Richard Jeffrey Newman wrote:
>Important stuff you bring up, Ken. Thanks.
>
>Richard
>
>
Since this morning, Rachel has commented on the comments, and it's
fascinating...discerning how you can get (intellectual/poetic) fuel from
a bunch of fossils. Amy Fisher...ye Cripes. Doesn't she write a
newspaper column now? Colin Ferguson and his "Black Rage" defense. I
worked with a guy 11 years ago who came from eastern Nassau County near
the Suffolk line, and he said Long Island was a haunt of Evil. Remember
Johnny Pius, the kid who was suffocated by neighborhood bullies who
shoved pebbles down his throat? I could make something of my ex-wife
coming from the North Fork, near Montauk, but let's not go there, I
don't see a real connection. She could in her turn make something of me
having grown up in the Bronx, another bastion of the insane and people
waiting to go nuts.
I remember the Playboy Philosophy but I have no idea whether anyone (1)
read it, and (2) took it seriously. The idea of turning womanizing into
an art form (seduction) isn't as weird as developing supposed ideas to
bolster what one would do anyway. Maybe Hef wanted a whole world based
on the pursuit of pleasure, a universe modeled on the court of Francois
I in 16th century France. "And at the end, boys and girls, we ALL get
to die of syphilis, won't that be a hoot?!"
Picture Hef as a guest on _Sesame Street _fondling Miss Piggy. Picture
Grover looking at the centerfold with a weirdly rapturous expression on
his fuzzy face.
Maybe this sounds like a Standard Disclaimer, but I should add anyway
that I did not intend to mock the women themselves. Beauty is glorious,
even if it's my sometimes outre concept of it. What I have find
disturbing is the imagery--of taking a beautiful woman and converting
her via filters, lighting, etc., beyond All American Girl into a Thing
or Object. I can hear Andrea Dworkin shouting from her grave for all
the good it did her in life. I read an interview in the late 1980s in
_American Photographer_ with the man who did the Playmate of the Month
photographs. His name was Pompeo Posar and he was fabulously talented.
He had to be to get the kind of effects he achieved. He used an antique
8x10 Deardorff view camera with all sorts to tilts and swivels, filters,
and exposure adjustments, and he knew that it was his job to turn
"regular" woman, albeit beautiful as nature made them, into profane
religious icons. "I don't want reality, I want magic." Someone said
that Hefner's daughter is running the operation now that Hef himself a
bit long in the fang. There's a study by itself in a woman running an
enterprise dedicated to showcasing woman-as-thingie-do. Where, oh
where, is Ms. Hefner's head at?
Ken
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Kenneth Wolman http://kenwolman.com http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
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"Only silence is shame."--Bartolomeo Vanzetti
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