The perfect gift for mother
 
Anyone who’s spent any time in America is familiar with the phenomenon of the elevation of Brian De Palma’s 1983 cokehead tour de force Scarface as a singular icon of worldly American success. Unsurprisingly, Martin Scorsese’s enervating masterpiece Wolf of Wall Street starring Leonardo DiCaprio seems headed down the same road, of a morality tale whose relevant audience seems to have missed the point entirely. 

I couldn’t tell you a single thing about financial operations of the real-life Jordan Belfort, but I do know that the man made a lot of money on Wall Street, did a lot of drugs and had a lot of sex, and then was busted by the feds for being a scumbag or something. Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street is the blackest of black comedies mainly due to its willingness to wallow in its protagonist’s point of view at such length. There’s an extended sequence towards the end of the movie that ranks up there as one of the core reasons I cherish the cinema as an art form, and if you’ve seen the movie you can probably identify the one I mean.

In any case, Leonardo DiCaprio, in addition to being a talented actor, is also famous for hanging out on yachts, which somewhat blunts the brilliance of his portrayal of Jordan Belfort. Stupid people everywhere appear to have seized on DiCaprio’s Belfort as a hero worth emulating, much as Martin Scorsese might have a different opinion on the subject.

Case in point. Right now on Amazon several canvas prints of DiCaprio-as-Belfort for use as “wall art” are available. All of them come in two sizes but if you’re the Belfort fan I think you are, you don’t want the small size, you want the full 44”x26” Big Kahuna, which will run you $124.99. There’s one of Belfort snorting cocaine off of a woman’s ass, that one’s my favorite. There’s another one of Belfort cavorting on the floor with his scantily clad mistress-then-wife Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie) which covers similar terrain as the cocaine-ass one.

All of these can be shipped in time for Christmas, by the way.

There are a few others, including one of Belfort holding a glass of wine on a yacht that I think has extra resonance due to DiCaprio’s own hobbies, that you can see below. I wish they had thought to include a still of the early scene where Belfort is mentored by a senior trader named Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) in the art of rapidly getting hammered during the luncheon hour. Hanna is given one of the movie’s more memorable lines when he says that the secret to success on Wall Street can be boiled down to “cocaine and hookers, my friend.”

Keeping on the subject of cocaine, in addition to the Wolf of Wall Street canvas prints I’ve thrown in one of Wagner Moura playing Pablo Escobar in the Netflix series Narcos and another one of David Bowie as Jareth in Labyrinth.
 

Naomi Lapaglia goodness
 

Sexy money armor
 

Leo on a yacht
 
More DiCaprio wall art after the jump…....
 

A photo of a 24-year-old Raquel Welch taken by Peter Gowland for the Ridgid Tool Company Calendar in 1964.
 
The man who shot the bikini models featured in the Ridgid Tool Company Calendar, Peter Gowland, was referred to as “America’s No. 1 Pin-up Photographer” by the New York Times in 1954. That same year Gowland was one of the first to shoot photos of a then 21-year-old Jayne Mansfield shortly after the blonde bombshell arrived in Hollywood. He published his first of more than 35 books, How to Photograph Women—a subject that Gowland mastered during his long career—that same year. That’s not to say that Gowland’s talent was limited to being behind the lens, he also built cameras himself (21 varieties to be precise) which led to the development of a twin-lens camera he called the Gowlandflex. The Gowlandflex attracted clients from the FBI to famed celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz.

In addition to images shot by Gowland which made their way to over 1000 different magazine covers, he was also the principal photographer for the famous Ridgid Tool Company Calendar for 40 years. During the calendars 81-year history it regularly featured racy pinup illustrations, most if not all drawn by artist George Petty (who came to prominence along with pinup king Alberto Vargas) before Gowland’s in-the-flesh bikini girls took over as eye candy for Ridgid’s annual calendar—including a 24-year-old Raquel Welch in 1964 pictured at the top of this post. The tradition would endure until just last year when Ridgid officially stopped using girls in bathing suits posing alongside wrenches and motor oil in their calendars. BOO!

Gowland and Petty’s contributions to Ridgid’s girlie tool calendar tradition are worth celebrating. Both men were remarkably talented and experts in their field of work which helped create a unique vibe for the promotional vehicle—as you will see while looking through the large selection of images from both artists taken from the Ridgid calendar as it appeared during the 50s, 60s, and 70s. In case you’re wondering, girls + bikinis = possibly NSFW.
 

A pinup illustration by George Petty for the Ridgid Tool Company Calendar, April 1952.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

(You can find several porn parody posters from the “Golden Age of XXX” like the ones in this post at The Westgate Gallery online, now on sale for 30% off!)
 
Once upon a time, making a porno meant a camera, some lights, a bedroom or some other suitable location, and a hot young couple (give or take) with firm (give or take) yet pliable bods.

Then things changed. Pornos started taking in storylines, so a scriptwriter was required and a sound recordist to capture all those well-delivered lines like “Hi, I’m Dick the..er..plumber, I’m here to..er…sort out your pipes.” 

As the storylines developed, the producers and directors started making longer and more complex films so they could have not just one big sex scene but two, three, even four, before the snot shot. This also allowed early porno to skirt certain censorship laws.

But writing scripts can be tough work. It meant thinking up stories, creating characters, and giving them reasons to take off their kit every few minutes. The easiest way to think up a porno, with a good story, fun characters and a built in marketing angle, was to make a Hollywood parody. This way the viewing public could give their hands a rest and have a few yuks while watching the action.

I have no idea what was the very first parody porn movie but I don’t need no PhD to tell you there have been a heck of a lot of parody pornos made since their first appearance circa 1968. Where the originals had a wit, verve, some comic invention and damn fine posters too, the more recent examples of parody porn tend to go for the easy sci-fi, fantasy and trendy television titles which are sold with rather unimaginative covers. I mean doesn’t Sleazy Rider look way more intriguing than say X-Men (shuerly they should have called it SeX-Men?) or Hairy Twatter?

Anyway…

Here’s a small selection of X-rated porn parody movies from the sixties to the noughties. Some are posters, some video and DVD covers.
 

 

 

 
More porn parody posters, after the jump…
 

A cheeky illustration by New York native, Bill Kresse.
 

“Don’t ever be afraid to try something new. You will learn from it, use it, and, hopefully, profit from it.”

—Bill Kresse.

Bill Kresse is a hero in the world of illustration and comics with many accolades to his credit, including a gig he scored after graduating from high school for legendary New York studio Terrytoons as an inker in the animation department. Terrytoons produced a few cartoons you might have heard of like Mighty Mouse, a series of toons featuring the wisecracking magpies Heckle and Jeckle, and The Mighty Heroes (Diaper Man! Never forget!).

Following that dreamy-sounding job, Kresse joined the Associated Press as a member of their prestigious art department. If you were a reader of the New York Daily News in the late 60s and early 70s you probably looked forward to Kresse’s cheeky comic strip “Super” Duper which ran in the paper exclusively for several years every Sunday. Kresse and his layout artist friend Rolf Ahlsen collaborated on the storylines and comic panels for “Super” Duper which centered around the antics of tubby, girl-crazy apartment superintendent, Mr. Duper. Kresse and Ahlsen’s fictional Mr. Duper had the good fortune to work in a building inhabited by bodacious females dressed in hotpants and mini skirts. While I’m on the topic of scantily-clad, impossibly proportioned illustrated women, let’s dive into Kresse’s foray into what is commonly referred to as “vintage sleaze” in comics and his pin up art which was routinely showcased in various men’s interest digests put out by Humorama—a wickedly popular division of Martin Goodman’s massive pulp publishing firm.

In the 1950s Kresse earned the reputation of being a “good-girl” illustrator. His lighthearted pinup-style illustrations would appear in various Humorama digests for decades along with other well-known artists versed in sleaze funnies such as Bill Ward (not to be confused with Black Sabbath drummer, Bill Ward), and Superman creator Joe Shuster. So yeah, just like Clark Kent, Shuster had his own secret identity of sorts as an illustrator of fiery-hot, hardcore fetish. Go figure. Fans of Kresse and his contributions to vintage sleaze refer to him as “unappreciated” during his lifetime.

Peers of Kresse I’ve already mentioned in this post who drew classic/sleazy pinup art have already been immortalized in beautifully curated gallery shows as well as hardcover retrospectives. When it comes to Kresse, anything tangible beyond his individual vintage illustrations or comics, is a book he authored in 1984 Introduction to Cartooning. After Kresse passed away in 2014, I was hopeful that someone might finally get around to publishing a collection of his exuberant adult-oriented comics, though sadly that hasn’t happened yet. As a huge fan of all things sleazy, I can say without hesitation that Kresse deserves such an homage and more. Kresse’s work might look rather tame when compared to his contemporary Eric Stanton and one of the genre’s most prolific stars, Gene Bilbrew, but it’s still NSFW. Just like hotpants.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
The four-song EP Barnes & Barnes released in 1982 goes by the name of its best-known track, “I Had Sex with E.T.,” and is distinguished in Steven Spielberg’s biography as “perhaps the most egregious unauthorized product” related to the sci-fi blockbuster. Adding insult to injury, one half of the group that wrote and recorded the song was Bill Mumy, who had played Will Robinson on Lost in Space as a child actor. Had he no respect for the sacred fraternity of showfolk?

Barnes & Barnes’ erotic outer-space adventure in intellectual property rights was over almost as soon as it began. It is alleged that, when the duo had sold just 73 copies of the EP’s limited run of 200, they received a stern warning from Spielberg’s or Universal’s lawyers that compelled them to delete the release. (This Barnes & Barnes discography quotes Mumy’s allusion to “serious bigtime showbiz legal problems.”)

If Barnes & Barnes don’t sound familiar, their novelty hit “Fish Heads” will. As Art and Artie Barnes, Mumy and his partner Robert Haimer recorded a string of albums and singles for Rhino and their own Lumania label, and they collaborated on LPs with Wild Man Fischer and Crispin Glover. This number was just one in their series of kiss-and-tell songs, all of them set to the same one-minute-and-twenty-second backing track: “I Had Sex with Pac-Man” (on the same EP as “I Had Sex with E.T.”), “I Had Sex on TV,” “I Had Sex with Santa,” and the still-unreleased “I Had Sex with Madonna” and “I Had Sex with Your Mother.”

Speaking of the sacred fraternity of showbiz, Mumy and Haimer have a bunch of writing credits on records by the band America, and Mumy used to play with the late Miguel Ferrer of Twin Peaks fame in a blues band called the Jenerators. On the sole release by their previous band, Seduction of the Innocent, you can hear Ferrer sing “Sunshine Superman.”
 

 
Among the many elements of popular culture that the Beatles can be said to have invented, one might add the development of the possibility of women, in numbers, showing acute sexual interest in music stars. Yes, there was Frank Sinatra, and Rudy Vallée before him, but the advent of Beatlemania was an essentially new phenomenon. One of the staples of the mid-1960s is footage of dozens of teenage girls screaming/fainting because they happen to find themselves in the vicinity of Ringo Starr. The general trope of sneaking up to a hotel room in order to kiss a Beatle was surely one of the factors that convinced so many young men to try their hand at the music business.

They came to be called groupies, and some of them even became famous, such as Pamela Des Barres and the Plaster Casters. Des Barres and a few other women briefly became the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), a kind of groupie band in their own right under the tutelage of Frank Zappa, releasing their only album Permanent Damage in 1969.

That was the same year that another groupie-related album came out. It was prosaically called The Groupies and featured no music at all, merely the recorded musings of a few (unidentified) groupies in a tell-all confessional. It was released by Alan Lorber Productions, one of the few releases put out by the label put together by Lorber, who was a well-known arranger at the time.

The GTOs were an L.A. act, but judging by their accents (and the tales they tell), the women on The Groupies are pure New York City, reminiscing about learning to hook up with pop stars at the Brooklyn Fox Theater or discos like Cheetah or Ondine. The women on the album sound pretty young, which can be seen in their primary choice of euphemism for sex, which is “making piggies.”

It’s a curious album and may make the perfect backdrop for your next key party.

Amusingly, the makers of the album tried to immortalize the ladies’ banter by featuring a “groupie glossary” on the back cover, which is simply a listing of the terms they use, almost invariably in an ad-hoc manner, on the album. In other words, it’s too much to call this the widespread accepted terminology of a subculture but it is at least an accurate rendering of typical vocabulary.
 

 

Groupie glossary:

poxie: physically repulsive
plaster caster (The Plaster Casters): girls who cast plaster molds of the genital organs of male pop stars.
kinky: attractively weird
randy: horny, sexually obsessed
puny: small as in male genitals
piggies (making piggies): sexual intercourse
The Fox (The Brooklyn Fox Theater): scene of early sixties rock shows usually m.c.‘d by Murray the “K”
Goof: an event that occurs contrary to normal social behavior; sometimes just for the fun of it.
slaggy: low-life groupie
pop star: the artist with the hit record; major recording artist with international popularity
head (gave him, to give): oral copulation
whank-off: to masturbate
dosed-up: having contracted a venereal disease
creamies: reference to the physical properties of venereal disease
downs: pills with mental and physical depressant qualities
ups: opposite effect of downs
messed-up: a state resulting from excessive drug involvement
fling-on (to fling-on someone): a groupie who physically throws herself at a pop star.
stoned: mental and physical state of being resulting from the intake of mind-expanding drugs
gross: ugly, repulsive person or scene
rock-geisha: an elite groupie
hang on the wall: wait around in a rock club for the action
freak scene: sexual orgy
Prince Charming: as in “Cinderella”
up-sexed: Freudian slip for “upset”
leader: lead singer or the star of a pop group
roadys: road managers who accompany pop groups
out of it: stoned to the point of being out of it
pop people: those people involved in the music scene including recording, producing and all related fields

 
Here’s the full album. For some reason the people who made the album made the choice to introduce each side with a curious echo effect that may dupe you into thinking you’ve opened two instances of the same recording—you probably haven’t.

An iconic shot of actress Raquel Welch as a cavewoman in the 1966 film ‘One Million Years B.C.’
 
If my research regarding the long history of actresses playing cavewomen in films is correct, it is likely that actress and Ziegfeld Follies girl Cecile Arnold was the first woman to play a prehistoric chick in Charlie Chaplin’s 1914 silent film, His Prehistoric Past. Decades later, however, movie-goers would be treated to a vast array of like-themed films such as One Million B.C. (1940); Prehistoric Women (1950); One Million Years B.C. (starring the Raquel Welch in 1966); Hammer’s smashing 1967 remake of Prehistoric Women; the bonkers Italian film, When Women Had Tails (1970); and another stone-age hit from Hammer, Creatures the World Forgot (1971). 

I must be honest—I’m very fond of pictorial-style posts, and this one may be my favorite of all that I’ve done here on Dangerous Minds. And that is because the Internet was exceedingly generous when it came to revealing images of vintage, risky-looking cinematic cavewomen. Photos of Hammer girls Edina Ronay and Caroline Munro, actress Martine Beswick, Barbara Bach (the wife of Beatle Ringo Starr), and the enchanting Norwegian actress Julie Ege—are all featured in this post. Over 30 images of sexy fictional cavewomen follow—most of which are NSFW due to the skimpy attire. You’re welcome. 
 

Actor Charlie Chaplin surrounded by a few of his cavewomen (and a not so sleepy caveman) in the 1914 film, ‘His Prehistoric Past.’
 

Actress Edina Ronay in the 1967 “Hammer Glamour” remake of ‘Prehistoric Women.’
 
More after the jump…

 
Anyone who’s ever been to Stockholm has probably gotten at least a taste of the remarkably vibrant artistic concepts that define many of the city’s subway stations. A bunch of the stations are incredibly distinctive––my favorite was the Solna Centrum station on the blue line, executed by Anders Åberg and Karl-Olov Björk in 1975. In that instance, the cavernous, rocky ceilings are painted a deep shade of red, while the walls at each exit are either green or black. (As you wander about the platform, there are plenty of odd, rustic dioramas to hold your attention.) If you Google the subway stations of Stockholm, this is the image you’re most likely to see––it is rather like a vision of hell. Other stations have geometrical patterns or motifs from science, and not all of them are by any means pleasant.

Stockholm continued its tradition of adventurous subway art when it granted a commission to a cartoonist named Liv Strömquist. Americans are most likely to have encountered Strömquist’s work as the cover art for The Knife’s 2013 album Shaking the Habitual, which necessitated the creation of a comic book called “End Extreme Wealth” that portrayed the 1% as culturally impoverished and vermin-esque. 
 

 
In 2014 Strömquist published Kunskapens frukt (Knowledge’s fruit), in which she introduced menstruation as a major theme of her work. This year, after accepting the commission to do art on the subway, Strömquist decided to present the menstruation-themed artwork in an even more public setting. Did been on display at the Slussen station, which services the green and red lines, since late September.

The enlarged felt-pen sketches, which are self-consciously simple in execution, are entirely black and white except for a noticeable streak of red strategically positioned to evoke menstruation. All of the pictures feature women doing things outdoors; only a few of them focus on menstruation. One of the images references Bob Dylan’s song “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”

Not everyone is delighted to be confronted by images of blood-stained womanhood in the subway. The pictures have been criticized for being “disgusting” and “inappropriate”; one blogger, while acknowledging the positive aspects of a franker attitude towards menstruation, stated that she has doubts that “not sure that enormous pictures like this are what I want to be faced with on my daily commute.”

One tweet complained: “It’s not fun explaining to a four-year-old about the red between the legs.” Another read: “It is not enough to get [your period] once a month. Now you will be reminded every time you jump on the subway.”

As Strömquist commented to Sverige Radio:
 

This discussion always comes when I exhibit my art, because it’s a taboo in society and evokes strong emotions. I’ve not commented on the discussion, and it’s not my place to give judgments to my own art. I’m very excited that some people have enjoyed it.

 
“It’s weird that it’s deemed so provocative, considering it’s something that we see all the time,” she explained to the SVT television station. “I have a hard time understanding that.”

One woman who has no problem with the images is the well-known singer Neko Case, who in early October tweeted some of the images, with the message “Yep, these amazing Stockholm subway murals are by Liv Stromquist!” followed by a heart emoticon.
 
See the images after the jump….......
 

Patti never made the Playboy scene, but she was a CREEM Dream at some point in the late 70s

Bebe Buell was one of the most famous rock and roll girlfriends of the 1970s (she doesn’t like the term groupie, calling Pamela Des Barres’ scene in L.A. “West Coast crap”). Her first relationship with a rock star came when she dated Paul Cowsill of the Cowsills; she was 16 at the time. During the 1970s she also had romantic involvements with Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, and Jimmy Page. Famously, she gave birth to Steven Tyler’s daughter but knowingly named her with the “wrong” name Liv Rundgren to shield her from Tyler’s addiction problems. Although Todd Rundgren and Buell were breaking up around around the time of Liv Tyler’s birth, Rundgren committed to the deception and for years did not divulge that he wasn’t Liv Tyler’s biological father. Liv Tyler herself didn’t know the truth until she was nine years old.

One of the major turning points in Buell’s life was becoming the Playboy Playmate of the Month in November 1974. She didn’t need Playboy to date Rundgren, whom she’d already been seeing for a couple of years. (In her Playmate Fact Sheet, she lists “My boyfriend, Todd Rundgren” under “Favorite Performer.”) While posing in Playboy probably didn’t help her recording career any, it did have the effect of elevating her status among the rock elite—as she said, after “I did Playboy ... the rock stars came-a-hunting.”
 

 
Another notable woman living in NYC at that time was Patti Smith, who had yet to record any music under her name. She also had some fairly serious dalliances with Rundgren, and was also friendly with Buell. According to Buell in the essential oral history of punk Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, it was actually Smith who convinced Buell that she should say yes to Playboy.

More interestingly, Smith would have been totally down with posing for Playboy herself.

Here’s Buell on the subject:
 

The person that talked me in to posing for Playboy magazine was Patti Smith. At the time I was doing well as a cover-girl model for Revlon, Intimate, and Wella. I had four or five big accounts. But my role models weren’t models. I admired girls like Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull, those were the girls I looked up to and aspired to be like.

So when Playboy asked me to pose, Patti said, “I wish Playboy would ask me, I’d do it.” Patti had really big boobs, a lot of people don’t realize that. She was extremely well-endowed and she always thought that kind of stuff was really cool. She showed me pictures of Brigitte Bardot, Ursula Andress, Raquel Welch, and all these Playboy pictures. She’d say, “Being in Playboy is like Coca-Cola. It’s Andy Warhol. It’s American, you know, it’s part of America, this magazine.” She said, “Do it. It’ll be great. It’ll fuck up that fashion thing.”

-snip-

Patty’s idea of feminism seemed to me to be about not being a victim–-that women should make choices in full control of their faculties and make a rebel stand.

Posing for Playboy was a rebel move. It almost ruined my career as far as legitimate Fashion work went. The only magazines that ould book me after that were like Cosmopolitan and stuff. I lost all my bread-and-butter clients. I lost Avon and Butterick. All the straight fashion magazines stopped booking me.

But how could I regret it?

 
So there you have it. Patti Smith, of course, did not end up ever posing for Playboy but instead released Horses in 1975 and eventually became an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A realistic piece of doll-sized BDSM furniture made by a Russian artist going by the name of Mick. Mick sells his dollhouse dungeon furniture on his Etsy site, BdsmFan.
 
A few years ago I wrote about UK-based artist Jennie Nightfall and her naughty doll-sized BDSM furniture here on Dangerous Minds. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the post was a huge hit, proving once again that DM readers like to let their freak-flags wave and give zero fucks if you are offended at the sight of a doll spanking another doll who bent over a little wooden horse. This logical approach to life is shared by a Russian architect, artist, and designer named Mick—the man behind the doll-sized BDSM playthings and contraptions seen in this post.

Mick resides Novosibirsk—a city in the southwestern region of Siberia near the Ob River.  According to his Etsy page, Mick has been making his little torture devices and equipment for about a year and will allegedly make custom BDSM pieces for you in either doll or human scale. His doll-sized work is rather authentic-looking and includes all kinds of bondage furniture such as benches, various “punishment boards” (or pillories), cages, and even a little BDSM toilet. Mick also crafts kinky accessories like paddles, masks and fishnet stockings because even inanimate dolls want to look good while they are behaving badly. Most of Mick’s little bondage gear will run you anywhere from five bucks for a mini-mask to $95 for a deviant doll-sized dungeon diorama. I’ve posted photos of Mick’s adult-oriented doll furniture below which contains images of nude dolls making this post perplexingly NSFW.
 

One of Mick’s doll-sized punishment boards. Dolls not included.
 

 
More after the jump…