Every curse word on The Sopranos (yes, all 6 seasons’ worth)

the sopranos, uncensored. from victor solomon on Vimeo.

France's First Lady

This is verified. In this power point, the pictures are of:

Carla Bruni - The Nude First Lady (Of France)

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Carla Bruni, who recently married noted ladies' man Nikolas Sarkozy and became the First Lady of France, used to be a model. A naked model. A nude—and relatively tasteful—portrait of Bruni by the photographer Michel Comte is up for sale at Christie's in April. The press duly reported on the upcoming sale, but there's been an admirable sense of maturity about it across the board. By contrast, imagine the prospect of a nude Hillary Clinton portrait surfacing. Or not. Michelle Obama perhaps???

Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story

Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds.
Chronicle Books. October 2008.

Steven Watts. Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream.
Wiley. October 2008.

The Complete Centerfolds is a coffee-table book compiling every Playboy centerfold published from the magazine's inception in 1953 until 2007. Six short essays preface the decades, but there is no other text. As you might expect, the pleasures of the book are instant and visual. My favorite Playboy centerfold is Miss September 1983, dressed for a college football game in striped socks and a tartan scarf. She has a flask, a fuzzy wool cap, and a team pennant. Her neo-Gothic surroundings are meant, I think, to evoke Yale. A single branch of ivy cascades next to her, and a textbook lies abandoned at her feet. She is naked. It sounds funny in writing, but somehow there's nothing funny about the photograph, or about any of the photographs in The Complete Centerfolds. Is laughter an anti-aphrodisiac?

The first thing that strike the casual reader is the anatomical variety among bunnies. Nipples, for one thing. Some are as big as cupcakes, others are the size of a penny. They are occasionally erect and come in a range of colors as varied as drugstore lipsticks. Pubic hair is another delight to behold, appearing first in 1971 and thriving until 1997. Gauzy coronas of pubic hair, technicolor dreampubes of every shade. You forget how assertive a healthy growth of hair can look. It comes as a pleasant shock in the midst of a creamy-smooth expanse.

Pubic hair diminishes as the nineties draw to a close. Neat triangles turn to Band Aid-sized strips, which become little Hitler mustaches or nothing at all. The modern crotch is a bit prim, a bit less forthright. You'd think that depilation would lend a youthful look to the genitals but it has the opposite effect instead, making the girls look older and slightly jaded. (Intimate grooming signals forethought.) The youthful quality of the early centerfolds disappears.

A 1956 memo to Playboy photographers listed Hefner's criteria for the centerfolds. The model must be in a natural setting engaged in some activity "like reading, writing, mixing a drink." She should have a "healthy, intelligent, American look—a young lady that looks like she might be a very efficient secretary or an undergrad at Vassar." Many centerfolds feature the implied presence of a man: a flash of trouser leg in the corner, a pipe left on a table. These props transform the pinups into seduction scenarios. Their premise is simple: by identifying with the absent man, a viewer can enter the scene.

The centerfold's signature is what we might call the "Playboy aesthetic"—something responsible both for Playboy's long run of success and its schmaltziness. As Hefner put it in a letter to Russ Meyer (director of Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill!), the ideal centerfold is one in which "a situation is suggested, the presence of someone not in the picture." The goal was to transform "a straight pinup into an intimate interlude, something personal and special." Playboy readers are meant to be participants, not voyeurs. Hefner's vision of American sexuality was a distinctly pasteurized one—sex cleansed of its ugly (and often exciting) power plays. "Clean sex," he insisted, "has greater appeal than tawdry sex." Strippers, threesomes and S&M had no place in his magazine. The Playboy centerfold was a world away from the European ideal of a sexually-sophisticated temptress. Hefner's girls were always girls, first of all, or bunnies— not women. There was no knowing gleam in a centerfold's eye.

By packaging the photos with cosmopolitan content (stories, interviews), Hefner hoped that sex and culture would seep into each other by dint of their page-to-page proximity. A taste for babes, he claimed, was just as fine a taste to cultivate as one for Scotch, fast cars or sharp suits (all of which Playboy advertised). The magazine lavished its readers with aspirational rhetoric. In 1955 Playboy described its typical reader as being "in the midst of the biggest buying spree of his life. Cars, cameras, and hi-fi cabinets. Clothes, cognac, and cigarettes." When these items appeared as props in the centerfold layouts, their connection to a stupendous sex life was visually underscored. Of all the lifestyle accessories Playboy celebrated, a bunny was the easiest to enjoy vicariously.

In those days Hefner liked his centerfolds "round, soft, and with a maximum emphasis on the beauty of being female." The Playmates of the first three decades follow this formula, flashing biteable bottoms and breasts. Things go downhill in the 1980s as breast implants became popular: the new boobs are globe-like and tactile only in the way that bowling balls are tactile. Some of them cast a glare, like cartoon balloons. Food metaphors no longer apply.

Something else (related) happens around this time: Playboy ceases to be about the erotic everyday encounter. Flesh and blood women turn to images; the "girl next door" becomes distinctly mediated. The bunnies were always mediated, of course, but something about the earlier photographs made you forget the medium and feel as though you were staring straight into the eyes of a luscious partner. Enthusiastic photoshopping has aided the transformation. Gone are the freckles and downy arm hairs of the predecessors. Breasts are surgically standardized; gym routines and spray tans produce identically toned and tinted bodies. Girls of all ethnicities blend together into one latte-colored woman, and the result looks computer-generated. When you try to imagine how the models might feel and smell, things like rubber come to mind.

This is partly the book's fault. Centerfolds that appear in the magazine are accompanied by a block of text describing the model's job, activities, hobbies, and attitudes—bits designed to enhance the bunny's appeal by demonstrating her personality and sexual interests. These are excluded from The Complete Centerfolds. The book's pages, too, are reduced to a rectangle only slightly larger than a Chinese takeout menu. Why have the publishers done such a thing? To scrimp on costs? To give the book a modicum of portability? It still weighs nearly six pounds—no one is toting this thing further than the distance from coffee table to lap. Plus, the allure of a pinup was always its mondo size. The book's shrunken pages undermine the tone of luxe comprehensiveness suggested by its press materials and ritzy design (matte black cover, discreet bunny). To catalogue every centerfold would be amazing indeed, but these are just girls without clothes on. Still, there are worse ways to pass an hour than with 648 cute nudes.

+ + +

Steven Watts' Mr. Playboy is a biography of Hugh Hefner and an account of Playboy's trajectory. In a way, there is nothing in the 450-page book that you can't parse from the centerfolds. If the Playboy centerfold easily stands in for the magazine, the magazine easily stands in for Hefner, who comes across less as a person than a sensibility. Watts, a history professor at the University of Missouri, has a tricky subject in Hefner. How many ways are there to say "shifting bevy of girlfriends"? How can a biographer get across the gooey sentimentality of his subject without floundering in clichés? The book opens with a forlorn twenty-six-year-old Hef standing on a bridge, muttering "Is this all there is?" and silently vowing to escape the ennui that threatens to suffocate him. The episode marks a turning point, and within fifteen years Hefner takes the country by storm. Thankfully, Watts makes it clear that Hefner is the one who sees himself in such cornball terms.

In many ways, the Playboy founder seems a person specifically bred to be the subject of a biography. We learn that he was inspired by The Fountainhead and Jay Gatsby. In Mr. Playboy we get the story of a man obsessed with crafting his own story. The biographer's instinct to mythologize is inverted as Watts goes about politely demystifying (or complicating) Hefner's gilded self-conceptions.

The most interesting parts of the book involve Hefner's childhood. As a kid consumed by pop culture, he doodled and daydreamed his way through class. When a girl rejected him in high school, the young Hefner gave himself a montage-worthy makeover: buying new duds, improving his dance skills, learning hip expressions, and adopting a "suave manner." Many people revise their image in high school, but Hefner was eerily thorough, producing an entire comic series about his new self. He described the character in writing as "a very original fellow" who "calls everyone 'Slug' or 'Fiend' and his pet expression is 'Jeeps Creeps.'"

The campaign was successful. Hefner grew into a popular and unusually horny teen. He also came to consider himself a sort of representative American male, confident that his own dampened urges and acquisitive mania were shared across the nation. What Hefner wanted, he figured, America must also want. Throughout his biography, Watts regards Hefner as a sort of human Richter scale attuned to the subterranean desires of American males. It is this instinct, combined with a right-place/right-time circumstance, to which Watts attributes Playboy's success.

What Hefner wanted, in his words, was "a pleasure primer styled to the masculine taste." The quote is revealing. It nods to Playboy's instructional quality and to Hefner's belief that a man might become his ideal self. In Hefner's terms, masculine taste is a single and definable force. As Watts puts it, Hefner "edited Playboy for himself." He was a work-obsessed, bunny-centric monomaniac, the "editor, publisher, and, at the same time, audience" of the magazine.

If Hefner's private yen for sexual and material plenty was risqué in his youth, a certain freedom was de rigeur by the mid-1960s. Teens were no longer punished for cuddling in the rumble seat, and everyone knew that nice girls enjoyed sex. The 1970s brought trouble: economic decline soured Playboy's buy-more credo, and rival magazine Penthouse took a bite out of Playboy readership by offering raunchier material. X-rated films like "Deep Throat" and "Behind the Green Door" attracted huge audiences. The Playboy enterprise collapsed in the 1980s.

As a record of influence—Hugh Hefner's influence—both The Complete Centerfolds and Mr. Playboy are entertaining. His achievement was to give great credence to his fantasies, and to the idea of fantasies in general. His gift was to commercialize something he knew from personal experience: that girls liked sex. More specifically, that they liked sex with Hefner. He extrapolated from this.

Hefner fit the cherished American mold of an ambitious, diehard dreamer and his description of the Playboy Mansion sounds a little like Xanadu—a place where a person "could work and play without the usual inconveniences, conflicts and concerns that were commonplace in the outside world." It is an apt summary of his business model. Step one: articulate fantasies. Step two: realize them.

The point of the Mansion was the same as that of the centerfold: a place in which to enjoy an idyllic sexual experience. The act of unfolding the spread, like undressing a girl, was meant to give the reader a private sensation. Just him and her; no politics, judgments, or restrictions—none of the things involved in a public discourse about sex. Such things have always been excluded from Playboy. They are too complicated.

Sam Kinison - Pocket Toys

Old Chisholm Trail

Old Chisholm Trail
Immortalia, Oscar Brand, llewtraH
Come along boys and listen to my tale,
A jigging and a frigging on the old Chisholm Trail.
chorus: Come tie my root around a root around a tree,
Come tie my root around a tree.
I come out of Alice with the longhorn cattle
On a ten-dollar horse and a forty dollar saddle.
Sitten in the saddle with my hand on my dong,
Shooting jism on the cattle as we ramble along.
Boss says "Cowboy, you better shove,
The steer you shot was my own true love."
I jumped in the saddle and the saddle wasn't there,
And I shoved seven inches up the old gray mare.
I'm lying in bed and counting sheep,
They look so pretty, I just can't sleep.
With my ass in the saddle and my pecker all sore,
I spied a little lady in the whorehouse door.
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a penny,
She says, "For that you not getting any."
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a nickel,
She says, "For that, you don't even get a tickle."
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a dime,
She says, "Young man, you're just wasting time."
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a quarter,
She says, "Young man, I'm a minister's daughter."
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a half,
She didn't say a word, just started to laugh.
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a dollar,
She took my hand and put in in her collar.
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a five,
She said, "Come inside, we'll see if you're alive."
I rode her standing, I rode her lying,
If I'd a had wings, I'd of of fucked her flying.
I went to the doctor for my pecker was sore,
He said, "God Damn! It's the same damn whore."
The Doc took a look and then said, "Cough."
I coughed so hard my balls fell off.
Put away your holster, put away your gun,
Your barrels been breached, and your shooting's done.
The next time I seen her, she was shitting on the floor,
And the wind from her ass blew the cat out the door.
The next time I seen her, the weather was hot,
And the roaches run right out of her twat.
The next time I seen her, the weather was cool,
She was fucking herself with an entrenching tool.
I went down to the cellar to get some cider,
There I saw a cockroach jacking off a spider.
I went down to the cellar to get some gin,
There was that cockroach at it again.
The last time I seen her and I ain't seen her since,
She was jacking off a man through a barbed-wire fence.
(Ft. Ord 1953)
(Immortalia)
I rode out of Alice on an October morn,
My horse was a gelding and I had a raging horn.
We didn't reach town till winter, eighty-two.
My ass
was a draggin' and my pecker was too.
I went hunting tail for a prlor house whore.
I didn't have enough so she kicked me out the door.
Reached in my pocket, took out six bits;
She said, "Young man, you can flick my tits."
Reached in my pocket, pulled out a buck;
She said, "That's more like it, now let's fuck!"
I gave her the dollar and she took it in her hand.
She said, "Young men, will you long pecker stand?"
I jumped off my horse, and bolted the door.
She said, "Come and get me, I'm a damn fine whore."
I grabbed right ahold and I threw her on the grass.
My toe-hold slipped and I rammed it in her ass.
I fucked from the rear; I fucked from the front.
I fucked her up the ass when I wore out her cunt.
Lying or standing, she's a buckaroo's dream.
I fucked her nearly senseless and I filled her up with cream.
I paid another dollar and I got another ride;
Put my cock inside of her and couldn't feel the side.
The hair on her pussy was a strawberry brown
And the crabs on her belly were jumping up and down.
Took my old pecker to the watering trough;
Washed him and I scrubbed him till his head fell off.
The next time I seen her, she was floating down a stream
With a belly full of clabber and a cunt full of cream.
The sun shone down on the nipples of her tits;
I knew she was a whore and I didn't give a shit.
The next time I saw her, she was jacking off my hound,
And the jaws of her twat were drippin' on the ground.
Her tits hung down like a pair of wooden buckets,
And her cunt stunk so bad, my dog wouldn't fuck it.
The next time I saw her, she was jacking off her brother;
The crabs on her ass were fucking one another.
Her cunt was so big that no man alive could screw it;
A cart-horse saw it and he went right to it.
The next time I saw her, she was standing by the door,
And the hair from her cunt hung down to the floor.
So I grabbed her by the neck and I threw her on the grass,
Then I stretched her cunt from her navel to her ass.
So I grabbed her by the waist and I threw her on the bed,
But the wind from her ass killed my dog stone dead.
The last time I seen her 'fore I went back on the trail,
And the drippings from her cunt left a track like a snail.
I saddled up my horse and we hit the cattle trail,
Never thought no more of that greasy piece of tail.
Spent three nights in a bedroll full of fleas,
So damn cold that I thought my balls would freeze.
Five days later and my prick turned blue;
I ran to the doctor and he don't know what to do.
So I went to another and he said, "Cough!"
And I coughed so hard, both my balls fell off.
In about nine days, I looked for to see;
Chancres on my pecker were big as a pea.
He said I'd got a bad case of the red, white and blue;
Crabs, lice, and crawlies and the whole damn zoo.
Red with the itching and blue with the clap;
White where it's falling off and won't grow back.
Got ointment for the itching and my pecker turned green.
Doc said I'd got the worse dose of pox he'd ever seen.
The whore found out, and called me a kid;
Told me to remember her, and by God, I did.
Gave me some lotion and my pecker went black.
It might have cured the chancres but my ball began to crack.
"Well," said the doctor, "I'll tell you what I'll do.
Gotta saw your pecker off and both balls too."
Guess you won't go whoring and you'll never get a wife."
Then he sawed off my manhood with his mule-skinning knife.
I met a whore in Alice and she gave me the syph.
My balls dropped off and I can't get stiff.
A cart-horse saw it and he went right to it.
The next time I saw her, she was standing by the door,
And the hair from her cunt hung down to the floor.

Blinded by turds

There was an old lady who lived in the street,
Her passage was blocked up from too much to eat,
She took stomach pills without reading the box,
Before she could think turds were flying for blocks.

Chorus:
Too-ra-li, too-ra-li, too-ra-lay, too-ra-lay,
A rolling stone gathers no moss so they say,
Sing along, sing along, with the birds, with the birds,
It's a wonderful song but it's all about turds.

Well she ran to the window and stuck out her arse,
Just at that moment a p'liceman came past,
That poor old p'liceman was eating his pie,
Whena steaming hot turd hit him right in the eye,

[Chorus]

Well he ran to the East and he ran to the West,
When a further consignment hit him right in the chest,
Well he fled to the North and he fled to the South,
When a bloody great turd hit him right in the mouth.

[Chorus]

The next time you walk over Waterloo bridge,
Look out for a p'liceman asleep on the ridge,
His chest bears a plackard, around it these words,
"Be kind to this cop who's been blinded by turds"

[Chorus twice]

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