Reading Playboy for the Articles: April 1972

My wife, Lisa, has acquired a large collection of vintage Playboy magazines. I'm flipping through those issues that catch my attention and offering my thoughts on the non-photographic content that filled its pages. You know, the articles.

Highlights: Man, I don't know how this could ever be a highlight but what immediately jumped out at me--on the inside front cover, no less--was a Smirnoff ad that threw serious shade at classic gin martinis and made the cringe-inducing argument that vodka and peppermint schnapps makes for the only drinkable martini. I mean, I knew the cocktail dark ages began in the 1970s but I had no idea they happened this early, this aggressively and this egregiously. Look, I've made no secret of my belief that vodka only exists for those souls who want to get shitfaced as quickly as possible but don't want to taste themselves doing so. James Bond be damned, a vodka martini isn't a real martini. And for those chumps who look

down their nose at vermouth as something that only ruins otherwise good spirits, I say: vermouth is an aromatized, fortified wine! It is not shelf stable! You have to refrigerate it, dipshit. If you don't, of course it's going to taste like garbage! I mean, my first 1970s issue is not starting off on the right foot, is it?

But of course it gets better. And by better, I mean much, much worse. A few pages later I was struck by this eyesore of an ad:

I mean, sure, all my life I've heard how the 1970s were a fahion trainwreck where poor decisions intersected bad taste on an epic scale. I mean, the first decade of my life was spent living through this decade. But something repeated so reflexively begins to take on an air of cliche, to the point where one is tempted to soften condemnation a bit. Maybe it wasn't that bad. Nope. With a single ad H.I.S. Jeans and Western Shirts confirms everything that's bad about 70s fashion. And just to underscore this isn't a one-off, there are a couple other ads in the issue that underscore unfortunate fashion trends, plus there's an actual article, "Playboy's Spring & Summer Fashion Forecast," that showcases even more egregious fashion faux pases with the indication this is what all the self-respecting lemmings will be wearing the coming season. For the record, at least one male model in the spread looks downright angry at getting stuck wearing a knit wife-beater with embroidered flowers on the front. Not even kidding.

As if to counter the notion that this issue consisted only as a time capsule of regrettable cultural miscues, Playboy turns around and serves up "Seven Poems by Mao Tse-Tung," translated by Nieh Hua-Ling and Paul Engle. I mean, what? The poems aren't romantic affairs by any means, but rather his musings on guerilla warfare and grim ideological determination. For instance:

Chingkang Mountain (Autumn 1928)
Below the mountain, their flags flying
High on the mountain, our bugles blowing:
A thousand circles of the enemy around us:
we still stand unmoved.

Defense is deadly, trench and wall,
the strongest fort is our will.
From Huangyangchieh cannon roar,
crying: the enemy runs away in the night.

I mean, he's no Shel Silverstein but the man certainly knows how to stay on message. It's an insightful glimpse into the man who would have a profound influence on shaping the 20th century.

There's also a Jack Nicholson interview here. He's a star in the aftermath of Easy Rider but not yet become THE Jack Nicholson. Much of the interview is consumed by discussion of taking drugs and various trips Nicholson had experienced, but the following section was interesting, in a "the more things change, the more they stay the same" sense:

Nicholson: In fact, in the first and only film I directed--Drive, He Said--I used a number of my old cronies. And I was more than pleased that I was in a position to do so.

Playboy:Why was Drive, He Said originally rated X by the Motion Picture Association of America?

Nicholson: Because it had frontal nudity and it had someone who was fucking have an orgasm. The orgasm is audible, not visible. The person says, "I'm coming." I'm convinced the rating system is 100 percent corrupt. The censors say they're protecting the family unit in America when, in fact, the reality of the censorship is if you suck a tit, you're an X, but if you cut it off with a sword, you're a GP [PG today].

Other thoughts:

Great googaly moogaly, what the hell is this gonzo monstrosity!?

The 70s were absolutely, certifiably nuts but every so often it stumbled upon something so brilliantly ahead of its time that one really has to wonder why we don't all have flying cars like the Jetsons. The bubble house is one of those things. Officially marketed as a Pneudome, a 500 square foot inflatable dome house made of polyvinyl and marked by a Los Angeles design group known as Chrysalis absolutely screams to be one of the centerpieces of a Burning Man bodypaint orgy. Preferrably one with lots of Jack Nicholson's drugs available. I can only assume from the fact that I have never, ever seen this before--despite the fact this thing looks like it is straight out of a 1970s science fiction movie--that the Pneudomes were not a tremendous success on the sales front. I have to wonder what the airflow in one of these was like, and all the furniture inside is presumably non-inflatable. The article earnestly insists that four people--two swinging couples, from the looks of it, as there are no separate bedrooms--can easily carry, inflate and pack up the globular pop-up with minimal effort. I have my doubts. AndI can't help but imagine the whole thing smelling like the inside of a beach ball. But damn, talk about being 50 years ahead of its time, I can just imagine Elon Musk ordering up a thousand of these wannabe Mars habitats for his Tesla factory town outside of Bastrop. The mind boggles.

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