexual goddesses?
     Answer:  Yes.
     ("What?")


"Sex is a positive thing, and should be enjoyed and celebrated.  I love my primary girlfriend, and on occasion I enjoy the intimate company of assorted other young ladies when the spirit moves me."

     "And your primary girlfriend enjoys this same freedom of sexual spirit, right?"

     "What??!"

______________________________

 1953

"We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex."

     Hefner wrote this blithe, liberated, aspirational statement in Playboy's first issue, which sold (50 cents each) fifty-four thousand copies.
     At its peak -- in 1975 -- circulation climbed to 5.6 million.

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a candid conversation

In the 1960s, when Playboy had been in business for 10 years, the Playboy Interview became a big deal.

     The interviews were in-depth, free-ranging, and "finely edited."  Hugh Hefner and his fellow organizers at Playboy tried to offer the best interviews to the reading public.


[excerpt]___________________________________

Playboy Interview with The Beatles:

A candid conversation with England's mop-topped millionaire minstrels

Interviewed by Jean Shepherd
February 1965 issue
Article ©1965 Playboy Press

---------------------------------

PLAYBOY:  "OK, we're on.  Why don't we begin by..."

JOHN:  "Doing Hamlet."

(laughter)

RINGO:  "Yeah, yeah, let's do that."

PLAYBOY:  "That sounds fun, but just for laughs, why don't we do an interview instead?"

GEORGE:  "Say, that's a fine idea.  I wish I'd thought of that."

PAUL:  "What shall we ask you for a first question?"

RINGO:  "About those Bunny girls..."

PLAYBOY:  "No comment.  Let's start over.  Ringo, you're the last Beatle to join the group, aren't you?"

RINGO:  "Yes."
JOHN:  "A few years probably ... sort of off and on, really ... for three years or so."
PAUL:  "Yeah, but really amateur."

GEORGE:  "The local pub, you know.  And in each other's uncle's houses."

JOHN:  "And at George's brother's wedding.  Things like that.  Ringo used to fill in sometimes if our drummer was ill.  With his periodic illness."
RINGO:  "He took little pills to make him ill."
PLAYBOY:  "When you joined the others, Ringo, they weren't quite as big as they are now, were they?"

RINGO:  "They were the biggest thing in Liverpool.  In them days that was big enough."

PAUL:  "This is a point we've made before.  Some people say a man is made of muscle and blood... No they don't... they say, 'How come you've suddenly been able to adjust to fame,' you know, to nationwide fame and things.  It all started quite nicely with us, you see, in our own sphere where we used to play, in Liverpool.  

We never used to play outside it, except when we went to Hamburg.  Just those two circles.  

And in each of them, I think we were 'round the highest paid, and probably at the time the most popular.  So in actual fact we had the same feeling of being famous then as we do now."


GEORGE:  "We were recognized then, too, only people didn't chase us about."...

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private jet plane with a dance floor

     Later on, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the docu-series on Hugh Hefner shows him buying the Mansion in Chicago, and getting a private plane for all his travel -- it has everything, even a dance floor.

     But profits and wealth like that didn't come immediately:  during the 1950s, the film shows Hefner working at a manual typewriter, typing two-fingered at his kitchen table.  He gets a couple of other men in on the project with him, and they put out the first issue of Playboy magazine in 1953.

     Early Playboy published some fiction, and articles about "lifestyle" -- what to wear, what music to play "when a girl comes over," and the latest kitchen gadgets.


     ("What to wear" -- ironic.  How about for the young ladies posing for photographs:  mightn't they have been allowed to wear something...?)


     In the '70s, everything's in color, men have long-ish hairstyles -- I could imagine being at one of those parties, dancing to some of the greatest music.  



That looks like fun -- however, it was always hard for me to imagine people getting nude for their photograph to be taken and put in the magazine.  Yikes -- but there were lots of women who wanted to do that.  Apparently no one coerced them.  They'd show up and have their picture taken like that.

     How much were the ladies paid for this?  I didn't catch that info in the movie -- maybe they said it and I missed it.  They must have been paid, surely.


     I think my own upbringing -- surrounding milieu, the people I knew, no one would do something like that -- at least that I knew of, or could imagine.  I think the logic behind not posing with your clothes off (besides being sinful if one wanted to "go there") was -- it would be like getting a tattoo, you would be sorry for it later.  ("Later on."...)







     You let nude pictures of yourself be in the world, and first thing you know (or -- "later on") you've got trouble.  
     Remember, that one Miss America who had to give back her title because of nude photographs -- 1984, or something...?


     A part of Hugh Hefner's ethos that I could "get into" is the part about music and other cultural appreciations.

     I never knew Playboy / Hefner had a TV show until the 1990s when I read Tina Turner's autobiography, I, Tina.  In the book there were some photographs, black-and-white pictures from the early days of her childhood and later the Ike-And-Tina-Turner-Revue.  

One photo showed her dancing onstage, wearing one of her fantastic costumes -- a designer creation, modified for her energetic performing style.  The caption underneath said it was from "Playboy After Dark."


     So -- OK -- I had never heard of that, before.  "Playboy After Dark."
     I thought, "Playboy magazine had a TV show?"  And by that time -- that day of my discovery while reading her book, that television show was more than 20 years in the past, already.

     And I thought, Well -- wow, if they had the brains to have the Ike and Tina Turner Revue on, then that must have been a good show.  And I thought that maybe someday I would see that show, although at that time I couldn't imagine how.




     And another twenty-four years after that, when Hugh Hefner caught our attention in the news because he died, I went about looking up Playboy After Dark on You Tube, since by then I finally had the Internet.  And I found something else that I hadn't known about -- another show Hefner hosted, 'Playboy's Penthouse' -- 44 episodes, 1959 - 1961.



     'Playboy After Dark' had 52 episodes, 1969 - 1970.

     A bunch of episodes of both these shows are on You Tube.  Amazing history, and a look at people having a nice party, basically, and conversation and laughs.  (No contrived bickering, like the "reality" shows now.)

     In the Amazon docu-series, a guy says the parties were fun, with an opportunity for some intellectual conversation if that was what you were interested in.

-30-

jazz, and cocktails, and Picasso

     There's a saying, "No one is indispensable" -- but that's not true, some people, you lose them and there's no one else who can take their place, there's an empty space where they used to be.

     Since Chris Matthews of Hardball left the airwaves, I get home from work and have nothing to watch.  God, I miss him.  No one else can do what he does.  Or maybe they could, but they haven't been hired.


     I always used to watch him on You Tube.  Someone, somewhere, would upload the show, most evenings if we were lucky....  I've tried some other shows, but -- complaining about the news is not the same as reporting the news -- and adding useful commentary and perspective.


     Similar to films and books -- complaining about them is not the same as reviewing them.

     Recently I watched a show on Amazon Prime.  I thought the music they used in it was so great!  My gosh, every song was just terrific.  Some of them I knew, some I didn't -- they were all -- excellent, excellent, excellent.  Wonderful to hear.



     So I looked on Internet and read some reviews of the show, thinking I would read something scintillating about the music used in the film.  As it turns out, each writer/critic used their article to -- figure out something to "pick on," and then -- Type That.

     The number of reviews that even mentioned the music -- was Zero.


     That is hard for me to understand.


          American Playboy:  The Hugh Hefner Story is the title.  It is an Amazon Original Series, it came out in 2017.  One season; 10 episodes.



     It is a lively, fascinating history.  Hefner started Playboy magazine in 1953.  The series begins in that time period and advances chronologically through the '60s and '70s, etc.  

The songs you hear a few bars of, throughout the film, correspond to the era being shown or discussed -- for example you don't hear '80s arena rock playing during events that happened in 1957....  
     The song "Stagger Lee" is in there, somewhere, just the beginning part...

     (I was standing -- on the corner,
When I heard my bulldog bark
He was barkin' at the two men who were gamblin'
In the dark...)

     I've never read Playboy, with the exception of an interview they had with John Lennon.  A film-school student in Boston had it, and I borrowed it from her, to see what was on John Lennon's mind.


     In the Amazon series, Hugh Hefner says when he started Playboy, he was doing it because there was no magazine out there that answered to his taste.  

He said magazines for men were mostly about hunting and fishing and sports.  (A narrator even adds that, in the '50s, magazines -- and even reading itself -- were kind of seen as being women's activities.)  [?]




     Hefner said he wanted a magazine for men that had "pin-up girls," and discussed "jazz, and cocktails, and Picasso" -- art and culture and "beautiful girls."  Since there wasn't such a magazine, he had to create it himself.

-30-

being and nothingness

------------------------- [excerpts] -------------- But I noticed that whenever I inflicted my fatal prestidigitation on audiences, my spontaneous patter, as I marched around the stage quacking nervously, would always break up the crowd.  It never crossed my mind afterward that I had some potential as a comic, but only that I was a failed magician.


-------------- It was announced there was to be a talent show at school.  I thought I might do some impressions.  Impersonations, they were called then.  I don't know when they magically changed into impressions....


{Woody Allen, Apropos of Nothing}

__________________________

-30-

recipes in The Guardian are always too hard

Air Force One comin' in through the gate
Johnson sworn in at 2:38

Let me know when you decide to throw in the towel
It is what it is, and it's murder most foul

~ Bob Dylan






________________________________

---------------------------- [excerpt from Apropos of Nothing, by Woody Allen] ----------------- As a young boy my favorite films were what I've dubbed champagne comedies.  I loved stories that took place in penthouses where the elevator opened into the apartment and corks popped, where suave men who spoke witty dialogue romanced beautiful women who lounged around the house in what someone now might wear to a wedding at Buckingham Palace.




     These apartments were big, usually duplexes, with much white space.  Upon entering, one or one's guest almost always headed directly to a small, accessible bar to pour decantered drinks.  Everybody drank all the time and nobody vomited.  

And nobody had cancer and the penthouse didn't leak and when the phone rang in the middle of the night, the people high above Park or Fifth Avenue didn't have to, like my folks, drag ass out of bed and bang their knees in the dark groping for the one black instrument and hear maybe a relative just dropped dead.  


No.  

Hepburn or Tracy or Cary Grant or Myrna Loy would just reach for a phone on their night table inches from where they slept, and the phone was usually white and the news did not revolve around the metastasizing of cells or a coronary thrombosis from years of deadly brisket, but more likely solvable conundrums like "What?  What do you mean we're not legally married!?"

-30-

the hustling, the tap dancing

     Last week -- Two Good Things, one a total surprise, the other a reversal of fortune.

A new Bob Dylan song came out.
"Murder Most Foul"
        about the assassination of President Kennedy

And -- Woody Allen's book came out, after all!
I saw a news story on my android tablet that said another publisher had "quietly" released the book on Monday, March 23.

I had been so annoyed (or -- enraged?) over that whole debacle, I wrote an e-mail to Jeff Bezos and asked him to try and get someone to publish it.  (Not that I imagined anyone would read it, but what else could I do??)

     After I read that Apropos of Nothing was out, it took a little while before I remembered sending that e-mail.
     Hahahahaha -- when I write to Mr. Bezos, he swings into action!  LOL

_______________________________

----------------- [excerpt, Woody Allen memoir] -------------- I first saw a Broadway show when I was seventeen, and I discovered paintings on my own playing hooky and needing a warm place to hang out, and the museums were free or cheap....

     My father owned one book, The Gangs of New York.  It was the only book I browsed growing up, and it imbued in me a fascination with gangsters, criminals, and crime.  I knew gangsters like most boys knew ball players.  

I knew baseball players, too, but not like I knew Gyp the Blood, Greasy Thumb Jake Guzik, and Tick-Tock Tannenbaum.  Oh, I also knew movie stars, thanks to my cousin Rita, who papered her walls with color portraits from Modern Screen....

In addition to Bogart and Betty Grable and how many wins Cy Young had and how many RBIs Hack Wilson hit in one season and who pitched two consecutive no-hitters for Cincinnati, I knew Abe Reles 



could sing but not fly -- plus where Owney Madden wound up and why an icepick was the weapon of choice for Pittsburgh Phil Strauss.

     In addition to The Gangs of New York, my entire library consisted of comic books.  I read only comic books until I was in my later teens.... 

Folks, you are reading the autobiography of a misanthropic gangster-loving illiterate; an uncultivated loner who sat in front of a three-way mirror practicing with a deck of cards so he could palm off an ace of spades, render it invisible from any angle, and hustle some pots.  

Yes, I eventually got blown away by Cezanne's heavy apples and Pissarro's rainy Parisian boulevards, 



but as I said, only because I would cut school and needed succor on those snowy winter mornings.  

There I was at fifteen, on the hook, confronted by Matisse and Chagall, by Nolde, Kirchner, and Schmidt-Rotluff, by Guernica and the frantic wall-sized Jackson Pollock, by the Beckmann triptych and Louise Nevelson's dark black sculpture.  Then lunch in the MOMA cafeteria, followed by a vintage movie downstairs in the screening room.  Carole Lombard, 



William Powell, Spencer Tracy.  Doesn't it sound like more fun than Miss Schwab's obnoxious picklepuss demanding the date of the Stamp Act or the capital of Wyoming?  

Then the lies at home, the excuses next day at school, the hustling, the tap dancing, the forged notes, caught again, parental exasperation.  "But you have such a high IQ."  And by the way, reader, it's not so high, but you'd think from my mother's cri de coeur I could explain string theory.  You can tell from my movies; while some are entertaining, no idea I ever had is going to start any new religion.

_________________________

-30-