| Intl. Notebook | Jun 1 2023 |
Recent transmissions from overseas indicate that our headquarters is about to be invaded.
We interrupt your regularly scheduled pulp. Once again, as summer starts to kick into gear, we've had visitors coming to Spain—one set is already here, and another pair show up Saturday. This is all according to our long term plan. It's why we have two spare bedrooms. We wrote material to cover about half of the upcoming days, and you've already seen that, including the cover set below, but we're taking a break for the remaining six days, starting now. We have big plans, and they'll eat up too much time for us to focus on the website. But as always we shall return, reinvigorated and re-inspired. Meantime check out some Pulp Intl. classics here, here, here, here, here, and here.
| Intl. Notebook | Mar 3 2023 |
It's way past time for another trip to one of our favorite towns.
We have a birthday approaching, and as usual we like to celebrate those out of town, so above is an intermission card we made as a placeholder while we fly up north to San Sebastián for a week to eat some food, drink some drinks, connect with some friends, and generally indulge ourselves. There will be a quick foray to France involved as well, and you know what that means—possible pulp purchases. As always, if you're new to the website, try to make the time for a look around. We'll be back in a week, hopefully with new treasures to share.
| Intl. Notebook | Aug 2 2022 |
It's time to let the south of Spain weave its spell.
Hello, Pulp Intl. visitors. We've scanned and uploaded so much recently, you had to know an intermission was coming, right? We have some friends over from the U.S., so we're going to leave our base of Cadiz, have a wander, and show them a few amazing sights. This will actually be the sixth time we've gone wandering this year, but our first website hiatus. We know the province pretty well now, and there's plenty for our friends to see. Roman ruins? Pristine beaches? The best bars in Spain? Let's go with all of the above. There are even some vintage bookstores scattered around, and we've picked up a few pulp items but not shared them yet. We'll get to that. Regarding our break, since there's plenty of recent content we won't bother with our usual links to old posts. Okay, maybe a few. Check out this, this, this, and this. Or just have a scroll. Our intervalo will be finished within a week or so.
| Intl. Notebook | Oct 16 2021 |
Rolling on down the highways.
We know. We just had an intermission. Well, a friend has flown in all the way from the U.S., so we're going to take a little drive around the region surrounding our new home, stopping in three towns and two countries, then circle back here. As always the first question is: will there be pulp where we're going? We think there may be. We're hopeful. Second question: is there potential for serious trouble? Hey, not just anyone can be threatened with murder by five guys in the Marrakech medina, so we're hopeful on that front too. Barring true catastrophe, we'll be back in five or six days.
| Intl. Notebook | Sep 2 2021 |
We hear Tarifa is terrific this time of year.
Hello. And goodbye—but only briefly. We're taking a little break, heading to a place called Tarifa. It's not far, but after pondering ambitious ideas about going to Italy, Croatia, and Malta, we decided a short trip was best to get back into the swing of travel for pleasure. It's been a couple of years (the move doesn't count—that was back breaking, shin barking work). We don't know much about Tarifa, just that a few friends like it. Will there be pulp there? Only the kind that comes in a mimosa, we're betting, but you never know.
As we've noted before, Spain is one of the countries that actually did generate a fair amount of pulp style art, and it's also a country where you occasionally stumble upon a used book store that has a lot of old crime novels. About the time the pulp craze was in full swing, Tarifa looked like what you see in the photo below. Even if there's no pulp to be
found there these days, and despite it modernizing a bit from its quaint form of yesteryear, we expect to have (careful, socially distanced) fun. We'll be back in four or five days. As usual we're linking to a few posts for your enjoyment, and this time, for a change, they're all books.
found there these days, and despite it modernizing a bit from its quaint form of yesteryear, we expect to have (careful, socially distanced) fun. We'll be back in four or five days. As usual we're linking to a few posts for your enjoyment, and this time, for a change, they're all books.A picnic with a special treat.
The shortest car trip ever.
It's true, we like to make fun of sorority girls, as evidenced here, here, and here. Fraternity boys are also favorite targets, as we show here, here, and here.
A match made in pulp heaven: Robert McGinnis and Carter Brown.
Here's a bit of encouragement for job seekers.
And here are thoughts about cowboy fashion, what a real cowboy drinks, what a real cowboy eats, what's a noble ending for a cowboy, whether a cowboy really needs a horse, and whether higher education makes him less of a real cowboy, or more.
Everybody sing along—you know the words.
Kozy books kome back from obscurity.
Knock down drag out fighting in mid-century art.
| Intl. Notebook | Aug 26 2020 |
We're on top of the world and the view is fine.
We're back online. Did you ever doubt us? Truth is, this was not a seamless move. Problems cropped up in almost every area. Internet acquisition was very tough. Our workloads (again, we actually do have jobs) have piled up to dangerous levels. Travel problems linger, which is to say we haven't yet determined how to get the indispensable Pulp Intl. girlfriends here. And don't even bring up the health thing—one of us caught something before leaving, but had a negative virus test just days before traveling. Whatever that thing is has not gone away fully, so hopefully there aren't a lot of false negatives with these nasal swabs they give you. We'll work it all out somehow. Advice: don't move during a pandemic, and especially don't do it during a dangerous surge in virus cases. But we had to. Just look at our new view. That's worth any amount of discomfort and inconvenience.
| Intl. Notebook | Aug 17 2020 |
Pulp Intl. takes a long day's journey into the night of Spain.
It's intermission time. But wait—didn't we just have an intermission? Indeed we did, but this next one can't be avoided, because we're moving. We mean physically, not online. This is going to be a long, tricky journey that delivers us to our new home—Cádiz, Spain, which you see above, and below, night and day. Once we arrive there we'll have to contend with getting internet set up. The provider (who we've only spoken to by phone) has been comically overconfident, but we're experienced in these matters, and we know—even if they don't—that they'll botch it somehow or other.
We're looking forward to this move. Cadiz is an intimate, active place, with an excellent nightlife and a world famous carnival, which we hope to enjoy if the killer virus is somehow vanquished. But even if that takes a long time or forever, Cadiz is still a nice city to walk around in, a visually inspiring place with numerous old buildings, a maze of streets, and at least a hundred outdoor terrace bars. This outdoor lifestyle is what attracted us—if the virus lingers and we can never go indoors again, we'll still be in good shape.
We know what you're thinking. Isn't undertaking a major move during a pandemic imprudent? Well, we're impulsive like that, and hope to pull it off without contracting anything. Assuming all goes according to plan, we'll be back online with new inspiration, new material, and—crucially—a new scanner to help us get back into the swing of posting old tabloids. Figure seven to ten days, end-to-end. Wish us luck. Meantime, we have some fun posts to help build the anticipation for our glorious return. Look below the photo.
Assorted covers of Luchadores de Espacio.
Desperate embraces on vintage book covers.
Our amazingly extensive tabloid index.
Voyeuristic paperback cover art.
Everything we've ever posted about Japanese pinku icon Reiko Ike (warning: nakedness).
A whole lotta love from the vintage French nudie mag Folies de Paris et de Hollywood (warning: nakedness).
Everything we've ever posted related to sci-fi (warning: nakedness—just kidding).
Femmes fatales in red.
Have suitcase, will travel.
Some of the most beautiful magazine covers we've ever seen.
Film noir, in all its variations.
Laura Gemser, in all her glory.
The unique art of French illustrator Jef de Wulf.
| Intl. Notebook | Jul 20 2020 |
Or how we took the opportunity to travel while it was there.
We're taking a break to wander a bit. We were debating it, in this age of virus, but three factors swayed us. First, we're going entirely by car rather than mass transit. Second reason is that virus cases will certainly rise from here onward, so we probably won't be able to travel as safely later. And the third reason is if we haven't seen nature, hills, and empty ocean when and if a second wave of the virus comes through, we probably won't survive a new quarantine. Well, that's an exaggeration. We'd survive. But we might kill our neighbors.
Anyway, this is our shot at travel, so we're taking an all-day road trip to a distant peninsula and theoretically we'll be back in a week. As usual, we've selected a few posts for first time visitors to glance at. They represent a small cross section of more than 5,600 posts in the website, which probably encompass more than 30,000 pieces of art, much it seen online for the first time here. Some good items reside here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Make yourself at home, but don't break anything.
| Intl. Notebook | Jun 2 2019 |
Pulp Intl. visits Paris as it springs into summer.
We're going to Paris for a bit. The trip is not due to our initiative. The Pulp Intl. girlfriends plan to intersect with friends passing through there, and we're going along partly to keep them company and partly to buy magazines and books. When the girls go to meet pals we generally stay home and take the opportunity to eat popcorn, hit the bars until sunrise, and churn out website material at an increased rate, but not when Paris is involved. As buying opportunities go, that's a city you can't pass up. So the website will be idle for a few days. Five or six, depending.
Second topic, you remember a technical glitch threw us offline a while back. Every time that happens we lose some functionality or other, and this time it was the ability to navigate to earlier pages using keywords or section headers. Savvy internet users know that it's possible to paste “?next=10” onto the end of the url and navigate backwards by changing the number—i.e. “?next=20,” “?next=30,” etc. So that's an option for those that want to bother.
But it's also a pain, and we know that. We will fix the navigation problem, hopefully soon. But of course, that will be a case of slapping duct tape on the most rickety old website left online. So, as we've been promising for years, a Pulp Intl. 2.0 is coming. It's 95% built, we swear. Whether that final 5% will take a week, a month, or years is not known at this point. We'll get there eventually. But right now we want to get to Paris. We'll be back soon.
Second topic, you remember a technical glitch threw us offline a while back. Every time that happens we lose some functionality or other, and this time it was the ability to navigate to earlier pages using keywords or section headers. Savvy internet users know that it's possible to paste “?next=10” onto the end of the url and navigate backwards by changing the number—i.e. “?next=20,” “?next=30,” etc. So that's an option for those that want to bother.
But it's also a pain, and we know that. We will fix the navigation problem, hopefully soon. But of course, that will be a case of slapping duct tape on the most rickety old website left online. So, as we've been promising for years, a Pulp Intl. 2.0 is coming. It's 95% built, we swear. Whether that final 5% will take a week, a month, or years is not known at this point. We'll get there eventually. But right now we want to get to Paris. We'll be back soon.
| Intl. Notebook | Nov 1 2018 |
One decade down, another to go.
So today is Pulp Intl.'s anniversary, and a special one, as we've now been around ten full years. Yeah, it's crazy. When we began there were numerous blogs and websites that we admired and drew inspiration from, and all of them are gone or permanently idle now. A few new ones have popped up and we can only hope they last. Pulp Intl. came about because we had moved out of the U.S. and wanted something to eat up the idle hours we'd benefitted. Mostly we partied those hours away, but there were still a few left and Pulp duly sprang forth. We figured maybe ten or twenty people might drop by per week. Last we checked that number had reached more than 7,000 individual visitors per day, and in the summer it has been as many as 14,000. Per day. It's just shocking. So we definitely want to thank every one of you for dropping by, and particularly those who visit time and again, with a special shout to those who write in with corrections and ideas.
We've scanned and uploaded thousands of original images, and seen them reposted tens of thousands of times on Tumblr, Twitter, and various other platforms. We have more to come. We shot photos of some items we have laying around the flat, just to give you an idea. It's not a complete accounting. We have things we're too lazy to pull out of storage right now. In all, scanning and sharing this stuff should take ten more years. Of course, as some wit once pointed out, plans and life are two different things—often diametrically opposed. Anything could happen, up to and including losing everything in a fire or the Pulp Intl. girlfriends—who are real people, by the way, not some concept we came up with—finally getting fed up and threatening to leave or kill us if we don't shut down the website. But they'd never do that because they're the best. Heh heh. Anyway, thank you everyone for these ten years. It's been incredibly fun for us and we hope you've gotten a few laughs out of it, learned a few things, and had a love of vintage media instilled or just reaffirmed. And now—future here we come...
