Playboy March 1975

Playboy

March 1975

Let's take a stroll down memory lane to March, 1975. Frankie Valli is atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart with his single 'My Eyes Adored You.' Minnie Riperton, the mother of Saturday Night Live actress Maya Rudolph, sits at number 3 with 'Lovin' You,' while Olivia Newton-John is enjoying success with 'Have You Never Been Mellow,' a quintessential 70s 'Me Decade' song.

The latest issue of Playboy magazine is out on the stands. Its lead pictorial features the 27 year-old, up-and-coming actress Margot Kidder, who Baby Boomers will remember as portraying Lois Lane in the Superman films of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

 

In posing for the magazine, Margot is adamant that it is an act of regaining control of the discourse on the female body and its presentation to the make gaze. Or something like that.........

 

Hopefully. these pictures are of a real honest-to-God in-the-flesh fucked-up-like-everybody-else human being. At first I said no to Playboy, pleading male chauvinism. Finally I said yes in a fit of missionary zeal. I'll show them what a real body looks like, I thought to myself. I'll be brave and outrageous and get the photographer to show me in all my imperfect glory.

 

 

Later in life, Kidder struggled with addictions and mental illness. She died in 2018 (by suicide), at age 69.

During the seventies Playboy editors idolized Kris Kristofferson, seeing him as the sort of rugged individualist, 'man's man' type who could fit comfortably into the counterculture and yet also credibly represent country music, with its reactionary sensibilities. 'Just A Good Ole Rhodes Scholar,' by Jack McClintok, treats Kristofferson with veneration.

 

John Hughes contributes 'Chariots of the Clods,' a satirical treatment of Erich von Daniken and the Ancient Astronauts franchise. It's a piece that would have been more at home in the National Lampoon. Later in the decade, Hughes would indeed be a major contributor to the Lampoon, and in the 80s, a very successful feature film director (National Lampoon's Vacation, The Breakfast Club).

There are three good fiction pieces in this March issue, all of them featuring outstanding illustrations.

 

'Up Out of Zoar,' by Ben Maddow (the pen name of author and playwright David Wolffe), illustrated by Doug Gervasi, is science fiction, and provides an offbeat examination of the Last Man on Earth theme. It is superior to many of the New Wave era treatments of this theme.

Sci-fi author Norman Spinrad contributes 'Holy War on 34th Street,' which is not sci-fi, but instead, a satire about what happens on a New York City street corner when the Scientologists and Hare Krishnas decide to get confrontational. Spinrad gets the craziness of 1970s New York down pat. The illustration is by John Youssi.

 

In 'The Jail,' by Jesse Hill Ford, an abrasive, affluent, New York City Jew finds himself caught up in Southern Fried Weirdness, Tennessee-style. The illustration is by Christian Piper.

I'm glad I have this issue. Some good stuff, from the golden age of men's magazines, an era we are unlikely to see again......

Book Review: Nameless Places

Book Review: 'Nameless Places' edited by Gerald W. Page

 4 / 5 Stars

'Nameless Places' (280 pp.) was published in hardback by Arkham House in 1975. Copies of these Arkham House books are rare and costly items nowadays, but I was able to procure this one for about $20.

Gerald W. Page was active in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s as an author and editor. In the mid-70s he edited four volumes of DAW's 'The Year's Best Horror Stories,' and unsurprisingly, some of the entries in 'Nameless Places' were featured in both DAW horror and fantasy anthologies of that decade. 

In his Introduction, Page states that 'Nameless' was a showcase for newer, younger authors in the fantasy and horror genres, as such things stood in the mid-1970s. In this, it served a worthy cause, as back in those days outlets for short stories of genre fiction were few and far between. In keeping with the ethos of Arkham House, the entries all deal with either the 'macabre,' or Lovecraftian topics, or, sometimes, both.

My summaries of the contents of 'Nameless':

Glimpses, by A. A. Attanasio: an Eldritch Artifact does strange things with time and space, including bringing the unwelcome attention of an Older Deity. This novelette has an interesting premise, but is ruined by the author's stilted prose (which seems to have been inspired by the New Wave movement then in high fashion in science fiction).

 

There are a number of short (i.e., under 5 pages) stories. 'The Gods of Earth,' by Gary Myers, and 'In 'Ygiroth,' by Walter C. DeBill, Jr., are Clark Ashton Smith / Randolph Carter pastiches. 'The Night of the Unicorn,' by Thomas Burnett Swann, is a fable about the mythology of rural Mexico. 'The Warlord of Kul Satu,' by Brian Ball, is a horror story centered on an archeological expedition. 'More Things,' by G. N. Gabbard, is a clever tale about what nowadays is referred to as 'Dark Academia.'

Fables and allegories are represented by 'Businessman's Lament' and 'Botch,' by Scott Edelstein, and 'Worldsong,' by editor Page, which is mawkish and sentimental and reads as a Ray Bradbury pastiche.

 

David Drake, who in '75 was beginning to emerge as a significant contributor to the horror and fantasy short fiction markets, gets two entries: 'Awakening' features urban witchcraft, while 'Black Iron' is sword-and-sorcery.

A short tale with an emphasis on humor is 'The Stuff of Heroes,' by Bob Maurus. A grimmer entry is 'Before the Event,' by Denys Val Baker. Carl Jacobi's 'Chameleon Town' has the flavoring of a Twilight Zone episode.

Lin Carter gets to contribute two tales. 'In the Vale of Pnath' is a Clark Ashton Smith pastiche, one of the better ones that Carter has penned. A longer piece, 'Out of the Ages,' is a Mythos entry and serves as an introduction to the gods and monsters of that franchise.

I consider Robert Aickman to be a very over-rated author, and 'The Real Road to the Church' does little to change my mind. Underneath its stilted, overwritten prose is something to do with a middle-aged woman living on a vaguely Mediterranean island; the locals consider her home to be a mystical place.

One of the best entries in the anthology is the Brian Lumley tale, 'What Dark God ?' about a sinister encounter in the berth of a UK train. Also standing out is Joseph Payne Brennan's 'Forringer's Fortune,' which takes place in the sorts of dank caverns where unpleasantries abound.

 

'Walls of Yellow Clay,' by Robert E. Gilbert, mingles humor with the unworldly in a tale that could have appeared in an issue of an EC comic from the 1950s.

Ramsey Campbell, then an up-and-comer in horror fiction, gets two entries. 'The Last Hand' is about a poker game, played by a creepy group of card sharks, in a train car on the line from Liverpool to London. 'The Christmas Present' is set in Liverpool, where the first-person narrator allows an argumentative young man to join a holiday houseparty…..with unforeseen consequences. 

'In the Land of Angra Mainyu,' by Stephen Goldin, features the recurring character 'The Black Angel.' Goldin utilizes Zoroastrian mythology in this story, giving it an offbeat, imaginative character that in my opinion makes it one of the standouts in the anthology.

'Lifeguard,' by Arthur Byron Cover, is a modern ghost story.

The worst story in the anthology is 'Selene,' by pulp veteran E. Hoffman Price. Having something to do with modern-day California witches, and efforts by an unscrupulous wife to poison her husband, this story has profoundly stilted prose: at one point, Price deploys the noun (?) 'quadrupedalian.' 

 

Also failing to impress is 'Simaitha,' by David A. English, which features the sentence: The moon, for example, now moved Thestyllis like the sight of an animal vomiting, which is (possibly) the most fatuous simile I've ever read.

The verdict ? I'm OK with awarding Four of Five Stars to 'Nameless Places.' Some of that might be due to the fact that it evokes nostalgia in me, recalling a time (i.e., the 1970s) when fantasy and horror fiction still were very much in the pop culture basement, consigned to the category of 'fringe' literature. Anthologies such as this one were written to appeal to a small but devoted following, and among the baby boomers, there was a sense of community for those who pursued this stuff.

The Last Frontier

'The Last Frontier'

Interview with Beau L'Amour on Men and Reading 

'Fictional Influence' (Substack)

I periodically post here at the PorPor Books Blog on topics related to genre fiction, the state of publishing nowadays, and the dwindling participation of men as fiction readers.

Via Castalia House > the Worlds Between Wasteland and Sky blog, I've learned that over at the 'Fictional Influence' Substack, which is maintained by Kristin McTiernan, there is a lengthy interview between McTiernan and Beau L'Amour, the son of the western writer Louis L'Amour.

The interview touches on L'Amour's efforts to maintain his father's legacy by issuing new editions of selected titles, as well as unpublished novels. L'Amour must contend with perceptions by people in the publishing industry that 'men don't read.' 

Beau L'Amour has some interesting observations about how boys learn to read, and what sort of content appeals to them:

I really started reading compulsively with Lester Dent’s amazing (though today probably dated) Doc Savage series. This was considered adventure fiction for a general audience, adults and kids, in the 1930s. I read the Bantam reprints in the 1960s and 70s.

If you crossed a down-to-earth “superhero” like Ironman’s Tony Stark and injected him into the mystery, political thriller and science fiction genres, that’s pretty much who Clark Savage Jr. was. It was very male oriented, with lots of action, exploration and gadgets (Dent, along with writing hundreds of short stories and magazine novels invented telephone answering machines, garage door openers and mine detectors for the US navy). I also devoured Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, and later Larry Niven. A lot of kids of my generation read Ray Bradbury, a real poet. He might be kind of underappreciated these days … certainly he was under appreciated by us when we were youngsters.

All of this was hard hitting, fast moving, and relatively short fiction. Great stuff! Today the material for kids and young people is too careful … or too transgressive! It’s too inward looking, too slow paced, and not technical enough to really activate a boy. 

Personally, I don't have high hopes that the industry is going to make any concerted effort to engage with men. All I have to do is walk through my nearest Target store and see the shelving for books, either in the dedicated book section, or in the 'impulse buy' racks at the checkout line: titles by, and for, women. Like the novels of Sarah Maas and Rebecca Yarrow. That's where the money is.

The sci-fi novels I review here at my blog are artifacts of the popular culture as it was forty to sixty years ago, when there was no internet, no smartphones, no podcasting, and no social media. TV had maybe 15 - 30 channels, if you paid extra for 'cable.' And a video game console meant an Atari system, with 8-bit graphics rendered on your 25-inch, picture tube color TV. Nowadays, there's simply so much more content that is available at the press of a button, or a swipe across a screen...............

'So It Goes' by Nick Lowe

Stiff Records, 1976

'So It Goes' is a single, released by Nick Lowe in 1976 on the punk label Stiff Records. It later was recorded in a li be one of the tracks on Lowe's 1978 LP, Jesus of Cool (retitled Pure Pop for Now People in the USA).

 

You can listen to the Stiff Records version here. Barely 2 1/2 minutes long, but a classic of the New Wave, Punk era !

Music from the 21st Century

Music from the 21st Century

LP, GNP / Crescendo Records, 1982

 

This vinyl LP was released in 1982 by GNP Records, which was prominent at that time for issuing sci-fi related albums (such as 'Greatest Science Fiction Hits,' by Neal Norman). 

 

The album cover features a memorable illustration by Michael Whelan; they don't make 'em like that anymore.

 

You can listen to the entire LP here.

 

Intended as a "...collection of daring electronic music experiments," Music from the 21st Century "....features the most gifted futurists of the audio spectrum." In all honesty, when I sat down with the album, the only participants that I recognized were Neil Norman, and Tangerine Dream. But the liner notes on the back of the album cover provide bio sketches of all contributors.

 

As far as the music goes, the first side is a letdown. After a brief (1:50) intro track by Richard Burmer, we have a > 19 minute track from Tangerine Dream. While it starts out reasonably listenable, as the track progresses, it displays a failing common to a lot of the 'electronic' music of the early 1980s: too much rambling doodling, for a track of such length. Given the chance to contribute to this LP, Tangerine needed to deliver better material.....

 

Luckily, side two is an improvement. All the artists present music that is coherent, well-composed, and fulfills the sci-fi, futuristic vibe indicated by the LP's title. Too, it helps that these tracks are short.

Who will like Music from the 21st Century ? I'm not sure modern-day fans of electronica and techno will find all that much to get excited about; let's face it, the technology for this genre of music has advanced considerably in the past 40+ years. Nowadays, the sounds featured on 21st Century easily can be surpassed with PC software by artists who are not reliant on studio and label resources.

 

The LP best will appeal to Boomers, who remember their college years and how, if you wanted to hear electronic music on the radio, you had to tune in to the college station late on a Sunday night, when the DJ had leave to play this genre for several hours. That's how it was done, back in the early 1980s.......... 

Book Review: The Second Sleep

Book Review: 'The Second Sleep' by Robert Harris

 

4 / 5 Stars

 

'The Second Sleep' first was published in the UK in 2019 by Hutchinson. This trade paperback edition (432 pp.) was issued by Arrow Books in July, 2020. 

I usually don't post reviews of sci-fi or fantasy novels published after the early 1990s, as there are quite a few websites and blogs that cover such novels and I prefer to focus this blog on works published during the interval from the middle Sixties to the Early Nineties.

However, I was motivated to post a review of 'The Second Sleep' because it uses the theme of a technologically deracinated England struggling to emerge into a new era of enlightenment, a theme used to good advantage in some novels from the Seventies and Eighties.  I thought it interesting to see how author Harris (who has had considerable success with writing mystery novels set in ancient Rome) would handle the theme.

 

The eponymous 'second sleep' refers to the practice, by people living in the eras before artificial lighting, of briefly walking during the middle of the night, before returning once more to slumber.

 
‘The Second Sleep’ takes place in the UK, some 1,500 years after a vaguely described cataclysm that occurred in the 2020s propelled the country to a quasi-medieval level of civilization. Life is nasty, brutal, and short, and the church the sole arbiter of learning. The upper echelons of the clergy are intent on prohibiting any revivals of ancient technologies, as these are seen as challenges to the supremacy of the church. The violators of church edicts are eligible for summary prosecution, and execution, for ‘heresy.’

As the novel opens a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, is traveling to the village of Addicott, in Wessex, there to see to the funeral of the village parson, one Father Thomas Lacy. Fairfax learns that Lacy tread dangerously close to heresy, possessing forbidden books about the ancients, and prone to digging for artifacts in the middens scattered around Wessex.

 
While Fairfax is callow, he also is curious, and his inquiries into the manner of father Lacy’s passing, and the information presented in the deceased man’s collections of texts and artifacts, lead him into attitudes and beliefs that will contradict all he has been taught by the church. Fairfax makes a fateful decision to extend his stay in Addicott, and in so doing, joins a clandestine project to learn more about the ancients. A project that could earn all its participants the scaffold……

As I mentioned earlier, ‘The Second Sleep’ certainly is not the first novel to take as its topic a post-apocalyptic Britain, where the awareness of the destroyed past keeps percolating up into the consciousness of the present-day population. Edmund Cooper visited this trope in his excellent novel ‘The Cloud Walker’ (1973), Richard Cowper with his 'Road to Corlay' trilogy (1978), and Keith Roberts in his novel ‘Kiteworld’ (1985). Like those novels, ‘The Second Sleep’ focuses on the conflict between humanism and religion, and between orthodoxy and innovation.

However, while ‘The Second Sleep’ is a well-written novel, with smoothly flowing prose, it lacks the imaginative power of the novels from Cooper, Corlay, and Roberts. The plot of ‘Second Sleep’ takes its time unfolding, and is subordinate to characterization, setting, and atmosphere. And the denouement has a desultory quality. 

While I certainly wasn’t expecting Fairfax to discover a Vault, access its armory, grab some Power Armor and a Gatling Laser, and lay waste to Wessex, I was anticipating something more impactful than what occupies the last 15 pages of ‘The Second Sleep.’   

If you have the patience for a small-scale novel that unfolds at a very slow pace towards a rather underwhelming ending, then you might like ‘The Second Sleep.’ But if you want something a little livelier, you’ll want to look elsewhere.

The Eternals the Complete Collection

The Eternals: The Complete Collection

by Jack Kirby

Marvel Comics, 2022

 

In 1975 Jack Kirby quietly returned to Marvel Comics, a company he had left, with some rancor, five years previously. Kirby's efforts at DC Comics, such as 'The Demon,' 'The New Gods,' and 'OMAC,' had not brought lasting commercial success, and Kirby increasingly felt constrained by the editorial staff at DC. So, following conversations with Stan Lee, who offered Kirby the freedom to create new books at Marvel, Kirby decided to return to the company.

Lee handled Kirby's 'return of the prodigal son' with grace and consideration (something Lee's detractors have failed to acknowledge). Lee assigned Kirby to draw 'Captain America,' as well as Kirby's new title, 'The Eternals.'

'The Eternals,' which Kirby both drew and plotted, ran for 19 issues from July 1976, to January 1978, at which time Kirby, disillusioned with the comic book business, left Marvel to go work for Hanna-Barbera. 

 

'The Complete Collection,' which was published by Marvel in 2020, assembles in trade paperback format all 19 issues, plus the 1977 Eternals Annual, along with some pencil art pages, editorials, and advertisements, for a total of 400 pages.

 

Kirby took inspiration for The Eternals from the works of Erich Von Daniken and other popularizers of the 'Ancient Astronauts' theme. In Kirby's mythology, the Eternals are godlike beings created a million years ago by a race known as the Celestials. Opposing the Eternals are the Deviants, a race of monsters who dwell in the depths of the sea and inside the Earth's crust. Homo sapiens form a third humanoid type, displaying both the malevolent tendencies of the Deviants, as well as the moral and intellectual aspirations of the beneficent Eternals.

In the opening issues of the series, Kirby introduces the reader to lead characters Ikaris, an Eternal who is engineering the return of the Celestials to the Earth, and Margo Damian, a young woman who serves both as Ikaris's girlfriend, and as a sort of interlocutor between humankind and the Eternals.

As the series unfolds additional Eternals are introduced, all assisting in the fight against the machinations of the Deviants. The Celestials, depicted as beings of immense size, remain enigmatic as they appear in various places around the Earth, terrifying the populace (as well as the Deviants). 

While Kirby's artwork for The Eternals maintained his characteristic visual energy, the reality is that his writing had not advanced much at all, in terms of sophistication, during his time at DC. The dialogue and plotting in The Eternals has a simplistic, almost juvenile quality, and is markedly inferior to the caliber of writing that was commonplace in other Marvel titles of the mid-70s.

According to Sean Howe's 2012 book 'Marvel Comics: The Untold Story,' the reader mail for Kirby's titles was so relentlessly disparaging that at least one staffer admitted to fabricating letters that said favorable things about Kirby's stuff, this being the only way the letters pages could have an approbratory quality.

Also according to Howe, Kirby resisted efforts by Lee and the Marvel editorial staff to feature other Marvel universe characters in The Eternals, something Lee saw as a viable way to bring new readers to the Kirby lineup and boost circulation. 

Grudgingly, in issue 14 Kirby did include the Hulk, but it's not really the Hulk, rather, it's the 'Cosmic Hulk,' an android created by students at the 'Maryland Institute of Technology.' 

 

It's a lame storyline, with trite dialogue ("Jumpin' Jupiter -- He's a MONSTER !") and perfunctory plotting that did little to endear The Eternals to the newer generation of Marvel comic book buyers who were avidly reading 'X-Men,' and its complex plotting from Chris Claremont.

Who will want a copy of 'The Eternals: The Complete Collection' ? While Jack Kirby fans certainly will be interested in the book, I doubt modern-day comic book readers will see much in its pages that they will find appealing (particularly after the 2021 feature film based on the comics turned out to be a Woke mess that bombed at the box office). That said, I was able to find a copy of the book for under $9, so getting it is not a heavy lift for those curious about this chapter in Kirby's career.

Book Review: Hobgoblin

Book Review: 'Hobgoblin' by John Coyne

0 / 5 Stars

'Hobgoblin' was issued in 1981 in hardcover, with this Berkley Books paperback (342 pp.) published in July, 1982, with stepback cover art by Mark and Stephanie Gerber.

Author Coyne (b. 1937) published a number of horror novels in the late 1970s, and throughout the 1980s. He has a fondness for using gerunds as titles.

'Hobgoblin' refers to the fictional tabletop role-playing game (RPG) that the lead character, a tormented teen named Scott Gardiner, is obsessed with. As Grady Hendrix points out in his 2017 book 'Paperbacks from Hell,' Hobgoblin sought to capitalize on the notoriety of 'Dungeons and Dragons' in the early 1980s. 

 

Strange as it may seem to modern-day audiences, back then D&D was all over the pop culture, depicted as a pastime that suborned naive kids into practicing black magic and the dark arts. The premise of a fantasy RPG driving wholesome teens into committing acts of mayhem and depravity has a certain allure. Does 'Hobgoblin' do anything effective with this premise ? Well.......no.

'Hobgoblin' is set in the Fall of 1981. As the novel opens, Scott Gardiner and his widowed mother Barbara have taken up residence in the grand estate of Ballycastle, on the Hudson River in New York state. Ballycastle is an impressive monument to egomania. Originally a castle in Ireland, in the 1920s it was dismantled stone by stone, shipped across the Atlantic, and re-erected on the grounds of property owned by an eccentric Irish-born magnate named Fergus O'Cuileannain. A foundation operates Ballycastle as a tourist attraction, and has hired Barbara to be the archivist for the estate.

Scott is a prick, and a fuckup. He's self-centered, arrogant, a mamma's boy, prone to self-pity, has attempted suicide several times, and is preoccupied with Hobgoblin to the point where he interprets the world through the lens of the game; people are judged based on their resemblances to characters from Hobgoblin. In his own mind, Scott sees himself as the ancient Irish hero Brian Boru, his avatar in the game, and Gardiner's real-world struggles are echoes of those Boru has faced in sessions of Hobgoblin.

Nothing of consequence takes place in the first 300 pages of 'Hobgoblin'. Author Coyne is determined to stuff as much padding into the narrative as he possibly can. We get lengthy passages describing the emotional conflicts between Scott and Barbara; Scott's (improbable) romance with his high school classmate, Valerie Dunn; Scott's bullying at the hands of some troglodyte football players; and Barbara's burgeoning romance with the foundation's director, Derek Brennan. There is considerable exposition on the gameplay mechanics of Hobgoblin and RPGs in general (Coyne at one point alludes to TSR founders Gary Gygax and Dave Arenson). 

There are all sorts of Ambiguously Spooky Phenomena, associated with what may have been devil-worshipping conducted on the grounds of Ballycastle by O'Cuileannain, popping up now and then to impart a feeble momentum to the narrative.

'Hobgoblin' could have redeemed itself by providing a worthy climax, but the final 40 pages read like a really bad script for a Slasher film: it seems that Scott has persuaded his teachers to allow the high school kids to have a Hobgoblin cosplay party at the castle ! Contrivances are so plentiful that they completely negate the author's efforts to impart a sense of horror and dread to the proceedings.

The verdict ? 'Hobgoblin' is one of greatest duds of the Paperbacks from Hell era, and deserving of a Zero Stars score.

The Story of the Stepback Cover

The Story of the Stepback Cover

Over at the 'Sweet Savage Flame' blog devoted to vintage paperback romance novels, an interesting series of articles about the stepback cover, a major artistic and marketing feature of old school books. Lots of pics from not just the romance genre, but Paperbacks from Hell, too !

Penthouse March 1977

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