Here we go with this week’s quickly blickety blog, so I can have some time to hopefully work on my forthcoming book.
——
Every Picture In The MBIP World Headquarters Tells A Story: Dian Hanson, Juggs Magazine and Six Degrees of Separation With R. Crumb…
For this week’s MBIP World Headquarters photo, I closed my eyes and chose a random book from a bookcase in the front room and it turned out to be a book of postcards featuring drawings from artist R. Crumb.
I’ve been a fan of R. Crumb since I was a kid in the late ’60’s when I first became aware of his art through underground comics like Zap and The East Village Other.
Years later I would have a six degrees of separation R. Crumb moment and here’s what happened…
It was the summer of 1996 and I was living in New York City, working a night job and publishing and writing my magazine fishwrap. For those of you that don’t know, fishwrap was my pre-internet magazine that reported and made fun of magazines, mainstream media and life in general. At this point in time we had been doing the magazine for a couple of years and it had been written up in Sassy magazine, Spin, the NY Daily News, USA Today and the Chicago Tribune. We had gotten a decent cult following and had hundreds of subscribers across the country.
I was working on a new issue and I had an idea to compare the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue to Juggs Magazine. While this sounds like a crazy idea, it really wasn’t.
The way I saw it was that the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue was basically a porno magazine for pussies. It was an excuse to look at photos of scantily clad women in various poses while excusing the fact that you were doing this because it was a mainstream magazine and you were just looking at their latest issue. When basically you’re really just interested in looking at photos of nearly naked women.
Remember, this is 1996, way before the internet happened and if you wanted to look at photos of naked women, you had to go out in public and purchase a porno magazine or a video tape. That meant you could be seen by someone you know and it could lead to all kinds of embarrassment.
I wanted to write a comparison article about the similarities between the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and a porno magazine called, Juggs, which brazenly billed itself as “The World’s Dirtiest Tit-Mag.”
I thought it would be fun to not only compare the two, but talk to the editors of both magazines, so I sent copies of fishwrap along with a letter about my comparison article to Bill Colson, the managing editor of Sports Illustrated back then and to Dian Hanson, the editor of Juggs magazine.
I never heard back from Bill Colson, but Dian Hanson called me up and asked me what my intentions were. I remember she specifically said to me, “What, do you just want to make fun of us?”
I explained to her that I wasn’t intending to make fun of Juggs at all, because they were being honest and up front about what they were publishing, a porno magazine devoted to naked, busty women.
Dian laughed at my explanation and told me she’d be happy to meet with me and we set a date for me to stop by the office of Juggs magazine. I couldn’t believe it and was excited to see the office and meet Dian.
Their office was located downtown on Broadway in an old building. They had an entire floor and Dian’s office was in the back.
Someone led me back to her office and from the moment I met her, she looked familiar and I couldn’t qhite place it, but I felt like I had seen her somewhere before. She was an attractive woman and I guessed she was around my age.
She had a great sense of humor and we had a fun interview and she told me she enjoyed fishwrap. We talked about the porn industry and at one point I noticed a small sculpture on her desk that looked like something in the style of R. Crumb.
I asked her what it was and she smiled and said it was a piece of art that her friend R. Crumb had made for her.
Then I realized why she looked familiar, a couple years before this, in 1994 a documentary about R. Crumb came out and Dian was in the movie and in it she talked about being friends with R. Crumb. I loved the documentary and had watched it on several occasions.
Dian laughed when I told her I had seen her in the movie and told me that after the movie came out people would do a double take seeing her on the street and would ask her if she was the woman from the R. Crumb movie.
We laughed about that and after about 45 minutes of chatting, she said she had to make some phone calls and get back to work. I thanked her for her time and as I was getting ready to walk out of her office she said this to me: “Hey Marty, are you single?”
Thinking maybe she was going to ask me out on a date, I excitedly replied, “Yes, I am, Dian!”
She reached into a drawer in her desk and threw me a copy of Juggs and said, “Take this home and have fun jerking off to it!”
I caught the magazine and said, “Thanks, I’ll definitely hand it to myself!” We both laughed as I walked out the door.
Below is the article that came out in fishwrap about a month after my meeting with Dian. I sent a copy to Dian and she wrote me back and told me that she enjoyed the article and had fun meeting and chatting with me. I never saw her again, but it’s always been a fond memory!
Okay, this is getting to be like a broken record here, I got nothing done on the book last week. It’s really too hard to try and get anything done on it while doing the blog. I’ve decided I’m going to take two weeks off in March or April and devote that time to finish writing it. I’m going on a vacation trip in May and I want to have it completely written by then.
I don’t have three paragraphs to put up here, because I haven’t made any progress since last week, so hopefully I will have something new next Thursday. Time will tell!
——
This Week’s Sunday Night Pizza Video
I sampled and reviewed a Schnucks Sausage and Bacon Pizza for this week’s Sunday Pizza Review.
Click on this link to see the review on my YouTube channel and see what kind of rating it got.
I actually filmed a Spiteful Stories video, but I haven’t edited it yet. I’m hoping to do that today and if so, I’ll post it tomorrow. Check my YouTube channel for updates and feel free to subscribe to that channel as well!
Okay, I’m off to work on the video, try to finally finish Chapter 14 of the book and I also have to go out and take photos for tomorrow’s Friday snack blog. It never ends!
Have a great Thursday, everybody!
——
Related Post: Last week’s Thursday Blog Buffet.