Were you the obituraries researcher at your local paper as a kid or something? The Iceman? I think we need to change your handle to The Grim Reaper. Nate, can you make this happen?
Heffner started a record company, Playboy Records, in the 70's. His goal was to create a vehicle for girlfriend, Barbi Benton to put out CW records. He hired Larry Cohn from Epic Records to head the venture. Larry's top priority was to get out an album of Leadbelly blues recordings, and he was much more interested in the blues/RnB sound of Phillip Walker ("Hello My Darlin"), Candi Staton, Sharon Cash, etc. Eventually Barbi got a record released and Country Western music made money for Playboy...after the label signed Mickey Gilley. ---------- BnT
Hefner's contribution to the world was promotion of the objectification of women. So I can't agree with "another great one gone".
Last Edited by AppalachiaBlues on Sep 30, 2017 1:45 AM
One may not agree that everything that Hugh accomplished was fair just and verdant, but one can't deny that he helped shape society in a sense, as well as giving voice to politics and folk not covered in other magazines - his interviews were legendary.
Very similar, to me anyways, in the fact that Miles Davis changed the course of music at least 4 times during his lifetime, but also was abusive towards women. Mixed bags, for sure. ---------- The Iceman
Truth is is that Hefner was a relentless self promoter a mere step or two removed from being a pornographer. He essentially dressed up his magazine with classy writers and journalists and he promoted a good number of causes advancing the cause of civil rights and civil liberties, but that was a cynical move to purchase himself a veneer of legitimacy. He was sexist and, I suspect, a misogynist, dehumanizing not just his models but women in general. Men, as well, suffered wounds at the market and image manipulation of this salacious Svengali, instructing generations that one can be sophisticated and cerebral at the same time as they are emotionally stunted, locked into a narcissistic world view that regarded half of the world's population as property. Hefner dehumanized all of us . He was not a great man. He was very successful creep. ---------- Ted Burke ted-burke.blogspot.com
Oh please. I was gonna leave this alone, but I couldn't let the intellectually lazy "sexist, misogynist, creep" take be the last word on the subject. Here's an interview on his legacy with author, professor and feminist, Camille Paglia. I think she encapsulates it perfectly. Warning, those of you in the misogynist camp aren't gonna like what she has to say.
Well, I've been reading Paglia for years and find her views on matters of pop culture to be distressingly pedestrian. Her book 'Sexual Personae" is a genuinely provocative, superbly researched and brilliantly argued thesis about how sexual instincts, from preferences to gender and points beyond, are such a deeply embedded thing in the human condition that politics nor religion can coerce them out of existence. In the the arts,in her readings De Sade, Miller, Emily Dickinson, she provides us a third wave feminism of a sort that reclaims womens' sexuality. Paglia seems to only have one set of real ideas and theories, those worked out in her research and argumentation in Sexual Personae, and it seems the work she's published sense appear to be a slap dash application of ideas that are no longer fresh. She repeats herself to the extent where her views are genuinely banal. What she does her is basically nothing more procative or insightful than what we could exect from a Time Magazine obit. ---------- Ted Burke ted-burke.blogspot.com
