Posts Tagged ‘Playboy’

Hollywoodland

‘Playboy’: Paul Krassner Vs Andrew Breitbart

by Hollywoodland

Playboy:

[Iconic American liberal Paul] Krassner thought it might be fun if he rang up his longtime cultural adversary and invited him to sit down and discuss their differences and similarities. Breitbart wanted to meet at Applebee’s, says Krassner, but the actual location remains a secret. The result, we think you’ll agree, is one hell of an interesting dialogue.

KRASSNER: I was surprised to learn you consider my work to be one of your inspirations. You also claim that the mainstream media had a double standard and didn’t criticize me the way they do you and the conservative movement that you represent. That’s not true, though. I’ve been excoriated in papers from the Los Angeles Times to the Chicago Tribune to The Washington Post. My favorite headline was give this man a saliva test. You’ve also praised Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as heavy influences. Both those men were close friends of mine and remain my touchstones, and yet you’re at the other end of the social and political spectrum. What I want to know is, how do they fit into the context of your personal mission?

BREITBART: Well, at the time you were doing what you were doing, trailblazing and causing mischief and mirth and effecting the type of political and social change you were attempting, there’s no doubt you were being challenged by others. What I’m talking about is the current order of the media in the 21st century and how history now looks on the Merry Pranksters, Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey and Hunter ­Thompson with great reverence. It’s as if they’ve been given their own wing of the journalism school. I don’t want to simplify history. I understand that, at the time, you went through hell, and the same could be said of Matt Drudge. From 1995 until about 2002 the same forces were trying to claim that Matt Drudge had no right to be doing what he was doing, which everybody now accepts as commonplace and accepted ­practice—AOL just purchased the Huffington Post for $315 million for replicating, on a left-of-center bent, what Matt Drudge does. So the trailblazers, while they’re trailblazing, can have slings and arrows hurled at them, and I’m not trying to diminish the peril you went through. I’m stating that right now, when I’m reporting truths on Wednesday and causing mirth on Thursday, the press has a problem with that. I’m saying no, you’re not going to define me; I’m going to define what I do, and you’re going to have to deal with it. I gained my inspiration from the knowledge that you guys went through the same process, and I’m using you as models.

KRASSNER: In your book you write, “Man, how I long for the days of Sam Kinison, Richard Pryor, Abbie Hoffman, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, George Carlin and Lenny Bruce, and today the only people upholding their free-speech legacies are conservatives like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.” At first I thought you must be kidding. What about Louis C.K., Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Lewis Black, Margaret Cho, Marc Maron, Rick Overton, Harry Shearer, Kathy ­Griffin, Wanda Sykes, Richard Lewis, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, ­Stephen Colbert, Larry David, Rachel Maddow, Paul Provenza? The place is overflowing with liberals upholding their free-speech legacies.

(more…)

Kurt Schlichter

Will Oscar-Winning Screenwriter Mark Boal’s Latest Attack on our Troops Land on the Big Screen?

by Kurt Schlichter

Oscar-winning screenwriter Mark Boal must be thrilled about this whole Libya thing, since he seems to be making a cottage industry out of articles, books and movies about American soldiers and how they are a bunch of incorrigible psychos whose desire to murder everyone they see is constrained only by their limited intellect.  Who knows what doors the latest “kinetic military action” might open for him in Tinseltown.

His current anti-soldier hit piece, The Kill Team, is about a group of disgraceful scumbags in Afghanistan who decided to murder several civilians.  With it, Boal seems to be following his tried and true formula – write something for publication in a past-its-prime magazine that makes American troops look like cro-magnons then work to turn it into a movie.  He took a Playboy article on Americans murdering each other and soon we had In the Valley of Elah.  You may have seen it – though the odds are stacked against it.  It was ignored by popular demand.

Another article, this one on bomb disposal experts, became The Hurt Locker, which took some of the bravest and most dedicated people in our armed forces and made them out as undisciplined, drunken, unprofessional clowns.  In fact, Boal got sued by one of the guys he allegedly wrote about.  To be fair, it did win an Academy Award . . . from the same band of geniuses who passed over Saving Private Ryan in favor of Shakespeare In Love and once picked as “Best Song” the unforgettable hit “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”  So, there’s that.

Boal’s technique is to chronicle the most degenerate fringes of the warfighters’ experience and repackage the most sordid episodes as its totality.  One can easily imagine the Rolling Stone editors eager for the chance to please their dwindling audience of aging Garfunkel-digging hippies and Chomsky-devouring clove-smokers with another prejudice-reinforcing piece about how those Middle-American Army guys are barely one step above gorillas.  Rolling Stone even promises a glimpse at the grim photos the mean old Pentagon doesn’t want you to see – as if there was some moral imperative for the military to provide gist for the jihadi propaganda mill.  Hey, that’s Boal and Rolling Stones’ job!

What is particularly cunning in his approach is that there is no excuse for the crimes these savages committed, and Boal uses this fact to deflect any kind of perspective.  Hundreds of thousands of young, heavily-armed and stressed American men and women have served overseas since 9/11.  Several dozen have murdered people.  You won’t find any city in America with a murder rate like that for that demographic. 

(more…)

Dana Commandatore

Jenny McCarthy: When Celebrity Advocacy Turns Deadly

by Dana Commandatore

Jenny McCarthy has really done it this time.  This is much worse than pretending to eat her own vomit or faking orgasms.  When she became one of the most vocal opponents of the CDC, she became party to what amounts to biological terrorism. For decades, the childhood vaccination program has prevented children from contracting serious and sometimes deadly diseases. Yet, McCarthy believes that these vaccines are unsafe and the reason her son is autistic. 

jm

In a Time Magazine article last year, she announced that she would rather her son contract a potentially life-threatening disease than be autistic (I apologize now to any autistic adults that may be reading this for I can imagine how offensive that is).  The problem is, there is no proof that vaccines cause autism. Celebrities mean well.  Whether they are trying to free Mumia or inform us that 9/11 was the first time in history that fire melted steel, they desperately want to “do good” so that we don’t stop paying attention to them.    

“I do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it’s their f___ing fault that the diseases are coming back. They’re making a product that’s s___. If you give us a safe vaccine, we’ll use it. It shouldn’t be polio versus autism…If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the f___ing measles.” 

I don’t ever remember Jenny calling me, or any of my friends, to see if we’d rather have children with measles or autistic children.  Many of us would prefer she just stopped talking about autism altogether.  She is not brave, nor is she any kind of warrior mom. She is simply a misguided attention-seeker. Before she went public with her son being autistic, she announced that he was a “crystal child:”  (more…)

Warner Todd Huston

Sex-Selling Hypocrite: Madonna Protects Her Daughter After Decades of Selling Smut to Yours

by Warner Todd Huston

I guess as a youngster she was busy designing wacky, risque outfits when she should have been learning the definitions of words, but Madonna — the famed “Material Girl” — uttered a whopper recently misusing the word “irony” when she should have been using the word “hypocrite”… as in what she is.

wannabe1 

Of course the first thought that anyone has of pop singer Madonna is sex, sex, sex. She has made her entire career on selling her sexuality. From the days of 1983’s hit “Holiday,” to photo spreads in Playboy and Penthouse, to crawling on stage like a cat in heat, to girl-on-girl kisses, and raunchy videos throughout, Madonna has made her bucks with her body with as much skin showing as possible at all times even today in her 50s.

But, suddenly mother Madonna is hopeful that her own 13-year-old daughter, Lourdes, will “dress more conservatively.” Sex is bad all of a sudden when Madonna is talking about her own child. (more…)

Adam Baldwin

Marriage is Sacred: Sarah Silverman Misfires

by Adam Baldwin

Comedienne/Actress Sarah Silverman told Playboy recently: 

“I’m not against marriage, but it’s just not for me…” 

That’s an entirely reasonable position. Not every person is suited for marriage. 

the-sarah-silverman-program-20070131111105336

But then she pitched intolerance: 

“I think it’s gross and [bleep]-ing crazy.” 

Not a follower of gossip tweets, I do however recall a not so private break-up from a certain late night talk-show host that may have played a role here. 

We can presume President Obama and family would object.  During his campaign and term as president his proud advocacy of traditional marriage and family has coincided with the vast majority of Americans.  (more…)

Christian Toto

Interview: ‘Caddyshack’ Star Cindy Morgan Discusses Her Support of the Troops and Why She Wouldn’t Apologize to Chevy Chase

by Christian Toto

Hard to believe the lovely actress Cindy Morgan was once told she belonged behind the camera, not in front of it.

Morgan, who became a pop culture sensation by playing Lacey Underall in “Caddyshack,” started her career in broadcasting. “I ran camera, I ran sound,” Morgan tells Big Hollywood. “But they wouldn’t let me on camera. ’You’ll never get a job,’ they said.

A few years later, she was sharing the screen with Chevy Chase in the 1980 comedy classic.

Morgan’s “Caddyshack” role gave her an early lesson in how Hollywood works, and it wasn’t pretty. The day before her nude scene, a producer called to say a Playboy photographer would be on set to snap pictures which would run in the nudie magazine. (more…)

Daniel J. Flynn

When Megastars Die, We Get Old

by Daniel J. Flynn

You are realizing your age today if you grew up in the 1970s or ’80s. Farrah Fawcett, whose iconic image was as ubiquitous on the bedroom walls of American teenage boys as Kim Il Sung’s was in the homes of North Koreans, died of cancer at 62 yesterday. Age is the cruel fate of all sex symbols. In Fawcett’s case, she not only contended with Father Time but with the public’s changing tastes that dated what once symbolized sex. Demographics, and Sir Mix-a-Lot, killed the pin-up girl monopoly of bleach-blond anorexics. But even twenty years after her heyday, ’70s postergirl Fawcett so symbolized sex that her 1995 appearance in Playboy became the bestselling issue of the 1990s. To put this in perspective, an over-the-hill Farah Fawcett beat Pamela Anderson, Jenny McCarthy, and Denise Richards in their primes. (more…)