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On Drugs: Why More is Always Less

by Bellamy Edwards
It is a widely known fact that hallucinogenic mushrooms can add a certain sparkle to an after dinner speech and that Indian hashish, when ingested in the correct amounts, can transform an evening at the opera into something a lot less dull, however, drugs are illegal and a good thing it is too. Especially for someone like myself - for as a university graduate who has travelled the world extensively - I could not possibly make the correct decisions regarding my own well being for myself; fortunately, there are cocaine fuelled politicians in office to make the correct decisions for us. Now, there was a time when drugs, all drugs, were completely legal and it was only the decent sorts who took them, such as the aristocracy and the landed gentry. It was considered presumptuous and ill mannered to ask a gentleman what he had in his pipe, and Fitzroy’s of London’s house cocktail was a Kubla Khan No 2 comprising Gin, vermouth and laudanum. Unfortunately, the working classes eventually spoiled all of that by taking them too, not turning up for work and getting strange ideas about trade unions and better pay. The government of the day had no choice but to act. What’s the point of the working classes if they can neither work nor show a good example to the rest of us? And it wasn’t until modern times that Bill Clinton - whom it has been alleged was a rude-boy Rasta man before moving into politics – found a way to counteract this sad travesty of backfiring political injustice by simply privatising the prisons. This was a splendid idea and has helped to restore the natural order to society.
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Swank: The Exit Music

by Jack Newcastle
Who knows when it was all over? Some say it had come with a bullet fired from the Texas School Book Repository and some say the victim had managed to limp along for three years thereafter, finally succumbing to massive blood loss toward the end of ’66. All we know about the case is that it happened. Swank was dead, and no one cared. A public that had formerly got dressed and gone out suddenly decided they had better things to do with their lives. The nightclubs were abandoned for television, the cities for the suburbs, and even a neglected Las Vegas seemed to shutter its doors and dim its lights for a while. Yet, no matter the causes, consequences, or actual date of death, in 1969 there came a definitive goodbye to the old guard, and ironically, it was issued from the man who had done everything in his power to keep it alive. The roots of this grand joke, this cruel twist of fate, go back to December 12, 1915 when Francis Albert Sinatra was born into a world that was just getting ready to swing. Down in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong was hanging around Funky Butt Hall, studying the sounds of King Oliver, while Jelly Roll Morton had already hit the road to bring a new art form to cities like San Francisco and Chicago. In 1917, Dixie Jass Band One Step, a jazz record and the first of its kind, was cut, and by the time nineteen-year-old Sinatra made his radio debut with The Hoboken Four, syncopation was as much a part of the warp and weft of American culture as the automobile. With swing being king for all of Sinatra’s life, is it any wonder that twenty years later, with the cocked crown having been placed
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Book Review: The Last Playboy

by Koop Kooper
It was with pleasure that I came across a book about quintessential playboy Porfirio Rubirosa whilst searching for a book for a friend in a dark and overcrowded Sydney bookshop. From the shelf, the title jumped out at me and I knew it would be one of those books I just couldn’t put down, and brother was that true. If you haven’t heard of this jetset cad, then make sure you hunt this book down as I know that reading it will give you hours of pleasure and will probably make you realize how much work can go into being the ultimate international playboy; this cat practically made it an occupation. Porfirio Rubirosa was a Dominican diplomat, polo player, and race car driver who competed in the 1950 and 1954 24 Hours of Le Mans but was best known as an international playboy for his jetset lifestyle and legendary prowess with women. He was born into a military family but had the good fortune to marry well by romancing the dictator’s daughter. Now, some would say that this is a bit of risk as you might lose your life
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Exactly What Were Ward and June Up to After the Beaver Went to Bed? Jimmy Vargas Takes a Look at a Telling Relic from the 50s.

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   In 1952 a tome erupted from the sewers of America's sin alley, gushing its spurious ink into book form, shattering the smug social and political tectiles of America.

   Its title?

   USA CONFIDENTIAL.

   It was a searing post-coital cigarette burn to the seductive warblings of the Kinsey Report, a corrosive Zippo salute from yesteryear's male before the incendiary no sex war-cry of bra-scorcher Betty Friedan, and a premonition of American social decay that allowed for Marshall Mcluhan’s, Anton La Vey’s and Alvin Toffler's smooth segues into the sixties to exploit America's already shattered moral psyche, all of them becoming messiahs of a new permissive order.

   Catapulting into the national best sellers at number two for 1952, USA CONFIDENTIAL, made uneasy bedmates with the Revised King James Bible, which held it off from the national top spot with a Mosesian righteousness.

   But only just.

   These apostles of apostasy and social decline were two New York tabloid hucksters: Jack Lait, who worked for the Hearst paper chain, and nightclub proser, poseur, and entertainment goss' hound for the New York Herald, Lee Mortimer. The sleaze and sinuendo of America was taken out of the pool hall, the clip joint, the burleycue cooch joints and five-dollar cribs and bound in respectable hardcover green canvas ( something I guess to match the Ethan Allen Revolutionary repro furniture in the loungeroom ) and placed

More Than Just Hitting Him in the Wallet, High Gas Prices Have Tim Steiner Saying Ciao to a Lifestyle

   This spring in America, as gas prices rose above four dollars a gallon, everything changed. It was a sudden irreparable shift, and the reaction was a collective gasp, like the first glimpse of a monster comet streaking across the sky, about to impact, and to destroy those automotive dinosaurs known as SUVs. It was a feeling that, like any huge beast scavenging for scarce resources after a catastrophe, those massive trucks that had armored suburban moms and upwardly mobile IT guys from Menlo Park, may not be dead all at once, but their days were surely numbered. At that moment, we all knew that even if gas prices were to lower, we could never take cheap gas prices for granted again.

   This was the doomsday scenario we all had feared: an America without cheap and reliable supplies of gasoline. Would some sort of “Mad Max” inspired world emerge, where wolf packs of commuters would kill each other over jerry cans of gasoline? Would we see a return to the mile-long lines at gas stations that I remember from my youth in the Ford administration? Would there be rationing as they did during WWII? What would Americans do in this brave new post-apocalyptic world? Is it possible we would all become more European?

   When this shift happened, I was in Italy, a country used to high gas prices translating to roughly $10 per gallon. Still, Italians have a love of speed and of their cars that rivals our own. They just get their fix in a different way.

   The Italian roads are clogged with a mix of light trucks, motorcycles, scooters, and more tiny cars than a Shriners’ convention. It’s common to see an Italian family of four joyfully zipping along in a Fiat 500; a car roughly the size of the cargo bed of a GMC Denali. Smart cars and flatbed delivery vehicles with motorcycle engines park along the cobblestone streets, scooters of all sorts line the

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