Many of you may already recognize Dan DeCarlo’s name as the man behind the Archie Comics in the 1950s and most of the 60s. Some of you will also be aware of the kitschy fact that DeCarlo, who also penned the comic Josie and the Pussycats, modeled the character of Josie after his own wife whose name was, you guessed it… Josie. According to DeCarlos’ wife, it was the leopard cat costume she wore on a cruise with DeCarlo that inspired “Josie’s” signature leopard leotard with a tail that she wore on stage while performing with her rockin’ girl combo, the Pussycats.
 

Dan DeCarlo’s “Josie” in her cat costume (and her signature hairdo) from the pages of a ‘Josie and the Pussycats’ comic
 
In the late 40s when Marvel Comics was still known as Timely Comics, the editor-in-chief (yes, Stan Lee), gave DeCarlo a few good breaks and DeCarlo would go on to work with Lee in different comic publishing outfits for many years. During the 50s and 60s, DeCarlo’s cheesecake pin-ups and racy (and often sexist) illustrations were routinely published in “Humorama” magazines like Breezy, Comedy, Romp, Eyeful of Fun, and other “digest sized” publications alongside fleshy pin-up images of burlesque queen Lili St. Cyr, Bettie Page and actress Julie Newmar. DeCarlo’s original illustrations are highly sought after by collectors and routinely sell for several thousands of dollars each.
 

 
DeCarlo’s “amusing” illustrations are often accompanied by not-so-amusing captions that contained straightforward misogyny as well as the typical sexism that was rampant in the 1950s. There’s also a lot of spanking involved. Thankfully, as I’m a woman with a good sense of humor and strong appreciation for art (especially when it comes to historical documents belonging to notable and respected artists), I really dug looking at the “other side” of the man behind some of my favorite pop culture memories and his bawdy, scientifically impossible bodacious bad girls.

If you too dig DeCarlo’s work, there are two wonderful books that detail his pen and paper obsession with cheeky girls—the 300-page Innocence & Seduction: The Art of Dan DeCarlo and The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo (published by Fantagraphics).
 

Dan DeCarlo’s “Humorama” illustrations from 1950s “digest size” magazines
 
More after the jump…

 
Roman Polanski’s first film after the horrific murder of his wife Sharon Tate and their friends at 10050 Cielo Drive, Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, in 1969 was a reworking of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Polanski said the murders had traumatised him to such an extent that making movies seemed utterly pointless.

I couldn’t think of a subject that seemed worthwhile or dignified enough to spend a year or more on it, in view of what happened to me.

That may sound extremely pompous, but I couldn’t make another suspense story. And I certainly couldn’t make a comedy: I couldn’t make a casual film.

Polanski suffered a severe depression. He was deranged with grief and felt a terrible guilt for what had happened. He abandoned the film he had been working on, The Day of the Dolphin, but eventually he started to tentatively look for a subject of substance worthy of his attention. He had once had an ambition to make a film based on one of Shakespeare’s plays. Together with the writer and critic Kenneth Tynan he began adapting Macbeth for the screen.

This dark film of witchcraft and brutal, bloody murder was considered too close to the recent events in Polanski’s life for any Hollywood studio to produce. The director therefore approached a friend, Victor Lownes, who was a senior executive with Playboy. Lownes had been partying with Polanski the night of the Manson murders. He had also produced Monty Python’s first theatrical film And Now For Something Completely Different. Lownes secured $1,500,000 from Hugh Hefner to make Macbeth.

Polanski and Tynan refused to cast the expected middleaged Shakespearean actors in the lead roles opting instead for the relatively unknown Jon Finch as Macbeth and Francesca Annis as his wife, with Martin Shaw as Banquo and Terence Bayler as MacDuff. Polanski had met Finch on a plane journey and was mesmerized by the young actor’s charisma. Finch was then best known for his television work, while Annis had at one time been considered the next Elizabeth Taylor. In fact Taylor herself briefly took the actress “under her wing.” She had also modelled and was friends with a many of London’s music scene—including Jimi Hendrix.

Filming took place during some of the worst weather imaginable in Wales and the north of England. The weather along with Polanski’s perfectionism and his insistence on multiple takes caused a $600,000 overspend. On its release, the critics were overly harsh—either damning it with feint praise or like Pauline Kael, impolitely suggesting that the excessive violence in the film was Polanski’s way of exorcising his wife’s murder. The film was bleak, unrelentingly so, with an ambiguously downbeat ending. However, it was also far, far better than any critic gave it credit for, and Polanski was more in tune with a younger audience who were coming of age at the start of the 1970s against a background of Vietnam, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and terrorism across Europe and the Middle East.
 

 

 
More ‘Macbeth’ after the jump…

 
This marvelous bit of playful fetish art comes from the skillful hand of Dirk Vermin, who tossed off this comic book in 1992 in a limited run of 1,000 copies. Vermin is a tattoo artist who works out of Las Vegas and I can think of no better endorsement of his work than this comic. Today he is probably best known for the A&E reality series Bad Ink.

Over the course of 20-odd pages, Bettie (whose name is rendered as “Betty” throughout) flirts with, is spanked by, threatens to whip, and generally cavorts with many of the highly recognizable figures from 20th-century pop culture, including James Bond, Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock, Norman Bates, Marvin the Martian, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, King Kong, Adam West’s Batman, and so forth.

All I can say is “Wholly not safe for work, Batman!”
 

 

 
More Bettie and friends after the jump…

 
Chastity belts—pretty fucked up, right?

There’s a lot of competition for the most powerful symbol of oppressive patriarchy, including hijabs, foot-binding, and female genital mutilation, but there’s little doubt that chastity belts are deep in the mix.

However, what you may not know is that their use is probably vastly overstated. There were definitely instances of chastity belts in use in Italy around the 15th century, but ... well, most examples of medieval chastity belts derived from much later, between 1700 and 1900 and should perhaps be more properly considered as naughty novelty items.

In Fake? The Art of Deception, a book edited by Mark Jones and published by the Trustees of the British Museum—and really, who better for information about fucked-up practices in medieval times?—chastity belts are presented as one example of a thing that was not so much of a thing after all.

Here’s historian Timothy Wilson elaborating on the phenomenon:

There is evidence for the existence of chastity belts from the beginning of the fifteenth century onwards. E.J. Dingwall in The Girdle of Chastity ... concludes that they were invented in Italy around 1400 and were in actual use, albeit occasionally, right into the present century. The evidence for their use in the Renaissance period, however, is largely anecdotal or in burlesque fiction. It is probable that the great majority of examples now existing were made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as curiosities for the prurient, or as jokes for the tasteless.

So there you have it. If your curiosity on this subject isn’t yet satiated, you’ll be glad to learn that that Dingwall book Wilson mentions is available on Amazon.

Meanwhile, real or fake, here are some spine-tingling pics of chastity belts (click any image for a larger view):
 

 

 
Much more after the jump…...

A book cover for a fetish publication called “Dolly Slave” by Carlo, late 1920s/1930s

I’m sad to say that I wasn’t able to dig up much information about the artist featured in this post, a French fetish illustrator from a century ago who went by the moniker, “Carlo.” However, Carlo’s illustrations themselves are very well-known in the world of vintage fetish. His strong sadomasochistic images and bondange-themed drawings adorned erotic magazines and the covers of naughty novels. Carlo’s first illustrations may have been seen in French erotic print as far back as 1909, and he was fairly prolific from about that time, and well into the 1930s.
 

“Slave” a fetish book cover illustrated by Carlo, late 1920s/1930s
 
Here’s what I do know about the somewhat mysterious “Carlo”—he was French and he seemed to be very, very well acquainted with the world of hardcore BDSM. His style is very much in line with another French erotic illustrator who was active at the same time known as “Esbey.” Both artists’ work appeared in several publications put out by Select-Bibliothèque, one of the very first publishing houses to put out fetish-oriented material, as well as other French publishing houses that catered to the thriving fetish community in Paris back in the very early 1900s (”spanking fiction” was especially popular back in those days, mon dieu!).
 

 

“The Dominator”
 
When I first saw Carlo’s work, it was hard to conceive that this kind of high-level kink was a thing so long ago. I mean, we’re not just talking whips, chains and stilettos here (although there is no lack of those accessories, either): Carlo’s world as he portrayed it to be in his illustrations is full of sophisticated bondage contraptions, and S&M gear and scenarios that would make Caligula blush. And if it would make Caligula blush, it’s safe to assume what you are about to see is NSFW.

If this is your kind of thing (I don’t judge and neither should you), try to track down the 1984 book Carlo, by Robert Merodack.
 

 

“The Triumphant Leather”
 

 
More vintage BDSM smut from ‘Carlo’ after the jump…

Balloons set (2004)

I was once on a porn set. It wasn’t how I had imagined it would be. I was part of a production crew making a documentary about online porn. We were in the upstairs bedroom of a small terraced house in the north of England. Outside all the houses looked the same: red-bricked back-to-backs with cobbled lanes. Quiet streets, half-net curtains hung in windows. In a small bedroom a man who looked like Benny Hill wearing a blonde Beatle wig was directing two young girls in bikinis to cover their bodies with various food products. He was filming their antics for his web channel, telling the girls to squirt more mayonnaise down their cleavage, splatter more beans on their bottoms, get that ice cream all over their chins and so forth. Downstairs Benny’s wife sat by a coal fire patiently knitting, and sipping weak sweet tea.

Behind the fantasy set of latex curtains, paddling pool, ketchup bottles and assorted props was a small dingy room—the kind seen in Britain’s black & white kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s. The smell of congealing food was nauseating but the girls who were smeared with it were laughing and joking and egging each other on to be more outrageous. Their onscreen activities seemed very unsexual. I was seeing the whole absurd scene—the bare floorboards, the peeling wallpaper, the small tripod lights—not the close-up titillation being broadcast to an excited online audience paying by the minute.

This dissociation between the pornographic image and its creation—between location and use—form part of Jo Broughton’s photographs of empty porn sets.

Broughton was studying a foundation art course at Thurrock, Essex, when she was sent for work experience to London, as she explained in an interview with Jean Wainright.

I thought what I was being sent to was a glamorous fashion shoot when in actual fact I walked into a studio in Hoxton to a nurses set being set up and a girl walking out of a changing room wearing suspenders and stockings, the full monty kit. Quite an abrupt Yorkshireman approached me and asked if I’d ever seen a “fanny up front” and I squeaked “No” and he replied “Well today’s your lucky day”.

[Fanny is British slang for “pussy” not rear end—the difference of meaning once disconcerted English jazz singer Cleo Laine when her American doctor said he was going to give her “a jag in the fanny.”]

Jo was supposed to be doing two weeks work, but dropped out of college and stayed with the studio for two years.

For a long time I had quite a problem with what was going on there, I was quite conflicted. I was green as grass; I’d never ever walked into something like that before…

..It was very contradictory in some respects to have this space where I was safe and had a connection to people that were “family” and yet it’s perceived as very unsafe to other people: it’s a safe industry because they work very safely but it isn’t your desired environment, I wouldn’t desire it for my child to work as a pornographic model. My conflicting emotions stayed with me and I hid it very well, where I’d been and what I’d been doing, for a long time.

She worked as a studio assistant.

...my job was to paint the set, make lots and lots of tea and to sweep up. I was just the dogsbody, to put up the lights; always give Steve a “pop”, meaning I’d have to dump the power on the light packs for him to do the light test. I had to put up the poly boards and all the normal stuff you do in a studio with the content of a sexual nature, which actually was very tame and quite tongue in cheek now.

Having left college and finding herself temporarily without a place to stay, Jo started sleeping on the studio sets at night. During the day she was working as a photographic assistant at major Sunday broadsheet the Observer. Because of how people perceived porn, Jo could tell no one what she was doing or where she was staying.

When I was working as an assistant we would get phone calls all day, somehow people had got hold of the studios number and they would scream obscenities down the phone and make threats. People were repelled and absolutely disgusted by the subject of porn; you just didn’t mention that you worked in the porn industry. So in order not to be tainted by that brush, I didn’t dare mention it when I was at The Observer because you just didn’t knew how people would take it, take what you did.

Then Broughton enrolled at Royal College of Art. She also continued visiting the studio every week and began working as a cleaner there.

I’d had these conflicting issues about these models seen as meat and I was doing all this feminist work and then I became Steve’s cleaner every two weeks. I became this… I don’t know how to describe it, this Igor character, cleaning up after someone. But also, I felt more humanistic towards the models, the industry and suddenly I started becoming more comfortable with it myself. I started to see this more human aspect because I’m seeing bodily fluids and I’m washing things and I’m in contact with almost what the untouchable is. You know, washing dildos and whatever, you’re there, at that point. And suddenly I started to laugh and see the funny side of it and going in and putting the radio on and seeing the set week after week after week, it would change. It made me laugh because you see the set, there’s so much work that goes into those sets and yet it’s still the same subject; tits and arse.

Broughton started photographing the sets at night. She was interested in revealing the reality behind the artificial glossy sex of porn mags.

I’m letting the audience in to see what I saw and also to take the power out of it almost. It is to say this is false, which I suppose pornography is, it’s false. I like the fact that there’s a brick holding up the poly-board that reflects the light, the ambiance coming in, the floor boards coming in. For me it’s really important to have those elements, also it shows humanistic elements of imperfections. Because in the magazines that its published in that would all be cut off and straightened and it would all be very glossy, so that was important. Also, I wanted to show the space I had this relationship with, that was important to me as well. This space doesn’t really know what’s going on, a table doesn’t know it’s a table, a porn set doesn’t know it’s a porn set and that’s almost what I was trying to do.

Each of Jo Broughton’s photographs was taken on a porn shoot. The bed sheets are crumpled and stained, stockings and shoes lie on the floor, discarded sex toys and lubricant are visible. The frame is devoid of people, only the evidence of sexual performance and the illusion of passionate intimacy remain.

More of Jo Broughton’s work can be seen here.
 

Christmas November Set (2003)
 

Nurses (2002)
 
More after the jump…

Jean-Jacques Burnel and Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers on the stage at Battersea Park in London, September 16th, 1978
 
Back in 1977, the members of the Greater London Council were not the biggest fans of punk rock instigators, The Stranglers. According to legend, (and detailed in the book, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond) at a show at The Rainbow in London, Strangler vocalist Hugh Cornwell wore a shirt with the word “fuck” on it. This didn’t go over well with the GLC, and The Stranglers set was cut short. After that, the GLC banned the The Stranglers from booking and playing gigs around London. Finally, on September 16th, 1978, the band was able to organize and play an outdoor gig at Battersea Park in London. And thanks to the fact that The Stranglers love trouble, it wouldn’t go off without a good dose of controversy.
 

Two of my favorites things; Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers and the word “fuck”
 

Showbill for The Stranglers show at Battersea Park, August 16, 1978

The line-up for the show at Battersea included Peter Gabriel, Scottish punks the Skids, English band The Spizzoil (better-known in the US as Athletico Spizz 80 and for their “Where’s Captain Kirk?” single, also known as Spizzenergi and The Spizzles), a band called The Edge, and a comedian that was being managed by Cornwell at the time known as “Johnny Rubbish.”

Everything was pretty mellow until nearly the end of The Stranglers set when the band slid into “Nice ‘n’ Sleazy” from their 1978 record, Black and White. During the song, The Stranglers brought a group of strippers onstage (both male and female) and a guy with a whip (because why not?), who all proceeded to serve up some daytime strip-club, full-frontal glamor for the audience. Although the show was filmed, the footage that’s gotten around isn’t amazing quality by any means. Lucky for us, the five-minutes of the completely bonkers (and NSFW if you haven’t already figured that one out) performance of “Nice ‘n’ Sleazy” is pretty great, and I’ve posted it below for your viewing pleasure.
 

The Stranglers and their stripper posse performing “Nice ‘n’ Sleazy” at Battersea Park, London, 1978

The magazine version of the controversial advertising campaign for Black and Blue from 1976

In 1976, the Rolling Stones released Black and Blue, their first record with new guitarist, Ronnie Wood. To help promote the record, a billboard was erected over the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. The boundary pushing advertisement featured a racy image of model Anita Russell (who Mick Jagger originally considered “too pretty” for the part).
 

The billboard on the Sunset Strip, 1976

Jagger took one for the team and tied Russell up himself for the bondage-themed photo shoot. In the 14 x 48 foot billboard that hung above one of the busiest thoroughfares in Hollywood, Russell is tightly bound, her clothing ripped and the inside of her legs are bruised, as she sits spread eagled on top of the gatefold cover of Black and Blue with the caption:

I’m “Black and Blue” from The Rolling Stones—and I love it!

For some weird reason nobody in the Stones PR camp thought that the billboard would bother anyone, much less send the message that female fans of the Rolling Stones like to be physically abused. Of course the outcry to remove the billboard, especially from feminists who defaced the billboard with red paint, was immediate and it quickly disappeared.

But the news about the controversial photo and message had already garnered the band worldwide press coverage, and Black and Blue (a record infamous rock journalist Lester Bangs called “the first meaningless Rolling Stones album”—he was right) eventually went platinum in the U.S.
 

The tables turn on Mick in this spoof that ran in National Lampoon’s “Compulsory Summer Sex Issue” in August of 1976

And because now I’ve got Black and Blue on the brain, here’s the band (with Billy Preston) looking like absolute plonkers in the “Hey Negrita” video.
 

 
Long considered a “lost film” (defined as a known work with no surviving copy), 1962’s Pages of Death was ranked number fourteen in Gambit magazine’s list of fifteen “lost” films.

A 16mm print of the film was recently discovered in the collection of the Portland, Oregon based Oregon Historical Society.

Writing in Vintage Sleaze, Jim Linderman describes Pages of Death as the story of a teenage boy who “hung out reading pornography at Baker’s Variety Store until he couldn’t stand it any longer and murdered a girl in a whipped up frenzy of smut inspired rage.”
 

 
Two self-righteous, anti-smut-crusading, Dragnet-esque police detectives investigate the “sex fiend” murder of an eleven-year-old girl. The trail leads them to the rec-room of a teenage boy and his extensive porn stash. BUSTED.
 

 
The cops pay a visit to the shop owner to let him know he’s culpable in the young girl’s murder for peddling smut. Wrap-around segments narrated by Heisman Trophy winner, Tom Harmon deliver the Citizens for Decent Literature‘s over-the-top message that nudie magazines turn young men into raging sex maniacs. The exact same stock music Ed Wood used for Plan 9 From Outer Space plays over the soundtrack during the investigation.

Pages of Death is a hilariously dated exercise in nostalgic sex-paranoia that has been described as the “Reefer Madness of porn.” The Oregon Historical Society should be commended for making this lost classic available to the public.

You can watch it here:

H/T: Reddit

Kat Mon Dieu.
 
The photographer Leland Bobbé describes the neo-burlesque movement as “an art form that allows the performer to use their bodies and costumes to deliver a statement or message.”

It can be a political, social or comedic statement. The message is up to the performer because they come up with their own act including costumes and music to deliver their message. It’s different from classic burlesque in that in classic burlesque it’s just about a seductive reveal of the body without having a specific message.

Neo-burlesque kicked-off around the mid-1990s. Billie Madley in New York and Michelle Carr her Velvet Hammer Burlesque troupe in Los Angeles revamped the spirit of old burlesque with some feisty punk pizazz. Neo-burlesque “put the tease into striptease” and brought spectacle, comedy and art back to the stage. They created their own characters, designed and made their own costumes, and choreographed their own acts. Unlike old burlesque, these young independent performers were making shows that often appealed more to women than men. And so neo-burlesque became a thing.

When New York-based portrait, lifestyle, street and landscape assignment photographer Leland Bobbé heard about the resurgence in neo-burlesque he knew it was something he had to photograph. He was not interested in just documenting these artists’ stage performances. He wanted to “capture their creative costumes and stage persona in very real non-posed studio portraits.”

Bobbé put an ad in Craig’s List. Made some contacts, got some referrals and soon neo-burlesque performers were knocking on his door. He photographed these beautiful everyday performers between 2010-2012. See more of Leland Bobbé‘s beautiful photographic work here.
 

Perle Noir.
 

Harvest Moon.
 

Ferro.
 
More beautiful portraits of neo-burlesque performers, after the jump…