Director, who has been in Poland to shoot a new film, faces extradition to the US over his 1977 child sex crime conviction
Roman Polanski is due in a Polish court on Friday at a hearing to consider a US extradition request over his child sex crime conviction.
The Oscar-winning director pleaded guilty in 1977 to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl during a photo shoot in Los Angeles fuelled by champagne and drugs.
He served 42 days in jail as part of a 90-day plea bargain, but fled the country for France the following year, believing that the judge hearing his case could overrule the deal and impose a longer prison sentence.
Polanski has been in Poland to shoot a new drama about the Dreyfus affair, based on a novel by Robert Harris. The 82-year-old was born in France but grew up in Poland and holds dual nationality.
While French law forbids extradition of its citizens, Polish law does not, and Polanksi’s lawyers had been trying to strike a deal giving him immunity from legal action while he shot in the southern city of Krakow.
The leader of Poland’s newly elected Law and Justice party, Jarosław Kaczyński, recently suggested that there will be no leniency for the director . “There was open talk that he should not be made responsible for his deeds because he is an outstanding, world-famous film-maker. We will totally reject this attitude,” he said.
Polanski previously appeared in Polish court in February . The judge presiding over that case said the court could not make a ruling because it still had to consider extra documents submitted by Polanski’s lawyers.
Under Polish law, if the court rules in favour of the extradition request, it will then be passed on to the justice minister who will make the final decision on whether to hand Polanski over to the US authorities.
In 2009, Polanski was arrested in Zurich on a US warrant and placed under house arrest. He was freed in 2010 after Swiss authorities decided not to extradite him.
Since fleeing the US in 1978, Polanski has won an Oscar for The Pianist. His most recent film, Venus in Fur, was released in 2013.
A post on Twitter by user Damito Jo (@kiaspeakes) showed on Thursday how the violent incident at Spring Valley High School -- in which an white "school safety" officer brutalized a teenage black girl -- could have gone differently.
"A former co-worker just shared this," wrote Damita Jo. "This is how good teachers respond to what happened at #springvalleyhigh."
The post said:
About 90 minutes ago, I was observed by my principal. A student had his phone out, I asked him quietly to put it away. He told me he couldn't. I immediately thought about "the situation." I asked him if he was ok, he told me no and burst into tears. He walked out of the room, I contemplated following him. I was being observed after all. I followed my heart though. The young man's brother was killed last night. I told him to write me a letter and express all his pain and use whatever words he wanted to express. He did it and I wrote back. It took me two minutes. When he walked out today, he said "I love you, Mrs. Turner-Swift. Thanks for listening to me." I really only gave him maybe five minutes of my time. That's all he needed; that's why I teach!
The new American politics was showcased in tonight’s Republican debate.
It’s a political landscape where Twitter may have as much impact than endorsements, and experience is no way to win support.
US politics has long been the triumph of image over content, the domain of celebrity. Today, celebrity is created by reality TV and social media followers, not television news.
The old school media form was a well-edited attack ad, featuring grainy photos, bold text captions and a gravel-voiced announcer.
Today it’s talking heads, Facebook statuses and retweets.
This was supposed to be the era of the Super PAC, but it’s become the moment of basic cable and user-generated content.
Debate audiences for the first two GOP debates and the first Democratic debate were in the tens of millions. The audience numbers for the CNBC debate were likely slightly less thanks to the World Series going on at the same time, but they were still substantial.
What are all these people looking at?
Talk radio with pictures
CNBC offered anti-television as if it was hosting a talk radio program.
The backdrop featured only its logo. Every shot was a head-and-torso picture of the person speaking, with only an occasional mid-range shot for variety. No compelling visuals were offered, unlike in the second GOP debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential library that featured an Air Force One plane as a compelling backdrop.
What was happening on TV may have been eclipsed by what was happening simultaneously on smart phones and tablets. Many viewers now follow live TV events on Twitter. Donald Trump has 4.7 million Twitter followers – up from just 3.2 million a few weeks ago. Rubio and Carson are at around 900,000, while establishment hero Jeb Bush dawdles at 350,000 followers.
Compare Trump’s huge reach online with the 131,000 daily viewership of CNBC, the business channel hosting the debate, and it seems a new media model has emerged for political campaigns.
Trump’s confrontational rudeness works in 140 characters: education policy is harder to condense.
But old media is not yet done. Club for Growth attack ads in Iowa have been effective in knocking down some of Trump’s poll leads.
The bad news for the party establishment: all the lost support went to Ben Carson, another so-called ‘outsider’ with a net worth of $30 million.
This inside out pattern dominated all night.
Millionaires emoted about poverty, working people, student debt and Medicare. Being the son of a bartender, like Marco Rubio, beats being the child of a president, like Bush.
This third GOP debate was reality TV with exaggerated characters speaking prepared lines as if speaking ad lib. No one thinks they are saying anything other than what they hope will create an advantage for them. Republicans have set up their nomination process as a low-budget hybrid of The Bachelor/ette and Big Brother with the ethics of Survivor.
The only unaccustomed sight was that of Ben Carson, an African-American, at the center of the stage. For a party that has flirted with racism in its hostility to President Obama, Carson is the acceptable “mild-mannered” face of black culture. His was one of few African-American faces visible all evening.
Whoever the horse-race commentators and polls deem to have won, the upside down, inside out dynamic of this election came out on top. That much was plain to see Wednesday night.
In a second live public interview with novelist Marilynne Robinson, the US premier says fiction helps us to find truth in a complex world
Barack Obama has said that novels taught him “the most important” things he has learned about being a citizen.
Interviewing Marilynne Robinson in the second instalment of a two-part interview for the New York Review of Books ( also available as audio ), the American president asked the author if she was worried about people not reading novels anymore, as they are “overwhelmed by flashier ways to pass the time”. For himself, Obama said, “when I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels”.
“It has to do with empathy,” Obama told Robinson in a conversation which is published in the 19 November issue of the New York Review of Books. “It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of greys, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.”
Last November, Obama visited an independent Washington DC bookshop, Politics and Prose, where he bought novels including Richard Flanagan’s Booker winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.
Robinson, whose novel Gilead won her the Pulitzer prize and Home, which won the Orange , told the president that “literature at present is full to bursting”, and while “no book can sell in that way that Gone with the Wind sold”, there is “an incredible variety of voices in contemporary writing”.
“You know people say, is there an American tradition surviving in literature, and yes, our tradition is the incredible variety of voices,” she said.
Obama responded that it isn’t that Americans don’t read; “It’s that everybody is reading [in] their niche, and so often, at least in the media, they’re reading stuff that reinforces their existing point of view. And so you don’t have that phenomenon of ‘here’s a set of great books that everybody is familiar with and everybody is talking about’.”
Television shows can “fill that void”, he felt, but “we don’t have a lot of common reference points”. And in a world where a premium is placed “on the sensational and the most outrageous or a conflict as a way of getting attention and breaking through the noise”, a “pessimism about the country” develops.
“Because all those quiet, sturdy voices that we were talking about at the beginning, they’re not heard,” said Obama. “It’s not interesting to hear a story about some good people in some quiet place that did something sensible and figured out how to get along.”
The first part of the conversation between Obama and Robinson, which took place in September in Des Moines, Iowa, was published two weeks ago .
Outspoken rock legend Roger Waters has voiced concern that Hillary Clinton is too hawkish, quipping that she might use nuclear weapons if elected president.
Waters, the former Pink Floyd member best known for the classic album "The Wall," said he is supporting liberal insurgent Bernie Sanders as he challenges Clinton for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
"I have an awful worry that she might become the first woman president (only) to drop a fucking nuclear bomb on somebody," Waters told Rolling Stone magazine in an interview released Monday.
"There is something scarily hawkish about her," he said.
But he said that Clinton was a better choice than Republican contenders "by a long, long way."
Waters, who recently released a new film version of "The Wall," lives in New York but is a British national and cannot vote in the United States.
Clinton has often been described as more willing to support military options than President Barack Obama, especially in Syria's civil war.
The former secretary of state enjoys support from plenty of stars, with pop queen Katy Perry singing for her Saturday, although Sanders has amassed endorsements among folk veterans and indie rockers.
Waters is known for his strident condemnation of the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians, frequently leading to criticism of him among the Jewish state's defenders.
Playboy’s decision earlier this month to jettison the nude images in its print edition lays bare the magazine’s own naked truth: it was always really a lifestyle magazine, with nudes simply acting as window dressing.
If it seems counterintuitive for a quasi-smut mag to renounce its own seeming raison d'etre, it’s important to remember that the magazine, since its inception, always held itself at a distance from the world of pornography.
The aspiration of Hugh Hefner’s project was cultural legitimacy – not a globally recognized logo (today, more profitable than the magazine itself), nor the cultivation of a “girl next door” image.
The magazine – at least, how it presented itself – was simply too classy to be confused for porn.
Look no further than Playboy’s debut issue, which featured Marilyn Monroe on the cover.
Its famous opening manifesto announced: “If you’re a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you.” Their “articles, fiction, picture stories, cartoons, humor” would all be culled to “form a pleasure-primer styled to the masculine taste.”
Before Playboy, other magazines did feature nude photos, but they were seen as culturally lowbrow: tawdry publications for unsophisticated readers. Other magazines, most notably Esquire, would position scantily clad women next to articles on food, style and other central features of the developing consumer culture, but not quite as boldly as Hefner’s iconic centerfolds.
Still, Playboy treated its own nudity as playful and passé. While it did occupy the “centerfold,” it was packaged as simply another accoutrement of the modern man’s cultural repertoire, which included knowledge of proper cocktail proportions and the finer points of the Miles Davis discography.
The crusade against smut
Playboy’s debut came just one year before America’s moral panic over smut came to a head.
The House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials led the charge with a December 1952 report that highlighted “cheesecake” and “girlie” magazines, crime comics for children and, particularly, the burgeoning genre of lesbian pulp fiction novels, which – as the committee wrote in prose befitting its own targets – were “filled with sordid, filthy statements based upon sexual deviations and perversions.”
Yet even in the midst of this frenzied postwar moral righteousness, Playboy eased comfortably into the mainstream.
A few years later, when Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver launched his own anti-porn crusade, Playboy remained conspicuously absent from the hearings, which drew headlines like The New York Times' “Smut Held Cause of Delinquency.”
Possessing presidential aspirations (and finely attuned to the optics of media spectacle, having pioneered televised hearings in his earlier investigations of organized crime), Kefauver decided against subpoenaing Hefner.
Instead, he tacitly pandered to anti-Semitic sentiment by forcefully grilling a predominantly Jewish group of erotic distributors. The white-bread Hefner remained above the fray while smut peddlers like Abraham Rubin, Edward Mishkin and Samuel Roth reluctantly testified before Congress. (Roth would suffer the most, spending five years in federal prison for distributing material not substantially different from Hefner’s. His case also led to the 1957 Supreme Court precedent that still undergirds modern obscenity law.)
‘Skirting’ trouble
If Playboy emerged remarkably unscathed from these sexual-political skirmishes, Hefner nonetheless stayed perpetually cautious, calibrating the magazine to fit shifting contexts.
The pubic hair battles with Penthouse in the early 1970s – when Playboy started publishing more graphic images to compete in the expanding adult market – are most famous. But less remembered are earlier adjustments Hefner made to dissociate Playboy from cultural riffraff.
When Time covered the “horde of [Playboy] imitators yipping after pay dirt” in April 1957, it noted that new nude magazines like Caper, Nugget and Rogue were outpacing Playboy in “the smirk, the leer, and the female torso.”
Yet rather going skin-for-skin with its competitors, Playboy tried to distinguish itself through topnotch fiction and journalism (as well as science fiction, as PhD candidate Jordan Carroll notes in his recent study of the magazine).
According to Time, Playboy ultimately found that the most “effective censor was success”; in response to growing readership and ad revenue, the magazine “toned down its gags and dressed up its girls.”
Indeed, in one striking 1962 letter sent to Hefner by a suburban Chicago chapter of the conservative Citizens for Decent Literature, the group happily informed him that that it had decided not to include Playboy among its list of 37 magazines that should be removed from local newsstands.
Later, in the 1970s, Playboy would attempt to compete with the more graphic pornography unleashed by the sexual revolution and the weakening of obscenity laws. More recently, it has reshaped its content to adhere to the strict regulations of social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, which forbid users from posting female (but not male) nipples.
Clearly, 2015 is not the first time Playboy has switched up its strategy to respond to market forces.
The bunny supplants the girl next door
If Hefner’s erotic vision was quaint enough to pass muster even with some conservatives in the early 1960s, today it’s as retrograde as Don Draper. As Washington Post columnist Mireille Miller-Young observes, today’s girl next door isn’t uniformly white, thin, heterosexual and presented with a smarmy editorial voice. Instead, she could be a queer woman of color. She might even be publishing her own porn.
While the magazine once walked a tightrope between smut and sophistication, branding always remained Playboy’s real strength.
Today, 40% of its revenue comes from China – where the magazine itself isn’t even sold. Instead, a recognizable bunny logo that appears on products ranging from cigarette lighters to coffee mugs is what persists.
With limitless free online nudity a click away, the cash flow resides in a licensed logo that represents an upwardly mobile, urban lifestyle – much like it always did.
Two more women came forward in New York Friday to accuse disgraced US comedian Bill Cosby of rape and sexual assault, as a celebrity lawyer warned there were more to come.
More than 50 women have already publicly claimed abuse at the hands of the pioneering African-American comedian who played a beloved family doctor on hit 1980s sitcom "The Cosby Show."
Cosby's attorneys repeatedly deny any wrongdoing by the 78-year-old comedian, who has gone from megastar to pariah over allegations of sexual misconduct spanning four decades.
A woman who gave her name only as Dottye said she was an aspiring actress in 1984 when she auditioned for Cosby at his New York home one evening when she was 30-years-old.
She said he pressed a drink into her hands to calm her nerves. She took a few sips and remembered him saying: "Relax, we are going to do an exercise" and spinning her around the room.
"Once he stopped spinning me, I was dizzy and disoriented, and sick. Within seconds I began to vomit all over myself and his rug," she told the news conference.
Cosby removed her clothes and took her upstairs to wash her in a bathroom, before raping her in a hallway, she said.
"He leaned me against the chest, raised my robe, and raped me. Next Cosby took me... into the dining room, and laid me on the floor where he continued his assault," she said.
"I couldn't believe the man I respected as an actor and educator was doing this to me. I couldn't understand why I could not, did not, fight him off," she added.
- No one knew what to do -
Despite her alleged ordeal, Dottye accepted his invitation to watch a taping of "The Cosby Show," going to the studio for at least a season saying that as an actress she wanted to learn.
She showed reporters a "Cosby Show" jacket, meant only for members of the cast and crew, which she said Cosby had made with her name embroidered on the front.
Donna Barrett, dressed in a green jacket and pale green scarf, said she met Cosby in April 2004 at an international track meet at the University of Pennsylvania.
As she posed for a photograph with her team, she said Cosby grabbed her from behind, forcefully pulling her backside into his private parts.
She held up a copy of the photograph showing Cosby wrapping his arms around her from behind.
"He had me locked down against his body without my consent or desire," she said. She said she complained to officials, but that "no one knew what to do."
Celebrity attorney Gloria Allred said more alleged victims were also preparing to go public against Cosby.
Allred represents many of the women, who often tell remarkably similar stories of being drugged and sexually assaulted or raped.
In a lurid 2005 court deposition, Cosby admitted obtaining Quaaludes to have sex with at least one woman, obtaining seven prescriptions for the sedative and giving them to other people.
A California judge this month refused to throw out a lawsuit filed by a woman who claims Cosby sexually assaulted her when she was 15, denying it would stop him having a fair trial.
A Fox News guest terrorism analyst pleaded not guilty on Friday to U.S. charges that he falsely claimed to have been a CIA agent for decades, federal prosecutors said.
Wayne Simmons, 62, of Annapolis, Maryland, entered the plea in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, a Washington suburb, the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a statement.
Trial was set for Feb. 23. The Speedy Trial Act was waived because Judge T.S. Ellis III found the case "unusual and complex," the statement said.
Simmons had appeared on Fox News, the top-ranked U.S. cable television news network, as an unpaid guest analyst on terrorism since 2002.
A grand jury indicted him last week for portraying himself as an "Outside Paramilitary Special Operations Officer" for the CIA from 1973 to 2000. The indictment said Simmons allegedly tried to use that claim to get government security clearances and work as a defense contractor. At one point he was deployed overseas as an intelligence adviser to senior military officers. He faces charges of major fraud against the United States, wire fraud and making false statements to the government. A federal judge has ordered Simmons held in jail, citing arrests for driving under the influence and assault and firearms convictions.
The prosecutors' statement said Simmons' lawyer, public defender Whitney Minter, was seeking a top secret clearance.
(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
"Sesame Street" is introducing a new Muppet character who has autism -- and some anti-vaxxers are furious.
"The rollout of autistic Julia is Sesame Street's attempt to 'normalize' vaccine injuries and depict those victimized by vaccines as happy, 'amazing' children rather than admitting the truth that vaccines cause autism in some children and we should therefore make vaccines safer and less frequent to save those children from a lifetime of neurological damage," wrote Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, of Natural News.
While many parents, physicians and educators hailed the character's introduction, some critics have complained that Julia is a girl -- although boys are far more likely to have autism -- or pointed out that her autism is relatively moderate.
Adams, however, described the character as "yet another sickening example of the absolute mental derangement of modern society."
Most anti-vaccine advocates believe vaccines cause autism, although numerous scientific studies have debunked that theory and the Centers for Disease Control recommends vaccines as safe.
But Adams and other anti-vaxxers appear to be blaming the victims of what they see as a conspiracy between the government and pharmaceutical companies.
"I'm so glad I'm not the only one who thought this!! I was like why in the world is everyone celebrating this?!!" posted Lindsay Serrahn. "Normalize autism! It's not normal, it's cruel that vax companies help cause this and then it's oh this is normal."
The father of a boy with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism, pointed out that the character was intended to help other children better understand children they might meet who have autism -- but the anti-vaxxer crowd shouted him down.
"On the surface it's promoting acceptance but it's also trying to condition young children to think autism at today's rate is normal, (but) we know that is not true," posted Sarah White, who speculated Sesame Street was part of the conspiracy. "These shows are owned by networks controlled by big money. They have no boundaries. Not even what goes into our children's heads. Why do you think this is conspiratorial? It's happening."
"(It's) not (an overreaction) when you analyse (sic) their childrens' programming; intensely racist, derogatory and demeaning to white children," complained Dara McNamara.
Other anti-vaxxers complained that the character should be a black boy to be more representative of children who have autism -- and that's a point Adams, "The Health Ranger," made in his overheated style.
"In the name of 'vaccine science,' they actively altered data to eliminate the statistical link between vaccines and autism in African-American boys, thereby condemning millions of young black babies to a life of permanent neurological damage. #BlackLivesDONTmatter to the vaccine industry, it seems," Adams wrote.
He also complained that another Sesame Street character, Elmo, "has been exploited as a literal puppet by the vaccine industry" to encourage parents and children to get vaccinated for preventable diseases -- such as measles.
"They try to brush it off as a normal disease that anyone can get like flippen measles!" posted Lizette Lamprecht. "Morons!"
Autism is a developmental disorder of the brain, not a disease, and is not contagious.
Last week Playboy offered the latest example of how much times are changing in the digital age.
The pioneer of soft-core porn announced that it is no longer going to publish images of naked women, beginning in March. Before we all celebrate this as a feminist victory, we need to ask why Playboy has now decided to rebrand itself as a lifestyle magazine for young men, much like Vice and FHM, or, put another way, Cosmopolitan for men.
Playboy successfully launched porn as a viable mainstream industry, but ironically, it is now a victim of the competition it spawned. The industry has evolved from soft-core magazines to hard-core internet platforms, and Playboy’s old advertising-based business model became obsolete. Playboy simply cannot compete in the world of contemporary porn because its pin-up style pictures look boring, bland and, yes, antiquated, next to the hard-core and cruel images that are now mainstream on the internet.
Playboy is your father’s porn, with young, naked, mostly white, airbrushed women smiling coyly at the camera as they frolic on a beach or a meadow. Today’s average porn user – typically male – would most likely die of boredom before he got to the centerfold, given the intensity, violence and brutality of acts that he has become so accustomed to as he clicks his way through pornhub.com or youporn.com.
As academics, we have studied porn for many years as a cultural and business phenomenon that shapes our society in deep and insidious ways, with negative impacts on gender equality and public health. We’ve also brought our expertise to bear in advocacy and legal struggles.
Our analysis of the evolution of the porn industry suggests that Playboy’s move really represents the triumph of mainstream porn and not a victory for women.
Winning the battle, losing the war?
That the magazine opened the way for more hardcore porn is not lost on Playboy executives, who told The New York Times that Playboy’s goal of making porn part of mainstream media culture is a “battle” that “has been fought and won.” Anyone familiar with this history of Playboy will know that using the word battle is not overkill.
Playboy had to fight many battles to survive.
First with the right wing, who wanted to shutter the magazine because of its supposed moral bankruptcy and threat to the heterosexual family. Also opposed to Playboy were feminists, who saw the images as sexist and degrading, and organized numerous protests against the magazine. However, the biggest challenge of all was the need to attract advertising dollars from big name companies who, in the conservative 1950s, were squeamish about placing ads for their products next to what was then considered scandalous pictures of semi-nude women. How quaint.
Playboy eventually won these battles and became one of the most successful and profitable magazines in the history of publishing. However, to stay that way, Playboy had to negotiate a very careful balancing act between the need to attract advertising from businesses and marketing agencies with clear policies proscribing explicit images, while simultaneously building circulation by keeping readers interested in the sexual content.
It was this built-in conflict that eventually led to Playboy’s downfall – and US$3 million in annual losses – and explains why it has given up competing in the porn market, which has increasingly become something Hugh Hefner wouldn’t recognize when he founded the magazine in 1953.
Selling a lifestyle (and nudes)
Hefner was a brilliant businessman who understood that the only way to sell porn in the 1950s and also attract advertising dollars was to wrap the magazine in the cloak of upper middle-class respectability. In the first issue of Playboy, Hefner told his readers:
We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors-d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, Jazz, Sex.
The markers of upper-class life were an attempt to avoid the sleaze factor that had previously been associated with porn. The articles, interviews and stories were needed as a cover during the early days of Playboy because porn use was stigmatized as low-class.
Playboy spent much of its early years crafting a magazine that taught upwardly mobile white men what clothes to wear, what furniture to buy for the office, what food to cook and, most importantly, how this consumption would attract the real prize: lots of women, just like the ones in the centerfolds.
Playboy thus not only commodified sexuality, it also sexualized commodities. Hefner revealed this strategy of sexualizing consumption when he explained:
Playboy is a combination of sex … and status … the sex actually includes not only the Playmate and the cartoons and the jokes which describe boy-girl situations, but goes right down in all the service features.
Hefner, by sexualizing consumption, provided an extremely hospitable environment for advertisers looking to expand in the post-war boom. By the end of 1955, advertisers had overcome their initial fear of advertising in a “men’s entertainment” magazine and were, according to author Thomas Weyr, “clamoring to buy.”
A rabbit hunter emerges
Ironically, it was in 1969 that Playboy came up against its first real competitor, Penthouse, and in the struggle it learned lessons that help explain why it has been forced to rebrand today.
In the summer of 1969, full-page ads appeared in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times showing the Playboy bunny caught in the cross-hairs of a rifle. The caption read, “We’re going rabbit hunting.”
Robert Guccione, editor-publisher of Penthouse magazine, aimed to compete with Playboy by emulating its format of having both a literary and service side, while making the pictorials more sexually explicit. He did this by foregoing advertising revenue in the short term, planning to draw in the advertisers after he had put Playboy out of business. In a March 1970 Newsweek article on Penthouse, Guccione is quoted as saying:
I’m not coming to America to be number No 2 … in five years, Playboy and Penthouse will be locked in a toe-to-toe competition.
At first Hefner ignored Penthouse, seeing it as a poor imitator of his magazine, but by the end of 1970, Penthouse’s circulation had reached 1.5 million, and Hefner decided that it was time to go to war by making his centerfolds more sexually explicit.
In August 1971, Penthouse carried its first full-frontal centerfold, and, in January 1972, Playboy did the same.
The change in policy was successful: by September 1972, Playboy’s circulation had risen to 7 million, but the magazine’s advertisers were beginning to complain about the explicit nature of the pictorials, and high-level executives had to fly to New York to placate them.
Eventually, due to the outside pressure of advertisers, internal battles with editors and the appearance of other competitors such as Gallery and Hustler, which captured the hard-core market, Hefner capitulated to Penthouse, sending a memo to all the department editors informing them that Playboy would cease to cater to “hard-core” readers. He would instead return to its previous standards.
Circulation figures from the nineties suggest that Hefner made the right decision. In 1995, Playboy had a monthly circulation of nearly 3.5 million while Penthouse reported just over 1 million. Playboy still had no real competitor as it successfully dominated the market for a respectable soft-core magazine.
Penthouse, on the other hand, positioned itself between soft-core Playboy and increasingly hard-core Hustler – not the best move from a competitive standpoint. It couldn’t attract the writers or interview subjects that provided Playboy with its markers of respectability and thus strong advertising revenues, nor could it risk offending the advertisers it already had by emulating the content of more hard-core magazines to grow subscribers.
Ironically, 20 years later this is exactly where Playboy now finds itself, in a world where internet porn has become far more violent and abusive than Penthouse and even Hustler.
To keep its image as a magazine for the well-heeled male, Playboy needs to continue to wrap itself in upper-class trappings, but were it to compete with mainstream internet porn, every advertiser would flee.
To give a sense of just how cruel and violent this porn has become, psychologist Ana Bridges and her team at the University of Arkansas found that a majority of scenes from 50 of the top-rented porn movies contained both physical and verbal abuse targeted against the female performers. And 90% of scenes contained at least one aggressive act if both physical and verbal aggression were combined.
Modern porn bids farewell to the girl next door
And that’s why Playboy’s “girl next door” had to go, because it couldn’t compete with the growing misogyny and explicitness of modern mainstream porn, in which a so-called “bitch” or “slut” supposedly prefers being gagged with a penis to gazing at the camera provocatively as she picks flowers in the nude.
The new denuded Playboy is still aiming for the higher-end male, according to Scott Flanders, Playboy’s chief executive, who describes how his target audience differs from other men’s lifestyle magazines by being “the guy with a job.”
Whether this rebranding will work remains to be seen.
That’s because as Playboy was working hard to keep its advertisers happy by staying soft core, another company came in and made a killing by vacuuming up the hardcore porn market. That little-known company has played a dramatic role in reshaping the entire business strategy of porn for the internet age. Originally called Manwin, this Luxembourg-based company (renamed MindGeek in 2013 after CEO Fabian Thylmann stepped down following his arrest on charges of tax evasion) advertises itself as driving “the state of technology forward, developing industry-leading solutions enabling faster, more efficient delivery of content every second to millions of customers worldwide.”
That bland description masks the fact that this company is the biggest distributor of porn in the world. However, according to an article on the website therichest.com, MindGeek is “hands down” the world’s top distributor of porn, owning most of the biggest players, from Reality Kings (38 sites) to Brazzers (35 sites).
Brave new world of porn
MindGeek has revolutionized the business model and doesn’t have to worry about alienating advertisers.
Playboy will now try to compete more directly with other men’s lifestyle magazines and needs advertising related to content around fashion, health and gadgets. MindGeek, by contrast, makes money from a sophisticated system that relies on payment for click-throughs from free content with ads for webcams and “dating” services to subscription services.
The free porn sites have so much traffic – more than 100 million visitors a day – that dominant companies can monetize the digital real estate without relying on conventional advertisers. MindGeek operates like a lead company in a global value chain, consolidating vast amounts of content produced by subcontractors and circulating users around its system of linked sites.
Feras Antoon, CEO of Brazzers, told New York Magazine that free porn sites have so “vastly enlarged the total universe of porn consumers that the number of those who pay has ballooned along with it.”
Clearly, Playboy is now too far behind the times to compete in this highly sophisticated internet world of business. Weighted down by the Hefner legacy that is so last century, it will struggle to find a niche as a men’s lifestyle magazine.
But whether Playboy’s move to remove nudes and reposition the brand succeeds or fails, it is far from a win for women – rather, it reflects the market and cultural triumph of mainstream hard-core porn.
I thought writer Ernest Hemingway was long gone from public memory, trundled off on the literary train to nowhere, an ancient relic of the days of sparse, pungent, emotional, gritty writing that does not exist anymore. Today, literature is filed with stories of men trying to find themselves, young women participating in Hunger Games, countless sordid murders, diet books and stories about an endless army of aliens headed towards Earth or already here. Hemingway wrote about tough men drinking themselves under the table, catching huge marlin on the high seas, shamelessly chasing women, soldiers firing cannons, wars, sailing through tropical storms, climbing mountains and fist fights. He was older than old school, gone, forgotten, yesterday’s news, on the dusty shelves at the back of the library.
When I walked into the Morgan Library and Museum in New York on a quiet, breezy Sunday morning to look at their new exhibit on the writer, “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars,” I did not expect to find many people there and, if I did, they would all be senior citizens who grew up with him in the 1950s.
Was I ever wrong! The library and museum, with is enormous rooms and high vaulted ceilings, was packed and I had to wait on a line to get in. The Hemingway gallery was jammed with people, and they were not senior citizens either. There were dozens of college students, women with scarfs wrapped around their necks and boys staring at their Blackberrys, and young men and women who looked like they hard worked terribly hard all week. There were New Yorkers, other Americans and tourists from Europe and other continents. I was shocked at how popular the bearded, macho-man writer, author of The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and so many other works, remains. The author blew his brains out a long 55 years ago, but is surprisingly popular today.
The exhibit is highlighted with a wonderful, six-foot high photograph of Hemingway on crutches after being injured in World War I. It is divided into six sections, each telling a part of his life, starting at the end of the first Word War. It ends with Hemingway as writer and sportsmen in the 1950s and his 1960 death. It is loaded with old documents (didn’t this guy throw away anything?), including his letters, magazines, passports, telegrams and even ticket stubs to bullfights he attended in Spain as part of his research on the novel Death in the Afternoon. There are photos of him, his wives and his friends.
There are two major surprises in the exhibit. First, he and F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, were very close friends. History has portrayed them as literary enemies who constantly sniped at each other, but that was not so. Fitzgerald was not only his friend, but read his work and suggested changes, some of them major, that Hemingway made. The other surprise is how many revisions Hemingway did on just about all of his fiction work. He redid entire paragraphs half a dozen times until he got it right. He dropped whole chapters that he did not like, or that others did not like, from his books. Someone told me that he rewrote the last page of the The Sun Also Rises 19 times and now, having seen his work, I believe it.
Hemingway wrote almost all of his stories in long hand on paper and rarely typed them out. Most people believe he labored over the typewriter because so many book jacket photos printed in later years featured him with a typewriter. The library exhibit has dozens of marvelous original drafts of his short stories and books, old ink leaping off the page at you, many with paragraphs heavily edited or trimmed from the text
Hemingway got started as a writer when he was badly injured while working as an ambulance driver in World War I. He wrote some fiction stories based on his experiences, and created a character, Nick Adams, who appeared in many of his short stories. Earlier, he had worked for the Kansas City Star, where he learned to write tight stories with few adjectives. He made that sparse style his hallmark, and it such a hallmark that for years after his death people participated in Hemingway write-a-like contests (there is an annual Hemingway look-alike contest, too).
He had a strange and wondrous style of writing. All of the young writers working in the World War I era were trying to find a style “It was the era of trying to use words,” wrote poet T.S. Eliot.
Hemingway himself stuck to his own ideas. On writing, he tried to “make it seem normal, so that it can become part of the experience of the person who reads it.”
People loved him and enjoyed his spartan style of writing with its explosions of both action and color. One friend who knew of his love of both action filled writing and boxing, mirthfully referred to him as “Kid Balzac”
Hemingway loved to cover battles and was as happy in World War II as he had been in the First World War. “War is the best subject of all,” he said. “It brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.”
He wrote on any paper he could find, once grabbing a thick pile of empty sheets of telegraph paper at an office and scribbling pages of a short story on the pages, faded now after all these years.
Dorothy Parker called him “a truly magnificent writer “ and critic Edmund Wilson wrote of one of his novels “your book is a knockout, the best piece of fiction that any one the new crop of Americans has done.”
Surprisingly, there has never been a full library exhibit of Hemingway. “It is impossible to talk about the history of twentieth century American literature…or world literature for that matter…without talking about Ernest Hemingway early in the conversation,” said Morgan Library director Colin B. Bailey. ‘His novels, such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are among the best known and acclaimed books of the modern era.”
The exhibit moves quickly to the streets (and bars) of Paris. Hemingway loved Paris and moved there in the early 1920s. He befriended Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein and others. He was one of the writers who coined the famous phrase “the lost generation” of post World War I men. There he became part of the literary set, dining and drinking with other writers, personally closing half the bars in Paris, as he wrote several novels and short stories.
An interviewer once asked him if something happened in his life that made him a writer, or if at some particular moment in his life he decided to write. He looked at him blankly. “No, I always wanted to be a writer,” he said.
He was noticed right away. When his book In Our Time was published, a critic for the New York Times wrote that “his language is fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean, his very prose seems to have an organic being of its own.”
Hemingway left Paris with his wife Pauline in 1929 and took up residence in Key West, Florida, where he wrote A Farewell to Arms. Later, they divorced and he moved to Havana, Cuba, where he stayed for years, wrote more and became quite a well-known deep sea fisherman (he caught a 465 pound marlin that was a record at the time). He was divorced, married Martha Gellhorn, another writer, and moved to a farm house outside of Havana with her. He wrote numerous short stories for large magazines in the 1930s and traveled to Spain to cover the civil war in that country His experiences there became the basis for one of his great books, For Whom the bell Tolls.
When World War II started, Hemingway was back in Europe covering it. "I got war fever like the measles,” he said.
His writing slowed down in the early 1950s, except for The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1960.
There are some weaknesses in the overall wonderful exhibit. Hemingway was famous for chasing women and for his many wives, but other than a few photos, you learn very little about his relationships with women. The exhibit has a lot of pictures, but they are all small. It needs some large, oversized photos of Hemingway, or posters of bullfights or places to where he traveled. Some of the stills from movies based on his books, like the film The Snows of Kilimanjaro, should have been blown up and mounted on the walls. The Old Man and the Sea was a very famous movie and has appeared frequently on television, yet there is little in the exhibit about the book or film. Just one big Old Man and the Sea photo or poster would have been nice. There might have been some of Hemingway’s fishing tackle, purchased in New York City, or one of his desks. How about a lot of photos of all the cats that lived with him in Cuba?
Would the great writer liked to have been remembered like this, held in such high esteem in one of the country’s finest libraries? No. He’d rather be remembered out there on a boat in the wide, blue ocean, looking for the big fish, a can of beer held firmly in his hand.
The Library is sponsoring a film and lecture series to accompany the Hemingway exhibit. It has screened already screened the films To Have and Have Not and The Killers, based on his books. It will host a concert, Cygnus Ensemble and Hemingway, featuring music of Paris in the 1920s, when he lived there, on December 8. Throughout the fall, there will be several gallery talks on the exhibit and his works.
The library’s gift shop is overloaded with Hemingway novels and biographies. They are selling a Hemingway ‘how to camp out’ booklet and even a book on Harry‘s Bar, the Venice watering hole made famous in Hemingway’s works.
By Bruce Chadwick
Bruce Chadwick lectures on history and film at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He also teaches writing at New Jersey City University. He holds his PhD from Rutgers and was a former editor for the New York Daily News. Mr. Chadwick can be reached at bchadwick@njcu.edu.
Gwen Stefani has opened up about her divorce from fellow rocker Gavin Rossdale in the form of music, releasing an emotional song entitled "Used to Love You."
The No Doubt frontwoman on Tuesday put out a video for the song that consists solely of close-up footage of the singer looking forlorn and reflective.
To a light electronic beat, Stefani sings, "I don't know why I cry / But I think it's because I remembered for the first time since I hated you / That I used to love you."
Stefani had debuted the song Saturday night at a concert in New York, telling the audience at the start of her encore that she would share a song about "pain and love and my real life."
The song is notably more melancholy than the best-known songs of No Doubt, which built a wide following in the 1990s as it brought ska music into the mainstream.
Stefani, a California native, met Rossdale when the English singer and guitarist's alternative rock band Bush was touring with No Doubt in the United States.
The couple married in 2002 and have been raising three children in Los Angeles.
The rockers had generally stayed out of the limelight except in 2004 when a paternity test revealed that Rossdale had a daughter with the British designer Pearl Lowe, with whom he had an earlier relationship.
The couple announced their divorce in a brief statement in August, saying they would remain "partners in marriage" to provide "a happy and healthy environment" for their children.
Jimmy Kimmel brutally mocked Donald Trump after the Republican presidential candidate abruptly canceled an appearance on his ABC talk show.
Representatives for Trump called off a brief scheduled appearance just hours before "Jimmel Kimmel Live" was set to tape, and the host complained the following morning on Howard Stern's satellite radio program, reported Variety.
“I don’t know what happened,” Kimmel said. “We’re delighted, needless to say.”
A campaign spokeswoman told Variety that Trump pulled out of the planned appearance due to a conflicting political obligation, but the candidate would reschedule once Kimmel's show returned to Los Angeles after taping this week in Brooklyn.
Kimmel joked about the cancellation during his opening monologue Tuesday night, and the crowd booed enthusiastically at the news.
“His people called and cancelled on us,” Kimmel said. “They were a little bit cryptic as to why he cancelled. They said he has a major political commitment — but he did want me to relay the message to you that if he was here, he would have been great.”
Kimmel continued needling the real estate mogul and reality TV star.
“I’m dying to find out what this major political commitment was," he said. "Usually, it means he had to go on CNN to call someone an idiot or something. Why did he cancel? We told him there were cameras here, right? Are Tuesday nights the night he volunteers down at the orphanage?”
He finished by slamming Trump's distinctive physical presence.
"Don’t worry, we’re giving everyone in our audience a basketball dipped in cologne so you can fully experience what it would have been like if he was here,” Kimmel said.
