Baby, It’s Cold Outside: Jean Cannon, Miss October 1961

Photographed by Ron Vogel.

The lovely and talented Jean Cannon was Playboy’s Miss October 1961. According to a source I trust from Kalamazoo, Ms. Cannon was enticed to pose partly out of pique with her husband, who said she was “too ugly” to be a Playmate.

The only thing about that story that doesn’t quite totally ring true for me is that she was already working as a Bunny and I think you must rate yourself at least decently attractive to apply for that job, don’t you? But maybe I’m way off base.

Besides the gorgeous photography by Ron Vogel, my favorite thing in this spread is the case of Jeannie’s disappearing, reappearing, cheek-switching beauty mark. In the above picture, the mole is on her right cheek (viewer’s left).

In the above picture, it has moved to her left cheek, or the cheek on our right as we look at the photograph. Is it a case of reversing the photograph? Or was makeup retouched and the mole accidentally moved to the opposite side? We’ll never know.

And here, in one of my favorite shots from the spread, she has no mole at all. At least that we can see. Much like the case with Miss July 1957, the lovely and talented Jean Jani, it’s really a tiny little continuity error but kind of fun to examine.

I like this shot best because it is not as posey as the others. I don’t know if Vogel caught her getting ready to pose, or in the middle of speech, or what, but it is for me the most natural expression of the bunch.

A gorgeous composition — and a wonderful addition to my ongoing series of Playmates topless in silly cropped pants (why are they so often red? I don’t know but I love it) — but a very tense expression from Ms. Cannon. Sad face. Then again, according to her write-up, she had a lot on her mind.

Nature-loving (and clearly loved by nature) Jean Cannon’s natural habitat is any reasonably shady glen, except when she’s water-skiing, showing her prize-winning pooches or boning up on the hippest way to crack the Hollywood enigma (she’s a stage-struck emigree from New York’s very “in” Neighborhood Playhouse).

(“Nature Girl.” Playboy, October 1961.)

While we’re not usually enthused over rambles through the greensward, the prospect of prospecting for dryadlike Jean would send us into the California woods faster than Apollo pursued Daphne.

(Ibid.)

Okay, so here’s that backstory since I know you’re dying to hear all about classic Greek mythology right now.

Apollo, who is roundly a dick in almost every story about him — ask Cassandra; I assure you she thinks he’s a real motherfucking asshole — mocked Eros, the tiny cherubic assistant of Aphrodite, for carrying a bow and arrows, since he wasn’t a warrior like Apollo (picture this as a Lucas type taunting exchange). Eros took offense and made two arrows, one of lead and one of gold.

The golden arrow strikes love in the heart of whoever it hits: the lead one does the opposite — it causes the stricken person to hate the object they see next.

The above shot is my favorite of the pictures from the standpoint of color and composition. And, holy cow, a ghost of a smile. It’s a Very Special nakey miracle!

Eros shot the nymph Daphne with the lead arrow and Apollo with the golden arrow. Apollo fell madly in love with her, but she despised him. Daphne already had many suitors but preferred not to get married at all, which makes me wonder if the original story didn’t have shit to do with arrows in the first telling, and was more in the vein of stories about Artemis or Atalanta.

In any case, they got in a race (like Atalanta) and as Apollo gained on her, Daphne begged her father, the river god Peneus, to save her from having to be with Apollo. So she changed in to a laurel tree. Apollo was still in love with Daphne depsite her transformation (those kinky greeks) and gave the tree his special protection and powers of eternal youth, which is why Bay laurel leaves stay green.

/backstory.

Jean as a Bunny at the L.A. club, right.

Doe-eyed Jean hasn’t met a satyr on her sylvan romps, instead speaks warmly of silver birches and her pet poodles (she brings out the beast in anyone). But the satyr’s loss is our gain, all 38-24-37 inches, so join us in a birthday toast to our sable-haired October Playmate, a tempting twenty this month.

(Ibid.)

According to the Playmate Book, Ms. Cannon was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2002. She passed away at the age of 64 in November, 2005. R.I.P.

Goethe Month: Sometimes it is good to be wrong featuring guest artist Landy Wardoll

Goethe Month coda and art by that One Guy.

The website from which I took this picture says:

This screenprint is based on a painting by the German artist Johann Tischbein. It depicts Johann von Goethe, a key figure in German literature as a traveller in a landscape of ruins. Warhol has cropped the original composition so as to create a head and shoulders portrait of the writer. Goethe had contemplated painting as an early career choice and published a book on the theory of colour. As the first person to study the psychological affects of colour, it is interesting to think what he would make of Warhol’s representation of him as a Pop icon.

via warholarts.com.
Near the end of his life, Goethe wrote to his friend and editor Eckermann,

My dear friend, I will tell you something that may be of use to you, when you are going over my works.

They will never become popular; there will be single individuals who will understand what I want to say, but there can be no question [that the work will be unpopular].

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter to Johann Peter Eckermann.)

Sometimes it is good to be wrong. Farewell, Goethe Month.

Who’s next?

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Talk nerdy to me, Nabokov’s color theory and the uncertainty principle

You are like, “E, that is not graffiti or even textual healing, it is merely a modern painting.” And I am all like, “Not quite.”

Artist Spencer Finch applied author Vladimir Nabokov’s synaesthetic colored theory of the alphabet to “transliterate” 9,251 characters from the pages of Werner Heisenberg’s thesis outlining the Uncertainty Principle.

via.

Art or crap? I say art on this one but I’m open to opinions that it is crap. Nabokov himself was happy to debate whether a thing was weighty and symbolic or cheap and trite — I am still reeling from the reading of a transcript of one of his lectures in which he rips on Kafka, one of my favorite authors. So I think Vlad N. would be happy to know that academic questioning of the merits and boundaries of “art” are still kicked around. I don’t think he’d like it if anything with his name on it got some automatic “awesome and meaningful!” stamp put upon it without examination.

Per mi amico: Husbandoh, “‘Congradulations’ on your birthday” edition

Happy birthday, HRH.

I know it’s weird with us all in estrangement and the like, but the important thing I want you to remember is the time we went to Lucy’s Table and that one waitress who later opened a meditative health center with her husband dropped the champagne as she popped the cork and it spun in the air as it fell and it hosed down THE ENTIRE RESTAURANT in a ten foot radius and the windows and tables and all those third-wave anorexic hipster yippies were dripping with wine. We did that.

Then we went to sit outside with our dessert and that very nice but drunk as shit first-wave yippie lady told us about walking around naked in front of her son when he was young, and then she apologized to us at great length for her generation being poor stewards of the earth and they misspelled “Congratulations” in some kind of very expensive alcohol-and-caramel-dulce-de-leche reduction sauce on your flourless chocolate cake plate.

Sometimes I forget that through no deliberate actions of your own you are somehow elected by the forces in this universe to be a one-man wrecking-crew of every situation you enter. Thank you for being a genial agent of chaos akin to Pigpen, because the anxious uptight energy of my yin at that time deserved and needed that yang to grow and see that what we must always try to do in this world is to stop time and bring back what’s died and it is not a thing we can do alone.

Thank you for trying with me. Happy birthday.

Daily Batman: A Night Without A Mouse

More great art by Bengal, an artist previously highlighted here back in March.

Art of Design: Varna Restaurant

Varna Restaurant in 1971.

The Varna Restaurant, also called the Varna Palace or Varna Palæet, in Århus, Denmark. The original restaurant is a reknowned, eye-popping marvel of color theory and artistic design.

The restaurant was situated in a renovated palatial building, itself built in 1909, in the Marselisborg forest of Denmark. It was designed by modernist architect and artist Verner Panton, who is also known for designing the Spiegel publishing house in Hamburg, another famous piece of breathtaking psychedelic eye candy. Maybe I will spotlight that one soon, too.

The architectural commission at the Varna restaurant in Arhus was for the interior design. … Fabrics from Mira-X were used by Panton to focus on proportions and connections, and using colour and shapes gave each room its unique dynamics. (Vernor Panton’s official website)

In contrast to the primarily violet colour of the restaurant, Panton formed the Rotonde red. A central element in the so-called Red Hall were red foamed plastic balls which hung from the ceiling. (“Room design from Verner Panton” official blog.)

By their arrangement they seemed to move on to the column standing in the middle of the space. The Flowerpot lights placed in between were arranged also perfectly circular. Below rectangular plastic tables, equipped with the Panton Chair, in red as well, formed groups. (Ibid.)

Tuned on psychedelic effects of his creation Panton put unquestionably the crown of the ambience of the restaurant. Coloured foamed plastic balls, in between Spiral SP1 pendulum lights, violet-coloured columns, carpets and curtains with the Decor I in the variation of Circles, in addition chrome-coloured Pantonova Chairs from Fritz Hansen – the use of colours and forms was virtually inflationary.* (Ibid.)

The city of Århus eventually sold the restaurant to the men’s social club the Order of Odd Fellows. Today, it has been renovated and is available for rent as several banquet halls. If you visit the offical site of the present Varna Palace, you can see that, though they have made renovations to make the spaces more open and airy, and they went a little nuts with yellow (guess they were really sick of the red and purple and wanted to go the other way?) a strong influence of Panton’s original design remains.

*The English-langauge version’s translation from the Danish is a little rocky, but it’s a really informative and beautiful site.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: RIP, AK edition

via yawp barbarian on the flickr.

Cheez-balls — May 16th totally snuck past me. I’ve had a lot on my mindgrapes but I’d planned to throw some things up about Andy Kaufman because he died that day in ’84. Yes, he did. Up there is some referential liberated negative space in his honor to at least partially atone for the oversight.

Screencap of Andy Kaufman taken by me.

And here he is selectively lip-synching the theme song to “Mighty Mouse” on the premiere of SNL, October 11, 1975.

RIP, A.K.

Daily Batman: Colors

“Light Night” via fyeahbatman on the tumblr.

“Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.”

(Pablo Picasso)

qtd by Zervos, Christian. “Conversation avec Picasso.” Cahiers d’Art Paris ed. Vol. X, 7-10 (1935): 173-178. Transl. by Myfanwy Evans for Alfred H. Barr’s Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York: MoMA press, 1946).

NSFW November: Tonja Christensen, Miss November 1991

And Then There Was One.

Your final Miss November is Playboy’s November 1991 Playmate of the Month, the lovely and talented Tonja Christensen. She is last because, next to Monica Tidwell and Bebe Buell, I think she is the prettiest of the girls of November. Someday I will examine my feminine beauty ideals, but not today because I’m busy. Anyway, I am afraid that, though I saved her for last because I thought she was beautiful, it is a mixed blessing; she bears the brunt of my boredom and busy-ness, because I’ve not got time nor inclination to say much about her. Going to let the interview with her do most of the talking.

Photographs by Stephen Wayda

Blonde, blue-eyed and gutsy Tonja Marie Christensen, who just turned 20, has come a long way in the past two years — 5800 miles, to be exact, the distance from West Valley City, Utah, a sleepy suburb of Salt Lake City, to cosmopolitan Barcelona, Spain’s second largest city. There, while the Catalan capital gears up for the 1992 Olympics, she’s diligently pursuing a dual career in modeling and acting. (“A Blonde in Barcelona,*” Playboy, November 1991)

Dang, I forgot there even was a Summer Olympics in Barcelona. There are new ones coming up, you know. Everyone hurry and get jingoistic about sports! Also, buy Doritos!!

*Gracious, that is just a damned ridiculous title. Barcelona is from where many a blonde Spaniard hails. Everyone knows that there are tons of hot (and not) fair people in Spain. With over 3 million people living in the city at the time of Tonja’s residency, I sincerely doubt she stood out because of her hair color in any way, shape, or form. You may just as well have said, “A two-legged person,” or even “A person from another country who lives” … “in Barcelona.” Jesus. What a stupid, Americanized view of what Spanish people look like to advance. Shame on you, Playboy: I expect you to be more international and dashing and man-of-foreign-knowledgey than that.

Our Miss November was one of nine children, an example she doesn’t plan to follow. “I believe families should be three or four children at most,” she says.

An intriguing viewpoint for a girl from Utah. Goodness knows, I know the playmates do not like it when assumptions are made about their religion (see last entry for a brave girl who was not embarassed to be of an identifiable faith and culture) … but … come on. Hint, hint, ya know?

Two things weird me out totally about the above shot.

Her arm hair has, like, its own set of dewy crystalline eye lights shining in it.

Her pubic hair has been either dyed or cell-painted to match her fake (though lovely!) head-hair color. In the previous shots it is dark.

See, I have a couple rules of thumb for gentlemen who want to imagine ladies sans clothing — I know you are few and far between because that is like, so gross, what with our widely-documented girl cooties and all, but bear with me for the sake of those perverse and unhappy freaks among you who actually picture women naked — and I am happy to share them. First, a lady’s pubic hair is nearly always the same shade as the coarse hair of her brows. So lay the drapes aside altogether, discard their color completely, and, unless you are pretty sure the gal you are gawking at has bleached or somehow cosmetically altered them, her eyebrows are your best bet as to the color of the carpet.

Similarly, the color of her lips without the aid of gloss, lipstick, rouge, permanent surgical lining assistance, or any other type of makeup is your leading predictor of the color of her nipples. Finally, a few shades darker but in the same family of hues as the lips and “nips” follow the labia (those can get rosier/darker brown depending on her arousal level and whether she is Northern European or has stronger Sapphardic Jew DNA — Caucus mountains and Eastern/Southern Europe are less pink and more browny-purple, and obviously your ladies from Africa and its subcontinent follow suit in deeper shades as well). Take those tips to the bank, y’all. You’re welcome!

Wow, I did not even realize there was a time when LaToya Jackson did not look like a total freak made of 90% post-consumer recyclable parts. She looks comparably human here. You’d think one of her psychic friends would have warned her of the Madamism syndrome of too much plastic surgery! Better luck in your next life, LaToya.