She’s baaa-ack. By she we mean Lucy Spiller, the cutthroat, merciless editrix played by Courteney Cox on FX’s Dirt, which returns for a second season this Sunday. When we last saw Spiller, she was stabbed and left for dead outside her home after a jaded junkie actress decided to, er, make some cuts to Spiller’s tabloid story that trashed her. We weren’t sure if FX would bring Spiller and the show itself back after a debut season of so-so ratings and largely lackluster reviews. We’re glad the powers that be decided to allow the actors grow into their roles a bit and let the tension build because, from what we’ve seen, the second season sinks its barbs into all the right celebutards in inventive, amusing ways.

Although real-life counterparts are not directly identified by name, when you see a rich, club-hopping, pooch-toting starlet named “Milan Carlton” get publicly whipped in a small foreign country for being busted with cocaine, we all know which heiress the writers are gunning for. Other pulled-from-the-headlines references include David Hasselhoff’s drunken burger-feast on the floor, Nicole Richie’s wrong turn onto a California freeway, and Alec Baldwin’s irate and profanity-laden voice message to his young daughter.

Some people have questioned whether Cox, who also serves as executive producer of the show along with husband David Arquette, should ridicule someone as unstable as Britney Spears, who is poked fun of in future episodes. “I am not out to offend anyone,” Cox has said.

Her show’s alter ego would laugh it all off, and so should you. Dirt airs on March 2 and every Sunday at 10PM ET/PT on FX.

This past weekend I wandered through a flea market on 21st Street, and a familiar woman caught my eye. It was Playboy’s Femlin adorning the cover of a tattered Party Jokes book from 1957. After 30 seconds of obligatory bargaining with the raspy salesman, I bought  the book and began to peruse the yellowed pages.

While a number of the jokes, poems and cartoons have grown stale with age, there remain a bunch that have stood the test of time. Here is one of my favorites:

A drunk and his inebriated friend were sitting at a bar.
“Do you know what time it is?” asked the drunk.
“Sure,” said the friend.
“Thanks,” said the drunk.    

Portishead. It’s certainly more than a band. The emotional quality of the trio’s music—and the passion that quality has instilled in its fans—makes their imminent return a major pop cultural event. Beth Gibbons, Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley invented trip-hop—before the term was discredited by the hoards of less imaginative (and—it must be said—less glum) artists trying to imitate them. They anchored the Bristol scene, home to Massive Attack, Tricky, DJ Krust and many, many more. And they had the good sense to disappear after making two magnificent albums and a landmark live recording.

Now, ten years since their last record, the question isn’t so much whether Portishead can still create that make-the-hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck-stand-up reaction (that would be impossible, you have to assume), but rather whether the gloom-hop legends can produce an album that won’t detract from their legacy.

Can they ever.

Having listened to the new LP twice through last night, I can assure all Portishead fans that Third is an absolute triumph, not only worthy of their legacy, but also able to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up all over again.  

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Copy editor Joe Westerfield reflects on comedy’s petrie dish.

Jamie Malanowski’s discussion with Richard Zoglin about his book, Comedy at the Edge was very interesting—and I’m not just saying that because Jamie’s my boss. The book will soon go up on my shelf next to Phil Berger’s The Last Laugh and Tony Hendra’s Going Too Far, which also cover stand-up comedy in the 1970s, and Betsy Borns’s, Comic Lives, which covers stand-up in the 1980s, as soon as I can get a copy—and a shelf.

I have more than passing interest in the present stand-up comedy scene. I performed stand-up in the late-1990s through September 2001, when something happened. I worked at several New York clubs, a couple of venues in Brooklyn and even a few of talent shows. I’d go anywhere there was an unguarded microphone.

I was particularly taken by Zoglin’s last comment on the state of stand-up today:

“When I go to the clubs in New York, I usually get a little depressed. Everyone seems so similar, and so desperate in their effort to push the boundaries.”

He’s so right. There are many reasons why I failed; foremost among them is that I sucked. But there were comedians who could perform, and their material was good. And they got nowhere. The problem was and remains: Comedy clubs have a lack of infrastructure. There are no middle rungs on the ladder of success, and the bottom rungs have termites.
 

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Our May issue will contain a letter from former LAPD chief Daryl Gates about the profile in February of current LAPD chief Bill Bratton. But we also heard from other police officers.

Rod Decker, who retired from the LAPD in 1983, writes: “The chain of command starts with the mayor, then the police commission, and finally reaches the chief. That’s how you end up with directives like Special Order 40, which prohibits offers from asking federal officials about a person’s immigration status before he or she is charged with a crime. But being aware of a person’s background keeps cops alive. Although Bratton supports Special Order 40, to take this hands-off approach is idiotic. It allows many criminals to slip through the cracks.”

“Years ago I had the privilege on sitting next to Bratton at a conference,” adds Bill Sullivan, a lieutenant with the Port Authority of Allegheny County. “You can tell when someone is a leader—Bratton has ‘command presence.’ At the time he was head of the 4,000-man New York Transit Police. He told me he had instituted a new policy to go after quality-of-life crimes in the subways such as disorderly conduct, fare evasion, graffiti, intoxication and loitering—the theory being that these were the same people committing robberies and assaults. Sure enough, transit crime fell dramatically. Pittsburgh has adopted that same strategy.”

Intern Ben Conniff salutes our friends David and Nic Sheff.

A dark past opened into a bright present this week for contributing editor David Sheff and his son, Nic. The pair just released concurrent memoirs dealing with Nic’s long and harrowing methamphetamine addiction. David’s book, Beautiful Boy , has been selected as Starbucks’s next featured title and both books received great write-ups in the New York Times last Thursday and this Tuesday. Janet Maslin praised the “sturdiness and sense” with which David deals with a crisis that “goes well beyond the horrors of garden-variety substance abuse.” Amazon’s David Callanan called Beautiful Boy “achingly honest,” and Publisher’s Weekly said it’s “a hopeful book, coming at a propitious moment in the meth epidemic.”

The joint publication represents a triumph over Nic’s addiction and over the rift in the relationship between two men, who at one time were not even on speaking terms. As Nic’s book, Tweak, tells it, he spent years virtually homeless, picking meals from the trash while spending every cent getting high. David chronicles his own cycle of denial, anger, and despair as he watched his son lose control. Even after they began writing their books David and Nic hit obstacles that dwarfed your standard writer’s block. Nic relapsed into addiction after 18 months, and David suffered a brain hemorrhage and had to relearn the craft of writing that he mastered decades ago. 

But today the books are finished, Nic has been clean for two and a half years and David is back at the top of his game—he interviewed Garry Kasparov for our March issue and Fareed Zakaria for May.

Congratulations to the Sheffs on their groundbreaking new works, and heartfelt good wishes for the future. 

A couple of weeks ago. we mentioned Sarah Silverman’s hilarious video "I’m Fucking Matt Damon." After the Oscars Sunday night, boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel had his revenge.

A number of readers wrote about the letters that we published in response to our Playboy Interview with Robert Redford (November).

Says Jack Decker of Lebanon Junction, Kentucky: “I can’t believe the only responses to Redford’s interview are from a girl whose ignorance is made worse by her claim to be attending college and a guy in Florida who still gets worked up about Jane Fonda. People like that have made liberal a dirty word.”

“Every time you interview someone of liberal opinion (Al Franken, Keith Olbermann, Robert Redford), a loud minority of right-wing nuts grab their megaphones and issue a chorus of denunciations,” says Robert Borden of Jemez Springs, New Mexico. “They’re entitled to their opinions, but let’s have some perspective. George Bush has an approval rating of 29 percent, nine percentage points less than Barry Goldwater got stomped with. More than 80 percent of the American people think the country is going in the wrong direction, and 54 percent favor impeaching Dick Cheney. While Iraq goes up in flames, the Taliban has made a comeback in Afghanistan. After seven years of lies and incompetence, even GOP candidates are talking about ‘change.’ Change from what, do you think? I think it’s safe to say that most people think Redford is an excellent actor and a patriotic citizen who cares about his country. His criticism of the Bush administration is, if anything, understated.”

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Yesterday, for the first time ever, Playboy Radio aired an interview with Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody that was recorded at the time she published her memoir, "Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper." On Sunday, Cody won the Oscar for best screenplay for Juno, one of 2007's most acclaimed films.

After the jump, you'll find four excerpts from the twenty-minute interview with Playboy Radio's Tiffany Granath, which will re-air on Playboy Radio on Sirius 198 on Thursday and Saturday at 1:30 p.m. PT during the Afternoon Advice show.

 

 

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Once a form that contained television’s most creative work, the mini-series is a dying breed on American television. After all, why take a six-hour movie and show it over three nights—playing havoc with your schedule in the process—when you can pad the show with four, or seven, or even eighteen hours of additional material, and have a nice series that could become appointment programming? Whether it’s The Wire or Dirt or The Tudors, the short series is the creative and economic model everyone is embracing.

However, to get a look at how appealing a good miniseries can be, take a look at State of Play, a British drama from a couple years back that arrives on DVD in stores today. State of Play is a twisty tale about journalism and politics and scandal and murder, and even if our scruffy reporter protagonist is up to his earlobes in squishy conflicts-of-interest, and even if our earnest politician seems too obviously a golden boy from the start, there are enough surprises to keep things lively. The leads are a little uni-dimensional, but there’s very good acting in the secondary roles, including before-we-knew-them appearances by Kelly MacDonald (No Country for Old Men), James McAvoy (Atonement), Polly Walker (Rome), and, in a deliciously nudgy-winky performance as the paper’s editor-in-chief, Bill Nighy (Pirates of the Caribbean.) Catch the series now—next year, Hollywood remakes State of Play as a conventional two-hour movie, with Russell Crowe as the reporter, Ben Affleck as the politician, and Helen Mirren as the editor, no doubt with a lot fewer nudges and winks.

Ike Kelneck of Muskoka, Ontario, writes, “Britney, Lindsay and Paris all knew they were going to show their booty to the world—they wanted the attention (The Year in Sex, January). Isn’t it a shame it’s come to that? Those pictures aren’t even stimulating as much as ‘paparazzi prurient,’ which is what seems to drive the culture these days. I remember how strong imagination was for me when that was all I had to rely on. And, frankly, there was more pleasure in not getting it all.”

D. Lamb of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware: “Seriously, what are you trying to do to me?! Amanda Paige and Hiromi Oshima in a photo together? (Sex in America, February). While I’m dreaming why don’t you throw in a couple of shots of them with Dalene Kurtis.”

“Growing up in Texas in the 1980s, I knew the joy of sitting on tailgates and drinking Natty Lite, as well as stealing my dad’s Playboys before implants became the norm,” says Ryan Powers of Houston. “Natural is hot, and Beverly Mullins of The Women of Hooters 2008 (February) looks amazing.”

“I had the privilege of meeting your February Playmate, Michelle McLaughlin, the other day,” says Trey Flynt of Albuquerque. “While many people joke that Playboy airbrushes and otherwise ‘fixes’ the models, Michelle is prettier in person than she in her layout.  The only problem was she was wearing clothes.”

Finally, Greg Doherty of Hillsborough, California, says he found a “glaring omission” in our February report Sex in America regarding the sexiest women in politics. “Elizabeth Kucinich (the wife of former Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich) is a truly scrumptious bit of crumpet, and she even has a naughty little tongue stud.” Greg has a point—see the photo at left.

Sam Jemielity from Playboy.com would like to draw your attention to the radio...

 

Today, Playboy Radio on Sirius plays a never-before-aired interview with Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody, who walked off with the golden statue last night for her screenplay for the film, "Juno."
 
In this 20-minute interview, Cody talks about her career as a stripper and how that empowered her, and discusses the experience of having completed her first film.
 
The interview airs today on Playboy Radio on Sirius 198, during today's Afternoon Advice show hosted by Tiffany Granath, between 1:30-2:00 p.m. Pacific time (4:30 p.m. on the East Coast). The interview will re-air at the same time on Thursday and Saturday of this week.  
 
Don’t have Sirius? Get their online service through your computer.
 
Also, check back tomorrow for audio excerpts on the Playboy Blog.

 

 

 

 

I don’t need a coffee-table book of naked women to find my favorite – it’s always been Cynthia Myers, who appeared in the December 1968 issue under the headline “Holy Toledo!” (The issue is particularly collectible because it’s almost impossible to find one that hasn’t been repeatedly opened, causing the staples to separate from the paper.) Her Centerfold probably got posted on more walls in Vietnam than any other and inspired countless young men to work hard to get home. In Steve Sullivan’s Bombshells, Cynthia recounts her reaction to seeing her Centerfold for the first time: "I didn't realize my breasts were that big! I'd never seen them from that angle. Wow! No wonder people were looking at me that way!" Cyber Club members can check out Cynthia’s home page. 

Richard Zoglin, a former colleague of mine at Time magazine, has written an excellent piece of history of entertainment history called Comedy At The Edge, about stand-up comedy in the 1970s. Not only has Richard been a longtime observer of the stand-up scene, but he is a top-notch reporter, and the book captures the broad history of this phenomenon, while  offering rich and insightful details about the comics themselves. Here Richard answers some of our questions:

PLAYBOY: Your book is subtitled How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America. Okay—what was so special about what happened in the 1970s, and how did it change America?

ZOGLIN: I think the stand-ups of the late '60s and '70s really articulated and even helped shape the attitudes that we identify with the social and cultural revolution of the time: suspicious of authority, expressing a new freedom of language and sex, calling into question the hypocrisy and outmoded morality of old '50s-era America – all the hits of the counterculture years. How did these comedians change America? They reshaped our sense of humor -- and our sense of humor is what defines us today, provides the framework for how we look at the world and at ourselves.
 

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