Intl. Notebook

March 19 2024

PORTU-PULP AND PORTU-GALS

Our visit to Lisbon swung between extremes.

Some of you may be wondering whether we actually picked up anything for Pulp Intl. during our ballyhooed trip to Lisbon. We did, we just haven’t had to time to sort and scan it yet. But above you see a snapshot of some items we bought at the city’s twice-weekly Feria de Ladra, which apparently has been going on since 1272 (not a typo), and these days takes place at the Campo de Santa Clara, behind the important monastery of São Vicente de Fora.

The market is a marvel. While it isn’t anything close to Le Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen in Paris, it remains one of the better troves of vintage matter you’ll find in Europe, and as a bonus is popular with beautiful women and supports a satellite industry of interesting bars and eateries. Among the items we found were old issues of the pop culture magazine Plateia, crime comics such as Secreto Agente Z33, and a copy of the movie mag Colecção Cinema. We’ll be scanning and uploading those throughout the year, and they’ll be nice reminders of a good trip. Well, mostly good.

When the Pulp Intl. girlfriends left, things went a bit haywire. We’ll share only one episode: the panic inducing disappearance of one of our group, who had been done in by Lisbon’s numerous hills as we searched for a music bar one night, and had headed home to rest with his left arm tingling (which he attributed to a pulled shoulder muscle he’d suffered after taking a spill on what we nicknamed the “heroin stairs”). We stayed at the bar and when we returned hours later he was nowhere to be seen. Frantic calls to his phone produced nothing. Calls to the hospitals ditto. Uh oh.

We organized ourselves for a 4 a.m. search of the deserted barrio where the bar was. Our working theory: coronary, collapsed, rolled into a ditch, died. That hadn’t happened. What had happened was he walked down the hills as planned, was near the apartment we’d rented, but got tractor beamed into a strip club where he spent 1,300 euros on lap dances. Under the circumstances, he’d heard none of our calls. Said he: “I felt better by the time I was passing the club.” Funny episode, but we think he’s due for a medical check-up. The week that was, Pulp Intl. style.

Portugal, Lisbon

Intl. Notebook

March 8 2024

OPERATION PORTUGAL

Pulp Intl. and friends abroad. What's the worst that can happen?

It’s intermission time. Yes, we just took a break, but it was unplanned due to our move and its many associated delays. The upcoming intermission has been planned for a while. We’re going to stage a triple birthday celebration in Lisbon with some of our favorite globetrotters. The Pulp. Intl. girlfriends are coming too, but are bailing on day four. They say they want us to have boy time, but the truth is four days with this crowd is all they can endure.

Mixed into the days and nights (of sedate museum visits and early bedtimes, we swear, girls) will be serious pulp digging. We have no idea whether Portugal has such items, but we’ll only learn the answer by looking. Hopefully we’ll make it back home intact by March 16. That’s the plan, anyway. But you know what they say about plans. To tide you over until our glorious return, let us direct you to some Pulp Intl. favorites.

A small collection of paperback covers by George Gross.

Fifteen covers of the pulp magazine Short Stories.

Modern pulp art by the amazing Owen Smith.

All our issues of the French art deco style magazine Paris Plaisirs.

All our issues of the Australian men’s adventure magazine Adam.

Misty Ayers does her daily lingerie workout then cooks a meal.

The paperback cover art of Bill Edwards.

A look at historic cinemas from around world.

Beautiful covers from the Italian publishers Edizioni MA-GA.

All our write-ups on sexploitation queen Laura Gemser.

And finally, below you’ll find our inexhaustible tabloid index, which used to reside somewhere in 2018, but which we’ve moved in case anyone wants to check out all the scandal sheets we’ve written about.

Portugal, Lisbon, intermission

Intl. Notebook

March 28 2021

SIRRING UP ADVENTURE

It's a tough job but some tabloid has to do it.

Above is the cover of a March 1953 issue of Sir! magazine, and in an example of the ephemeral nature of such items, shortly after we scanned this we spilled a glass of red wine on it. So behold! It’s even more rare than it was when we bought it. Above the slash you see boxer Kid Gavilan, he of the famed bolo punch, and on the right is model Joanne Arnold, who we’ve featured before here, here, and here. She doesn’t appear inside. But what you do get is a jaunt through such exotic locales as Melanesia, Tahiti, and Lisbon in search of knowledge and thrills.

We were drawn to the Lisbon story, which the magazine describes as a capital of sin. To us the word “sin” means late nights, good intoxicants, fun women, and excellent entertainment. To Sir! it means being cheated, robbed, framed, and arrested. To-may-to to-mah-to, we guess. We’ve spent some time in Lisbon and we love it. We don’t know what it was like in 1953, but Europe was still coming out of World War II, which means many countries—even non-combatants like Portugal—were wracked by poverty. So we wouldn’t be surprised if thieves were out in droves.

Elsewhere inside Sir! you get art from Jon Laurell and Joseph Szokoli, photos of model Jean Williams and Tahitian beauty queen Malie Haulani, a story on the danger of nuclear weapons, anthropological snobbery in exposés about New Caledonia and the Kogi people of Colombia, and fanciful theories about Russian scientists working to keep Josef Stalin alive for 150 years—which didn’t work, because he died a mere five days after this issue of Sir! hit the newsstands. Clearly, the magazine is cursed. It certainly cursed our wine glass. We have thirty-five scans below for your enjoyment and other issues of Sir! here and here.

New Caledonia, Colombia, Russia, Tahiti, Portugal, Lisbon, Sir!, Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Jon Laurell, Joseph Szokoli, Kid Gavilan, Malie Haulani, Jean Williams, magazine art, nukes, boxing

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

April 25

1939—Batman Debuts

In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale.

April 25

1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results

British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves.

April 24

1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs

Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule’s main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule’s descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission.

April 23

1986—Otto Preminger Dies

Austro-Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

April 23

1998—James Earl Ray Dies

The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray’s fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King’s killing, but with Ray’s death such questions became moot.

April 22

1912—Pravda Is Founded

The newspaper Pravda, or “Truth”, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country’s leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid.

April 22

1983—Hitler's Diaries Found

The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler’s diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess’s flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison.