Above, three covers of Soul, with the immortal Pam Grier, along with an inset of her boyfriend Richard Pryor,1973, 1976 and 1977. 

Today in 1915 Frenchman George Claude patented the neon sign. Earlier scientists such as Nikola Tesla had already discovered the luminescent properties of inert gases, but it was Claude who said: “Je l’ai! Advertising!” Claude had displayed examples of his signs at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1910, but his brilliant idea didn’t really catch on until more than a decade later. In the interim Claude realized he’d better patent the invention, which is exactly what he did ninety-six years ago today in the U.S. Pulp wouldn’t be the same without Claude’s glowing tubes, and on behalf of all the seedy diners, porno theaters, pawn shops, and strip motels managed by homicidal psychopaths, we say thank you, George.

On the cover of this National Police Gazette from December 1965 is a once-infamous Swedish spy named Stig Wennerström. Wennerström was an Air Force colonel who passed Swedish, U.S., and NATO secrets to the Soviets. He’s labeled a red by the Gazette, but that’s a stretch—he served the U.S.S.R. for fifteen years, true, but before that he may have spied for Nazi Germany, who as fascists were as near the opposite end of the political spectrum as it was possible to be. The obvious motivation, then, must have been money, but no, Wennerström didn’t spy for profit any more than he did for political ideology. He came from a moneyed Swedish family and as a colonel was well paid. Nor did fear of blackmail seem to drive him, as there was nothing seriously embarrassing in his past. The answers wouldn’t come until after he was caught.

The Swedish state police—SAPO—had directed Wennerström’s maid to snoop around his home. She eventually found incriminating film negatives that resulted in his arrest, and he was convicted of four counts of treason and sentenced to twenty years in prison. During those years he finally answered some questions about his motivation. He claimed thatat some point during his time in the military he came to believe that peace could only be maintained through balance, and the secrets he passed helped maintain that balance. The answer was unsatisfactory to most observers, but that was the only one Wennerström would ever furnish.

Stig Wennerström served ten years of his sentence and secured parole at age 77. Twenty years later in 2004 while living in a seniors' home, the 97-year-old ex-spy was interviewed by the magazine Aret Runt. It was clear this would probably be his last interview, and he was asked if he had any regrets. His answer: “If I could live my life over again, I am stupid enough to let it be exactly the way it has been so far.” He died two years later at age 99, the questions surrounding his spying mostly unanswered, the crimes he committed mostly fading into history, and the secrets he passed entirely obsolete.  

How times have changed. Could one of the most brutal killers in the world openly hobnob with the Hollywood set today? We doubt it. But back in the day, a few rumors of murder only bolstered a man’s adventurous reputation, as proved by this November 1958 Whisper showing Rafael “Ramfis” Trujillo, Jr. charming Zsa Zsa Gabor and Kim Novak. One or both women, you may notice, actually appear courtesy an X-acto knife and glue, but what self-respecting tabloid has time to locate a legit photo when paste-up will do the job almost as well? Trujillo did date and bed both Gabor and Novak in real life, which makes this cover technically accurate, and makes him the second most enviable Dominican jet-setter in history.

Ramfis Trujillo reportedly gave most women that frisson some find irresistible, but his life wasn’t all starlets and champagne. Though he wanted nothing more than to be a playboy, there was an obstacle in the form of family baggage. Specifically, his father was a sadistic military dictator who had been put in power in the Dominican Republic by the CIA. Trujillo, Sr. expected his son to continue in the family business. This had been abundantly clear to Ramfis since the day his father made him a full general—with full pay—at age nine. For this and other reasons, he grew up with a warped sense of power and by the time of this Whisper cover had already ordered several murders and indulged in the occasional gang rape. He might have been considered a classic chip off the old block, save for rumors that Ramfis’s father was actually a Cuban named Rafael Dominicis—hence the “illegitimate dastard” tag in the banner. But the story about Ramfis being illegitimate was strongly denied by everyone involved (except Dominicis, who “disappeared”).

In any case, through the late fifties Ramfis tomcatted his way from Hollywood to Paris, and only occasionally let his urbane manner slip to reveal someone considerably less charming beneath. He seemed to have settled into his chosen lifestyle permanently when he married an actress named Lita Milan, below, who had starred opposite Paul Newman inThe Left-Handed Gun. But back in the Dominican, the impulsive Rafael Trujillo, Sr. was behaving less and less like the good lap dog the CIA had put in charge three decades earlier. Eventually, his U.S. benefactors turned against him and he died in a fusillade of possibly CIA-arranged bullets.

Junior succumbed to the pull of familial duty, as well as the desire for revenge, and flew back to the Dominican to restore order. This involved personally killing some of the participants in his father’s assassination. While this must have given him great satisfaction, it did little to stabilize the country. Under pressure from both internal enemies and the U.S., Ramfis Trujillo fled to Spain less than a year later with a casket containing millions in cash, jewels, bonds, and his father. By 1969 he was dead too, due to complications stemming from an automobile accident. In the end he presents an interesting question of nature versus nurture, i.e. was he meant to be a ladykiller, a real killer, or both? 

Photo of the mushroom cloud generated by the American nuclear test Buster Charlie, a fourteen kiloton shot conducted at the Nevada Test Site, today, 1951. 

Our copies of National Informer span a time during which the paper was transitioning from typical tabloid to sex magazine. In our issues from 1966 to 1968, you get alarmist political journalism, which by the 1970s becomes drooling quasi-smut, as we see in this issue that first hit newsstands today in 1972. Of course, this shift from commie-baiting to masturbating meant abandoning a rightward leaning readership for a leftward leaning one. Clearly the move was meant to boost readership, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t Informer’s fault, though. All the old school tabloids were taking a beating. Even the venerable National Police Gazette, which had begun publishing lifetimes earlier, in 1845, died during the seventies. But Informer had a shorter history, a smaller audience, and a lower budget. In a tabloid sea where old battleships like Gazette and Confidential couldn’t turn quickly when the weather changed, Informer was a mere speedboat. Turn it did, and quite easily. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy had obliterated America's already battered pubic hair barrier in 1971 and Informer followed in its wake. But more explicitness did not bring more readership, as far as we can tell. National Informer and its sister publication National Informer Weekly Reader were dead by 1974. 

Above, a vintage poster for Marajah the all-knowing mystic seer, who appeared at the Auditorium Theater in Stillwater, Minnesota starting today in 1923. Marajah was one of a number of popular seers who toured the U.S. during the early half of the twentieth century, although—let's be clear—as good as he was, he was no Criswell.

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 a beer can, and here's the evidence, from thewebsite 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, so it dances faster and fasterand 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.  

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.