It’s much easier to be successful than it is to be relevant. The tricks won’t keep you relevant. Tricks might keep you popular for a while, but in all honesty, I don’t know how U2 will stay relevant. I know we’ve got a future. I know we can fill stadiums. And yet with every record, I think, ‘Is this it? Are we still relevant?’—Bono
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Marilyn Monroe. Jane Mansfield. Elizabeth Taylor. Ursula Andress. Kim Basinger. Linda Evans. Joan Collins. Drew Barrymore. Belinda Carlyle. Bo Derek. Tara Reid. Jamie Pressley. Denise Richads. Dita Van Teese. Tori Wilson. Nancy Sinatra. These are just a few of the celebrities who not only posed nude for Playboy®, but did so at a time that made their presence in the magazine culturally relevant. From the very first issue in 1953, Hef used celebrities as a way of making sure the magazine mattered, that what appeared in the magazine would be conversation fodder for water coolors and bar rooms everywhere.
Having content that was socially relevant took the magazine from something one hid under the bed or in a closet, to one that was regularly discussed at dinner tables. It didn’t matter whether one approved of the content, it was the fact that people were talking about Playboy and its nudes that made the magazine relevant. For a celebrity, being in Playboy was an instant invite to the late-night talk shows, a career booster like no other. In fact, for a set of celebrities such as Pam Anderson, Carmen Electra, and Anna Nicole Smith, their careers would not have existed without their appearance in the magazine; it was just that relevant.
Playboy has long held a very unique and even peculiar place in American society. As hard as the mainstream media tried to demonize the men’s magazine, Hef continually produced content so incredibly relevant that people had to pay attention. The magazine’s interview with Georgia governor Jimmy Carter in 1976 was one of the factors that propelled Carter into the White House. Nancy Sinatra’s spread in 1995 helped rejuvinate a career that had been dormant for two decades but was about to explode again with the Kill Bill movies. Drew Barrymore and other former child stars took to the pages of Playboy to let the industry know they were ready for more adult roles. Granted, the spreads worked out better for some than it did others, but the point is that the nudes, as well as most all the content, were relevant.[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Now, ask yourself the last time you rushed to pick up a Playboy because of who was going to be in its pages? When was the last time that anyone actually cared about who was doing a spread in the magazine. While management’s decision to completely abandon nudes happened only a week ago, they’ve quietly been moving away from that format for the past three years with an increasing number of pictorals not going any further than implied nudity and several non-gatefold sets not even getting close to anyone being naked. With the base reason for picking up the magazine dwindling, the rest of the content, such as the interviews and fiction, have been largely ignored. Playboy is no longer as relevant as it once was.
Over the past few years, Playboy has stepped away from the controversy that once surrounded their nude spreads. As the quality of the photorgaphy diminished, so too did their choice of celebrities and models. One of the challenges they now face is that international fashion magazines, such as Vogue Italia, not only have more nudity than does Playboy, but they are more culturally relevant (because of the relationship to fashion) and the level of photography is arguably light years above anything Playboy is producing. Photographers such as Steven Meisel and Nick Knight are shooting the new celebrities, fashion models such as Cara Delevigne, Joan Smalls, and Karlie Kloss in nude editorials that render the mediocre nudes in Playboy almost boring.
Playboy could still come back to a position of being dominantly relevant, but it is not likely to do so by dropping nudes. The success of fashion magazines publishing creative nude spreads demonstrates that the right style of nude photography is still amazingly relevant and capable of selling print issues. Change has to happen, but dropping nudes isn’t the answer now and won’t be the answer in the future.[/one_half_last]
Love, Everyone
Welcome Home (2013)
Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.—Buddha
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]What’s wrong with people? I look through the news this morning and all I see is hate. Republicans hate democrats. This religion hates that religion and both hate anyone who disagrees with them. White hates black, black hates white, and they both hate brown. If I were to do a quick, informal estimation, which is exactly what I’m doing right this moment, I would say that roughly 80% of what has been tossed at me this morning ultimately contains a hateful message. Where is the love? Where is the empathy? Where is any attempt at actually wanting to get along with other people.
Here’s the great paradox of the 21st century: we’re willing to spend billions of dollars (collectively) looking for love, trying to find love, improving ourselves so that we’re more lovable, but we don’t do a damn thing toward actually loving other people. We are as selfish about love as we are everything else in our lives. We want it all to come to us, knock on our door, overwhelm us with emotional goodies, and reaffirm our sense of how valuable we are to the world. We define love not as something we feel toward other people, but by the quantity of warm fuzzies other people give to us.
In other words: we don’t have a fucking clue. For all the talk about love, we fail to realize that love is an act of giving, not an act of receiving. Love is not something that happens to you, but something you distribute to others. Love is not doing something based on what you feel, but what you feel based on what you’ve done. Love is active, not passive. Love is not something to be found, but something we create, from the center of our being, so that we might give it to someone else. Love is not narrowly limited to a familial relationship, but an over-arching sense of inclusiveness and responsibility to the greater good of humanity.
Love holds no bias, nor fear, but includes everyone.[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]So, we are, and have been for a while, at this point in the United States where we have had more mass shootings (where more than four people are shot), than there have been days in the year. We foolishly ask why this keeps happening. Some want bans on weapons. Some want tighter control on those with diagnosed mental disorders. Some want everything locked down and stored in a box where no one can get to it. None of those are solutions. We cannot solve with legislation what was not caused by government in the first place. There is only one reason we keep shooting ourselves: we’ve forgotten how to love.
It was a mere 45-50 years ago that we, my generation and those just older than us, were all about peace, and love, and happiness. We were sure that we could change the world with love, and ultimately we were correct, but we didn’t see it in the way we thought we would see it. We thought love would give us things, take away responsibility, make life more relaxed. What we failed to realize is that love creates responsibility and when we fail that responsibility, we fail love. Love doesn’t just chug along like a toy train circling the Christmas tree. Love requires maintenance, effort, and a completely selfless attitude.
Where is the American society failing? Don’t blame government, Republican orDemocrat. Don’t blame religions, present or absent. Don’t blame race or economics. Blame the total and complete absence of love. We’ve stopped loving, we’ve stopped teaching our children to love, and we’ve stopped letting love be the guide by which we live our lives. In a world where we’ve all but thrown love out the window, is it any wonder that society has gone to hell in a handbasket?
Love, everyone. You won’t learn how until you try.[/one_half_last]
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