 When good girls go bad. 
Above, a striking poster for 1971’s Furyô shôjô Mako, aka Bad Girl Mako, starring Junko Natsu. We really like the design on this. The movie has the distinction of being Nikkatsu Studios’ last production before shifting into pinku-inspired Roman porno, a seventeen-year period during which it almost exclusively made high budget sexploitation films. Junko Natsu, pictured on the poster, started her career in 1967 with Violated Angels and acted in more than forty movies and many television shows. We haven’t actually seen this movie yet, but if we do we’ll be sure to get back to you about it.
 Cinema killed the Radio star. 
We found this unusual magazine in Bayonne, France last year and picked it up because of its striking cover star, who happens to be French actress Simone Renant. She had a fifty-year career in cinema but we were not aware she also worked in radio. But it says right on the cover she could be heard in Les sept mensonges de l'impératrice, aka The Seven Lies of the Empress. Radio is filled with broadcast schedules. Pages of them for the entirety of France, from metro Paris to Nice to Bretagne. But Renant’s presence hints at cinema overlap and, indeed, film star Rita Hayworth makes an appearance. And because readers cannot live on celebrity alone, there’s a bit of politics, opera, dance and, of course, boobs. This issue appeared today in 1947, which is why 47 appears in the name. The next year’s issues had a 48, and so forth, from 1943 until the publication faded away in the early 1950s, when dramatic radio was also on the way out. We have a few scans below.   
 Toto we’re not in Africa anymore. 
Stuart Cloete’s 1943 jungle melodrama Congo Song was not glowingly reviewed, but was reprinted over and over. Its popularity certainly owed something to the fact that it nurtured all the cherished Western stereotypes about Africa. We’ll just give you the book's closing words and you’ll get the idea: This was the Congo song: the song of sluggish rivers, of the mountains, the forests; the song of the distant, throbbing drums, of the ripe fruits falling, of the mosquitoes humming in the scented dusk; the song of Entobo, of the gorilla, and the snake. The song no white man would ever sing. So, basically white people in Africa are undone by their inadequacies, which are amplified by the deep, dark, primitive, savage, mysterious Congo. Cloete’s characters include Nazis, artists, and spies, but the real creation here is Olga le Blanc, who has a pet gorilla she—wait for it—nursed at her own breast when it was an infant. Le Blanc nursed le gorille, eh? Cloete’s symbolism is pretty thick milk. Eventually the surviving characters are chased away, but they remember the Congo with bittersweet nostalgia. Kind of like in that Toto song “Africa.” It’s gonna take a lot to take me awaaaay from yoooou… There’s nothing that a hundred men or moooore could ever doooo… I bless the rains down in Aaaafricaaa…     
 Publishers provocateur Goliath release a collection of Japanese-bondage-inspired art photos. 
A long while back we mentioned the Japanese art of kinbaku-bi or shibari (we won’t get into the debate over which term is more correct) and said we’d discuss it again, but of course never did. Well, we were reminded of that promise when Berlin-based rebel publishers Goliath sent us a couple of their books. Ostensibly, they’re coffee table volumes, but of a rather provocative type, dealing with bondage as art. Today we’re looking only at Strictly Bondage, and we’ll get to the other book Kinky Bondage Obsession later this week. Strictly Bondage, a compact volume of black and white images derived directly from the Japanese bondage arts, was shot by longtime bdsm photographer Victor Lightworship. Like the master or kinbakushi who restrains women in kinbaku-bi, Lightworship uses ropes in some of his photos to suspend his models. He appears in many of the shots, and while he goes through the motions of dominating his models, the content doesn’t overpower the compositional beauty of the tableaux. Or put another way, while the book generates some raised eyebrows when visitors pick it up from the coffee table, they quickly become aware that they’re looking at the output of someone with talent and a finely honed aesthetic. Lightworship has been at this for thirty years, even studying kinbaku-bi under a rope master, so the sharpness and cohesion of this collection is no surprise, nor is the fact that he can walk a tightrope between the disturbing and erotic so deftly. Some of his non-Strictly Bondage work goes farther, so the effect achieved here is deliberate and is partly due, we think, to the array of expressions his models wear—sometimes a sort of overacted b-movie terror, but other times a resigned serenity comically juxtaposed against the most elaborate of subjugation. The book’s foreword asks: “What is art? What is erotic? What is porn? What is interesting?” Strictly Bondage is a little of all those, and it’ll be living on our coffee table for some time, or at least until our friends bring their kids by. We have several of the tamer images from the book’s interior below, and you can learn more about Victor Lightworship and Strictly Bondage at www.goliathbooks.com, and at the photographer’s site here.    
 Hold me, thrill me, Kissmu, kill me. 
Random Japanese goodness. Here’s a poster for a 1972 movie with Minami Kissmu. No western release means there’s no western title, but the poster says something like “Reckless Driving Woman Biker.” We searched but found no sign of this anywhere on the internet, which is too bad because the title alone would make it worth a viewing. No such luck. And no info on Ms. Kissmu either. What a great piece of art, though. Those striped pants need to come back in style, we think. But what is it with Japan? Based on one or two other examples, we can only assume there’s no penalty for riding under the legal limit of clothing.
 1950s male fitness magazine features a surprising guest star. 
Today we’re back to the bodybuilding publication Tomorrow’s Man. The content of TM was health focused, but in the same way that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is about swimwear. We’ll let a contemporary from the period say it: “When I was a closeted teenager Tomorrow’s Man was my favorite guilty pleasure magazine. I was so impressed that in 1965 I mentioned Tomorrow’s Man specifically in my first novel What They Did to the Kid.” That’s from award winning author Jack Fritscher. So you had a health and fitness publication that—for some customers—also served as a sexual outlet, exactly like Sports Illustrated. One difference here, though, is that underaged boys were often featured in TM’s pages, and that holds true for this issue as well, in which a fifteen-year-old boy named Steve Jano poses in the woods wearing a thong and holding a spear. Of course, back then there were nudist publications that published photos of entire families—including completely naked pre-pubescent girls—so there’s nothing going on with TM that heterosexuals weren’t doing too, probably long earlier and doubtless in far greater numbers. None of that is the reason we wanted to share this issue, but as we’ve said before, sometimes to get where we want we have to first address the elephant in the room. Okay, done. What actually struck us about this issue from May 1956 is the inclusion of Marilyn Monroe. We thought we’d seen Monroe everywhere, but no—here she is in a male bodybuilding publication. There seems to be no limit to her range. But we do think she needs to bump up the weight she’s lifting just a bit. You can check out more TM covers here.     
 To get to the top you sometimes have to climb over someone else. 
This publicity photo from Warner Bros. shows six members of the studio’s beauty chorus posing on a ladder that was part of a pirate ship being used in the 1933 Busby Berkeley musical Footlight Parade. This is not the first time this movie has been mentioned on Pulp Intl. We shared an excellent magazine cover related to it last year. Among the chorus girls who appeared in the film were nineteen-year-old Dorothy Lamour and twenty-two-year-old Ann Sothern, both just beginning their careers. The women above are not identified, but if we had to guess we’d say Lamour could be third from the top. 
 You and your stories. Bart’s a vampire. Beer causes heart attacks. 
Yeah, there’s a girl on the cover of this Midnight published today in 1969 demanding $15,000 for her virginity, but she’s not important right now. Does beer really cause heart attacks? Doctors tell us that FAEEs (fatty acid ethyl esters) are synthesized at high rates in the heart, and because ethanol in alcohol is a toxic agent that affects the metabolism of fatty acids—which are the sole energy source for the heart—there’s a plausible link between the ingestion of alcohol and observed cardiac damage. But fuck those doctors. Let’s turn to noted beer drinker Plato. He once said that it was a wise man who invented beer. Sizzle. And what would the Mahatma say? Nothing, because he was too busy breaking a blood vessel in his eye tossing his cookies after a long binge one night at Samaldas College. In short, we don’t need no stinking doctors—if the best minds in history drank beer, it’s good enough for us.
 Free and easy? You heard wrong on both counts, buster. 
Not well known today, June Wetherell wrote numerous novels spanning genres as diverse as historical romance and science fiction. Free and Easy was originally published by E.P. Dutton & Co. in 1947 as Run, Sheep, Run, but everything got the pulp treatment in the 1950’s and this sexed up Popular Library paperback appeared in 1959. Of course, only the cover was different. The story was the same. The plot here commences in college in the mid-1930s and extends into the real world and the war years. The main player is a party girl named Pat Reed who ditches her aspiring composer boyfriend Ken Morrison mainly because his economic prospects seem bleak. Later, when both are married to others, she changes her mind and decides to go after him. Ken is unemployed and unhappy, and both remember their relationship with nostalgia and regret, but he’s a moral dude and it’s no foregone conclusion he’ll simply ditch his wife. So Free and Easy is a love story, but one that reached for serious literary status by virtue of its plot bridging two pivotal points in American history—the Great Depression and World War II. Probably what’s most interesting about it is how the themes resonate so strongly half a century later. Here’s the New York Times blurb inside: “An interesting and disturbingly reminiscent novel. Knowing the generation that graduated from college into hopelessness and economic insecurity, Wetherell writes of them with penetrating sympathy.” Hopelessness and economic insecurity. Sounds like it could have been written about a book published last week, right? Next time you see your parents or grandparents make sure to apologize for those times you told them they just didn’t understand what you were going through. And if you’re very interested in June Wetherell, here’s a blog piece about her as she turned 100 years old.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1926—Aimee Semple McPherson Disappears
In the U.S., Canadian born evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappears from Venice Beach, California in the middle of the afternoon. She is initially thought to have drowned, but on June 23, McPherson stumbles out of the desert in Agua Prieta, a Mexican town across the border from Douglas, Arizona, claiming to have been kidnapped, drugged, tortured and held for ransom in a shack by two people named Steve and Mexicali Rose. However, it soon becomes clear that McPherson's tale is fabricated, though to this day the reasons behind it remain unknown. 1964—Mods and Rockers Jailed After Riots
In Britain, scores of youths are jailed following a weekend of violent clashes between gangs of Mods and Rockers in Brighton and other south coast resorts. Mods listened to ska music and The Who, wore suits and rode Italian scooters, while Rockers listened to Elvis and Gene Vincent, and rode motorcycles. These differences triggered the violence. 1974—Police Raid SLA Headquarters
In the U.S., Los Angeles police raid the headquarters of the revolutionary group the Symbionese Liberation Army, resulting in the deaths of six members. The SLA had gained international notoriety by kidnapping nineteen-year old media heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley, California apartment, an act which precipitated her participation in an armed bank robbery. 1978—Charlie Chaplin's Missing Body Is Found
Eleven weeks after it was disinterred and stolen from a grave in Corsier near Lausanne, Switzerland, Charlie Chaplin's corpse is found by police. Two men—Roman Wardas, a 24-year-old Pole, and Gantscho Ganev, a 38-year-old Bulgarian—are convicted in December of stealing the coffin and trying to extort £400,000 from the Chaplin family. 1918—U.S. Congress Passes the Sedition Act
In the U.S., Congress passes a set of amendments to the Espionage Act called the Sedition Act, which makes "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces, as well as language that causes foreigners to view the American government or its institutions with contempt, an imprisonable offense. The Act specifically applies only during times of war, but later is pushed by politicians as a possible peacetime law, specifically to prevent political uprisings in African-American communities. But the Act is never extended and is repealed entirely in 1920.
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