LOS ANGELES, CA- I had been on vacation since New Year, and when I got home yesterday, my neighbors told me that at one point since the Eaton fire started in Altadena just the day before, entire pages of burnt books and magazines were wafting across the neighborhood, blown by the beyond-gale force winds that were feeding the flames a few miles to the northeast. It was a weird and eerie image. The “School’s out for Summer” scene from Dazed and Confused but … devastating wildfire edition. As I looked around, on the surface, I saw that my home looked normal in the Vuarnet-tinted orange of the LA skyline. But on closer inspection, it was dusted in a layer of soot and ash that continued to fall, moving in softly chaotic patterns like a snowflake or a dandelion. And you really would think it was lightly snowing if you had zero context for where you were and what was happening. As advertised, some of the ash was big, the size of a quarter, often with printed words still legible, but none approaching the size of a full page from a book. That was until I opened my door this morning and found a remnant of a magazine lying, half buried under a pile of leaves on the sidewalk. Singed perfectly only at the borders, as if on purpose for artistic effect to highlight the composition or to lend the document an air of faux antiquity, it was a full page from a magazine.
At first glance, I knew precisely what publication it was, clued in by the unmistakable midcentury aesthetic of cartoons that appeared in Playboy magazine, a distinct style of art that even as the magazine drifted in and out of relevance, always remained frozen in time, tethered firmly to an early to mid-1960s chauvinism; an eternal reminder that the magazine was born of aspirations for an American masculinity that balanced virility with sophistication. For the Playboy cartoon and its parent publication, the working class was a nostalgic echo of our fathers, Bohemia was an amusing dalliance of our children, and the American man was (or sought to be) a professional with varied interests and disposable income. This imagination of the American man had resources that allowed for travel, wardrobe, and collections of art and literature. He had varied hobbies that ranged from tennis and golf to hunting deer and elk. The playboy man listened to jazz on Saturdays, watched football on Sundays, and liked his PJ O’Rourke punctuated with photographs of round, full breasts. This was the aesthetic of the now timeless cartoon inked by the hands of Erich Sokol, Doug Sneyd, and others. (And no, I did not have those names at my fingertips. Come to think of it, historically, the only thing at my fingertips when perusing their cartoons was my 14-year-old shvantz. But for today’s musings, it was just my thumbs typing out a Google search.)
One must remember that as porn went digital, playboy flirted repeatedly with bankruptcy. And yet, through all the trials and tribulations one encounters when bringing the thinking man his monthly porn, Hef and his heirs held tightly to the cartoons of his youth as a mainstay of the publication. A sort of timeless rudder at the helm of a ship navigating the ever-shifting seas of the marketplace for visual stimulation. The volume of the proverbial bush on a centerfold might ebb and flow with the times, but the cartoon remained steadfast. It was the preservation of permanence in an impermanent world. It was Hodor leaning back with all his might against the door, trying, if only for an extended moment, to dilate the length of time we could feel safe from change — specifically, the way in which the double-edged sword of change that we hope will swing in the direction of progress and evolution can and does inevitably swing in the direction of death and destruction, threatening that which we’ve built or those that we love.
Under the ash and haze of the Eaton fire blowing southward from Pasadena, staring at this cartoon under the leaves and ash on the sidewalk, my first contemplation was to mourn the loss of some poor soul’s spank bank. It takes a certain mix of commitment, nostalgia, or laziness to hold on to old magazines, pornographic or otherwise, and commitment, nostalgia, and sloth are all things I can empathize with. As someone born at the young end of Gen X, I’m old enough to understand on a very personal level the romance, excitement, transgression, and pleasure that was to be discovered in a stack of Playboys obtained through various forms of subterfuge and thievery and then wedged deep under the mattress, well out of view of parents who most certainly knew these “adult” magazines were in their pre/teen’s possession and only feigned ignorance to preserve their adolescent child’s dignity and preserve their own equilibrium.
So, to whom did this page belong? Dare I pick it up lest my hands land on the fossilized stain of spatch from some unknown Onanite? I dared. Looking more closely, the caption had been burned off, and there was only the image of a stern-looking late middle-aged businessman sitting on a chair, skeptically watching a buxom and much younger woman try on lingerie in the middle of a department store — her nipples jutting far above the coverage of the bustier as she stares proudly into a mirror. No doubt, even if the caption had remained, it wasn’t the funniest of Playboy cartoons. Still, it did fit neatly within the always chauvinistic and oftentimes anachronistic brand of the medium.
Flipped over, the page revealed an article titled “Hail to the Chef,” a January 2013 introduction to a fashion spread featuring America’s “best chefs,” “tastemakers,” and “culinary talents.” My curiosity was peaked. Who was hot in 2013?! I had to know. Marcus Samuelsson, Eric Ripert, [Frank] Falcinelli and [Danny] Bowein (misspelled in the article) were the only names I could make out. I remembered Ripert from when I was a Top Chef fanboy. Maybe the owner of this magazine was a gourmand, a connoisseur, and not just a horny kid desperate to jerk off. There’s really no way to know. Archives are always imperfect and incomplete. Even when built for a purpose, they typically serve only to validate the conscious and unconscious preconceived agendas to which we’ve already been married. For example, just a few weeks ago my rabbi offered a transsexual reading of the weekly Torah portion. He took a text that for millennia had no connection to what we know as the modern trans discourse and neatly folded it into the contemporary conversation on trans-sociopolitics. It demonstrated how archives and artifacts are what we make them. They serve a purpose that is aspirational (“this will be preserved for the future”) and manipulative in a way that may be malevolent or benign (“what do we want this to mean now?”).
For these two reasons, archives are essential, and their creation and preservation are part of our social fabric as humans. Art is an archive. Archive is art. Music, painting, sculpture, journalism, literature, family albums, journals, administrative and bureaucratic documents, boxes of old clothes. Archives. Until recently, in the arc of human history, archives were only preserved via analog media, which typically through physical artifacts or oral transmission. But in the last 30 years, we’ve seen the explosion of digital archives. This represents a tectonic shift in record keeping that has resulted in a counterbalance between the analog and the digital, which is a sort of mutual failsafe. Should the servers collapse, paper documents will survive. Should the paper be consumed by fire or flood (or, as the Beastie Boys lamented, “your mom throws away your best porno mag”), the digital archive can survive in an omnipresent and portable cloud. The one doesn’t supplant the other. They ensure and insure each other. While the scales may be tipped at the moment toward the predominance of the digital, its survival is not unconditional. The analog still provides much-needed security, as well as a tactile experience and opportunity for interactivity that the digital, even with the rise of AR, can never fully replace. The one is a provisional guarantee for the survival of the other. (Allow me here to resist the overwhelming urge to detour into a diatribe on how this is a metaphor for Zionism and the Jewish diaspora, but feel free to let your mind wander should you please.)
Everything in this terrestrial realm comes to an end. But there’s something beautifully human in our efforts to delay that end, whether it arrives before or after our demise. We seek to protect and preserve. It’s the fabric of family and community and probably no small amount of tribalistic and sectarian divide. So while I’ll never have answers to the backstory of this 2013 cartoon from the waning years of Playboy’s print journalism, I have photographic documentation of this charred and fragile artifact that I can carry with me on my phone and share on medias. A humble and kind reminder to help those who have lost to rebuild. Rebuild the big — homes, businesses, infrastructure. Rebuild the small — clothing, books, art, knickknacks, smut. A notoriously taciturn Kareem Abdul Jabaar famously softened his public persona when, after a home fire destroyed his world-class collection of jazz albums, friends and fans donated albums to help him rebuild his music library. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford to replace what was lost. It was more symbolic. It was about connection and support.
In a disaster as massive as what we are witnessing now, needs will be prominent, and needs will be subtle. But regardless of the scope or scale of need, the ethos of American individuality and self-sufficiency will undoubtedly be necessary but woefully insufficient to meet the full spectrum of those needs. The other iconic and celebrated thread of the American fabric will need to be more front and center: the uniquely American ability to cowboy the fuck up. That shared instinct to leave no man behind, to tackle the shooter, to run towards the flames. Taking that heroic part of who we think we are and channeling it into helping people rebuild. Because people will need help on structural levels, that will require the courage of our civic leaders to shake off the crusted layers of institutionalized government dysfunction and actually get shit done. And people will need help on more human levels that can only be served through personal or communal interaction. What are those less concrete needs? We should probably talk to each other and ask! Much like our personal preferences for pornography, we keep so much of what we need in life private from each other. Even that friend who seemingly “has it all” may have lost things in the fire, the gravity and importance of which we’ll never totally understand. But we might understand better if we simply ask.
Will someone admit to losing a stack of vintage porn? Maybe. Maybe not. That potential reticence doesn’t preclude us from being proactive and gifting someone an old magazine (preferably in mint or otherwise unused condition) to reconstruct a retro spank bank. It’s these symbolic gestures that might not have significant economic value that will pay tremendous dividends as we rebuild. Because coming back stronger is no guarantee. Rebuilding is merely an opportunity to forge stronger and more beautiful bonds (kintsugi) but an opportunity that can be easily missed.
If you are so inclined to give Los Angeles a helping hand, please feel free to visit any of the following sites:
California Community Foundation
CAL FIRE Benevolent Foundation
California Community Foundation
The Memories We Lost in the Fire: Reflections on Loss, Preservation & Rebuilding
