Tag: writers

The Wit And Wisdom …

Everybody has that one friend who is just one step faster, funnier and wittier than everybody else.  These are the people who turn ordinary conversations into playgrounds.  For example:

If you don’t like somebody, lend them $100.00 — you’ll never see them again.

Life is short; smile while you still have teeth.

The human body is 60% water — so we’re actually all just cucumbers with anxiety.

At times, I’m grateful my thoughts don’t appear as bubbles over my head.

Whenever you do something stupid, remember there are tons of people still wandering around looking for Pokemon.

I wish everything was as easy as getting fat.

I never finish anyth…..

I’m taking care of my procrastination problems: just you wait and see.

I have neither the time nor the crayons to explain this to you.

You think I’m crazy now?  Wait until I get out of this strait-jacket.

Sometimes, I look up at the stars and think, “Wow! I love peeing outside.”

When asked to guess anybody’s “spirit animal,” I always say “jackass.”  Making friends is hard.

Being out of your mind is between you and your mind.

People who judge other people always have job security.

Somebody else’s therapist knows all about you.

When I was younger, I felt like a man trapped in the body of a woman.  Then I was born.

I’m so horny I’m going to buy a plane ticket — just to get the airport security pat down.

The cost of living has gotten so high that my wife has started to have sex with me because she can’t afford batteries.

Sex is like cooking: everybody can do it, but only the very few make it delicious.

(Thanks, Marty!)baby

Bob Dylan — Nobel Laureate?

Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I’m not sure what to think about this.  It’s difficult for me to be objective about Bob Dylan.  So much stuff gets in the road.  I remember Bob when he and I were both kids, so there’s a lot of old man nostalgia going on — and my hindsight isn’t even close to 20/20.  I’m not suggesting he shouldn’t have won  — poetry shouldn’t be confined to the rhyming couplet and the quill pen.  Singer/songwriters are still writers, after all, and of all the Rod McKuens, Leonard Cohens and Joni Mitchells my generation produced, no one deserves a Nobel Prize more than Bob Dylan.  But I can’t help thinking that if he’d been toiling away with pen and paper instead of guitar and harmonica — well — regardless of how good Bob Dylan really is, I’m not sure The Swedish Academy would have come calling.

But here is the music with the lyrics — you decide.  And then I’ll let Joan Baez speak for me because, like her, if the Nobel Prize people are offering me nostalgia — I’ve already paid.

 

Playboy Changed The World

vargasNow that Playboy magazine has renounced nudity, it’s become an easy target — a misogynist relic of the 20th century — more silicon than substance.  Perhaps.  I don’t know.   Like most people, I don’t actually read Playboy anymore, so I’m in no position to judge.  However, I do know this.  If you’re over 35 and not dead, you’re part of the massive impact Playboy has on our society.

Take a look:

The Playboy Interviews read like a history book of our times:

Malcolm X, Jimmy Hoffa, Federico Fellini, Fidel Castro, Orson Welles, Ralph Nader, Marshall McLuhan, Ray Charles, Germaine Greer, Tennessee Williams, Jimmy Carter, Barbara Streisand, David Frost, Marlon Brando, G. Gordon Liddy, Lech Walesa, Ansel Adams, Jesse Jackson, Carl Bernstein, Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, Yasser Arafat, Donald Trump, Martin Scorsese, Michael Jordan, Salman Rushdie and on and on and on.

In one single year, 1964, Playboy interviewed Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand, Jean Genet, Ingmar Bergman and Salvador Dali.  And Playboy didn’t just follow what was trending; it tried to understand.  It interviewed Martin Luther King Jr. at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in 1965; Timothy Leary, when mainstream drug use was a brand new phenom in ’66 and Steve Jobs, immediately after getting booted out of Apple in 1985.  Plus, Playboy took some chances, like sending Alex Haley, the author of Roots, to interview George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party.

Yes, Alex Haley wrote for Playboy and so did Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson and Gore Vidal.  There were others too, but the list of fiction writers is even more overwhelming:

Joseph Heller, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Ray Bradbury, Bharati Mukherjee, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Ursula Le Guin, Martin Amis and, once again, on and on — including four Nobel Prize winners: Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Doris Lessing.

In fact, if it wasn’t for the boobs, Playboy would be considered a literary magazine — one of the best.

But what about those boobs?

Some of the most beautiful women in the world have voluntarily taken their clothes off for Playboy:

Farrah Fawcett, Olivia Munn, Robin Givens, Katarina Witt, Ursula Andress, Tia Carrere, Kim Basinger, Elle Macpherson, Kate Moss, Catherine Deneuve, Shari Belafonte and Raquel Welch among many, many others.  The numbers alone take Playboy pictorials beyond sleazy.  Besides, is there any great distance between Charlize Theron and Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” or Naomi Campbell and Goya’s “The Nude Maja?”  Argue all you want about objectifying women, but if you want a lesson in that go to the pages of Vogue or Fashion or Harper’s Bazaar.  Rhetorically speaking, is a pouting, uber-skinny supermodel a more acceptable female image?  Or is it just that she’s covered up their naughty bits?

At 62, Playboy magazine is old and grey and nodding by the fire.  In a one-click universe where the most outrageous porno is at your fingertips and few people are willing to wade through serious pages of unbroken prose, Playboy is passé.  Eventually, it will dissolve into history — the history it helped shape.  Like it or not, Playboy changed the world — no doubt.  But, mostly, it let us be adults about sex and it single-handedly transformed sexuality from Downtown smut to Uptown sophistication.  It made smart sexy, and that’s what made Playboy cool.