Last week, my esteemed colleague Robert DeSalvo gave you a nice review on Michael Moore’s latest, Sicko, which opens today. While I don’t dispute much of what Robert wrote (I’m sure the film is “alternately funny and heartbreaking—Moore is a very talented filmmaker), I know I won’t be seeing the film. Extremists like Moore and Ann Coulter scare me equally: They cling to their side of the political fence with such ferocity that they skew the facts for their own agenda.

But rather than going on about my own views, I’d be better served by pointing you toward this terrific review of Sicko by Kurt Loder. It’s a bit long, but well worth it. But if you just don’t have the time (oh, come on—you know you do), here’s a highlight:

In the case of Canada—which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation—a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called Dead Meat, by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore's movie would have you believe don't exist:

A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list—this time for drug rehab.
A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery—and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.

A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he'd contacted: "As of today," she says, "it's a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation." Later, when the man and his wife both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list, they finally mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium to have the operations done there, with no more waiting.

Look, our health care system has problems. No one can dispute that, and Moore, to his credit, has shown where the healing should begin. But other nations' approaches aren't necessarily the answer, either, and our own medical industry does a fine job in most cases. 

The latest issue of Illustration includes a tribute by Jack Raglin to Reid Stewart Austin (seen at left in a 1995 photo by Jacquelin Kimer), a former associate art director at Playboy who died last year. Austin was instrumental in recruiting Alberto Vargas to contribute his famous pinups. “At Playboy office meetings Reid would occasionally suggest using a new illustration by Vargas,” Raglin writes. “Hugh Hefner, a serious pin-up aficionado who had published some original Vargas illustrations in Playboy back in 1957, expressed some interest but deferred. Reid wasn’t about to give up. But rather than pester Hefner, he blew up a Vargas girl to poster size and pinned her to the wall for Hefner to see every time he passed by Reid’s office. The courtship was protracted, but Hefner eventually relented [in 1960] and agreed to print a single Vargas girl in an upcoming issue.” Hef has written that he saw a portfolio of unpublished Vargas paintings before deciding to again print them in the magazine, but it all occurred a long time ago and however it happened, the payoff was great: Vargas continued his relationship with Playboy for 16 years and 152 paintings.

Austin wrote a number of wonderful books on pin-up artists, including two on Vargas, the most recent of which is Alberto Vargas: Works from the Max Vargas Collection.

The same issue of Illustration, which is available for $10 postpaid, includes a column by Austin in which he recalls how, in 1966, he quit “the best job I’d ever had” at Playboy in Chicago to move to Fort Lauderdale and set up a retail shop. After he told his boss, Art Paul, that he was leaving, Austin suggested he could continue on a freelance basis to act as Vargas’ art director. “Lo, they went for it—and I got a nice stipend in the bargain,” Austin wrote. “I would have done it for nothing, but that monthly fee often proved the saving of a struggling new business. God bless, HMH.”

By 1971, after several years of living outside the Playboy culture, Austin took his annual trip to Chicago to discuss Vargas's latest works. (The challenge of publishing a Vargas painting every month was to keep them fresh.) One image presented a challenge, Austin recalled, because it showed the model’s pubic hair (something that was revealed only rarely at the time) and there was no easy way to cover her crotch. “I suggested that her Bogart trench coat could be the foil,” Austin recalled. “Her hands plunged into her pockets could easily if awkwardly be made to cover the offending anatomy.” After some thought, Hef decided to publish the painting without alteration (it appears in the May 1972 issue). This worked out for the best, Austin reported, as “pubic hair was an aesthetic Alberto had never wished to wrestle with in public, nor fully resolved in private.”

Some interesting baseball news coming out of Pittsburgh. (Yes, I said Pittsburgh, home of the Pirates, who haven’t had a winning season since 1992.) Pirates fans are planning a walkout during the third inning of Saturday night’s game vs. the Washington Nationals to protest the direction the Bucs have been going since, well, 1992.

I applaud this. So often we sports fans sit back while our ticket prices are raised as we shell out $7 for beers and $5 for hot dogs. What can we do? we say.

Well, apparently, beers and dogs are one thing, but on-field performance is quite another. The Pirates have what many consider to be the league’s best ballpark in PNC Park, built in 2001. (I agree—it’s gorgeous.) And how was it built? With public funds. We need this jewel of a park to compete in baseball’s uneven economic playing field, said ownership. Sounds nice on paper, but here are the Pirates’ payrolls, beginning with 2001: $52M, $42M, $54M, $32M, $38M, $46M, $38M.

So since building this glorious new facility—with public money—the Bucs’ have cut payroll by $14M since 2001. My only question to Pirates fan about this walkout is, “What took you so long?”

As Robin Kent explains in her book, “Aunt Agony Advises,” the advice column quickly moved in the late 17th century from addressing “abstruse and learned topics” to more personal matters. Writing in 1692 in the Lacedaemonian Mercury, newly appointed columnist Tom Browne said he appreciated reading John Dunton’s advice in the rival Athenian Mercury because it helped him fall asleep when he ran out of opium. This slander led to a battle of insults and threats that continued for months until Browne abandoned his post. That same year (1693), the first women’s magazine appeared. The typical mix of topics in the Ladies Mercury’s advice column, Kent writes, included “a letter from a deflowered virgin contemplating marriage with someone other than her seducer, another from a virgin wife whose husband was backward in his attentions, and a third from a husband whose spouse had been unfaithful to him.”

Dunton continued to offer advice well into the next century, even after his answers became rambling and incoherent, leading to speculation that he had gone mad—an accusation also leveled at the Advisor. (Some trace Dunton’s decline to a whipping he received in 1708 for cursing Queen Anne.) The next guru to step to the plate was none other than Daniel Defoe (depicted below), in 1705. Responding to letters in the pages of his magazine The Review, Defoe preached a strict middle-class morality, opposing pre-marital sex, abortion, sex after menopause and divorce. “His great shortcoming as a counselor was a very simple one—he felt superior to his readers,” Kent writes. Defoe’s purpose, as he explained it, was “to enlighten the stupid understandings of the meaner and more thoughtless of the freeholders and electors.”

Advice columns became less common in London after 1712, when a tax on newspapers made it imprudent to waste pages on personal affairs. Finally, in 1734, a magazine called The Weekly Oracle revived the genre. It was quickly overwhelmed with letters, and the editor had to ask readers to stop sending “trifling or indecent” questions. Four centuries later, the Advisor also discourages the trifling variety but can’t get enough of the indecent.

He’s ba-aaack. This time award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore is gunning for the American health care system in Sicko, which opens everywhere today and is probably his least polarizing and best film to date.

The 47 million uninsured citizens of this country don’t need Moore or anyone else to tell them how screwed they are, but we all feel the pain of this topic. The director asked his website visitors—many of whom dutifully pay their insurance premiums—to share their health-care horror stories. Watching 9/11 heroes who suffer from debilitating illnesses get strangled by bureaucratic red tape is enough to make anyone sick, especially when Moore highlights the more patient-friendly health care systems in Canada, Great Britain, France and, yes, even Cuba. It’s alternately funny and heartbreaking as well as, hopefully, a much-needed wakeup call for us about universal health care. Here is what Sicko’s writer/producer/director had to say about his latest documentary:

You started by asking readers of your website to submit their heath-care horror stories. Did any one theme resonate in their responses?

Yes—it was a frustration with the bureaucracy that exists to essentially make it very difficult to get help or to get that help paid for, even though people or their employers have paid into the system for it. One of the big myths is that the private sector is the way to go because there’s less red tape and it’s more efficient. In fact, the opposite is true, especially with health care. Health care companies spend upwards of 25 percent of their budgets on paperwork, administrative costs and other red tape, while Medicare and Medicaid only spend around 3 percent for administrative costs.

You read thousands of these horror stories—how did they affect you?

It was very difficult. You had people saying, “I’m going to die if I don’t get help…” or “My mother is dying…” You feel helpless about what you can do, and it deeply affected everybody working on the film. We also knew most of the film wouldn’t be focusing on these horror stories, but rather we'd be explaining how they wouldn’t be going through any of this if they just lived in Canada—and for some people who wrote in, the border was just a few miles north.

After spending over a year making Sicko, what are the three most important things you believe would improve the US health system?

We need to eliminate private health-insurance companies—that’s the biggest single impediment to making sure everybody who needs to be taken care of receives the help they require. The pharmaceutical companies should also be highly regulated, like ConEd [the New York-area power company]. A lot of people need medicine to survive, but to allow pharmaceutical companies to jack up prices and make it impossible for some people to get the drugs they need to live is criminal. Finally, there’s We the People. Health care needs to be in the hands of the people, just like the fire department and the police department are in the hands of the people instead of a private company like Halliburton. We all have to become more active in caring about these things, and start thinking of ourselves as part of a group larger than just me, myself and I.

Political pundits, special-interest groups and big corporations often attack your films. Who do you think will fight you on Sicko?

Those who profit from people’s misery and illnesses are not going to like this film. Yet Sicko may have the widest audience of any film I’ve ever done, simply because so many people—regardless of their political stripe—are affected by this issue.

Last week we attended Ferrari's 60th anniversary party at the factory in Maranello, Italy. Suffice to say, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Among other events, the company held a Concorso D'Eleganza. Ferrari owners from North America, South America, Europe and Asia made the trek with their vintage beauties.

Among Ferrari racing cars, the 1967 330 P4—a car so striking and beautiful, it has no peer—won Best in Show. Stay tuned for more coverage on the fete and Ferrari's 60th anniversary car in a future issue of Playboy. But for now, have a look at the P4. This shot was taken at Pebble Beach some years ago. Imagine yourself at the wheel, shooting down the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans at 200 mph.

Instead of a pool, our summer intern Lynsey Gilchrist seems to have been immersing herself in scientific literature. Here’s her report:

When you open up to Playboy’s centerfold each month, where do your eyes go first? If you’re anything like the men who participated in a new study by Emory University researchers, the first place you looked was the Playmate’s face.

The study set up participants with eye trackers and showed them pictures of men and women having sex. The male participants looked at the women’s faces first. The female participants’ eyes, on the other hand, went straight to the action.

The study’s authors suggest this may be because looking at a naked man easily shows the state of his sexual arousal, but women’s bodies don’t reveal much. Men look at women’s faces first to see if they are enjoying themselves.

This has even led some to question why the likes of Amanda Beard and Pamela Anderson would go to the trouble of undressing for Playboy. (Although just because men look at faces first doesn’t mean that’s the only place they look.)

Either way, men’s brains respond more to sexual stimuli than women’s. The study suggests that increased response is partially due to men’s increased attention on faces.

Maybe the next time a guy tells me I have a nice smile, I’ll actually believe him.

When not answering questions from readers, the Advisor loves to sit with a good book. Lately we’ve been engaged with a history of the advice column called “Aunt Agony Advises.” Written by Robin Kent and published only the U.K., the title is long out of print.

Kent dates the first English-language advice column to March 1691, the invention of a bookseller named John Dunton (depicted at left) in his newly launched newspaper, the Athenian Gazette (later Mercury). Notably, “less than half the questions were from readers racked by personal difficulties with love, family, loyalty or sex,” Kent writes. “The majority delved into such topics as the mysteries of the Creation, the morality of slave-trading, the probability of perpetual motion, what causes a rainbow, the reasons for dizziness and why one hour’s sermon seems longer than two hour’s conversation.”

(As those questions have all been answered over the centuries, today’s readers instead ask the Advisor about electronics, cars, cigars and liquor.)

The famed intellect Samuel Johnson hated  Dunton’s low-brow efforts, alleging that the editors made up most of the letters. That accusation is still tossed around today, and our response when it arises is the same Dunton gave to Johnson: There’s no need, because we receive hundreds of letters. In the early 18th century, The British Apollo tackled the issue head-on:

Q: Hark ye, you Apollo, don’t you make questions and answers?
A: Not at present, really Sir; but should soon take that method if other people’s questions were of no more consequence than yours.

Kent believes that Dunton likely did receive many more letters than he published, if only because “the prospect of skilled legal or medical advice for 2d (1d for postage and 1d to buy the paper) must have been an almost irresistible bargain when a doctor’s fee was already a guinea.” Dunton said he heard from a variety of people, from aristocrats and clergymen to prisoners.

Our cartoon coordinator Jennifer Thiele fondly remembers a true great:

It is with great sadness that we learn of the passing of cartoonist J.B. Handelsman.

Bud, as he liked to be called, had a long-standing relationship with Playboy. We published nearly 400 of his cartoons, with the first appearing in the September 1965 issue and the latest in the July 2007 issue.
 
The majority of Bud’s cartoons deliver profound political and social statements. He tackled heavy subject matter with cynicism and humor creating drawings with an almost minimalist line and wash, as well as in glorious color. Click below to see examples of his work.

We will miss him very much. 

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I am not one who generally finds it difficult to sit still for long periods of time, but over the weekend I endured a memorable challenge: I attended a rare showing of Serge Bondarchuk’s epic film of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The film, which won the 1968 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is seven-and-a-half hours long, and it is spectacular.

Among the central attractions of the film are recreations of the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino. When those battles between France and Russia were fought in the early 19th century, they were the largest military contests ever waged. Bondarchuk, with his film underwritten by the Soviet government, didn’t stint on any costs, and these massive recreations, involving tens of thousands of extras and thousands of horses, capture the chaos of combat brilliantly.

Bondarchuk also showed his genius for composition in the scenes involving grand balls. In one brilliant scene at one of the balls, we see news of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia spread one by one among the Russian army officers, as the rest of the aristocrats  continue to whirl to the music. On the other end of the spectrum, there are many quiet scenes, scenes of nature, that are just as stirring.

When I came home from my hours of viewing, I learned that the film is indeed available on DVD. Do yourself a favor and rent it. Do yourself another favor, and watch it over three or four nights.

The other day we blogged about Vice President Cheney’s refusal to turn over various records regarding his travel, scheduling and appointments to a federal management office. It shows a certain defiance on Cheney’s part, but the issue is kind of legalistic, and if that’s all that could be pinned on the man, the matter would amount to little.

Unfortunately, that’s not all that can be pinned on the man. In an article in The Washington Post,  Barton Gellman and Jo Becker show that Cheney has been a powerful, ceaseless and ardent advocate for the use of torture against suspected terrorists and enemy combatants.

Since 9/11, says the Post, ``Cheney and his allies …pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden ‘torture’ and permitted use of ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading’ methods of questioning.’’ And although reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo caused a general revulsion in the American public against these techniques, and although Congress outlawed torture and the Supreme Court repudiated the administration’s handling of prisoners, the Post reports that behind the scenes, Cheney has successfully led the fight to maintain these odious practices. “Many of the harsh measures he championed,” reports the Post, “and some of the broadest principles undergirding them, have survived intact but out of public view.’’

In other words, Cheney has been busy pasting fig leaves and creating semantic distinctions that would allow American personnel to use waterboarding, to sodomize a subject with a stick, indeed, to inflict any sort of mental or physical violence that stopped short of killing the prisoner or causing organ failure. How despicable.

Dick Cheney is the most un-American public official of our era, if not our lifetimes. Do not doubt that one day his actions will cited by terrorists in justification for attacks perpetrated against us.

 

 

Exciting news awoke fans of the Playboy Empire this morning as it was announced in the pages of Variety that the life of Playboy’s founder, Hugh M. Hefner, is coming to the big screen in all its controversial glory.

Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer acquired the rights to Hef’s life story several years ago and has just anointed uber-director Brett “Rush Hour 3” Rattner to fast track the still to be scripted project through the Hollywood development process. Still unannounced is which actor will be cast as Hef. Will it be the perennially young Johnny Depp? The reasonably resembling Billy Crudup? Maybe even wild Nicholas Cage? All would all make fascinating choices. Who is your candidate?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saw this bit of trickeration from the iPhone’s marketing on BoingBoing. It reminded me of a guy I know who only dates women with small hands.