Joys of Fantasy

 Celebrating Valentine's Day 2024 !

Joys of Fantasy: The Book for Loving Couples

by Siv Cedering Fox

Stein and Day, 1977

Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we like to celebrate Valentine's Day by showcasing a book (fiction or nonfiction) that deals with love. For Valentine's Day 2024, we're looking at a quintessential work of 1970s 'erotica'.

In the Summer of 1976, film producer and editor Ed Rothkowitz and photographer Joseph Del Valle arranged for some of New York City's best-known porno actors and actresses to pose for a series of photographs, taken in the studio of 'adult film' film director Toby Ross.

Rothkowitz combined the photos, which epitomized the soft-focus 'erotica' of the 70s, with various 'sensual' poems and prose pieces, most of which were authored by a woman named Civ Cedering Fox. 

Cedering Fox (1939 - 2007) was born in Sweden and later moved to San Francisco, where she grew up. She gained notice as a poet, novelist, children's book author, artist, and songwriter during the 1970s and 1980s.

The photo and poem combination, titled Joys of Fantasy to channel the runaway success of The Joy of Sex, was published by Stein and Day in 1977 in both hardcover and softcover editions.

There are products of the 70s that are so cheesy and kitschy, or so sublime and transcendent, at the same time and point in space that any attempt to analyze them is futile; so it is with Joys of Fantasy. I'll simply present selected, carefully cropped photos from the book and let readers come to their own conclusions.

Of note is the fact that one of the male models used in the portfolio is none other than Dennis Posa, aka 'Dennis Parker', whose 1979 LP 'Like An Eagle' is one of the touchstone records of the disco era ! Can you get any more Seventies than that ?!

Although it's long out of print, copies of the paperback edition of Joys of Fantasy can be had for affordable prices. I recommend perusing it accompanied by a bottle of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill, incense, an Emerson Lake and Palmer record, and shag carpeting........in an Earth Tone.

National Lampoon February 1975

National Lampoon

February 1975

February, 1975. On the Billboard Hot 100, the top-selling single in the USA as of February 15 is 'You're No Good' by Linda Ronstadt.

Let's open up the latest issue of the National Lampoon, which has a 'Love and Romance' theme. This is one of the better mid-70s issues of the magazine.

The letters column offends with faux missives from bigoted rednecks, and serial killer Juan Corona (!).

The advertising in this issue includes Earth Shoes (very 70s), and a new Yes album, which is accompanied by bad poetry. 

Other album advertisements include an LP from Kenny Rankin (a YouTube video of Silver Morning is here). I can't say Rankin's album is all that impressive - rather tame 70s singer-songwriter stuff (folies should not scat-sing, and what folkie didn't, at some point in his / her career, do a cover of Paul McCartney's 'Blackbird' ?!). 

There's also an album from George Carlin, whose brand of comedy was thriving in the mid-70s. I can't say that the Carlin catalogue has aged well, but then, not much from the mid-70s really has, when you think about it...........

An ad for something called the 'Great American Song Festival' features the late, great, Suzanne Somers, adorned with some strategically placed sheet music !

The color comic in this issue is a satire of romance comics, featuring.....Nazis ?! Yep, this sort of thing probably would not be allowed nowadays..........

One of the funniest features in this February issue is a parody of Modern Bride magazine. 

This 'Lake Innuendo' spoof of the advertisements for the Poconos honeymoon suites (like the Birchwood) that were common in the 70s, is spot-on:

The comics section has the usual strips. Because this section of the magazine was printed on newsprint rather than 'slick' paper, even at 300 dpi, the scans are not crisp and require much fiddling in order to be legible.

And there you go with Lampoon humor, as it was early in '75............

High Times February 1986

High Times

February 1986

February, 1986. The single at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 is 'How Will I Know' by Whitney Houston.

Let's sit down with the latest issue of High Times magazine !

This issue has some genuine highbrow content: an interview with French film director Jean-Luc Godard, and a feature on the UK author and philosopher Colin Wilson.

There's a music article on up-and-coming folkie, and geek girl icon, Suzanne Vega. Her song 'Luka' would be a breakout hit in 1987.

Indicating the editorial board's greater emphasis on promoting not just marijuana-related issues, but all left-of-center political causes, there's a lengthy article on anti-abortion politics.

The magazine does stay true to its roots with the traditional columns and features from botanical guru Ed Rosenthal. Kids, can you believe that back in 1986, it was a big deal to send in photos to High Times of you and your plants, all in a clandestine fashion ? Quite a change from how it is nowadays, where you can stroll into your fave dispensary and select from an impressive array of legitimate 'product' !

The advertisements showcase a 'dope' board game, various formulations of 'food supplements' (gotta cut that coke with something !) and pot growing paraphernalia. 

I never bought any of those mushroom growing 'kits', as my understanding was that even if you were able to grow the Psilocybe spp. mushrooms in the first place, the yield was so tiny that you weren't going to catch a buzz.

Harkening back to the days of yore, we get a reminiscence of how it was in the early 1980s to make dope-buying trips down into Mexico. But in the mid-80s, things were becoming very dangerous..........

And on the pop culture front, well, the High Times editorial staff aren't all that happy with those Death Wish films and their glorification of vigilante violence.

That's how it was, folks, 38 years ago, in the pages of High Times. Truth be told, I read this issue with some disappointment. The goofy, hippie / Cheech and Chong / counterculture vibe that made the magazine resonate so well with the stoner culture during the 1970s and early 1980s, was by the mid-80s replaced by editorial concepts and directions that considerably were more 'corporate' in attitude. Admittedly, this editorial strategy was increasing circulation, but at the same time, it felt like something of the original soul of the publication was leaching away............

Hardboiled paperbacks February 2024

Hardboiled Paperbacks

February 2024

Looking to take a break from a steady diet of science fiction, fantasy, and horror paperbacks, I stopped in at a bookstore in downtown Charlottesville this past weekend and picked up a selection of hardboiled crime paperbacks. 

I have to admire the grasping way Fawcett Crest took old John D. MacDonald novels and novelettes from the detective fiction digests of the 1950s, and repackaged them for paperback publication in the 1980s. Hard Case Crime displays a similar sense of enterprise in reprinting Richard Prather's 1963 novel 'The Peddler' in 2006, with a nice Robert McGuiness cover illustration. 

And who knew that sometime in the early 1970s, Roger Zelazny had written a spy / suspense novel ?! I'll have to see if it incorporates New Wave parlance, or sticks with a straightforward prose styling...........

Book Review: The Jones Men

CELEBRATING BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2024

Book Review: 'The Jones Men' by Vern E. Smith

5 / 5 Stars

Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we like to celebrate Black History Month by reading and reviewing a book (fiction or nonfiction) that describes the Black Experience. For February 2024, we are reviewing 'The Jones Men' by Vern E. Smith.

'The Jones Men' first was published in 1974. This Old School Books / W. W. Norton trade paperback edition (222 pp.) was issued in 1998.

Vern E. Smith was born in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1946. In 1971 he joined Newsweek  magazine as a reporter in the Detroit office, later serving as the bureau chief in Atlanta from 1979 to 2002. Although Smith has contributed pieces to nonfiction books (such as 'Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did To Us'), and written screenplays, 'The Jones Men' remains his only published crime novel.

'The Jones Men' is set in Detroit in the early 1970s. The two protagonists, Lenny Jack and Joe Redd, are youngbloods looking to make it big as drug dealers - 'jones men' - in the city underworld. Lenny Jack intends to get his heroin inventory in a particularly dangerous fashion: stealing it from Willie McDaniel, Detroit's drug kingpin.

While ripping off Willie McDaniel is something of a death wish, Lenny Jack is living with a fatalism born in the jungles of South Vietnam, where, as a soldier in the American Army, he recovered from a serious wound. As far as Lenny Jack is concerned, he has nothing to lose. Either his heist works, or it doesn't.

But while Lenny is a reckless man, he isn't a stupid man. He's willing to pay top dollar to hire a team of gunslingers to protect himself. And he's taking all manner of precautions to avoid alerting the Detroit criminal enterprise to his plans.

As snow falls on the mean streets of the city, Lenny Jack and Joe Redd are about to pull off a robbery that will bring chaos and violence to Detroit. The question is, will they live to enjoy the proceeds ?

'The Jones Men' is one of the best crime novels I've ever read.

The author uses a clean, clipped prose style that communicates a hardboiled sensibility. But it avoids the pitfall of getting so caught up in the hardboiled diction that the prose comes across as an unwitting self-parody.

The chapters are short and the plot unfolds with speed. There are subplots that contribute to the narrative without retarding it. The novel builds in a careful and deliberate way to a slam-bang climax of violence and mayhem, that leaves no plot threads dangling.

Author Smith fills the pages of 'The Jones Men' with descriptive passages communicating the street culture of the Detroit of the mid-1970s. These passages give the action an authentic sensibility. In your mind's eye, as you read the book, you can visualize the El Dorados and Fleetwoods cruising the ghetto streets under overcast skies, their drivers wearing the latest and greatest in Player fashion, listening to Marvin Gaye and Al Green on the dashboard tape deck.

Anyone who appreciates a well-written crime novel is going to want a copy of 'The Jones Men'.

Al Stewart LPs

 Al Stewart LPs

top: Time Passages (1978) and 24 Carrots (1980), center, Year of the Cat (1976) and Live / Indian Summer (1981), bottom, Modern Times (1975)

If you are a Baby Boomer than you undoubtedly are familiar with the music of Scotsman Al Stewart (b. 1945). While Stewart's first album, Bedsitter Images, was released in 1967, he really became prominent following the release of the LP Year of the Cat in 1976. Its eponymous track was perfectly made for the FM, Album Oriented Rock radio stations of the 1970s. 

Successive albums saw heavy airplay for the tracks 'Time Passages' and 'Midnight Rocks'. Stewart released studio albums all the way up to 2008 and continues to tour the UK.

Stewart's albums from the 1970s and 1980s are readily available at used record stores and websites, for quite affordable prices. These LPs feature his distinctive lisping voice and impeccable musical accompaniment and production (check out the flamenco guitar on the track 'What's Going On'). They are AOR at its most polished, and the musicianship is the antithesis of modern-day Algorithm Pop. Certainly well worth a listen to, now that vinyl firmly is back in fashion.