Zardoz portfolio Playboy March 1974

Zardoz portfolio

from Playboy, March 1974

Directed by John Boorman, Zardoz is one of the weirdest sci-fi movies of the 1970s. My review of the film's novelization is here.

 

To coincide with the film's February, 1974 release, the March issue of Playboy magazine featured a brief portfolio of stills and staged shots from the movie. I have to say that Charlotte Rampling looks amazing, while Sean Connery.....well......he looks rather foolish. But then again, things were different in the 1970s. And in my mind, it's a better portfolio than what you would get in those old issues of Starlog and Famous Monsters and Fangoria..........

 

Book Review: The Oxygen Barons by Gregory Feeley

Book Review: 'The Oxygen Barons' by Gregory Feeley 

2 / 5 Stars

‘The Oxygen Barons” (264 pp., Ace Books, July 1990; cover art by Dave Archer) is one of the last books in the Ace ‘Science Fiction Specials Series 3,’ which was edited by Terry Carr. Following Carr’s demise in 1987, Damon Knight took over the editing duties. It is unclear whether Carr or Knight was responsible for handling this novel.

‘Barons’ is set several centuries in the future, at which time the bodies of the inner Solar System have been colonized or exploited for raw materials, which are delivered via mass drivers from one outpost to another. 

The Moon has been terraformed and possesses a stable, breathable atmosphere and a network of rivers and large bodies of water. Its government is divided between two feuding factions, the Nearside and the Farside. These polities loosely are confederated with a variety of offworld corporations and trading blocs, who are competing for power among themselves. A particular bone of contention is the extravagant amount of oxygen needed to sustain the operation of the Moon. Some of the offworld corporations are lobbying to divert this oxygen for use in sustaining other colonies elsewhere in the system.

As the novel opens, a Nearside engineer named Galvanix is attempting to prevent an opposing faction from driving an asteroid into the Moon, a decidedly unfriendly action. He finds unexpected assistance in his task from Beryl Taggart, a cybernetically enhanced super-soldier. The first half of the book is one extended chase sequence, as Taggart and Galvanix find themselves stranded on the Farside, fleeing hostile authorities in an effort to retrieve an important database.

The novel then moves to a large space station orbiting the Earth, and from there, to the Earth itself and an entire floating city anchored off the coast of India, as the various entities referred to as the ‘Oxygen Barons’ engage a series of maneuvers designed to bring a hapless Galvanix under their control.

‘Barons’ does have its positives; every few pages another ‘gee whiz’ moment rears its head, and the physics of living and working in low-gravity environments accurately are represented. 

 

But overall the novel is a labored read, and needed better editing. Feeley’s prose is very dense and overly descriptive. For example, in one segment of the narrative, Galvanix has to ascend a narrow shaft embedded belowground in a lunar installation. Most authors would deal with this segment within several paragraphs, perhaps, but Feeley spends nearly two pages on the event, turning it into a sort of prolonged mini-epic. The novel is clogged with too many of these instances of over-writing.

The backstory involving the political and economic conflict surrounding the Moon never is adequately communicated to the reader. Indeed, whatever plot underlies the events in the narrative is so poorly outlined that I finished the book with no real idea of why Galvanix was such a pursued character in the first place. 

Things aren’t helped by the author’s tendency to use some of the more stilted dialogue I’ve encountered in a recent hard SF novel:

Beryl answered these questions with alacrity. “Cognitive modification is negligible, since it cannot be accomplished without jeopardizing sophic integrity. If your memories and expertise were readily separable from your sense of self, they would have been decanted alone.”

A steady diet of such awkward phrasing tends to wear on the reader, and makes ‘Barons’ a too-hard slog. I only can recommend this novel to those readers with a particular affectation for hard science fiction narratives.

Comics from Vertigo

1993-1998

 

I never was one for DC's 'Vertigo' comics imprint. 80% of the titles were pretentious crap and 90% had awful artwork and 'dogshit' quality coloring. But - perhaps in the spirit of nostalgia - recently I got four titles in the 'Vertigo Visions' lineup, all of these one-shots published in the interval from 1993-1998.

 

Dr. Occult, aka 'The Ghost Detective,' was first created in 1935 by Siegel and Shuster, and pops up every now and then in some DC titles.

 

Tomahawk is a colonial-era frontier drama, featuring Native Americans. Tim Truman had considerable success with illustrating the Joe Lansdale-written 'Jonah Hex' Vertigo titles of the 1990s. 

 

DC's long-running Z-list character Phantom Stranger gets the postmodern treatment in his own Vertigo Visions book. The plot has something to do with the residents of a down-at-heels nursing home. I'm not encouraged..........

 

Probably the best of the four titles is Prez: Smells Like Teen Spirit, from the well-regarded team of Ed Brubaker and Eric Shanower. This comic is another postmodern take, this time on the short-lived, 1973 teen comic 'Prez.' 

 

I'll likely do a post about the Prez title, but as for others, well.....I'll see if they are Worthy. But right now it's a warm early Spring day, and it's a good day to sit on the porch and read some comic books.......

Playboy February 1974

Playboy

February 1974

Well, it's February, 1974, and atop the singles charts is Barbara Streisand, with 'The Way We Were.' My main man Barry White and his Love Unlimited Orchestra are in second place, but 'Love's Theme' eventually would reach Number One. That single, with its chucka-whucka sound effects, prefigured the advent of disco. Rrrright-on, baby !

 

Sitting at position number 6 is one of the stranger chart entries in that chilly Winter month of February: 'The Americans,' by Byron MacGregor, a Canadian broadcaster. This single was a spoken-word tribute to - you guessed it - the Americans, to the accompaniment of 'America the Beautiful.' In the era of inflation, the 55 mile-an-hour speed limit on the interstate, the economic damage of the Arab oil embargo, spiritual and psychological anomie, and the increasing mistrust of the Nixon administration, MacGregor's single was a rebuke to 70s fatalism. Not as effective, in my opinion, as the Kink's 1979 LP track 'Catch Me Now I'm Falling,' which was a similar treatment of the U.S. in decline.
 

 

The February issue of Playboy is on the stands, and it's a good issue. Interestingly, while the traditional (dyed-) blonde is on the cover, elsewhere in the issue is a short portfolio of an 'ethnic' woman, a rarity in those days. The eponymous 'Butterfly Girl' is Ratna Assan, from Indonesia.

Looking at the contributors to this issue reveals a lineup of some of the nation's most prominent authors, writers, actresses, and intellectuals: 

 

Richard Rhodes (b. 1937) wrote the celebrated nonfiction books 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb,' 'Farm,' and 'Deadly Feasts.' Susan Sontag (1933 - 2004) was of course one of the major cultural critics of the postwar era, and John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 - 2006), one of the eminent economists of his time. Nat Henthoff (1925 - 2017) was a well-known author and columnist. 

 

Frank M. Robinson (1926 - 2014), who assists with music reviews at Playboy, would become a major author and screenwriter in the 1970s and 1980s with such works as 'The Glass Inferno,' 'The Prometheus Crisis,' and 'Blow Out.' Robinson also authored the nonfiction work 'Science Fiction of the 20th Twentieth Century An Illustrated History.'

 

Top-billing actress Candice Bergen (b. 1946) writes about her trip to China as a member of a motley assemblage of 'artists' and lefty agitators. 

 

And while white, male, urban Jewish men and women are heavily represented, also contributing to the issue are artist Ignacio Gomez and photographer David Chan; diversity is there, if you look for it.....!?

One thing that I always highlight in these vintage issues of Playboy and Penthouse is the high quality of their illustrations. Nowadays magazines and their graphics are dwindling as media enterprises, but 50+ years ago, editors commissioned outstanding pieces to accompany articles. 

For an article by Malcolm Braly about an upstate New York 'fat farm,' where - gasp - the overweight are treated with fasting (no semaglutide in 1974, folks), George Hirsch provides a brilliant painting that calls to mind the subdued, luminous renditions of George Tooker. 

For Sontag's story 'Baby,' designer Gordon Mortensen and photographer Bill Frantz concoct a creepy illustration that complements what is otherwise a too-lengthy, and utterly mediocre, piece by Sontag.

For Bergen's travelogue, Herb Davidson puts together a fine illustration.

The ongoing series, 'Playboy's History of Organized Crime,' sees Peter Palombi channel the sensibility of a pulp magazine cover to craft one of the more striking images in any Playboy of the decade. And there's also a suitably grim depiction, by George Roth ('after Edward Hopper') of a gangster meeting his end in the electric chair.

Sontag may have contributed a dud of a story, but at less than two pages, Henry Slesar's 'Nothing But Bad News' ably delivers black humor. It benefits from a fine illustration by Kinuko Craft.

The cartoons in Playboy could be cruel, especially in those years before the advent of Viagra:

The February interview subject is none other than Clint Eastwood, an actor who rarely gave interviews. He comes across as down-to-earth and unassuming.......carefully calibrated.

But let's not forget the nubile young women ! For February they are the 'Girls of Skiing,' and rather than digitally enhance the coloration of these scans of a five-decade-old magazine, I'll retain their rather faded coloration and provide that nostalgic, Kodachrome-style glow.......

 

And that's how we do Vintage, from those long-ago days of the mid-1970s............

Vintage paperback typefaces

'10 Typefaces we need to bring back for book covers'

 

 

Over at 'The Pulp Librarian' twitter site, an interesting little article on vintage paperback fonts / typefaces. 

 

I found myself wishing some of the profiled typefaces were available for use here at Blogger...... 

Book Review: The Lords of Hell by Sara Harris and Lucy Freeman

  

Celebrating Black History Month 2026  

 

Book Review: 'The Lords of Hell' by Sara Harris and Lucy Freeman

1 / 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 illuminates the Black Experience here in the United States. For Black History Month 2026, we're taking a look at the luridly titled 'The Lords of Hell,' and it's quite a selection......

 

'Lords' (223 pp.) was published by Dell in 1967. Information on main author Sara Drucker Harris is a little scant; according to her German-language Wiki page, Harris specialized in publishing books dealing with the more titillating aspects of social dysfunction. For example, she wrote 'Hellhole: The Shocking Story of the Inmates and Life in the New York City House of Detention for Women'  (1967). A rather lengthy review of 'Hellhole' is available here. 'The Puritan Jungle' (1969) examined 'America's Sexual Underground.'

 

Co-author Lucy Greenbaum Freeman (1916–2004) specialized in books on psychiatry and psychopathology.

 

'Lords' purports to be a sociological study of a 'Negro' Harlem pimp, Charles 'Satinhead' Johnson, and his main girl, a white woman named Patricia Reardon. 

 

I should make clear that there is no way to confirm the veracity of the book's contents, as it is devoid of any sourcing or notes. The book's cover states that 'tape recorded interviews' conducted with '....a Negro procurer and a southern white prostitute' are the basis of the book. However, the book never discloses when those interviews were conducted (or even when the described events took place), nor whether the interviews were transcribed word-for-word, or paraphrased. Accordingly, 'The Lords of Hell' needs to be read with a healthy dose of skepticism...........  

 

The book's Preface has the sententious, self-serving attitude of those publications that winkingly exploit Trash Sociology tropes: 

 

This is believed to be the first attempt to describe the life of a Negro pimp, his relationship to the women in his stable and to his family.

 

In lower-class Negro America, it is the women who control the purse strings...Resenting the women's domination, the men keep trying to persuade themselves and everyone else of their virility by gambling and drinking and making love to enough women so they [i.e., the men] can feel they count for something. 

 

Underneath the sensational aspects of their lives, lies tremendous anguish and fear...

 

What hurts a Satinhead Johnson or a Patricia Reardon hurts all of us, not only because we have to live in a world that suffers because of their anger and frustration, but also because there is something of Satin and Patricia in all of us.   

 

The initial chapters of 'Lords' introduce us to our protagonists via the 'Sportmen's Ball' where pimps show up every year to trade girls (interestingly, Satin and the other pimps attending the Ball insist on being referred to as 'sportsmen'). 

 

Satin is smitten with the beautiful blonde Patricia and bargains with her white (!) pimp, 'Bible John,' to trade her to Satin in exchange for two girls from the Satin stable. Unhappy with the abuse she takes from Bible John, Patricia initially sees Satin as both a savior and a lover. But of course, Satin soon turns her out as one of his higher-priced hoes.

 

The book alternates first-person narratives from Satin and Patricia (Satin's narrative is rendered in Ebonics), these being interspersed with faux-scholarly, didactic overviews from the authors:

 

As Patricia enters Satin's stable, she becomes part of his family of women. She finds herself one of what is known in the life as a group of 'sisters-in-law,' somewhat of an ironic term for women who are rivals for the same sportsman (making of the sportsman, incidentally, a brotherly figure).

 

As the plot unfolds, anyone with a modicum of sense knows that the outcome of the relationship with Satin and Patricia will not end in an idyllic married life, with our protagonists running a lingerie shop in New Orleans. I won't disclose spoilers, save to say that the authors milk the book's conclusion with all manner of pontificating about social mores, and the indifference of society to the plight of the marginalized. 

 

Of course, our contemporary attitude towards the black pimp as an admirable individual, a man with 'game,' a true 'Playa,' a man valorized in hiphop and ghetto culture, is not present in the pages of 'The Lords of Hell.' Indeed, as Michael Gonzales points out, the deification of the black pimp only would arise in 1973, with the release of the movie The Mack. 

 

I finished 'The Lords of Hell' thinking it a tedious and underwhelming read; failing both as a melodrama, and as a sociological expose. Readers interested in the pimping and macking enterprises of the 1960s and 1970s are advised to investigate 'Gentleman of Leisure,' by Hall and Adelman (1972).

Book Review: The President by Drew Pearson

Celebrating President's Day 2026

 

Book Review: 'The President' by Drew Pearson 

Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we like to celebrate President's Day by reviewing a vintage book that illuminates the drama inherent in holding the highest office in the land. For this President's Day 2026, we examine 'The President,' by Drew Pearson.

 

During the 1950s and 1960s Pearson (1897 - 1969) was a high-profile newspaper columnist covering the DC Beltway. According to a fawning, July 9, 2021 profile of Pearson, published by Washington Post book reviewer Matthew Pressman, in his day Pearson was '...arguably the most influential political columnist in U.S. history.' Pearson, raised as a Quaker, was a strident liberal and continuously inveighed against what he felt were the immoral behaviors of the American Right.

 

Pearson wrote two political potboilers, 'The Senator,' (1969), and 'The President' (1970), the latter published posthumously (Pearson died of a heart attack on September 1, 1969). This Avon Books paperback edition of 'The President' was published in January, 1972.

 

'President' is set in the mid-1970s, and is narrated by one Eddie Deever, the chief of staff to the eponymous protagonist, a former senator named Benjamin Bow Hannaford. Hannaford won his election with only 33 percent of the popular vote, thanks to some vote-splitting between two conservative GOP candidates. There also are suspicions on the part of Capitol Hill that Hannaford's campaign benefited from some less-than-legal maneuverings in counting ballots in California. 

 

Despite the narrowness of his victory, Hannaford believes he has a mandate to implement his program of Social Justice.

 

And it's an unabashedly progressive program (one of course near and dear to the heart of author Pearson). Hannaford seeks to slash the Pentagon budget in half, and use the freed monies to advance the welfare of the 'Negro.' There are to be massive investments in 'ghetto communes' (?!), jobs programs, educational facilities, welfare payments, and health care resources.

 

Of course, the Right adamantly is opposed to such a redistribution of wealth, and the battle between Hannaford and the GOP-controlled House culminates in an effort by the latter to impeach the newly elected president. Will the right and its 'dirty tricks' triumph, and remove Hannaford from office ?   

 

'The President' is the first political melodrama I've ever read, and likely will be the last (I never bothered to read 'Primary Colors,' Joe Klein's 1996 novel about the Clinton administration). Pearson is a skilled writer, but at 603 pages of small font, 'The President' is just too long and too lumbering. Too many speeches that go on for page, after page, after page......

 

Pearson's righteous indignation over the American political landscape as it stood in the late 1960s suffuses every page, and Hannaford and his team are portrayed as avatars of integrity and virtue engaged in a struggle for the soul of the nation. The problem is that Hannaford's nobility makes him a rather dull individual.

 

Indeed, the most interesting characters in 'The President' are the black activists who refuse to buy into Hannaford's White Savior mystique. My favorite 'Negro' is Kakamba Jones, the dashiki-wearing leader of the militant Afro Avengers organization. Jones has little use for white liberals or back conservatives (the latter reflexively are condemned as 'Uncle Toms'). When given a chance to berate the white power structure, Kakamba doesn't disappoint:

 

....Then I heard Kakamba's voice, challenging, insulting, hurling his defiance at the lawmen across the barbed wire.

 

"We are ready, whitey ! We got us the guns and grenades and the heavy stuff. Maybe you got more, but it won't stop us. We willin' to die, and take lots of you along, and make this place a great big pool of black and white blood. We got us a list of nonnegotiable demands and we want Mr. Number One, the pig governor himself, Whitey Fancourt, to talk with us, here, now and without no soldiers around him !"

 

At one point in the novel Deever attends a left-wing rally in Manhattan, hosted by Arvid Farbelman, a white, Jewish leftist who is Pearson's stand-in for Abbie Hoffman. When Deever pleads with Jones to take action to support Hannaford, Kakamba lets whitey know exactly what's up:

 

"Tell them, Kakamba !" Arvid Farbelman cried. "Tell them like it is !"

 

"Shut up, motherf---er," Jones grunted, over his shoulder. "When I wanna hear from white trash, I'll ask."

 

"He's right, he's right," Farbelman muttered to a mini-skirted white girl next to him on the stage - a millionaire dress manufacturer's daughter. "We're all guilty, and we all deserve his contempt." 

 

"I say to hell with Hannaford and his Uncle Toms, to hell with his white boss's lying schemes. What is our President, but a lousy peckerwood with a rich wife ? A damn oil-drillin', cheatin', lyin' faker. Why his rotten brothers in the Senate didn't even trust him, and he had to be censured. And now he's President !"

 

"He stole it !" a black girl called.

 

"Yeah, robbed it !" 

 

Also engaging is Mona Varnum: Soopa Soul Sistah and journalist, the object of adoration and dazed lust on the part of Eddie Deever. Mona, like Kakamba Jones, don't take no shit from whitey: 

 

"To hell with all of them," Mona said. "I know what I look like. I know the effect I have on you uptight honkies. Well, I let you try it once, get a taste of it - and then, you can all go to hell, you can all slobber over it, and maybe take it out on your white broads."

 

I finished 'The President' thinking it would be a better novel had it been 200 pages shorter, and more focused on the antics of the black characters. As a political melodrama inevitably it is dated, and I doubt that anyone under 75 years of age will grasp the satirical portrayals of the Beltway elite and their machinations, as they were in the late 1960s. This novel is for Boomers only.

The Permanent Playboy: romance and domestic life stories

Celebrating Valentine's Day 2026

  

'The Permanent Playboy' romance and domestic life stories 

edited by Ray Russell

Crown, 1959 

 

'The Permanent Playboy' was published in hardcover by Crown in 1959. It's a slipcased, 503-page book, and a reminder that as the 1950s drew to a close, Playboy magazine was a powerful entity in American popular culture. The top fiction writers and essayists of that day would submit to the magazine, as it was one of the best-selling periodicals in the country.

 

Many of the stories and the essays in this anthology illuminate the social mores governing men and women back in the era before the Sexual Revolution, and the Pill (both Enovid, the first oral contraceptive, and the Margulies Spiral IUD, were approved by the FDA in 1960). 

 

In an era when women hoping to avoid pregnancy were reliant on diaphragms, condoms, and cervical caps. An era when men seeking premarital sex had to: a. find a willing 'broad,' and b. hope she didn't get 'knocked up,' and ruin his life for ever after.

Also of anthropological value are the fashions displayed in these issues of Playboy. I had no idea that in the 1950s, it was the height of fashion for men to wear shorts accompanied by calf- or knee- length dark socks, and dress shoes. And belts were located high up on the abdomen. The mind boggles..........

So, here are my capsule summaries of the stories in 'The Permanent Playboy' that are apropos for Valentine's Day...........

 

'Beware of Hasty Marriage,' by Shepherd Mead, is an exemplar of this era. In a facetious tone, Mead enjoins young men to have lots of 'fiancees' and girlfriends, because it improves the odds that some of these may be willing to let a guy have some premarital nookie. Mead recommends forming an alliance, rather than antagonism, with a future mother-in-law; watching out for gold-diggers; and the best strategies for breaking off engagements.  

Somewhat more lyrical is 'The Goofy Girls,' by Robert Paul Smith, an homage to those girls that you should have married, but didn't.......

 

'The Mask and the Maiden,' by John Collier, is an underwhelming tale about a young woman gifted with a great figure, an appetite for intimacy, but, unfortunately, marred by a plain face. In the 1950s, those days before the use of filters in social media posts, she experiences problems in gaining male attention.  

'All Through the Night,' by Nelson Algren, is about a prostitute and her pimp who are living the high life in postwar Los Angeles. Unfortunately they're busted by the police and have to leave the city. Scraping up bail money allows them to escape to Chicago. But once in Chi-town, a withdrawal from smack takes hold. Then their supply of methadone starts to run out......This story is too overwritten to be effective.

'The Marvelous Lover' features a rarity: a female author, Joyce Engelson ! The eponymous lover is named 'Porter Dobey,' which doesn't seem promising, but the first-person female narrator is happy enough with him. The story has a lumbering quality, but it does feature a twist ending.

The romantic comedies 'I Love You, Miss Irvine,' by John Wallace, and 'Thank You, Anna,' by Bill Safire, all present male fantasies very much of their time: making it with swell dames, who aren't Saving Themselves for Marriage. 

Darker in tone is 'A Dish of Desire,' by J. P. Donleavy, which (with stilted prose) tells the tale of a woman who did Save herself, only to discover that her suitor, grown tired of waiting for her to 'come across,' has decided to end his pursuit because he's been getting nookie from other broads.

Wry observations about married life are provided by Erskine Caldwell in 'Advice About Women,' and 'The Double Cross-Up,' by T.K. Brown III (the latter tale prefigures, in some ways, Roald Dahl's classic short story 'The Great Switcheroo). 

 

'The 44 Year-Old Boy Disc Jockey and the Sincere-Type Songstress,' by Herbert Gold, strains to be comedic; it's about a middle-aged, Jewish DJ named Tad Comet who becomes infatuated with a rising pop star named Orlee Phipps. This being Playboy of the 1950s, there is a happy ending (the Young Nubile gives in). 

 

This story is illustrative of the magazine's attitude towards rock-and-roll music, during the 50s: it was kid stuff, and sensible adult men - i.e., Playboy readers - worshipped Jazz. 

A New York City, Jewish sensibility also pervades 'A Very Human Story,' by Henry Swados. Bosley Feibush, an egotistical 'Hollywood Writer,' is working on a screenplay about '...a nice colored boy named George Washington Goldstein, a 'Jewish Negro,' who marries an Eskimo, and resists being turned into a traitor by the 'commies.' It's a satire, still relevant almost 70 years after it was written, about the schlock nature of so much of Hollywood's product.

 

'A Stretch in Siberia,' by John Wallace, has as its protagonist a prick of a teen named Drake, who has been exiled by his wealthy father to a reform school (the eponymous 'Siberia'). As luck would have it, the school nurse, Ms. Phillips, is not only comely, but a nymphomaniac ! No other term could so excite the 1950s male...........

Charles Beaumont contributes 'A Classic Affair,' is about a man who appears to be Straying. But the object of his affection is not what you think......

So there you have it; some humor, some pathos, some good times, some bad times. From those days when romance and relationships were a bit different from what they are today, 70 years later.......