 Aliens seem inordinately attracted to the United States. Maybe it's the free drink refills 
Talk of UFOs—sorry UAPs—is ramping up in the U.S. again, which means it's time for one of our periodic buckets of ice water over the debate. There are no alien craft in the skies. There, we did it. We've already gone through the reasons why. Condensed version: aliens could learn everything they wanted to know about Earth without coming here. They could hang out undetected behind Uranus—heh heh—and intercept endless radio and television transmissions. Or they could send undetectable drones the size of gnats here. If they came to Earth physically they would have stealth technology. The list goes on. But today we're interested in a slightly different question. Why does the U.S generate 92% of global UFO sightings?
You ever notice, also, that it's the U.S. that has all the secret data, hidden wreckage, and refrigerated bodies? The unlikelihood of aliens visiting the U.S. to the near exclusion of the rest of the planet, and the hubris that drives that belief, is worth note. If you're an alien, why not land in Tanzania? There's some pretty interesting shit there. Why not India? There are 1.5 billion people there worthy of study. It seems to us that the fantasy of government held UFO secrets needs to be intertwined with the U.S. or else it doesn't really work. Why? Well, we've travelled around a bit, and not all governments are the same. Some are far less interested in keeping secrets. We feel pretty confident that if the government of, say, Iceland, or Finland, or New Zealand learned something about UFOs they'd simply say so.
By the same token, some governments have so little in the way of a national security apparatus we doubt they have the capability to keep extraordinarily large secrets. If a UFO crashed in Belize or Nepal we bet everybody in and out of government would know within days. All it takes is for aliens to do one of their periodic oopsy-daisys somewhere other than the U.S.—or the other highly secretive nuclear powers—and the beans would probably be spilled. This is why UFO sightings are concentrated in the U.S., with its incredibly opaque government. The idea of UFOs elsewhere spoils the fun, because the point isn't so much aliens as it is conspiracies.
It's easy to imagine the leader of a smaller nation seeing good reason to share definitive proof of alien life. Geopolitics works on two tiers, with nuclear armed nations existing outside international law. We bet dozens of leaders would be interested in throwing sand in the gears of those nations' global domination machinery by offering proof that Earth is being observed by infinitely more powerful (and wise?) entities. And you know what? When we think of it that way, maybe we should believe after all. Could proof of alien life stop warfare? There are certainly worse things to believe in. So come on, bobble-headed intergalactic saviors. All of a sudden, we've found the faith.
 I've decided to start a nudist colony. What do you think? Any chance of success? 
Monica Gayle was a b-movie actress extraordinaire, appearing in more than thirty mostly low budget films, including Switchblade Sisters, The Harem Bunch, The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio, and, quite memorably, The Stewardesses, in which she's onscreen for only a few minutes but performs the lotus position in a way you've probably never seen. We also just saw her in Southern Comforts, which is why we're featuring her today—we figured after all those fuzzy screenshots we needed to give you a clearer look. Posing nude was no rarity for her. She appeared in probably a dozen men's magazines, often quite explicitly. This more modest shot of her comes from an issue of the nudist publication Sun Buffs and is from 1970.
 My examination indicates that you're remarkably healthy. If only my marriage were in the shape you're in. 
Above: another piece of medical sleaze, Steve Bell's Doctors Are Lovers Too, for Chicago Paperback House, 1962. Bell is also credited with Venus of Lesbos, Swap Road, and a few other books, but we suspect a pseudonym. The cover art on this is by an unknown.
 Cormac McCarthy goes to the place that was his lifelong literary obsession. 
Because we have actual jobs we're always a little late with tribute posts, which is why we generally don't do them. The last time we wrote about an author's death it was Elmore Leonard, who transcended the bounds of genre fiction to develop one of the most unique and entertaining literary voices of the last fifty years. And then there's Cormac McCarthy, dead as of yesterday, who was one of the greatest stylists to ever work in the English language. From the first page of his first book you knew you were dealing with a different vision, a different way of seeing the world and processing the events that occurred within it. In All the Pretty Horses, which was McCarthy's sixth book but the first we ever read, he did the following in the third paragraph, writing about a train:
It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground-shudder watching it till it was gone.
That's a classic McCarthy sentence, overwhelmingly visual, scoffing at structure and punctuation, seeming to run forever but mirroring the minute focus on objects and landscapes people often feel during emotional distress. In this case it reflects the inner turmoil of a character—the iconic John Grady Cole—who doesn't express emotion extravagantly, if at all. McCarthy often used long sentences in this way, but his powers of description could also be concise, as in this example, from Suttree:
He made a fire beneath a shelf of rock and watched a storm close over the valley down there, ragged hot wires of lightning quaking in the dusk like voltage in some mad chemist’s chambers.
And he would also do this, from Cities of the Plain:
The desolation of that place was a thing exquisite.
 The sentence is more bleakness observed through the eyes of young man/ancient soul John Grady Cole, who was perhaps a version of McCarthy himself. We gather that there's a debate between those who prefer his early work and those who prefer his later work. For us, All the Pretty Horses represents the dividing line. We prefer that book and everything before, but we very much love everything after too. When someone asks which of his novels we like best, we're usually baffled. Often we select Blood Meridian, in which he rewrote the Old West as a gore-drenched Boschian hellscape. Babies are massacred. Horses are diseased. Men wear necklaces of ears. And death comes swiftly from nowhere.
About a third of the way through the book McCarthy unflinchingly shows readers the lethal mutation within the American DNA by using the example of two cowboys who hate each other. They're both named Jackson, but one is white and the other is black, and they're called by their company of companions White Jackson and Black Jackson. McCarthy does this to suggest the basic sameness between these men, like cousins from a family, but in their minds they're completely opposite. White Jackson expresses this through racism and high-handedness, and inevitably he finally pushes Black Jackson too far, with horrifying results. It's nighttime, and all the men are sitting around a campfire:
The nearest man to him was Tobin and when the black stepped out of the darkness bearing the bowieknife in both hands like some instrument of ceremony Tobin started to rise. The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head. Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest's feet where it lay with eyes aghast. Tobin jerked his foot away and rose and stepped back. The fire steamed and blackened and a gray cloud of smoke rose and the columnar arches of blood slowly subsided until just the neck bubbled gently like a stew and then that too was stilled. He was sat as before save headless, drenched in blood, the cigarillo still between his fingers, leaning toward the dark and smoking grotto in the flames where his life had gone.
Other authors have used far more words to get across what McCarthy imparts in that highly metaphorical passage—that hoping to reach a covenant is futile when people exist in a Hobbesian maelstrom of violence, or a zero sum trap of daily existence. The rule that says we must vie with one another merely to survive, that one person's victory must come at another's loss, issues from the minds and media of those who never really have to vie for anything, and the idea needs somehow to be erased and rewritten before lasting peace and prosperity are possible. McCarthy's characters almost always fail on that front because he personally didn't think humans collectively have the capability to throw off the shackles of ignorance, indolence, hate, and greed. He believed all of those are inalterable human qualities—or human nature, full stop. If he ever thought differently, even for a second, it certainly didn't color his almost unbearably hopeless prose.
McCarthy possesses the hallmarks of someone who, because of his unique literary vision and the lavish praise it generated, will bring the iconoclasts flocking soon, and they'll claim he's overrated and not really a good writer at all. Good luck with that. Like Hemingway and other giants, though, he was indisputably a writer with a narrow focus. But we don't believe that an author must be everything to everyone. McCarthy didn't bother trying to flesh out female characters in a realistic way; there are plenty of writers who do. His ethnic portryals were limited to the people you'd encounter near the U.S.'s southern border; writers abound who are more inclusive. McCarthy was a singular creator who explored every nook and niche of a tightly bounded realm circumscribed by the duality of the U.S. and Mexico's violent historical dance, the banality of seeing the world in good/evil terms, the salvational potential of love, the struggle of those in meager circumstances, and ultimately, the inevitability of oblivion. Yesterday was his turn to fall, and be borne away into the unknown.
 At least we're still in love after all these years, honey. You're in love with a waitress, and I'm in love with a cabana boy. 
We're back to Italian illustrator Sandro Syemoni today, who we consider a genius in his field. Above you see his cover for Ace Books' 1958 edition of Alberto Moravia's The Time of Indifference, which was originally published in 1929 as Gli indifferenti. We gather it was quite a racy book and it sold out in weeks. Ace, as we've mentioned before, repackaged a lot of literary fiction with newly provocative covers. If you're going to go that route, Symeoni was close to the best. See what we mean here and here. And check some of his poster work here.
 You can think about it, but first you have to know what “it” is. 
Stop us if you already know this. Back during the ’60s and ’70s stores that sold items related to tobacco and weed consumption were known as headshops. The hippest sectors of town—your Haight-Ashburys, Capitol Hills, and Greenwich Villages—were home to these establishments, and among the many products on offer counterculture posters were big sellers. These would be Che Guevara posters, naked-woman-smoking-a-bong posters, fluorescent black light posters, etc., genrally aimed at young male customers. Above is an example of that collectible art form. The shot was made by Dozier Mobley, who you see here.  He was a photojournalist for the Atlanta Journal, the Associated Press, and United Press International, and later went on to work extensively with NASCAR.
The message of the poster may seem self-explanatory (most websites say it calls for revolution), but we aren't sure. While that's an understandable interpretation, we actually think, because the model is nude, this is more likely a sex-not-war, anti-Vietnam type thing aimed specifically at black buyers, who had been sent overseas in disproportionate numbers (particularly early in the war, and particularly when compared to earlier wars). The “Think About It!” tag suggests an anti-war message, we feel, as in, “Think about what you'll lose.” But we'll never know the exact meaning. It's a headshop poster. The message is up to each buyer to determine. Mobley would probably know, but he died in 2009. The model might know too, but she's unidentified, sadly. Unidentified—but unforgettable.
 
 Happiness, anger, and ballistics.  
These two promo images of famously thin actress Audrey Hepburn were made for her 1964 film Paris When It Sizzles. It's another movie in her romance/adventure mold, along with Charade, How To Steal a Million, and others. There's a Hollywood commandment: Thou shalt not mess with success. For a while, following that rule made Hepburn one of the biggest stars of all.
 They're a hell of a lot of trouble. 
Above: an alternate poster in tateken format for a movie we highlighted last year—Sanbiki no mesubachi, aka Three Pretty Devils. It starred Reiko Ohara, Junko Natsu, and Yoko Ichiji, and preimiered in Japan today in 1970. See what we wrote about it here.
 Spillane gets mad and gets even in Red Scare revenge thriller. 
We're on a roll with these panel length posters. Here's another excellent example, this time for Mickey Spillane's The Girl Hunters. And when we say Spillane's, he didn't just write the screenplay (with an assist from Roy Rowland and Robert Fellows)—he starred. That Hollywood felt he could carry a movie gives you an idea just how big a celebrity he was. He also co-headlined 1954's Ring of Fear, but we'll get to that one later. In The Girl Hunters Spillane plays his own literary creation, hard-edged private dick Mike Hammer. The movie opens with Hammer as an alcoholic because his longtime secretary and unrequited love Velda has been missing and is presumed deceased. But when a dying hood hints that Velda is still alive, Hammer snaps out of his drunken stupor, shifts into revenant mode, and along the way uncovers a communist plot headed by “the greatest espionage organization ever known.”
Obviously, the salient question is whether Spillane can act. The answer is not really, and his one-note performance keeps the film from reaching its potential. A couple of times it even sounds like his lines are voiceovers by another actor. However, there are two high notes: a pretty good climactic fight in a barn equipped with a whirring rotary saw, and a co-starring turn from future Bond girl Shirley Eaton, who the filmmakers give three extended bikini sequences to heighten audience interest. Are those bonuses enough to make the film worth a watch? We would say no, but you can't get around the fact that it stars one of the best-selling crime writers ever. If you're a fan of pulp, we suspect you'll enjoy the movie despite Spillane flatlining through its 103 minutes. The Girl Hunters premiered today in 1963.
           
 If she crashes at least her head might be okay. 
This photo is from 1966 and shows German actress Barbara Zimmermann wearing an unbeatable combination of underwear, heels, and a safety helmet. This would be dangerous enough on a regular bike, but on this almost-recumbent contraption, looking like she might steer with her feet instead of her hands? Not a good idea. However, we can tell you she survived this adventure because we've seen her in two Quebeçois tabloids circa 1968. See those here and here. As we mentioned in those posts, Zimmermann is aka Babsi Zimmermann, but in the text that accompanied this image she's referred to as Astrid Behrens. We have a couple of shots of her behrens her all that we may share later. The above image appeared in an issue of the Belgian magazine Ciné-Revue.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1947—Heyerdahl Embarks on Kon-Tiki
Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and his five man crew set out from Peru on a giant balsa wood raft called the Kon-Tiki in order to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. After a 101 day, 4,300 mile (8,000 km) journey, Kon-Tiki smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947, thus demonstrating that it is possible for a primitive craft to survive a Pacific crossing. 1989—Soviets Acknowledge Chernobyl Accident
After two days of rumors and denials the Soviet Union admits there was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Reactor number four had suffered a meltdown, sending a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Today the abandoned radioactive area surrounding Chernobyl is rife with local wildlife and has been converted into a wildlife sanctuary, one of the largest in Europe. 1945—Mussolini Is Arrested
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and fifteen supporters are arrested by Italian partisans in Dongo, Italy while attempting to escape the region in the wake of the collapse of Mussolini's fascist government. The next day, Mussolini and his mistress are both executed, along with most of the members of their group. Their bodies are then trucked to Milan where they are hung upside down on meathooks from the roof of a gas station, then spat upon and stoned until they are unrecognizable. 1933—The Gestapo Is Formed
The Geheime Staatspolizei, aka Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established. It begins under the administration of SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police, but by 1939 is administered by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or Reich Main Security Office, and is a feared entity in every corner of Germany and beyond. 1937—Guernica Is Bombed
In Spain during the Spanish Civil War, the Basque town of Guernica is bombed by the German Luftwaffe, resulting in widespread destruction and casualties. The Basque government reports 1,654 people killed, while later research suggests far fewer deaths, but regardless, Guernica is viewed as an example of terror bombing and other countries learn that Nazi Germany is committed to that tactic. The bombing also becomes inspiration for Pablo Picasso, resulting in a protest painting that is not only his most famous work, but one the most important pieces of art ever produced.
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