The National Police Gazette hits all bases in this vibrant September 1959 issue, telling us about Billie Holiday’s heroin woes, Carmen Basilio’s feud with Sugar Ray Robinson, Mickey Mantle’s lack of respect from his employers, and Debbie Reynolds' divorce. But we’re focused on the John F. Kennedy article. Just fifty years ago Americans were suspicious enough of Catholics that Kennedy’s opponents were able to exploit his religion during his campaign for president. The far right Aryan Knights are quoted from a press release: The Romanist church organization insolently pretends to temporal authority over various governments and people of the world, including our own United States. The League goes on to claim that Rome wants Catholicism established as America’s state religion, and that those who refuse to conform will be prosecuted or destroyed. The leaders of a religion based across the sea want to take over America using the President as a Trojan Horse? Hmm. Why does that ring a bell? Merrill J. Fox, head of the Federal Party, said: “Kennedy is bound to carry his religion over into politics. He does it now, subconsciously. Kennedy wouldn’t be good for our country because he isn’t his own boss.” Interesting, no? These fearmongers are basically forgotten today, consigned to that copious dustbin of history which is home to some of the most odious loudmouths who ever emerged from the woodwork. But at the time these guys made a fine living. And when you revisit some of their laughable assertions, it becomes clear that green—not red, white and blue—was their focus. Put another way, you'll never go broke telling people what to be afraid of. With regard to our current era, there’s an old saying that applies: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Promo photo of American film actress Alice White, née Alva White, who appeared in around forty films, including the original Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, seen here circa 1928 in the mode of Clara Bow, to whom she was often compared. 

Every once in a while we go through a period of fascination with the seven-hundred-fifty-million car pile-up that is American popular culture. Of all the crashes we’ve seen, this is just about the most bizarre. Reality television star Tila Tequila was pelted with debris—including a beer can that opened a cut on her face—after she flashed her breasts in an attempt to control an unruly audience at the Gathering of the Juggalos music festival last week. The first anyone heard of this disaster was when she sold photos of her bandaged face to TMZ. The comment strings indicated that everyone thought it was a publicity stunt. Well, turns out she really did get hit with abeer can, and here’s the evidence, from the website Driven by Boredom. Apparently, the crowd became enraged due to the utter ineptness of her performance. We don’t know about that, because we didn’t hear it, and you couldn’t pay us to. What we wonder is if maybe the crowd became enraged due to the fact that they’re simply sick and tired of these forays into music by untalented professional celebrity types (Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, et.al.). We’re not condoning the mob behavior of these apes—they staged an impromptu public stoning. Yet the whole catastrophe is impossible to look away from. We think of the circus scene in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian where the drunk cowboy shoots the dancing bear. The bear is mortally wounded, but all it knows is to keep dancing, soit dances faster and faster and roars its dying pain as chaos erupts all around it. Tequila's attempt to keep performing even as her lifeblood was gushing out of her forehead is a sad echo of McCarthy's prose—and truly the stuff of nightmares. There was Bosch’s Garden of Earthy Delights, Picasso’s Guernica, and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian—and now we have Tequila’s Gathering of the Juggalos. We don't know if it qualifies as the sort of real-world pulp we're always looking for, but we do know we may never sleep again.  

Photo of Hawaiian-born actress, singer and model Agnes Lum, aka Lum-chan, who during the late 1970s was a star in Japan and one of the most recognizable sex symbols in the world. She specialized in "gravure", a Japanese style of provocative but nudity-free modeling, and most images feature her in the above mode—as an embodiment of summertime. 

In Phuket, Thailand—a place known as one of the hellraising capitals of the world—a manhunt is underway after a British kickboxer killed an American marine following a fight at a nightspot called the Freedom Bar. The alleged killer is 28-year-old Lee Aldhouse, above left, who had lived in the Phuket area for about four years. According to witnesses, Aldhouse instigated an altercation with Dashawn Longfellow, 23, who was in the bar visiting a female employee. The fight between the two foreigners—who are “falang” in Thai parlance—ended with Longfellow as the victor, and shortly thereafter he and the employee left the bar. Aldhouse then went into a nearby 7-11 store, where he was caught on security cam (above) either stealing or buying a knife. He immediately went to Longfellow’s apartment, knocked on the door, and allegedly stabbed the marine to death in front of a witness. Official accounts stop there, but unofficial accounts posted on a Phuket-based internet forum describe Aldhouse as a well-known troublemaker, someone police were well aware of due to previous run-ins and who locals avoided because of his violent temper and knowledge of Muay Thai kickboxing. He had fought professionally, and considered himself a disciple of the art. At least one witness described Aldhouse as enraged to have lost a fight to someone with no professional ring experience, and suggested that, for a man with such an erratic nature, embarrassment was motive enough for murder. The killing is one of several so far this year in Phuket involving falang, including one just last month in which a former U.S. Navy officer killed a local girl and disposed of her body by stuffing it in a travel bag and dumping it by a deserted roadside. The expat propensity toward violence is a constant source of friction in Thai resort towns, and the Aldhouse/Longfellow murder has only served to ratchet up tensions even more. Police are scouring the Phuket area for Aldhouse, but so far haven’t located him. 

Promo photo of American actress Barbara Stanwyck, indisputably one of film and television's greatest and most enduring stars, circa mid-1930s.

As you may know, Laurence Fishburne’s daughter Montana is releasing a porn movie in hopes that it will make her famous. Inspired by Kim Kardashian, who earned her celebrity via an accidentally (?) leaked sex tape, Montana Fishburne seems to be hoping for a career in reality television. We weren’t going to comment on this story, but someone sent us a link that we foolishly followed down the rabbit hole, and since we can’t unsee what was there, we’re going to dump it on you.

In short, we have to come down on Montana’s side: she could spend the next twenty years developing the chops to be a character actress, or an artist, or a novelist, but if she wants be a celebrity now porn is a surefire method. Since Morpheus, er, we mean Montana, understands that she probably can’t be a real Hollywood star without looking like Zoe Saldana and weighing 100 pounds, she boldly took a step that has made her known to tens of millions of people who had never heard of her just days ago. So she’s already pretty much proved her point, wouldn’t you say? Will she achieve her goal of Kardashian-like fame? Who can say? Is it a sign of cultural decay that people get famous this way? People have always gotten famous this way, as anyone who follows this site knows.

Personally, we could easily picture Fishburne in Pam Grier type roles, karate-chopping men in throat, starting with all the assholes calling her evil names in internet comment chains. In any case, you’ll find no phony morality here. We simply play our role as a cog in the machine. Montana Fishburne, with pure post-millennial pragmatism, had decided porn is her route to fame, and since we always post these kinds of photos, today is no exception. The imagery is courtesy of her partners at Vivid Video. Our work is done.

Thus watching Claudia Jennings in Dynamite Women is a surprise. Despite the hype about her beauty, you would never think—initially at least—that she could be a centerfold. With her long nose, sharp chin and expansive forehead, she looks more like the type you’d find serving burgers in a small town diner. But the more you observe, the more you’re drawn to her. The smile, the attitude, and the big, expressive eyes begin to weave a spell. While Dynamite Women’s tale of two female bank robbers isn’t Oscar material, the script does give Jennings a lot to work with—she’s allowed to express a wide range of emotions, is asked to getphysical, and does well with both. As in other counterculture films, Jennings’ character soon finds herself in way too deep as the police pick up her trail. She wants to stop robbing banks, but of course needs one more big score to get away clean. In the end she and her partner Ellie-Jo (played by Jocelyn Jones, who resembles Jennings so strongly they could be sisters) must somehow survive a final stand-off against the cops if they hope to escape to Mexico.

It’s reasonable to assume Claudia Jennings would never have gotten a break in Hollywood if not for her Playboy appearances, but in at least one case—trying out for a role on Charlie’s Angels—she was passed over because of her nude modeling. Jennings never got the chance to prove one way or the other whether it was her talent or Playboy’s backing that sustained her career because, sadly, she was killed in an automobile accident in October 1979, at the age of twenty-nine. She had appeared in eighteen movies, including cult favorites Gator Bait and Deathsport, but had never been given a chance to shine in a truly important role. Dynamite Women might be the closest. While not great, it is entertaining, and by the end, we understood why Jennings has an internet cult. Based on what we’ve seen, she deserves one.     

American actress Laraine Day, who starred in The Locket with Robert Mitchum and in Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, seen here circa early ’40s.

At top is a photo of the first atomic device, a plutonium bomb nicknamed Gadget, detonated in a test known as Trinity, at White Sands Proving Ground, aka White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. The second photo shows the bomb's fireball at six-hundred feet in diameter 0.016 seconds after detonation, releasing energy roughly equal to 20 kilotons of TNT. The Trinity blast is considered the beginning of the nuclear age, today in 1945.