Tuesday, July 27, 2010

“Beat Girls” smoking peyote! Topless! Yeah, man! I read it in UNTAMED magazine…


Lately, I’ve been posting entries about old issues of Untamed, one of my favorite vintage men’s adventure magazines.

Untamed featured painted covers by two great pulp artists who are more widely known for their science fiction magazine covers, Ed “Emsh” Emshwiller and Leo Morey.

It also featured some wild stories that I find highly entertaining, though probably for different reasons than originally intended.

Consider, for example, the supposedly true story about Beatniks from the February 1959 issue of Untamed, titled:

       “‘BEAT’ GIRLS: Worshippers of Zen and Sin?”

In this exposé-style piece, author Gilbert Nash sets out to answer that question with his buddy Bob.

Gil is a New Yorker who knows some Beats in the city. Bob is said to be a writer of detective novels from Bloomington, Indiana.

Bob tells Gil he wants “to get a close look at this Beat Generation he’d been hearing so much about, and see if he could get some idea what makes it tick.”

“I’ve read Kerouac and Ginsberg and all the so-called spokesmen for the Beats,” he confessed, his brow furrowed. “I’ve read all the books and articles I can find claiming to explain the whole thing. And frankly, all I get is more confused.”

Bob isn’t a fan of Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg, or any of the other legendary Beat writers.

But he is especially intrigued by a recent article he’d read “about the kids who held plush Madison Avenue jobs on weekdays and indulged their Beatness on weekends, at ‘cool’ parties.”

That article “described how all the girls take off their blouses and bras and walk around with nothing on top.”

With this tantalizing image in mind, Gil and Bob set off on their “quest for Beatness.”

During the course of the evening they go to a Beatnik party and actually do encounter one topless “Beat Girl,” plus some others who are like, real crazy, Daddy-O.

For example, there’s Joannie.

She’s a 21-year-old who has already bedded hundreds of guys.

Joannie “keeps track of the number of men she sleeps with and announces the running total out loud at the appropriate moment.”

The “moment” is during sex. Joannie likes to shout out the guy’s number (“297 or 369 or whatever the number is”) while they’re going at it.

“It can be pretty disconcerting,” Gil notes.

Then there’s the blonde girl “who was not nude from the waist up, but might as well have been.”

“She wore a thin, faded man’s shirt, wide open at the throat and tied in a knot beneath her large breasts. There was a huge expanse of skin visible between it and her ragged shorts, which were obviously the barely surviving remains of a pair of dungarees.

She was talking in a low, steady drone. ‘Baby,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me about the past, baby. There is no past. The past is dead. The past is dead, baby. The future isn’t here yet. Maybe there’ll be a future, maybe there won’t. We’re in between. And in between is nowhere, baby. Nowhere.”

Man oh man, I dig that groovy Beatnik lingo!

I also dig the story’s unintentionally funny anecdote about how Beats liked to smoke peyote:

“‘Pot’ is a word that is used loosely, like most words these Beat kids use,” Gil explains in the story. “But generally it means the dried leaves of the peyote cactus, which are made into cigarettes and smoked. Though the stuff has obvious narcotic effects, for some odd reason it has not been made illegal in New York yet, and lots of the kids use it to get ‘high,’ or ‘far out.’ Aldous Huxley wrote a whole book about the sensations he had when he tried it, and now uncounted young people in New York grow the plants, dry the leaves, and smoke the stuff for kicks.”

The part about Aldous Huxley has a basis in fact. It refers to his groundbreaking 1954 book The Doors of Perception.

It’s also true that peyote and the psychedelic alkaloid it contains — mescaline — were not yet illegal in most states or under federal drug laws when Gil wrote his story in 1959.

Of course, the part about smoking peyote leaves is hilariously absurd.

Peyote is a cactus plant that has no leaves. And, it’s not smoked. Indeed, it’s not even smokable.

As noted on the Mystica web page about the use of peyote by American Indians and other fans: “Smoking peyote is impossible because it simply will not burn in a pipe or cigarette.”

I also seriously doubt if many people in New York were growing peyote in 1959. And, I don’t recall ever hearing anyone refer to anything but marijuana as “pot.”

If you think Gil’s knowledge gap about peyote and his search for topless Beat Girls sounds amusing, I think you’ll enjoy reading his story “‘BEAT’ GIRLS: Worshippers of Zen and Sin?” 

You can read the entire story in PDF format by clicking this link.

And, if you like that, you should also check out some of the other vintage drug stories I’ve posted here in case you missed them, like the LSD story “I WENT INSANE FOR SCIENCE” and the one that has a photo purportedly showing cocaine being made from the pods of cocoa trees.

They’re ginchy!

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Comments? Questions? Corrections? Post them on the Men’s Adventure Magazines Facebook Group.

Further reading, listening and viewing about “The Beat Generation” (and peyote)…

Thursday, July 22, 2010

“Lustful Bushwhackers,” a “Heroic Orgy” and Lili St. Cyr’s answer to the question “Are Strippers Oversexed?”


In my last post I featured cover art done for the magazine Untamed by Ed “Emsh” Emshwiller, who is more widely know for his great science fiction cover art.

In tonight’s post, we’ll take a look inside an issue of Untamed — Vol. 1, No. 5, dated September 1959.

Untamed was a short-lived men’s pulp mag published by Magnum Publications, Inc., a company owned by Irwin Stein, who also published horror and science fiction magazines and was a co-founder of Lancer Books.

The cover painting for the September ‘59 issue was done by the prolific pulp illustrator Leo Morey (1899-1965).

Morey was born in Lima, Peru. He worked as a commercial illustrator in Buenos Aires as a young man, then emigrated to the United States in 1926.

Over the next four decades, he provided cover and interior art for a long list of classic pre-World War II pulp magazines, Golden Age and Silver Age comics, vintage science fiction magazines and men’s adventure magazines (a.k.a. the postwar men’s pulp magazines).

Morey’s cover for the September 1959 issue of Untamed is literally a bodice ripper. It’s for the cover story “The Lustful Bushwhackers Of Yellow Creek.” As this title and Morey’s painting suggest, those evil, bushwhackin’ varmints were both robbers and rapists.

But that story is topped by another one that’s featured on the cover with the coverline (i.e., cover headline): “The Heroic Orgy of Ray Harrison.”

Inside, it’s titled “THE ORGY THAT WON ME A SILVER STAR.”

This is a purportedly true World War II story “by ex-Pfc. Ray Harrison,” who claims he got the medal for his, um, service in France.

In the table of contents for this issue of Untamed, the “Lustful Bushwhackers” and “Heroic Orgy” stories are in the “TRUE ADVENTURE” section.

Personally, I suspect the events in “Lustful Bushwhackers” took place in the same alternate Wild West as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo.

And, Harrison’s “orgy” story seems to be set in the parallel universe where Hogan’s Heroes exists.

You didn’t know an orgy could somehow be heroic? Well, you’re just not reading the right stuff. I’ll remedy that by letting you read Private Harrison’s yarn for yourself. Just click here to download the entire story in PDF format.

The page-spanning interior illo for Harrison’s piece is another painting by Leo Morey. Morey also did the artwork for both of the stories in the “UNTAMED FICTION BONUSES” section of this issue.

The first one — “Murder Is a Two-Sided Triangle” — was written by the famous science fiction writer Algis Budrys (1931-2008). Like many sci-fi greats of that era, Budrys also wrote stories for men’s, mystery and detective mags. His story in the September 1959 issue of Untamed is a classic noir-style piece of fiction with a totally unexpected twist in the very last sentence. The other featured “fiction bonus” in this issue of Untamed is a horror-tinged tale titled “The Thing That Stared” by Paul Sloane (which I think is a pseudonym, but don’t know who for).

The “UNTAMED GLAMOR GALLERY” includes three fairly tame cheesecake photo spreads. But the best photos are in the piece titled “Are Strippers Oversexed?”

Several of the ladies featured in this one were top Burlesque queens back in the day, most notably: Lili St. Cyr (“The Queen of Burlesque”); the former “Our Gang” child star Shirley Jean Rickert, who went on to become the striptease artist billed as Gilda, the Golden Girl; and, Jennie Lee, “The Bazoom Girl” (aka “Miss 44 & Plenty More” and “The Biggest Bust in Burlesque”).

Here they are. (Yer welcome.)

If you click on the JPEGs above to enlarge them, you can read the answers these legendary striptease artists gave to the question “Are Strippers Oversexed?” They’re in the captions next to the photos. My favorite is the answer given by the great Lili St. Cyr (bottom left in the third page in the series). She said:

“Strippers are no more oversexed than so-called movie sexpots. We’re artists, perhaps more than they.”

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Comments? Questions? Corrections? Post them on the Men’s Adventure Magazines Facebook Group.

Further reading about the Queens of Burlesque and the art of striptease…

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Ed “Emsh” Emshwiller’s UNTAMED magazine covers


If you’re a fan of vintage science fiction magazines and paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s, you’ve almost certainly seen cover art by Ed Emshwiller (1925-1990), who often signed his illustration art as “Emsh.”

“Emsh” cover paintings appeared on the covers of many popular sci-fi mags, such as Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy, If and Infinity.

He also did dust cover art for science fiction hardbacks and cover paintings for sci-fi paperbacks, including some of the great Ace Doubles and the “Science Fiction Library” paperbacks published by Lancer Books.

During the Fifties and Sixties, Emshwiller also provided artwork to mystery and detective periodicals, like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and to at least six men’s adventure magazines, including Lion Adventures, Man’s World, See for Men, Sportsman, True Action and Untamed.

I particularly like the cover paintings he did for Untamed.

Untamed was published bi-monthly from 1959 to 1960 by Magnum Publications, Inc., which also published two other short-lived men’s postwar pulp mags: Lion Adventures (1960) and True War (1956-1958).

Magnum was owned by Irwin Stein, who founded Lancer Books with Walter Zacharius in 1961. Stein and Zacharius had previously been partners in publishing the sci-fi magazines Infinity and Science Fiction Adventures and the horror mag Monsters and Things.

Lancer Books published paperbacks in many genres, but is probably best known for its science fiction and fantasy books. Lancer released the first paperback versions of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories and a number of science fiction classics by Isaac Asimov, Jack Williamson and many other noted sci-fi authors.

Lancer also published some great vintage erotica, such as Terry Southern’s notorious Sixties classic Candy and Ted Mark’s campy Man From O.R.G.Y. spies-and-sex series.

I believe the first cover painting Emshwiller created for Untamed is the one he did for the June 1959 issue (shown at the beginning of this post). It’s an over-the-top scene done for an equally OTT story: “Death Orgy of the Doomed Vice Queens.”

For the July 1959 issue of Untamed, Emsh painted a classic “Arab peril” cover. It shows a scantily clad, obviously thirsty damsel being menaced by a sheik-like Arab carrying a bloody sword. Meanwhile, someone in the foreground is taunting the poor girl by pouring water onto the sand in front of her. (That’s just nasty!) This Emsh cover painting goes with the story “Bessie Darling's Thirty-Hour Ordeal.”

The Emsh cover on Untamed’s November 1959 issue was done for an underwater treasure tale titled “THE SINGAPORE SLUT AND THE SUNKEN TREASURE.” The painting Emsh created for that one shows a scuba diver using a strand of pearls to strangle a hot-looking babe (presumably the “slut”).

Emshwiller also painted the covers for what I believe are the final two issues of Untamed, published in January and March of 1960.

His painting for the January issue, featuring a tough-looking Latino mercenary, goes with the story “MEN WANTED — FOR ASSASSINS, INC. TOP PAY — HIGH RISK IN EXOTIC LANDS.”

The March 1960 cover painting shows a bit of Western-style bondage, done for the story “HARPE’S LAST RIDE.”

That story title is oddly dull for a men’s pulp mag, especially given Emshwiller’s racy painting. But, inside, the story is promoted with a more typical pulpy subhead: “Robbery...murder...rape...no crime was too fiendish for Micijah Harpe and his brother. When he at last was caught, he died as he had lived — horribly.”

For more info about Ed Emshwiller, see his page on David Saunders’ terrific website Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists.

Better yet, buy the book EMSHWILLER: INFINITY X TWO. It’s the definitive source on Ed and his wife, science fiction and fantasy author Carol Emshwiller.

EMSHWILLER: INFINITY X TWO was written by Luis Ortiz and published by his company Nonstop Press.

In case you missed it, I recently posted an interview with Ortiz. In addition to authoring the dual bio about the Emshwillers, Ortiz co-edited the excellent book CULT MAGAZINES: A to Z with the legendary sci-fi fanzine publisher and risqué book editor Earl Kemp.

In an upcoming post, I’ll give you a look inside Untamed magazine.

In the meantime, you can read an excerpt from EMSHWILLER: INFINITY X TWO in the April 2007 issue of Earl Kemp’s online e-zine, eI.

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Comments? Questions? Corrections? Post them on the Men’s Adventure Magazines Facebook Group.

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