The most popular film noir festival in the world launches its eleventh edition tonight in San Francisco when the Noir City Film Festival returns to the Castro Theatre. It runs until February 3, and screens 27 films, including three new 35mm restorations. Some of the movies on the slate this year include 1950’s Try and Get Me!, 1949’s Repeat Performance, 1948’s High Tide, 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, and 1962’s Experiment in Terror. Along with the films, the festival features guest of honor Peggy Cummins, who played the unforgettable character Annie Laurie Starr in 1950's Gun Crazy. There’s also a noir themed nightclub with live music, torch singers, burlesque and more. Although we love living overseas, events like this are a reminder of why the Bay area lifestyle is so wonderful. If we ever return to the U.S., it’ll be straight back to the Bay. The festival poster above is just the latest in a long series, and we’ve uploaded all the predecessors below. You can find out more about the Noir City Film Festival at the festival website.

Author Dorine Clark was a sleaze vet who penned many racy titles during the ’50s and ’60s, including Bachelor Boy, Continental Affair, Passion in the Sun, Gutter Star, and this—1964’s Sex Swindler. Was Clark a pseudonym used by a better known author? No idea. We can only say it was often the case with sleaze lit. Looking at this cover, we can’t help but think the woman here is saying to herself, “Perfect! Next I think I’ll restore that old Jesus fresco in Zaragoza.” If you’re one of perhaps a dozen people on the planet who has not heard that story, just look up “Ecce Mono.” It’s well worth your time. Regarding the art, the illustrator here had a difficult assignment, we think. He had to paint a cover-worthy piece, inside of which would be another painting that justified the blurb: “She had two talents—art and love!” Was he successful? Well, within the constraints of his modest talent, we’d have to say yes. For instance, he painted his black clad dominatrix and her creation in different styles, which is kind of cool. Somebody like McGinnis could have knocked this concept completely out of the park, but is it really fair to compare anyone to that guy? We’d tell you this artist’s name, but Gaslight Books couldn’t be bothered to credit him. Since he got no recognition, here’s hoping he at least got paid.

We found this great vintage poster for the Turkish illusionist Zati Sungur, who began performing during the 1920s and parlayed his talent into international fame. Spending most of his career touring Europe, the Middle East and South America, he performed not only as Zati Sungur, but as Zati Bey, Sati Richmond, and Conde Sati von Richmond. In the 1930s he developed the famous illusion of sawing a model in half, which was adopted by nearly every illusionist in the world. He eventually opened the famous Universal Magic and Illusion Tricks Studio, where he taught scores of Turkish students his secrets. Sungur died in 1984, but is well known among today’s illusionists as one of the masters of the craft. We located a few other vintage posters for famous and semi-famous magicians, illusionists and seers, circa 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and we’ve shared them below. 

The unusual image you see above, which probably has you just a rarin’ to book a hotel room in Los Alamos before they’re all gone, appears in authors John O’Brien and Jeremy Borsos’ recently published Atomic Postcards: Radioactive Messages from the Cold War. The book features a wide array of nuclear themed mid-century postcards, some of which were produced for educational purposes, some to influence political debate, and some—like this one—to boost tourism. All the images we’ve seen from Atomic Postcards are fascinating, and we have a feeling this will be the hottest nuclear coffee table book since Michael Light’s stunning collection of atomic images 100 Suns. Historical note: the above photo is actually from an atomic test at the Nevada Proving Ground in 1952, but as far as the Los Alamos chamber of commerce was concerned, any old mushroom cloud would do as long as it was irresistibly enticing. Mission accomplished, chamber guys. Our bags are packed. If you’d like to see more of Atomic Postcards, there’s a slideshow here, and if you’d like to see Pulp Intl.’s collection of nuke images, just click the fallout shelter icon in the sidebar. 

In a tangled case that has implications for privacy laws and the traditional methods by which tabloids do business, British model and reality television contestant Imogen Thomas was yesterday accused of trying to blackmail a Premier League footballer for up to £100,000. Thomas was in court, backed by the daily tabloid The Sun, trying to have a gag order lifted so that she could name in print the married footballer with whom she had an affair from September to December of 2010. The same judge who had issued the initial injunction said during yesterday’s hearing he would not lift the order because evidence seemed to strongly suggest the possibility that Thomas was blackmailing the footballer. He stopped short of calling her a cold-hearted money vampire, but not much. In the end, his ruling was so harsh that legal observers wonder if it signals the end of one of the most traditional practices of the tabloid press—outing cheaters. At the heart of the ruling is whether the right to privacy, as guaranteed by article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, is outweighed by article 10, which guarantees freedom of expression. Yesterday the judge made it clear that he thought the naming of cheaters had no social value, and he pointed out that Sun lawyers had “not even argued that publication would serve the public interest.” The decision has the nation’s philandering footballers—and one unknown wandering penis in particular—cheering. But we think the celebration will be short lived. Why? Because as long as the man who was riding in Imogen Thomas’s dinghy goes unnamed, every married player in the Premiership has to live under suspicion. We don’tmean from the public or the tabloids—we mean from their wives. A few months of that unpleasantness and the next petition to the high court to name the anonymous footballer will come from the other players, just so they can say to their wives, “See? Wasn’t me.” 

You’ve probably heard that the encierro is dangerous, but the truth of that depends on your idea of danger. Deaths average two per decade, including one last year. That isn't going to get most people quaking in their espadrilles, but injuries are common—this morning there were four minor horn wounds, one broken ankle and, we’d guess, several dozen bruises and scrapes. So the question is, how do you like those odds? The odds for the bulls are not so good—six will be killed in the plaza de toros this evening. We won’t bother with any polemics about the tradition of bullfighting, or animal murder, depending on your view. We’re not from Spain, thus we don’t feel we have the right to comment. How’s that for a refreshing attitude? 

Below, we’ve expropriated photos of some of San Fermin’s finest cornadas, which we’ll have to take down in a day or two to avoid any copyright issues. In panel 13 you see last year’s fatal goring (a horn through the top of the left shoulder, severing the brachial artery and shredding a lung), and in panel 14 you see a horn piercing the underside of an unfortunate mozo’s chin, though non-fatally. These are both atypical injuries—a bull rakes upward with its horns and usually hooks a human in the groin region (or the ass if you happen to be running away like a sensible person). In the final shot, panel 15, you see how the men of Pamplona separate themselves from the boys—in the plaza de toros they crouch en masse in the bull’s path and force it to leap over them. You want to show you’ve got true cojones? Try that.     

In Britain, a growing scandal has ensnared Rupert Murdoch, head of News International, and Andy Coulson, who was editor of the News International paper News of the World before becoming communications director for Conservative Party leader David Cameron. In short, News of the World hacked into voicemail accounts and computerized police records, and also extracted confidential information from banking computers. Murdoch claims to have known nothing about it, but yesterday a committee of MPs concluded an investigation into the matter by accusing News International execs of engaging in “obfuscation” and suffering from “collective amnesia.”

While Murdoch has taken some heat for the mess, the investigation into the hacking has increasingly turned toward Andy Coulson, who, while editor of News of the World, employed four private investigators to dig up dirt on public figures. Nineteen victims of the hacking have been identified, but records show that ninety-one were targeted. To make matters worse, Scotland Yard resisted investigating the matter, has refused to comply with Freedom of Information requests concerning the investigation, and failed to notify those whose cellphone pin codes were found in possession of one of News of the World’s PIs. This means that public figures who suspect being targeted by News of the World have been forced to launch their own investigations to discover whether they were victims.

If all this seems to point toward a culture of criminality within News of the World, also consider that the paper recently paid a £792,000 settlement to a reporter who experienced harassment at the hands of Coulson, and last year paid out another large settlement to Professional Footballers Association head Gordon Taylor for illegally intercepting his phone records. Back then News International and Rupert Murdoch issued statements assuring the public that the reporter responsible for the phone tampering, Clive Goodman, was an “aberration” within the company. Now, half a year later, a bipartisan committee of MPs has described the hacking as having taken place “on an industrial scale.”

Perhaps most interesting is the fact that, while Murdoch claims to have no knowledge of these matters, his newspapers, which he touts as exemplars of balanced reporting, hid the story in their Thursday editions. While The Guardian and other papers devoted multiple pages to what is one of the biggest scandals of the year and quoted directly from the official report, Murdoch’s Sun buried 135 words on the matter between an ad and a weather map of Ireland, his Times printed a mere 230 words, and his Daily Telegraph was able to manage only 325.

For years the sex blog belledujour was one of the most scandalous and popular blogs in Britain. Funny, explicit, and well-written, its popularity led to a series of bestselling books and even a television series called Secret Diary of a Call Girl starring Billie Piper. But it was all driven by an anonymous mystery woman—until this weekend, when the pseudonymous Belle du Jour revealed her identity in an interview with London’s Sunday Times and followed that up with a posting on her blog. Turns out she’s Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a research scientist from Bristol, England.

Whatever her motivation for coming out of the closet, one of the questions she did answer was whether Belle du Jour was even real. Many of her critics thought not, and had also routinely blasted her for glamorizing her work. But Magnanti has said she stands by everything she wrote. Now, with her books certain to climb the charts again, and the television series ongoing, the only question left may be whether she plans to continue as a researcher, or be a full time celebrity.