Gay Head. Just sayin’.

A little NSFW image for you. Ukukeles, leis…

Seen at the Maryville BBQ festival.

Um… No thanks…

Bamboo Ben is a true original. An old punk like myself, you just never quite know what to expect from him. He’s made a lot of art in various mediums. But, I think he just made his masterpiece. A real statement about art and being true and commercialism. When the trap snapped on the neck of a rat in his shop recently, an idea was born. This piece, which may be number one in a series, is one fantastic work.

“Piss Fink”

Somewhere between Rat Fink and Piss Christ… Yes, that’s a real dead rat.

More and the series may continue at Ben’s MySpace page…

What can you say? Buck naked gals in front of something vaguely tiki-ish and some matting and maybe a grass skirt on the wall. Gotta love it. (NSFW) 

I had come across this cover many years ago, and this week, I finally found the magazine. As best as I can tell, it is from 1966. Maybe a bit racier than Playboy at the time and just full of pictures of girls. The tiki and the bar are apparantly owned by the same photographer who did this spread for Nylon Jungle magazine. The rest of the images in the magazine are NSFW, so, you click on the below links as you wish.

Buff Treasure - on Pleasure Island – Rare, indeed, is the day that a ship calls at the island of Secluda, so this lovely native celebrates the event.

The Phallocrypt

Page 3 - She’s asking the fire god who rules over the island to provide them with rainless weather so that the passengers and crew on board the ship can come ashore to sample the island’s hospitality. The native food is delicious, the dances are delights to behold and the people are friendly children. “Pleasure Island,” it’s been called, and with good reason. With luck, perhaps some day your ship will call at this pearl of the Pacific!

Page 4

Center Fold

I am proud that I was able to contribute images for the “Sexy Tiki” portion of Sven’s newest book, “Tiki Modern“. I just got a bit of new naughty hula stuff to share.

From the January 1963 we have a surprisingly long pictorial of a Hawaiian festival. We see the fantasy unfold. The images are NSFW: not safe for work.

      
We see the natives get restless, then our blonde “private secretary” cuts loose!

Note the tan line on her that is 6 inches above her belly button.

Duke Carter, author of “Tiki Quest” and organizer of “Exotica” posted a swell review he found in a Chicago rag of a small event he put together recently.

Way too many of you are going to be pleased to know that the Chicago Antique Market boasts a “Retro Tiki” theme this weekend, and that it will showcase one-of-a-kind vintage items from Tiki collectors David and Amy Carter. The Carters have written a book, Tiki Quest: Collecting the Exotic Past which, if we weren’t trying so hard to be nicer, we would label as an idiotic exercise in how to waste time and money while making everyone else think you’re gay, if you’re straight; or, if you’re gay, making you look like an effete poseur. But you don’t care what people think, judging by how many of you have already headed for the door. Fine. I wash my hands of you. Yes, Tiki seekers, it’s retro time on Saturday and Sunday, June 30 and July 1, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the 1300 block of West Randolph (312/951-9939). You have to pay $8 to get in, unless you suspect that David and Amy Carter have brought particularly desirable gems of the Tiki oeuvre which you need to get your hands on before the hoi polloi arrives, which means you better bring $20 so you can get in at 8 instead of 9 a.m.

Man. Thanks for outting me! Much good commentary available on Tiki Central as well.

Warning, NSFW. 

The 1966 issue of Nylon Jungle.

I have been looking for this for years. Nice tiki, nice, um, gal.

This carving must be in the photographer’s home. This is all we get to see. A random prop. If this was a recent picture, I’d be inclided to say those are too perfect. They must be fake. I know they had boob jobs in the 60s. Regardless, that’s a pleasing set.

The magazine is full of that odd fetish for shockings, feet and rather oddly, girls in dirty white sneakers and stockings.

Previously on Swank Blather:

Tiki Lingerie Lunch Hour

Route 66 Tiki Lingerie Show

Kiki in NYC reports on seeing this film and Mr. Waters himself recently. Sounds like a fun way to spend an evening. She says the video is to be released through Netflix soon.

This article makes more sense than any. Terrorists want to cause terror. We go nuts over every little thing and thus, they succeed, even when they fail i.e. the London liquid plane bombers. They were stopped and we still have to bring air traffic to a grinding halt and raise the panic level. The list of panicy non-threats is seemingly endless i.e. the arrest of the “terrorists” who had bought hundreds of cell phones to resell. Oops! They are capitalists, not terrorists!

We can never win if winning means stopping them. We can always win if winning means not changing our lives to meet their useless threats and feeding them with our hype.

I don’t mean to get all conspiritorial on ya, but, who benefits from this hightened sense of panic?

I’ve been reading the Bleat for years now and he has gone further and further into the business of being a grumpy guy and less and less being an amusing commentator on culture. He had the sense to move a lot of it to a separate blog. But today he just lost it. It sounds to me like the rantings of an “old guy” who can’t take the notion that he is a complete square. He spends a lot of words trying to discount any sort of counter culture sensibility as being stupid and has a bad habit of justifying things by pointing out that much much worse things are happening elsewhere in the world. Sort of like “Why are the namby pamby Democrats so up in arms about the goverment spying on them without warrants when North Korea has 100,000 people being tortured to death in secret prisons?” “Why get so up in arms about blacks being kept out of good schools in the 50s when Russia was killing thousands of people every month in Gulags?” Sad. That’s not an argument. Mis-direction.

I read most of the Bleat today and over and over it was just saying, this guy is really a stiff neck jerk. “How dare you rebel against a country that feeds you, Marlon Brando and James Dean!” Lileks, you are a sad old guy. Mr. Unhip. And that seems to make you crazy. You need to start allowing people to reply to your rants on your site. Dialog.

I am very sick of adults who tell kids that education is useless. Art class? I use skills I learned in art class on a weekly basis. Because art is much more than just drawing or painting. Every sign or ad or television program is just crammed full of art. It’s everywhere! Now, you can do it badly of course, and if you don’t care how things look, you may find it useless. But if you want the sign you make for your business or yard sale to attract customers, you will likley need to draw (pun!) from your high school art education and lay out the elements correctly, balanced and level. That’s just art! Used in normal life!

The one I hear more than any other is the uselessness of Algebra in life. Please! I probably use this basic math skill daily and so do you. Of course, if you never bothered to learn math, you may not use it, but don’t handicap the next generation! Example:

A case of 12 6 ounce cans of cat food costs $3.96 for the Friskies and $8.16 for 24 cans of the Purina. Which is a better value?

Solve for X. 12X= 3.96

Solve for Y. 24Y = 8.16

Whoa. Algebra just let me save a penny a can on cat food! It’s every day life. Yes this is a simple example, but it is still Algebra. Basic math. Stop glorifying stupidity and anti-education. Stop making excuses for kids to be ignorant.

I have often said that, although it is horrible to those affected, terrorism is really a drop in the bucket. Over-reaction is the buzz today. This paper by the Cato institute should be required reading for everyone. I wish the media would get the message. But lawyers and courts make us all victims too. When was the last time anyone you knew was poisoned by a product tampered with in a store? But how many times have you started to squeeze out some mustard or pour some honey and realized you had to open it up and remove the “tamper proof seal?”

“Some sort of terrorist inoculated Tylenol capsules with cyanide in 1982, killing seven people. However, that frightening and much-publicized event (it generated 125,000 stories in the print media alone and cost the manufacturer more than $1 billion) failed to inspire much in the way of imitation.”

In 1982, some demented soul murdered 7 people. Since 1982, we all have been tearing through seals on every damned product under the sun, which annoys us and costs us and the product maker. It’s also likely there just to try to keep you from suing them when some other retard poisons you. That’s right. If Sue Bee honey didn’t put that seal on there and you died because a murderer put poison in your honey, you’d likely try to own their company. That’s pathetic. But that’s life in the USA. We go to war in two countries, search every shoe that comes on a plane, x-ray and feel up luggage, check for metal on people, seal all products, scare and annoy the crap out of everybody for what? Next to nothing. The terrorists have indeed won. No, they didn’t blow us all up. They just made us all so scared of a few dozen guys in the desert that we do all sorts of stupid, costly and annoying things, to ourselves and others. And, I might add, do all these things rather than help out our fellow Americans and humans. Taking money out of positive and helpful pursuits and into all sorts of things that help no one. By the USA declaring war on the terrorists, we have made them our equal. Equal? Yes. As we have not beaten them and never will. They are our nations enemy. And we can no more win against them than we can catch every person on the most wanted list or stop all people from getting hit by lightning or prevent some idiot from removing a tamper proof seal and injecting poison in the ketchup. We have declared war on a few dozen individuals, not a country. It can never end. And as long we continue to choose to fear them and plan our lives around them, they will always exist and they will always “own” us. Every time you tear that seal off your mustard, remember everything that has and continues to be wasted in the name of unwarranted fear.

UPDATE August 13th: I like this article. Something I have said all along. You can’t stop them, just inconvience them, whether it’s terrorists or high school shooters. And this article. Good fodder for conspiracy folks, but it is in the main media…  

August 16th: Nice to see more people using intelligence in this theater of terror. I wish our President had used some a few years ago before he lead us down this path. Here is a nice article by a chemistry student about the ridiculous possibility of the liquid explosives and the ridiculous idea we can stop the imaginitive terrorist.

I like this article too. It’s by a nationally recognized security expert. Sense. We need more people making sense.

I read a number of the comments on this site and got a good laugh. This particular one just has everything. It’s a real classic. I have stated my disdain for the Intelligent Design idea a long time ago. I believe it was discussed and tossed out a few hundred years ago. This is the current farce created to mock the current ridiculous notion called Intelligent Design. It has allowed a lot of uber Christians to show their lack of intelligence. Every religion has them. And they don’t represent the religion. But they do make for some damned funny reading.

There seem to be two different views on the flag desecration issue. Some see it as a battle flag that symbolized those who fought and died for the United States. (That’s the United States, not America. I believe Mexicans fought for some American freedom as well…) I think that is awful. I don’t want our flag to symbolize war.

The other view is that it is a symbol of freedom. That I can agree with. If the U.S. flag is the great symbol of freedom, not being free to desecrate it makes it not a great symbol of freedom.

And my memory of the first people burning the flag were war veterans protesting. That would make both groups plans to make it illegal seem ridiculous.

Lileks takes great exception to an Ang Lee comment today and it just bugs me.

The first thing that comes to mind is very simple. Ang Lee has made a number of films and is the one actually capable of having the very qualified opinion he does. The second, and more crucial thing that hits me is that Mr. Lee’s statement is completely out of any context and without any way to know what exactly he means. Lileks takes the opportunity to tell us what Mr. Lee is saying. It’s senseless. Lileks knows no more about the context of the statement than you or I, but feels free to fill it out fully.

He has decided to harp on the word “free” and decided Ang Lee is talking about the state of “freedom” in the United States. That our ability to live our lives without our women being stoned to death for lack of head coverings means Ang Lee is a hoighty toighty egg head who has no right to assail our way of life.

It’s a very crass thing to take one sentence from an international film maker about his industry and tell the world that he is thus part of the liberal elite who would stab us in the back and feed us to terrorists. I don’t think we need to protect our borders and our Freedom from a prominent director who uses the word “free” in a negative statement about the US.

Lower your hackles Mr. Lileks. You are begining to see liberal elitests under every newspaper article.