How do you think Kim Jong-un got to be the dictator of North Korea, anyways?
 
In searching for hint of satire or farce, I am left wanting. Beat Your Way to the Top: Masturbation as a technique for business success, written by Dr. Stephen Larkin PhD, appears to be (somewhat?) legit. In my mind, it’s really only the natural mutation of 1980s self-improvement pseudo-psychology business culture. Really, what’s more masturbatory than meditating on one’s own awesomeness? I mean, doesn’t espousing masturbation in the context of business culture feel kind of redundant?

But Dr. Larkin appears to be deadly serious about his work, despite the cynical dismissal of his peers.

I am not able to publish these findings in any psychology journal. Business journals that I have approached have tended to act as if it was all a joke. I assure you it is not joke. As embarrassing as it is to admit it, I myself started following these routines and as a direct consequence, I am publishing this book today.

I’m surprised he found the time.

Masturbation WILL lead to the realization of your dreams. It will focus you. Energize you. It will allow you to see with clarity. Follow the instructions in this book and you too, will find success.

Okay… but what if I’m wrong? What if this man the Tesla of our time? Pitching his drops of pearly brilliance over the heads a skeptical audience of prudes?

Are we the ones on the wrong side of history? Is success in business not based on luck, skill, being born into a wealthy family and (to a far lesser extent) hard work? Call me a skeptic, but I just think that if this worked, we’d ALL be far more successful by now. Poverty would have been conquered thousands of years ago. EVERYONE would own a Rolls Royce!

But if you look at the Amazon reviews, it seems to be working for many of Dr. Larkin’s readers.

Hannah from Michigan, gives the book a five-star rating:

I was worried when my husband brought this little gem home. Imagine my relief when I learned it was actually about masturbation!

This book is geared toward men, but if you squint, you can relate it to women, too. Before I read this book, I was a dime-a-dozen bean counter at the local Mexican restaurant. How was I supposed to know that the secret to success is tickling the taco? It had been so long since I had stirred the yogurt, but you know what they say about riding sidesaddle ! Now, every day at my lunch break, I spend five minutes in the bathroom making soup and feeding my bearded clam, and my professional life is climaxing! The owner has been eyeballing me for my manager’s position- I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I have a feeling I’ll be rubbing out her name on the office door soon!

Reviewer Noj also seemed to get something from Dr. Larkin’s techniques:

Before I bought this book, my handshakes were weak and weary. Now, they are firm and muscular, with a hint of a non-slip grip. It’s hard for me to imagine how I survived in the business world before. The only problem that I have now is that I occasionally squeeze a soda can too tightly, and get it everywhere.

Well, maybe it does work, what do I know? I just wouldn’t buy a used copy of this puppy, if you know what I mean…

 
This piece, “The Sex Life of Robots” was one of the few segments that I didn’t personally—control freak that I am—produce in the Disinformation TV series, it was produced and shot by Doug Stone and edited by Nimrod Erez. As you’ll see, it arrived a little polished gem and was one of my favorite things in the entire series.

The character you’re going to meet here, animator Mike Sullivan will be a familiar face to a certain percentage of DM readers for his roles in both Robert Downey Sr.‘s Greasers Palace (he played Lamy “Homo” Greaser) and the low-budget early 80s slasher flick Madman. Mike was also a special effects technician on one of the Star Trek films, worked in the art department of early SNL and did many of the “Foto Funnies” strips found in the National Lampoon magazine during its heyday.

Today Sullivan runs his Cloud Studios from a dusty loft on 26th Street and 6th Ave in NYC, near the site of the weekly 6th Ave Flea Market, which he scours for Barbie and GI Joe dolls to modify and put through perverse paces for his perpetual work-in-progress magnum opus, “The Sex Life of Robots.”

Mike’s work has been covered in several publications and exhibited in museums. You can visit his website where a few of his beautiful one-of-a-kind robot porno stars are for sale.

NSFW or apparently Virgin Air: A few months back this segment was featured on the in-flight Boing Boing channel and there were some complaints. I was pleased to see that the show was still a lil’ controversial after more than a decade.
 

 
A truck driver called the Port Townsend Police Department on April 5, 2013 to report an allegedly naked dude (‘though the dude denies being nude) “waving around a vibrating phallic device in an attempt to flag down semi-truck drivers for a date.”

I like how the cops let him go with a warning to “engage in more traditional ways to find a date.” Good advice?

Via Arbroath

 
From the DM achives:

Scottish documentary filmmaker John Samson died at the age of 58 in 2004. But sadly, for someone of his distinct talents, he had unceremoniously faded into obscurity two decades before his death.

Samson was a hugely influential artist who never got his due during the seminal years in which he was actually engaged in creating the films he would later be lauded for. It is only in retrospect that his films are being heralded as being too honest, too real and too thoughtful for the British television corporations he depended upon for the distribution of his work. Years after his death he’s finally getting some recognition in a case of too little too fucking late.

Samson’s films often focused on compelling and unorthodox (for its time) subject matter such as tattooing, fetishism, dwarfism and sex. He approached his material objectively, never editorializing, letting the subject speak for itself. Perhaps it was his own outlaw status that helped him relate to social outcasts, the stigmatized and the proudly defiant.

In 1977 Samson made Dressing For Pleasure, a documentary about ordinary people who enjoyed dressing in rubber and who approached their fetish with a matter of factness that seems almost quaint. The film was an immediate sensation among British fashion designers and within the London punk scene and was promptly banned as a video nasty. It ended up becoming one of the most ripped off British films of the 1970s.

The BBC used segments of Dressing For Pleasure in a 1995 documentary on the Sex Pistols. Having not seen the BBC documentary, I assume the parts they used are the scenes with Jordan in Vivienne Westwood’s boutique Sex and the one where allegedly Malcolm McClaren’s oversized head is wearing an inflatable black rubber gimp mask. Exactly where John Lydon wanted him. 

During Vivienne Westwood’s 2004 career retrospective in London, Dressing For Pleasure ran on a continuous loop and Julien Temple featured the Sex segments in his Pistols documentary The Filth And The Fury.
 

Punk icon Jordan in Seditionaries boutique, Kings Rd.
 

The lasting impression of Samson’s film is not of aggressive provocation (of which punk was often accused by its mainstream detractors) but of an affectionate tribute to a characteristically English strain of bloody-minded eccentricity.

 

John Samson and his plastic fantastic lover.
 
The long overdue appreciation for John Samson is a small victory for good art. He’s not around to benefit from it. His heart knocked him out the game. I wonder if the stress of the game, the politics and business of it all, was just more than he cared to handle. The hassle of selling yourself can be deadening. His style of egalitarian filmmaking was life embracing and opened up doors into worlds that may have seemed strange to some but contained a certain purity that was undeniable. He found the flesh under the rubber. But perhaps he couldn’t put up enough latex and plastic between himself and the corporate pigs to protect his own beating heart and it attacked him.

The director Don Boyd, an executive producer on The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, is still appalled by the ease with which John Samson was allowed to fade away. “He represented a different breed of film-maker,” Boyd says. “He had commitment, vision and a respect for the truth. He was criminally ignored by tyrants in an editorially fascist television era which, thank God, looks as if it’s coming to an end. His best work represents everything they have destroyed.”

Here’s the rarely seen Dressing For Pleasure in its entirety. As you watch it, take notice at how beautifully the film is composed and shot. At times I’m reminded of the the films of Kenneth Anger, the soft meeting the hard, the yin, the yang, the whole damn thing, to a rock and roll beat.
 

 
Rob Beschizza over at Boing Boing posted about this nifty lil’ product sold on Amazon : A cat-tail buttplug aka “The Emma.” Yeah, you heard me.

Apparently it’s designed “for the most comfortable fit.”

The cat-tail buttplug sells for $29.95. If you think outside the box, you could, er, scratch two itches at with once by usuing it as a duster... ?

 
What you’re looking at is the 2013 album cover for Wasnatch’s Front to Back. To be honest, I’ve never heard of these guys, but if the cover has you curious… here’s what they sound like via Spotify.

According to some folks on Facebook, this image is from a 70s German porno. I have no idea, but WOW!

Is “French horning” like… a thing? I’ve heard of “oboeing” before, but not this.

 
In 1969, Louise Huebner, the “official” witch of Los Angeles, recorded a spoken word album of her successful book Seduction Through Witchcraft for Warner Brothers Records, who were no doubt happy to cash in on the notoriety of a celebrity occultist in the era of Anton LaVey and Sybil Leek.

Tailor-made for the acid-head occultniks of the time, Huebner lays some sexy pop magic on her listeners, including cuts like “The Self-Fascination Ritual for Increased Power,” “The Demon Spell for Energy,” “Orgies - A Tool of Witchcraft” and “The Earthquake Spell for Unwanted Lovers.”

Seduction Through Witchcraft features a musical score by circuit-bending electronic music pioneers Louis and Bebe Barron of Forbidden Planet fame (Huebner’s late husband, Mentor Huebner, was a leading Hollywood production illustrator and storyboards artist who did uncredited designs for the film). It’s one of the Barron’s most obscure works, and not even listed on their Wikipedia page. I noticed that much of the online information about the record completely neglects to mention them.

Seduction Through Witchcraft is quite good fun. It was briefly released on CD, but that’s been out of print for years. In 2009, Scorpio Music put out a 180 gram vinyl LP version that’s still around.
 
Below, “The Demon Spell for Energy”:
 

 
“Orgies - A Tool of Witchcraft”:
 

 
As announced by his close friend, Don Schenk, the well-known 70s porn actor and successful real estate broker Harry Reems (real name Herbert Streicher)  passed away yesterday afternoon, March 19, at the Salt Lake City V.A. Hospital.  He was 65.

Harry Reems came to pop culture notoriety as the male star of Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat, the 1973 porno film that is the biggest XXX money earner of all time. Reems co-starred as the manic doctor who discovers that Linda Lovelace’s clitoris was located in her throat. He was the only actor ever tried and convicted of pandering obscenity for being in a porno movie.

By the 1980s, Reems had become a serious alcoholic and ended up homeless on the streets of Los Angeles, before turning his life around and becoming a very successful real estate broker in Park City Utah. He married his wife of 22 years, Jeannie, in 1991.

Reems appeared, as himself, in the 2005 documentary, Inside Deep Throat.

Via Don Schenk:

A few years ago Harry’s health began to deteriorate due to peripheral neuropathy and emphysema, forcing him to retired from real estate. This past summer he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which the doctors discovered during a routine test for something else, and Harry went through months of chemo and radiation treatments.

On March 5th, Harry entered the VA Hospital due to jaundice. His liver was failing. Next his kidneys began to fail as his body started to shut down. My wife and I have been driving from Park City down to the Salt Lake City VA Hospital to visit with Harry and Jeannie every afternoon.

Harry slipped into a coma 4 days ago, and passed this afternoon.

Harry went from living a bizarre lifestyle, through a 180 degree, almost miraculous change to find a Higher Power he called God, and become a truly nice guy who cared for others, and helped a lot of people in Park City, UT.

 

 
Below, Al Goldstein interviews Harry Reems on Midnight Blue, 1982.
 

 
Thank you Steven Otero!

 
An image of a couple performing a sex act on Temperance Street, Manchester, England, has been deleted from Google Street View, after the picture was spotted by users.

Temperance Street is well-known Red Light area in the city, and it is believed the image had been on Google Street view since April 2010.
 

 
Close-up, after the jump…
 

 
The fine folks over at Porn MD—where they’re making some serious medical breakthroughs—complied six months’ worth of the most searched terms on porn sites and then put them into this easily browsed format:

Ever wonder which states or countries are into what when it comes to what goes on behind closed doors? In this graphic below we take a closer look at the sexual interests of people around the planet.

You can “check out every state in the U.S. and then see what other countries around the world are searching for.”

Here’s what Alabama, California, Texas and New Jersey are up to:

 
Here’s what Africa is up to:

 
Via WFMU on Twitter!