Cartoonist extraordinaire Will Elder passed away on Thursday, May 16th in New Jersey.
Will collaborated with Harvey Kurtzman on the popular Little Annie Fanny strip, which ran in the magazine from 1962-1988. It’s considered to be one of the most labor-intensive comics ever produced thanks to Will’s exacting and painterly technique.
The Los Angeles Times published a piece about Will on Saturday in which Hef said, “His artistic ability was unparalleled, but it was the sense of humor that he brought to it that really set him apart.”
To get a sense of this fantastic artist’s work and life, we recommend the book Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art published by Fantagraphics in 2003.
Playboy contributing editor and Fox News correspondent James Rosen has written a biography of John Mitchell, who was Richard Nixon’s law partner, campaign manager and first Attorney General, and the highest ranking official to do time for Watergate convictions. It’s a well-written, thoroughly researched, and often challenging look at the Mitchell that will certainly provoke some controversy. We’re happy that James has agreed to answer some questions about his book.
PLAYBOY: Let's start at the beginning: who was John Mitchell, and why should we care about him? ROSEN: First of all, thanks for having me on Playboy.com. John Mitchell was the closest thing to a friend Richard Nixon had in government, and, as a result, became the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to be convicted on criminal charges and to serve prison time. After a fabulously successful career on Wall Street, where his innovations in the financing of public works projects made him an indispensable figure to mayors and governors in all fifty states, Mitchell merged his law firm with Nixon's in 1967. The next year, Mitchell served as campaign manager for Nixon's amazing comeback presidential bid, and, after Nixon won, reluctantly agreed to serve as U.S. attorney general. As head of the Justice Department from 1969 to 1972, Mitchell served as the nation's chief law enforcement officer during a period of extraordinary turbulence in American life, one that witnessed the Kent State killings, the Mayday riots, the heyday of radical groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, and a number of controversies unprecedented in their nature and seriousness, e.g., the desegregation of Southern schools, the Pentagon Papers, and the episode where the Joint Chiefs of Staff were discovered to have been spying, during wartime, on the commander-in-chief. After resigning to run Nixon's '72 re-election campaign, Mitchell became embroiled in the Watergate scandal, and ultimately served nineteen months in prison for his role in the cover-up.
Dave Golokhov, host of Hardcore Sports Radio (Sirius 186), foresees dark days in the desert.
For the last four seasons, the Phoenix Suns have been close to an NBA Championship, but no cigar. But last February, instead of making minor renovations and improving a good team, they've done Extreme Makeover: NBA Edition. Now, like one of Josh Howard's blunts, everything has gone up in smoke. They are left with an over-the-hill, overpaid center in Shaquille O'Neal, an all-offense no defense All-Star in Amare Stoudemire, a faded former MVP in Steve Nash and with Mike D’Antoni off to the Knicks, no head coach.
The latter figures to be the biggest problem. The Suns' opening should be considered the worst head coaching positions in the NBA. The Suns have a mature team with Championship expectations but the tide has already hit its high point and is now rolling back.
Anyone who cares about magazines should drop by Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, where there is an exhibit devoted to George Lois, who was the art director of Esquire between 1962 and 1972. The word iconic gets thrown around a lot these days, but during his tenure, Lois produced one cover image after another that truly deserve the name iconic—Sonny Liston in a Santa suit; John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King standing amid the tombstones of Arlington; Muhammad Ali as the arrow-pierced martyr St. Sebastian; Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. Working before PhotoShop and other software programs made image manipulation easy, Lois had to combine meticulous photography and painstaking craftsmanship to execute some of his ideas. But of course, that was the technical part. Lois’s great genius was to imagine, again and again, the simple, striking, brilliant image that not only would jump off the newsstand, but that would complement the story inside. In the process, he became the foremost visual commentator of a tumultuous era. Here’s the greatest praise I can give Lois: again and again as I looked at the 24 covers mounted on the wall, I itched to flip them over and dive into the article.
We know Chris Matthews can be a blowhard sometimes. Of course, we'd probably end up saying some pretty goofy things if we had to give live commentary over thin election results for 7 hours at a stretch every other week. But never mind any past misses, when the guy lands a punch he lands the living hell out of it.
Witness this, the talking-head equivalent of a reverse suplex from the top rope followed by a folding chair to the head. Pop some popcorn and watch as Matthews not only pins right-wing radio pundit Kevin James to the wall over his tenuous grasp of history, but also draws out the key flaw in President Bush's recent poor-taste remarks to Israel's Knesset that compared Obama's statements about Iran to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. We don't typically enjoy seeing helpless animals get mauled by predators, but in this case we'll make an exception (the drubbing begins around the two-minute mark).
Beauty and brains do not have to be mutually exclusive. Add razor-sharp wit and a dash of deadpan humor and you get Miss June: Juliette Fretté, a self-proclaimed “artist creatrix” from California who is just as stimulating to talk with as she is to gaze upon.
By day she is a painter of surreal, vaguely erotic colorful works who also writes art analyses for Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art online. By night, well, we can only dream. “How I adore written masturbation,” she says about writing her thesis “Posing for Playboy from a Feminist Perspective: How Media Images Impact Women’s Empowerment,” which she is currently expanding into a book. “The first time I worked for Playboy was for the Girls of the Pac 10 issue in 2005, followed by Special Editions and Coed of the Month in 2006. I used my thesis to sort of analyze women’s empowerment in the context of Playboy. I made a case that objectification is not necessarily a bad thing. Objectivity and subjectivity exist in the world, and it’s more about reciprocity to me. I found that it’s not horrible to be an object of beauty as long as you have a sort of mobility to be both a subject and an object. If you look at it within relationships, you change roles between the aggressor and the submissive person. My identity, our identities, can be as fluid as we wish them to be.”
For Juliette, this has meant reexamining the definition of “feminist” and tossing away the tired clichés. “In truth, a real feminist is anything but a man hater,” she says. “I am definitely a man lover. A lot more feminists are open-minded to the fact that celebrating sexuality is empowering. I’m just embracing this celebration of beauty and different manifestations of myself. I consider myself sexually liberated, but I think I still have a lot to unleash!”
There was a feature in the New York Times on Wednesday about an on-air tiff between WNBC-TV anchors Sue Simmons and Chuck Scarborough in which the former ripped the latter with an “eyebrow-raising word-bomb” (is that the Times attempt at a little hipster patois?). What was the word used? Well, you had to find out elsewhere because it was “not publishable in the newspaper.” Which basically means that the world’s paper of record cannot accurately quote people, books, movies, war protestors, plays and spats between TV anchors (one wonders if that might have just a little impact on one’s understanding of a subject).
Years ago, I was in Miami covering Super Bowl XXIX for the Village Voice. I remember my press credential read “New York Village Voice” instead of just Village Voice, and so alphabetically, I sat in the press section next to a really nice young reporter from the New York Times. I introduced myself, and when he saw for whom I was writing, he looked at me and said, “The Voice! That’s great. You guys can write ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’.” The Times’ profanity policy is fucking weak-kneed bullshit and they can print that. Oh wait, they can’t.
This summer, instead of reaching for a margarita or a tall glass of iced tea, grab a pickle pop. They have all the taste of real pickles, with the added benefits of being frozen and available in tube form. Sounds like they would go perfectly with hamburger ice cream and a French fry milkshake.
Dan Henrick of Playboy.com is wearing out his iPod to bring you this report:
Until recently, Sweden’s most popular exports have been moody, black-and-white art films, an amply gifted bikini team, and affordable furniture for college students and the newly divorced. And then there’s always ABBA. So it’s a bit of a shock to discover the sudden wave of remarkable female pop singers coming out of the land of high cheekbones.
-The most notable is Robyn (pictured), a pop dynamo who recently collaborated with Snoop Dogg on the single “Sexual Eruption.” Her own tracks, “Be Mine!” and “Konichiwa Bitches” are explosively catchy too.
-El Perro Del Mar is the pseudonym of Sarah Assbring (please, no jokes). Her new album “From the Valley to the Stars” merges Wall of Sound arrangements with a sweet, subtle melancholy.
Crown Royal invited Assistant Editor Rocky Rakovic to experience auto racing with the Royal treatment. He was given a pit pass, a ride in the pace car and shadowed the race’s Grand Marshal. Oh yeah, Rocky had never watched a race, doesn’t much like cars and is content on taking the subway to work. Here’s his first dispatch:
I received a call from the Crown Royal people inviting me to the Dan Lowry 400 at Richmond International Raceway. “Who is Dan Lowry?” I asked. Turns out he’s a regular guy. In the sport (I’ll call it a sport until I confirm or deny it’s “sportiness”) where advertising is king, Crown Royal bucked the trend by giving their naming rights away to a Regular Joe, or in this case: Dan. Dan Lowry won a contest in which he had to write a 50-word essay about his favorite experience with Crown Royal. To give you a feeling of how long that essay was the introductory paragraph to this post is longer. I was promised full access to the race and their cabinet of Crown—I’m in.
-I’m not a “car guy,” I don’t salivate over the new Audi or—hold on let me ask a coworker—Bugatti. I don’t feel the need for speed. I barrage the Crown Royal people with idiotic questions: ear plugs? How fast does the pace car go? Not to sound weird, but what do I wear? The answers: Yes. Fast. And khakis. I’m totally out of my element; I haven’t worn khakis since third grade.
Scott Alexander
Gary Cole
Robert DeSalvo
Leopold Froehlich
Heather Haebe
Conor Hogan
Amy Grace Loyd
Gilbert Macias
Jamie Malanowski
Tim Mohr
Christopher Napolitano
David Pfister
Playboy Staff
Stephen Randall
Rocky Rakovic
Josh Robertson
Chip Rowe
Matt Steigbigel
Jennifer Thiele
John D. Thomas
The Playboy Advisor
Cartoonist extraordinaire Will Elder passed away on Thursday, May 16th in New Jersey. 
Playboy contributing editor and Fox News correspondent James Rosen 
Dave Golokhov, host of Hardcore Sports Radio (Sirius 186), foresees dark days in the desert.
Anyone who cares about magazines should drop by Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, where there is an exhibit devoted to George Lois, who was the art director of Esquire between 1962 and 1972. The word iconic gets thrown around a lot these days, but during his tenure, Lois produced one cover image after another that truly deserve the name iconic—Sonny Liston in a Santa suit; John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King standing amid the tombstones of Arlington; Muhammad Ali as the arrow-pierced martyr St. Sebastian; Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. Working before PhotoShop and other software programs made image manipulation easy, Lois had to combine meticulous photography and painstaking craftsmanship to execute some of his ideas. But of course, that was the technical part. Lois’s great genius was to imagine, again and again, the simple, striking, brilliant image that not only would jump off the newsstand, but that would complement the story inside. In the process, he became the foremost visual commentator of a tumultuous era. Here’s the greatest praise I can give Lois: again and again as I looked at the 24 covers mounted on the wall, I itched to flip them over and dive into the article.
Beauty and brains do not have to be mutually exclusive. Add razor-sharp wit and a dash of deadpan humor and you get Miss June: 
This summer, instead of reaching for a margarita or a tall glass of iced tea, grab a pickle pop. They have all the taste of real pickles, with the added benefits of being frozen and available in tube form. Sounds like they would go perfectly with hamburger ice cream and a French fry milkshake.
Dan Henrick of Playboy.com is wearing out his iPod to bring you this report:
Crown Royal invited Assistant Editor Rocky Rakovic to experience auto racing with the Royal treatment. He was given a pit pass, a ride in the pace car and shadowed the race’s Grand Marshal. Oh yeah, Rocky had never watched a race, doesn’t much like cars and is content on taking the subway to work. Here’s his first dispatch:
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