Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => The Coffee Corner => Topic started by: Rob C on September 28, 2017, 03:29:57 am
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Sad news - he's gone to the great big Mansion in the sky.
Amazing achievement, creating such a magazine on nothing but a bright idea and a sense of freedom.
Thanks for so many fantastic bits of writing, some great photographs and a huge amount of inspiration. Your printed images provided the basis for many a calendar layout proposal. I owe you.
R.I.P.
Rob C
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He was also quite the innovator in marketing. We studied his corporation (but, alas, not the photographs) in our business school.
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He's in a better place now. Oh, wait ...
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He's in a better place now. Oh, wait ...
;D
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it's all in the head. ;)
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He's in a better place now. Oh, wait ...
My thoughts exactly Bill!!
Kevin in CT
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it's all in the head. ;)
Naughty!
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Hefner was one of the silliest people ever. He started a magazine that showed tits. He sold a lot and used his money to hire some good writers and cartoonists. To see him running around in his bathrobe - well, what can one say? A few years ago they stopped showing tits. Sales plummeted. Now they are showing tits again.
"I read it for the articles."
Ha ha.
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My first exposure to Playboy was via an older cousin's stash c. summer 1973. I certainly wasn't looking at 'em for reading material (!), but even so a film review caught my eye. Don't remember the film but I do remember going through the whole stash after that and scarfing up both film and book reviews. I wanted to see The Godfather something awful after reading about it but it wasn't playing anywhere locally. (Finally saw it a year or so later on a double-bill with Part 2.) So I can honestly say I did read the articles. :)
-Dave-
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In my experience, most of the people who laugh at the idea of reading Playboy rather than simply looking at it are possibly referring to the post-mid 70s era.
I bought the thing on subscription for many years and read every word - often with help from the dictionary (eat your heart out, Reader's Digest!) - and both the text and the photographs were class leaders.
So why did I quit? Because I used to leave the thing lying around the house, perfectly happy if my two kids picked it up, but then it apparently began to feel the competition from Penthouse and went down the slippery slope. At that point, when I felt I didn't want either my son or daughter to look at it any more, I gave it up; it had stopped attracting me, too. I feel that if you have a liking for pornography then that's probably inborn; as with an artistic ability, I don't think everybody has that drive. Thank God, both ways!
If anything, it strikes me that if Playboy did indeed lose sales to Penthouse for not being "explicit" enough, then the problem lay more in the head of the world's readership than in the editorial board at the old Playboy, which had never been pornographic. What it became after I gave it up, I have no idea.
France 24 tv ran a little spot on it during the Friday Debate slot just because of Hef; Christopher Dickie, both a regular Friday guest at France 24 tv and an editor at The Daily Beast, confided to having had two articles published at the happy rabbit, and that his father had been subject of an interview there, too. He was a little wary about joining in with the general condemnation and ugly-sister complaints from the righteous rest, the majority of whom I felt had a lot of opinion but precious little experience of the actual magazine. That's life in public, I suppose: all opinion and empty sound bite, just to appear clever and of a mind with the world at large. Jesus, I bet the show has a "like" button when viewed on the Internet rather than on the box!
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He's in a better place now. Oh, wait ...
That is pretty good.
Don