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Rappers are often criticized for violent lyrics, but Kanye West 
has made his name avoiding that aspect of the hip-hop counter- 
culture. In the Playboy Interview West tells Rob Tannenbaum 
how his independence and contrarianism in the face of rap 
conventions have helped him become a pop-chart mainstay. 
“He talks about how much he loves bands,” Tannenbaum says. 
“Most rappers don't open up to other music. West listens to 
rock, so he understands the structure of a good рор song, That 
has made him very successful.” West also tipped off Tannen- 
baum that he may soon be a bit richer. “Three years ago, Jay-Z 
told mein his Interview that he was retiring,” Tannenbaum says. 
"I made him a $20 bet with 50-to-one odds that he wouldn't stay 
retired. In this Interview West says it will pay off. If he is correct, 
Jay-Z is going to owe me $1,000—and | will collect.” 


Ranking one and two on Jeremy 
Bloom's 2006 agenda: win an 
Olympic gold medal in skiing, 
then break into the NFL as a re- 
tum man. The path is steep, but 
if he succeeds he will surely be- 
come America's new favorite two- 
sport athlete. We tapped Roberto 
Parada, no stranger to challenge 
himself, to paint Bloom for Jeremy 
Bloom Can't Lose. “I was severely 
ill with aplastic anemia, which I 
contracted from my paint thinner," 
Parada says. “| had to receive а 
bone marrow transplant. My 
love and livelihood nearly killed 
me; | was totally unaware of the 
dangers in my studio. Now | use 
only safe products. With pieces 
like this | have to prove to the art 
world that you can do great work 
without toxic chemicals." 


When Tim Flannery's The Weath- 
er Makers was published in Aus- 
tralia this past year, it persuaded 
the government to change its 
stance on global warming and 
finally acknowledge the growing 
threat. Let's hope our excerpt, 
What's Going On Here?, along 
with the book's appearance in 
America (Grove/Atlantic), will 
have the same effecton the Bush 
White House. “Some Americans 
feel there are more crucial is- 
sues,” Flannery says, “but if we 
keep polluting at the current rate, 
we will see a catastrophic climate 
change in a decade or two. The 
outcome of the Iraq war will be de- 
cided in a few years, but climate 
change will continue to grind on, 
costing more and more lives.” 


Queens of the Stone Age and Corey Gunz headline our Rock/ 
Rap/Fashion spread, which was shot by legendary music pho- 
tographer Mick Rock. "We are such a visual society, so it is 
important for musicians to have a look,” Rock says. “Musicians 
need something people can visually latch onto, and in turn mu- 
sicians strongly influence what we wear. People emotionally 
bond to music, and it seeps into their psyche and soul. The pro- 
liferation of the artists’ imagery gets it hammered into them; to 
identify with the music, people take style tips from the artists." 


"| had to turn it into fiction," Tony D'Souza says of the three 
tumultuous years he spent in Africa as a Peace Corps vol- 
unteer. Here he offers Sogbo's Wife, the tale of an affair be- 
tween a villager and a relief worker, a story he didn't think he 
would live to tell. “I was living in a hut, teaching about AIDS, 
when civil war broke out. | crossed the war zone without any 
Possessions and spent days hiding in the jungle before | 
escaped. So much happened that I had to tell it somehow. 
The medium of fiction provided an emotional buffer.” 


Just 1.15 cm thick. But that slender body sports а precision-cut keypad, huge color screen, 
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features 


WHAT'S GOING ОМ HERE? 

Catastrophic hurricanes like Katrina are only harbingers of extreme climate changes 
tocome. The fate of humanity, not to mention the rest of the planet's animal and 
plant life, is already in desperate peril—as shown by the facts presented i in this 
excerpt from what may Бе the year's most important book. в 


THE YEAR IN MUSIC 2006 

From veterans lighting up the comeback trail to promising new artists from every 
genre, the winners in our annual music poll prove that 2005 was abundant with 
aural pleasures. We also check out the rise of Houston hip-hop, ponder the fate 
of the New Orleans music scene and reveal which songs members of Smash 
Mouth, Spoon and other bands were listening to when they lost their virginity. 


PLAYING FOR KEEPS 

Here are the things to play with when playing's the thing. Our ultimate game 
room has it all: a pool table that would make Minnesota Fats do sit-ups, а 
selection of classic pinball and arcade games. pinup-girl poker chips, a chess 
set made from auto parts, a high-end backgammon set (for when Hef comes 
over), a table hockey game, a Ping-Pong setup, foosball and more. Don't ever 
tell us you're bored, в 


JEREMY BLOOM CAN'T LOSE 

America's best hope for gold in Turin could be Jeremy Bloom, г freestyle skier 
so competitive that he plans on taking his muscular five-foot-nine physique 
and model's looks from his MTV gig to the NFL. Meet a man who may have 
the word lirnit in his vocabulary but hasn't much use for it. B N 


fiction 


SOGBO’S WIFE 

An international relief worker assigned to an African village tries to go native. He 
falls in love with a married woman but soon finds his secret affair threatened by 
racial and cultural clashes—and a bit of jungle witchcraft. 


the playboy forum 


CHINA SYNDROME 

Don't blame China for outsourcing. The country is adopting the latest developments 
in technology so quickly that it attracts enormous investments from global 
corporations. Yet China is losing large numbers of jobs as well, which goes to 
show that the creation of a fair global labor market amid preste offshore out- 
sourcing is one of the great challenges of our time. NI ROSS 


20Q 


FRANZ FERDINAND 

‚Alex Kapranos and Nick McCarthy are the driving forces behind Franz Ferdinand, 
the million-selling nu-new wave band from Glasgow. The two come clean about 
backward messages on their albums, why their group is named after a certain 
archduke and their affinity for Interpol. в 


interview 


KANYE WEST 

He's sold millions of albums, earned Grammys and scored last year's biggest rap 
hit with “Gold Digger.” Now the anything-but-modest rapper and producer talks 
about why he said George Bush doesn’t care about black people, how he compen- 
sates for not having the best flow, how his stand against homophobia has affected 
him and why his mom wants him to shut ир. BY ROB INENBAUM 


vol. 53, no. 3—march 2006 


CO - 


The unforgettable women we selected as 
the 25 Sexiest Celebrities kept pulse retes 
dangerously high during the past year. We 
could write a book about the lasting appeal of 
Ziyi Zhang, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, 
Jennifer Garner, Beyoncé and especially Sex 
Star of the Year Jessica Alba, photographed 
here by Andrew Eccles. We put our Rabbit 
back into the blue with Jessica on this photo. 


contents continue 


vol. 53, по. 3—march 2006 


pictorials 


WILLA FORD 

The singer and Lingerie Bowl 
competitor behind "I Wanna Ве 
Bad" finally fulfills her wish. 


PLAYMATE: 
MONICA LEIGH 

Miss March, a future dental 
hygienist, shows how pretty a 
girl can look wearing nothing 
but a smile. 


PLAYBOY'S 
25 SEXIEST CELEBRITIES 
From Jessica Alba to Ziyi Zhang, 
we show who's hot from A to Z. 


notes and news 


HEF'S HOUSE OF HORRORS 
The sight of Paris Hilton, 

Jenna Jameson, Adrianne Curry 
and a bevy of Playmates 

at Hef's Halloween bash is 
truly haunting. 


CENTERFOLDS ON SEX: 
COURTNEY RACHEL CULKIN 
Miss April 2005: hunts for 

the perfect sex toy and admits 

to having a weakness for 
well-endowed nerds. 


PLAYMATE NEWS 

Miss November 1980 Jeana 
Tomasino Keough is wistful 
for wisteria on her new reality: 
series, The Real Housewives; 
Pam Anderson gets lovingly 
roasted on Comedy Central. 


departments 


PLAYBILL 
DEAR PLA 
AFTER HOURS 
MANTRACK 

THE PLAYBOY ADVISOR 


Y 


PARTY JOKES 

WHERE AND HOW TO BUY 
ON THE SCENE 
GRAPEVINE 

POTPOURRI 


fashion 


ROCK/RAP/FASHION 
Different worlds, different 
threads. We put together looks. 
that make statements for 
artists as diverse as Queens 
of the Stone Age, Tru Life, 
the Sounds and Corey Gunz. 


reviews 


MOVIES 

The future looks bleak in V for 
Vendetta; Bruce Willis and Mos 
Def team in the buddy action 
flick 16 Blocks. 


DVDS 

Philip Seymour Hoffman is 
disarmingly creepy in Capote; 
1938's Holiday makes its DVD 
debut in The Cary Grant Box Set. 


MUSIC | 

The Subways craft-music free 
from today's microfads; Van 
Morrison takes on Nashville 
with Pay the Devil. 


GAMES 

Full Auto showcases vehicular 
weapons of mass destruction; we 
check out some games that help 
you release your inner musician. 


BOOKS 

Learn about the postpunk 
bands today’s artists revere 

in Rip It Up and Start Again; 
the best recent biographies of 
music legends. 


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PLAYBOY 


HUGH M. HEFNER 


editor-in-chief 


CHRISTOPHER NAPOLITANO 
editorial director 
STEPHEN RANDALL deputy editor 
ТОМ STAEBLER art director 
GARY COLE photography director 
LEOPOLD FROEHLICH executive editor 
ROBERT LOVE editor al large 
JAMIE MALANOWSKI managing editor 


EDITORIAL 
FEATURES: AJ. BAIME articles editor; AMY GRACE LOVD literary edilor FASHION: JOSEPH DE ACETIS 
director FORUM: CHIP ROWE senior editor MODERN LIVING: SCOTT ALEXANDER senior editor 
STAFF: ROBERT B. DE SALVO, TIMOTHY MOHR associate editors; DAVID PFISTER, JOSH ROBERTSON assistant 
editors; VIVIAN COLON, HEATHER НАЕВЕ, KENNY LULL editorial assistants; ROCKY RAKOVIC junior editor 
CARTOONS: MICHELLE URRY editor COPY: WINIFRED ORMOND copy chief; CAMILLE слил associate 
copy chief; ROBERT HORNING, CATHERYN KEEGAN, PABLO MORALES copy editors RESEARCH: DAVID COHEN 
research director; BRENDAN BARR senior researcher; MATTHEW SHEPSTIN associate зе? 
AR BRADBURY, BRENDAN CUMMINGS, MICHAEL MATASSA RON MOTTA researchers; MARK DURAN research 
librarian EDITORIAL PRODUCTION: Marr DE Mazza assistant managing editor; VALERIE THOMAS 
manager READER SERVICE: MIKE OSTROWSKI correspondent CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: 
MARK BOAL (wriler at large), KEVIN BUCKLEY, SIMON COOPER, GRETCHEN EDGREN, LAWRENCE GROBEL. 
KEN GROSS, JENNIFER RYAN JONES (FASHION), WARREN KALBACKER, ARTHUR KRETCHMER (AUTOMOTIVE), 
JONATHAN LUFTMAN, JOE MORGENSTERN, JAMES R. PETERSEN, STEPHEN REBELLO, DAVID RENSIN, 
DAVID SHEFF, DAVID STEVENS, JOHN D. THOMAS, ALICE К. TURNER 


r researcher; 


HEIDI PARKER west coast editor 


ART 
SCOTT ANDERSON, BRUCE HANSEN, CHET SUSKI, LEN WILLIS, ROB WILSON senior art directors; 
PAUL CHAN senior art assistant; JOANNA METZGER art assistant; 
CORTEZ WELLS art services coordinalor; MALINA LEE senior art administrator 


PHOTOGRAPHY 
MARILYN GRABOWSKI west coast editor; JIM LARSON managing editor; PATTY BEAUDETFRANCÍS, 
KEVIN KUSTER. STEPHANIE MORRIS Senior editors; MATT STEIGBIGEL associate editor; RENAY LARSON 
assistant editor; ARNY FREYTAG, STEPHEN WAYDA senior contributing photographers; GEORGE GEORGIOU 
staff photographer; RICHARD 1201, MIZUNO, BYRON NEWMAN, GEN NISHINO, DAVID RAMS contributing 
photographers; pu. мнит studio manager—los angeles; BONNIE JEAN KENNY manager, photo library; 
KEVIN CRAIG manager, photo lab; PENNY EKKERT. KRYSTLE JOHNSON production coordinators 


DIANE SILBERSTEIN publisher 


ADVERTISING 
JONATHAN SCHWARTZ associate publisher; RON STERN new york manager; HELEN BIANCULLI 
direct response advertising director; MARIE FIRNENO advertising operations director; KARA SARISKY 
advertising coordinator NEW YORK: SHERI WARNKE southeast manager; BRIAN GEORGI 
consumer electronics manager; MELISSA MEANY, TONY SARDINAS account managers; SAM STAHL 
assistant account manager CHICAGO: wADE BAXTER midwest sales manager LOS ANGELES: 
PETE AUERBACH, COREY SPIEGEL west Coast managers DETROIT: STACEY С. CROSS detroit 
manager SAN FRANCISCO: ED MEAGHER northwest manager 


Visible through the 


MARKETING 
LISA NATALE associate publisher/marketing; Jutta LIGHT marketing services director; 
CHRISTOPHER SHOOLIS research director; DONNA TAVOSO Crealive services director 


PRODUCTION 
MARIA MANDIS director; JODY JURGETO production manager; CINDY PONTARELLI, DEBBIE TILLOU associate 
managers; CHAR KROWCZYK, BARB ТЕКІН А assistant managers; BILL BENWAY, SIMMIE WILLIAMS prepress 


CIRCULATION 
LARRY A. DJERF newsstand sales director; PHYLLIS ROTUNNO subscription circulation director 


ADMINISTRATIVE 
MARCIA TERRONES rights & permissions director 


PLAYBOY ENTERPRISES INTERNATIONAL, IN! 
CHRISTIE HEFNER chairman, chief executive officer 
JANES P RADTKE senior vice president and general manager 


THE ҒАТЕ OF THE ENTIRE 
GALAXY IS IN YOUR HANDS. 


ARE YOU READY? 


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ships from space and bomb 
them back to the Stone Age? 


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| Jenny McCarthy cuddles up to the Man. 


Not even the host recognized Leonardo 
DiCaprio disguised as an old man at Hef's 
unforgettable Halloween party that included a 


goblins. (1) Playboy Mansion maidens showed 
off their freshly carved jack-o'-lanterns at Holly's 
pre-party Pumpkin Night. (2) A devilish Hef with 
Kendra, Bridget and Holly. (3) Chicago mob- 
sters Billy Marovitz, spouse Christie Hefner and 
Hef's brother Keith. (4) “Weird Al” Yankovicand 
his wife, Suzanne. (5) 2006 Playmates Miss April 
Holley Ann Dorrough and Miss February Cas- 
sandra Lynn get down with Malcolm in the 
Middle's Frankie Muniz. (6) Actor Steve Gutten- 
berg with the host. (7) David Gallagher takes a 
bite out of delicious Jillian Grace. (8) Retired 
slugger Jose Canseco and guest. (9) = 
American Idol's Ryan Seacrest, singer Z 
Debbie Gibson and guest. (10) A sexy 
assortment of Painted Ladies. (11) Mike 
Тузоп with announcer Michael Buffer 
and girlfriend Christine Prado. (12) 
The ladics fall for Jeff Goldblum. (13) 


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MARILYN'S DEMISE 

Your special report The Strange, 
Still Mysterious Death of Marilyn Monroe 
(December) brought to mind a 1992 
book by the brother of Chicago mob- 
ster Sam Giancana. In Double Cross, 


Chuck Giancana claims the Mob killed 
Monroe in a failed attempt to bring 
down Auorney General Robert Ken- 
nedy. John Miner, the former Los 


We know how she lived. How did she die? 


Angeles County deputy district attor- 
ney who attended Monroe’s autopsy, 
says the actress may have been given 
a lethal dose of Nembutal through 
an enema. Chuck Giancana makes 
the same claim, saying his brother 
ordered four hit men to use a Nem- 
butal suppository to avoid suspicious 
bruising, needle marks and vomiting 
But Giancana makes so many other 
wild claims in his book that it left my 
head spinning. We'll probably never 
know the truth. 

Mike Farenell 

Glens Falls, New York 


After 43 years of investigation, there 
is still no credible evidence that Monroe 
had an affair with Robert Kennedy, that 
he wasat her home on the day she died 
or that she was murdered. According 
to FBI records and witnesses, Robert 
and Ethel Kennedy spent the weekend 
of Monroe's death with John Bates and 
his family at their northern California 
ranch. Of Miner’s transcript of tapes 
Monroe supposedly made for her psy- 
chiatrist, pLaysoy remarks, “You can't 
make this stuff up.” Who says? Any 
imaginative person who has read up 
on the actress could do it. Like many 


others who have a tenuous or imag- 
ined connection to Monroe, Miner is 
trying to cash in. In August Monroe 
biographer and Vanity Fair contributor 
Anthony Summers said on MSNBC 
that Miner first approached him in 
1995. “He obviously wanted money,” 
Summers said. Suspicious of the tran- 
scripts validity, Summers said he and 
the magazine declined. He also said he 
couldn't understand why a reputable 
newspaper like the Los Angeles Times 
would run the material. We might now 
ask the same of PLAYBOY. 
Peter Winkler 
North Hollywood, California 
Though the transcript is controversial, 
we find Miner's account credible. Miner is 
no bystander, after all, but the prosecutor 
who investigated Monroe's death. He says 
he used a "trial lauyer's memory"—sharp 
but not perfect—to make notes within hours 
of hearing the tapes. He broke his promise 
to Dr. Ralph Greenson to keep their contents 
confidential decades later, only after the late 
psychiatrist was attacked for possibly caus- 
ing Monroe's death and only with the per- 
mission of his widow. We didn't pay Miner 
for the transcript—which we consider а 
public document because of its source—or 
for his interview with us. 


The fascinating articles on Monroe 
left me stunned, and this is from a self- 
proclaimed Marilyn aficionado. Thank 
you for putting her on your cover 
once again; she can still make any red- 
blooded man’s heart skip a beat—or 
two beats, in my case. The tribute to 
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (December) 
is another of the absorbing pieces of 
writing I've come to expect. I’m not 
ashamed to say I subscribe for the arti- 
cles and the photos. 


Sam Ninalga 
Layton, Utah 


MORE GIRLS NEXT DOOR 
My wife has taken to watching The 
Girls Next Door. 1 like it too, for rea- 
sons beyond the women's beauty. Spe- 
cifically, I share Hef's love of movies. 
He seems more interesting than his 
public persona. 
Michael Thornton 
Florence, Kentucky 


Тат a feminist and a well-educated 
professional woman who earns more 
than $200,000 a year and has been 
happily cohabiting for 13 years with 
the same man—and my favorite show 
is The Girls Next Door. My daughters, 
ages 18 and 22, and I haven't missed 
an episode. We even rewatch them. 
The show is full of good-hearted 


VADO 


laughs, the girls are gorgeous, and we 
get lots of tips оп how to look sexy and 
keep life fun. I wish they lived next 
door to us. 1 totally understand Hef's 
relationships with all three—they are 
based on love. 

‘Tamara Lee 

Corona Del Mar, California 


у 


Thank you to Holly, Bridget and 
Kendra for stopping by Stogies Cigar 
Lounge while on their publicity tour. 
We had a great time, and it’s still caus- 
ing a buzz around town. 

Russ Daniels 
Lodi, California 


AL PACINO 
By posing such trivial questions to 
Al Pacino as “Do you feel as though 
you belong in a museum?” and “How 
does praise affect your hat size?” (200, 
December), Lawrence Grobel comes off 
as having little respect for the actor or 
his work. How did Grobel get this job, 
and who does he think he is, anyway? 
Jared Sunrai 
‘Twin Falls, Idaho 
You never know which questions will pro- 
voke an enlightening response, and Grobel, 


Tony asks, "You got a problem with that?” 


who is a longtime contributing editor, knows 
this better than most. He has interviewed 
Pacino many times. In fact, Simon e Schus- 
ter in August will publish Al Pacino: In 
Conversation With Lawrence Grobel. 


TOUGH TICKETS 

Your report on Super Bowl hustlers 
(The Ticket Masters, December) is on the 
money. Jacksonville was a tough game 
because Eagles fans came in droves 


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and expected a victory. I had orders 
for 480 tickets, and I found them, but 
1 also lost $150,000 doing it. Still, like 
the broker you call the General, we 
make a profit four of every five years. 
Last year wasn't even the most intense 
Super Bowl—that was 1998, Packers 
vs. Broncos in San Diego. Not only 
was John Elway expected to retire, but 
Green Bay fans rarely sell. That's why 
tickets still cost $3,000 at the end of the 
first quarter. In Jacksonville, the Gen- 
eral spent what he had to spend to fi 
his orders; many of his competitors 
not. One broker had to stand in front 
of 300 Philadelphia fans in a hotel 
lobby and tell them he had only 220 
tickets. That nearly caused a riot. In 
situations like that, when the middle- 
men are scrounging for seats, you'll be 
happy to be working with a licensed 
broker. The worst financial scenario | 
can imagine for the 2007 Super Bowl 
in Miami would be to have the Giants 
there. New Yorkers would pay any- 
thing, and that would drive up my 
costs to fill advance orders. One thing 
has changed: Тһе game is less corpo- 
rate and more of a house party, which 
has added an edge to the business, 
especially given the cash involved. 

Alex Pramenko 

VIP Sports Marketing 

Chicago, Illinois 


MARTINI SURPRISE 
My husband made me a white christ- 
mas (After Hours, December) this morn- 
ing. I am writing to thank you for my 
first martini morning sex and the best 
day of my life so far. 
Stephanie Whitacre 
Akron, Ohio 


ONE AND ONLY 
In Dream a Little Dream (December), 
you describe Mark Hamill as “the orig- 
inal Luke Skywalker.” But aside from 
an infant in Episode Ш, no other actor 
has played the character. 
John Harris 
Memphis, Tennessee 


THE BEST PARTS 
"Тһе photo of Mimi Rogers in Sex in 
Cinema 2005 is easily the sexiest image 
in the December issue. 
Louis Claudio 
Safety Harbor, Florida 


Iam blown away by Chinese Ameri- 
can actress Eugenia Yuan (After Hours, 
December). She doesn’t think guys in 
the West consider her sexy? Please. 

John Smith 
Toronto, Canada 


А CLASSIC ERROR? 
In November's DVD reviews you call 
the “features-filled” Birth of a Nation 


“worth making noise about.” I'm all for 
freedom of speech and artistic value, 
but Birth of a Nation is nothing more 
than a tribute to the Ku Klux Klan. 

Kevin Wilson 

New York, New York 

To recognize the film as a technical mas- 

terpiece is not to endorse the Klan, just as 
praising Triumph of the Will is not endors- 
ing Nazism. 


BARRET ROBBINS 
Thank you for your article on my 
brother Barret Robbins (Down Line- 
man, November). His brain chemis- 
try is being monitored, and we hope 
that he will get the treatment he 
needs and turn the tragedies of his 
life into a source of inspiration for 
himself and others who suffer from 
bipolar disorder. 
Scott Robbins 
Houston, Texas 


HOLIDAY PLAYMATE 
Game over! Christine Smith (Must 
Love Dogs, December) is the next 
Playmate of the Year. She is abso- 
lutely flawless. 
John Devine 
Las Vegas, Nevada 


Christine Smith likes warm and cuddly. 


Dog lover Christine Smith is incred- 
ible, especially her sweater puppies. 

Тот Norman 

Reno, Nevada 


In my previous life I was a yellow 
Lab. Many of my doggy memories 
have been repressed, but the opening 
page of your pictorial brought back 
many fond ones. Will Christine take 
me back in human form? 

Joseph Roosth 
Houston, Texas 


E-mail via the web at LETTERS.PLAYBOY.COM Or write: 730 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10019 


PLAYBOYSTORE.COM 


Babe of the Month 


Issa Bayaua 


DUKES UP, MISS ISSA IS 
READY TO RUMBLE 


Over drinks at a slick Santa 
Monica restaurant, pop music's 
23-year-old diva-in-waiting 
Issa Bayaua is talking tough. 
“Watch out," she warns. “I 
may knock you dead." She's 
describing her sparring chops; 
boxing is part of the workout 
routine that keeps her phy- 
sique cut yet curvy. "I'm very 
competitive," Issa teases, run- 
ning a finger along the rim of 
her glass. “І һауе to be the 
best female fighter in the 
gym." Her debut single, "Stay 
Up," shows similar swagger; 
it's less an invitation to noc- 
turnal fun than a challenge to 
your manly endurance. But 
enough with the sex appeal. 
Issa assures us that her pipes 
are what really count. She's 
been polishing her voice since 
she was five, when her mother 
would take her to San Diego 
parks to sing for picnicking 
families—an exercise in pre- 
cociousness she admits was 
"kind of embarrassin It's 
our only hint that Issa hasn't 
always been completely at 
ease being Issa. Seconds later 
she describes her habit of 
hitting the clubs solo. Finding 
a dance partner is never hard, 
particularly when she’s dressed 
to thrill. “A lingerie designer 
at the PLAYBOY photo shoot 
gave me a red corset," she 
explains. “I wore it out the 
same night, and | looked hot.” 
But then she has to dash: 
Baby, the tiny Maltese stashed 
beneath the table in a Louis 
Vuitton bag, is going to the 
vet. “I always make my Baby 
comfortable," she coos. So 
much for the knockout postur- 
ing—turns out she's a softy. 


ә. 
бк, 


may 


| knock 
2 you 
dead. 
Fm very 
- com- 
petitive.” 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIE CHILDERS 


[afterhours 


Tease and Spank You 


Call her the torch- 
bearer for the lost art 
of burlesque, a PLAYBOY 
cover girl or Mrs. Mari- 
lyn Manson—just don’t 
call her a stripper. With 
Burlesque and the Art 
of the Teese, Dita Von 
Teese provides a win- 
dow (or three) on her 
world. More than a 
Picture book, it’s also 
a history of burlesque 
and fetish and a how- 
to guide for your own 
vamp-to-be. Intrigu- 
ing? Of corset is. 


nom 


Tibe ГІ of the TEESE 


Dim r 


Websites That Sound Smutty (but Aren’t) 


cummingfirst.com (Cumming First ipanywhere.com (ipAnywhere, an 
United Methodist Church) add-on to pcAnywhere software) 
gotahoe.com (Lake Tahoe, Incline penisland.net (Pen Island, a custom- 
Village/Crystal Bay Visitors Bureau) реп seller) 

speedofart.com (Speed of Art, the expertsexchange.net (European Ex- 


personal site of an art director) perts Exchange, a source for IT advice) 
whorepresents.com (a database of therapistfinder.com (a database of 
agents and whom they represent) therapists) 

Roll Over, 


Bay City Rollers 
BELLE & SEBASTIAN: BEST 
SCOTTISH BAND EVER? 


You would never have bet indie- 
tock outfit Belle & Sebastian 
would make it this far. Started 
a decade ago by Stuart Mur- 
doch as a school project, the 
band spun quiet, catchy tunes 
critics described as precious. 
The fragile sound hinted that 
Belle & Sebastian couldn't survive—much less conquer. 

PLAYBOY: In a recent Scottish magazine poll, Belle & Sebastian was 
voted the best Scottish band of all time. How did that feel? 
MURDOCH: | was mystified by that. It's just nice to be up there with 
the Jesus and Mary Chain, Aztec Camera and Cocteau Twins. 
PLAYBOY: You've taken the band in some new directions on your past 
two albums, Dear Catastrophe Waitress and The Life Pursuit. Strange as 
it sounds, Belle & Sebastian is kind of rocking these days. 
MURDOCH: Yes, the group has taken off to an extent and become 
tougher and more rocking. | picture myself as Ben-Hur in this 
chariot being pulled by six horses. The group is the six horses, and 
I'm the fellow trying to rein them in. | feel | have to make sure we 
don't just go off in a testeless direction. 

PLAYBOY: How does a Scot write "Piazza, New York Catcher"? 
MURDOCH: The song isn't really about him, but I do have a fond- 
ness for the Mets and particularly their ex-catcher. In Scotland they 
show baseball late at night, and I find watching it a good way to wind 
down. On one of my first trips to New York | went to a game at Shea 
Stadium, and for once | didn't feel like a tourist. 


[afterhours 


Neil Before the Camera 
JONATHAN DEMME CATCHES NEIL YOUNG ROCKING THE HIGH 


CHURCH OF COUNTRY MUSIC 


Early on, Jonathan Demme emerged as 
а director with a distinctly musical bent, 
filming Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense 
and the soundtrack-driven Something 
Wild. With Neil Young: Heart of Gold he 
documents Young's two-night stand at 
Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, formerly 
home to the Grand Ole Opry. 

PLAYBOY: Neil Young is a much-filmed 
artist. What sets this movie apart? 
DEMME: It's Neil taking stock: Here's what 
he has learned in his life thus far about 
family, friends, loss, joy and tragedy. 
PLAYBOY: In the film Young displays more 
sartorial acumen than usual. Did you have 
any input on his wardrobe? 

DEMME: Мо. All I сап say is that опе night 
| found myself at the dinner table with the 
clothing designer Manuel, who did all these 
great costumes over the years—Elvis's 
gold lamé suit, Gram Parsons's outfits, 
everything Johnny Cash wore for the last 
20 years of his life. It was a fait accom- 


pli that Manuel would do the costumes. 
PLAYBOY: How did you pick the songs? 
DEMME: | wanted to film the Prairie Wind 
suite at the Ryman—that was it. 1 had fallen 
in love with those 10 songs. Then | realized 
we'd end up with a 55-minute movie. So I 
asked Neil if he'd do an encore to pad out 
the running time to 90 minutes. We were 
іп а restaurant, and Neil took out a pen and 
started writing on the white place mat, off 
the top of his head—“‘One of These Days,’ 
‘Comes a Time,’ ‘Harvest Moon.'" | was 
looking at the place mat, thinking, eBay, 
eBay, eBay. One song | pushed for was 
“The Old Laughing Lady,” which did not 
make it onto Neil’s list. | told him, “I can't 
explain why, but it seems to be the missing 
jigsaw piece. You could do it alone onstage 
after the audience has left.” After Friday 
night's show, he went out there, picked up 
his Hank Williams guitar and pulled notes 
out of it like you've never heard before. 
That's how we end the movie. 


Stripped! 


Here's Elena Gibson in winning form 
at Miss Pole Dance World 2005, held 
in Amsterdam. Judges later ruled that 
Gibson's routine had “strip elements" 
and gave her title to the runner-up. 


Motorcycle 
Madness 


HOW HE MADE 
A 40-YEAR-OLD BIKE 
DO 180 


The World's Fastest Indian 
tells the story of Burt 
Munro, the New Zealand 
daredevil who set speed 
records in the 1960s ona 
motorcycle that was nearly 
an antique. Munro's friend 
Roger Donaldson, who is 
also the film's writer and 
director, tells us how the 
eccentric Kiwi did it. 
"Burt's bike, а 1920 
Indian Scout, would nor- 
mally go about 50 miles an hour. In 1967 
he set a record of 183 mph with it. To go 
that fast, he needed to streamline it, but 
he knew nothing about aerodynamics. 
He just built a fiberglass goldfish shape 
around the bike because that's what he 
thought would work. Inside, he first con- 
verted the engine from a side valve to 
an overhead valve, then radically modi- 
fied the pistons, rods and valve equip- 
ment. He made cylinder liners out of 
cast-iron sewage pipes, and to make the 
pistons he melted down some old car 
pistons plus metal he had gotten from 
overseas—he never really knew what it 


was, maybe titanium—and poured the 
liquid into a mold he had built by hand. 
He moved the fuel tank to the rear so he 
could lie prone. The first version of the 
bike, the one in our movie, was unstable, 
at times uncontrollable. To make it go 
Straight he had to alter the aerodynamics 
by lifting his head into the slipstream 
Once, the wind blew his goggles off and 
he was riding blind at nearly 200 mph. 
People ask why he didn't use a newer 
bike. I think he took a perverse pleasure 
in fixing up this old Indian. He wanted to 
be the oldest guy setting records on the 
oldest motorcycle." 


23 


24 


[afterhours 


What Sort of Men 
Study PLAYBOY? 


NEXT TIME SHE ASKS—YOU NEED THEM FOR 
ACADEMIC RESEARCH 


Professors James K. Beggan (sociology, University of 

Louisville) and Scott T. Allison (psychology, University of 

Richmond) don’t just read us for the articles—they dissect 

us for scholarly publications. From their curricula vitae: 

“Tough Women in the Unlikeliest of Places: The Unexpected 
Toughness of the Playboy Playmate.” The Journal of 
Popular Culture 38 (2005). 

“"What Sort of Man Reads PLAYBoy?' The Self-Reported 
Influence of РЕАУВОУ оп the Construction of Masculinity.” 
The Journal of Меп 5 Studies 11 (2003). 

“The Playboy Playmate Paradox: The Case Against the Objec- 
tification of Women.” Gendered Sexualities 6 (2002). 

“What Do Playboy Playmates Want? Implications of Expressed 
Preferences in the Construction of the ‘Unfinished’ Masculine 
Identity.” The Journal of Men's Studies 10 (2001). 

“The Playboy Rabbit Is Soft, Furry and Cute: Is This Really 
the Symbol of Masculine Dominance of Women?” The 
Journal of Men's Studies 9 (2001). 


“Ап Analysis of Stereotype Refutation in PLAvBOv by an 
Editorial Voice: The Advisor Hypothesis" (with Patricia 
Gagné). The Journal of Men's Studies 9 (2000). 


Irish Jigger 


DON'T SHAKE ОР STIR THIS SHAMROCK 5НОТ 


We wouldn't presume to tell a native Irish- 
man how or what to drink on March 17, but 
really, is the American urban sophisticate 
obliged to carry on as if he were in some 
dank, drafty pub of the Auld Sod? Moreover, 
despite the brewer's best efforts and fancy 
cans, the challenge of serving keg-quality 
Guinness in the comfort of one's own party 
has yet to be solved. So for the love of Saint 
Patrick, loosen up and do something differ- 
ent, Bonus: This colorful, cute and totally 
gimmicky shooter will be a hit with ladies 
who don't like Guinness or Jameson—that 
is, most ladies. Sláinte. 


Lt j 


Irish Flag 
1 part crëme de menthe In a tall shot glass, pour 
(green) ingredients carefully, in order 


1 part Irish cream liqueur 
1 part Mandarine Napoléon 


given, so that each floats on 
the preceding one. 


Employees of the Month 


Hot Sellers 


TWINS BRIDGET AND KATRINA EVERETT 
PRODUCE IMPRESSIVE FIGURES 


PLAYBOY: So you're both in sales? 

BRIDGET (left): Yes, | sell plastic products to grocery chains. 
KATRINA (right): | sell billing services to health clubs. 

PLAYBOY: What's your favorite part of the job? 

BRIDGET: Building relationships with clients. 

KATRINA: Building relationships with clients. 

PLAYBOY: Wow, you really are twins. Got any good tales of 
double-dating high jinks? 

BRIDGET: Maybe we will, now that we're both single again. 
Katrina just moved in across the street from me. 

KATRINA: We're going to start raising some hell. 

PLAYBOY: For the record, you're fraternal twins, not identical? 
BRIDGET: Yes, but the older we get, the more we look alike. 
KATRINA: We sound alike, too. | have a huge crush on this guy, 
and I haven't done anything about it, so Bridget's going to call 
him and pretend to be me to break the ice. I'm a little shy. 
PLAYBOY: What's your sister's best physical asset? 

BRIDGET: Her butt is perkier than mine. She has a great ass. 
KATRINA: Okay, but that's probably because I'm shorter. Her 
boobs are much better than mine. 

BRIDGET: I've noticed clients staring at my boobs, but ! don't 
take offense—you use what you got. 


Employee of the Month candidates: Send pictures to Playboy Photography Department, Attn: 
Employee of the Month. 680 North Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60611. Must be at least 
18 years old. Must send photocopies of a driver's license and another valid ID (not a credit card), 
one of which must include a current photo. 


Capital Hill 


The U.S. Senate voted 57 to 42 in October to reject 
an amendment to a bill that would have raised the 
minimum hourly wage from $5.15 to $6.25. It has 
been a decade since the Senate last raised the mini- 
mum wage; over the same period, senators’ own annual 


salaries have increased by $28,000. 


Bunch of Bull Shirt 


Laney High School, Michael Jordan's alma mater, collected $162,000 
from Nike this past year from sales of a replica of Jordan’s Laney jersey 
and other related gear. The figure represents just 7% of the net sales 
of Jordan-Laney products, to which Nike holds exclusive rights. 


Most Dominoes 


Knocked Over 
4,002,146, by employees of 
a Dutch television show. The 
feat was nearly foiled when ап 
uninvited house sparrow felled 
23,000 pieces during setup. 
The bird was shot by an exter- 
minator, which made things 
worse: The feathered meddler 
was an endangered species. 


| t - 
State of Undress | 

Number of strip | Dump Roast 

5 3 clubs in West Vir- The U.S. rejected 357,000 pre- 

ginia—or about 3 packaged meals donated by the 

| U.K. after Hurricane Katrina be- 

| cause of the ban on British beef. 


per 100,000 residents, the 
highest ratio in the U.S. 


1 Owe U. 
$300 billion 

The total cost to put 
the class of 2009 
through college. 


$3.6 million 

According to Forbes, the amount Chris- 
tina Aguilera received to sing three songs 
at the wedding of Russian billionaire 


Andrei Melnichenko and model Aleksan- 
dra Kokotovic in the south of France. 


Extra Credit 


Last year credit card 
companies sent an 
estimated 6 billion 
solicitations through 
the mail—or 27 for 
each adult in the U.S. 
The average Ameri- 
can household has 
about 8 credit cards. 


Nectar of the God 


The Catholic Church spent $1,100 
advertising for new priests on beer 
coasters in U.K. bars last summer. 


Spam Futures 

An online study that tracked 38 
stocks touted in junk e-mails found 
that in a six-month period only 3 of 
the stocks had risen in price. 


| Czarbucks 


Sergei Zuykov owns 
the Russian rights to 
at least 300 trade- 

| marks, though he 
doesn't plan to open 
any shops. When 
Starbucks tried to 
move to Russia, Zuykov offered to 
sell the company the rights to its 
own name for $600,000. 


25 


PLAYBOY 


26 


А. Keep both you and your sweetie sexily under wraps. 
These throws have the feel of cashmere and are generously 
sized (51* x 71") in the softest imported acrylic/cotton. А 
white Rabbit Head оп black оса black Rabbit Head on pink ог 
white; simply fiip each over for the opposite color scheme. 
6728 Black/White Reversible Throw $49 

Buy 2—SAVE $10 

7501 Reversible Throw Set of2 588 


В. NEW! Midnight blue. The neon tube around the Rabbit 
Head in this black wall clock will add a dreamy tint to your late- 
night encounters. 11" diameter. 

10222 Neon Rabbit Head Ciock $35 


С. NEW! Three-dimensional refreshment. Molded crystal 
Rabbit Heads rise from the bese of these sexy glass shooters, 
Set of 2. Each holds 2¥ oz. 

10224 3-0 Rabbit Head Shooter Sel. $18 


Buy 2 sets—SAVE $7 
10225 4 3-0 Rabbit Head Shooters $29 
D. NEW! Get a grip. Styish stitched leather makes th 


less steel flask with a Rabbit Head on the side easy to hold on 
to. 4" x3". Holds 5 oz. 
10044 Classic Leather Flask $15 


“To receive FREE standard shipping and 
handling in the U.S. only: 


visit playboy e.com 
{enter Source Code MG552 during checkout) or 
call 800 


(mention Source Code MG552) ог 


order by mail 


please send check or money order to: 
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(include Source Code MG552) 


Sales tax: On orders shipped to NY add B.375%, IL add 
6.75%, CA add 8.25%. (Canadian orders accepted 


EH. 


Сай the toll-free number above 
to request a Playboy catalog. 


E W S 


| V FOR VENDETTA 


Sometimes science fiction can seem very real 


Science fiction often tackles the big issues and does so 
way ahead of the curve. We're talking serious and weighty 
problems such as totalitarian governments that use reli- 
gion and fear as weapons. Such old-school masters of 
speculative fiction as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and 
Arthur С. Clarke ignited the torch picked up by latter-day 
maestros, including the brilliant graphic novelist Alan 
Moore. Moore's vision of dystopia, poorly served by the 
screen versions of his League of Extraordinary Gentle- 
men and From Hell, gets a more fitting adaptation in V 
for Vendetta. The film stars Natalie Portman, Hugo Weav- 
ing, Stephen Rea and John Hurt. At the helm is James 
McTeigue, former assistant 

director for Matrix creators "|t". 

Angy and Larry Wachonsk, (tS a Way of 
who роосу and wrote the referencing 
screenplay. Set against the ч iti 
landscape of fascist Britain today’s political 
circa 2040, the action kicks Situation. 

off when a flamboyant masked 

freedom fighter known as V (Weaving) rescues a young 
woman (Portman) from torture and interrogation by 
secret police. "It's sort of an oblique way of referencing 
today's political situation by saying, ‘Oh, it happens 35 
years from now,’” Portman explains. "You can then criti- 
cize everything that's going on now and get it into peo- 
ple's minds subliminally." — Stephen Rebello 


Failure to Launch Our call: The overhyped McCon- 

sic ker) A30-something | aughey may be the sexiest man 
dogs (McConaughey) is far Ga comfy sponging off his par- | alive to People magazine, but 
ents and playing paintball to ever leave the nest. But when he | moviegoers tend to yawn when 
meets his dream girl (Parker), he fears he's been set up by his | he's on the big screen. This 
folks, who are frantic to get him out of the house. man needs a hit. 


16 Blocks Our call: Those who wouldn't 
This buddy action flick pits Willis, a | walk 16 feet to see Willis can 
gritty NYPD vel, against Def, a motormouthed key witness. | take comfort that director 
But can the twosome walk 16 crime-ridden blocks to the | Richard Donner knows how to 
courthouse while thugs are gunning for them? Bullets fly, jokes | deliver slam-bang action. And 
are cracked, and yes, polar opposites find common ground. trash-talking Def is a winner. 


The ӨНЕГЕ Our call: Okay, imagine if Frank 
ges, a е оп, Capra tackled the world of 

шге J lian Fugit) This quirky | рот, presenting loving families 
ensemble comedy features Bridges as a beaten-down unem- | alongside jokes about carpet 
ployed dad and ex-husband. Strapped for cash, he and his fel- | munching and dick size. It's an 
low small-town oddballs band together to make a porn movie. | amusing spin on ап old subject. 


The Hills Have Eyes Our call: Does anyone really 
aron Sta ed Lev li Nuke-deformed | tire of the endless struggle be- 
hill spawn terrorize a family headed cross-country in direc- | tween humans and mutants? 
tor Alexandre Aja's remake of Wes Craven's 1977 low-budget | We don't, and we're intrigued 
classic. Who will survive? We're pulling for beautiful babe De | that this remake boasts such а 
Ravin, who's already been put through hell on Lost. good director and quirky cast. 


27 


reviews [ dvds 


-CAPOTE 


The celebrated author sells his soul to write /л Cold Blood 


This compelling portrait of Truman Capote focuses on the five years the ruthless 
young author spent conceiving his masterpiece In Cold Blood, based on the sensa- 
tional 1959 murders of a Kansas family by a pair of drifters. Philip Seymour Hoffman 
shines as the title character, the preening, self-aggrandizing writer with the high South- 
ern drawl who dazzles everyone—especially himself—with his devastating wit. When 


the drifters are caught and 
Capote slowly cajoles one 
to reveal details about his 
life and the killings, we real- 
ize that Capote is a consum- 
mate performer who does 
everything for effect. This is 
humorous when he charms 
the literati but terrifying 
when he’s with the killers, 
methodically making sure 
he gets everything he needs 
for his great book before 
they hang. Extras: Prepro- 
duction and postproduction 
documentaries, including 
Hoffman on playing Capote. 
УУУУ; —Matt Steigbigel 


SAW И (2005) Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), a cancer- 
stricken psychopath, kidnaps his victims 
and puts them in depraved life-or-death 
situations. Bull-headed detective Eric Mat- 
thews (Donnie Wahlberg) is hot on his trail 
and snares the killer early on, but then must 
get inside Jigsaw's mind to rescue his son, 
whom the killer has abducted, before time 
runs out. Like its predecessor, this unapol- 
ogetically gory and sadistic movie is more 
fun than it should be; Jigsaw's skewed moral 
sensibilities give 
it a twisted philo- 
sophical resonance. 
Extras: Commen- 
tary, interviews, 
behind-the-scenes 
featurettes. ¥¥¥ 
—Bryan Reesman 


A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005) When 
Viggo Mortensen defends his small-town 
diner from two killers on the lam, the 
subsequent media blitz alerts gangster 
Ed Harris to his whereabouts. This top- 
notch psychological thriller from director 
David Cronenberg proves that comic- 
book adaptations 
can be more than 
Superhero movies. 
Extras: Cronen- 
berg commentary, 
behind-the-scenes 
featurettes. yyyVz 
--Впап Thomas 


THE CARY GRANT BOX SET The Cary 
Grant boxed in this essential set is, with 
one exception, a screwball comedian. 
The five movies are uniformly excellent, 
beginning with the disc debut of George 
Cukor's superb Holiday (1938, pictured) 
and closing with George Stevens's The Talk 
of the Town (1942). Formidable women 
always bring out Grant's best persona, а 
uniquely stylish sophisticate cum clown 
with an accent all his own. Holiday casts 
Grant to kinetic effect opposite Katharine. 
Hepburn, but he's no less interesting with 


Buxom former B-movie siren Virginia Madsen has never shied away from chancy 
roles on her road toward legitimacy. She hit potholes like Fire With Fire (1986), 
Zombie High (1987) and Hot to Trot (1988) before scoring a surprise hit with 1992's 


Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth (1937), 
Jean Arthur in the adventure Only Angels 
Have Wings (1939) and Rosalind Russell 
in His Girl Friday 
(1940). Extras: 
Featurettes on 
each movie, 10 
postcards with 
vintage images 
of Grant. УУУУ 
— Greg Fagan 


DOMINO (2005) In director Tony Scott's 
ode to the late bounty hunter Dornino 
Hervey, sexpot Keira Knightley plays the 
Hollywood offspring who busts balls with 
a crew of wranglers. The seizureinducing 
cinematography will turn off some, but risk 
a grand mal to see scene-stealer Mo'Nique 
defend her cus- 
tom mixed-race 
monikers such 
as Japanic and 
blacktino. Extras: 
Deleted scenes 
and featurettes. 
УУУ; —Кеппу Lull 


GREY'S ANATOMY: SEASON ONE (2005) 
A cult of brainy viewers has embraced 
ABC's medical drama about sex-obsessed 
surgical interns at a Seattle hospital. We 
can't blame Dr. Derek Shepherd (Patrick 
Dempsey) for offering private physicals 
to his co-workers when they fill out their 
scrubs as Ellen Pompeo, Katherine Heigl 
and Sandra Oh do. No wonder the season 
finale involves an 
outbreak of syph- 
ilis—among the 
staff. Extras: A 
making-of fea- 


turette, audio com- É > 
mentaries. ¥¥¥ > 
—Buzz McClain МЕ 


creepy Candyman. А decade of 
mostly straight:to-video cheapies 
followed, until her unexpected 
turn as a soulful, wine-loving 
divorcee іп 2004's Sideways 
earned her an Oscar nomination 
and left us thirsty for more. Her 
impressive anatomy has hardly 
been scarce onscreen, as 1983's 
Class (pictured) shows. But as 
a nurturing wife and mother 
opposite Harrison Ford in the 
new thriller Firewall, Madsen 
and her bosom buddies appear 
to be kept under wraps. 


reviews [ music 


[ GOING UNDERGROUND 1 


The Subways live fast on Young for Eternity 


This trio takes cues from its Britpop forebears—bands 
such as Supergrass and Ash—but also seems con- 
scious of the way Swedish bands like the Hives, Shout 
Out Louds and Mando Diao have managed to enliven 
what is a fairly static, conservative niche: classic, loud 
guitar pop. Billy Lunn has a good melodic howl. Bassist 
and occasional vocalist Charlotte Cooper is the newest 
in a distinguished line of indie hotties. And unlike many 
drummers since the success of the White Stripes and 
Franz Ferdinand, Josh Morgan does not ride the cymbals 
and high hat, taking instead a crashing-straight-ahead 
approach on catchy U.K. singles “Oh Yeah” and “With 
You.” The Subways have multiple gears, too, showing 
a quieter side on “Lines of Light” and “No Goodbyes.” 
What's refreshing about this LP is that it's not trendy. 
This is not a group of hipster record collectors who 
have stumbled upon another early-1980s obscurity to 
mimic. Instead, just as Oasis rejected many of the de 
rigueur affectations of Britpop to shoot for timeless, 
archetypal rock and roll, the Subways, in their desire to 
stay young for eternity, craft music similarly unburdened 
by today's microfads. Nice one. (Sire) ¥¥¥ —Tim Mohr 


RHETT MILLER * The Believer 

Rhett Miller is best known as the singer 
for the boozy, foot-stompin' Old 97's. 
Desperation is his strength, and he plays 
it up here on "Help Me Suzanne" and the 
jumpy "Singular Girl." The album has 
less twang and more pop, possibly at 
the expense of his band's usual power. 
(Verve Forecast) УУУ —Jason Buhrmester 


VAN MORRISON « Pay the Devil 

Largely a tribute to Ray Charles's 1962 
Modern Sounds in Country and Western 
Music, this is Morrison's take on Nashville. 
Given that he founded Them—regarded as 
the Belfast Stones—it's no surprise to hear 
a blues touch, too, especially on songs by 
Louis Armstrong and Big Joe Turner. Truly 
great stuff. (Lost Highway) ¥¥¥¥ --ГМ. 


AUDIO BULLYS * Generation 

Emerging at the same time as the Streets, 
the Bullys were lumped in with the nascent 
hooligan-hop scene. Back with a some- 
what mellower sound—typified by the 
now familiar lead single, the dramatic, 
Nancy Sinatra-sampling “Shot You 
Down"—the Bullys maintain their signa- 
ture bounce. (Astralwerks) УУУ —T.M. 


SERGIO MENDES * Timeless. 

This dreaded collaboration with today's 
stars (produced by Black Eyed Pea 
Will.Am) isn't bad. Tellingly, the rappier 
tracks are the least satisfying; we'd dig 
more of the ladies (Jill Scott, Erykah 
Badu, India.Arie). But you could do 
much worse for a summer deck-party 
disc. (Concord) ¥¥¥ --/овһ Robertson 


MYLO » Destroy Rock & Roll 

Down-tempo electro, whimsical break 
beat, blissed-out trip-house—call it what 
you want. Or for simplicity, just call Mylo 
the Scottish version of Royksopp. What- 
ever the description, it is the perfect 
midpoint between party pulse and chill 
out beat. Take the club vibe home with 
this slinky classic. (RCA) ¥¥¥¥ --ГМ. 


CRUNA * A Hustla'z Love Story 

As the name suggests, this one recalls 
the 1970s soul of Curtis Mayfield. But 
don't let the old-school falsetto foo! you. 
This Tennessee native has a harsh story 
to tell about the modern-day realities 
of romantic love. Cruna's singing is 
Sweet, but his lyrics pack a mean punch. 
(Reprise) ¥¥¥ —Leopold Froehlich 


THE GOURDS » Heavy Ornamentals 

These zydecoinfluenced Texans have 
always mixed toe-tapping catchiness 
with foot-shooting quirk and seem a 
bit sheepish about this collection's 
directness. Yet it's just that quality that. 
makes this a better Gourds record than 
most—meaning it's a very good record 
indeed. (Eleven Thirty) ¥¥¥ IR. 


CAST KING * Saw Mill Man 

Some musicians get better with age. 
King, a 79-year-old Alabaman, can't 
get much better than he is here, with a 
dozen relentless songs about death and 
drinking. This is unregenerate country 
music at its most intense. What King 
lacks in complexity he more than makes 
up in emotion. (Locust) УУУ; — —LF. 


GOURDS 


PRESENT 


reviews[ games 


fully (and spectacularly) destructi- 
ble scenery on a level we've never 
seen before. What the game lacks 
in realism it more than makes up. 
for in sheer chain-reaction chaos— à 
missile contrails roar past your 
windshield as entire buildings fly 
apart and fuel stations blow sky- 
high, scattering debris. But the 
game's crowning contribution to 
the genre has to be its "unwreck" 
feature, which lets players rewind 
to undo missed shortcuts or par- 
ticularly nasty deaths; the clouds. 
гой in reverse as blown-to-bits 
cars fly back together. Here's to 
the death of scripted animation. 
Every wreck here is uniquely your 
own. УУУУ? —Chris Hudak 


When you get behind the wheel in Full Auto (Xbox 360), you're also picking up a 
weapon. Each of these cars packs heavy ordnance, from mines to machine guns to 
missiles and more. And if the opponent in your sights somehow escapes unscathed, 
the buildings behind him won't. The muscle under the Xbox 3605 hood allows for 


[ CRASH COURSE | 


Full Auto turns vehicular homicide into a day at the races 


MVP '06 NCAA BASEBALL (PS2, Xbox) 
The sights, the sounds, the sweating 
hordes of awkwardlooking freshmen: It's 
baseball, college-style. This, the first-ever 
college baseball video game, is filled out 
with teams from 128 leading universities 
and plays a very respectable season 
thanks to solid gameplay mechanics 
(including an effective new batting scheme). 
We're big fans 
of the real-time 
score tickers from 
ESPN, which fur- 
ther blur the line 
between real and 
virtual ball. ууу 
—Scott Steinberg 


MARC ECKO'S GETTING UP (PC, PS2, 
Xbox) Trane, an aspiring graffiti artist, is 
out to make his mark on New Radius, an 
analogue for New York City. Help him by 
scaling and spray painting skyscrapers 
and billboards while evading oppressive 
authorities, rival crews and street thugs. 


| The higher you can get your creations, the 


greater your rep will grow as you evolve 
from Toy to King. 
It's a refreshingly 
unique blend of 
street art and 


action with nary 
a nine-millimeter | 


Қ) 


in sight. УУУУ; 
--Магс Saltzman 


WORLD SOCCER: WINNING ELEVEN 9 
(PC, PS2, Xbox) Video game soccer is 
often “arcaded up” in the States to compen- 
sate for the sport's demands on the atten- 
tion span. But the long-running Winning 
Eleven has never felt the need to pander 
to footie phobic American tastes, and we 
couldn't be happier about it. Purists who 
don't need to see every goal in the top 
corner and can _ 5 

handle a score 
less half or two 
will be in heaven. 
This year’s ver- 
sion comes with 
online play. ¥¥¥ 

—Scott Alexander 


FULL SPECTRUM WARRIOR: TEN 
HAMMERS (PC, PS2, Xbox) This sequel 
to 2004's innovative squad strategy 
simulator raises the adrenaline factor 
tenfold, with four squads of soldiers as 
well as vehicles at your command. Driv- 
ing tanks through the fictional Middle 
Eastern country of Zekistan is a thrill. 
New vehicles also improve online multi- 
player gaming, as 
does the ability 
to recruit neutral 
computer-con- 
trolled residents 
to join your side 
of the fight. ¥¥¥ 
—John Gaudiosi 


[ LET THE MUSIC PLAY ] 


One man's quest for musical 
immortality through gaming 


Video games have convinced me that 
I'm Jimi Hendrix, DJ Danger Mouse and 
James Brown rolled into one. This may 
‘or may not be a good thing. It all started 
with GUITAR HERO, a PS2 music- 
and-rhythm game featuring a 
replica Gibson controller complete 
with five fret 
buttons on 
the neck 
and a 
wham- 
my bar. | 
strummed while fin- 
gering the correct frets and 
within 30 seconds I had some very 
striking power chords humming out of 
my TV to the tune of “1 Wanna Be 
Sedated.” Suddenly I could play guitar. 
Drums were the next obvious step. 1 
couldn't find games featuring full kits, 
so I made do with GameCube's frighten- 
ingly addictive DONKEY KONGA 2 and 
its plastic bongos. Once I was convinced 
1 could back Santana should the need 
arise, it was time to work on my pipes. 1 
eagerly plugged KARAOKE REVOLU- 
TION FARTY's microphone into my 
Xbox. The game tracks the pitch of 
your singing to figure your 
Score. As it turns out, my 
voice is best suited to 

duets with Boy George. 
and Cyndi Lauper. 

Thankfully 1 am 

naturally modest. 

Karaoke Revolution 
supports dancing while 
you sing, but my brain does not, so 
1 switched to the break-dancing game 
FLOW (PS2). It didn't take long for me 
to realize that my skills amount to one 
tired robot dance and a smidgen of run- 
ning man. 1 figured if | couldn't bust. 
much in the way of moves, at least 1 
could spin a little juice. DJ simulator 
BEATMANIA (PS2) comes complete 
with a mini 
keyboard- 
turntable. 

Hit the right 

notes while 

you scratch 

and you'll 

create a mu- 
sical stew that 
can zombify the 
neighborhood club kids for 
hours. Eager to test what Га 
learned, I grabbed my turntable and some 
LPs, then borrowed amps, guitars and 
drum kits from friends. Since then I've 
ruined my records and been threatened 
with eviction, and my dogs haven't come 
out from under the couch. Thanks, music 
video games. Thanks a lot. —Brian Crecente 


WHERE AND HOW YO BUY ON PAGE 131 


reviews 


books 


MUSIC RIFFS 


Bowie, how to be a rap mogul and all that jazz 


Last year was a banner one for books on music. If you’re looking for more, try Mick 
Воск’ Moonage Daydream: The Life and Times of Ziggy Stardust. It combines 
photographs of Bowie's androgynous alter ego with commentary by the Thin White 
Duke himself and does for cross-dressing what Jayne Mansfield did for the D cup. 
Picking up where Bowie left off, Simon Reynolds's Rip It Up and Start Again is a 
thoughtful history of the postpunk bands that today's artists never tire of referenc- 


me 


ing. Based on interviews with members 
of Devo, Talking Heads and more, it’s 
essential reading for anyone wonder- 
ing where such groups as the Strokes 
and Interpol found their musical inspira- 
tion. And lest anyone think the acad- 
emy has fallen off the bandwagon, 
management expert Richard Oliver's 
Hip Hop, Inc. examines the success 
strategies of rap moguls like Suge 
Knight, while Syracuse professor David 
Yatfe's Fascinating Rhythm: Reading 
Jazz in American Writing provides a 
brilliant account of the music's often 
overlooked influence on J.D. Salinger, 
Philip Roth and other lights of the liter- 
ary firmament. Alex Abramovich 


ON MICHAEL JACKSON * Margo Jefferson 
“Jackson's sperm count, I'm relieved to say, 
is one of the few things we know 
nothing about,” observes New 
York Times cultural critic Margo ON 
Jefferson. She goes on to cata [MICHAEL 
log what is known, assumed or 

rumored about the King of Pop, DACKSON 
recounting his life from his child- 
hood on the chitlin circuit and 
atop the pop charts, through his 
2005 acquittal on molestation 


charges. Along the way she makes cogent 
observations about Jackson's outsize 
talent and his bizarre behavior, 
but her intent isn't to find a 
Rosebud moment. Instead she 
turns her gimlet eye on the public 
that, she argues, has been com- 
plicit in the creation of all of 
Jackson's guises: child star, vic- 
tim, alleged sexual predator. We 
have met the freak, and he is truly 
ours. УУУ —Bill Vourvoulias 


JAZZ AGE BEAUTIES 
Alfred Cheney Johnston 
In the 1920s Alfred Cheney Johnston 
photographed stars, debutantes and 
Ziegfeld Follies dancers in velvet, pearls 
or nothing at all. Editor Robert Hudo- 
vernik hopes to revive interest in the 
neglected mas- 
ter with these 
sumptuous 
sepia-toned 
portraits, their 
subjects hum- 
ming with erot 
ic energy under 
a single, pitch- 
perfect light 
source. ¥¥¥ 
—J. Reynolds 


M LIU EA 


[ NOTEWORTHY LIVES ] 


Sam, Bob and the Beatles 


All the research in the world does not 
guarantee empathy for a biographical 
subject. But the finesse and scope of 
several recent biographies give dimen- 
sion and voice to our musical legends. 
Sam Cooke's influence on our cul- 
ture may be less evident than Elvis's, 
but Peter Guralnick's Dream Во 
resurrects this troubled, benevolent, 
ambitious man, and no matter what 
your feelings are about Cooke's 
music, it makes for an essential, 
thrilling read. Guralnick doesn't shy 
away from the profane contradictions 
of the gospel world or from those 
of Cooke’s private life: His home 
was a disaster, his epic extramarital 
carousing leaving a resentful wife and 
abandoned children adrift. Guralnick 
plays it as it lays, neither lionizing 


Bob Spitz's biography TI tl 
frank and authoritative, though some- 
what clinical compared with Gural- 
nick's soulful feel. In this big book, 
the little things shine. After the 
Beatles’ first record-company 
audition, manager Brian 
Epstein ordered “a bottle 
of wine, a touch that, іп 
most of their fami- 
lies, was reserved 
for funerals.” 
This deft detail 
demarcates the 
band's past from 
its future. 

One of the 
most reluctant 
participants in 
the Beatles” 
story has long 
been Lennon's 
first wife, Cynthia. Her perspective on 
John is refreshing here: The growth of 
the band happens in the background 
while she mollifies his stern Aunt Mimi 
and sets up an apartment for the cou- 
ple's trysts. By the time of “She Loves 
You,” there's real feeling when she 
writes, “I loved that song: It reminded 
me of John's first Christmas „card to 
те—'1 love you yes, yes, yes." 

Bob Dylan's autobiography, Ch 

e, is surprisingly 
Ionen apa cceli. ИЕ our 
affection: "Kennedy, King, Malcolm 
X..l didn't see them as leaders 
being shot down but rather as fathers 
whose families had been left 
wounded." Pleasantly shambling in 
its narrative structure, Volume One is. 
like a jigsaw-puzzle piece that may 
help form an expansive picture but 
also stands alone as a beautiful 
self-portrait. —Robert Gordon 


31 


NEW! Renowned for carefully composed, almost cinematic shots, Helmut 
Newton's signature style makes for a dramatic counterpoint to the PLAYBOY photog- 
raphy known the world over. Between shimmering metallic covers ara more than 
150 color and black & white photographs, the definitive collection of Newton nudes. 
You'll see his take on Playmates in Los Angeles, Nastassja Kinski playing out a fan- 
tasy with a doppelgänger doll, а Lolita-esque travelogue, plus much more. Feeturing 
a foreword by Hugh М. Hefner, an introduction by celebrated writer Walter Abish and 
an afterword by PLAYBOY's Director of Photography for the past 30 years, Gary Cole. 
Hardcover. 9" x 127. 176 pages. 


visit playboystore.com 
call 800-423-9494 


order by mail 

Please send check or money order 
10: PLAYBOY, P.O. Box 809, Itasca, 
IL 60143-0809. 

Enter, mention or include source 
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REMEMBERING THE MASTER 


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== DE - 


А new car company takes the road less traveled—at а swift 202 mph 


EVER SHOW UP at a party wearing the same cocktail dress as another guest? Neither have we. But we have seen drivers show up оп 
the highway in the same model car as our own. The horror! Starting this spring, Danish-born Henrik Fisker will offer car buyers options 
that are striking and, most important, unique. Fisker, who designed the Z8 for BMW and the DB9 for Aston Martin, has revived 1930s- 
era custom coach building with his new company, Fisker Coachbuild. The cars begin their life as a Mercedes or a BMW; Fisker's team 
then strips and refits them with super-high-end embellishments on the interior, exterior and power train. The result is a Fisker Coach- 
built automobile, with a Fisker logo on the sharklike nose, certified by the original manufacturer. Pictured above left is the 2006 Latigo 
CS coupe ($198,000, fiskercb.com) with BMW 650ci architecture. Under the hood is a 4.8-liter V8 that kicks out 360 hp. Above right 
and inset: the Tramonto (starting at $254,000), a Mercedes-Benz SLSS AMG lavishly restyled, with a 610 hp V8. Zero to 60 flies by ina 
mind-boggling 3.6 seconds, and the top speed is 202 miles an hour, putting this souped-up roadster well into Ferrari-land. We tested 
the Tramonto on the Pacific Coast Highway and found the steering and handling crisp, the acceleration hair-raising. Fisker will make 
only 150 of each car annually, so you won't see yourself coming and going. All you'll see is heads turning your way. 


5 Monster Head 
March Madness (beginning on the 14th): 21 SPEAKING OF DRIVING, spring is 


days, 13 cities, some $2.4 billion wagered upon us. The fairways beckon. 
worldwide. Now that's a tournament. St. Patrick's Nike's newish SasQuatch 
Day (17th): City authorities use 40 pounds of veg- 460 driver ($360, nike 
etable dye to turn the Chicago River green. South golf.com) has an almost 
Boston's Blackthorn pub will serve around 40 kegs human-size titanium 
of Guinness at the Southie parade. The vernal equi- head—460 cc, the le- 
nox (20th): On this day, because of gravitational pull gal limit on the tour. 
and the position of earth in the cosmos, legend has it It's designed for 
you can balance an egg on its end. What this has to maximum distance 
do with numbers, we have no idea. Benito Juárez's with the broadest 
birthday (21st): 2006 marks the 200th anniversary. possible sweet spot. 
of the birth of Mexico's greatest (and only Native Does it swing? Our 
American) president. Women's History Month: Cel- test driver bet cash on his 
ebrate by paying a visit to PLavBov's 634th Playmate, game, and he hit the green 


Monica Leigh. She's waiting for you on page 82. in more ways than one. 33 


34 


sz: MANTRACK 


a ve І h 


Marrakech Express 


A FEW MILES from here, the dark al- 
leys and frenzied thoroughfares of 
Marrakech teem with snake charm- 
ers, jewelry and bronze hagglers, and 
the aroma of exotic spices. But at Ksar 
Char-Bagh you can bathe in the unique 
ambience of Moroccan luxury. The 
French owners of this boutique hotel 
constructed their version of a 14th cen- 
tury Moorish palace with all the mod- 
ern touches, sparing no expense. It's a 
one-of-a-kind romantic hideaway, situ- 
ated in a date-palm oasis known as the 
Palmeraie, surrounded by the snow- 
capped Atlas Mountains. The French- 
Moroccan dining is unforgettable, and 
the lavish treasure-filled suites (each 
has a private garden or terrace) will 
make you want to shake your couscous 
until dawn. Spend the day in the city, 
hunting for the ghost of Paul Bowles. 
By dusk, you're poolside. Suites start at 
$650 a night (ksarcharbagh.com). 


A Real Hard Case 


WE MISS THE GOLDEN AGE of air travel, when you dressed 
your best, quaffed quality cocktails in roomy seats and 
stowed your clothes in stylish hard-case luggage. Bring a 
little jet-age magic into your house with Maybe Design's 
Sitbag ($1,370, 8gon.com), a chair made by setting а classi- 
cally styled suitcase on steel legs. When you sit, you'll think 
it’s 1969, minus Dick Nixon and all that brown acid. 


About Time 


IMAGINE IF HUMAN SKIN were see-through. Would your dream 
girllook any hotter than, say, John Madden? This much we know: 
The guts of Breguet’s Classique Grande Complication Openwork 
Tourbillon & Perpetual Calendar ($189,200, breguet.com) are 
mesmerizing. Every part of this Swiss-made mechanical time- 
piece is crafted by hand. The case is platinum, and the hands are 
blue steel, It’s pictured here with a black alligator strap. 


< 
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Pretty Amped 


OUR PLAYBACK GIZMOS keep shrinking, while the rest 
of our stereo has remained the same size. Until now. 
The iMP ($525, impamp.com) is the world’s smallest 
tube amplifier, marrying the warmth of analog sound 
and the convenience of digital music (or whatever else 
you play through it). Small enough to fit in your hand, 
the iMP can fill a room with plenty of volume, and it 
has a dual monoblock design for superb separation. 


Wooden You Like to Know 


BACK IN 2004 JVC used a new wood-cone speaker technology in some 
of its bookshelf systems. Wood's stiffness confers excellent acoustic 
properties (think of an acoustic guitar), but engineers couldn't make it 
work in speakers until one had the idea of soaking the cones in sake. 
(We've had meetings like that too.) The results аге spectacular—and now 
available in the floor-standing 5X-WD10s ($1,700 а pair, jvc.com). 


Future Perfect 


YOU WANT THE ADVANTAGES of digital music 
(the selection, the flexibility), but you don't want 
to hook up unorthodox gear to your stereo (the 
formats, the agita). Olive's Musica system ($1,100, 
olive.us) is built like a conventional stereo com- 
ponent, but inside it has a 160-gigabyte hard 
drive and an Ethernet port for home networking 
and Net radio, along with a CD drive that will rip. 
your new discs. It doesn't just play your library; 
is your library. Can we get an amen? 


WHERE AND HOW TO BUY ON PAGE 131. 


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Ehe Playboy Advisor 


My husband has been staying up late 
to look at porn on the computer. He 
says he can't fall asleep otherwise. I tell 
him he can always wake me, but he says 
he doesn't look at the sites because he 
wants sex. Do many men use porn to fall 
asleep>—].P, Virginia Beach, Virginia 
Many men use masturbation to fall asleep. 
That's fine as long as it doesn't affect the sex 
life you share. Online porn is easier for a 
quick release than waking the wife, and we've 
never felt that every orgasm has to involve a 
conversation. That goes both ways. 


Three months ago I took up golf. I visit 
the driving range or course twice a week, 
but I am getting blisters оп my thumbs. 
Am I holding the dubs too tightly? 
Would it help to wear gloves on both 
hands?—M.T., Sacramento, California 
Holding your clubs with a death grip is a 
common beginner's mistake. Have the club 
pro take а look—and soon, before you ingrain 
any bad habits. But even if you have a per- 
fect swing, expect blisters if you don't play 
every day. One study found that a golfer must 
pull the grip of a driver with more than 100 
pounds of force during a fast swing to keep 
from falling forward. A slow swing requires 30 
to 40 pounds. That causes some wear and tear. 
“When you shake hands with tour players, 
their hands feel like sandpaper," says Shawn 
Humphries, who works with many pros as 
director of instruction at Cowboys Golf Club 
near Dallas. “Yet they still fear blisters. Tiger 
Woods often puts medical tape on a finger or 
pinkie because he doesn't want his hands to 
split, especially in cold weather. Lee Trevino 
always wore a glove with tape on the outside 
around his thumb. If a golfer stays the course, 
he'll get calluses. In the meantime there’s noth- 
ing wrong with using two gloves, although it 
тау be enough just to tape your thumbs,” 


А reader who had started a relationship 
with a woman online asked in November 
if itis possible to fall in love with someone 
you've never met. You said, “Yes, it's pos- 
sible. But being in love and being lovers 
are two different things." Three months 
ago I met a woman through an online 
sex board that allowed us to express our. 
desires up front. (When you advertise 
on a standard dating site, you can't come 
out and say, “Anally fixated man seeks 
anally fixated woman who likes bondage 
and masochism." Well, you can, but it 
never leads to anything serious.) Things 
clicked between us, and she bought an 
airline ticket. Even before she arrived, 
we had decided to marry. We spent eight 
glorious days together, during which we 
agreed to rely on each other for love, 
support and as many spankings as we 
can handle. The tricky part is moving 
We are starting fresh in a new state so 
neither of us has a home-field advan- 


tage. I would tell the reader who wrote 
in November that if he has any dark 
perversions, he should get them in the 
open while he and this woman still know 
each other only online. It's much easier 
to dispose of a virtual relationship than 
a physical one. Based on my past experi- 
ences I guarantee unhappiness if truths 
are not revealed prior to your first physi- 
са! encounter.—B.W., Hilo, Hawaii 

That's good advice. It’s often easier to write 
what one can't say. Glad it worked out. 


l inherited my grandfather's fedoras. 
Growing up, I always liked his hats and 
thought he looked good in them. But 
when I wear them, people laugh or make 
comments such as “Hey, Indiana Jones!” 
Should I give up on them? What would 
you do?—A.R., San Diego, California 

If the fedoras fit your sense of style, perse- 
vere. People making such comments are likely 
challenged by selecting a baseball cap. 


You missed the call when responding in 
November tothe woman who refused her 
husband’s request for a blow job because 
he was playing a video game. As selfish as 
it may be, guys love spur-of-the-moment 
BJs. His wife's offer to come back after he 
finished the game made it an appoint- 
ment, and the fantasy evaporated.—S.P, 
Indianapolis, Indiana 

Jt must be a treat to receive so many blow 
jobs that you siart to categorize them. 


In November you advised a young lady 
that her partner is reluctant to call her 
his girlfriend because he hopes someone 
better will come along. While this may 
be the case, it’s also possible that he re- 
fuses to label the relationship because he 


ILLUSTRATION BY ISTVAN BANYAI 


is dealing with intimacy or commitment 
issues. Perhaps she should evaluate why 
she wants this label, and they can come 
up with something that meets both of 
their needs.—].S., Tucson, Arizona 

You mean like fuck buddies? Rebounders? 
Someday-maybes? You may be correct about 
his issues, but he should work them out on his 
own time rather than wasting hers. Labels 
may be confining, but after three months 
"girlfriend" threatens no man. 


Is there any way to get out of an ашо 
lease early?—G.]., Detroit, Michigan 

Just ask the dealer nicely. No go? You can post 
ап ad online and hope someone will assume the 
payments. The two major sites for unloading 
leases are Swapalease.com, founded in 1999 
by a chain of Cincinnati dealerships hoping 
10 turn lessees into buyers, and Lease Trader 
.com, created іп 1998 by a Miami businessman 
who didn't want to forfeit $14,000 to dump his 
Beemer. The services charge $40 to $50 for a 
basic listing, plus $95 to $150 if you make a 
transfer. It may help to offer an additional cash 
incentive or to be unloading a sports car—the 
five most traded vehicles оп LeaseTrader are 
the BMW 323i, the Audi A4, the Mercedes 
C230, the Porsche Boxster and the BMW X5. 
The finance company must approve the deal, 
but that’s usually a rubber stamp. If you're 
lucky, your freedom will cost only а couple hun- 
dred dollars. Another option is a site such as 
Un-Lease.com, which will buy your lease at a 
discount to resell. 


In October the Advisor implied men 
would be willing to give birth if they 
could haye multiple orgasms. Obviously 
the Advisor has never given birth. I am 
sure most women would give up mul- 
tiple climaxes іп а heartbeat.—K.B., 
Greenville, Kentucky 

We'd take that bet. The pain of childbirth 
lasts а day, while multiple orgasms continue for 
а lifetime. Notably, while it may be impossible 
for a man to get pregnant, it is conceivable 
that he could be pregnant. There have been 
cases of an embryo floating out of the fallopian 
tube into a woman's abdominal cavity and 
attaching to her pelvic wall. The baby devel- 
oped normally before delivery by cesarean sec- 
tion, Presumably an embryo could be attached 
the same way inside а male, as long as he 
receives progesterone and other hormones. The 
implantation would likely occur in the perito- 
neum, the lining of tissue that holds organs 
in place, according to Dr. Ronald Magness, 
director of perinatal research at the University 
of Wisconsin-Madison. For a glimpse at what 
might someday be, visil the art project posted 
at malepregnancy.com. 


М) friend just picked up his first bespoke 
suit—a midnight-blue three-piece. ОҒ 
course Iam happy for him, although 


with its four-button jacket, vest and 39 


PLAYBOY 


pleats its not exactly fashion-forward. 
When I suggested that he shouldn't wear 
sneakers with it, as he does with his other 
suits, he replied that in fact this is “all the 
rage” in our hometown of London. Are 
my senses failing me? Please tell me it's 
still a faux pas to wear $100 Nikes with a 
$4,000 suit—T-R., Hollywood, Florida 

Like so much of fashion—and life—it 
depends on the context. Does a midnight-blue 
suit with sneakers work in а Miami or London 
disco? Sure. Will it make a good impression at 
а business lunch or while meeting the queen? 
No. If your friend finds dress shoes uncomfort- 
able, there is a middle ground—classier shoes 
that wear like sneakers, such as selections from 
Ferragamo, Geox or Cole Haan, which has a 
line of oxfords with Nike Air technology. 


Twice during the past month my wife 
has had my erection so far back in her 
throat that when she tries to swallow she 
aspirates semen into her nasal passages. 
It hasn't affected her enthusiasm, but any 
tips to prevent this would be appreci- 
ated.—M.W., Little Rock, Arkansas 

Your wife should pay close attention to your. 
breathing to more accurately predict when 
you're going to come. That will allow her to 
bach you up an inch as you ejaculate. In the 
meantime, grunt twice or lug her car. 


The Advisor claims “there is no question 
that meat grilled over charcoal tastes 
better.” Who says? Charcoal, like gas, is 
just fuel. The grilled flavor comes from 
the smoke that rises when the juices 
and marinade drip onto the briquettes. 
Gas grills approximate this with bars or 
rocks. 1 am an experienced griller and 
can taste no difference. However, the 
convenience of gas can't be beat. It also 
allows you to grill in the winter.—R.G., 
Lake in the Hills, Illinois 

іп 2000 a research firm hired by Kingsford 
charcoal gave a blind taste test to 796 adults 
in four cities and found thal around 65 per- 
cent preferred chicken and hamburgers 
cooked over charcoal—by someone else, nota- 
bly. But Weber, which makes both types of 
grill, says it has conducted repeated surveys 
in which people report they can’t tell the differ- 
ence, As one griller puts it, a lot depends on 
whether you're into the journey or the destina- 
tion. Some people compromise—gas during 
the week, charcoal on the weekend. Others, 
like the Advisor, simply follow the party. 


Your November response about open rela- 
tionships needs clarification. One reason 
people often reject polyamory is that it is 
misrepresented as swinging. Polyamory is 
having committed relationships with more 
than one person. Swinging is recreational 
and often involves replacement sex, i.e., 
something is lacking, so a couple agrees 
to experiment without addressing the 
root conflict. Most polyamorists believe 
that humans are not naturally monoga- 
mous and that jealousy is a social con- 
struct derived from insecurity and a 


40 misguided right of possession. Humans 


can only benefit from a gene pool that 
includes some old-fashioned competition. 
"The point is, I've never seen any relation- 
ship work if the participants—whether 
two or more—are not honest with each 
other. The Advisor writes that open rela- 
tionships don't work for most people, but 
monogamous relationships don't seem to 
work for most people either.—C.A., Los 
Angeles, California 

They can both be a challenge. The dif- 
ficulty for most people, after a point, isn't 
being honest; it’s what to do when their part- 
ner doesn’t want to play. 


Are there any sex toys that a man 
and woman can both use at the same 
time? —H.N., Montreal, Quebec 
Besides lube? You might enjoy the Blue Dol- 
phin or the Diving Dolphin, available from 
Babeland.com. These. are jelly penis rings 
with two tiny vibrators attached like guns in 
а holster. One points up 10 stimulate her clito- 
ris during penetration while the other points 
down to tickle his balls. Babeland also sells a 
variety of cock rings with vibrators attached to 
stimulate the clit during intercourse. 


[used to hang out with this guy once in a 
while only because I liked to have some- 
one to drink or shoot hoops with. Now 
1 һауе a girlfriend, but he still calls. Any 
advice?—B.D., New York, New York 

In other words, how do you break up with a 
guy? Tell him you're busy and you'll call when 
things are less hectic. You can only hope he 
takes the hint, although your new girlfriend 
should be a big clue. Your priorities have 
changed, but he’s in the same place, 


Pro baseball player Rafael Palmeiro has 
said that a B12 shot given to him bya team- 
mate may have caused him to test positive 
for steroids. What does this vitamin do for 
you? Any side effects? Should I be taking 
it?—J.M., New York, New York 
We can say it won't make you test positive 
for steroids. B12 helps maintain nerve and ved 
blood cells and releases energy from food. It is 
found in fish, meat, poultry and dairy. When 
you shoot up hundreds of times the recom- 
‘mended daily dose, it supposedly gives you a 
Jew days or weeks of increased energy, restful 
sleep and sharpened senses. That's what makes 
it popular with athletes, performers and busy 
professionals. According to one of her former 
assistants, Margaret Thatcher had regular 
injections in her backside when she served as 
prime minister of Britain. But megadoses have 
not been extensively researched, so it’s hard to 
say how much of the rush is a placebo effect. 
Traditionally the vitamin shots have been used 
reat depression, chronic fatigue and other 
ns in people with B12 deficiencies, not 
as boosters for the well-adjusted. Healthy adult 
men need only about 2.4 micrograms of B12 a 
day. (A cup of yogurt has 1.4.) 


My boyfriend takes about 30 minutes to 
climax after extensive foreplay. He attri- 
butes his stamina to the fact that he's get- 
ting older. (He's 29.) He says he didn't 


have this problem before we met, but 
he also hadn't had sex in seven years. Is 
there something we can do to shorten 
the experience for both of us?—A.C., 
Brooklyn, New York 

A variety of things can cause delayed ejac- 
ulation, but in this case it may be that your 
boyfriend masturbated for years without апу 
female intervention. He may have conditioned 
himself to respond only to a specific type of 
stimulation. A number of drugs, including 
Prozac and other antidepressants, can also 
impair ejaculation. And there's the off chance 
that he has neurological damage, although 
that can be discounted if he can come relatively 
quickly by masturbating. He needs to test his 
reflexes, and you need to watch. Resolving this 
may be as simple as having him describe and 
show you what feels best on his cock. 


The last member of our group of 20 col- 
lege friends is getting married, so we 
are planning a bachelor party. We have 
been all over the world for previous 
send-offs—Amsterdam, Las Vegas, 
South Beach, Daytona, Fort Lauderdale, 
New York, Los Angeles, D.C. and Lon- 
don. We are debating either going to 
Montreal, where none of us has been, or 
returning to Vegas. Thoughts?—M.A., 
Washington, D.C. 

Montreal is ап excellent choice. It has great 
restaurants, the Casino de Montréal and full- 
contact, all-nude strip clubs filled with gor- 
geous women. You will want to stay within 
a few blocks of Crescent and Ste. Catherine, 
and it’s probably wise to hire a company such 
as MontrealVIP (montrealvip.com or 800- 
371-1224) to make arrangements and offer 
advice, Marc Tadros, one of the company’s 
partners, says the dancers in Montreal aren't 
as aggressive as those in the States; you have 
to ask them for a private lap dance, which typi- 
cally costs about U.S. $7.50 а song, with no 
tip required. (The girls keep everything they 
make.) The only thing you can’t touch is her 
vulva. Tadros says most groups number about 
a dozen guys, but he has arranged trips for as 
few as four and as many as 50. You can't go 
wrong with Las Vegas as a plan B, says James 
Oliver Cury, author of The Playboy Guide to 
Bachelor Parties. “Because the city is growing 
so fast, there's no way you can exhaust every- 
thing in one visit,” he s If you go back, you 
can hit all new clubs and restaurants.” The 
new Scores is gaining a reputation as the best 
strip club in town. In Europe, Cury suggests 
Dublin, which is where Londoners play and 
host their own stag parties. 


All reasonable questions—from fashion, food 
and drink, stereos and sports cars to dating 
dilemmas, taste and etiquette—will be per- 
sonally answered if the writer includes a 
self-addressed, stamped envelope. The most 
interesting, pertinent questions will be pre- 
sented on these pages each month. Write the 
Playboy Advisor, 730 Fifth Avenue, New 
York, New York 10019, or send e-mail by 
eee our website at playboyadvisor.com. 


THE PLAYBOY FORUM 
CHINA SYNDROME 


THE ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION OF CHINA IS AS MUCH A 
THREAT TO THAT COUNTRY AS IT IS TO THE U.S. 


BY ANDREW ROSS 


dren? In his recent book, The World Is Flat, Thomas 
L. Friedman, ıhe apostle of free trade, describes his 
effort: “When I was growing up my parents used to say to 
me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner. People in China and India 
are starving.’ I say to my girls, ‘Girls, finish your homework. 
People in China and India are starving for your jobs. 
Friedman wants us to remark on the contrast between his 
comments and those of his parents. But what's more striking 
is how little has changed: In both cases it's about how afflu- 
ent folks in the global north have to monopolize resources— 
food or knowledge—lest the not so fortunate in the global 
south make off with them. If workers in the developing 
countries win, Friedman's daughters and their peers lose. 
Is there any alternative to this thinly veiled social Dar- 
winism? Corporate America would have us believe that 
the only option is to adapt to free-trade rules written 
explicitly to exploit distrust between people on different 
sides of the globe. In the past 10 years liberalization in 
both China and India has given corporate investors access 
to hundreds of millions of new workers. Economists call 
it global labor arbitrage. Another euphemism they like is 
knowledge transfer, which is used by corporations to refer 
to the outsourcing of skilled labor. Both terms are just 
fancy names for what New York garment workers once 
called runaway shops. In the old days they ran to New 
Jersey or North Carolina; now they flee to Guangdong 
or Dhaka. How we create a climate for fair labor in these 
circumstances is one of the great challenges of our time. 
Take China. Most 
of us are stillinclined 
to see it as a threat. 
For political hawks 
the menace is a mili- 
tary one. For envi- 
ronmentalists it is 
the impact of China's 
breakneck growth 
on global energy 
supplies and other 
natural resources. 
For national policy 
makers the specter 
comes in the form 
of lopsided trade 
balances between 
China and more- 
developed countries. 
And for workers in 
industries and ser- 
vices vulnerable to 
offshore outsourc- 
ing, it is the loss of 
their livelihoods that 


| | ow does а father explain globalization to his chil- 


has raised the alarm. Scaremongers have been stoking "ycl- 
low peril” fears for the past century and a half. The recent 
uptick shows the sentiment for China bashing is far from 
exhausted—it persists at the AFL-CIO as well as in the right 
wing of the Republican Party. 

Most readers are probably unaware that China has lost 
many more millions of jobs in the past decade than the 
United States has, whether from the closure or restruc- 
turing of state-owned enterprises or from the pressure 
of World Trade Organization requirements on farm- 
ers. In fact, China’s job losses are just as much the result 
of neoliberal privatization as are job losses in the U 
In addition, there are now about 150 million “floating' 
uneniployed who pose the same kind of threat to Chinese 
trying to hold on to their jobs as corporate offshoring 
does to U.S. breadwinners. While they are the presumed 
beneficiaries of job transfers from the West, employees in 
China's developed coastal zones are being squeezed hard 
by the prospect of their jobs being moved to the inland 
and western provinces, already earmarked as the next 
frontier for buccaneering foreign investors. 

I recently completed a year of field research among Chi- 
nese workers in the Yangtze river delta. The anxieties and 
insecurities I found among factory and office employees 
were depressingly familiar. Job pressure offshore is not 
very different from what we have seen onshore. Distrust and 
disloyalty are rife, job hopping is a national pastime, and 
investors’ flightiness results everywhere in the shredding 
of economic and social security. Foreign-owned companies 

are still a novelty in 
China's private sec- 
tor, so it is dispirit- 
ing to come across 
the same complaints 
and fears in Shang- 
hai as one finds 
in Taipei, Singa- 
pore, London, Sao 
Paulo and San José. 
Everyone every- 
where is working 
longer and harder. 
Fewer and fewer 
workers, whether 
skilled or unskilled, 
expect their current. 
employer to be their 
boss for long. 

In other develop- 
ing countries with 
free-trade zones, we 
have seen the same 
kind of instability. 
Why is the China 


case so alarming? The answer lies not just 
in the jumbo scale ofindustrial operations 
but abo in their all-encompassing spread. 
China is moving so fast up the technol- 
ogy curve that it attracts the highest- 
level investments—in product design 
and R&D—from global corporations 
No industrializing country in history 
has been able to compete for high-skill 
jobs at the same time it absorbs those at 
the bottom of the production chain. To 
command this spread—from the lowest 
assembly platform work to the upper 
reaches of industry and services—is to be 
in a position to set the global norm for 
employee standards at minimal levels 

No doubt this is a threat to livelihoods 
everywhere, but it is not one hatched in 
Beijing. If China did not provide the 
most profitable current mix of authori- 
tarian governance, cheap, abundant 
labor and investor-friendly policies, 
it would be sought out elsewhere 
Though this arrangement would not 
exist without government cooperation, 
the primary beneficiaries are global 
corporations. They stand to profit most 
from the normalization of an environ- 
ment where jobs and capital can be 
transferred at a moment's notice. 

Protectionism is a natural response 
and has been unfairly vilified. Surely 
every community has the right to pro- 
tect the livelihood of its members. But 
this is not the only nor always the best 
way. All too often it brings out the ugly 
side of economic nationalism rather 
than holding corporations accountable 
for paying third-world wages and ask- 
ing first-world prices. Let us remember 
that there are alternatives to free-trade 
fundamentalism. They are equally 
global in scope and are based on the 
principles of fair trade, sustainable 
economics, internationally recognized 
labor and human rights, and socially 
conscious investment, rather than on 
short-term profit and plunder. 

I have a few years before I'll decide 
what to say to my own daughter, but 
1 know my message will be different 
from Friedman's. A two-year-old dur- 
ing the time we spent in Shanghai, she 
was the only foreigner in the neighbor- 
hood nursery school, She had to learn 
Mandarin, even some Shanghainese, 
to get by on a daily basis. Ever since 
our return to New York, she has been 
seeing little bits of China in the streets 
and in the media landscape. For her, 
China has always been a way of life, as 
it soon will be for all of us. 


Ross's Fast Boat to China: Corporate 
Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade 
will be published in April by Pantheon. 


FORUM 


HANDS OFF MY GENES 


ING AT Y 


By Lori Andrews 


Нег Chicago Bulls center Eddy 
Curry showed signs of an 


rregular heartbeat last season 
before a game against the Charlotte 
Bobcats, the Bulls refused to sign him 
to a long-term contract. The team 
instead offered him a one-year con- 
tract at $5.1 million, with the require- 
ment that he undergo a genetic test 
to see if he had a predisposition to 
heart disease. Curry balked at the 
testing; cardiologists he'd consulted 
had declared him fit to play. Even if a 
test indicated a genetic concern, many 
men with a genetic 
marker linked to 
cardiac disease 
never develop 
heart problems. 

Before Curry 
could take the 
Bulls to arbitra- 
tion to escape the 
test, he was traded 
to the New York 
Knicks. Although 
the Knicks won't 
require the genetic 
analysis, the issue 
of testing with- 
out consent is far 
from resolved. 
David Stern, com- 
missioner of the 
National Basket- 
ball Association, 
suggested that all 
potential rookies submit to DNA test- 
ing prior to the league draft. 

Even if you aren't a professional 
athlete, your potential employers or 
insurers—or even the cops—may still 
want a peek inside your genes. Some 
seek it for identification—to match 
DNA to crime-scene evidence or to 
finger a father through a paternity 
test. Others, such as employers and 
insurers, want to save money by turn- 
ing away healthy people who may 
later develop costly diseases. Accord- 
ing to a 2004 survey by the American 
Management Association, 63 percent 
of companies obtain medical infor- 
mation about employees. Some even 
admit they use the results of genetic 
tests for sickle-cell anemia or Hunting- 
ton's disease as a basis for hiring and 
promotion decisions. But genctic tests 


are no crystal ball. A woman who is 
denied health insurance because she 
has a genetic mutation supposedly 
linked to breast cancer still has a 50 
percent chance of never developing 
the disease; even more surprising, 90 
percent of women who get breast can- 
cer pass the genetic test. 

Yet another group—researchers 
and biotech companies—wants access 
to people's DNA to search for lucra- 
tive genes for research and patent- 
ing. In one case, a group of families 
donated money and body tissue over 
the course of a 
decade to identify 
the fatal gene that 
had killed their 
offspring. They 
were shocked 
to discover that 
researchers had 
patented the 
gene. The fami- 
lies objected 
because the pat- 
ent increased the 
cost of the test 
and allowed the 
patent holder to 
forbid anyone 
else from offering 
that genetic test 
or undertaking 
research on the 
gene. A genetic 
test without a pat- 
ent royalty can cost $100 or less. With 
a patent royalty attached, the cost to 
the patient can rise to 10 times that. 
Asa result of gene patents, one in four 
laboratories has stopped performing 
certain genetic tests. Half have not 
developed a test for fear they will run 
afoul of patent law. 

The technology is available to use a 
simple blood sample to sequence a 
person's complete genome, the 30,000 
genes in the body. Affymetrix, a biotech 
company, already markets the technol- 
ogy. The test itself would be affordable, 
but imagine the royalty fees if the test 
for each gene required a $1,000 roy- 
alty. Who could afford the $30 million 
price tag to learn his or her genetic 
makeup? Even if your doctor were will- 
ing to ignore the patents and create а 
CD-ROM of your personal gene 


sequence, you'd be violating multiple 
patents by putting that CD in your com- 
puter to check if you had a predisposi- 
tion to a particular cancer. No wonder 
the American College of Human Genet- 
ics and the College of American Patholo- 
gists oppose gene patents. 

In our society the law gives extensive 
protection to our bodies; court cases 
hold that touching a person without 
consent is battery and that people have 
a right to refuse medical intervention 
and to forbid research on their body. 
Under constitutional law, people have 
liberty interests in what is done with 
their body—induding saying yes or no 
to contraception and abortion—and 
privacy interests in controlling the dis- 
semination of information about them- 
selves. Yet the law currently fails to 
protect what is done with DNA. 

"The need to protect genetic privacy 
and liberty is great because DNA is so 
accessible. If you have a blood test or 
biopsy at a hospital, your DNA may end 
up in commercial research and product 
development. New York City’s Memo- 
rial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center gave 
access to cancer biopsies from patients 
to a biotech company. If you leave den- 
tal floss in the garbage, someone could 
grab the DNA from your gum tissue: 
Multimillionaire Steven Bing's dis- 
carded floss was pilfered for a paternity 
test. If you agree to give blood for a 
certain type of rescarch, scientists may 
use it for unrelated genetic research 
projects. That's what happened to 
members of the Havasupai tribe who 
live in a remote area of the Grand Can- 
yon accessible only by horseback, foot 
or helicopter. Such isolation is the геа- 
son certain genetic diseases occur more 
often among the Havasupai than in the 
general populatio 
the highest incidences of type 2 diabe- 
tes anywhere in the world. The Havasu- 
pai consented to have diabetes-related 
research done on their blood samples, 
but researchers undertook additional 
unauthorized genetic research on them 
regarding schizophrenia, inbreed- 
ing and population migration. The 
Havasupai assert that the research on 
schizophrenia and inbreeding stigma- 
tized them and insist they would not 
have authorized the migration research 
because it conflicts with their religious 
beliefs about their origins. 

"The legal rights in each of these situa- 
tions are slim reeds. Only one court—the 
Ninth Circuit, a federal appellate court 
in California—has taken genetic rights 
seriously. Іп the case, an employer used 
blood from routine physicals to test Afri- 
can American employees secretly for 


; the tribe has one of 


the sickle-cell-anemia gene mutation. 
The court ruled in the employees’ favor, 
saying, “One can think of few subject 
areas more personal and more likely to 
implicate privacy interests than that of 
one's health or genetic makeup.” 

But not all courts are as protective of 
genetic rights. In 2005 a federal court 
ruled against the Havasupai's claims that 
researchers had acted fraudulently and 
violated the tribe's right of informed con- 
sent by conducting additional research. 


When other patients whose genes and cell 
lines had been patented went to court to 
claim that their "property"—their DNA— 
had been taken without their consent, the 
courts ruled that patients could not have 
a property right in their DNA but that 
researchers could. 

Since courts fall short of protecting 
genetic rights, advocates of genetic pri- 
vacy and liberty have turned to the leg- 
islatures. As a result, various states have 
laws that prevent insurers from discrim- 
inating against people based on the 
results of a genetic test. But most states 
have loopholes that allow insurers to col- 


HE GENETIC BILL 
OF RIGHTS 


* You should have the right 
to refuse genetic testing 

and not to disclose genetic 
information, except іп 
criminal cases in which there 
is individualized suspicion. 


* You should not be dis- 
criminated against by 
insurers, employers, schools, 
courts, mortgage lenders 

or other institutions based on genetic tests. 


* If you undergo genetic testing, you 
should have the right to control who receives 
the results, 


+ Your genes should not be used in research 
without your consent, even if your tissue 
sample has been made anonymous. 


* Your genes should not be patented. 


lect genetic information in other ways 
Plus, those state laws don’t protect the 55 
percent to 65 percent of employees who 
work for companies that self-insure. The 
federal Health Insurance Portability and 
Accountability Act provides protections 
against losing your insurance if you 
change jobs, butit doesn't protect people 
in individual plans. 

The federal Americans With Disabili- 
ties Act prohibits employers from dis- 
criminating against people based on a 
medical condition unrelated to the per- 
son's ability to do the job at issue. But the 
law allows the potential employer (such 
as an NBA team) to require genetic test- 
ing, and it would be difficult to prove 
a person didn't get a job because of a 
glitch in his genes rather than because 
the winning applicant had more educa- 
tion or a better jump shot. 

Only seven states have laws requiring a 
person to give written informed consent 
before he or she is genetically tested. In 
six of these states police can access blood 
samples without such consent. Five of 
the seven states allow research on a 
person's genes without consent as long 
as the individual's name is taken off the 
blood sample. Yet people may object to 
certain research even if their name were 
to be unattached—such as research in 
which genes are patented. 

In a South Carolina case, an ex- 
husband in a custody dispute convinced 
a judge to order genetic testing on his 
healthy ex-wife to see if she would die at 
a younger-than-average age. This case 
may foreshadow genetic battles in all 
custody cases in which divorcing spouses 
seek genetic testing on each other in 
order to predict which one is less likely 
to get cancer or heart disease. 

Do we really want to see a society in 
which our ability to work, get insurance 
or even maintain custody of our children 
is based on a genetic test? In which our 
genes enter the research and commerce 
arena without our consent? We should 
retain our right to reject mandatory 
genetic tests, genetic discrimination and 
the patenting of our genes. Whenever 
a third-party institution—an employer, 
an insurer or the police—tries to subject 
you to a DNA test, refuse until you can 
assess your legal protections. And if you 
provide blood for medical testing, make 
sure to find out what will be done with 
it—and dictate the restrictions you want. 
Only by being conscientious objectors in 
the DNA draft can we get policy makers 
to pay attention 


Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College 
of Law, chaired the federal ethics advisory 
committee to the Human Genome Project. 


SOUTH PARK: THE PREQUEL 
Marty Beckerman (“Ме Want Bush,” 
December) is only 22, so when he fails 
to challenge Brian Anderson’s state- 
ment that today’s college Republicans 
“wouldn't be recognized by those who 
campaigned for Ronald Reagan,” he has 
the excuse of not having been there. I 
was there; I campaigned for Reagan in 
1984. Plenty of hard-partying conser- 
vative and Republican college students 
who voted for Reagan drank to excess 
and slept around. One college Republi- 
can group was banned from a hotel for 
poor behavior during a convention but 
was invited back after someone pulled 
strings with the hotel owner. South Park 
conservatives aren't new. 
Anthony Argyriou 
Oakland, California 


Reogon supporters? 


GUN FIGHT 
"Thank you for Pat Jordan's commen- 
tary ("Stand and Fire," December). I 
appreciate his pointing out that a seg- 
ment of the population believes the 
Second Amendment ought to be inter- 
preted as loosely as the First. Though 
I am not a card-carrying member of 
the American Civil Liberties Union or 
the National Rifle Association, I think 
both are valuable in protecting our 
constitutional rights. І agree with both 
groups' stance on the amendments 
they protect. 
Bryan Waller 
Sanford, Florida 


I think Jordan is a little misleading 
when he takes a portion of the Stand 
Your Ground lav out of context. The 
law doesn't allow blanket immunity from 
prosecution and civil liability regardless 
of the circumstances. It prevents the 
arrest and prosecution of someone if 
no evidence exists that the person acted 
contrary to the law. This part of the bill 


FORUM 


came about because police would arrest 
innocent victims at the scene of a shoot- 
ing and sort out the facts later through 
depositions and court hearings. That 
practice in effect took away the pre- 
sumption of innocence, which this part 
of the law restores. 

Rob Keeton 

Lynn Haven, Florida 


I recently purchased my first firearm 
and would not hesitate to use it if con- 
fronted by someone intent on harming 
me or my family. I consider it a huge 
responsibility that is not to be taken 
lighiy. I suspect my fellow licensed gun 
owners feel the same way and will con- 
tinue to act responsibly, as they have 
since the passage of our conceal-and- 
carry law in 1987. I am equally certain 
that the bad guys will not 

Brian Smith 
Oviedo, Florida 


ANGEL IN THE CENTERFOLD 
What a sad commentary on the 
state of religious affairs іп 21st century 
America that the Playboy Forum had to 
reach back more than 100 years to find 
a public figure with the intelligence— 
and guts—to explicate what the Con- 
stitution says regarding the separation 
of church and state ("God and Wash- 
ington," December). Not only is there 
no person of Robert Ingersoll's stature 
in this country today, but if Ingersoll 
were alive he would be under strict 
surveillance by the FBI, the CIA and 
the Department of Homeland Secu- 
rity as a subversive threat to the moral 
and religious “values” without which, 
we are told, our beloved nation under 
God would be doomed 
Don Oakley 
Gainesville, Virginia 


It is refreshing to read "God and 
Washington." With the voice of the reli- 
gious right dominating so much of the 
media these days, we need to hear more 
from the free-thought point of view. 

David Overman 
Fenton, Michigan 


As a longtime subscriber and avid 
PLAYBOY fan, I always find it distressing 
when your magazine bashes Christianity 
in its Forum section. I am not ashamed 
to say ат a Christian and a PLAYBOY 
reader. There is no conflict in that. 

Michael Contakis 
Ellington, Connecticut 


Welcome to the Sunshine Stote. 


Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Ishmael 
Reed, Thomas Friedman and other 
writers have gotten quite a negative 
response from your conservative 
readers. Have these liberal-knocking 
readers admitted to their religious- 
fanatic friends that they read м. лувоу? 
Conservatives want to believe they 
are taking the high road in this 
country, and they are willing to send 
2,000 young Americans to their death 
fighting religious fundamentalists. 
Yet we elect a born-again Christian 
to follow through with a war against. 
religious rule. Are agnostics the ones 
who strap on bombs to kill people? 
Was it an agnostic organization that 
hid hundreds of child molesters? 
Conservatives don't understand why 
the moderates in this country can't 
identify with them but are more than 
willing to criticize. The conservative 


Seporotion anxiety on Capitol Hill 


connection to hypocritical religious 
fanatics just makes me want to be a 
Democrat 
George Kraus 
Avon, Ohio 


E-mail via the web at letters.playboy.com. Or 
write: 730 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10019. 


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DON’T DRINK THE WATER 


PHARMACEUTICALS IN OUR WATER CAUSE INVOLUNTARY SEX CHANGES 


hen forensic scientists want 
hard evidence of cocaine 
use, they test a suspect’s 


urine for benzoylecgonine, a metabo- 
lite created in a user’s body. Euro- 
pean scientists recently took this to 
the next level. They tested for cocaine 
in Italy's urine. More precisely, they 
sampled the Po, the country’s longest 
river. Turns out the Po is brimming 
with coke and its by-products—about 
four kilos a day flows out of locals and 
into its waters, representing an annual 
street value of about $150 million. 
Advances in chemistry now allow 
scientists to analyze water for the 
Uniest amount of chemicals, in parts 
per billion or 
even trillion. Until 
recently, conven- 
tional wisdom 
held that this was 
not worth doin; 
en if one did 
find a tiny trace 
of a particular 
chemical in some 
lake or stream, it 
would be a mere 
curiosity. That 
view is erod- 
ing. Іп 2002 the 
U.S. Geological 
Survey released 
a survey of riv. 
ers and streams 
across America. 
Of the 139 water- 
ways examined, 80 percent tested 
positive for things that shouldn't have 
been there: steroids, caffeine, anti- 
depressants, painkillers, antibiotics 
and more. And while the concentra- 
tions are usually minuscule, labo- 
ratory work suggests that even the 
tiniest doses of some substances can 
affect aquatic life. Rebecca Klaper, a 
biochemist with the Great Lakes Wis- 
consin Aquatic Technology and Envi- 
ronmental Research Institute, kept 
minnows in aquarium water contain- 
ing the tiniest trace—on the order 
of a part per billion—of a common 
cholesterol-regulating medication. 
“We found that the fish’s movement 
decreased,” she says. "They're nor- 
mally active swimmers, but these guys 
were just sitting at the bottom of the 
tank." A control group was unaffected 
Peter Fong, a biologist at Gettysburg 


By Matt Bivens 


College, has exposed various shellfish 
to low doses of antidepressants. He 
says certain kinds of clams and mus- 
sels start spawning like mad when 
exposed to Prozac or Paxil. He also 
cites research by others that suggests 
a whiff of antidepressant in the water 
has a mellowing effect on crayfish: 
Males on Prozac can't be bothered to 
adopt dominant postures. 

The real question is not what a tiny 
dose of cocainc docs to a fish; it's what. 
the overall effect is of constant tiny 
doses of medications. The search for 
the answer to that question is growing 
in urgency. The U.K. Environment 
Agency, the equivalent of our EPA, 


recently completed a 20-year survey of 
Britain's waterways. A third of male 
fish sampled in 42 U.K. rivers were 
suffering an involuntary sex change: 
shrinking testes, ovaries growing 
alongside those testes, even male fish 
packed with eggs. Closer to home, 
60 percent of male smallmouth bass 
examined last year from the Potomac 
River near Washington, D.C. had 
been similarly chemically castrated. 
The tentative consensus in both 
Europe and America blames these 
fish feminizations on endocrine dis- 
rupters, chemicals that, however 
different from one another, all mess 
with an organism's hormonal sys- 
tem. Endocrine disrupters are turn- 
ing up everywhere, from plastics to 
pesticides. Still, finding them in river 
water is one thing; what about tap 
water? In Milan, Ettore Zuccato, who 


headed the team that searched the Po 
for cocaine, has turned up traces of 
pharmaceuticals in tap water. So have 
researchers in Germany. 

But isn't our tap water cleaned— 
chlorinated, for example? Yes, but 
as noted in a study by the Southern 
Nevada Water Authority, chlorine 
doesn't remove caffeine, some com- 
mon pharmaceuticals or progesterone 
and testosterone. So our waterways 
might be emasculating more than 
just the fish. Endocrine disrupters 
have been blamed for the poorly 
understood collapse in sperm counts 
across the industrialized world. This 
summer the British Association of. 

Plastic Surgeons 
reported that 
twice as many 
men last ycar 
sought breast- 
reduction sur- 
geries as in the 
previous year. 
Even if you 
don't need a mans- 
siere, your body 
is still probably 
laden with chemi- 
cals, A 2002 study 
by Mount Sinai's 
School of Medi- 
cine in New York 
found its subjects 
had soaked up at 
least 90 indus- 
trial compounds, 
including many that are poisonous, 
carcinogenic or the cause of birth or 
developmental defects. Evidence of 
this so-called body burden of chemi- 
cal invaders has also been collected 
by the Centers for Disease Control 
and Prevention, which recently 
reported on a random survey of. 
thousands of Americans’ blood and 
urine. The CDC findings suggest 
more than 90 percent of U.S. resi- 
dents carry a mixture of pesticides 
and other pollutants in their bodies. 
This past summer, the Washington, 
D.C.-based Environmental Working 
Group upped the ante: It analyzed 
the umbilical-cord blood of 10 new- 
borns. "The babies averaged 200 
contaminants in their blood," the 
study reports, "including mercury, 
fire retardants, pesticides and the 
Teflon chemical PFOA. 


THREE SHADES OF SEXY 


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PLAYBOYSTORE.( 


uno ein KANYE WEST 


A candid conversation with the record of the year contender about his 
Katrina controversy, hip-hip homophobia and his addictions to porn and sex 


“White people, this is your only chance to use the 
word ‘nigger,’” Kanye West shouts to the The 
ater at Madison Square Garden crowd roaring 
the words to “Gold Digger,” the biggest rap hit 
of the past year. “Take advantage of it." 

That snapshot from West's recent tour sums 
up the wit and audacity of the 28-year-old rap- 
per and producer. The chorus of the song—“I 
ain't saying she a gold digger/ But she ain't 
messing with no broke niggers" —is not only 
as catchy as bird flu, it’s also a provocative 
comment about money, race and sex. A one- 
man smash factory who has produced songs 
for Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, 
Ludacris, Talib Kweli, John Legend, Com- 
mon, Cam'ron and Jay-Z, West doesn't back 
down from any topic—or from the spotlight. 

Last September, during NBC's live broad- 
cast of a benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina 
victims, West burst the apolitical cue-card 
solemnity, denouncing the media for refer- 
ring to black New Orleanians as looters and 
alleging that the government had been slow 
to respond because those in need were mostly 
black. His digression was full of pauses and 
incomplete sentences, and co-presenter Mike 
Myers stood by in silent panic. After Myers 
interjected a few lines from the Teleprompter, 
West distilled his argument to its pith: “George 
Bush doesn't care about black people.” NBC 


“You know, when Marvin Gaye made ‘Sexual 
Healing,’ it was a fun song, but he really 
did have a problem with sex. And I think I 
might have a problem, a sexual addiction. I 
have porn on me at all times.” 


instantly cut away and excised the dangerous 
moment from а rebroadcast later that night 
on the West Coast, but the clip was Кері alive 
on the Internet, where bloggers called West 
everything from a racist to a hero to a self- 
promoting profiteer. 

His name, pronounced KAHN-yay, means 
“the only one” in Swahili, and he’s the lone 
child of Donda West, who recenily retired as 
chair of the English department at Chicago State 
University, and Ray West, а photographer and 
former Black Panther who is now a Christian 
counselor. When Kanye was three, his parents 
split up. He was raised primarily by his doting 
mother, and his father has said Kanye “displayed 
his charisma even in day care.” 

He first wrote rhymes in third grade and 
four years later began to make beats, the pro- 
duced tracks rappers rhyme over. He won an 
art scholarship but dropped out of college, 
lived at home and continued to struggle until 
2001, the year of his personal tipping point: 
Jay-Z picked five West tracks for his CD The 
Blueprint, including “Izzo (H.O.V.A.), " which 
used a Jackson 5 sample to (over)popularize 
the phrase "fo shizzle ту nizzle.” 

West's beats were vivid and brassy, and he 
helped even the dullest rappers get on the radio. 
But when he told Jay-Z and other decision 
makers at Roc-A-Fella Records that he wanted 


“Gold Digger’ is straight poetry. It uses profanity, 
and it's fucked-up and funny. It's so perfect and 
out of the park. Га like to state this, and fuck who- 
ever tells me I can't word it out loud: ‘Gold Dig- 
ger’ is one of the biggest songs of our lifetime.” 


to rap, they snickered with reverse class snob- 
bery. West came from a comfortable background 
and had no firsthand knowledge of drug deal- 
ing or weaponry; he was cule, wore pastel polo 
shirts with the collars turned up and couldn't 
have been. more the opposite of 50 Cent, rap’s 
biggest star of the past few years. 

The record label finally relented, and West 
began to work with his customary industri- 
ousness. Driving from a studio one night іп 
October 2002, he fell asleep and crashed his 
car, fracturing his jaw. With his mouth still 
wired shut, he recorded “Through the Wire,” 
one of four hit singles on his first CD, The 
College Dropout. They are songs of celebra- 
tion and mourning, with comedy as the lone 
constant; in “Slow Jamz” he talks about using 
old soul records to seduce women and drops a 
great joke at Michael Jackson's expense. But 
the album has as many wise cracks as wise- 
cracks. In “Jesus Walks,” West confesses both 
his sins and his devotion to Jesus, and “АП 
Falls Down" traces young blacks’ appetites for 
expensive sneakers and gold-heavy watches to 
insecurity: “We all self-conscious/I'm just the 
first to admit it.” As it turned out, there was 
а big market for a rapper who'd never sold 
drugs. The best-reviewed album of 2004, 
The College Dropout sold 3 million copies 
and earned 10 Grammy nominations. The 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVIO ROSE 


“I might have some cockiness. It's always a con- 
flict: Maybe Im more self-conscious than I am 
‘self-confident, and self-conseiousness is what 
makes me ask 30 different people for their opin- 


dons. I overcompensate for my anxielies.” 


49 


PLAYBOY 


world suddenly gave West as much adulation 
as he said he deserved. 

For Late Registration, released in August 
2005, West added a co-producer, Jon Brion, 
a while Angeleno best known for working with 
Fiona Apple. No other rapper would have risked 
such an audacious move, and it paid off with 
even more raves. "There's never been hip-hop so 
complex and subtle musically,” wrote The Vil- 
lage Voice, while The New Yorker claimed the 
album “encompasses decades of African Ameri- 
can music.” Late Registration broke West fully 
into the mainstream—from the cover of Time 
magazine to a place among Barbara Walters's 
10 Most Fascinating People of 2005. 

While West was on tour, PLAYBOY sent writer 
Rob Tannenbaum fo inlerview him; the two 
began their discussion backstage at a De Kalb, 
Illinois concert hall, then contin- 
ued it later at a Manhattan studio. 
Tannenbaum reports, “West's mind 
leaps around unpredictably, so in 
the course of our conversations he 
told me about the suede jacket he 
was wearing (‘It’s Yves Saint Lau- 
rent’), the music video he was editing 
with animator Bill Plympton and 
his 2,700-square-foot loft in SoHo, 
which has a 16-foot walk-in closet 
and a 12-foot bathroom sink. 

“He says some pretty outrageous 
things, usually about how great he is, 
but it’s a welcome antidote to the false 
modesty most stars put across. And 
it’s clear he subscribes to the playful 
theory of Muhammad Ali: ‘It’s not 
bragging if you can back it up." 

"But it's also clear how seriously 
he takes his work. ‘I really study тар,” 
he said, and he can keenly analyze 
changing trends in the arcane field 
of rhyming couplets. And he played 
at shatteringly high volume а new 
beat he'd written for Jay-Z, a simple, 
monstrous thing with a resounding 
cymbal. ‘That beat is killing,’ he 
said. ‘Just think of that with Jay on 
it,” Along the шау, he announced he 
had lured Jay-Z out of retirement. 
And no wonder: West really is that 
great. Just ask him.” | 


PLAYBOY: Let's start with the Was 


on it wasn't heartfelt enough. They wanted 
me to read some random point about the 
levees. Mike Myers and I talked about 
how we had a problem with that word. He 
said, “I just dont want to mispronounce 
levees.” That was his main goal when we 
went up there. He was already nervous, 
and I told him, “Yo, I might stray off the 
Teleprompter a little bit." I told him I was 
going to ad-lib. I was talking to him back- 
stage, and I saw Chris Tucker. I remember 
telling Chris, “Get ready for live TV.” 
PLAYBOY: Did Myers say anything when 
you got off camera? 

WEST: He shook my hand and said, “It is 
what it is.” 

PLAYBOY: What kind of greeting did you 
get backstage? 


ica was like, “Oh shit, they still do that? I 
thought t 5 America." Yeah, this is 
America. This is America. 
PLAYBOY: Did the reaction surprise you? 
WEST: A lot of people feel that Bush 
doesn't care about poor people. It's a 
common opinion. 
PLAYBOY: But you didn't say he doesn't 
care about poor people; you said he 
doesn't care about black people. There's 
a difference. 
WEST: There just happen to be way more 
poor black people. If you pick at the 
statement, I’m sure you could find some- 
thing wrong, but that was the overall 
feeling of America at the time. 
PLAYBOY: Entertainers don't often 
really speak their mind, especially not 
on live TV. 
WEST: And entertainers who 
would say what they're thinking 
wouldn'tbe given that opportu- 
nity on live TV. Networks are 
more apt to put a five-second 
delay on me now. They didn't 
really listen to "All Falls Down" 
and "Jesus Walks" and *Crack 
Music." They just heard the 
hooks. They didn't hear what 
I was saying about social issues. 
With my polo collars popped, 
they never saw me coming. 
PLAYBOY: There's an element of 
social awareness to your music 
but also a party element. They 
probably thought they were 
going to get the second guy. 
WEST: І bet they wouldn't have 
put Dave Chappelle up there. 
Butthar's who Гат: I'm like the 
rap version of Chappelle. 
PLAYBOY: What's the similai 
west: He talks about seri- 
ous things, but he makes you 
laugh to keep from crying. 
The humor is the honey in the 
medicine. 
PLAYBOY: Actually Chappelle’s 
been doing a joke about you: 
| “I gotta give props to my man 
Kanye West because he said 
some real shit. That took a lot 
Й of bravery and a lot of strength. 


seven words that made national 
headlines: "George Bush doesn't care 
about black people." Had you planned 
on saying that, or was it an ad-lib? 

WEST: I've never been asked this question 
before, but I totally didn't plan to say it. 
I planned the bullet points about the 
media portraying black people as looters 
and how it took the government so long 
to go down there to help. Bad news is 
great news, and 1 felt like CNN, NBC 
and all these stations were capitalizing 
on the tragedy. 

PLAYBOY: Describe what led to your mak- 
ing that statement. 

west: Tim McGraw did a song, and it was 
really emotional, showing all the imagery 
from New Orleans. When I went up to read 


50 the Teleprompter, I just thought what was 


he Red Cross and the NBC execs 
didn't say anything to me. They acted like 
I wasn't even in the building. Before that, 
it was all VIP. 

PLAYBOY: How did the day end? 

WEST: At the bar, taking shots of Patrön 
[laughs] You know, if you go up and hit the 
class bully in his face, you're like, “What 
am I going to do tomorrow?” I still live іп 
a country that George Bush controls 
PLAYBOY: When NBC broadcast the tele- 
thon on the West Coast, it cut your com- 
ment about the president. 

WEST: I thought that was great because it 
proved my point about the media. It let 
America know that the media still censors 
us and monitors us and brainwashes us. 
For them to chop it, everybody in Amer- 


I'm proud of Kanye. And I'm 
gonna miss him so much.” 
west: [Laughs] Oh shit. That's why we 
меге popping Patrön that night 
PLAYBOY: Laura Bush denounced your 
comment as disgusting, and Bill O'Reilly 
said it was “simply nutty” and called you 
a “dopey little rapper.” Did any of the 
criticism bother you? 
WEST: I didn't even know that until now. I 
care as much about Bill O'Reilly as | care 
about somebody at my show who goes to 
the bathroom during “Jesus Walks.” I'm 
not going to stop the song; I'm not going 
to stop my show. Matter of fact, I need 
to never say his name again, because I'm 
making him too hot right now. 
PLAYBOY: He does love to pick on rappers. 
west: He can't pick on us. He picks at us. 


We're like statues. He picks at pop-culture 
icons, which is what we rappers are right 
now, like modern-day royalty. 

PLAYBOY: Did anything about the cover- 
age of your comments bother you? 
west: People kept misquoting me and 
using incorrect English: [in an exagger- 
ated dialect] “George Bush don't be carin' 
"bout no black people.” And I'm like, “I 
didn’t say that." 

PLAYBOY: Has the comment hurt you іп 
any way? It seems you got a lot of pub- 
licity from it. 

west: I wouldn’t say it was the smart- 
est business move. At this point I'm not 
going to say any more things that could 
be harmful to me. 

PLAYBOY: So we shouldn't ask for your 
position on the war in Iraq or Supreme 
Court nominees? 

WEST: I'm not into politics at all. I can't 
even name the people in politics. That's 
not what I do. I've learned from this how 
powerful my voice is. It's like going to 
your bank to take out $20 and seeing 
$1 million in your account. You're like, 
“Oh shit, what am I gonna do with this?” 
Now I know my voice is powerful, and I 
just try to use it wisely. 

PLAYBOY: During the telethon, you 
announced you were going to donate 
“the biggest amount I can give.” So how 
much did you donate? 

west: I would never tell you that. I called 
my business manager, and I was like, “Yo, 
what's the most I can give?” And that's 
what we gave. 

PLAYBOY: You won't name an amount? 
WEST: ГИ just say it's way more than I 
would have made in a year if I'd gone to 
college and gotten my doctorate. 
PLAYBOY: Before your career as a rapper, 
you were one of the biggest producers in 
hip-hop. How good a rapper are you? 
The New Yorker described you as “merely 
average,” and Entertainment Weekly said 
you have a “clunky flow.” 

WEST: I'm nowhere near as good as Jay-Z, 
Eminem or Nas. So I compensate. 
PLAYBOY: How do you compensate? 
WEST: With star power, sheer energy, 
entertainment, videos, really good out- 
fits and overwhelmingly, ridiculously 
dope tracks. Justin Timberlake isn’t the 
best singer, but he's a true star, the entire 
package. The main thing I use to make 
up for my lack of rapping skills is my 
content, my subject matter. 

PLAYBOY: What's an example? 

WEST: I'll use words or rhymes no other 
rapper has used. [raps] “Take your dia- 
monds and throw 'em up like you're 
bulimic/Yeah, the beat cold, but the flow 
is anemic." Damn, nobody would ever 
rhyme those two words together. When 
they come up with a hip-hop curriculum, 
I want my raps to be in the textbooks. 
PLAYBOY: Some people say you just rap 
about clothes and brand names. 

WEST: How could someone possibly say all 
I dois rap about brands, when my biggest 
songs don't even really mention them? If 


Drop Out U 


West shares the same non-alma mater with some good company 


ІІ Gates 
Expected class: Horvord 1977. Не 
dropped out in his second year after 
writing a programming language with 
Paul Allen. Since: Chairman of Micro- 
soft and the richest man in the world, 
with an estimated $51 billion. Lesson 
learned: 1 realized the error of my 
\woys and decided | could make do 


es with а high school diploma.” 


Karl Rove 
Expected class: Utoh 1973. He left 
school in 1971 to work for the Col- 
lege Republicans. Since: The archi- 
tect of the Bush presidency. Lesson 
learned: "As people do better, they 
start voting like Republicons—unless 
they have too much education and 
vote Democratic, which proves there 


БА сол be too much of o good thing.” 


David Geffen 

Expected class: Texas at Austin 1965. 
He dropped out in his freshman year. 
Loter he went to wark in the mail room 
of the William Morris Agency. Since: He 
founded Geffen Records, Geffen Film 
‘Company and co-founded DreamWorks 
5КС. Lesson learned: “I was а lousy 
student. At Morris I soid I'd graduated 
because а degree was а requirement.” 


Ted Turner 

Expected class: Brown 1960. In his 
fourth year Turner was asked to leave. 
Since: He founded CNN and TBS. Tumer 
Озо owned the Atlanta Braves and is 
America’s largest private londowner, 
with 1.8 million ocres. Lesson learned: 
"| got suspended twice—the first fime 
for having a girl in my room. And the 
second time, 1 don't remember.” 


Steve Jobs 

Expected class: Reed College 1976. 
He dropped out ofter six months; a 
colligrophy class inspired the clean 
typography in Apple computers. Since: 
He co-founded Apple and Pixar and is 
worth more than $3 billion. Lesson 
learned: “1 had no idea what | wanted 
to do with my life ond how college was 
going to help me figure it out.” 


Woody Allen 
Expecied class: NYU 195B. He wos 


Іс and inconsistent filmmokers of all 
time, he storted os o comedy writer. 
Lesson learned: “| was thrown out of 


college for cheating on the metaphysics 
final. I looked within the soul of the boy 
sitting next tome.” —Rocky оком 


5i 


POLIASVIBIOLY 


someone says that, it's blatantly stupid, 
and I refuse to argue with a stupid per- 
son because from a distance you can't tell 
who's who. 

PLAYBOY: If you're trying to raise people 
up with your music, why use so many 
brand names? 

WEST; I really do care about the music 
itself, but I also care about superficial 
consumer shit. I really like Atlanta strip- 
pers—like, a lot. I really like Louis Vuit- 
ton. 1 have multicolor trunks stacked up 
in my loftin New York. 

PLAYBOY: Fine, you have Louis Vuitton in 
your apartment. But why put it in your 
songs? 

WEST: What is it they say? "Great art is met 
with mediocre initial response.” It's the 
same. If I throw some Gucci and Louis 
оп top of a song that means something, 
I get your attention. And it comes from 
the heart. It hurt to be at the Gucci store 
with a girlfriend, acting like I was going 
to try on something, and she was busting 
me because I didn't have enough money 
for it. [raps] "Back when Gucci was the 
shit to rock/Back when Slick Rick got 
the shit to pop/I'd do anything to say I 
got it/Damn, them new loafers hurt my 
pocket." Any person who loves clothes 
is going to hear that and be like, “Yo, I 
feel him." Like when I say, “We're all self- 
conscious/I'm just the first to admit it," 
many people relate to it. 

PLAYBOY: 50 Cent says you owe your suc- 
cess to him because people wanted a rap- 
per who didn't wear a bulletproof jacket 
and have bullet scars. 

WEST: There was no successful black artist 
who was like a regular person and also 
liked cars and clothes. That was my niche. 
On The College Dropout, the songs offer 
melody and message. That's the main 
goal. I saw it as a simple math project: If 
T can rap 70 to 80 percent as good as the 
beats are, I'll be successful. 

PLAYBOY: Why are your songs so much 
more successful than other rap songs? 
west: Choruses and hooks. That's why 
the Black Eyed Peas’ “Му Humps” is a 
killer. That song is just constant hooks 
all the way. See, people think a chorus 
is the only hook, but “Gold Digger” has 
so many hooks in it. Jamie's intro, that's 
a hook. The drum intro, that's a hook. 
“L ain't sayin’ she a gold digger”; thats a 
hook. The entire second verse is a hook: 
“18 years, 18 years.” That could be a cho- 
rus! “We want prenup"; that’s a hook. 
And the white-girl line? That's why I get 
the big bucks. That's bottom of the ninth, 
bases loaded, World Series. That's gold. 
PLAYBOY: At the end of “Gold Digger,” 
you say, “When you get on, he'll leave 
your ass for a white girl.” 

WEST: It uses profanity, and it’s shock- 
ing and controversial and fucked-up and 
funny. It’s so perfect and out of the park. 
It touches on social anxieties and over- 
compensation and racial tension. Black 
people say, “Yeah, that does happen.” At 


52 опе of my concerts I saw white girls with 


T-shirts that read HE'LL LEAVE YOUR ASS FOR 
A WHITE GIRL. Like, “Yay!” They're very 
happy about that line. 

PLAYBOY: So the combination of hooks 
and provocation made “Gold Digger” 
one of the biggest songs of 2005? 

WEST: God wanted me to have "Gold Dig- 
ger." You know, 1 made that song for 
someone else; I wrote it for Shawnna 
from Disturbing tha Peace, but she had 
problems clearing the sample and had 
to turn her album in. At the end of the 
day—all bullshit aside, all the shit I talk 
aside—God hands me these records. And 
Jon Brion, he was a dope-ass producer, 
a guy who could just sit there and check 
my lyrics. 

PLAYBOY: Wait. You took advice about 
rapping from a white piano player? Most 
rappers would Һауе thrown him out of 
the studio. 

west: Right. And that’s why so many 
people make inadequate music, I beg for 
criticism. I'll get 30 opinions on what's 
wrong with a song and fix all of those 
things. So when it comes out, you can’t 
tell me shit. You can't learn anything 
from a compliment. I also had a poetry 


I always wanted to make 
raps that could be respected 
in the barbershop but that 
an old white lady could also 
understand. So I'm Jadakiss 
meets Will Smith. 


instructor. She was on Def Poetry Jam with 
me, and I was like, Yo, she is so much 
better than me at this. If 1 could apply 
this, I could be like a Bob Dylan, a Bob 
Marley, a Stevie Wonder, a Prince, a John 
Lennon. “Gold Digger” is straight poetry. 
Га like to state this, and fuck whoever 
tells me I can’t word it out loud: “Gold 
Digger” is one of the biggest songs of our 
lifetime. ІСІ be there with “In da Club” 
and “When Doves Cry.” 

PLAYBOY: Doyou expect to win the Grammy 
for record of the year on February 8? 
WEST: For all I know, I'm not going to win 
one Grammy this year. You know, I talked 
a lot of shit last year. When I got the 10 
nominations for the 2005 awards, I said, 
“I'm the face of the Grammys.” I thought 
that was really funny. But it was true at 
the end of the day. The older voters might 
have been like—— What's my boys name 
from the L.A. Times? Bill? Bob? 

PLAYBOY: Robert Hilburn. He was the Los 
Angeles Times music critic for 35 years. 
WEST: Yeah. He wrote this dope article, 
saying, "Grammy credibility, for the sec- 
ond year in a row, revolves around a 
single artist: Kanye West." For the 2006 


awards the only people I would accept 
defeating me for album of the year would 
be System of a Down, and they didn't get 
nominated. I made a really good album, 
but how do I word this? I'm not trying to 
dis people, but there weren't that many 
really, rcally good albums. You know, if 
you're a championship team, it feels bet- 
ter if the series goes seven games, but this 
year it's a straight four-game blowout. 
What albums would be up against me? 
PLAYBOY: If you had Grammy voters right 
here, what would you say to them about 
why you deserve album of the year? 
WEST: First thing I'd say is “Don't worry 
about all the things I say in the media. 
They're just true.” [laughs] 

PLAYBOY: Having gone to a few of your 
concerts, we've noticed you have more 
white fans than most rappers. 

WEST: ] always wanted to make raps that 
could be respected in the barbershop but. 
that an old white lady could also under- 
stand. So I’m Jadakiss meets Will Smith. 
PLAYBOY: Does your having pop hits make 
it harder for some people to take your 
music seriously? 

WEST: You know, I'm still thinking about 
the whole Grammy thing. Like, my mother 
told me I should stop talking, but I wasn't 
going to stop saying I should win album 
of the year just so Í could win album of 
the year. I even make it harder for myself 
by talking so much shit. There was a TV 
poll asking, “Do you think West's com- 
ment on NBC will hurt his chances at the 
Grammys?" And people said, “No, but 
the way he acted at the awards show last 
year will hurt his chances." [/aughs] 
PLAYBOY: What did your mom say to you? 
west: She told me to shut the fuck up—in 
like a nice English-professor way. 
PLAYBOY: When your mom tells you to 
shut the fuck up, maybe it’s time to shut 
the fuck up. 

WEST: Put it like this: The Grammy award 
is great. Everybody celebrates you, you get 
endorsements, and everybody looks at you 
like, yo, this is a really quality artist. But I 
celebrate awards every day by talking shit, 
by saying I'm going to win. Think about 
that. 1 didn’t win the most Grammys last 
year, so I would have done myself a dis- 
service not to talk shit when I had the most 
nominations. That'd be like getting a fuck- 
ing star in Super Mario Bros. and just walk- 
ing at a regular pace instead of running 
around. When you get that star, go and kill 
as many mushrooms as possible. 
PLAYBOY: Still, having pop hits must 
have drawbacks. 

WEST: I want my music to be as real as 
possible. With the Black Eyed Peas, I feel 
their music is pure and honest, but I don’t 
think it’s perceived as that. 

PLAYBOY: That's the second time you've 
said something good about the Black 
Eyed Peas. 

west: I love the Black Eyed Peas! 
PLAYBOY: We've always wondered what 
rapper would risk his reputation to 
defend them 


WEST: You know, I speak up about what- 
ever I'm feeling, whether it's a common 
opinion or not. I think they're talented, 
and I argue with people about them all 
the time. Well, see, I didn't need to say 
I have to argue with people, because 
now they'll read this and feel a little bad 
about it. Its like when people come up 
to me in an airport and say, "Yo, man, I 
argue with people all the time. I try to 
tell them you not no bitch-ass nigga." 
PLAYBOY: How do you reply to that? 
WEST: I say, “Thank you, I appreciate 
that. Thank you for telling me you have 
to argue with people all the time." [laughs] 
You don't want to hear that at eight 
o'clock in the morning. It implies that 
everybody's saying bad stuff about me. 
They'll say, “Well, I thought you were 
arrogant because I read some article 
about you.” 
PLAYBOY: Why would people think you 
are arrogant? 
WEST: Because of how the media por- 
trays me. 
PLAYBOY: Come on, Kanye. If people think 
you're arrogant, it’s not only because of 
how the media portrays you. You've got 
some arrogance in you. 
west: Nah, I might have some cockiness. 
It's always a conflict: Maybe I'm more 
self-conscious than I am self-confident, 
and self-consciousness is what makes me 
ask 30 different people for their opinions. 
I overcompensate for my anxieties. 
PLAYBOY: But you even refer to yourselfas 
“the international asshole” in one song. 
WEST: That's just playing into what people 
believe. Like, okay, people have this per- 
ception; let's fuck with it a little bit. Here 
is a statement that will come off as arro- 
gant: I almost wish I could not be me for 
a day, just so I could be entertained by 
the shit I say. [laughs] You know, that’s a 
good beginning for a rap. It even rhymes. 
I need to put that in a rap. 
PLAYBOY: Let's talk about your background. 
Describe the street you grew up оп 
wesr: All over the world, actually. I stayed 
in China an entire year when I was in fifth 
grade. I stayed in different places grow- 
ing up in Chicago, all the way from the 
inner-city South Side, which was gang- 
populated, to the suburbs, which were 
gang-populated, to even further suburbs, 
also gang-populated. In Chicago you're 
not getting away from the gangs 
PLAYBOY: Were you in gangs? 
WEST: No. I was always focused оп some- 
thing creative. It would seem like I was 
in my own world. I'm sure you'd say I 
was special. 
PLAYBOY: In what way were you special? 
WEST: Well, I grew up to become me. 
PLAYBOY: Okay, but what was special about 
you at the age of 10? 
WEST: I was a performer and a ham and 
just wanted to entertain. I would always 
sk questions; I was never good with 
“Because I told you so.” And І hate 
when parents try to stop their kids from 
asking questions. Kids should ask as 


many questions as possible. Whenever 
I'm around somebody I admire, I ques- 
tion them to death 

PLAYBOY: Were you funny-looking? Didn't 
you have braces? 

west: Not until high school. People in 
my family would act like my tecth were 
okay, but whenever we were talking about 
each other, that would be the main joke. 
I went to a girlfriend's house, and her 
neighbor's sister said, “Your teeth are big 
and white just like horse teeth.” I said, 
“Fuck this.” When I got braces, the ortho- 
dontist had to remove eight teeth. And 
Гуе got a big mouth! So imagine how big 
my teeth were. 

PLAYBOY: You're very close to your 
mother. Would it be fair to say you were 
а mama's boy? 

WEST: Yeah, ГА say so. My dad had a lot 
of influence too. 

PLAYBOY: He was a Black Panther, and 
to a lot of people that means a militant, 
Afrocentric separatist. 

WEST: He wasn't а separatist. We lived in 
an all-white neighborhood. It’s funny 
He was like, “I don’t want anybody to 
know I'm a Black Panther.” He was a 
military brat, so he was raised around 
white people, but they didn’t like him 
because he was black. Then he’d go 
around black people, and they didn't 
like him because he talked white. It was 
hard for him, and he was always looking 
for a home or a movement, something 
to be part of 

PLAYBOY: It sounds as if you had a 
happy childhood even though your 
parents divorced. 

WEST: Yeah, I used that to my advantage. 
I'd ask Mom for something, then ask Dad 
for something. 

PLAYBOY: Were you a spoiled only child? 
WEST: I was taught a lot about morals and 
values. My father or stepfather would 
have me cutting the grass while every- 
body else was playing basketball. Or my 
mother would buy me only two pairs of 
shoesa year when she could afford to buy 
a pair of shoes every month. That made 
me appreciate stuff. And it made me feel 
a want or a need for stuff. So now when I 
buy clothes, I really do feel fulfilled. Like 
a little kid who always wanted to go to 
Disney World: You go to Disney World, 
and it's great. So Gucci is like Disney 
World for me. 

PLAYBOY: But there must have been some- 
thing bothering you as a kid, because you 
were a bed wetter. 

WEST: Yeah, I don't want to talk about 
that. 

PLAYBOY: Why not? You even mention it 
in a song. 

WEST: [Silence, shakes head] 

PLAYBOY: Okay, so tell us about your 
grandfather Portwood Williams. He was 
involved in the civil-rights movement in 
Oklahoma in 1958, which you refer to in 
"Never Let Me Down." 

WEST: He's just a great figure in Okla- 
homa City. He's got monuments and 


The Macallan Fine Oak 10-years-old Single Malt 


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PLAYBOY 


54 


stuff. Yeah, he’s the number-one stunner. 
Hell start off a sentence by saying, “I am 
the master," the same way other people 
would say "Hello" or “How are you?” He 
loves having me as a grandson. He'll be 
like, "Yo, my grandson is Kanye." 
PLAYBOY: It's easy to sec where you got 
your confidence. 

WEST: But he's way more eloquent. People 
say I'm a good speaker for a rapper, but I 
fall short. I can't talk after Barack Obama 
or Oprah Winfrey. Ninety percent of 
the time I fall short of my goal. I want 
my concert to be as stunning as U2's or 
Michael Jackson's. People say my show is 
great, but I know it's not as good as that 
"Talking Heads DVD I just saw, Stop Mak- 
ing Sense. See, I threw ош that Talking 
Heads reference to sound like I know a 
lot about music. 

PLAYBOY: You keep revising many of your 
songs until the last possible second. Isn't. 
that a difficult way to work? 

WEST: І envy people who settle for 
mediocrity. Right when Late Registra- 
tion was about to come out, I was driv- 
ing myself crazy. The years Im losing 
off my life stressing out about a drum 
sound are the reason people can go to 
the store and purchase albums of the 
caliber of Late Registration. My pain is 
everyone else's pleasure. Everything I 
worry about isa gift I give to the world. 
I can't say I perfected my album, but 
any song that's perfect would be bad 
because imperfection is a quality peo- 
ple relate to. 

PLAYBOY: Is that why you sing on your 
records? 

WEST: Are you asking me if I sing to 
make my records worse? [laughs] Yeah. 
I was singing on the original version of 
*Heard 'Em Say," and I felt like it was 
making it too “worse.” I used incorrect 
English on purpose—just put worse in 
quotation marks. 

PLAYBOY: In “Drive Slow” you talk about 
being a teenage virgin. How old were you 
when you lost your virginity? 

WEST: [To girlfriend] Can you please leave 
the room? [she leaves] I was 17, which is 
remarkably late by our standards. I think 
my game was wack. 

PLAYBOY: So who took your virginity? 
WEST: She was my girlfriend, and she had 
great titties, even by my standards today. 
She had a bit ofa gut, though. I wouldn't 
fuck with that now. She was short, like 
five-foot-four, with 36Ds. And the nipples 
were almost the same color as the skin. I 
used to love those fucking titties. Га stare 
at them. 

PLAYBOY: Your game has gotten a lot bet- 
ter in the past few years. Are you taking 
advantage of your fame? 

west: In between having a girlfriend, 
sure, but I don't really wild out. I'll show 
you some of my girlfriends’ pictures оп 
a website as long as you don't print the 
name of it. If I were to tell you, “Хо, I did 
this and this," it might be a little bit taste- 
less coming from me. 


PLAYBOY: You graduated from high 
school in 1995, and your breakthrough 
was Jay-Z's The Blueprint, which came out 
in 2001. What were you doing in between 
those years? 

WEST: [ went to college for a year and а 
half. [ worked a telemarketing job, sell- 
ing insurance to people who bought stuff 
with a Montgomery Ward credit card. 1 
was way better than most of the people 
there. I could sit around and draw pic- 
tures, basically do other shit while I was 
reading the Teleprompter. [laughs] Even 
back then I would stray from the Tele- 
prompter. 

PLAYBOY: You've also been producing 
since you were in seventh grade. Were 
you able to sell the tracks you made? 
WEST: I was hustling beats, selling them 
to local drug dealers for $200 or $250. 1 
had a platinum plaque when I was 19 for 
working on Jermaine Dupri's first album. 
I was making $60,000 or $70,000 a year 
by the age of 20 or 21. 

PLAYBOY: But you had a lot of frustration, 
too. Your career stalled. 

WEST: I couldn't make ends meet. You're 
chasing dreams, you want something so 


People say I'm а good 
speaker for a rapper, but 
I can't talk after Barack 

Obama or Oprah Winfrey. 
Ninety percent of the time I 
fall short of my goal. 


bad, you're so close to it. І remember me 
and Just Blaze would have beats on the 
same album, and six months later he'd 
have 20 more beats sold and I'd have 
one beat sold. And it hurt. Like, damn, 
I thought we were the same caliber. But 
he could buy whatever he wanted, and I 
wasn't sure I could pay the rent. 
PLAYBOY: Even though you couldn't pay 
the rent, you were telling people you'd 
be bigger than Michael Jackson. 

WEST: I didn't say that all the time, but I 
remember telling executives at Sony that. 
PLAYBOY: That's awfully cocky for a guy 
who had nothing. 

WEST: Hey, you gotta dream big. What's 
the point in saying, "I'm gonna be bigger 
than Tito Jackson"? 

PLAYBOY: For a guy with that much con- 
fidence, it must have been a shock to 
struggle at selling your music 

west: I had one nervous breakdown I talk 
about on “Touch the Sky,” when I busted 
out crying. My girlfriend and I were in 
a room together, listening to the first 
Lil’ Kim CD, Hard Core. I would listen 
to Lil’ Kim, then listen to my beat— 
another Lil’ Kim song, then my beat. It 


sounded like the same caliber to me, but 
I couldn't sell a fucking beat. And I just 
stood next to that stereo and busted out 
crying and shaking. I didn't have con- 
trol of my body, didn't have control of 
my emotions. It didn't make any sense. 
ТЕТ could have sold even one beat, that 
$7,500 would have meant so much to 
me. I was living in New York, 600 miles 
from home, and had $300 in my bank 
account. You should never have less in 
your account than how far you are from 
your crib. 
PLAYBOY: Once you were established as a 
producer, what kind of response did you 
get when you told people you wanted to 
rap, too? 
WEST: So many people thought I was wack. 
PLAYBOY: Well, rappers are supposed to be 
from the hood. You grew up middle-class 
in the suburbs. Jay-Z says he didn't believe 
in you because you werer't ghetto. 
WEST: Yeah, but also my raps were trying 
to be ghetto. They didn't believe that, 
coming from me. I had to figure out 
my niche. 
PLAYBOY: Can we hear one of your ghetto 
rhymes? 
WEST: It was something like "I got the 
platinum chain to show you what my 
stacks is about/And a platinum gat to 
back up what I'm rapping about.” It was 
good wordplay. Some people believed 
in me. They thought the shit was pretty 
hot. People always talk about how bad my 
raps were, but if you go back and listen 
to them, they're better than a lot of shit 
that's out today. 
PLAYBOY: So when did people start to 
believe in you? 
h “Slow Jamz,” when you heard 
the line “She got a light-skinned friend 
look like Michael Jackson/Got a dark- 
skinned friend look like Michael Jack- 
son,” you all knew you were dealing with 
a star. That is one of the greatest punch 
lines in rap history. 
PLAYBOY: Let's talk about your car acci- 
dent. You fell asleep at the wheel when 
you were making The College Dropout. 
WEST: Okay. Damn, there is a lot of inter- 
esting stuff that happened to me. 
PLAYBOY: When you came to, what did 
you see in the mirror? 
west: I saw my mouth getting bigger 
and bigger, like in a horror movie. My 
Jaw was separated, and inside it was bro- 
ken open. I was in the car for like 10 
minutes before anybody got there, and 
I called my girlfriend and my mother 
to apologize for hurting myself. I didn't. 
know if I was going to be able to rap 
again. Га been working so hard to do 
this album—I already had “All Falls 
Down" and “Jesus Walks." 
PLAYBOY: What happened when you got 
to the emergency room? 
WEST: Man, that wasa bad experience. The 
things they had to do to support my jaw 
were just hurting it worse. This one lady 
kept on talking to me. 1 said, “Why are you 
(continued on page 132) 


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| cities of the world received 
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BY TIM FLANNERY 


58 


In the shadow of an iceberg, a crabeater seal hunts for plankton off the Antarctic coast. According to the National Snow and Ice Data 
Center, 150 miles of Antarctic coastline have changed dramatically during the past I6 years. The most notable shift occurred in 2002 with 
the collapse of the Larsen Bice shelf, an area of surface ice almost the size of Rhode Island, on the eastern edge of the continent. 


the first sophisticated computer models were suggesting that a doubling of 
carbon dioxide (CO,) in the atmosphere would lead to an increase in global 
temperature of around five degrees Fahrenheit. Still, concern among scientists 
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believed that extra CO, in the atmosphere would fertilize the world's croplands 


and produce a bonanza for farmers. But by 1988 climate scientists had become 
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ing experts to report twice each decade on the issue. Their third report, issued 
in 2001, sounded a note of sober alarm, yet many governments and industry 
leaders were slow to take an interest. Even today the general public is unaware 
of the increasing number of danger signs that are harbingers of the monumental 
changes looming in our planet's near future. 

What follows is a concise survey of just some of these monumental changes: 
the melting of ice near the poles, which has the potential to disrupt aquatic food 
chains and lead to the extinction of polar bears, penguins, seals and whales; an 
elevation of temperatures in other regions, which could lead to the extinction of 
perhaps half the species of animal life; and an increase in ocean temperatures, 
which will bring greater rainfall and flooding to some regions and an increase in 
the number and ferocity of hurricanes in others. These changes will cause loss of 
life, an impoverishment of our natural heritage, economic disruption and social 
disorder. New Orleans after Katrina will be just the start. 


DISAPPEARING ICE 


It's hard to imagine anything more emblematic of the transformations occur- 
ring at the ends of our earth than the greening of Antarctica. Climate change is 
occurring now at the poles at twice the rate seen anywhere else. Yet terrestrial 


changes pale into insignificance when 
compared with those occurring at sea, 
for the sea ice is disappearing. 

The subantarctic seas are some of the 
richest on earth, and there is a genu- 
ine paradox here because that richness 
exists despite an almost total absence 
of the nutrient iron. The presence of sea 
ice somehow compensates for this. The 
semifrozen edge between the saltwater 
and floating ice promotes remarkable 
growth of the microscopic plankton that 
is the base of the food chain. Despite 
months of winter darkness, plankton 
thrives under the ice, allowing the krill 
that feed on it to complete their seven- 
year life cycle. And wherever krill are in 
abundance, penguins, seals and great 
whales are likely to be present. Indeed, 
so miraculous is the influence of sea 
ice on plankton—and therefore on krill 
and the creatures they feed—that there 
is almost as much difference between 
the ice-covered and ice-free portions of 
the Southern Ocean as there is between 
the sea and the near-sterile Antarctic 
continent itself. 


Angus Atkinson of the British Antarc- 
tic Survey is deeply interested in the 
relationship between plankton, krill and 
the mammals that feed on them. Atkin- 
son and his colleagues examined records 
of krill catches from the research vessels 
of eight countries working in the south- 
west Atlantic sector of the Southern 
Ocean. This is the true home of the krill; 
more than half their total southern hemi- 
sphere population resides here. Atkinson 
and his colleagues found a significant 
decline in krill numbers since the late 
1970s, at a rate of nearly 40 percent a 
decade. As Atkinson and his colleagues 
tell us, “This is not a localized, short- 
term effect; it relates to around 50 per- 
cent of the [krill] stock, and the data 
span 1926 to 2003." 

Year-to-year population appeared to 
fluctuate with the extent of sea ice 
the previous winter, extensive sea ice 
meant plenty of winter food for the krill. 
Research reveals that the extent of sea 
ice was stable from 1840 to 1950 but 
has sharply decreased to such an extent 
that the northern boundary of the ice 
has shifted southward, from latitude 
59.3 degrees south to 60.8 degrees 
south. This corresponds to a 20 per- 
cent decrease in sea ice extent. The 
reduction in krill numbers, plus the link 
between krill abundance and winter sea 
ice cover, suggests that climate change 
is threatening the world’s most enig- 
matic ocean and the unique creatures 
that exist and feed there. 

Already there are signs that some Ant- 
arctic fauna are feeling the pinch. The 
emperor penguin population is half what 
it was 30 years ago, while the number 
of Adélie penguins has declined by 70 
percent. Such studies suggest that in 
the near future a point will be reached 
at which one krill-dependant species 
after another will be unable to feed. 
The humpbacks that traverse the world’s 
oceans likewise will no longer be able to 
fill their capacious bellies nor will the 
innumerable seals and penguins that 
cavort in southern seas. Instead we'll 
have an ocean full of jellylike salps (a 
nutrient-poor species thriving in the wake 
of disappearing plankton), the ultimate 
inheritors of a defrosting cryosphere. 


THE LAST OF THE 
POLAR BEARS 


The Arctic is a region that is almost a mir- 
ror image of the south, for while the Ant- 
arctic is a frozen continent surrounded Бу 
an immensely rich ocean, the Arctic is a 
frozen ocean almost entirely surrounded 
by land. It's also home to 4 million people, 
which means it is better studied. Most of 
the Arctic's inhabitants live on its fringe, 
and there, in places such as southern 
Alaska, winters are 4’F to 5'F warmer than 
they were just 30 years ago. 


‚Alight-blue plankton bloom appears in the southern Atlantic (above). The sizeof the plankton 
population is linked to the amount of sea ice in the Southern Ocean. As plankton declines. so 
does the quantity of the nutrient-rich krill (bottom) that feed on it. a trend thatthreatens krill- 
dependent species such as penguins, seals and whales. Meanwhile the ice cap at the north 
Pole has been receding rapidly. Below. satellite images from 1979 and 2003. 


60 


Fossil-fuel-fired power plants release CO, into the atmosphere (above). As CO, increases, so 
does the amount of moisture in the air, which then traps radiant heat. This phenomenon is 
only partially offset by the cooling effect of sunlight-reflecting cumulus clouds. 


If anything symbolizes the Arctic, it is surely nanuk, the great white bear. He 
is a wanderer, a hunter and a fair match for man in the white infinity of his polar 
world. Every inch of the Arctic lies within his grasp: Nanuk has been sighted 1.2 
miles up on the Greenland ice cap; he has been found denning at the bottom of the 
Hudson Bay, at a latitude of just 53 degrees north, and purposefully striding the ice 
within 100 miles of the true pole itself. “І used to think the land would stop them,” 
remarked Canadian polar bear biologist Ray Schweinsburg, “but I think they can 
cross any terrain. The only thing that stops them is a place where there is no food.” 
And for polar bears, having sufficient food to live means having lots of sea ice. 

Polar bears, it’s true, will deign to catch lemmings or scavenge dead birds if 
the opportunity presents itself, but sea ice and netsik, the ringed seal that lives 
and breeds there, are at the core of the creature's economy. 

The plight of the harp seals (Pagophili groenlandici) living in the Gulf of St. 
Lawrence gives us a clear idea of the shape of things to come. Like the ringed 
seal, the harp seal can raise no pups when little or no sea ice is present—which 
happened in 1967, 1981, 2000, 2001 and 2002. The run of pupless years that 
opened this century is worrying. When the run of ice-free years exceeds the repro- 
ductive life of a female ringed seal—perhaps а dozen years at most—the Gulf of 
St. Lawrence population, which is genetically separate from the rest of the species, 
will become extinct. Ringed, ribbon and bearded seals also give birth and nurse 


on the sea ice. Even the mighty walrus 
lives under the spell of the frozen sea, 
for the highly productive ice edge is its 
prime habitat. 

The great bears are slowly starving as 
each winter becomes warmer than the 
one before. A long-term study of 1,200 
bears living in the south of their range 
around the Hudson Bay reveals that 
they are already 15 percent skinnier on 
average than they were a few decades 
ago. The feeding season has become 
too short for the bears to find enough 
food, and 15 percent is a lot of body 
fat to lose before hibernation. With each 
year, starving females give birth to fewer 
cubs. Some decades ago triplets were 
common; they are now unheard of. And 
back then around half the cubs were 
weaned and feeding themselves at 18 
months; today the number 15 fewer than 
опе in 20. Even females that success- 
fully give birth face dangers unknown 
in times past. Increasing winter rains in 
some areas may collapse birthing dens, 
killing the mother and cubs sleeping 
within, and the early breakup of the ice 
can separate denning and feeding areas. 
When young cubs cannot swim the dis- 
tances required to find food, they will 
simply starve to death. 

As Schweinsburg says, the only thing 
that stops nanuk is a place where there 
is no food. And in creating an Arctic 
with dwindling sea ice, we are creating 
а monotony of open water and dry land 
where, for nanuk at least, there is no 
food. Without a thick fall of snow, he 
has nowhere to make his winter den, 
and without ice, snow and nanuk, what 
will it mean to be Inuit—the people who 
named him and who understand him 
like no other? When nanuk is fit and 
well fed he will strip the blubber from 
a fat seal, leaving the rest to a retinue 
of camp followers including the arctic 
fox, the raven, and the ivory and glau- 
cous Thayer's gulls. At certain times and 
places many of these creatures depend 
on nanuk, for there is no other giver of 
bounty in this forbidding land. As the 
Arctic fills with hungry white bears, what 
will become of these lesser creatures? 
Some, such as the ivory gull and little 
auk, also depend on sea ice. Indeed the 
ivory ви! has already declined by 90 
percent in Canada in the past 20 years 
and will not see out the century if that 
rate continues. It looks as if the loss of 
nanuk may mark the beginning of the 
collapse of the entire Arctic ecosystem. 

If nothing 15 done to limit greenhouse 
gas emissions, it seems certain that 
sometime this century a day will dawn 
when no summer ice will be seen in the 
Arctic—just a vast, dark, turbulent sea. 
My guess is that the world will not have 
to wait even that long to be done with 
папик, for before the last ice melts, 
the bears will (continued on page 68) 


“Care to take a ride...?” 


AS GOOD 
AS SHE SOUNDS ' 


o how did you spend your Super Bowl halftime? Were you watching the Rolling Stones through your fingers, hoping 

with all your might that this year's spectacle wouldn't end in another wardrobe malfunction? Or were you glued to the 

sight of Willa Ford and her beautiful friends playing full-contact football in their panties? In case you foolishly fumbled 

the chance to witness the unmistakably buff 25-year-old playing quarterback in the annual pay-per-view celebration 

known as Lingerie Bowl, we'll let Willa herself let you know how to recognize her more easily in future contests. “А lot 
ofthe other girls go out there to smile and be cute," she says. “I’m always the one with war paint on.” 

Feats of athleticism come naturally to the intensely driven, no-holds-barred Florida native. A lifelong tomboy and an amateur 
boxer to boot, Willa hosted the first season of The Ultimate Fighter, a reality-TV competition in which amateurs compete for a contract 
with the Ultimate Fighting Championship. She considers herself the first female UFC personality sufficiently qualified to analyze the 
bloody battles of the Octagon for devoted home viewers. “In the past they'd hired Lisa Dergan and Carmen Electra, and the fans 
basically chewed them up and spit them out,” she says. “I live and breathe the sport, so | know what I'm talking about.” Growing 
up in the rural town of Ruskin, near Tampa, Willa came of age playing softball and riding go-karts, but at the age of 11 she was 
recruited into the same Florida teen-pop farm system that would also yield Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Mandy Moore. 
By the time she was 20, Willa had already racked up an album, Willa Was Here, a hit debut single, (fext concluded on page 131) 


id dm rc 


Fromieft: Talk about atalented lineup (clockwise from eff) —Willa Ford, Jenny McCarthy, Amber Smith and Adrianne Curry at the Lingerie Bowl 
press conference. Willa's album, Willa Was Here. "I had so much more tun taking my clothes off for pLarsoy than! ever had sifting in astudiowrrfing a 
song,” she says. Willawith Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White and Willa's sometime boyfriend, Chuck “the Iceman” Liddell. 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEPHEN WAYDA 


63 


See more of Willa at cyberplayboy.com. 


PLAYBOY 


68 


BAD WEATHER (continua rom page 60) 


In a few decades’ time there will be no glaciers 
left in America’s Glacier National Park. 


have lost their constellation of den 
sites, feeding grounds and migration 
corridors, without which they cannot 
breed. Perhaps a cohort of elderly bears 
will linger on, each year becoming thin- 
ner than they were the previous. Or 
perhaps a dreadful summer will arrive 
when the denning seals are nowhere to 
be found. A few ingenious hunters may 
eke out a living on а diet of lemming, 
carrion and sea-caught seals, but they'll 
be so thin that they will not wake from 
winter's sleep. 


GLACIAL MELT 


The changes we're witnessing at the 
poles are of the runaway type, mean- 
ing that unless greenhouse gases can 
be limited—and quickly—there will 
be no winners among the fauna and 
flora unique to the region. Instead we 
should expect that the realm of the 
polar bear, narwhal and walrus will sim- 
ply be replaced by the largest habitat on 
earth—the great temperate forests of 
the taiga and the cold, ice-free oceans 
of the north. In areas where forest does 
not take over, increasing temperatures 
(and thus increasing evaporation) will 
give rise to polar deserts, for surpris- 
ingly large areas of the Arctic receive 
very little precipitation. 

All that remains of the great north- 
ern hemisphere ice caps today is the 
Greenland ice sheet, the sea ice of the 
Arctic Ocean and a few continental 
glaciers, and some signs suggest these 
8,000-year-old remnants are begin- 
ning to melt away. Alaska’s spectacu- 
lar Columbia Glacier has retreated 7.5 
miles in the past 20 years, and in a few 
decades’ time there will be no glaciers 
left in America’s Glacier National Park. 
Insummer 2002 the Greenland ice cap, 
along with the Arctic ice cap, shrank 
by more than 386,000 square miles, 
the largest decrease ever recorded. 
Two years later it was discoyered that 
Greenland’s glaciers were melting 10 
times faster than previously thought. 

The greatest extent of ice in the north- 
ern hemisphere is the sea ice covering 
the polar sea, and since 1979 its extent 
in summer has contracted by 20 per- 
cent. Furthermore the remaining ice has 
greatly thinned. Measurements taken 
using submarines reveal that it is only 
60 percent as thick as it was four decades 
earlier. This prodigious melting, how- 
ever, does not result in rising seas any 
more than a melting ice cube raises the 
level of liquid in a glass of scotch. 


Although the melting of the sea ice 
has no direct effect on sea levels, its indi- 
rect effects are important. At its current 
rate of decline, little if any of the Arctic 
ice cap will be left by the end of this cen- 
tury, and this will significantly change 
the earth’s albedo, the rate at which 
it reflects light. One third of the sun's 
rays falling on earth are reflected back 
to space. Ice, particularly at the poles, is 
responsible for much of that albedo, for 
ice reflects into space up to 90 percent 
of the sunlight hitting it. Water, in con- 
trast, is a poor reflector. When the sun 
is overhead, water reflects a mere five to 
10 percent of light back to space, though 
as you may have noticed while watching 
a sunset by the sea, the amount increases 
as the sun approaches the horizon. 
Replacing Arctic ice with a dark ocean 
will result in a lot more of the sun's rays 
being absorbed at the earth's surface and 
reradiated as heat, creating local warm- 
ing that, in a classic example of a positive. 
feedback loop, will hasten the melting of 
the remaining continental ice. 


PEOPLE IN GREENHOUSES 


If you want a visceral understanding 
of how greenhouse gases work, visit 
New York City in August. It’s a time of 
year when the heat and humidity leave 
those who still trudge the streets in a 
lather, Trapped in a crowded, built-up 
environment of concrete, hard edges, 
parched asphalt and sticky human bod- 
ies, the heat feels so unhealthful that it 
is almost insupportable. And the worst 
of it comes at night, when humidity and 
a thick layer of clouds lock in the heat. 

Suddenly you'll long to be in a dry, 
clear desert where no matter how hot 
the day, the clear skies at night bring 
blessed relief. The difference between a 
desert and New York City at night is a 
single greenhouse gas, the most power- 
ful of them all: water vapor. 

It’s testimony to human ignorance 
that as recently as 30 years ago, less 
than half the greenhouse gases had 
been identified and scientists were 
still divided about whether the earth 
was warming or cooling. Yet without 
these gas molecules our planet would 
be dead cold, a frigid sphere with an 
average surface temperature of —4°Е. 
But we have known for some time that. 
these gases have been accumulating. 
Scientists now recognize the indisput- 
able fact that since 1950 the tempera- 
ture of the earth has increased by 1^F, 
and it will continue to rise. 


Carbon dioxide is the most abun- 
dant of the "trace" greenhouse gases, 
and it's produced whenever we burn 
something or when things decompose. 
In the 1950s a climatologist named 
Charles Keeling climbed Mauna Loa in 
Hawaii to record CO, concentrations 
in the atmosphere. From this study he 
created a graph known as the Keeling 
curve, which is one of the most won- 
derful things Гуе ever seen. In it you 
can see our planet breathing. During 
every northern spring, as the sprout- 
ing greenery extracts CO, from our 
atmosphere, the great aerial ocean, 
our earth begins a massive inspiration, 
which is recorded оп Keeling's graph 
as a fall in CO, concentration. Then 
in the northern autumn, as decom- 
position generates CO,, there is an 
exhalation that enriches the air with 
the gas. But Keeling’s work revealed 
another trend. He discovered that 
each exhalation left a little more CO, 
in the atmosphere than the one before. 
This innocent perkiness in the Keeling 
curve was the first definitive sign that 
the great aerial ocean might prove to 
be the Achilles’ heel of our fossil-fuel- 
addicted civilization. Looking back I 
see that graph as the Silent Spring— 
the best-selling book that helped kick- 
start the grassroots environmental 
moyement—of climate change. One 
need do nothing more than trace the 
graph’s trajectory forward in time to 
realize that the 21st century would see 
a doubling of CO, in the atmosphere, 
from the three atoms per 10,000 that 
existed in the early 20th century to six. 
And that increase has the potential to 
heat our planet by around 5°F and 
perhaps by as much as 11°F. 

When scientists first realized that 
levels of CO, in the atmosphere were 
linked to climate change, some were 
puzzled. They knew that CO, absorbs 
radiation only at wavelengths longer 
than about 12 microns (a human hair 
is around 70 microns thick) and that 
a small amount of the gas captured all 
the radiation available at those band- 
widths. In experiments, increasing 
its concentration seemed to cause no 
real difference in the amount of heat 
trapped. Besides, there was so little 
of the gas it seemed inconceivable 
that CO, could change the climate of 
the entire planet. What scientists did 
not commonly realize then is that at 
very low temperatures—such as those 
found over the poles and high in the 
atmosphere—more heat travels at the 
bandwidths where CO, is most effec- 
tive. Most important, they discovered 
that rather than being the sole agent 
responsible for climate change, CO, 
acts as a trigger for that potent green- 
house gas, water vapor. It docs this 


(continued on page 134) 


Ore 
T а 


SY 
DUTTON 


“Could you call back? I can’t seem to locate her right now.” 


usic іп 2005 reached a new nadir with the devastation of the 

Crescent City music scene and the astonishingly dumb deci- 

sion by Sony BMG to implant its ХСР antipiracy software оп 
= consumers’ computers. But despite the techno hype—the 
chatter about spyware, the potential for ring tones to eclipse “real” music, 
the thrill of telephones that play music and iPods that play video-2005 
was in many ways a year of familiar old faces. As music videos started to 
move through the iTunes store, many top sellers were friendly classics. 
Madonna and Mariah Carey made near-miraculous returns to form, both 
blazing back onto the dance floor and avoiding the soft sound that had 
made them strictly chick music for the past few years. Gwen Stefani—fast 
becoming a latter-day Madonna. able to jump between genres and en- 
gage men and women alike—provided a playground chant for us all. cre- 
ating a pleasingly nostalgic feeling of togetherness (*B-A-N-A-N-A-S!") 
even as the music market continued to splinter into millions of autono- 


IN 


wa 


К 
i 
READERS, YOU HAVE VOTED. NOW IT'S TIME ТО REVEAL 
YOUR CHOICES. WE'VE ENSHRINED YOUR FAVORITES 
BUT BEFORE WE БЕТ TD THAT, WE THOUGHT 
SIDER THE YEAR OF MUSIC GONE BY. WEL- 
URNS, EXCITING DEBUTS, CHAOTIC SHIFTS IN 
ILOGY—THE SHIT WAS B-A-N-A-N-A-S IN 2005 


mous earbud-wearing podcasters of one. Foo Fighters, Coldplay. the 
White Stripes, the Rolling Stones, Franz Ferdinand and Beck all ге- 
leased new albums. all pretty good. That was a relief, given the way these 
follow-ups dominated the year in rock. EMI shareholders could breathe a 
sigh of relief too, since in addition to Coldplay's successful return, Gorillaz 
also managed a spectacular sophomore album. offering a multicultural 
mélange of electronics, hip-hop and indie rock able to bring wary listeners 
to electronica by transforming it into eclectica. In hip-hop, things weren't 
much different, with Kanye West's second album standing like a colossus 
over all else. Fear not, early adopters: some new trends had turntables 
spinning. Biggest of all was the emergence of Houston as a hip-hop hot 
spot, its slow beats turning the tide against frenetic crunk. There were 
signs of a revival in Nashville. And the readers’ poll favorite in the best 
breakout artist category. My Chemical Romance. proves that new rock 
remains a vital part of the musical spectrum. 


PT 


ТНІСК, SLOW BEATS 
BUBBLE IN OILTOWN 


Houston is hip-hop's newest boom- 
town. With local heroes Mike Jones, 
Paul Wall and Slim Thug catapulting 
to gold and platinum success in 
2005, Houston grabbed the spot- 
light from Atlanta. the Dirty South's 
previous hot spot. But the city is по 
Johnny-come-lately to the hip-hop 
landscape. “Man. Houston's always 
been hot” says Jones. “It just took 
some time for y'all to notice us.” The 
third coast got its start more than a 
decade ago. In 1991 the Geto Boys 
scored a hit with “Mind Playing Tricks 


DNE CITY WAXES AND ANOTHER WANES AS THE NEW CENTER OF HIP-HOP INTRODUCES 
A TWISTED SDUND—AND COMPANION COCKTAIL—TD THE WORLD 


on Me." Though they became super- 
stars in their hometown and one 
member, Scarface, went on to have 
a string of regional hits, they failed 
to get traction at the national level 
with subsequent releases. Houston's 
ғар honor roll also includes the duo 
UGK-short for Underground Kingz— 
made up of Bernard “Bun В” Free- 
man and Chad "Pimp C" Butler. UGK 
highlighted Houston's unique culture: 
candy-painted cars. iced-out grilles 
and, perhaps most important of all. 
drinking what's referred to there 25 
sizzurp. or lean. a cocktail of alcohol, 
soda and codeine-infused cough 
syrup. These are still the staples of 
Houston rhymes. “I'm glad the things 
that me and Pimp C rapped about 
back in the day are the same things 
the new H-Town generation is talking 
about.” Bun B says. Houston's signa- 
ture sip has influenced its signature 
sound-the superslow. reverb-heavy 
productions known as chopped and 
screwed. These days this sound is so 
popular that artists like Ying Yang 
Twins release entire chopped-and- 
screwed versions of their hit albums. 


No wonder the most influen 
Houston rap icon is the late Robert 
Earl Davis Jr.. known as DJ Screw. To 
make tracks more conducive to sip- 
ping syrup, DJ Screw would slow 
down records with the turntable’s 
pitch control. "Without DJ Screw 
there's no such thing as chopped 
and screwed,” says Aztek. a rising 
Houston MC signed to Jay-Z's Roc 
La Familia label. “As Houston rap- 
pers, we have to pay homage to 
Screw.” DI Screws influence is huge 
for another reason, too. His entre- 
preneurial streak created a strong 
do-it-yourself ethic in the 
Houston underground. He 

sold tens of thousands of 

records from his car and 

later through a store- 

front headquarters. "Mix 

tapes got us going,” 

reports Jones. 71 sold 

three underground 

albums before | ever 

came out on e major 


PAUL WALL 


label Venturing into business deals 
is part of the package now. Paul Wall 
is part owner of a jewelry store spe- 
cializing in custom diamond grilles, 
Lil Flip markets his own liquor, and 
Jones has started his own Ice Age 
record label. Screw would be proud. 


ІШ 


КЕТЕТІН 
SINGI. ES BARGAIN BIN 


BUST-A-NUT AIRTIGHT LOVE JAMS, VOL t FLL BE GENTLE sac 


"(GONNA Т W) Emm IN YA CABOOSE” 


w Ú 


— DEATH CITY MURDERERS TOUR CANCELEO ny 


ECT "MI RANA LOCA” 


TRES CAJDNES ESPAÑOL DE HIGH SCHOOL A CLEVELAND 


т ШОИ 
ENGLISH FOPS FOPPERY м 
A) “STILLSUCKING’ 
| "NSYNC GETTING TOO 010 FOR THIS з 


87 "n |THE JEWS MADE БИН" 


WHITE SABBATH REVERENCE 


10 7 талат ARPA UE — 


ITE USED TO BE ALT-COUNTRY wow ктү 


1 м "HEY HEY, WERE THE PUNKEES” = 


| BACKSTREET DIIS THE PASSION OF BOZAK ANO LUKE DUKE те 


12) TATY HAPPY CRY KITTY” 


SUSHI GIRLS HELLO AMERICA MAN, NOW! гэхиетен 


13 12 ТП IT” MICHAEL anckson & THE VIENNA 
BOYS’ CHOIR DIFFERENT LAWS OVER THERE ғо, 


(D) “WARRIAGE IS BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN" 


, CODY DON DONNIE FINT0LERANCFIS WRONG... cies 


THEME FROM JALBAN ЗАТ” — 


| JAILBAIT SISTA JUST LOOK AT MY ASS e% cnori 


D. TEE MI MI BEEF PATTY 


BIG DADDY BEEF Am ALOVE BEEF PATTY pasao | PATTY Beer ратил 


Pro) “FRUITY GOSPEL NODDLING RADIOED" — 


DJMBA MUSIC TO SELL CARS WITI 


-- "HAP ME OUT, YOUNGSTER’ susan 


MADE SOME BAD INVESTMENTS, NEED C} 


IS ARMSTRONG | 52 


BONING. BALUNG. BONKING. THE FIRST TIME IS A MEMORABLE EXPERIENCE FOR EVERYONE. TO PROVE IT WE TRACKED DOWN A RANGE 
OF MUSIC PERSONALITIES TO ASK THEM ABOUT THEIR FIRST TIME AND WHAT THEY WERE LISTENING TO. WHETHER IT WAS WITH 
A COED, IN A CLUB BATHROOM ОР WITH A CHICK IN A VAN PARKED AROUND THE CORNER FROM SCHOOL, EVEN ELEMENTS DF THIS 
DVERSEXEU SEGMENT OF THE POPULATION REMEMBER THEIR FIRST ROLL IN THE CABBAGE LIKE IT WAS FIVE MINUTES AGO 


RYAN KEY: it's not an adventurous story, but it's 
a great one. My parents were out of town. | was in love with this chick. 
And as cheesy as it is, the song was Oasis's “Wonderwall.” We were 
16. it was our song, and it was part of the plan: "Let's put this record 
оп and get it done.” And to put the cap on the whole thing—swear to 
God-it was Valentine's Day. | got to do it in my own bed. Totally rad. 
The whole experience was amazing because it wasn't like I lost it to 
some 2S-year-old babysitter who was horny and just wanted to do it 
with me because 1 was 16. | know it'll never be that rad again. 


5111511 CARLOS D: It was in Trenton, New Jersey. | was 16, 
‘one month from turning 17. It was at somebody's apartment. The 
girl was as white trash as can be. I liked her a lot. She was the text- 
book definition of the headbanging chick—didn't give a shit about 
anything. She was a year or two older than me, and even though 
1 went toa different school, | knew | wanted to hang out with this 
crazy older rock-and-roll chick who didn't give a shit. Back then 
1 had cheesy metal guitars. | was shredding. copying Steve Vai 
solos. This was at the dusk of the late-I9BOs metal movement, 
right before the tornado of grunge swept past and irrevocably 
changed the musical landscape. 1 was the last of the old guard. | 
was into Black Sabbath, Metallica—Iron Maiden was my favorite 
group. But the time we first slept together there was no music. 
It was late, the lights were off, and we pretended to be going to 
sleep. | ended up going out with her because she let me sleep with 
her. | even smoked pot with her father. But she cheated on me a 
couple of weeks after we slept together. 


AARON FLETCHER: My first time was at 
a school disco. | did it to “Star Trekkin'" by the Firm. 
KRIS BIRKIN: I'd like to say it was outside in the rain, listening to 
“Riders on the Storm” by the Doors, but it wasn't. 


RAY MANZAREK: | lost my virginity at my house. 
My mother, father and brothers had taken a weekend drive, and 
my first girlfriend and | went back to the house and used my bed. 
This was during my first year of college. | had gone to an all-boys 
high school. That was tough. When | got to DePaul University I 
was like, Oh my God. The girls were so beautiful. My first girl- 
friend and I were each other's first sex partners. The music was a 
Chicago rhythm-and-blues station that I listened to all the time. 
The DJ in the afternoon was Al Benson, and he would play—this 
was the South Side of Chicago in the late 1950s—Muddy Waters's 
"I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Мап," “Mannish Boy,” "Got My Mojo 
Working,” Howlin’ Wolf's “Smokestack Lightnin’.” Jimmy Reed, 
John Lee Hooker, Magic Sam, Slim Harpo. That's what we were 
listening to while we were fucking. 


PHIL COLLEN: | was 15 and desperate to get 
laid. It was September or October, and my birthday is in Decem- 
ber. | was thinking, Shit, I've got to get laid before I'm 16. Two 
friends and I met this girl who was really up for it. So my first time 
there were four of us in a van in East London. It almost put me off 
sex for life, Гуе got to say. It was woeful. You don't know what the 
hell you're doing. You're just so grateful that someone is actually 
letting you do it. And we were like, Wow, this is so cool. The best 
thing was this girl had a friend. A few days later | ended up shag- 
ging her friend at lunchtime during school; she and I went around 
to her house when her mom was out 


CHRIS SGUIRE: | can tell you that my first experience was 
Not terribly impressive. But the fact is Lam a member of the Royal 
Society of English Bass Players, which is a rather monastic body. 
We aren't allowed to go into detail about such things. It's a very 
specialized society—Lemmy is a member, after all-and the con- 
ditions laid down in the pledge preclude my discussing, among 
other things, loss of virginity and penis size. 


Salt-N-Pepa's “Push It” was playing. When that 
came оп, 1 was ready. We were at a party, and | was kicking it with 
a girl who was a friend of mine. When that song came on, it made 
the mood right. 


It was during high school, in Miami, at my boyfriend's 
home. We had been out to the movies. Then we were walking 
and ended up going back to his place. His mom was out. We had 
a Janet Jackson CD on; Janet always makes beautiful, sexy music, 
very romantic and laid-back. I didn't really know it was going to 
be the right moment— just a girl's intuition. 1 was young, | was 
scared, | thought I was in love. 


COURTNEY TAYLOR-TAYLOR: The 
first time 1 had sex was after high school. 1 was very stuck-up. The 
summer after | graduated | was at a party, getting drunk—the usu- 
al. Back then was a total eyeliner-wearing Goth. The music that 
night was Тогев on Tail, the band put together by members of 
Bauhaus, and we were drinking 40-cuncers of Olde English. A 
girl with a huge rack got me back into somebody's bedroom in 
this apartment in downtown Portland. So I'm making out with 
this chick, and the next thing | know she's got me on top of 
her. | was like, Wow. A few days later, though, it burned when | 
peed. I went to the downtown clinic didn't want my parents 
to know—and found out that while losing my virginity I'd picked 
up something called nongonococcal urethritis. It turned out to 
be no big deal, but it was a (continued on page 128) 


МҮ CHEMICAL ROMANCE 


HOT NEW MUSIC IS A BIG DART OF GAMING 


The days ol MTV and corporate rock radio are over. 
Video games are the new frontier for music fans in 
search of fresh tunes. The stolen car you're driving 
in Grand Theft Auto has better radio stations on the 
dial than your reaHife car, and the track list comes 
loaded with hot artists big and small. SSX on Tour 
features music from buzz bands LCD Soundsystem. 
Death From Above 1979 and Bloc Party. Artists are 
even using games as a way to break а song before 
it's on the radio: Green Day sneaked “American Idiot" 
‘onto the soundtrack of Madden NFL 2005 before 
the song hit the streets, and 50 Cent laid down 13 
exclusive tracks for his game. 50 Cent: Bulletproof. 


Е 
1 | 
You use a lot of Jamaican slang. Do 
people have trouble understanding you? 

People have trouble with almost every- 
thing | say, A few things on my album really trip 
people up. "Eye Deh a Mi Knee” is one. It's an 
old Jamaican saying that means “from when my 
eye was al my knee level.” like when | was a little. 
kid, | almost didn't put it on my album. People 
were like. “I dig this track, but what is this “eye 
deh а mi knee’?’ 

You swam for Jamaica in international 
competitions. Did that help your music career? 

Swimmers usually have great rhythm. 
Plus it helped develop my lungs, Now I have big 
lungs. so | can let loose. like “Yo. man. yo!” 

What city has the best weed? 

Los Angeles. The United States has some 

very nice weed, LA, has been good to те 
15 Bob Marley taught in schools in 
Jamaica? 


No. but he should be Everyone should have an 
appreciation for him, He's the only reason I'm here 


DUAL STEREO l MIXED IN THE USA 


NAMED AFTER A BOOK BY TRAINSPOTTING AUTHOR IRVINE WELSH, THIS JERSEY 
QUINTET WENT FROM EMO DUTSIDERS TO PLATINUM VICTORS IN A YEAR 


«January 13, 2005: Plays Late 
Show With David Letterman. 


April 4, 2005: Appears on Jimmy 
Kimmel Live. 

April 15, 2005: Begins 26-city 
tour opening for Green Day. 
«Summer 2005: Travels with Vans 
Warped Tour for second summer 


in a row. 


«September 15, 2005: Kicks off 
first headlining tour. in Colum 
bus. Ohio. 


«October 18, 2005: MCR's cover 
of the Misfits’ "Astro Zombies” is 
released on Tony Hawk's Ameri- 
can Wasteland soundtrack. 
«November 2, 2005: MCR wins 
Woodie of the Year at mtvU's 
second annual Woodie Awards. 


„November 9, 2005: Frontman for 
the Used. Bert McCracken-who 
duetted with MCR singer Gerard 
Way on a charity cover of “Under 
Pressure.” originally by Queen and 
David Bowie-reports he has fallen 


out with his former friends in MCR. 
"We dont speak at all” he says, 
«November 26, 2005: Gerard 
makes number 20 on the annual 
Cool List in British music bible 
NME. The magazine's definition of 
cool people? “People want to lick 
Nutella off their privates, and they 
never have to queue for drinks.” 
„December 2, 2005: SEG toys 
releases MCR action figures that 
stand five inches tall and have 16 
points of articulation 


SOUNDTRACKS 2.0 


DUAL STEREO HI WIFI 


MIXED IN THE USA 


the Raveonettes and Death Cab for Cutie recorded 
covers of 19505 rock-and-roll classics for the retro 
game Stubbs the Zombie. 

"Some bands did it because they love games: 
some love the era of music.” explains Zach Rener, 


THIRD 


This year game makers recruited artists to record 
cover songs to fit the themes of their games. Fall 
Out Boy. My Chemical Romance. Rise Against and 
others recorded versions of classic punk tunes to be 
mixed into the 60-song soundtrack of Tony Hawk's 
American Wasteland. Hip bands such as the Walkmen. 


SEAN PAUL | 


creative program director at Aspyr Media, publisher 
of Stubbs. “Phantom Planet agreed to do it be- 
cause the guys in the band love zombie movies.” 

When assembling the lst of artists for American 
Wasteland, Tim Riley. worldwide executive for music 
at Activision, found he didn't have room for all the 
bands that were jumping to be included. "We wanted 
to do 12 songs but ended up with 14. Bands were 
fighting over Black Flag and Bad Brains. We could 
have done another 20 bands if we'd wanted” 


SEAN PAUL'S TRINITY IS A TASTY MUSICAL 
STEW MADE FROM THREE KEY INGREDIENTS: 


ТІЛЕ m е DUTT UJ DANCEHALL, HIP-HOP AND REGGAE 


Youve worked with DMX and Busta 
Rhymes. Who is more insane? 

When | worked with DMX he had been film- 
ing a movie and took a flight straight to Jamaica. 
So he was pretty chilled out. Busta gets crazy 
in the studio, Everyone was drinking and chilling, 
smoking and toking. Ain't no joking. know what | 
mean? ! had a good time with Busta. 

What music do you listen to that 
might surprise people? 

Green Day, for sure. And Gorillaz. 

What's the worst hangover you've 
had recently? 

| was in New York and drank a bottle of 
cognac. The next morning I had a meeting. and} 
was hurting, | tried to keep a straight face and 
listen to what they were saying, but it was the 
worst hangover. | remember thinking, 1 need to 
speak. | kept trying to talk but couldn't. | actu 
ally canceled some shit that day. and I'd never 
done that before. | don't drink cognac straight 
from the bottle anymore 


" 


WORLD NE 


During Vietnam and 
Watergate. didyouever haveanurge 
to write political songs? 

No. but | didn't 
like the things the Nixon administra- 
tion did. Ive always had а problem 
with people who lie. whether it's а 
girlfriend. an agent or leaders who 
don't tell the truth and can't admit 
when they're wrong, to quote one of 
the songs on the new album. 

Can you pinpoint the 
moment you got so fed up you had 
to write about it in your music? 

The tip of the 


iceberg is there on “Please Ex- 
plain.” the first song we did for 
this album. Тһеге 5 a dissatisfac- 
tion, a disillusionment with what's 
going on. As I continued to write. 
things kept getting worse. When 
Colin Powell made his statement 
to the United Nations about the 
weapons of mass destruction. | 
believed it and thought, Yeah, 
we've got to go in. So to find that 
the information looks to have 
been massaged? That got to me. | 
get angry when I see that list every 
night. names of the dead being 
rolled off. | also think about the 


people coming back who weren't 
killed but whose lives as young 
people are over now because of a 
missing leg or some other wound. 

How did you approach 
writing about politics? 

I've been writing 
love songs all my life, but many 
of my love songs have to do with 
heartbreak: “Only Love Can Break 
a Heart" "Anyone Who Had a 
Heart." In a way, these new songs 
are still about having your heart 
broken-not by another person 
but by the wer and what's hap- 
pening to the country 


THE OBFUSCATION OF MARIAH CAREY'S LUNGS ARE TREASURED AROUND THE GLOBE. HOW BEST TD DISPLAY THEM, 


m | m HOWEVER, 15 APPARENTLY SUBJECT TD CULTURAL DEBATE. THE TOP ROW DF ALBUM ART BELOW 


SHOWS U.S. VERSIONS DF HER ALBUMS. BENEATH ARE THE SAUDI ARABIAN COUNTERPARTS. 
Ben 
J <i 


SINCE DAY ONE jazz has held а 
special place at PLAYBOY. Last year, 
for the first time, we named our 
Playboy Jazz Artist of the Year, 
acknowledging the achievements of 
an exceptional artist, pianist Jason 
Moran. This year we honor another 
piano player, Andrew Hill. Long, 
known as a link between the rigors 
of bebop and the discursiveness of 
free jazz, Hill is опе of che genre's 
great composers. Over the course 
of a long career he has established 


best rock album L Е] 
foo fighters |. kanve west — | 


Late Registra- 
In Your Honor. tion 


best soundtrack album 
gel rich or die tryin” | 


52 | best jazz album 
john cotrane 


On John Coltrane's remarkable 
Í — JAZZARTIST | we hear his fabled 
ANDREW HILL quartet start to push the boundaries cf jazz. 


Forty years later it still sounds as immediate 


and refreshing as if it happened yesterday. 
himself as a profound innovator 


with his distinctively discontinuous 
style. Born in Chicago in 1937, he 
got his start playing with Charlie 
Parker at the Graystone Ballroom in. 
Detroit. Through the 1960s he re- 
leased a series of amazing albums 
for Blue Note. Hill's latest CD, Time 
Lines (also on Blue Note), shows 
him in top form, stretching his com- 7 bestressue 

positions with a restless lyricism. Lesbo IA 

Like Earl Hines, Art Tatum and - 


Thelonious Monk before him, Hill қараса 
pushes jazz to new ground. “I've n 

always looked at life as a situation TheLegend 

you can grow in,” he says, “if you 

don't take yourself too seriously.” 


ur 


gorillaz 


Т best electronic album 


Demon Days 


ntry albu 


toby keith 


best live act 
uz 


Г 
ER 


romance 


AA 
tony hawk's american wasteland 


Тһе music іп games Is growing up as fast as 
the graphics. Of course, given the smash-and- 
burn bent of the tunes on your favorite game 
soundtrack, growing up seems to be a relative 
term. But the classic punk covers here rock. 


In 1965, when Syd Barrett joined 
Roger Waters, Nick Mason and 
Richard Wright, who had played 
together previously, Pink Floyd was 
born. After a couple of lefr-ficld sin- 
gles and an extraordinary album of 
acid rock, the band nearly imploded 
as Barrett's LSD use spun out of 
control, and he was replaced by 
David Gilmour. Confounding fans 
and critics who wrote Pink Floyd 
off ar Barretr's departure, its next 
incarnation would not only equal 
the original lineup's success but go. 
оп to become one of the most hal- 
lowed acts in rock history. More so 
than with its early psychedelic space 
rock, this second Floyd (led by Wa- 
ters and Gilmour) pushed musical 
boundaries with studio magic, lav- 
ish stage shows that transformed 
the concert business and a string of 
records, including concepr albums 
such as Dark Side of the Moon and 
The Wall, that were unprecedented 
in their combined commercial and 
musical gravitas. Godfathers of 
acid and prog rock, ambient music 
and current cerebral heroes Radio- 
head and Coldplay, Pink Floyd is 
so integral to the fabric of modern 
rock and roll, it’s hard ro believe 
that once, before its music became 
a cultural keepsake, it was just a 
band. Respect. 


° © OS 
АПАМА VISITS SOGBO'S 
HUT FOR A NEIGHBORLY MEAL 


BUT SOON FINDS HE'S NOT 
THE MASTER OF HIS APPETITES 


Fiction by 
TONY D'SOUZA 


remember a fight in the village. 

This was on a harvest night when 

the moon was full like a great sil- 

ver coin, and the tall mask—the 
one on stilts—had appeared in the 
witch doctor's compound, fortune- 
telling for rice and change, then 
dancing to the young men's drums. 
turning and leaping on those stilts 
like a giant crane. | had been in the 
village for more than two and a half 
years, and even though | was the 
only white most of the community 
had seen, | was no longer a novelty. 
| was a hunter, and I could wind my 
way through the Worodougou's 
maze of customs with relative ease. 1 
knew, for example, that when a man 
put on the mask to dance for the 
wellness of the people, he was no 
longer a man. He became the mask 
and the voice of the ancestors. 

Later, after the second harvest 
was stored in the granaries and the 
hot and dry harmattan wind had 
begun to blow, the leopard and 
crocodile masks would moan in the 
night, crawling on their bellies in the 
light of the bonfire like beasts scent- 
ing the air for flesh. But this night 
the moon was round, the land was 
moist, the first rice and cassava had 
been gathered, and the tall mask 
had made everyone happy. There 
would be a short lull in the field 
work now, and the sense of ease 
and festivity was general. 

Perhaps for this reason, Gaussou, 
my neighbor Bébé's arrogant older 
brother, thought to pay a visit to his 
third wife, the new one he'd taken as 
part of a debt settlement between 
his father and hers. Gaussou hadn't 
yet expressed much interest in the 
new girl. She was skinny as a chicken, 
her nose was thin, her eyes were nar- 


row, and her teeth were 
set tightly in her mouth 
so her face resembled a 
beak. But the air of the 
times was light. 

Long after everyone 
else had gone to bed, 
Gaussou roused himself. 
went and pushed on 
the door of her hut and 
was surprised to find it 
locked. He put his ear to 
the planks to hear if she 
was sleeping. He heard 
moans instead. His wife 
was giving pleasure to 
herself! With a carrot or 
slender sweet potato— 
women in need were 
rumored to do this. But 
what a waste of life 
energy, what an insult 
to the ancestors! If only 
he had known, he would 
have come to her hut 
more regularly. Yes, the 
girl was ugly. But what 
did beauty matter in the 
face of duty? 

Gaussou listened more 
intently, grew aroused at 
the sounds his new wife 
was making. He imag- 
ined her writhing on her 
mat, the carrot between 
her legs and her plastic 
bridal beads white as 
cowries around her hips. 
In this way Geussou 
finally understood the 
great beauty of his third 
wife's long thighs, sup- 
ple belly. He parted his 
evening wrap, took his 
erection in his hand. Yes, 
this was a great sin too, 


ILLUSTRATION BY NICHOLAS WILTON 


79 


80 


but listening to the girl moan, he could not help it. Suddenly he was on the 
verge of eruption. He shouldered in the door, stripped off his wrap and said, 
“Remove the carrot, wife! | am going to possess you.” 

In the darkness of her hut, he fell on her to mount her, thrust his penis 
vigorously between her legs. A male voice yelped: Gaussou was prod- 
ding the buttocks of the boy who was fucking his wife. All three tum- 
bled apart, found their feet, ran out of the hut. For their part, the lovers, 
anxious in their hearts already, assumed they were under attack by a 
genie. Gaussou, for his part, understood instantly that his name had been 
ruined beyond repair: Not only had he been cuckolded, but his mogo had 
touched another man’s anus. Naked, he began to beat the boy, and after 
taking a few blows, the boy began to fight back. He was the blacksmith's 
fourth son, and his arms were muscled from endless hours turning the bel- 
lows crank. The wife, Shwalimar, began to scream at the top of her lungs 
because, at times like these, everyone must do something. 

We all ran out into the silver moonlight at the commotion. We were hum- 
bled, quieted, by the fury with which the men fought. How strange, how 
awesome to see the primal rage of two furious men who weren't wearing 
any clothes. Gaussou's brothers jumped in, hitting the boy repeatedly in the 
face until it leaked like a cracked melon. Then the blacksmith's sons arrived, 
and the fight was a general rumble of elbows and grunts, of locked forearms 
and teeth. In the moonlight, it was like looking at a living field of marble hop- 
lites in battle. The night was punctuated with the root consonants of human 
language: chokes and shouts. The women of the two families scratched one 


THE CHIEF'S SONS CAME RUNNING WITH BRAIDED CATTLE 
WHIPS. IT WAS PANDEMONIUM, PEOPLE RUNNING IN CIR- 
CLES, THE WHIPS CRACKING LIKE THE END OF THE WORLD. 


another's faces, pulled hair; soon men punched women, women leaped on 
and bit men. Even the dogs snarled and cursed. 

The chief's sons came running with braided cattle whips, cracking 
them in the night, applying lashes liberally. It was pandemonium, рео- 
ple running in circles at three in the morning, the whips cracking like 
the end of the world. Then the chief himself arrived with his staff, his 
withered limbs. With a voice much louder than that body had a right 
to produce, he shouted, "A bana! A man-yee! Dougoutigi a nah! A bana! 
An Allah a nua laka?" It's finished! Evil people, your chief is before you. 
Would you open God's eyes onto us? 

Of course there was a history to it. not between the boy and Gaussou 
per se but between this man and that, this old woman and her neighbor or 
the parents who had sold your true love to someone else for two chickens 
and a wicker hat. There were always lingering debts, festering for genera- 
tions. It was life in the village. 

In the end, the boy was driven into the forest then and there, naked as 
he was, banished to whatever village would take him for two years on pain 
of death. The girl was carried into the forest by her husband's women, her 
vagina stuffed with chili peppers. And Gaussou received kola nuts and a red 
hen from the blacksmith in compensation for his shame, though this would 
never be enough. When we'd see him walking to his hut in the evening, alone 
asall men are, Mamadou, my best friend and village guardian, would swallow 
a mouthful of rice and whisper, "Remove the carrot, wife." 


This was my last year in Tégéso, a village of 700 people in the bush of north- 
ern Ivory Coast, and soon a war would ruin that place and separate me from 
it forever, but then, that time was my favorite. | spoke the language, and I 
lived in the village as a member of it. I'd grown my own fields, proven myself 
to the Worodougou in every way | thought | could. The reason I had come 
to the village—to find clean drinking water as a relief worker with Potable 
Water International—felt like an old and confusing dream. I had gone here 
and there with Mamadou and taught people about AIDS, promoted vaccina- 
tions and prenatal care, but really | was simply there, my heart beating, my 
lungs taking in air, growing older as the sun rose and fell. | thought about the 


hookers I'd visited in Abidjan, and | 
wondered if | had AIDS. The stars 
looked so wonderful to me at night. 
One day, maybe soon, I would take 
my place among them. 


One afternoon the witch doctor and 
| went hunting for mongoose. which 
we liked to eat. We crawled into a 
dense thicket in the forest where 
the leaf litter was a damp and warm 
humus, full of worms and grubs; what 
mongoose like to eat. We sat with 
our backs to an old termite mound, 
held our shotguns, waited. The hours 
turned toward evening, and nothing 
came. The sun set, and still we sat. 
Then in the dark of night, | heard the 
flick of his lighter, smelled the ciga- 
rette smoke. | lit one too. 

“Adama, you've learned patience.” 

“Thank you, Father.” 

“Before, | could feel your heart 
beating like a drum. Now you are 
like the air. 

“Adama, I am old now. Things 
have changed badly in the world. 
These days | like to come to the 
forest and simply look at it. The 
people come to me with their ail- 
ments, fears, and | gather those 
things from them and bring them 
here. | give them to the forest, and 
then | go home to the village. | like 
to look at the small children eating 
dirt. Sometimes | take a pinch of 
dirt and eat it too. You should go 
home, Adama, be with your people. 
You should sit in your village and 
look at your children. Gather your 
children's fears, take them to your 
forest, sit, marvel at the beauty." 

"| will soon, Father,” I told him. 
We crawled out of the thicket and 
followed the path home. 


The first time | noticed Mariam was 
in her hut. Her husband was visiting 
the village from Abidjan, and like all 
visitors, what he wanted to do 
before anything else was meet the 
white man. His name was Sogbo, 
and he was nice enough. He worked 
in a plastics factory in the city's 
Adjamé quarter, punching out dura- 
ble cups and bowls from a press. | 
didn't ask him about his life in the 
city, because | knew what it was like 
and didn't want to make him lie: He 
lived in a squalid shantytown like all 
village men there did. Here now, 
he'd brought soap and a new pagne 
for his wife, held his small son on his 
knee as (continued on page 143) 


“That probably explains the dog barking last night!” 


81 


82 


THE FULL 


Miss March delivers 
the whole package 


MONICA 


€ predict an influx of tourists to Long Island, 

given the area’s recent Playmate population 

increase. First came Miss April 2005, the fab- 

ulous Courtney Rachel Culkin. Now her long- 

time friend and sometime roommate Monica 

Leigh is showing us how they help keep New York beautiful. 

“I grew up with Courtney, and we've been best friends 

since I was 13," Monica says. “As a teenager 1 was always 

hamming it up for the camera, jumping around in the 

background and making sure I was in every picture. And 

I've always loved being naked. I used to run around the 

house nude, being the exhibitionist. But I got a little shy 

about trying out for rLaysoy. Courtney pushed me to do 
it because she loved it so much.” 


Monica has no regrets. Her long-standing fondness for 
flashbulbs has paid off. She landed the cover of our College 
Girls special edition and became December's Cyber Girl of 
the Month before Hef chose her as Miss March. Monica 
comes alive in front of the camera, and she does what it 
takes to get the perfect shot. Take the photo above, of her 
(right) and her sister Sheryl posing in front of the Statue of 
Liberty. “For that one shot we went back and forth to Ellis 
Island on the ferry about seven times. It was hilarious.” 

You'd better be laughing too, because this 24-year-old 
future dental hygienist is dying to see your choppers. “I 
am obsessed with teeth,” she says, leaning in to dazzle 
us with her own majestic molars. “I look at everybody's 
smile. I can't say І would never date a guy with bad teeth, 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEPHEN WAYDA 


oc 02090000, 
9200 
2005 


BESTER 
5 


but I'd have him get them fixed!” Speaking of men, Mon- 


ica says, “I like a man who works hard and has an artistic 
side. He has to be a free spirit, adventurous like me, will- 
ing to get crazy and try new things.” When we ask Miss 
March about her best date ever, it doesn't surprise us that 
it involved high speeds and free-falling. “I once told this 
guy that I wanted to try skydiving, so he took me,” she 
says. "Once you jump, it is such a weird feeling—so beau- 
tiful and peaceful.” 

Down on earth Monica fulfills her need for speed by 
snowblading with pals but likes to slow things down when it 


comes to her first love, singing. “I like to sing love ballads in 
the style of Celine Dion and Shania Twain," she says. "I'm 
going to try out for Making the Band if they do that show 
again." She pauses and stares at the heavens for a moment. 
“You know, I started looking at life differently after my mom 
passed away. She was a fighter, and she helped me realize 
that you can't just sit back. You have to go after the 

nt, and you have to look on the bright side and stay 

. I should have been around in the 1960s because 1 

such a hippie. I just want to make people smile." 
She's doing a good job, don't you think? 


See more of Miss March at cyber.playboy.com. 


PLAYMATE DATA SHEET 


NAME: Monica Leigh 
BUST: is QU ONES HIPS: 36 

HEIGHT: WEIGHT: Abe oo 
BIRTH DATE: AU er = Neus tock 


AMBITIONS: 19. ITS UC_ Wai 
ale олус о 00 
TURN-ONS: 15 \ nd har = 


ос Kin 


< 
TURNOFFS: г Aw 


THE FIVE BEST SINGERS EVER: an Ch сора 


RSS ania en > 
MY PETS: MJ. al e er а т 
МҮ EARLIEST ena ll er AS V аға ans 


mother t me de the Фа Xo see Ihe Swans and bow 


Жаз SEA Mee, were. „Juns so ee ahal а 
р \ 


Daem and one of Мена bit me realy hand! 
WHY I LOVE NEW oils an arazing sich and, such al еледі. 


| 


EN 
те + +R ev 
Me ` my pn ae ЖҰ ИЕ m I А k, 


6 years 


PLAYBOY’S PARTY JOKES 


What did Cinderella do when she got to the 
ball? Choked. 


One night a couple was lying in bed. The hus- 
band was feeling frisky, so he tapped his wife 
on the shoulder and started rubbing her arm 
to indicate that he wanted sex. The wife turned 
over and said, "I'm sorry, dear, but I have a 
gynecologist appointment tomorrow, and 1 
want to stay fresh.” 

Dejected, the husband turned over and tried 
to sleep. A few minutes later he rolled back and 
whispered in her ear, “Do you have a dentist 
appointment, too?” 


ë 


А man and his two friends were talking at a 
bar. His first friend said, “1 think my wife is 
having sex with the electrician. The other day 
I came home and found wire cutters under 
our bed.” 

His second friend said, “I think my wife is 
having sex with the plumber. The other day I 
found a pipe wrench under the bed.” 

The man said, “That's nothing. I think my 
wife is having sex with a horse.” 

Both his friends looked at him in disbelief. 

“I'm serious. The other day I came home 
and found a jockey under the bed.” 


А boy came home from school one day and 
said to his mom, “Guess what happened to me 
in school today. I had sex with my teacher!” 
His mom became very upset and screamed, 
“Go to your room! We'll tell your father what 
you did when he gets home.” 

When his father came home, the boy told 
him. “Way to go, son,” the father replied. “Let's 
go buy you a new bicycle.” 

When they came out of the shop with a 
brand-new bike, the father asked, “Do you 
want to ride it home?” 


“No,” the boy replied. “My ass still hurts.” 


A man went to his optometrist to have his 
eyes examined. The doctor told him, “Listen, 
you've got to stop masturbating.” 

“Why, Doc?” the man asked. “Am I going 
blind?” 

“No,” said the optometrist. “But you're 
upsetting my other patients.” 


А man was looking for work at a blacksmith 
shop. The blacksmith asked him, “Can you 
shoe horses?” 

"I'm not sure,” the man said, “but I once 
told a donkey to fuck off.” 


A kid was sitting on his lawn with a box of 
newborn puppies when George W. Bush came 
by on his morning run. Bush asked the boy 
what the puppies were. 

The boy said, “Republicans,” 

The president beamed, patted the boy on 
the head and said, “Thatta boy!” 

A few weeks later Bush was jogging again, 
this time with Dick Cheney in tow. Bush 
stopped at the boy’s house, winked at Dick 
and said, “Hey, kid, what kind of puppies are 
in the box?” 

‘The boy said, “Democrats.” 

Bush looked crushed and said, “What 
happened? A few weeks ago they were 
Republicans.” 

“Well,” the boy said, “that was before they 
opened their eyes.” 


In the beginning God created the earth and 
rested. 

‘Then God created man and rested. 

Then God created woman, and since then 
neither God nor man has rested. 


is 


í 


А little boy watched, fascinated, as his mother 
gently rubbed cold cream on her face. 

“Why are you rubbing that on your face, 
Mommy?" he asked. 

“To make myself beautiful,” said his 
mother. 

A few minutes later she began removing the 
cream with a tissue. "What's the matter?" asked 
the little boy. “Giving up?" 


Why don't women have brains? Because they 
don't have a penis to carry them in. 


Send your jokes to Party Jokes Editor, PLAYBOY, 
730 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10019, or 
by e-mail through our website at jokes.playboy.com. 
PLAYBOY will pay $100 to the contributors whose sub- 
missions are selected. 


M 
MUR 


“Darlin’...you’re home from the roundup already? Slim was showing me how 
to play Texas Hold “Ет!” 


т 


........., М . 
"| 


.. 
ee. LU 


OUTFITTING THE ULTIMATE GAME ROOM 


. 
. 
. 
ee 
. 
1 


BY JOEL JOHNSON 


We love fast cars and 
-as long as 
we're the ones behind 
the wheel, That's why 
ме get our racing fix 
playing pinball instead 
of watching TV. The race- 
trackon this table uses. 
magnets to send balls 
looping and features 
voice work from NBC 
racing commentator 
Allen Bestwick. $4,995, 
sternpinball.com. 


4 Тһе shafts оп these darts аге precision- 
machined from tungsten alloy. Now you'll know the problem is you, not 
your darts. $55 for three, blattbilliards.com. 


This pucked-up little rig is crafted to 
Gee the quick movements of real hockey (if you've 
got the wrists of a pro). Small touches like better goalie 
control outclass the competition. $895, tablehockey.com. 


Wurlitzer is as American as apple pie and the iPod. 
It went digital a few years back, and its newest jukebox features a 120-gigabyte hard 
drive, 375 watts of amplification and Klipsch speakers. Nothing starts a party like 
1,500 albums on tap and a built-in subwoofer. $4,000, gibson.com. 


The best dartboard on the market costs. 
$15 and looks...well, it looks like a dart- 
board. A game with this much put-your- 
eye-out potential deserves more. Dress 


Armando Ramiraz handcrafts up your board with a funky vintage-style 
these rustic warriors from polished car parts, If the cabinet. We like this pub house standard, 
bishops seem to have the most zip, perhaps it's because which features a pair of moonlighting 


their heads are topped by spark plugs. $210, novica.com. playing cards. $225, blattbilliards.com. 


Who says 
your table has to be 
green and brown? 
Brushed stainless 
steel makes this baby 
part pool table, part 
Chrysler Building. 
$32,500 and up, 
blattbilliards.com. 


е s Skills take you only so far. To really hustle а 
pool table, you need a hand from the right equipment. Blatt's two-piece 
cues are fashioned from hard rock Canadian maple, so you can depend 

оп them to strike hard and stay true. Ten different butt designs are 
available. $225 to $250, blattbilliards.com. 


It's not Ping-Pong, it's 
table tennis. How better to play 
than by using the proportions 

of a regulation tennis court? 


$1,700, rallystartennis.com. а 


Мапу mod- 
em video games lack a certain purity. 
Revisit the greats with Dream Arcades’ 
retro system. It packs more than 100 
classics, including Pac-Man and Galaga. 
The addition of a third and fourth con- 

\ troller lets you use its powerful built- 

іп PC for more modern gaming. Don't. 
| feel like playing? It doubles as a coffee 
| table. $2,300, dreamarcades.com. 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES IMBROGNO 


А good backgammon set is a 
lifetime investment. Don't skimp. This gem 
has faux-crocodile leather and a padded felt 
playing surface. $1,950, gammonvillage.com. 


You've invested in cues; 
now treat them well. 
Blatt Billiards’ stylish 
cases will get you 
noticed but won't make 
people suspect you 
have a colorful nick- 
name. $175 and 5225, 
blattbilliards.com. 


r The one thing 
most poker games are missing? Beautiful women. (f 
Take your game to the next level with this casino- Ў 
quality chip set featuring the pinup art of Greg 
Hildebrandt. $360 for 500 chips, nevadajacks.net. 


WHERE AND НОМ TO BUY DN PAGE 131. 


L The players оп 
this wood, steel and glass beauty can be. 
customized, so you can pit, say 20055 
Playmates against the 2004 lineup. 
$45,000 and up, elevenforty.com. 


"Don't think of it as a porno, Janet. Think of it as reality TV.” 


100 


ALL THE BUZZ 


1 love having sex after spending the 
day at the airport. and | can't get 
enough of vibrators. The last time I 
went to Puerto Rico | accidentally 
left mine in the hotel bed. | must 
have fallen asleep with it. When we 
got back home | rummaged through 
my luggage like crazy but couldn't 
find it. So | “| just need to go 
to the store really quickly," and I 
rushed to the sex shop in my flip- 
flops and nightie, | thought I'd be in 
and out really fast, but | couldn't 
find one 1 liked and got sidetracked. 
1 started looking at sex toys for 
guys. I was looking at cock rings 
because I'd heard they're good, and 
I wanted one with a tickler on it but 
couldn't find the right one. | was a 
little frustrated at that point, so my 
boyfriend and | wound up watching 
a porno together. 


CENTERFOLDS 


My man's а brainiac. I think girls like guys who are nerds. 
With my boyfriend I've become open to & lot of new things 
that I never imagined I would be. Now I'm like, "What's 
your fantasy? I'll do 1t." Ав for contra- 

ception, I prefer в condom because it 

makes my boyfriend's penis smaller. He's 

got a kickstand, let me put it that way, 

though the condoms start to irritate me 

about tne third time around. 


JEREMY BLOOM 
CAN’T LOSE 


HE’S A SKIER. HE’S AFOOTBALL PLAYER. HE’S A POP IDOL. 
THE SAVVY MARKETING OF AN OLYMPIC STAR 


е has the kind of fame usually reserved for beautiful 

heiresses caught in flagrante delicto or for young men 

in second-rate boy bands who marry pop goddesses 
and feel greatly conflicted about it. Still, he refers го himself as 
a brand, as in “Being a brand benefits me and my sponsors.” 
He has two agents, who sce him as a brand as well, although 
two different brands, as if they too are conflicted or at cross- 
purposes. He also has a publicist. 

Identifying his brand is difficult, as Jeremy Bloom, 23, is 
many things to many people. To CosmoGirl he is eye candy, 
and he's been called the It boy of 2005 and, according toa Brit- 
ish journalist, a dish. He is five-nine and 175 pounds, with the 
physique of a male model and the bland, nonthreatening good 
looks that appeal ro both teenage girls and older women. His 
mother says he is a sex symbol. “Older women ooh and aah 
over his abs,” she says. “I tell them they should be ashamed of 
themselves. They’re old enough to be his grandmother.” His 
attractiveness to women, however, doesn’t prevent him from 
continually asking his mother questions about his girlfriend. 
“He doesn’t understand her,” she says. He has been called a 
metrosexual who fusses over his looks, studiously musses his 
hair and maybe even shaves his chest. That annoys him. “Aw, 
come on,” he says. “That's ridiculous.” 

But his good looks are an important part of his brand. They 
have brought him endorsements for Under Armour and shirtless 
photo shoots for the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. (Bloom’s abs 
are legendary, scemingly divorced from their possessor and with 
a fame of their own, requiring their own talent agent.) He has 
also been the subject of photo shoots for Vanity Fair and GO, 
during which he posed with a topless female model in a hot rub. 
“Іс was a blast,” he says. “She was a stand-in for my girlfriend. 
People pay me an obscene amount of money to pose with beauti- 
ful women. I take advantage of open doors.” 


BY PAT JORDAN 


Considered friendly and ambitious, Bloom has taken advan- 
tage of his studied amiability, which has garnered him red- 
carpet gigs for MTV, hosting duties on the network’s Beach 
House and possibly his current girlfriend, an MTV star from 
The Real World: San Diego. He has appeared on Best Damn 
Sports Show Period, with Tom Arnold, who jumped up and 
down оп a trampoline with him, and on McEnroe, where the 
first question put to him was “Is it hard to get laid?” He was 
also a competitor on the 2003 SuperStars, which he won. In 
the 100-yard sprint—which he ran bare-chested, since our dish 
seems constitutionally unable to keep his shirt on—he beat 
NFL running backs Ahman Green and Charlie Garner. IMG, 
a sports agency that doesn’t even represent him, invited him 
to participare on SuperStars not merely because he is hand- 
some and personable but because he once played football аг 
the University of Colorado and, more important, is considered 
a world-class skier and America’s brightest hope for gold at 
the 2006 Olympics in Turin. In the sports world, he’s regarded 
as one of the most marketable skiers on the planet. 

Which is why, according to his mother, being called a male 
model “bothers him.” 

“People think they know you, and they don’t,” says Bloom. 
“I don't want to be known as a male model or a pop idol. 1 
consider myself a serious athlete.” Nonetheless, for $8.99 on 
his website, he sells posters of himself wearing a backward 
baseball cap, camouflage pants and nothing else. He is turned 
slightly to his left to better accent his chiseled abs and obliques. 
“Į do а lot of ab work for my sports,” he says. 

Bloom has a lot in common with Hubbell, the character 
Robert Redford plays in The Way We Were. Blessed with gold- 
en good looks, Hubbell is a talented athlete and writer whose 
accomplishments seem so effortless that some disparage them 
and, more important, him. In one of his short stories, Hubbell 


ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERTO PARADA, 


"SKIING 15 ABOUT FREEDOM, AND FOOTBALL 15 ABOUT DISCIPLINE AND ORDER,” 


SAYS BLOOM, “YOU CANT WIN А FOOTBALL GAME BY YOURSELF” 


writes of himself, “Things came easily го 
him, bur at least he knew it.” 

“Arc you saying things came casy to 
me?" Bloom snaps. “I got things by a lot 
of hard work." Yer many people work 
hard and aren’t blessed with his success. 
“I don't take it for granted,” he says. 
“And I don't indulge myself in the exte- 
rior world of how cool I am in a celeb- 
rity culture. I'm a competitive person. I 
used to want to conquer the world and 
be in every magazine.” That's a strange 


Char, was a housewife and skiing and 
snowboarding instructor. They were a 
kind of Leave It to Beaver family trans- 
ported to the Rockies. They spent all 
their free time outdoors, skiing, snow- 
boarding, waterskiing, hiking, moun- 
tain biking or rossing a football. “We'd 
throw a football around outside until 
it was dark,” says Bloom, “then we'd 
throw it in the house.” (Char says it’s a 
miracle they never broke a window.) “If 
it was snowing, we skied. We were the 


HIS GOOD LOOKS ARE AN IMPORTANT PART 
OF HIS BRAND. THEY HAVE BROUGHT HIM EN- 
DORSEMENTS AND SHIRTLESS PHOTO SHOOTS. 


comment for an athlete: Athletes want to 
win every game; celebrities want to be in 
every magazine. 

My mother taught me 1 could be 
anything,” Bloom says. “I never realized 
1 couldn't be everything. I think I can.” 
Bloom does nor see the subtle differ- 
ence between being anything and being 
everything, because he has the arrogance 
of youth. He sees life as an endless suc- 
cession of fulfilled desires; for Bloom, life 
will always be more, never less. Не can't 
imagine life could be a series of dreams 
destined to go unfulfilled. Which is why, 
in February, after the Olympic Games are 
over, he plans to attend the NFL scouting 
combine, а prelude to the draft, where he 
is sure he will be picked even though he 
hasn't played football in two years and is 
considered too small. “I've heard small 
all my life,” he says. “I was always the 
smallest. It fuels my fire. It motivates me 
to work harder to stay on top.” 


eremy Bloom, his older brother, 
Jordan, and his sister, Molly, grew 
up in Loveland, Colorado, north 
of Denver. Their father, Larry, was a 
clinical psychologist, and their mother, 


first ones on the lift. It was neurotic. No 
apres-ski. My siblings were better than 
me, so I had to struggle to keep up. I 
loved to go fast.” 

It was an idyllic life centered around 
the outdoors, much like the life of surfer 
dudes in southern California, with a 
shirtless Jeremy skiing in shorts along- 
side girls in bikinis on sunny days after 
a snowfall. There are the requisite cute 
stories about wild animals: coyotes 
playing with dogs, foxes іп the garden, 
deer in the backyard, mountain lions 
in the woods, hawks trying to capture 
a puppy, a brown bear in the driveway. 
As a boy, Bloom faced off against the 
bear. “Ма!” he screamed. “Ма! He’s 
hungry!” Char called back, “Then stick 
out your arm, dear.” 

The Blooms never seemed to be at 
rest, and their youngest son was the 
most restless. “If he had nothing to do, 
he was lost,” says Larry. “He made me 
throw him a thousand passes a day. Jer- 
emy was born competitive. 
“Jeremy was always quiet and well 
mannered in school, bur he was a little 
animal on the playground. He had го 
win. He was just gifted with determina- 


tion. When he was four, he was studying 
to get his black belt in karate. One day 
he started to cry because he didn’t want 
to stop playing with his friends to go to 
karate class. I rold him, ‘Then don't go.’ 
He said, “1 have to. It took him eight 
years to get his black belt. It was the 
same with football. He was always the 
smallest. | used го scream, ‘Ger thar big 
bully off my son!” 

Bloom first began to excel in skiing 
at the age of three, and by the time he 
reached 15 he was a world-class junior 
skier, But this didn’t keep him from 
Managing to cram as many activities as 
possible into his young life. He skied 
in competitions, competed in karate, 
football and track, and still managed 
to make the honor roll in high school 
for four years. Bloom would leave a ski 
event in, say, Finland or Norway, re- 
turn to Loveland and then catch four 
touchdown passes in his high school 
team's state playoff game. His secret, 
his father says, "was that nothing 
bothered him. He was serene. He had a 
quiet brain. He was at peace before he 
competed." Char says, “Не told me 
when he competed that his world went 
quiet and he just did ir. Who Jeremy 
is comes out on the ski slopes. He 
becomes a performer." 

When Bloom was 15 his idyllic life 
of personal accomplishment was briefly 
shattered when his parents divorced, 
but he adjusted quickly. *He handled it 
amazingly well," says Char. "Jeremy sees 
the positive in everything.” Char says her 
son even sees the positive in her present 
boyfriend, Tom, who refers to him as 
“the demon stepson.” 

“The divorce was best for all of us,” 
says Bloom. “We're all very close.” Still, 
when 1 call Larry Bloom to interview him 
about his son, he says, “I didn’t know Jer- 
ету was going to be in PLAYBOY.” 

By the time Bloom graduated from 
high school he was confronted with a 
choice that (continued on page 124) 


"I don't have that much cash.... Can I make up the difference in office supplies?" 


105 


FASHION BY 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY 
MICK ROCK 


PRODUCED BY 
JENNIFER RYAN JONES 


WHETHER YOU LISTEN 
TO HIP-HOP OR INDIE 
POP, YOU WANT TO 


» DRESS LIKE А ROCK 
ж Ambulance LTD STAR. HERE'S HOW 


THE ERA WHEN ROCKERS HATED DISCO IS LONG GONE. THESE DAYS, DISCERNING MUSIC FANS LISTEN TO ROCK, 
RAP AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN. CALL IT THE IPOD DIVIDEND: EVER MORE ECLECTIC MUSIC SOUNDTRACKS 
OUR LIVES. THE SAME GOES FOR STYLE. SUITS HAVE LEARNED A THING OR TWO FROM THE CLUBS, AND STREET- 
WISE RAPPERS AND GRIMY ROCKERS ALIKE ARE INTO COOL THREADS. SO CONSIDER THIS A PLAYLIST FOR YOUR 
WARDROBE. ABOVE: AMBULANCE LTD MAKES A BEAUTIFUL RACKET, WITH MELODIES AND VOCAL HARMONIES 
SWATHED IN WHITE NOISE. STANDING, GUITARIST BENJI LYSAGHT IS IN A SUIT ($2,215) BY DIOR HOMI HEDI 
5 ID X. AT LEFT IS DRUMMER DARREN BECKETT ІМ A BLAZER ($178) AND 
LEIN. IN THE MIDDLE IS FRONTMAN MARCUS CONGLETON IN A MILITARY JACKET ($1,140), 
PANTS ($440), SHIRT ($480) AND LONG-SLEEVE T-SHIRT ($290) BY R OND X. AT RIGHT IS BASS PLAYER MATT 
DUBLIN IN A SUIT ($850) AND SHIRT ($135) BY HUGO BY HUGO BOSS AND A SWEATER ($68) BY CALVIN KLEIN. 


k Corey Gunz 


WHEN HIP-HOP WAS EMERG- 
ING THREE DECADES AGO, 
COREY WASN'T YET A TWIN- 
KLE IN DAD PETER GUNZ'S 
EYE, BUT HE WAS DESTINED. 
TO BE AN MC. HE WAS BORN 
IN THE BRONX, THE BIRTH- 
PLACE OF HIP-HOP. НІ5 
FATHER HAILED THE BOR- 
OUGH ON A CLASSIC SIN- 
GLE, “DEJA VU,” TOGETHER 
WITH LORD TARIQ. NOW 
COREY 15 THE NEW FACE 
OF NEW YORK, LOOKING 
TO CONTINUE THE FAMILY 
TRADITION OF PLATINUM 


SALES. “MY SOUND 15 
UNIQUELY NEW YORK,” 
GUNZ SAYS, “BUT I PICK UP 
MY STYLE EVERYWHERE. 
YOUR CLOTHES REPRESENT 
WHO YOU ARE. ГМ A JEANS- 
AND-SNEAKERS GUY. YOU 
DON'T HAVE TO WEAR А 
SUIT TO LOOK GOOD; AS 
LONG AS WHAT YOU WEAR 
15 CRISP, YOU'RE SHOW- 
ING YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR 
APPEARANCE.” HIS YELLOW 
JACKET ($100) AND JEANS 
($95) ARE BY MASSIVE 
REVOLUTION. THE RHINE- 
STONE T-SHIRT ($35) IS BY 
PLAYBOY FASHION. THE 
BOOM BOXES ARE BY JVC. 


N 


Grafh 


THIS QUEENS RAPPER SPITS FIRE AS HE DELIVERS HIS STACCATO RHYMES. 
AFTER ATTRACTING ADMIRATION FOR HIS APPEARANCES ON UNDER- 
GROUND MIX TAPES AND CUTTING A SINGLE WITH KANYE WEST, HE'S READY 
FOR PRIME TIME. LOOK FOR HIS ALBUM, AUTOGRAFH, TO DROP THIS YEAR. 
"FASHION AND MUSIC GO HAND IN HAND BECAUSE THEY ARE BOTH OUT- 
LETS FOR CREATIVITY," GRAFH SAYS. “IN RAP YOUR LOOK IS AS IMPORTANT 
А5 YOUR SOUND, AND MY LOOK AND LYRICS ARE INFLUENCED BY MY SUR- 
ROUNDINGS. RAP IS ABOUT REALITY, SO IF MY WORDS COME ACROSS AS 
RAW, IT'S BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT MY REALITY IS LIKE. THE SAME APPLIES TO 
WHAT I WEAR. I DON'T LET PEOPLE ON TV DICTATE HOW І DRESS; 1 USE MY 
CREATIVITY TO BUILD MY LOOK FROM WHAT SEE DAY TO DAY." HIS JACKET 
(598) IS BY MASSIVE REVOLUTION, HIS SHIRT ($60) IS BY ROYAL FILTH, AND 
HIS JEANS ($72) ARE BY INDIGO RED. THE RIMS ARE BY BEST TIRES. 


ж Queens of the Stone Age 


“NICOTINE, VALIUM, VICODIN, MARIJUANA, ECSTASY AND ALCOHOL” ALWAYS SEEMED LIKE /A' 
GOOD MANTRA TO US-EVEN MORE SO AFTER THE QUEENS MADE IT A CATCHY ROCK ANTHEM, 
WITH “FEEL GOOD HIT OF THE SUMMER." WHILE THEIR ATTITUDE HAS REMAINED THE SAME, 
THEY HAVE NONETHELESS GARNERED ACCOLADES FROM EVERYONE, INCLUDING THE GRAMM! 


NOMINATION COMMITTEE THAT RECENTLY HONORED THEM FOR "LITTLE SISTER" FROM LULLA-/ / 


BIES TO PARALYZE, THE FOLLOW-UP TO THEIR MULTIPLATINUM SONGS FOR THE DEAF LP. FROM. 
LEFT: ALAIN JOHANNES IS IN А JACKET ($190), GRAY SHIRT ($92) AND BLACK T-SHIRT ($60) 
BY SALVAGE. JOEY CASTILLO WEARS А PIN-STRIPED BLAZER ($475), VEST ($250) AND WHIT 
SHIRT ($135) BY J. LINDEBERG; HIS BLACK JEANS ($150) ARE BY SALVAGE. EVIL GENIUS JI ^ 
HOMME FORMED THE BAND FROM THE ASHES OF STONER-METAL PIONEERS KYUSS. (HE. 
ENERGY AND TUNES TO SPARE AND PUTS THEM TO USE WITH EAGLES OF DEATH METAL. 

IN HIS ALL-STAR DESERT SESSIONS.) HERE HE WEARS A BLAZER ($250) BY СЫ 

(S120) AND JEANS ($155) ARE BY SALVAGE. AS FOR TROY VAN LEEUWEN, HE'S IN A PÍN- STRIPE 
SINGLE-BUTTON JACKET ($900) AND PANTS ($250) BY RICHMOND X. 


WOMEN'S STYLING BY KATHY KALAFUT 
D 


Tru Life 


TRU LIFE IS A RAP PURIST FO- 
CUSED ON LYRICAL CONTENT. 
WHEN HE PERFORMED HIS SINGLE 
"NEW NEW YORK" WITH SNOOP 
DOGG/AT THE APOLLO THEATER, 
HE KICKED OFF А RENAISSANCE 
OF THE BIG APPLE'S SIGNATURE 
STYLE:TT'S ALL ABOUT THE WORDS. 
WHILE CRUNK^AND GANGSTA 
HAVE DOMINATED THE CHARTS 
OF LATE, TRU LIFE WANTS TO 
BRING MESSAGES BACK INTO RAP. 
"THERE IS NO CONTENT ANY- 
MORE,” HE COMPLAINS. “PEOPLE 
ARE JUST TRYING TO FIND HOOKS. 
THAT WILL GET THEM ON THE 
RADIO AND INTO THE CLUBS. AS A 
RAPPER, YOU HAVE THE RESPON- 
SIBILITY TO BE HONEST AND HAVE 
MEANING IN YOUR LYRICS. EVERY- 
THING | DO IS ME; "МОТ SOME 
CHARACTER CREATED TO SELL 
RECORDS. THE SAME APPLIES TO 
MY CLOSET: IF 1 WEAR A THREE- 
PIECE SUIT WITH GATORS ONE 
DAY AND THEN JEANS THE NEXT, 
THAT'S JUST МУНО 1 AM," THE 
T-SHIRT ($75) HE WEARS HERE IS 
BY ROYAL FILTH; THE JEANS (572) 
ARE BY AZZURÉ DENIM. 


Тһе Sounds 


THANK GOD FOR SWEDEN. EVEN IF THE 
WOMEN WEREN'T ALL FAIR-HAIRED GOD- 
DESSES (THEY ARE), EVEN IF THE SUN SET 
ОМ SUMMER BEACH PARTIES (IT DOESN'T) 
AND EVEN IF THE COUNTRY’S DESIGN 
AESTHETIC HADN'T REVOLUTIONIZED THE 
LOOK OF MODERNITY (IT DID), WE'D STILL 
HAVE ALL THE BOISTEROUS SWEDISH ROCK 
АМО ROLL THAT HAS SCREAMED ITS WAY 
INTO OUR HEARTS IN THE PAST DECADE. 
THE SOUNDS, FROM HELSINGBORG, ARE 
ONE OF THE BANDS MAKING ALL THAT 
WONDERFUL NOISE. THEIR SECOND ALBUM, 
DYING TO SAY THIS TO YOU, A HOOK-FILLED 
UPDATE OF CLASSIC NEW WAVE, COMES 
OUT THIS MONTH ON NEW LINE RECORDS. 
THINK MISSING PERSONS, BLONDIE OR 
EARLY BERLIN. FROM LEFT: KEYBOARD 
PLAYER JESPER ANDERBERG IS WEARING A 
SILVER JACKET (51,250), BLACK SHIRT ($300) 
AND GRAY CORDUROY TROUSERS ($650) BY 
DUCKIE BROWN. JOHAN BENGTSSON, WHO 
PLAYS BASS, IS IN A NAVY PIN-STRIPED SUIT 
(5250) BY ORIGINAL PENGUIN AND SILVER 
SNEAKERS ($90) BY ASICS. SINGER MAJA 
IVARSSON IS IN A SILVER-AND-GOLD DRESS 
($1,08S) BY JUST CAVALLI; HER SHOES 
($217) ARE BY CLAUDIA CIUTI, AND HER 
BRACELET ($290) IS BY VASS LUDACER. 
GUITAR PLAYER FELIX RODRIGUEZ WEARS 
A JACQUARD-DETAIL JACKET (5895) AND 
STRAIGHT-LEG JACQUARD-DETAIL TROUSERS 
($395) BY JUST CAVALLI. FREDRIK NILSSON 
MANS THE DRUM KIT; HERE HE'S WEARING 
A GRAY PIN-STRIPED SINGLE-BUTTON SUIT 
($1320) BY RICHMOND X. 


WHERE AND HDW TO BUY DN PAGE 131. 


From left: Nick McCarthy, Paul Thomson, 
Bob Hardy and Alex Kapranos. 


BY ТІМ MOHR 
PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOM 
CORBETT/CORBIS OUTLINE 


FERDINAND 


ALEX KAPRANOS AND NICK MCCARTHY, THE DRIVING FORCES BEHIND THE 

GRAMMY-NOMINATED, MILLION-SELLING BAND, REVEAL THE SECRET BACK- 

WARD MESSAGES ON THEIR RECORDS, DISMISS GROUP HUGS AND BREAK 
DOWN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD CATCHY AND BAD CATCHY 


QI 

PLAYBOY: In an industry known for 
unusual band names, yours stands out. 
How did you come up with it? 

NICK: We were all sitting in Alex’s flat, 
watching horse racing on the telly, We'd 
been talking about band names for ages 
and had lists and lists of terrible ones. 
A horse called the Archduke came into 
the race. We thought, Oh yeah, the Arch- 
duke; what was he called again? Then 
we started talking about the First World 
War and thought that was a good theme 
somehow, a historic theme, and we hit 
on Franz Ferdinand. This one guy’s 
death changed the whole world. History 
changed in one moment. If you're in a 
band, you want to do that. You want 
to change everything. So we thought 
that would be a cool name. 


оз 
PLAYBOY: Is it fair that we think the Brit- 
ish are endlessly obsessed with the world 
wars and thei ictories over Germany? 
NICK: The British never forget when they 
actually win something. You never hear 
the end of 1945 or 1966, when England 
beat Germany in the World Cup final. 
Ever since, “Two world wars and one 


World Cup” has been the chant at football 
matches against German teams. The Brit- 
ish are pretty narrow-minded sometimes. 
ALEX: Among my contemporaries there 
is a lot of respect for Germany, particu- 
larly for Berlin and Hamburg. They're 
seen as great centers of creativity and a 
true bohemianism that's been lost in some 
arcas of the U.K. I think Berlin may be the 
last truly bohemian city in Europe. 


оз 

PLAYBOY: Are some song ideas so good 
that you recognize it immediately? 
ALEX: I knew straightaway that “Do You 
Want To,” on the new album, You Could 
Have It So Much Better, was a catchy tune. 
I was in my flat, and my girlfriend was 
humming it as well, so 1 thought, Right, 
it’s probably catchy. Bur there's a differ- 
ence between good catchy and bad catchy. 
There are those tunes you can't stop hum- 
ming but would pay large amounts of 
money to be able to stop humming. So you 
have to make sure it’s not one of them. 
NICK: You kind of know right from the 
beginning, maybe nor when writing a 
song on your own but when the four of 
us start playing it. With “Take Me Our,” 
it was like, Wow, this is really good. 


Then again, sometimes songs don’t have 
that immediacy—like “Matinée,” from 
the first album. That nearly didn't make 
the record. The producer hated it, but 
people thought it was amazing when we 
played it live. We ended up releasing it as 
a single in Britain, and people loved it. 


Q4 

PLAYBOY: Rumor has it a backward 
message is buried on your first album. 
True? 

ALEX: When we were recording the first 
album we talked about old heavy metal 
records that had these heavily negative 
satanic messages telling you to go out 
and kill yourself and your family, all that 
bullshit. And we hit on an idea: Wouldn't 
it be amazing to put in a backward mes- 
sage that was mildly posirive? The best 
one we could think of was “Call your 
mother. She's worried about you.” Ir's in 
the middle of “Michael.” So any moth- 
ers who have been receiving calls from 
wayward sons who are Franz Ferdinand 
fans may understand it now. 

NICK: There’s one on You Could Have 
It So Much Better, too. Of course, you 
have to play it backward; you can't 


really do that with a CD. 


13 


PLAYBOY 


114 


оз 
PLAYBOY. Do you remember the 
moment you learned your debut LP 
had gone platinum? 
NICK: We were in L.A., rerecording 
"This Fire" for a single version, and 
we were totally out of it. We'd gone 
for three days with hardly any sleep, 
and then we had to rerecord the 
song. It was draining. 
ALEX: Yeah, we'd flown to London 
from somewhere in Europe, then 
flown to L.A. for the session. We were 
completely exhausted. As soon as we 
put down the last chord, we just col- 
lapsed. Then the head of Domino 
records came in and said, "Hey, guys, 
you've sold a million albums." Every- 
body was so shattered that there was 
only a slight moan of recognition. 
NICK: All these people came in with bottles 
of champagne, and we just fell asleep. It 
wasn't much of a party, I can tell you. 


[613 


PLAYBOY: Do you ever get to enjoy 
your success? 

ALEX: We won the Mercury Music Prize 
in the U.K., and the next day we flew to 
New York. Bob Hardy, our bass player, 
was sitting next to me. On those trans- 
atlantic flights everybody sits with a 
little television in front of them, and 
they always play the news. At one point 
I stood up to get something out of the 
overhead locker, and I could see every- 
body's TV set. The news was showing 
coverage of our winning the prize and 
Bob standing up at the awards show 
with a look of mild shock on his face. 
It was so strange to see hundreds of 
people with headphones on looking at 
a picture of Bob while he was sitting 
next to me. That was my most surreal 
moment of the year. 


97 
PLAYBOY: You're constantly on the 
road. How do you know what place 
to call home? 
ALEX: I would say I live in Glasgow 
because that's where my record 
collection is 


08 


PLAYBOY. Does that mean you're all 
Glaswegians? 

ALEX: None ofus is a true, unadulterated 
Glaswegian. Paul Thomson, our drum- 
mer, was born in Glasgow but grew up in 
Edinburgh. Nick moved to Glasgow only 
three and а half years ago, from Munich. 
Bob grew up in Bradford. Although I 
went to secondary school in Glasgow, 1 
was born in England and have a Greek 
father. But the band formed in Glasgow. 
I've always thought that how you social- 
ize and who you go out with influence 
you more than anything else. The ideas 


exchanged over a couple of drinks in a 
pub are the ones that often form your 
character. And there are some good 
people to have a glass with in Glasgow. 


o? 
PLAYBOY: What is it about Glasgow that 
makes it such fertile ground for music? 
The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal 
Scream, Teenage Fanclub, Belle & 
Sebastian and many others have come 
from there. 
NICK: It's cheap and easy to live in 
Glasgow. Artists and musicians can 
focus on their art instead of spending 
all their time working in bars, trying to 
make money to pay the rent, like the 
way it is in London. 
ALEX: Glasgow is a major metropolitan 
city, yet it's so far away from London that 
people see themselves as independent of 
any scenes or trends that take place there. 
I've heard people talk about the miser- 
able weather—you can't do anything 
outside, so you might as well stay inside 
and write some tunes. There's also the 
straight-talking nature of Glasgow, which 
has a lot to do with its working-class 
heritage. It tends not to tolerate much 
bullshit. At the same time, if someone 
is doing something interesting, people 
are very vocal about their appreciation. 
Any band that plays in Glasgow comes to 
terms with this very quickly because an 
audience will either go completely crazy 
for you or bottle you off the stage. 


alo 

PLAYBOY: Were you able to live cheap 
and easy when you were starting out? 
Nick: In Glasgow there are so many old 
industrial buildings no longer in use and 
a lot of illegal dance parties. Alex and I 
were walking around one day and saw an 
empty building. We went in and walked 
upstairs, and on the sixth floor was this 
amazing space with windows all around 
it. You could see the whole city. We called 
it the Chateau, because you felt like king 
of the world up there. We thought it was 
a great place to set up because the club 
scene seemed tired. Eventually we got all 
six floors. So a lot of artists started using 
it for studios and rehearsal rooms. We 
had an amazing concert room on the 
top floor. It was really cheap to rent and 
became our headquarters. It was bril- 
liant—until the police arrived. 


all 

PLAYBOY. Did they kick you out? 

Nick: We had to give it up because the 
police came again and again about the 
noise. We moved to an old, disused jail. 
We took that over in the same kind of 
way. That's also full of artist studios now. 
ALEX: But the Chateau is still in use. There's 
a huge community, 30 or 40 artists. It's a 
cool place—a very cool place in winter. 


on 

PLAYBOY: What about religious divisions 
and the violence between Catholics and 
Protestants that plagues Glasgow? 
ALEX: I hate to say it, but the two big 
Glasgow football teams are at the heart 
of the sectarian problems. When I 
arrived at school everybody asked me 
straightaway if I was a Catholic or a 
Protestant —in other words, did I sup- 
port Celtic or Rangers. I said, “I'm 
Greek Orthodox. What does that make 
me?" There wasn't a Greek Orthodox 
team. Still, it's nowhere near as bad asit 
used to be. It seems to be very much of 
the older generations. In fact, it bears 
a lot of similarities to racism. I'm sure 
you find in America that two or three 
gencrations ago racism was a lot more 
common than it is in ours. 


an 

PLAYBOY: Do you ever want to mix 
politics into your music? 

ALEX: I feel slightly uncomfortable talk- 
ing about politics because І never want 
to turn into one of those horrible, mor- 
alizing sods in a band who try to tell 
people how they should see the world 

NICK: For us it's not the right place. I 
appreciate what Bob Geldof has done, 
though he’s not doing it in his music. 
Not too many bands do it well. They 
may be doing it for a good cause, but 
you often have the idea they don't know 
what they're talking about. 


ом 

рілувох Do you have а ritual to get 
ready for live performances? 

At Ex: No. Once we were backstage at a 
festival and we saw a band—I won't say 
which—all huddled in a circle, doing a 
basketball-team group hug. We had a 
good laugh at them. 


ав 
PLAYBOY. Does being on the road make 
writing new material difficult? 
ALEX: It's strange to talk about touring 
as grueling. When we were writing the 
songs for the first record, we were work- 
ing other jobs. At one stage Bob and I 
worked as chefs. If you're doing a split 
shift from 8:30 in the morning until 
three o'clock the next morning, that's a 
hell of a lot more grueling than having 
to play a show in San Francisco for some 
people who want to hear your music. 
Nick: We had six or seven songs 
we'd already been playing live that 
we wanted to record for the new 
album, and we had loads and loads 
of ideas. But we wanted to be back 
home, able to relax and write songs 
the way we used to—hanging out, 
playing music to one another. 

(concluded on page 142) 


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hen you turn on your ТУ, you see them. When the lights go out 
іп the theater and the movie begins, there they are again. You 
see them on your computer screen when you’re online and on 
the inside of your eyelids when you dream. We’re talking about 
Angelina, Paris, Halle, Scarlett—the glorious female specimens 
who are the toast of pop culture. And for good reason. Physical beauty is skin- 
deep, but the kind of sexiness these women exude comes from somewhere else. 
It's a confidence, a talent, a curiosity. The secret to their success lies in part in 
their ability to move both men and women viscerally, to stir us. These eight pages 
celebrate our picks for the sexiest female celebrities. You'll find many of the usual 
suspects looking their hottest, plus a few surprises. At the top of the list: the lovely 
Jessica Alba. She was young enough to qualify as Lolita-esque when we first got to 
know her іп 2000, on the hit series Dark Angel. But her performances in last year's 
Sin City and Into the Blue made it all too clear: This little angel is all grown up. 


From the trashy vixen in Poison Ivy: The New Seduction to 
the trashy vixen in My Name Is Earl-thank heaven for typecasting. 
С She's returned to TV with Party at the Palms. No. not 
those palms. Ain't it a shame? 
' Here's a million-dollar idea: Invent a new berry. Call it 
halleberry. Sell halleberry ice cream by the bucket. Hell. we'd buy it. 
The comeback story of the year! Admit it. You like that 
single on the radio. You know you do. 


How many Polish-born bikini models does it take to screw 
іп a lightbulb? No idea. but we get to hold the ladder. 
June Cleaver she isn't. But like her predecessor. the hottest 
desperate housewife has a beaver that just can't stay out of trouble. 
Who's your mommy? The Pitt-pilfering United Nations 
ambassador says she plans to adopt a third child. 


Roast. our Miss February 1990 only gets hotter. Know how she 
cools off? Skinny-dipping with Denise Richards. that's how. 
She had a televised sonogram to prove her perfect 
chest is 100 percent real. Jeez. Tyra, just go ahead and rub it in 
our faces. why don't you. No, really. we'd like it if you did that. 
Blog and Homer Simpson's doh! were recently added 
to the Oxford English Dictionary. What. no bootylicious? Guess 
those stuffy lexicographers still aren't ready for this jelly. 
She did a hot lesbian scene with Neve 
Campbell in Wild Things. She was a Bond girl. But still. 
Denise never looked half as hot as she did in our December 
2004 cover shoot. 
As Sydney Bristow on Alias or Elektra Natchios 
in Daredevil, she would just as soon seduce you as kick your 
ass. Thank you. Jen. May we have another? 


She won Dancing With the 
Stars when all three judges scored her a 
10. This wasn't exactly news to us-we 
gave her high marks as Miss April 1997. 
J Even in semiretirement, the 
first celebrity porn star is all about money 
shots, Revenue for ClubJenna, says Forbes, hit 
$30 million in 2005, a 30 percent increase. 
She's been hitting fans of kung- 
fu movies where it counts since Crouching 
Tiger, but her sexy turn in Memoirs of а 
Geisha may just put 2.2. over the top. 
This week’s celebutante is 
next week's burnout, but Paris endures. 
Scandal weathering is her science. She's 
smarter than she looks—and that's hot. 


121 


Coffee, cocaine and 'Kira-three addictive picker uppers brought to 
you by the good folks of Colombia. 
How do you rebound from the dumping of the year? Strip- 
ping down for a few magazine covers should do the trick. 
She's the latest inductee into the most exclusive of Playboy clubs. 
In all of recorded history. there have been but 46 Playmates of the Year. 
What does Brooke have in common with Bo, Farrah and Cindy? 
They were all invited back for a second PLAYBOY celebrity pictorial 
ı Her real name is Tara Patrick. and she's from Cincinnati. She 
hit the big time on Baywatch, and we've been watching her ever since. 
E This serious actress is seriously sizzling. We lost count of 
the times we hit PAUsE during the opening credits of Lost in Translation. 
Professor. what's another word for pirate's treasure? Send 
answers to i think its booty@playboy.com. 


PLAYBOY 


124 


JEREMY BLOOM 


(continued from page 104) 
was particularly painful for him. He 
had to decide whether to concentrate 
on his skiing career or his football 
career. The thought that, for the first 
time, he couldn't do everything both- 
ered him, but his choice was made 
easier because his skiing seemed to be 
stuck ina rut. He had always dreamed 
of skiing in the Olympics. When he 
was three he drew a picture of him- 
self at the 2002 Olympic Games. “1 did 
the math,” he says. “I knew I'd be 19 
then.” But with the games approach- 
ing he was relegated to America’s C 
team with little chance of ever mak- 
ing the World Cup squad. The head 
of the U.S. ski team didn’t even know 
his name. “I just didn’t understand 
it, why it wasn’t happening,” he says. 
“Some said it was because of football. 
So I quit skiing and accepted a foot- 
ball scholarship as a wide receiver and 
punt returner at the University of Col- 
orado. It had always been my dream to 
play for the Buffaloes.” 

This was the beginning of a pattern 
of behavior for Bloom. In the next few 
years, whenever his prospects in one of 
his favorite sports dimmed, he would 
turn his attention to the other. This way 
he always avoided outright failure. 

In summer 2001, before he enrolled 
at Colorado, Bloom received a call 
from the U.S. ski team, then training 
in Chile; if he did well, he would have 
a chance to make the World Cup team 
and compete in the 2002 Olympics in 
Salt Lake City. Bloom flew to Chile. “I 
got out of my football mentality and 
focused on skiing,” he says. 

That trip was the turning point of 
his Ше. “1 was never more motivated,” 
he says. “I skied really well and made 
the World Cup team.” Of course, this 
required him to ski in all the World 
Cup events leading up to the Olympics, 
which made it impossible for him to 
play football for the Buffaloes. When he 
returned to Colorado he was “scared to 
death” at the prospect of having to tell 
Gary Barnett, then Colorado's coach, 
that he was going to ski that winter. But 
Bloom was shocked at how understand- 
ing Barnett was. He told Bloom he bad 
a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and 
should take it. His scholarship would 
be waiting for him the following year. 
“He treated me like a son,” says Bloom. 
"If he had told me I couldn't do both, I 
would have chosen football.” 

During winter 2001 and early in 2002 
Bloom skied brilliantly. He won the 
World Cup Championship and along 
the way began to acquire lucrative 
ski-equipment endorsement contracts, 
which helped finance his training to the 
tune of $50,000 (but would become a 


major source of problems with the 
NCAA). When the Olympics rolled 
around, Bloom was considered the pro- 
hibitive favorite to win a gold medal in 
his specialty, freestyle moguls skiing. 

Freestyle moguls owes its popularity 
to the kind of gonzo X Games skiing of 
young daredevils with surfer-dude hair 
and baggy clothes who get their kicks 
doing somersaults as they ski off moun- 
tains. There is a countercultural element 
to moguls and an aura of rebelliousness 
around its practitioners. In freestyle 
moguls, skiers fly over a series of kidney- 
jarring bumps at more than 35 miles an 
hour, down a 250-yard course punctu- 
ated by two ramps. As skiers launch off 
those ramps, they perform tricks, such 
as backward or forward flips. Although 
Bloom often falls after attempting these 
stunts—he once landed on his back, 
bruising his liver, kidneys and verte- 
brae; his father remembers seeing it and 
thinking, Paralysis or death—he finds 
the sport exhilarating. "There's a huge 
element of danger to moguls,” Bloom 
says. "You're suspended in the air for 
three seconds, doing these crazy maneu- 
vers. It's insane, but I love the feeling of 
invinability and freedom.” 

In 1992 the LOC made freestyle 
moguls skiing an Olympic sport in a 
blatant effort to appeal to МТУ fans, 
who found most Olympic events bor- 
ing and stodgy. The rebellious freestyle 
skiers, it was hoped, would share a kin- 
dred spirit with these viewers. Bloom, 
however, is not really much of a rebel. 
He is more conventionally driven, cau- 
tious and success-oriented in a way X 
Gamers are not. X Gamers don’t care 
much about falling or landing properly 
on their skis or snowboard. They com- 
pete for the thrill of the trick, the dan- 
ger and outrageousness of what they 
do, not for the medals or endorsements 
that may follow. 

Bloom is “the best natural talent in 
our sport,” according to fellow moguls 
skier Travis Cabral. Bloom’s coach, 
Scott Rawles, says, "He's confident, 
competitive and blessed.” But the main 
reason he is the best moguls skier in 
the world is his showmanship. Like fig- 
ure skating, moguls is a judged sport. 
Moguls skiers are evaluated on their 
turns over bumps (50 percent), their 
tricks (25 percent) and their speed 
down the slope (25 percent). Bloom, 
in Rawles's words, “adds flair to his 
tricks to give the judges what they 
want to see.” But while Bloom admits 
he performs “a huge trick at the bot- 
tom to impress the judges,” he gets 
annoyed at being called a showman, as 
if the label were unmanly. “I consider 
myself an athlete,” he says. He claims 
that the judging for moguls is less arbi- 
trary than that for figure skating. “The 
judges usually get it right,” he says. 


In Ravles's view, Bloom's versatility 
makes him unique. “I've never seen 
someone so proficient in radically 
different sports—football and skiing. 
Usually skiers have no interest in foot- 
ball." That may be, but skiers have 
more in common with wide receiv- 
ers and punt returners then Rawles 
thinks. They need the same type of 
physique, strengthen the same muscle 
groups and must take the same аш- 
tude toward what they do. 

Like moguls skiers, punt returners 
and wide receivers need lean, flexible, 
muscular bodies dominatcd by a solid 
core of abs and obliques that allows 
them to swivel left and right to elude 
tacklers just as skiers swivel over ski 
bumps. Both need strong legs, speed, 
quickness from a standing start and 
balance, the ability to land steadily on 
their feet whether coming down from a 
trick or from catching a pass. Bloom has 
amazing foot specd—hc has clocked a 
4.3 in the 40 yards and a 9.4 in the 100 
yards—and an unbelievable burst from 
a standing start. His coaches say he can 
move as fast sideways and backward as 
he can forward. He also has excellent 
hand-eye coordination for pass catch- 
ing and exceptional depth perception, 
which allows him to evaluate approach- 
ing bumps or would-be tacklers. His 
NFL agent, Gary Wichard, says Bloom 
has “a subconscious reaction to color,” 
as if he sees more frames per second 
than the ordinary person—a percep- 
tion so quick that just a glimpse of a 
tackler's uniform can translate imme- 
diately into an elusive sidestep. 

Bloom says the major differences 
between his two sports have to do with 
preparation and competition: "Foot- 
ball training is redundant to motivate 
slow learners.” Bloom is self-motivated 
and a fast learner. He says each sport 
satisfies a different need. “Skiing is 
about freedom, and football is about 
discipline and order. You can't win а 
football game by yourself no matter 
how well you play, and that's frustrat- 
ing. In skiing, if 1 lose, it's because of 
me. І just do it better the next week. 
Skiing is about personal satisfaction— 
and personal frustration.” 

Bloom finished ninth in the 2002 
Olympics. Fellow skier Jonny Moseley 
said, “He blew it. That was his gold to 
win.” Disappointed, Bloom decided 
to return to football and accepted the 
scholarship waiting for him at Colo- 
rado. But before he could play for 
the Buffaloes, the NCAA insisted he 
drop all his ski endorsements, claiming 
they were contrary to its rules about 
professionalism. Bloom argued with 
the NCAA to no avail, so he decided 
to let his endorsements drop. "I missed 
the thrill of the quarterback calling my 
play in a huddle,” he says, "going over 


bin Madden _, 


"He doesn't have an appointment, Mr. Wilcox, but there's a very persuasive man here 
who'd be ideal to fill that sales slot.” 


PIU A ЖОНДО 


the middle, knowing Га get hit with 
that adrenaline rush when the ball was 
coming toward me, leaping, trying to 
stay relaxed and catch it with soft hands, 
then hitting the ground and tightening 
up before getting hit by a tackler.” 

Bloom arrived at Colorado amid much 
fanfare touting him asa skier, a heartthrob 
and a big playmaker on the gridiron. “I 
had a lot of publicity,” he says, “but I tried 
to fit in, not to take attention away from the 
seniors.” Buffaloes quarterback Joel Klatt 
says, “This big-play guy comes in, and he's 
like five-two.” But he was a handsome five- 
two: Girls climbed up his dormitory wall 
to peek in his window, and his teammates 
ribbed him about all his female attention. 

But not for long. The first time Bloom 
touched a football in a game, he revealed 
an explosive talent. He caught a punt on 
his 25-yard line, then threaded his way 
through the tacklers, scooting left and 
right like a water bug eluding hungry 
frogs. When he got into the open field, 
he simply outran his defenders to the 
goal line. “Nothing will ever top the thrill 
of that,” he says. His father remembers. 
that moment. “Here comes my son on the 
punt return," he says. “І closed my eyes 
and saw a little boy in the backyard. It was 
the most thrilling moment of my life." 

Another time, as a wide receiver, Bloom 
ran full speed down the field, outrun- 
ning the defensive backs chasing him, 
glanced up over his shoulder, caught a 
pass without breaking stride and took it 
to the end zone for a 96-yard touchdown 
reception, the longest pass for a touch- 
down in CU history. 

Bloom was an anomaly. He displayed 
the kind of game-breaking speed asso- 
ciated with black NFL receivers such as 
the Washington Redskins' Santana Moss 
and the Carolina Panthers Steve Smith, 
not white boys with names like Jeremy 
Bloom. If he ever made the NFL, that 
would be his brand: the Small White 
Hope, a little white-boy skier from the 
mountains of Colorado who could out- 
run black defenders from tiny towns in 


the Deep South. "He's a ferocious com- 
petitor," says Barnett. "At the time, Colo- 
rado had two receivers who would go on 
to the NFL. But opposing teams always 
double-teamed Jeremy because they 
were afraid he would beat them." 

The Buffaloes finished with a 9-5 
record that year, and in their Big 12 
title game, which they lost to Oklahoma, 
Bloom returned another punt 80 yards 
for a touchdown. He took his exams 
and then flew to Finland to compete in 
a World Cup skiing event, where he fin- 
ished fourth. He then flew back to Colo- 
rado to play in the Alamo Bowl. 

After his first season Bloom was named 
to the Freshman All-America team and 
was considered one of the five best punt 
returners in college football. Big things 
were expected in his sophomore sea- 
son, but that year was something of a 
disappointment for him. The Buffaloes 
ished with a 5-7 record, and Bloom 
did not fulfill the promise he showed as 
a freshman, although he was voted to the 
All-Big 12 team. He returned 24 punts 
that year for a total of 289 yards; the year 
before, just two of his returns accounted 
for 155 yards. Still, after two years at Col- 
orado he had five touchdowns on plays 
of 75 yards or longer. 

Nonetheless he turned his attention back 
to World Cup skiing and inexplicably 
signed endorsement contracts worth 
hundreds of thousands of dollars—a 
flagrant violation of NCAA rules. This 
was Bloom's second violation, which left 
the organization little choice but to ban 
him from intercollegiate sports forever. 
Why he did it, he won't say, other than 
that he needed money for his ski train- 
ing. It's possible that he wanted a reason 
not to play football after his disappoint- 
ing sophomore year and sought to shift 
that responsibility onto the NCAA. But 
maybe he thought he could have it all: 
World Cup skiing, the endorsements 
and girls that go with it, college football 
glory and, most important, the vindica- 
tion that Jeremy Bloom could do what- 


ever he put his mind to. Besides, a fight 
with the NCAA appealed to his combat- 
ive nature. So he went to court to try to 
force the organization to let him have 
his endorsements and play football at 
the same time. “The NCAA was trying to 
take my dream,” he says. “I was going to 
fight it to the bitter end.” 

As Bloom points out. Drew Henson 
had been paid a $2 million bonus to 
play minor league baseball for the New 
York Yankees after graduating from high 
school and was then allowed to play quar- 
terback for the University of Michigan. He 
also argues that Tim Dwight was allowed 
to compete on the Iowa track team after 
accepting endorsements as a professional 
football player. The NCAA argues that 
its rules are simple: Athletes can be paid 
or win prize money in one sport and still 
compete on the college level in a differ- 
ent sport, but they can’t sign endorsement 
contracts, period. Bloom and his lawyer 
tried to convince the NCAA that for all 
intents and purposes his ski endorse- 
ments were prize money and should be 
considered part of his salary, but the orga- 
nization rejected that argument. 

The battle dragged on through 2004, 
with Bloom losing appeal after appeal. 
Atone point Bloom wanted to prove that 
much of his appearance and endorse- 
ment money came not from his fame 
as an athlete but because of his talent 
in front of a TV camera. He wanted to 
call as a witness a casting director who 
had given him a role on Nickelodeon. 
“But the casting director couldn't tes- 
tify,” asserts Bloom, “because Nickel- 
odeon is owned by Viacom, which owns 
CBS, which has sports contracts with the 
NCAA. It was insane." 

When his last appeal had been exhausted 
in 2004 and the courts ruled against him, 
Bloom took his case to Congress. "I'm 
going tobe a thorn in the side ofthe NCAA 
all my life,” he says. He told his story to a 
subcommittee investigating NCAA sports, 
in whom he found what he had always 
wanted, a supportive audience. 


“It was ап incredible experience,” 
Bloom says. “I was going to testify 
before the House. I wore a suit, but I 
didn't wear a tie, because it's not like 
my generation to dress up. But I should 
have worn a tie. Representative Spen- 
cer Bachus led me underground to the 
hearing. I got fired up. It was a weird 
feeling, as though I were going through 
a tunnel onto the field, only my team- 
mates were now congressmen. I sat 
alone at a table, no lawyer, and gave my 
testimony. I thought, I can finally speak. 
Of course, nothing came of it. But for 
me, it was my Super Bowl.” 

After the hearing, Bachus said the 
NCAA's goal was “to keep athletes 
uninformed, poor and powerless.” 
Bachus also claimed the NCAA had 
accused him of taking up Bloom’s fight 
because, as a representative from Ala- 
bama, Bachus hoped to get even with 
the NCAA for sanctions it had placed 
on the Auburn basketball and Alabama 
football programs. 

Now, Bloom says, “The NCAA can 
take my career, but it can't take my pas- 
sion. Fighting it gaye me mental clar- 
ity.” Bloom returned to skiing full-time 
and in 2005 had one of the greatest 
World Cup years any moguls skier has 
ever һай. It brought him the type of 
exposure that would lead to MTV and 
endorsements beyond skiing. These 
would brand him as a sex symbol and 
reinforce the idea that Jeremy Bloom 
could be everything. 

Bloom says that prior to the 2005 
World Cup season he had been skiing 
tentatively, satisfied simply to reach the 
podium at each event in second or third 
place. Finally, he says, "I was sick of 
being third. 1 wasn't putting myself at 
risk to be first. I watched Tiger Woods 
and saw how he worked on his weak- 
nesses during a tournament, even if he 
didn't make the cut because of it. So 
last year, in my first World Cup event, 
I tried some new things and didn't play 
it safe. I finished 35th, second, 16th, 
fifth, and then it clicked. I won my first 
competition, and I thought, I don’t 
know if I can lose all year." 

He was almost right. He won six con- 
secutive World Cup events, a moguls 
record, finished second in his last 
event and won the World Cup title. 
Moseley, who had criticized him for 
his 2002 Olympics failure, said, “Не 
used to be great; now he's dominant 
He makes magic happen." 

Bloom is now poised to redeem him- 
self in Turin for his 2002 Olympics 
meltdown. But the pressure doesn't 
bother him. He says it doesn't mat- 
ter whether he even makes this year's 
Olympic team or wins a gold medal, 
because “I can walk away from ski- 
ing with a smile on my face about my 
accomplishments." Besides, the NFL. 
is waiting, and television too. Bloom 
likes to keep his options open 


Football, for Bloom, is "unfinished 
business." At the NFL combine in Feb- 
ruary he will have a chance to "blow 
them away" with his talent. He isn't the 
only one who thinks he can. NFL scout 
Ron Hill says that despite his small size, 
“Bloom plays at a fast pace. He’s a guy 
you have to look at." 

"Sure, I'm small,” says Bloom, “but look 
at Steve Smith. He's five-nine, and he's 
leading the NFL in receiving this усаг” 

Gary Wichard, Bloom's agent, also 
agrees with his client, calling criticism 
of Bloom's size a kind of reverse racism. 
"No опе talks about Santana Moss's or 
Steve Smith's size," he says. "No white 
wide receiver has been drafted in the 
first round since 1978, but Jeremy is 
going to dispel the myths about white 
wide receivers. Some scouts complain 
they haven't seen him play in three 
years; my response is that his body 
hasn't been abused in three years. I 
expect him to be drafied in one of the 
first three rounds on the first day." 

Highly regarded NFL draft expert Mel 
Kiper Jr. says, "I expect Bloom to go as 
high as the third or fourth round. He 
has tremendous instincts and vision, plus 
quickness and leg strength that he got 
from skiing to break tackles. He can catch 
the ball, he's a dynamic return man, and 
he's electrifying in the open field." 

Andif Bloom doesn't make the NFL, һе 
always has his МТУ exposure to fall back 
on. His goal is someday to host his own 
live television talk show, a “Bob Costas 
show for the MTV generation,” he says. 
“But I want it to appeal to everyone.” 

Тһе only problem for Bloom is that 
his MTV brand image will conflict with 
his NFL brand image. Wichard wants to 
brand Bloom as a tough white boy in a 
tough black man’s game. But Bloom's 
entertainment agents at CAA are wor- 
ried that any success he may have in а 
mainstream sport such as football may 
dilute his countercultural brand image 
among his skiing and MTV fans, who 
may think their hero has sold out. If 
Bloom makes the NFL, CAA hopes it 
can still maintain his rebellious, anti- 
mainstream image. 

“Do I fantasize about winning a gold 
in the Olympics, winning a Super Bowl 
and having my own show on ТУ?” he 
asks. “Sure, I do.” And if one of those 
dreams falls through, he'll just switch 
gears and concentrate on the possibi 
ties he has left. Even he admits, how- 
ever, that at some point in his life he 
may have none of them. 

“I think about what life will be like 
without the spotlight,” he says. “Some- 
day it will end. I don't mind that” He 
just doesn't want it to end sooner than 


he expects. 
El 


PLAYBOY РІСК5 


your guide for living the good life 


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Patrón is the ultimate 
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Playboy partnered with The Glenlivet 
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127 


PLAYBOY 


128 


NEW ORLEANS 


(continued from page 72) 
a deeper sentence. Many who desire to re- 
turn cannot afford it and have no home to 
come back to. But the rebuilding is under 
way. Shingles are nailed by day, rotten dry- 
wall is hauled to the curb, diesel Bobcats 
purr—and by night, sounds along the river 
have a Hispanic tinge. Boom boxes belt 
mariachi; guitars have a flamenco urgency. 
"There's talk that the city could be 40 per- 
cent Hispanic ina decade. 

Some people who have been cast away 
will claw their way home. The historian's 
nightmare is the city planner’s dream: 
Fresh concrete will be laid, neighborhoods 
will appear, and residents proud of their 
past and of the culture they have created 
despite their poverty, will return to claim it. 
"The government domicile—newly roofed, 
its siding manufactured, its look indistin- 
guishable from that of public housing in 
Minnesota, Maine or Montana—will be 
occupied by people who feel at home only 


in New Orleans and who will make their 
New Orleans home authentic. Through 
decoration, through humidity, through 
funk oozing up from the soil, the generic 
will become particular. There's a reason 
that beignets at Cafe Du Monde in the 
French Quarter taste different from the 
beignets in the Metairie suburb and differ- 
ent from those in your nearby mall. 

Give us an inch, everything about New 
Orleans seems to say, and we'll make a 
party. Like the fragrance from a camellia 
blossom after the rain, like bland rice tak- 
ing the flavor of what surrounds it, like 
the title of the Rebirth Brass Band's first 
album, Here to Stay (or even the band's very 
name), the spirit of New Orleans makes the 
best of a difficult situation. To the sound of 
Satchmo's dramatic, impossibly acrobatic 
introduction to “West End Blues,” we will 
be back, pig lips and all, to make our homes 
and live our lives in New Orleans. Such are 
the defiant rhythms of the city. 


"I can read you like a book!” 


GIVING IT UP 


(continued from page 73) 
horrifying experience. 1 thought, Man, 
I'm never doing that again. 


STEPHEN MALKMUS 


We were backstage at the legendary San 
Francisco punk-rock club On Broadway, in 
1982. This gnarly punk-rock chick came up 
from behind and put her hands down my 
pants. Then, in the filthiest needle-strewn 
toilet in Frisco, we became one. We had 
been flirting over Olde English 40-ouncers 
outside the club. You could say she was a 
veteran of the scene. I think the early, good 
Social Distortion was headlining that night. 


DILATED PEOPLES 


RAKAA: We played an old tape of 
Prince’s Purple Rain soundtrack. I was 
half in shock that it was finally happen- 
ing and half thinking about Apollonia. 


оксо 


DAMIAN KULASH: 1 was іп a shower. 
1 feel I leapfrogged the usual chain of 
things; I don’t think you're supposed to 
get to shower sex until the fifth or sixth 
time. But she was like my best friend. She 
was actually dating some guy in a famous 
rock band, but he was on tour. It wasn't. 
as if we made out for weeks and then this 
happened. We started making out, and 
then we were like, Hey, why not? I sup- 
pose people's first sexual experiences are 
frequently awkward, so the shower could 
have amplified that. But to tell you the 
truth, it wasn’t all that awkward. Maybe it 
was because having sex after my 15 years 
of not having sex felt so good. 


DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS 


PATTERSON HOOD: The Rolling 
Stones’ Tattoo You album came out that 
day, and I bought it. My girlfriend at the 
time had been out of town on a family 
vacation, so I picked her up at the bus 
station. We went to see An American Were- 
wolf in London and then went somewhere 
and humped our brains out. So it was Tat- 
too You, and it played over and over on 
the cassette deck. Not that it took that 
long, but if I remember correctly, we did 
it more than once. We were as in love as 
teenagers can be, which is quite a bit. I 
wouldn't want to change anything about 
it, and I hope she would say the same. 
ARMAND VAN HELDEN 

We were outside. When you're young that's 
usually where you are. It was in Holland, 
onasand dune. I was about 13, might have 
been 12. It was with a girl from school. I 
had already been doing some crazy shit 
before then, too, so I don’t know if it fully 
counts as my first time, but I didn't know 
what I was doing. Girls would just attack 
me. For real. They would say, "Let's go 
into the woods.” I'd say, “Why?” They'd 
say, "Let's take down our pants." 


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PLAYBOY 


SMASH MOUTH 


STEVE HARWELL: It was 1985, and I 
was 18, so it had to be Depeche Mode. I 
had been into Van Halen and the Clash for 
years, but then the mod thing hit and I got 
the bangs over to the side, the turtleneck, 
the Mary Jane flip-flops, all that shit. Back 
in the day there was a place called Moth- 
ег Disco in California, and there was this 
girl. She had the big Sixteen Candles hairdo 
and looked like Molly Ringwald with dark 
hair, with this hot little Italian body. God, I 
was so madly in love with her. I was living 
behind my parents’ house in a makeshift 
bedroom off the garage, and I remember 
having Depeche Mode on when she came 
back there. She'd had sex already, and I 
had no clue what the fuck I was doing— 
and she rocked my fucking world. From 
that day on I became a whore. 


THE PHARCYDE 


FATLIP: It was on the roof of an apart- 
ment building. Back in the day, if some- 
body's parents were home, you couldn't 
do it in the house, and I definitely didn’t 
have any money for hotels. I was 18. There 
was actually no music, but I remember a 
song was playing in my head for some 


\ 


reason, О. ТЕО. “Roxanne, Roxanne." 
It was playing at the school dances and 
parties when I first started deejaying. 
I don't know why I was thinking about 
music at that moment. 


WE ARE WOLVES 


ANTONIN: It was 1995. I was ata party at 
a friend's place. His parents were gone. We 
started playing spin the bottle. There was a 
girl I had my eye on. Finally my turn came, 
and the bottle came to rest pointing at her. 
We went into a closet and started kissing. It 
got more and more serious. I thought, This 
might as well be my first time; this should be 
the moment. The only problem was “Tears 
in Heaven” by Eric Clapton was playing. I 
hated that song. So we went into another 
room and continued, and I put on “Teen 
Age Riot” by Sonic Youth, which I still love. 
I'm just glad it didn't happen to Clapton. 


THE REVEREND HORTON HEAT 


I wish I could remember what song it was, 
but I think the reason I can't is because 
it was to a lot of songs. I last way more 
than one song. I'm an all-nighter. But 
I think one was "Three Times a Lady." 
Yeah. And "(Don't Fear) the Reaper.” And 


“First of all, this is not a state-sponsored event..." 


"Stayin' Alive.” All night long. It was in а 
housing project in Tulsa. And I was old, 
too. I couldn't get laid to save my life in 
high school. I was 18. And in truth it was 
one of those 15-second deals. 


SEVENDUST 


LAJON WITHERSPOON: I was 16 years 
old, living in Triple Creek apartments in 
Georgia. I had a piano teacher who lived 
upstairs. She was really cool. She was 
remarried, and I remember always hear- 
ing about her new husband’s daughter. I 
couldn't wait for the summer, when she 
was going to be in town. When I finally 
met her she was gorgeous. We would get 
close to the point, but I always had to go 
inside early. My parents were really strict. 
When it finally happened we were next to 
a shed out back, in among trees. It was a 
beautiful evening, dark, with moonlight. 
We started to do this, and it lasted about 
three minutes. It ruined my summer: The 
only thing I could think about after 1 ran 
10 my house was someone knocking on my 
door and telling me she was pregnant. 


WYLDE BUNCH 


YUNG DAME: It's a New Year's Eve 
in L.A., during high school. Some girls 
that me and my boys had been kicking it 
with for a few months call us that night 
and say they're having a get-together at 
a hotel. I’m not even thinking anything 
is going to happen; I'm still naive. Only 
two of us go over to the hotel, because 
one guy can’t make it. We get there, and 
it's just the three girls. I'm like, "Where's 
everybody else?" And they say, "This is 
everybody." So I'm starting to catch the 
drift of what's going on now. I'm taking 
big gulps, like, Here it comes; it's do-or- 
die time. Plus my boy is there, so I can't 
chicken out. So we drink plenty of cheap 
vodka. The girl I've been talking to is 
real cool. We're just lying in bed, talk- 
ing, chilling. My partner is in the other 
bed—there's only one room—but the girl 
he's with has her sister there. The sister 
is a little heated because there aren't 
three guys. And she's drunk, sitting over. 
there salting him up: "You aren't going 
to touch my sister tonight. You can forget 
her body. Nothing going down in here." 
Finally we get the lights off. We have 
the CD changer on random. D'Angelo's 
Brown Sugar comes on, the perfect CD. 
for a first time. As I start doing what I 
do, I can still hear my boy over there in 
the next bed catching the blues. All of a 
sudden the sister passes out and starts 
snoring. I'm trying not to laugh. I have 
to perform—this is my first time. The 
whole time I'm throwing my thing I can 
hear my boy trying to convince the girl 
now that her sister has passed out. As we 
finish, the D'Angelo CD fades out, and 
he is finally about to дег his on. As soon 
as he starts, the next CD comes on, and 
it’s Mack 10. I couldn't help but laugh. 


WILLA FORD 


(continued from page 63) 
“I Wanna Ве Bad,” and a serious rela- 
tionship with Backstreet Boy Nick Carter. 
But soon after, she gave it all up. “Music 
became this corporate world where you 
have to compromise everything, and I'm 
uncontrollable,” she says. “I was record- 
ing in New York, and I got in a cab, called 
home and said, ‘I'm finished. I'm not doing 
this anymore.’ 1 mean, I had so much more 
fun taking my clothes off for rLavBoy than 1 
ever had sitting in a studio writing a song.” 

Instead, Willa spent the next year and a 
half reinventing herself: She took up boxing, 
began working with the UFC and discovered 
a best friend (and sometime boyfriend) in 
the СЕС» hulking six-foot-two, 205-pound 
Chuck “the Iceman” Liddell, the light-heavy- 
weight champion as of press time. 

Don't assume, though, that muscles are 
the only way to win Willa over. “I like tough 
boys because I'm tough,” she says, “and if 
I can take you over—either mentally or 
physically—we've got a problem. But I like 
somebody who's brilliant, too, and if a guy 
can really out-smartass me, then I'm totally 
in love.” But be warned that in the time 
she’s spent with her UFC pals, she’s picked 
up a few fighting strategies of her own. "I'm 
more of a verbal fighter, but if somebody 
ever hurts one of my friends or lays a hand 
on me, they're going to get laid ош.” 

Willa once came close to testing her fight- 
ing skills outside the ring, опа night when 
she and onetime nemesis Paris Hilton—who 
also once dated Nick Carter—found them- 
selves in Las Vegas’s Hard Rock Hotel at 
the same time. Willa happened to be backed 
up by her UFC entourage. “We were sit- 
ting in a private booth,” she says, “and Paris 
wouldn't stop walking back and forth in 
front of us. Chuck went over to her security 
guards and said, "Listen, you see all those 
guys over there? We're with Willa Ford. It 
Paris comes closer and Willa snaps, I can't 
help anything. If you get in there and you 
touch Willa, we're all throwing down on 
you guys.” Needless to say, when Paris and 
Willa next crossed paths, at the Playboy 
Mansion Halloween party, the celebrity. 
heiress was eager to bury the hatchet. “She 
was so apologetic,” Willa reports. “She took 
the high road, and we're cool now.” 

With a film and TV career coming into 
focus, Willa says she's much more at ease 
with herself than the teen-pop princesses 
who were once her peers. “Ifyou look at all 
of them right now—Britney, Christina, Jes- 

„ Mandy—and what they're doing, hon- 
estly, how happy are they?” she wonders. "I 
just think they're burnt. They didn't take 
time to slow it down for a minute, decide 
what they really wanted and then figure out 
how they were going to get it.” 

Judging from what we're seeing, Wil- 
la's got what it takes to get wherever she 
wants to go. Brains and beauty—a knock- 
out combination. 


HOW 


E --- 


то 


BUY 


Below is a list of wlailers and 
manufacturers you can contact 
for information on where to find 
this month s merchandise. To buy 
the apparel and equipment 
shown оп pages 30, 33-36, 
96-99, 106-111 and 154— 
155, chech the listings below to 
find the stores nearest you. 


GAMES 
Page 30: Beatmania, konami 
«com. Donkey Konga 2, nintendo 
com. Flow, ubi.com. Full Auto, 
sega.com. Full Spectrum War- 
rior: Ten Hammers, thq.com. 


com. Rallystar Champion tennis 
table, rallystartennis.com. 
TableHockey, tablehockey.com. 
Three-sided Dreomcade, dream 
arcades.com. Wurlitzer Digital 
Jukebox, gibson.com. 


ROCK/RAP/FASHION 

Pages 106-111: Asics, asics 
america.com. Azzuré Denim, 
available at Fusion in Atlanta. 
Best Tires, 516-482-1060. Cal- 
vin Klein, 888-222-1213. 
Claudia Сіші, 888-31-ciuTI. 
Clift, 212-730-2288. Dior 
Homme ty Hedi Slimane, dior 


Guitar Hero, redoctane.com, 

Karaoke Revolution Party, konami.com. 
Marc Ecko's Getting Up, atari.com. MVP "06 
NCAA Baseball, ea.com. World Soccer: Winning 
Eleven 9, konami.com. 


MANTRACK 

Pages 33-36: Breguet, breguet.com. Fisker 
Coachbuild, fiskercb.com. МР impamp.com. 
JVC, jvc.com. Ksar Char-Bagh, ksarcharbagh 
«coru, Nike Golf, nikegolf cora. Olive, olive:us. 
Sitbog, 8gon.com. 


PLAYING FOR KEEPS 

Pages 96-99: American Beauties poker chips, 
nevadajacks.net. Auto part chess set, novica 
.com. Blatt Billiards pool cues, blaubilliards 
.com. Cuelech cue case, blaubilliards.com. 
Hector Saxe simulated-crocodile backgammon set, 
gammonvillage.com. King and queen dart 
cabinet, blaubilliards.com. NASCAR Pinball, 
sternpinball.com. New Yorker pool table, blatt 
billiards com. Opus foosball table, clevenforty 
com. Piranha И Razor Grip darts, blatibilliards 


com. Duckie Brown, 212-675- 
8627. Hugo by Hugo Boss, 800-nuco-noss. 
Indigo Red, available at Up Against the Wall 
stores nationwide. J. Lindeberg, jlindeberg 
„com. Jusi Cavalli, 709-893-3542. JVC, jvc 
„com. Massive Revolution, available at Up 
Against the Wall stores nationwide. Original 
Penguin, 646-443-3520. Playboy Fashion, 
Playboy Concept Boutique. Las Vegas. 
Richmond X, available at J. Ransom in Los 
Angeles and David Lawrence in Seattle. 
Royal Filth, available at All the Right in 
Queens, New York. Salvage, available at 
Nordstrom, Vass Ludacer, 212-206-3600. 


POTPOURRI 

Pages 154-155: CBGB shower curtain, cbgb 
«сопа. Flashlite Friends, thinkgeek.com. Geox, 
geox.com. Happy Dog Toys, sitstay.com. Hum- 
mer laptop, hummerstufl.com. Irish Pub Cook- 
book, available in bookstores nationwide. 
Playboy guitar straps and picks, musicians 
friend.com. Rosendahl Winetube, unicahome 
«com. Solitude headphones, protravelgear.com. 


CREDITS: PHOTOGRAPHY BY: P. 3 BRENNAN CAVANAUGH, PAUL ROAT. DAVID ROSE, DARLENE SPENETTO; P 5 
STEPHEN WAYDA; Р. В GETTY IMAGES (3), STEPHEN WAYDA, OJAMES WHITE/CORBIS OUTLINE: P. 13 CHAD 
DOERING. KENNETH JOHANSSON (4), ELAYNE LODGE (4), SCOTT WINDUS (41: P. 14 CHAD DOERING (2). KEN- 
NETH JOMANSEON 163, ELAYNE LOOCE (G). SCOTT WINDUG; P. 17 OUNIVEREALCOURTECY EVERETT COLLEC 
TION INC. WILLIAM READ WOODFIELD: F 18 STEPHEN WAYCA; Р 22 DANIELLE BEDICS/WHITERABBITSTUDIO 
COM, SILVERCANVAS PHOTOGRAPHY, DEBRA ZELLER: Р. 23 COURTESY OF CHUCK ZLOTNIK/MAGNOLIA PIC- 
TURES, MICHAEL MULLER/CCREIS OUTLINE, KOEN VAN WEEL/REUTERS; F. 24 JAMES IMBROGND, DAVID RAMS 
(3), F. 26 CORBIS (3), GETTY IMAGES (2); P. 27 PARAMOUNT PICTURES, LACEY TERRELL/FOX SEARCHLIGHT 
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131 


132 


KANYE WEST continued fron page 9) 


I'm not a tough guy, but Pm a strong person. Rap 
music innately has to be hard. Life itself is hard. 


talking to me? Can't you see my mouth is 
fucked-up?” But she kept on having me 
talk. You know how they keep you talking 
so you don't die or something? But it was 
like they were about to make me die—talk 
me to death, literally. 

PLAYBOY: And you say the accident was 
good for your career. How? 

WEST: That's one of the best things that 
can happen to a rapper, to almost die. 
Tupac, 50 Cent and now me. People con- 
nected with that. 

PLAYBOY: It made you seem a little 
tougher. People don't usually think of 
you as tough. 

WEST: I’m not a tough guy, but Pm a 
strong person. Rap music innately has to 
be hard. But we've changed what it means 
to be hard because life itself is hard. I've 
started presenting the hardship of regular 
people's lives. Hard isn't always "I went to 
jail” or “I have to shoot somebody. I'm 
gonna kill somebody today." Hard is апу- 
thing: "I have a test to take.” All I did was 
see the open lane. 

PLAYBOY: The reaction to The College 
Dropout wasn’t quite instant acclaim. 
west: When it first came out, I was frus- 
trated that people didn't believe in me. 
That's when you would read quotes that 
came off as more arrogant or defensive 
than funny. Now I don't have to be defen- 
sive at all. When people try to attack me, 
it's like, Come on, fam. What else do you 
need me to do? 


PLAYBOY: Late Registration has some 
conspiracy-theory lyrics. Do you believe 
the government is spreading AIDS, as 
you suggest in "Heard 'Em Say"? 

WEST: Right now? No. But I do believe 
the theory that AIDS vas being placed in 
Africa. I do believe the FBI placed crack 
in the black community. I believe the U.S. 
government gave smallpox to the Indians. 
I believe financial institutions are capita 
izing on the African AIDS epidemic. 
PLAYBOY: Not all of those theories are 
equally credible. What's your source for 
the government starting AIDS in Africa? 
WEST: You know what? I don't have the 
answer to that. Life isn't a big test in 
which 1 have to know the answer right 
now. People always want me to say things 
in black-and-white. "What's your answer 
to this?" So many people hang on every. 
word I say. I feel like I'm in Forrest Gump, 
the scene when he's running and every- 
body's coming up alongside him, asking, 
“What do you think about this?" He steps 
in shit and says, "Shit happens," and then 
there are bumper stickers. That's my life 
right now. 

PLAYBOY: What would we find if we drug- 
tested you? 

WEST: Does alcohol show up? You'd find 
some Hennessy, some Belvedere and 
that's it. The only drug Гуе done is 
weed. I used to smoke weed like every 
day. I hated it, though. It gave me a 
headache. But I'm really intrigued by 


‘An erection doesn’t count as personal growth, Howard.” 


the 1980s white yuppie cocaine culture. 
That was an inspiration for Late Regis- 
tration: white modern buildings, leather 
jackets, Lamborghinis, model bitches, all 
that. 1 wanted to make the album darker 
and sexier than the first one. I don't do 
any other form of drug. My only drug 
is porn. 

PLAYBOY: What's your taste in porn? 
WEST: Elegant Angel is pretty good, and 
the Brazilian joints are crazy. 

PLAYBOY: Are you unapologetic about 
porn? Do you play it in front of your 
girlfriend? 

WEST: Yeah, I'll just keep it on. That's one 
of the old pimp moves: If the girl comes 
over, have porn playing. If she’s like, 
“Ugh,” hurry up and turn it off. “Man, I 
don't know who left that on!” And if she 
says, “Hmm, what's this?" then keep it 
playing, keep it playing. [laughs] 
PLAYBOY: Not everyone admits to liking 


porn. 
WEST: We all like porn; I'm just the first 
to admit it. I could show you examples of 
some things I like. 
PLAYBOY: Let's look at the bookmarks on 
your laptop: "Ass man's paradise,” "Mexi- 
can lust." 

WEST: І have normal conversations all 
the time while I'm looking at these sites. 
If this were a phone interview, I'd prob- 
ably be looking at porn. It's an addic- 
tion. Whenever we go to the porn store, 
we call it the crack house. And I stash 
my porn just like someone would stash 
weed, in a baggie. Here, these are some 
really good ones. 

PLAYBOY: Let's see what you've got in the 
bag. Ghetto Booty. Housewives Gone Black, 
Part 3. She's Got Ass, Part 9. My Daughter 
Is Fucking Blackzilla. All That Ass Brazil 30. 
Black and Wild, Volume 18. 

WEST: This girl's incredible. See that? 
РААУВОУ would never have that. I don't 
think ғ.лувоу has enough ass. But the 
best girl you had in the past three years 
has to be Rita C., the Spanish girl. She's 
got an ass even white people like. 
PLAYBOY: One of your biggest songs is 
“Jesus Walks." Is Jesus happy with you? 
west: God is. I personally believe Jesus 
died for our sins, because that’s the 
way I was raised. Same reason I like 
fat asses: That’s how I was raised. If I 
had been raised in an all-white com- 
munity, maybe I'd like skinny asses. I 
try to walk and be more Christlike, Im 
aman, and I have shortcomings. But I 
think if there were a bible written today 
in the new millennium, Га be one of the 
characters in it. 

PLAYBOY: What role would you play in 
ible? 

`d be a griot. I bring up historical 
subjects in a way that makes kids want to 
learn about them. I'm an inspirational 
speaker. I changed the sound of music 
more than one time: 1 did it with The Blue- 
print, did it again with The College Dropout. 
For all these reasons, I'd be a part of the 
bible. I'm definitely in the history books 


already. “Jesus Walks"—that song will 
never go away. 

PLAYBOY: Is the devil trying to get you too? 
WEST: Always. Let's take it back to Atlanta, 
back to the strippers. You know, when 
Marvin Gaye made “Sexual Healing,” it 
was a fun song, but he really did have a 
problem with sex. And I think I might 
have a problem, a sexual addiction. I 
have porn on me at all times. 

PLAYBOY: Haven't you mostly been in rela- 
tionships for the past few years? 

west: Lust is part of the reason I've been 
out of relationships, too. I just want to do 
itall the time. All the time. Like four times 
a night. And then in the morning. 
PLAYBOY: Are you bothered by your 
addictions? 

WEST: In “Touch the Sky,” I say, "I'm try- 
ing to right my wrongs/But it's funny 
them same wrongs help me write this 
song.” Those addictions and afflictions 
are what make me a great artist. If 1 
were perfect, if I didn’t have any соп- 
flicts, what would І have to say? My big- 
gest problem is lust, looking at girls with 
big booties. 

PLAYBOY: You're one of the few rappers 
who have spoken out against homopho- 
bia. How did that go over? 

west: I got more backlash for that than I 
did for my George Bush comment. I said 
it’s wrong to discriminate against gays, 
to call them fags and to gay bash. And 
people were like, “We don't agree with 
you. We feel like it’s okay to do that.” 
What I said about Bush was just popular 
opinion, but homophobia is so taboo to 
talk about. If you bring it up, people say 
you must be gay, and then they hate you 
also. In the black community, not just in 
rap, it's a thing people stay away from. 
They mention gays only in a negative 
way, even if they have a gay cousin or 
they know the choir director, And I had 
to learn from experience. I felt like it was 
okay to say “fag.” 

PLAYBOY: In the past you used the word 
fag in your songs. 

west: Yeah, I'm sure I did. Even to 
this day I'm dealing with my personal 
homophobia. I'm not gay, and I don't feel 
comfortable in a gay bar. I wouldn't be at 
a gay parade. 

PLAYBOY: It's possible to be opposed to gay 
bashing but still feel some homophobia. 
WEST: Yeah, like I think it's wrong to lust, 
but I still end up at the strip club. 
PLAYBOY: What hip-hop trend would you 
like to see die? 

WEST: Hip-hop trends die on their own. 
That's like going to a senior citizens" 
home and asking, "Who do you want to 
die?" Yo, they're all going to die pretty 
soon! That's what hip-hop is about. At the 
point when my albums become classic, 
they transcend hip-hop. Because hip-hop 
is about being fresh. 

PLAYBOY: You said earlier that you were 
making $70,000 a year when you were 
21. How much haye you made in the 
past year? 


west: Millions. With a real long 5 at the 
end. Yeah, millionsssssss. 

PLAYBOY: Here's one number we heard. A 
movie studio paid $700,000 for the use of 
“Jesus Walks" in Jarhead. 

west: Let me check with my lawyer. 
So add that up, that’s one thing, and I 
have multiple movie offers and multiple 
shows. But I need to figure out a way to 
make more. 

PLAYBOY: You're not making enough 
money? 

WEST: No, I'm not. Not to do all the 
things I want to do creatively. Now that 
I сап get pretty much anything I want 
for myself, I want to show people art. 
I want people to know about the archi- 
tecture in Prague. I'd like to purchase а 
castle in Europe and renovate it. I want 
to design buildings. I want to produce 
movies and have complete ownership 
so I don't have to run ideas by people. 
I'm meeting with the biggest movie 
director in the game. I don't want to 
say his name. 

PLAYBOY: Well, the biggest director in 
Hollywood is Steven Spielberg. Is that. 
who you're meeting with? 

west: Okay, yeah. And I'm writing a TV 
show with Rick Rubin and Larry Charles, 
who wrote Seinfeld with Larry David. So 
it's like the real shit. I've been talking to 
Ben Stiller about some things. This year I 
met with the Steves: Stevie Wonder, Steve 
Jobs and Steven Spielberg. Im going to 
the Kanye Wests of their genres. 
PLAYBOY: What about music? 

west: What about it? Asking me “What 
about music?" is like coming to Spielberg 
and asking him "What about movies?" 
"This is what I do and what I will continue 
to do at the highest caliber possible. 
PLAYBOY: Are you producing anyone? 
WEST: I'm producing Jay-Z's new album. 
I'm doing the whole thing. 

PLAYBOY: Wait a minute. When we inter- 
viewed Jay-Z in PLAYBOY three years ago, 
he told us he was retiring. And we made 
him a bet: If he comes out of retirement, 
he owes us $1,000. 

WEST: Well, he's about to pay. 

PLAYBOY: Rap careers come and go in 
a pretty short time. As you said, trends 
die out; even the hot producers burn out 
quickly. How long are you going to stick. 
around? 

WEST: As long as I want to. Гуе had beats 
that were impactful on the culture for 
the past six years, and I’m not stopping 
anytime soon. I see things I still want to 
do that no one has done before. I could 
be the Steve Jobs of hip-hop. I'm mak- 
ing a beat a day, and they're coming out 
pretty good. 

PLAYBOY: Yeah, but in “Spaceship” you 
say you used to make five beats a day. 
You're slowing down. 

west: Yeah, you can put that in the story. 
Kanye's falling off. [laughs] He's making 
only one beat a day. 


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PLAYBOY 


134 


BAD WEATHER 


(continued from page 68) 
by heating the atmosphere just a little, 
allowing it to take up and retain more 
moisture, which then warms the atmo- 
sphere further. So a positive feedback 
loop is created, forcing our planet’s 
temperature to even higher levels. 

Although it is a greenhouse gas, 
water vapor is also an enigma in the 
climate-change arena, for it forms 
clouds, which can both reflect light 
energy and trap heat. By trapping heat 
more than they reflect light, high thin 
clouds tend to warm the planet; low 
thick clouds have the reverse effect. 
No single factor contributes more 
to the uncertainty of future climate- 
change predictions. 

Many greenhouse gases are in some 
way or another generated by human 
activity. Although scarce and weak in its 
capacity to capture heat, CO, remains 
in the atmosphere a long time: Around 
56 percent of all the CO, that humans 
have liberated by burning fossil fuel is 


w 


ШІЛ | À 
Т FAR” eb 


still aloft, which is the cause—direct and 
indirect—of around 80 percent of all 
global warming. 


OVERSPENDING THE CARBON BUDGET 


Тһе fact that a known proportion of CO, 
remains in the atmosphere allows us to 
calculate in very round numbers a carbon 
budget for humanity. Prior to the start 
of the Industrial Revolution there were 
about 280 parts per million of CO, in the 
atmosphere, which equates to around 
586 gigatons of CO,. (Figures such as 
these relate only to the carbon in the 
CO, molecule. The actual weight of the 
CO, would be 3.7 times greater.) Today 
the figures are 380 parts per million, or 
around 790 gigatons. If we wished to 
stabilize CO, emissions at twice the level 
that existed before the Industrial Revo- 
lution (widely considered the threshold 
of dangerous change), we would have 
to limit all future human emissions to 
around 600 gigatons. Just over half of 
this would stay in the atmosphere, rais- 
ing CO, levels to around 1,100 gigatons, 
or 550 parts per million, by 2100. This, 


NOT 50 SUPER HEROES 


incidentally, would be a tough budget 
for humanity to abide by, for if we use 
fossil fuels for only another century, that 
equates to a budget of six gigatons a year. 
Compare this with the average of 13.3 
gigatons of CO, that accumulated each 
year throughout the 1990s (half of this 
from burning fossil fuel), and add the 
projection that the human population is 
set to rise to 9 billion by mid-century, and 
you can see the problem. 

Our servants, the billions of engines 
we've built to run on fossil fuels such as 
coal, gasoline, oil-based fuels and natural 
gas, play the leading role in manufactur- 
ing СО, Most dangerous of all are power 
plants that use coal to generate electric- 
ity. Black coal (anthracite) is composed 
of at least 92 percent carbon, while dry 
brown coal is around 70 percent carbon 
and five percent hydrogen. 

Carbon and oxygen, the components 
of CO,, are dose neighbors on the peri- 
odic table, meaning they have similar 
atomic weights. Because two oxygen 
atoms combine with one carbon atom to 
form CO,, around three and a half tons 
of the gas are created for every ton of 
anthracite consumed. Some power plants 
burn through 500 tons of coal an hour, 
and so inefficient are they that around 
two thirds of the energy created is 
wasted. And to what purpose is the coal 
burned? Simply to boil water, which gen- 
erates steam that moves the colossal tur- 
bines to create the electricity that powers 
our homes and factories. Like the atmo- 
sphere itself, these Dickensian machines 
are invisible to most of us, who have по 
idea that 19th century technology makes 
21st century gadgets whir. 

‘The places that the carbon goes when it 
leaves the atmosphere are known as car- 
bon sinks. You and І and all living things 
are carbon sinks, as are the oceans and 
some of the rocks under our feet. Some of 
these sinks are very large, but they are not 
infinite, nor is their size steady through 
time. Over aeons much CO, has been 
stored іп the earth’s crust. This occurs as 
dead plants are buried and carried under- 
ground, where they become fossil fuels. 
On a shorter time scale, a lot of carbon 
can be stored in soil, where it forms the 
black mold beloved of gardeners. 

For the past couple of decades scientists 
have been monitoring where the CO, that 
humans produce by burning fossil fuels 
goes. They can do this because the gas 
derived from fossil fuels has a unique 
chemical signature and can be tracked as 
it circulates around the planet. In very 
round figures, two gigatons is absorbed 
by the oceans and a further 1.5 giga- 
tons is absorbed by life on land annu- 
ally. The contribution made by the land 
results partly from an accident of history: 
America's frontier phase of development, 
which gave some land plants a ravenous 
hunger for carbon. Mature forests don’t 
take in much CO, because they are in 
balance, releasing CO, as old vegetation 


rots, then absorbing it as new vegetation 
grows. For these reasons the world’s larg- 
est forests, the coniferous ones of Siberia 
and Canada and the tropical rain forests, 
are not good carbon sinks, but new, vig- 
orously growing forests are. 


THE MAGIC GATES 


Global warming changes the climate in 
jerks, during which climate patterns jump. 
from one stable state to another. Because of 
the atmosphere’s telekinetic nature, these 
changes can manifest themselves instan- 
taneously across the globe. The best anal- 
ogy is perhaps that of a finger оп a light 
switch. Nothing happens fora while, but if 
you slowly increase the pressure, a certain 
point is reached, a sudden change occurs, 
and conditions swifily 
alter from one state 
to another. 

Climatologist Julia 
Cole refers to the 
leaps made by the 
climate as “magic 
gates,” and she ar- 
gues that since tem- 
peratures began 
rising rapidly in the 
1970s our planet has 
seen two such events, 
in 1976 and 1998. 
These dates are im- 
portant, for again 
and again they mark 
the onset of remark- 
able phenomena. 

Between 1945 
and 1955 the tem- 
perature of the sur- 
face of the tropical 
Pacific commonly 
dipped below 67°F, 
but since the magic 
gate opened in 1976 
it has rarely been 
below 77°F. The 
central Pacific is an 
important location 
because it is where 
EI Ninos, which are 
a major climate force 
across the globe, are 
first detected. “The 
western tropical Pa- 
cific is the warmest area in the global 
ocean and is a great regulator of climate,” 
says Martin Hoerling of the Earth System 
Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo- 
rado. Among other thin, area con- 
trols most tropical precipitation and the 
position of the jet stream, whose winds 
bring snow and ram to North America. 
In 1977 National Geographic ran a feature. 
on the crazy weather of the previous year, 
which included unprecedented mild 
conditions in Alaska and blizzards in the 
lower 48 states. 

The 1998 magic gate is also tied up 
with the El Nino-La Nina cycle, a two- 
to-eight-year cycle that brings extreme 
climatic events to much of the world. 


During the La Nina phase, which until 
recently seemed to be the dominant 
part of the cycle, winds blow westward 
across the Pacific, accumulating the 
warm surface water off the coast of 
Australia and islands lying to its north. 
With the warm surface waters blown 
westward, the cold Humboldt Current 
is able to surface off the most prolific 
fishery in the world, the anchoveta. 
The El Nino part of the cycle begins 
with a weakening of tropical winds, 
allowing the warm surface water to 
flow back eastward, overwhelming the 
Humboldt and releasing humidity into 
the atmosphere that brings floods to 
the normally arid Peruvian deserts. 
Cooler water now upwells in the far 


western Pacific, and because it does 
not evaporate as readily as warm water, 
drought strikes Australia and south- 
east Asia. When an EI Nino is extreme 
enough, it can afflict two thirds of the 
globe with droughts, floods and other 
extreme weather. 

The 1997-98 El Nino year was immor- 
talized by the World Wide Fund for 
Nature (now the WWF) as “the year 
the world caught fire.” Drought had 
a stranglehold on a large part of the 
planet, and fires burned on every con- 
tinent, but in the normally wet rain for- 
ests of southeast Asia the conflagrations 
reached their peak. There more than 10 
million hectares burned, of which half 


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was ancient rain forest. Оп the island of 

Borneo 5 million hectares were lost—an 

area almost the size of the Netherlands. 

Many of the burned forests will never 

Tecover on a time scale meaningful to 

human beings, and the impact of this on 

Borneo’s unique fauna will, in all prob- 
ability, never be fully known. 

Climatologist Kevin Trenberth and 

his colleagues believe that the 1997-98 

event was an extreme manifestation of 

the more general impact global warming 

has had on the El Nino-La Nina cycle. 

Ever since 1976 the cycles have been 

exceptionally long—one would expect 

such long cycles only once in several 

years—and there has been an imbalance 

between the phases, with five El Ninos 

and only two La 

Niñas. Computer- 

based modeling 

supports their re- 

search, indicating 

that as greenhouse 

gas concentra- 

tions increase in 

the atmosphere, a 

semipermanent El 


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were permanent; 
ever since then the 
waters of the central 
western Pacific have 
frequently reached 
86°F, while the jet 
stream has shifted 
toward the north 
pole. So the ques- 
tion is, how has our 
changing climate 
affected various 
plant and animal 
populations? 

One of the most 
powerful tools avail- 
able to researchers 
wishing to docu- 
ment the response 
of nature to climate 
change is the jot- 
tings of birders, fish- 
ermen and other nature watchers. Some 
of these records are very long; one Eng- 
lish family recorded the date of the first 
frog and toad croaks it heard on its estate 
every year between 1736 and 1947. This 
type of record is of the utmost importance 
in revealing how things stood when the 
curtain separating the stable climate of 
the past 8,000 years from our brave new 
future began to lift. In 2003 the journal 
Science published a huge study drawing 
on such natural-history observations that 
reveals the immense scale of the shifts 
now under way. 

The database has information on 
more than 1,700 historically recorded 


species. The information includes 135 


PLAYBOY 


136 


detailed records of the migration, 
breeding habits and distribution of 
birds compiled by amateur birdwatch- 
ers, the jottings of botanists about the 
flowering and shooting of plants, and 
captains’ logs from whaling ships 

Prior to 1950 there is little evidence 
of any trend, but since that date, a very 
strong pattern has emerged around the 
globe. This manifests itself as a pole- 
ward shift in species’ distribution of, on 
average, around four miles a decade, a 
retreat up mountainsides of 20 feet a 
decade and an advance of spring activ- 
ity by two days a decade. These trends 
accord so strongly with the scale and 
direction of temperature increases 
brought about by greenhouse gas emis- 
sions that they have been hailed as con- 
stituting a globally coherent fingerprint 
of climate change. While such trends 
may seem small when compared with 
the rate of change seen over geologi- 


cal time, they are in fact so rapid and 
decisive, it's as if the researchers had 
caught CO, in the act of driving nature 
polevard with a lash. 


HURRICANE WATCH 


In the troposphere—the lowest atmo- 
spheric layer, which extends from the 
earth's surface to around seven miles 
up and is the most influential on global 
weather patterns—ever-increasing levels 
of greenhouse gases are trapping more 
heat, causing it to expand. 

As the troposphere has warmed in the 
past decade, the world has seen the most 
powerful El Nino ever recorded (1997- 
98), the most devastating hurricanes in 
200 ycars (Mitch, in 1998, followed by 
Katrina, in 2005), the hottest European 
summer on record (2003), the first south 
Atlantic hurricane ever recorded (2002) 
and one of the worst storm seasons ever 
experienced (2005). This series of events, 


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many would argue, indicates that the 
potential for the new climate to generate 
extremes is already increasing. 

Where do you think the energy to 
power a hurricane comes from? "A hur- 
ricane," Frederick Lutgens and Edward 
Tarbuck tell us in their atmospheric- 
studies textbook, "is a heat engine that is 
fueled by the latent heat liberated when 
huge quantities of water vapor condense. 
To get this engine started, a large quan- 
tity of warm, moist air is required, and a 
continuous supply is needed to keep it 
going.” We're all familiar with the prin- 
ciple that evaporation can carry heat into 
the atmosphere: On a hot day we all per- 
spire, and as our sweat evaporates it car- 
ries heat from our body into the air. It's a 
highly effective form of heat transfer, for 
the evaporation of just one gram of water 
from our skin is sufficient to transfer 580 
calories of heat. Think of the difference 
in scale between your body and an entire 
ocean and you can sense the power that 
heat energy derived from evaporation 
carries into the atmosphere. 

It's not widely appreciated just how 
much extra latent heat the hot air engen- 
dered by climate change can carry. For 
every 18°F increase in temperature, the 
amount of water vapor the air can hold 
doubles; thus air at 86°F can hold four 
times as much hurricane fuel as air at 50* F. 

There arc disturbing signs that hur- 
ricanes are becoming more frequent in 
North America. Hurricane Mitch tore 
through the Caribbean in October 1998, 
killing 10,000 people and making up to 
1 million homeless. With its wind speeds 
reaching 180 miles an hour, Mitch was the 
fourth strongest Atlantic Basin hurricane. 
ever recorded, along with 19695 Camille. 
Atthe time, Mitch was the most damaging 
storm to hit the Americas in 200 years, but 
the severity of its impact was surpassed a 
mere seven years later when Hurricane 
Katrina swamped New Orleans. It was 
with remarkable prescience that the U.S. 
National Weather Service predicted that 
the 2005 hurricane season was likely to 
be more destructive than usual. 

Many of the homes damaged by these 
storms arc still uninhabitablc. With hur- 
ricane fuel increasing in the atmosphere, 
it is only a matter of time before the 
storms return with redoubled fury. 

Anyone looking only at the number 
of hurricanes that occur in the Americas 
each year may think Katrina and Rita аге 
just part of a natural cycle. This is because 
there are cycles in Atlantic hurricane 
activity that mask more significant trends. 
By affecüng the Gulf Stream, the Atlantic 
Multidecadal Oscillation brings variations 
in hurricane activity every 60 to 70 years. 
Another cycle alters hurricane activity 
each decade or so. Both cycles have com- 
plex causes relating to ocean currents and 
the state of the atmosphere. 

Many of the most devastating impacts 
of any individual hurricane are unrelated 
to global warming. Whether Katrina wasa 


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Іше weaker or stronger, whether it struck 
30 miles or 100 miles from the city and 
whether it struck a week earlier or later are 
all matters of chance. But equally, evidence 
is growing that global warming is chang- 
ing the conditions in the atmosphere and 
oceans in ways that will make hurricanes 
even more destructive in the future. 

The impact of climate change on the 
later phases of the hurricane life cycle is 
more certain than its effect on the initial 
formation of storms. Satellite measure- 
ments reveal that the oceans are rap- 
idly warming from the top down as the 
result of additional heat coming from 
the atmosphere. Already the oceans 
have warmed on average by just under 
1°F, though some areas, such as the 
Gulf of Mexico, have warmed far more. 
(During the summer of 2005 the sur- 
face waters of the northern Gulf were 
exceptionally hot—around 87°F.) In 
response to this, the amount of water 
vapor—hurricane fuel—in the air over 
thc oceans has increased by 1.3 percent 
per decade since 1988. Both the warmer 
ocean and the increased water vapor 
augment the energy available for all 
manner of storms, from thunderstorms. 
to hurricanes. But they are especially 
important in transforming tropical 
storms into hurricanes and in feeding 
category 1 hurricanes so they become 
category 5s. With this enhancement of 
hurricane fuel, Katrina was an accident 


What is increasingly perplexing and 
astonishing to meteorologists is that, in 
the real world, we are already seeing an 
increase in hurricane intensity and num- 
bers far in advance of that suggested by 
computer modeling. Kerry Emanuel of 
the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- 
ogy has found that the total amount of 
energy released by hurricanes world- 
wide has increased by 60 percent in the 
past three decades. And Peter Webster 
of the Georgia Institute of Technology 
in Atlanta has discovered that more of 
that energy is going into the most power- 
ful hurricanes. Since 1974 the number 
of catcgory 4 and 5 hurricancs recorded 
has almost doubled. 

Some commentators believe that the 
discrepancy between the computer 
models and conditions in the real world 
somehow indicates that global warming 
is not responsible for the increasing hur- 
ricane activity. Others, however, believe it 
suggests what they have long suspected: 
that the global circulation models used 
to simulate future changes in climate 
are deeply conservative. If those latter 
researchers are correct, the current heat 
imbalance of the earth has been sufficient 
to shift our planet's climate into a new, 
more dangerous phase. 

Much hangs on this scientific debate. 
When Hurricane Ivan roared through the 
Gulf of Mexico in 2004, the oil industry con- 
sidered it to be a once-in-2,500-years event, 
but then came Katrina and Rita. “We're see- 


“Look at it this way—what has virginity ever done for you?” 


ing 100-year events happening every few 
years,” one oil industry executive said. 

It’s worth recording that the United 
States already has the most varied 
weather of any country on earth, with 
more intense and damaging tornadoes, 
flash floods, thunderstorms, hurricanes 
and blizzards than anywhere else. With 
the intensity of such events projected to 
increase as our planet warms, the United 
States would seem to have more to lose 
from climate change in purely human 
terms than any other large nation. 
Indeed, the ever-spiraling insurance bill 
resulting from severe weather events and 
the growing water shortages in the West 
mean that the 0.5. is already paying 
dearly for its CO, emissions 

Because extreme weather events by 
their very nature are rare, a long time can 
pass before sufficient data accumulate to 
detect a trend. Less extreme changes in 
temperature and rainfall are a lot easier to 
quantify, and with climate records going 
back centuries, Europe is a great place to 
start looking for these impacts. The 1990s 
was the warmest decade in central Eng- 
land since records began to be kept in the 
1660s; 1998 was the warmest year ever 
and 2001 the third warmest. As a result, 
the growing season for plants has been 
extended by a month, heat waves have 
become more frequent, and winters are 
much wetter, with heavier rain. The Had- 
ley Center, a world-leading institution set 
up in Exeter, U.K. to predict and examine 
climate-change impacts, has determined 
that the U.K. has experienced a signifi- 
cant increase in severe winter storms, a 
trend that is predicted to continue. 

On the Continent more alarming 
events have occurred. The European 
summer of 2003 was so hot that, statisti- 
cally speaking, such an outlandish event 
should occur no more than every 46,000 
years. It was worsened by water stress 
to plants, which restricted their mois- 
ture emissions. With less of the sun’s 
heat used up in evaporation, more of it 
warmed the air. The heat wave was so 
extreme that 26,000 people died dur- 
ing June and July, when temperatures 
exceeded 104°F across much of the conti- 
nent. Heat waves, incidentally, kill a large 
number of people worldwide each year; 
even in the climatically turbulent U.S., 
heat-related deaths exceed those from all 
other weather-related causes combined, 
And just one year after the European 
heat wave, Egypt experienced one of its 
highest recorded temperatures: 124°F. 


А MESSAGE FROM THE GOLDEN TOAD 


The Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve 
Costa Rica, with its Golden Toad Labo- 
ratory for Conservation, is blessed with an 
abundance of researchers. Soon after our 
fragile planet passed through the climatic 
magic gate of 1976, abrupt and strange 
events were observed by the ecologists 
who spend their life conducting detailed 
field studies in these pristine forests. 


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During the winter dry season of 1987, 
in the mossy rain forests that clothe the 
mountain's slopes nearly one mile above 
the sea, 30 of the 50 species of frogs 
known to inhabit the 12-square-mile 
study site vanished. Among them was a 
spectacular toad the color of spun gold. 
Aptly named the golden toad (Bufo peri- 
glenes), the creature lived only on the 
upper slopes of the mountain, but there it 
was abundant, and at certain times of the 
year the brilliant males could be seen by 
the dozen gathering around puddles on 
the forest floor to mate. The toad’s disap- 
pearance particularly worried research- 
ers, for it is one of the most spectacular 
of the region's amphibians and was found 
nowhere else 

The golden toad was discovered and 
named in 1966 Only the males are 
golden; the females are mottled black, 
yellow and scarlet. For much of the year 
it’s a secretive creature, spending its time 
underground in burrows amid the mossy 
root masses of the elfin woodland. Then, 
as the dry season gives way to the wet in 
April and May, it appears aboveground en 
masse, for just a few days or weeks. With 
such a short time to reproduce, the males 
fight with each other for the top spot and 
take every opportunity to mate—even if 
its only with a field-worker's boot. 

In her book In Search of the Golden Frog. 
(perhaps toad was too off-putting for a 
title) amphibian expert Marty Crump 
tells us what it was like to see the creature 
in its mating frenzy: 


As I round a bend, I slide to a 
halt. In front of me is one of 
the most incredible sights I've 
ever seen. Congregated in and 
around the small pools at the 
bases of stunted trees sit over 
100 dazzling bright orange toads 
poised like statues, jewels scat- 
tered about the dim understory. 


On April 8, 1987 Crump made a note 
in her field diary that was to have his- 
toric significance: 


We see a large orange blob with 
legs flailing in all directions: 
a writhing mass of toad flesh. 
Closer examination reveals 
three males, each struggling 
to gain access to the female 
in the middle. Forty-two bril- 
liant orange splotches poised 
around the pool are unmated 
males, alert to any moyement 
and ready to pounce. Another 
57 unmated males are scattered 
nearby. In total we find 133 
toads in the neighborhood of 
this kitchen-sink-size pool. 


Оп April 20: 


Breeding seems to be over. I 
found the last female four days 
ago, and gradually the males have 


returned to their underground 


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140 


retreats. Every day the ground 
is drier and the pools contain less 
water. Today's observations are 
discouraging. Most of the pools 
have dried completely, leaving 
behind desiccated eggs already 
covered in mold. Unfortunately, 
the dry weather conditions of El 
Nino are still affecting this part 
of Costa Rica. 


As if they knew the fate of their eggs, 
the toads attempted to breed again in May. 
This was, as far as the world knows, the last 
great toad orgy ever to occur, and Crump 
had the privilege to record it. Despite the 
fact that 45,300 eggs were deposited in the 
10 pools she studied, only 29 tadpoles sur- 
vived for longer than a week, for the pools 
once again quickly dried. 

The following year Crump was back 
at Monteverde for the breeding season, 
but this time things were different. After 
a long search, on May 21 she located a 
single male. By June, Crump, still search- 
ing, was worried: “The forest seems sterile 
and depressing without the bright orange 
splashes of color I've come to associate 
with this [wet] weather. I don't under- 
stand what's happening. Why haven't we 
found a few hopeful males, checking out 
the pools in anticipation?" Yet even after 
the season closed without another sight- 
ing, there was no undue pessimism. А 
year was to pass before, on Мау 15, 1989, 
a solitary male was again sighted. As it was 
sitting Just 10 feet from where Crump 
made her sighting 12 months earlier, it 
was almost certainly the same male who. 
for the second year running was holding 
a lonely vigil, waiting for the arrival of his 


fellows. He was, as far as we know, the last 
of his species, for the golden toad has not 
been seen since. 

Suspecting that some odd weather 
event might have been the cause of the 
changes, researchers began to pore over 
the monthly records of the region's cli- 
mate. It would be 10 years from the last 
sighting before they published their find- 
ings, but in 1999 they announced that 
they had identified the cause of Monte- 
verde's despoliation. 

Fxamination of the meteorological 
record revealed that ever since the earth 
had passed through its first climatic 
magic gate, in 1976, the number of mist- 
less days experienced each dry season 
had grown until they coalesced into 
runs of mistless days. By the dry season 
of 1987 the number of consecutive mist- 
less days had passed some critical thresh- 
old. It was apparently so subtle as to be 
undetectable to the researchers working 
on the mountain, yet it had plunged the 
entire ecosystem of the mountaintop 
into crisis. Mist, you see, brought vital 
moisture, and without it the forest dried 
out sufficiently to trigger a landslide of 
catastrophic changes that swept before 
it mountain birds, anoles, golden toads 
and other amphibians alike. 

Why, the researchers wanted to know, 
had the mist forsaken Monteverde? 
Beginning in 1976 the cloud line, the 
level at which clouds sit against moun- 
tainsides and bring misty conditions, had 
risen until it was above the level of the. 
forest. The change had been driven by 
the abrupt rise in sea surface tempera- 
tures in the central western Pacific that 


CALDWELL- 


‘Aah...my apologies, Ms. Brunswick. I thought 
you were chewing gum.” 


heralded the magic gate of 1976. A hot 
ocean had perhaps heated air, elevating 
the condensation point for moisture in 
it. By 1987 the rising cloud line had on 
many days forsaken the mossy forest alto- 
gether and hung about in the sky above, 
bringing shade but no mist. 

The golden toad's permeable skin 
and its propensity to wander in daylight 
hours had left it extremely vulnerable to 
the desiccation brought on by the run of 
mistless days. By the time the study was 
published in 1999, this wondrous crea- 
ture had been extinct for a decade. 

It’s always devastating when you wit- 
ness the extinction of a species, because 
what you are seeing is the dismantling of 
ecosystems and irreparable genetic loss. 
The golden toad’s extinction, however, 
was not in vain, for when the explanation 
of its demise was published in Nature, the 
scientists could make their point without 
equivocation. The golden toad was the 
first documented victim of global warm- 
ing. We had killed it with our profligate 
use of coal-fired electricity and our over- 
size cars just as surely as if we had flat- 
tened its forest with bulldozers. 

As the reason for the extinction of the 
golden toad became thoroughly com- 
prehensible, frog researchers worldwide 
began to reevaluate their experiences; 
since 1976 many had observed amphib- 
ian species vanishing before their eyes 
without being able to determine the 
cause. Could climate change, they won- 
dered, be responsible? 

The answer, sadly, is yes. When the 
first global survey of amphibians was 
completed in 2004, it revealed that 
almost a third of the world's 6,000-odd 
species were threatened with extinction. 
Many of these endangered species began 
their decline after 1976, and according to 
Simon Stuart of the International Union 
for the Conservation of Nature, "there's 
almost no evidence of recovery." 


MASS EXTINCTION 


Another way to try to understand how 
climate change is affecting the planet's 
ecosystems is to mass together the avail- 
able data, which involve observations of 
more than 1,000 species of trees, crusta- 
ceans and mammals, and see what they 
say statistically as a whole. This was the 
approach taken by a group of research- 
ers, led by Chris Thomas of the Univer- 
sity of Leeds, that published its findings 
in Nature in late 2004. 

Drawing from locations covering 20 
percent of the earth’s surface, includ- 
ing Mexico, South Africa, Europe, South 
America and Australia, and using a range 
of current predictions for climate change, 
the project examined the likely fate of 
1,103 plant and animal species, from 
proteas to primates, by the year 2050. 

Thomas and his colleagues found 
that at the lowest possible degree of 
global warming—between 17Е and 
3°F—around 18 percent of the species 


sampled will, in the dispassionate lan- 
guage favored by science journals, be 
“committed to extinction,” or, in other 
words, doomed. At the midrange pre- 
dictions—3°F to 4° F—around a quarter 
of all species will be extirpated, while at 
the high range of predicted temperature 
rises (more than 4^F) more than a third 
of species will become extinct. 

Believe it or not, this is the good 
news; in these analyses it is assumed 
that species can migrate. But what 
chance does a protea have of dispers- 
ing across the populated coastal plain 
of South Africa's Cape Province, or a 
golden lion tamarin monkey of cross- 
ing the agricultural fields that have all 
but obliterated the Brazilian Atlantic 
rain forests? The answer is very little 
indeed, and for species that cannot 
disperse, the likelihood of extinction 
is roughly doubled. This means that at 
the high range of predicted tempera- 
ture changes, more than half (58 per- 
cent) of the 1,103 species examined are 
committed to extinction. 

Extrapolating from Thomas's data 
set, it appears that at least one out of 
every five living things on this planet is 
committed to extinction by the existing 
levels of greenhouse gases. The WWE, 
the Peter Scott Trust for Educational 
Research Into Conservation and the 
Nature Conservancy have worked for 
decades to save, in real terms, relatively 
few species. Now it seems countless 
thousands will be swept away by a ris- 
ing tide of climate change unless green- 
house gas emissions are reduced. 

We must remember, however, that if. 
we act nov, it lies within our power to 
save two species for every one that is cur- 
rently doomed. If we carry on with busi- 
ness as usual, in all likelihood three out 
of every five species will not be with us at 
the dawn of the next century. 


TURNING UP THE HEAT 


The most recent study of climate change, 
the largest ever undertaken, was pub- 
lished in early 2005 by a team led from 
Oxford University. Using the downtime 
on more than 90,000 personal com- 
puters, it focused on the temperature 
implications of doubling CO, in the 
atmosphere. The average result of the 
many runs made indicated that this 
would lead to a warming of 6" F. Overall, 
however, there was an astonishingly wide 
range of possibilities—from 3*F to 20°F 
of warming, the higher end of which had 
not been predicted earlier. 

As I read these results, an anomaly 
that had long niggled at me resurfaced. 
At the end of the last ice age, 20,000 to 
10,000 years ago, CO, levels increased 
by 100 parts per million, and the earth's 
average surface temperature rose by 9° F. 
It is the fastest rise in the earth's recent 
history and occurred at almost 2°F per 
1,000 years. Today we face a rate of 
change that is an astonishing 30 times 


faster. This suggests that CO, is a power- 
ful influence on global temperature. Yet 
in most computer analyses, an increase 
in CO, almost three times as large (dou- 
bling preindustrial levels) results in a 
predicted temperature rise of only 5°F. 

This anomaly has serious implica- 
tions for the survival of our civilization 
and countless species. Scientists now 
working on aerosols think they may 
have the answer. Direct measurement 
of evaporation rates, which are influ- 
enced primarily by sunlight, indicates 
that the amount of sunlight reaching 
the earth’s surface has declined sig- 
nificantly—up to 22 percent in some 
arcas—in the past three decades. It is as 
if we had been stopping up that small 
“window” in the atmosphere through 
which visible light passes. 

This phenomenon is called global 
dimming, and it operates in two ways: 
Aerosols such as soot increase the reflec- 
tivity of clouds, and the contrails left 
by jet aircraft create a persistent doud 
cover. Soot particles change the reflec- 
tive properties of clouds by fostering 
the formation of many tiny water drop- 
lets rather than fewer larger ones, and 
these tiny water droplets allow clouds 
to reflect far more sunlight back into 
space than do larger drops. The story 
with contrails is different. In the three 
days following September 11, 2001, 
the entire U.S. jet fleet was grounded, 
over which time climatologists noted 
an unprecedented increase in daytime 
temperatures relative to nighttime tem- 
peratures. This resulted, they presume, 
from the additional sunlight reaching 
the ground in the absence of contrails 

If 100 parts per million of CO, really 
can raise surface temperatures by 9°F, 
and if aerosols and contrails Һауе coun- 
terbalanced this so that we have experi- 
enced only 1”F of warming, then their 
influence on climate must be enormously 
powerful. It is as if two great forces, both 
unleashed from the world’s smokestacks, 
are tugging the climate in opposite direc- 
tions, but CO, is slightly more powerful. 

This leaves us with a grave problem. 
Particle pollution lasts only days or weeks, 
while CO, is difficult to clean up and lasts 
а century or more. Facing the prospect 
of a 4°F or a 9°F rise in temperature, we 
have only one option if our understanding 
of global dimming is correct. We must start 
extracting CO, from the atmosphere. 

When we consider the fate of the 
planet as a whole, we must be under no 
illusions as to what is at stake. Earth's 
average temperature is around 59°F, and 
whether we allow it to rise by two degrees 
or five will decide the fate of hundreds of 
thousands of species and most probably 
billions of people. Never in the history of 
humanity has there been a cost-benefit 
analysis that demands greater scrutiny. 
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(continued from page 114) 
alg 


PLAYBOY: What has been the best part 
of your success—expensive dining, 
fast cars, drugs, girls? 
NICK: We haven't had any time to treat 
ourselves to anything. But I did get 
an iPod the other day. 


017 
PLAYBOY. Some musicians aren't very 
happy about the iPod. 
Nick: I'm not quite sure. I think if you're 
in one place, it’s nice to have an actual 
album, 2 record sleeve, the lyrics. So 
there will always be that element of 
wanting to own something and not just 
have a song on а hard drive. But I know 
because I travel a lot—and I've always 
liked to travel light—I don't like to have 
a lot of possessions. What I do is buy a 
CD and stick it in and rip it. Then I can 
listen to it and have it with me even if I 
lose the CD or give it away. 
ALEx: I like the idea that, because of 
downloading, people are going to buy 
songs only if they are good. I think 
that’s a positive thing. It means lazy 


bands aren't going to get away with giv- 
ing you one hit single and an album 
full of filler. We like the idea that every 
song should stand up in its own right so 
you don’t have to listen to а song in the 
context of an album to understand it. I 
suppose that’s why I’m sympathetic to 
the download environment. 


als 

PLAYBOY: Rock-and-roll feuds are a staple 
of the business. Do you have thick skins? 
мх. I don't like slagging off other 
bands, and I don't like getting involved 
in tit-for-tat stuff. I'm being silly, because 
І enjoy reading that kind of gossip, but 
I don't want to get involved in it. I don't 
want to slag off people I've never met. I 
wouldn't want to run into someone after 
having bad-mouthed them in the press 
and find out they're a lovely person. 
You'd feel like a prat yourself then. 


ой 
PLAYBOY. What about the bands that have 
come up in your wake—the Futureheads, 
Bloc Party and Kaiser Chiefs? 
NICK: I'm getting bored of it, to be honest. 
A lot of people saw us as part of a post- 
punk revival thing or as a band that kicked 


offa lot of other things. But that was then. 
It's someone else playing the four-to- 
the-floor disco beat on the drums. 


ао 

PLAYBOY. Whose career would you want? 
NICK: I like it when a band progresses. 
The Beatles are the big one—they always 
reinvented themselves from one record to 
another. Talking Heads did that as well 
"The Who did it too. We played at a char- 
ity concert in London organized by Roger 
Daltrey. I was talking to the sound guy 
for the Who, and he said, “Why do bands 
want to do something special, something 
different? It has ruined so many bands.” І 
thought, Man, you idiot. I definitely don't 
want to keep doing the same thing. 

ALEX: We did our first touring with Inter- 
pol. Now, I know they haven't been going 
for years and years, but when we first went 
on tour with them they'd been touring for 
a year and a half, and they were famous 
in the U.K. The fact that they were so 
together, loving what they were doing, 
and that they were completely unegocen- 
tric, pleasant people to spend time with 
was quite inspirational. God, I thought, 
you can make it and not turn into a dick. 


Dirty 


Duck. 


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509005 Wife 

(continued from page 80) 
he watched me eat the plantain foutou and 
peanut sauce that he'd had his wife pre- 
pare to honor me. In the corner, his wife 
undid her top wrap in the lamplight, 
smoothed shea butter from a jar over her 
chest and breasts with her hands. 

“You won't get sick and die if you eat 
black men's food?" Sogbo said. “The white 
теп in Abidjan, they eat ‘falafel.’ They eat 
this thing, ‘cheeseburger.’ Don't you need 
to eat those things not to die?” 

“Two and a half years now,” I said, 
whisking a glob of that great treat 
through the peanut sauce, popping it in 
my mouth. “Still alive.” 

“And you sleep in a hut? On а mat?" 

"Sometimes I sleep in my fields. When 
Tm hunting agouti, 1 don't sleep at all.” 

“Hey!” he said, shaking his head. "You 
hunt the agouti?” 

His wife snorted from the corner. 
Though she was deep in the shadows, the 
lamplight shone on her moistened skin. 
She rubbed her arms with the butter, 
said, "Don't pester him with questions, 
Sogbo. It's you who are the stranger 
here. They call him Uao-fa because һе 
kills so many francolins. Don't ask him 
what he eats, where he sleeps. He plays 
in the forest with the witch doctor." She 
looked into my eyes in a hard way as 
she said this. Why had I never noticed 
her before? “Look at how he speaks our 
language. Look at how he eats our food. 
How can he be white? He takes off his 
skin and hangs it up at night. He's black 
underneath. He's a sorcerer." 

“Hey?” Sogbo said and seemed 
confused. 

I said, “Тһе zipper's on my back.” 

He looked at me a moment, then 
bounced his son on his knee, smiled. 
"You even joke like we do." 

Iate, sucked the thick sauce from my 
fingers as I did. I looked at the wife, and 
she at me. Her presence was all over me. 
Her skin was black and supple with the 
shea butter. Her breasts were pendulous 
with milk. We'd both worked hard in the 
fields that day and were tired in a way 
that her husband wasn't. 1 said to her, 
"Sogbo's wife, you've pounded the foutou 
as smooth as cream.” 

“I thank you, friend of my husband's. 
1 thought of you as I pounded it.” 

“The sauce is as rich as honey.” 

“It was with thoughts of you that I 
mixed it.” 

"Sogbo's wife, I have eaten it all.” 

“I will rise now and prepare more, 
friend of my husband's." 

“Tomorrow I will eat it, my friend's 
wife." 

“As you say, Adama white man. Tomor- 
row. "Tomorrow 1 shall think of you again." 

Sogbo looked at his wife, at me, like 
he was trying to decipher this exchange, 
which I was too. The wife looked down 
at her hands, rubbed the shea butter into 


her shins. Sogbo said to me, "You are sat- 
isfied, Adama?” 

“For now." 

“You are welcome,” he said and smiled. 


I spent the next days close to him because 
I wanted to be close to his wife. Just the 
bowed presence of her as she served us 
food brought the blood up under my 
skin. Sogbo had left the village years 
before, visited now only irregularly. I 
could see that the conditions depressed 
him, that the labor of the fields wasn’t 
something he wanted to do. But J hon- 
ored him with my presence and in that 
way helped make his short visit a pleas- 
ant one. The men who came from the 
city went into deep debt to return to the 
village, to distribute gift: it. The vil- 
lagers had no concept of the poverty of 
city life, so nothing brought back to them 
was ever enough. All they could see was 
Sogbo's Manchester United jersey, his 
knockoff Reeboks, fine modern things 
to them. I understood that these were 
probably the only clothes he owned. 

“Good-bye, my friend,” Sogbo said 
to me as I saw him off onto the logging 
truck that would carry him away. He had 
tears in his eyes. “We are great friends 
now, and when you come to the city, you 
will come to my home and allow me to 
honor you.” 

As the truck coughed to life and raised 
thick veils of dust behind it, 1 waved 
good-bye at it, understanding simply 
that I would never see Sogbo again. 


Time passed as it does in the village. In 
the evenings, after a long day setting up 
an AIDS lecture in a neighboring campe- 
ment or uprooting yams in the fields with 
the men of my age-group, I'd wash from 
a bucket behind my hut in the last light, 
pull on my boubous like a nightgown and 
walk to dinner at Mamadou's. 

Since Sogbo had left, I'd found myself 
taking a roundabout route. There on the 
east end of the village, I made a pretense 
of saluting the blacksmith, of asking after 
the well-being of his banished son. He'd 
recently repaired the lever of my shotgun 
for me, and as Га sit and smoke a cigarette 
with him under his mango tree, I'd look 
across his courtyard to the next: Sogbo's. 
There Mariam turned cassava foh in the 
pot with the long paddle while Sogbo's 
decrepit mother sat nearby on a mat, 
watching. Sogbo's mother was an ancient 
woman; she often sat with her head bowed 
and eyes closed as though in pain or asleep. 
1 understood then that Mariam took care 
of her and the son both. Mariam's arms 
were long and strong, the skin on them. 
without flaw. She never looked up. 

At dinner Mamadou would note the 
direction Га arrived from. “What's there, 
Adama, this new direction you've been 
arriving from?" he said to me one night 
as his mother set calabashes of toh and 


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144 


okra sauce on the ground between us 

“The blacksmith's," I said and washed 
my hands in the water bowl. 

“Even the constant dog is led away by 
a new scent." 

"What's that you say, Mamadou? I'm 
not in the mood for proverbs.” 

As he lowered his eyes to eat, he said, 
“Women don't really satisfy themselves 
with carrots, Adama." 

“I know that.” 

“And men don’t use empty calabashes. 
Nobody needs to visit the cross-eyed 
blacksmith more than once a month. You 
know your way around. I won't say any 
more. Many things have happened since 
you've come. Now we'll see what you've 
learned from them.” 


I put Mariam out of my mind. Except 
one night, overcome by the image of her 
smoothing shea butter into the skin of her 
chest by lamplight, I lifted the corner of 
my mat and scratched her name, Mariam 
Dosso, into the dirt of my floor. Then I 
took an ebony leaf from the bundle the 
witch doctor had long ago given me to 
protect my hut and laid it over the let- 
ters of her name. What good would it do? 
Could the ancestors read? Could she? 
The next evening, | shot two francolins 
in the rice of the chief s fields, tied them 
by their spurs to my belt. The nightjars 
were calling the coming of evening, and 


as a last thing, I hunted the swamp in the 
forest near the edge of the village. There 
was a large lizard that lived there. The 
people called it varan-o. I don't know the 
Western name. But it was like a small 
crocodile without teeth, and if you hap- 
pened upon it and startled it, it would 
whip your legs with its tail before diving 
under the water. 

Here now, I crouched in the rushes 
at the swamp's edge, breathed, let the 
scene come to me. The evening light 
between the trees was blue all over the 
black water. There were gray stumps 
in the water like broken concrete pil- 
ings, and on one, its eyes closed, lay the 
varan. I aimed, exhaled, watched the air 
sacs under the creature's throat fill and 
deflate as it breathed. The meat and skin 
were prized. If I brought it back to the 
аре, the children would holler and 
sing my hunting prowess to everyone. 

Perhaps І had been there too long. 
I looked at the sleeping animal a long 
time, wondered why in the world 1 
should want to kill it. 1 lowered my gun, 
simply looked at it. How did this great 
lizard and 1 come to share this world? 

Nearby someone was chopping wood 
L circled through the forest and crept іп 
close to the sound. I could stalk people 
even more easily than 1 could animals. It 
was a woman with a child tied to her back, 
collecting some last wood before returning 
to the village for the night. I crept closer 


“Now turn your head and tell me how long you've been 
seeing my wife.” 


and saw it was Mariam. She thwacked the 
long ax into a dried stump, worked the 
blade free again with her foot. Her son 
was asleep on her back, and each time she 
raised the ax high above her head and 
swung it down into the wood, she exhaled 
like coughing. She seemed as oblivious to 
everything as her sleeping son was. From 
behind the tree where I watched. she was 
Africa, struggling with her work beyond 
the eyes of the noisy world. 

I stepped into the clearing. Mariam 
turned and looked at me. 

“I felt you behind me, Adama. How 
long have you been watching?” 

“Why didn't you turn if you felt me 
there?” 

“Who turns and looks at danger?” 

“Am I a danger to you, Mariam?” 

She looked at me. She didn't seem 
frightened. She said, “I don't know what 
you are." 

"I've wanted to see you." 

"I've seen you, at the blacksmith's. 
Every night you come and look at me.” 

"Should I not?" 

She didn't say anything. I slung my 
gun over my shoulder. I went to herand 
touched her bare arms. She looked up 
at me. She said, "Not here, Adama. Not 
in the forest." 

"When I breathe, I think of you. When 
1 sleep, I think of you." 

"When the moon is new, come to me. 
The old woman sleeps early. It will be 
dark all over the village. Come to me 
then. Even after you go back to your 
people, I must stay here. When the moon 
is new, Adama. Then come." 

I pressed her arms with my rough 
hands, was surprised at how soft her 
skin really was. She gathered the shards 
she'd cut from the stump, arranged them 
into a neat stack on her head. She said, 
“I know that you are a man, Adama. I 
know that the skin you wear is your own. 
Every night I am glad to see you looking: 
at me. Every night Гуе wondered how 
we would meet.” She squeezed my hand, 
left on the trail to the village, and I lit 
a cigarette and waited in the swamp for 
the full cover of the falling darkness. 


Ina few more nights the moon was new, 
and after dinner I went to my hut, made 
all my typical signs of retiring—brushed 
my teeth and spit, pissed a last time in 
the grass—then closed the door and lay 
on my mat, waiting. I could hear the 
witch doctor’s sons laughing around 
their hearth fire. A long time went by 
as I willed everyone to go to bed, and 
finally there were last coughs, and then 
there was quiet. I went out through the 
dark village in my bare feet, the dust of 
the paths soft like powder between my 
toes. Some dogs barked at me, and I hur- 
ried on. Even the stars were covered by 
clouds. Under her mango tree I whis- 
pered, “Mariam, Mariam,” to the night. 
I heard someone trying to hide her 


footsteps. Then her hands were on my 
arms. “To your hut,” she whispered 
“The old woman is sleeping. 

Пей her by the hand through the dark. 
Inside I closed the door, lit my hurricane 
lamp. Mariam's son was asleep on her 
back, and she untied him now, spread the 
wrap on the floor, laid him on it. Then 
we stood and looked at cach other in the 
lamplight. I offered her my hands, and 
she took them, stepped close to my body. 
She unhitched her wraps, let them fall; 
the lamplight shone warmly all over her 
clean body. I pulled off my shirt, undid my 
belt and let my pants fall. I stepped out of 
them. I pulled down my shorts, stepped 
out of them, too. Her marriage beads 
were like pearls around her waist. Milk 
hung in drops on 
her nipples. What 
was there to say? We 
didn’t say anything. 
For the first time 
I held her to me, 
nothing between us 
but flesh. 

“Hurry, Adama. 
There isn't time.” 

She looked at 
me, put her fingers 
in the hair of my 
chest, touched my 
stomach, wrapped 
her hand around 
me. Everything was 
a marvel: my body, 
hers, the colors of 
our skin, our desire. 
She lay on my mat, 
and I lay on her. 
I kissed her, held 
her face, drank her 
milk. I had a con- 
dom, began to put 
it on. She took it off 
me with her hand. 

“You should be 
afraid of me, Mar- 
iam. I've been to 
the city.” 

“How can I fear? 
My husband lives 
there.” 

It didn't last long. 

In a few minutes, she dressed, tied her 
son on her back, and I led her to her hut. 


"Has Nothing to Hide 


We made love everywhere. It was diffi- 
cult, it was dangerous. But with my every 
breath, I thought now of Mariam 

I asked the witch doctor for the leaf 
wash that would make me invisible to 
genies in the forest, shared the leaves 
with Mariam, and we made love in the 
rushes of the swamp, in the forest's dark 
glades, her son asleep on a bolt of cloth 
beside us. We contrived stories to travel 
into Séguéla: she to sell onions from 
her garden, me to mail letters home, 
and when her onions were sold, she'd 
come to the small housc I shared with 


Flot & 
Naked 8 


the aid workers ofthe region. Melissa or 
Shanna would entertain the boy in the 
front room while Mariam and I made 
love on а real bed for a change, show- 
егей together afterward. The girls had 
their own affairs. They were happy to 
help me in mine. 

After a few months of this, Mariam 
received word that her mother had bro- 
ken her leg back in their home village, 
Djamina. She told me as I passed by her 
hut, “Meet me tomorrow in Gbena.” 
Gbena was the village where the bone- 
setter lived. I told Mamadou I'd be 
hunting gazelles in the forest beyond 
Soba-Banadjé, and he took it at that. I 
wound my way to it through the for- 
est, found Mariam in Gbena with her 


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Even the first sound of the women's pestles 
pounding rice in the morning found Mari- 
ars body entwined with mine. 


When I returned from Gbena, I ate dinner 
with Mamadou. “No gazelles?" he asked. 

“No luck,” I said and brushed off my 
pants 

He wouldn't look at me. I washed my 
fingers in the water bowl, and we ate his 
mother's toh. 1 pretended for a while 
that his silence didn't bother me. Finally 
I said, "What is 
"Don't you know what it is?" 

has why I'm asking." 
"Sogbo's my kinsman. We were cir- 
cumcised together. 


“What if I say I 
don't know what 
you're talking 
about 

“Adama, you are 
my brother. You were 
like an infant when 
you came, and you 
have grown before 
me until you have 
become more impor- 
tant to me than my 
children. Don't you 
respect my name? 
Our ways? Her 
mother-in-law has 
made accusations to 


15%. ("HY assesses sales tax on 


the chief. Don't you 
know that old people 
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to the ancestors, are 
almost ancestors 
themselves. She says 
they've been speak- 
ing to her in her 
drcams. She's made 


E daims against you.” 
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mother. The mother's shin was swollen 
with the break, and she had to stay at 
the bonesetter's for a week. Villages kept 
secrets like this from each other, and 
after presenting the chief of Gbena with 
a bundle of kola nuts and a pair of fran- 
colins Га shot on the way, Mariam and I 
were able to live there a week, discreetly, 
as man and wife. 

Her mother was kind to me, and this was 
the finest week of my life in Africa. Га hunt 
francolins in the Gbena chief s rice fields 
during the day and in the evening return 
to the hut he'd given us and a meal of toh 
that Mariam had prepared. Then we'd 
watch the evening settle down on the land 
from our stools until all of the land was 
dark, and we'd retire to our night together. 


"He sent her away. 
If it was anyone else, 
Adama,” he said 
and shook his head. 
“But it is you. Our 
white man. The old 
woman's gone to Wye. The only reason 
anyone goes to Wye is to see the witch 
doctor there. He is blind and has a white 
beard. Everyone fears his magic. You 
should be careful now. If shame comes 
upon me because of you, I don't care. But 
the old are old because they have learned 
to protect their lives. She needs Mariam 
to care for her. Be careful, Adama. You 
think you know a lot here, but you don't. 
Get medicine from Chauffeur. Do what- 
ever he sa’ he’s set genies on you. 
Everyone is expecting you to die.” 


1 met Mariam in the hut of my old fields. 
The work had been too difficult alone, 


and after the first year, I'd let mine fall 145 


PLAYBOY 


fallow to help Mamadou enlarge his 
instead. All around us my old farm was a 
tangle of weeds and short trees. Even the 
old paths through it were lost in the surg- 
ing reclamation of the forest. Mariam set 
her son down on the cloth to sleep. She 
lay beside me. She wasn't well. 

"What's the matter, Mariam?" 

“I haven't eaten in three days. I'm 
afraid of the old woman. I think she's 
going to try to poison me." 

"She's an old witch." 

"She's not a witch, Adama. She's Sog- 
bo's mother. If I were in her place, I 
don't know if I would do any differently. 
Adama, I have to leave the village. If I go 
to my mother's, they will find me. I have 
to go to Abidjan. I've wanted to anyway. 
I learned how to weave as a child. I can 
go to Abidjan and weave market baskets. 
Everyone will buy them. All women need 
a basket to go to market with." 

"And ГИ be alone here?" 

She petted my face. She said, “You will 
go back to your people. Give me money, 
Adama. Let me run away. I will write 
you, and then you can join me. I'll find a 
house in Abidjan, and when you come to 
me, it will be like when you came to me 
the first time, when the moon was new." 

For a few days we kept a low profile. I 
went into Séguéla and withdrew 150,000 


в 


CFA francs from the bank. People in Abi- 
djan were lucky to make 15,000 CFA a 
month; people in the village, 15,000 the 
whole year. It was nearly all the money I 
had. I gave the bundle of money to Mar- 
iam in my field hut, and she tied it into 
her wrap. We made love a last time. 

In the morning Mariam was gone. On 
discovering this, the old woman let up a 
lament that brought even the old chief 
to her hut. No one, not even Mamadou, 
spoke to me for days. 


For many weeks the old woman and I 
batted with magic. I was constantly sick 
with malaria and killed first one cobra, 
and then another, that had somehow got- 
ten into my hut. After that I visited the 
one-eyed witch doctor of Kavena, because 
1 knew Chauffeur wouldn't help me with 
what I wanted to do, and was told to sac- 
rifice a black-and-white-speckled chicken 
at the black granite boulder outside that 
village to cleanse myself. 

“It needs to be strong magic,” I told 
him when I came back from the sacrifice. 


what you feel in 
your heart, white man,” the old man said. 
He tossed bones, antelope joints, on his 


mat, read them, then assembled a packet 
of herbs and fur drawn from the many 
bundles of them he had tied in the rafters 
of his hut, which looked like an alchemist's 
workshop. He wanted 5,000 CFA and six 
eggs to get the old woman's genies off my 
back and gave me the concoction in bur- 
lap to bury behind my hut. 

For some days the old woman and I 
exchanged hard stares when we'd pass 
each other in the village, as hard as what 
we felt against each other. The whole vil- 
lage seemed to await the outcome of this 
battle, and everyone, even Mamadou, 
kept their distance from us lest the genies 
circling about our huts think they were 
caught up in it too. Soon enough, the 
old woman cut her foot while chopping 
wood for her hearth fire. She was carried 
to her home village, Kenegbé, on the back 
ofa young nephew, and there, despite the 
Kenegbe healer's best efforts, the wound 
grew gangrenous and she died. 

After he returned from her funeral, 
Mamadou said to me, “So it’s over, 
Adama. Good. But know that the bush 
pig who uproots a baobab tree cats well 
for one day. After that, he starves.” 


I'd be leaving soon because of war, 
though I didn't know that yet. In many 
respects, the death of the old woman 
was my end in Tégéso anyway. It wasn't 
about the way people treated me. It was 
how I felt about myself. 

Nothing I'd done there was what I had 
been sent there to do. Now I'd killed an 
old woman. 


A letter came on a logging truck 
addressed to me: Diomandé Adama, 
Whiteman, Tégéso village. On the seal, 
it read, Devine. Guess. 

Inside there was an address in Abidjan, 
The words оп the paper said simply, “I 
wait for you as on the new moon.” 

I took a transport to Séguéla the next 
day, was in Abidjan within three. The 
address was in a squalid and dangerous 
neighborhood of Adjamé, and as I made 
my way through the fetid alleyways of 
tin-roofed shacks іп the darkening eve- 
ning, youths and menacing toughs fol- 
lowed in my wake. At her shack I rapped 
on the door. Sogbo opened it. His smile 
was broad and open under his thin mus- 
tache. He said, “Adama! I told you that 
you would visit my house. Come in. Mar- 
iam will prepare a special meal, a feast! I 
hear my mother has died. I'm very sorry 
for that. But first I thank you for the 
help you gave Mariam so that she and 
my son could join me here." 

In the corner, in the lamplight, she 
was spreading shea butter on her chest — 
unconquerable, unknowable, as beautiful 
and resolute as always. She did not look 


up at me. 


Miss 
November 
1980 
Jeana 
Keough 
(center) 


anchors 
the new 
Bravo. 
realy 


JEANA KEOUGH KEEPS IT REAL 3 


“Over the years my friends have made com- 
ments that we should have our own TV 


show. They say I'm like the charac- 
ter Karen from Will & Graceand f 
my housekeeper is like Rosa- 
rio," Miss November 1980 Jeana 
Keough, formerly Tomasino, says. 
She finally gets a spot on the tube 
this month with the new Bravo 
reality series The Real Housewives, a 
decadent blend of Desperate House- 
wives and The O.C. that follows the 
lives of five women in the competi- 
tively affluent Coto de Caza gated 
community in southern California 
Her Playmate status has worn an 
interesting wrinkle into the conser- 


vative neighborhood. “There were children 
who were not allowed to play at my house 


when the kids were little because I was а 
Playmate,” she says. "Now that we're older 
= 2- weal laugh hysterically about it." 
Though she’s now a successful 
real estate agent, the entertain- 
ment business is nothing new 
| for the media-savvy Playmate. 
As readers may remember, 
ж 7 Jeana worked in movies and 
D 


was one of the original video 
7 vixens, appearing in the iconic 
| = 4 ZZ Тор videos for “Gimme 
і All Your Lovin’” and “Legs. 
“Unfortunately, with reality 
TV you're not allowed to see 
the shows until they come 
out,” she says. “I think 1 will be 
the scandal-free one. Hopefully. If not, I can 
always blame it on the editing.” 


RED CARPET RAIDERS 


The plush red pile 
unfurls for everyone's 
favorite Centerfolds. 
From for left: Victoria 
Silvstedt at the World 
Music Awards, held 
in Hollywood's Kodak 
Theotre; Anno Nicole 
Smith ot Pom Ander- 
son's Comedy Central 
roast ot Sony Studios; 
Heother Kozar ot 
the Mansion; Jenny 
McCarthy ot the IV 
Guide ond Inside TV 
Emmy Awards ofter- 
party at the Roosevelt 
Hotel in Hollywood; 
Pam Anderson ot the 
World Music Awords. 


PLAYMATE ¿ NEWS 


Readers may recall Miss 
March 1976 Ann Penning- 
ton following in the foor- 
steps ot her stster Janice—a 
Price Is Right 
modcl, as 

well as Miss 

May 1971— 

right onto A 
the pages of А 
PLAYBOY and >A 
onto the set 1 
ofthe game Wif J^ 

show. Ar the As 

time, Ann ж 4 y 
had just di- We 
vorced and 
considered % 
herself to 
be “unin- 
hibited and 
very open." She dedared, 
“It's great to experiment. 
There isn't anything I won't 
try"—no doubt fueling our 
readers' fantasies. 


“My dog has a little PLAYBOY 
collar. When peo- 

ple ask why he 

has it, 1 say, ‘He 

gets around 

a lot?" 

Collen Marie 


ПЕ FAVORITE PLAYMATE 


By James McDaniel 


My favorite Playmate is 
Miss June 1975 Azizi 
Johari. Hove yau seen 
her? She loaks like the 
prototype for those vel- 
vet paintings of a black 


woman 
one diff, | 
holding o 
cheetah on a leash. 
The first fime 
1 saw her 
it was 
“Wow!” 
| wonder 
what 


she’s up 
to naw. 


QUESTIONS: AMBER С 


©: Are you still working at the restau- 
rant, or does being a Playmate take 
up all your time? 

i: When I'm not modeling I'm 
still doing the same stuff I did 
before. It's nice to come back 
and catch everyone up on my 
life. They're always asking me, 
“Where have you been?” 

@: Do readers come to the 
restaurant just to see you? 

A: I have lots of customers 
who come in and want stuff 
signed or want to have a 
picture taken with me, so I 
definitely can't run in wear- 
ing sweatpants and with my 
hair in a ponytail anymore. 


: What do your parents think of your 
newfound notoriety? 
А: My dad loves it. He's totally sup- 
portive. He framed my issue. We're 
working on a little area of the 

restaurant where we'll hang a 
bunch of my memorabilia. We 
have all these photos of celebri- 
ties and sports stars, and 
now I'm going to have my 
own little wall. 
Q: What's your favorite 
lish at the restaurant? 
A: I just love the pizza. 
Hef loves it too. He or- 
ders it on a regular basis, 
and we FedEx it out to 
the Mansion. 


Even Tommy Lee described Pam Anderson's Com- 
еду Centrel roast as “unbelievably hard-care” 
after she took some solid shats from Jimmy Kim- 
mel, David Spade, Sarah Silverman and other 
noted potty mouths. So with Pam's blessing the 
cable network cobbled tagether an uncensared 
DVD riddled with raucous, raunchy yuks. The real 
showstopper, thaugh, may be Courtney “Saber for 
а Year" Lave's attempt to stay upright. 


Miss March 2005 Jillian Grace 
and PMOY 2005 Tiffany Fallon 
teamed for a sexy spread in Guitar 
World's Guitar Review Guide... | 
Miss December 1997 Karen £) 
McDougal had a 10-page (е. 
"Hardbody" pictorial in. 

Tron Man magazine... Miss W, 
June 1963 Connie Mason ^ 
appeared at the Chiller ^^ 
Theatre convention, where she 
received a commemorative plaque 
for the 40th anniversary of her cult 
film Tivo Thousand Maniacs!... Miss 
March 1996 Priscilla Lee Tay- 


AMPLIFIERS 


| Tiffany ond Jillian ore 
dangerously electric 
neor the high-end equipment in 
Guitar World’s Guitar Review Guide. 


lor had a guest shot on the CBS 
series Out of Practice... Miss Feb- 
Tuary 1999 Stacy Fuson and Miss 
August 2001 Jennifer Walcott can 
be scen playing mock newswomen 
on FoxxyNews.com, a parody of 
the Fox News Channel... On Feb- 
ruary 28 Anna Nicole Smith made 
an appearance 

at the Supreme 

Court to claim 

an $88.6 mil- 

lion inheri- 

tance from 

her late hus- 

band.... Con- 

gratulations to 

Miss December 

2001 Shanna 

Moakler, whois 

а new mom; to 

Miss July 1998 

Lisa Dergan, Workouts are за 

who wed White much more in. 

Sox base stealer ;oied with Koren. 

Scott Podsednik; 

and to Miss May 1998 Deanna 
Brooks, who celebrated her 10th 
wedding anniversary... We extend 
our condolences to the family of 
Miss October 1961 Jean Cannon, 
who passed away in November. 


cubergclub 


See your favorite Playmate's 
pictorial in the Cyber Club 
at cyber.playboy.com. 


PLAYBOY TV. 


Playboy TV. Tune in. 


Not getting it? Contact your local satellite or cable provider to get Playboy TV or log on to ЫЕ сот. 


FW 


"P. 


Get a little 
something-something. 
go to playboy.com/notshy 


Mayboy On The Scen 


WHAT'S HAPPENING, WHERE 


IT'S HAPPENING AND WHO'S MAKING 


IT HAPPEN 


Customs Official 


Young, hip and prolific, Roland Sands is fueling the next generation of custom motorcycles 


hen Roland Sands says he was born into motorcy- 

cles, he means it literally. “My dad brought me 

home from the hospital on a Harley,” he says. But 
motorcycles were more than just transportation in the Sands 
family. His father, Perry, helped pioneer the aftermarket 
motorcycle-parts industry with his company, Performance 
Machine; when Roland dropped out of college, he went to 
work for Perry and started racing bikes. In short order he 
won 10 American Motorcyclist Association nationals, but by 
2002 a bruised lung, a lacerated liver and 32 broken bones 


had convinced him he wasn't having fun anymore. He be- 
gan designing concept bikes, creating a startlingly unique 
series of choppers that have won top design awards (see 
the bikes at rolandsands.com). Handcrafted one-offs as 
they are, Sands's creations are not for sale. Neither are they 
museum pieces. "I thrash "ет till they fall apart," he says. “І 
need to be sure that whatever I build is going to last." What's 
next? “I love Frank Lloyd Wright. I want to apply the phi- 
losophy of custom bike building—tune and flow, form and 
function—to a building. You could make it absolutely sick." 


E Mind Bender 


| A sculpture in the lobby of Penn State's 
McAllister building will break your brain 


т. n one level this tangle of stainless steel called 
Octacube is a work of art. On another it's а 
w^ feat of mathematical derring-do. On still a 
third, it's a window into the fourth dimension. Con- 
fused yet? Its designer, Adrian Ocneanu, explains: An 
octacube is a four-dimensional regular solid with 96 
Sides. Just as your shadow is a two-dimensional out- 
line of your three-dimensional form, this sculpture 
is a three-dimensional outline of a theoretical four- 
dimensional form. Four-dimensional objects are hard 
to visualize, but thanks to a process called radial 
stereographic projection we сап see what their three- 
dimensional outlines would look like. Ocneanu has 
spent 20 years researching the mathematics of sym- 
metry, which is related to quantum field theory. Octa- 
cube lets him show people a little bit of whathe thinks 
about at work. Note, however, that the piece is not 
actual size. "The legs are cut of{ halfway toward infin- 
ity,” he says. "We had only a finite amount of metal.” 151 


Dirty Linens 
It’s a myth that Orthodox 
Jews have sex through 

a hole in a sheet, but that 
didn't stop cutup SARAH 
SILVERMAN from shredding 
the bedding to show some 
kosher cleavage. Mazel tov! 


girls with big 
stones. The 
risqué athletes 
of Torino 2006 
аге female curl 
ers; seen here is 
sh ice queen 
KASIA. Copies 
of their calendar 
are available 
at thecurling. 
news.com. 


Watts Goin' On 
She's the Aussie who had us at hello, if by “hello” you mean “lengthy lesbian 
sex scenes with Laura Elena Harring in Mulholland Drive.” Hel-lo! You loved 
NAOMI WATTS in King Kong; for а full Naomi overdose, rent the little-seen 

152 Ellie Parker, a throwaway mockumentary salvaged by luminous Wattage. 


Casting Call 


You're never too old for 
а schoolboy crush. Our 
latest is on Page 3 girl 
KEELEY HAZELL, a natural 
to head up the U.K.'s 
Ministry of Sculpture. 


Keira Knippley 
She froze, confused. KEIRA KNIGHTLEY hadn't expected 


dancing polar bears in tuxedos and bowler hats. “Aha!” 
said her left nipple. “Now’s my chance to slip out.” 


Gluteus 
Magnificus 
"And on 

the pedestal, 
these words 
appear: 

“Му name is 
KAROLINA 
KURKOVA, 
superest of 
supermodels: 
Look on my 
ass, ye mighty, 
and despair!'^ 
—rency BISSHE SHELLEY 


Welcome 
Back, Hotter 
Once upona time, 
(CHARLIZE THERON 
was hot. Then she 
puffed up for Monster, 
and she was really 

not Good news, fellas: 
She's hot again. 


Motpourri 


THE SOLE OF A MAN 


Mario Moretti Polegato was walking down the 
street one day when—eureka!—he had an idea: 
shoes that expel sweat and keep your feet dry. 
He figured out the technology, and 11 years 
Jater his company, Geox, is growing faster than 
any other in Italy. With a new flagship store on 
Madison Avenue, he’s ready to take on Amer- 
ica. Pictured from left: the canvas-and-suede 
Gade walking shoe ($110), the calf-leather Sea 
thong ($93) and the suede-and-mesh Legend 
sneaker ($95). Available at geox.com. 


SHOWER OF 
POWER 


There's a problem іп 
bathrooms across 
America. A problem 
that, unchecked, 
could become а 
national tragedy. 
We're talking about 
shower curtains that 
are not punk. Lucki- 
ly there’s a solution: 
CBGB's shower сш- 
tain ($18, cbgb.com), 
printed with fliers 
from the legendary 
New York City club 
from its beginnings, 
in December 1973, 
through 2001. 
Everyone from 
Richard Hell to the 
Knack is on the bill, 
so string it up, turn 
| on the water and 
start your own two- 
person mosh pit. 


CHEW ON THIS 


Between the barking and the scratching and the 
whining to get out, your dog makes enough noise 
without a $@%# squeak toy. But Snuffles loves his 
squeak toy, doesn't he? Yes, he does! Yes, he does, 
his widdle shnuflly snuffums! Sorry. Now your 
peace and Snuflles's play don't have to be mutually 
exclusive. In a stroke of genius, Happy Dog Toys 
has fitted its line of Soniks silent squeak toys with 
an ultrasonic squeaker he can hear but you can't. 
(pictured: Tweeter, $5, sitstay.com). It's like a dog 
whistle, minus the eHort. And the going outside. 


THE REAL MCFOOD 


The Irish are known for a lot of things: stout, 
whiskey, James Joyce, U2, stout, whiskey. But 

food? Aha! The fact is, nothing beats Irish 

cuisine when the occasion calls for it (say, when 

you're drinking stout or whiskey). Margaret M. 

Johnson's new Irish Pub Cookbook ($25, available in Eu 
is thick with great simple recipes for the Emerald Isle's com- 
fort food, such as beef-and-Guinness pie, prawns and bacon 
with mustard sauce, and cider-braised chicken and cabbage. 
Pictured: caramelized duck breast with pineapple chutney. 
If you're a fan of that other holy trinity—bacon, butter and 
beer—consider this book holy scripture. 


154 


МО STRINGS ATTACHED 


Bebe Buell and Steven ‘Tyler. Pam Ander- 
son and Tommy Lec. Shanna Moakler 
and Travis Barker. Playboy and rock share 
an intimate history. With a set of logo 
($6) and a Swarovski erystal- 
ed Rabbit Head strap ($40 to $70, 
musiciansfriend.com), you won't even need 
to learn how to play to be a rock god. 


HUM ALONG 


If you travel with a laptop, chances are 
you've dropped it a few times. Whoops. 
Itronix, the company that makes com- 
puters for the military, partnered with 
GM to create this tough-as-nails Hum- 
mer laptop ($3,000, hummerstuff. com) 

It shrugs off bumps and features built-in 
GPS, as well as swappable cell receivers for 


wireless Internet access. Finally, a Hum- 
mer you have a legitimate reason to own. 


RACK ‘EM UP 


In case you haven't heard, 
women love a well-designed 
accoutrement. Especially when 
175 Danish, mounted on your 
wall and stuffed full of vintage 
Barolos and Médocs. Part of 
Rosendahl's Black Label collec- 
tion, the Winetube wine rack 
(8100, unicahome.com) is a min- 
imalist masterpiece of anodized 
aluminum that displays up to 12 
bottles. With each vintage sus- 
pended by the neck, the Wine- 
tube creates a floating effect. And 
who doesn't like a little floating 
effect? Isn't that why you uncork 
those bottles in the first place? 


A FRIEND INDEED 


Imagine a flashlight that points itself. No more holding it between 
your teeth, sucking on the hard metal. No more arguing with 
your girlfriend, who's so bored standing there that she forgets your 
name. Now you're free to peer into that black hole behind your ste- 
reo cabinet and get to work. Flashlite Friends ($20, thinkgeek.com) 
come in black or silver, with legs that twist 360 degrees and lock 
in 10 positions. Sometimes it’s the simplest things in life... 


QUIET, PLEASE 


There are things you cancel and 
things you don't. Things you 
don't cancel: season tickets to the 
Lakers, Р.лувоу subscriptions. 
Things you do cancel: equivalents 
оп both sides of a mathematical 
equation, airplane noise. These 
Solitude noise-canceling head- 
phones ($200, protravelgear.com) 
were developed by a pilot ac- 
quainted with the edginess that 
comes from a six-hour flight's 
constant drone. Though not as 
heavy-duty as the headphones 
real pilots use, they can negate a 
full 18 decibels of noise, removing 
the hum while keeping what you 
want to hear—whether that's 
music, video-game sound effects 
or our favorite, absolute silence. 


WHERE AND HOW TO BUY ON PAGE 131 


COMIC GENIUS 


TAKE A TUMBLE ON THE MAT WITH CANDICE MICHELLE. 


SCIENCE VS. RELIGION—FROM SCHOOL BOARDS TO CON- 
GRESS, THE BATTLE OF OUR LIFETIME IS BEING WAGED 
BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON. A SYMPOSIUM OF MODERN 
HUMANISTS, KURT VONNEGUT AND LEWIS BLACK AMONG 
THEM, PONDERS THE DANGER OF REACTIONARY THOUGHT. 


CANDICE MICHELLE—MEET ANOTHER WWE DIVA WHO 
COULD PIN YOU (AS IF THAT'S A BAD THING). DON'T LIKE WEAR- 
ING SPANDEX SHORTS? PIN HER PICTORIAL UP INSTEAD. 


KEANU REEVES—IN HIS ROLES, REEVES HAS RANGED FAR 
AND WIDE, FROM THE ABSURDITY OF TED IN BILL 8 TED'S 
EXCELLENT ADVENTURE TO THE COMPLEXITY OF NEO IN THE 
MATRIX SERIES. NOW HEAR HIM SPEAK FOR HIMSELF IN A 
MUST-READ PLAYBOY INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL FLEMING. 


THE BEST MEALS I EVER ATE -ANDY MURRAY IS A CHEF 
AND A SIBLING OF A SUPERB COMIC ACTOR, BUT HE IS 
FOREMOST A TRENCHERMAN. A FABULOUSLY FINICKY EATER 
RELIVES HIS FAVORITE RESTAURANT EXPERIENCES. 


GRAPHIC CONTENT—ART AND LITERATURE COALESCE IN A 
UNIQUELY AMERICAN FORM, THE COMIC BOOK. IN THE PAST 
25 YEARS, COMICS HAVE EXTENDED THEIR POP INFLUENCE 
INTO FILM, TV, BOOKS, VIDEO GAMES. DESIGN, ADVER- 


‘PLAYBOY INTERVIEW: RED PILL OR BLUE PILL? 


CYBERSEXY. 


TISING—BASICALLY EVERYTHING. HERE'S THE ESSENTIAL 
PRIMER ON THE KEY ARTISTS, AUTHORS AND TITLES. 


SEX WITH ESTHER—A MIDDLE-AGED FILMMAKER FALLS FOR 
A YOUNG STARLET. SHE GIVES HIM HER BODY, BUT LOVE IS 
NOT IN THE SCRIPT. FICTION BY MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ 


CRASHING AUGUSTA—THE MASTERS TOURNAMENT, HOME 
TO SLICK GREENS AND MUCH-WORSHIPPED GREEN JACK- 
ETS, IS THE HIGH HOLIDAY FOR AMERICAN GOLF FANS, BUT 
AVERAGE JOES ARE USUALLY SHUT OUT. OUR ENTERPRISING 
JONATHAN LITTMAN, HOWEVER, MANAGES TO MAKE HIS 
WAY INTO 18-HOLE HEAVEN. 


SPRING AND SUMMER FASHION FORECAST STYLE 
PSYCHIC JOSEPH DE ACETIS SEES А DELUGE OF SHORT 
JACKETS AND A LINE OF THIN TIES ON THE HORIZON. 


CRAIG FERGUSON—THE SERIOCOMIC SCOT WHO WORKS THE 
LATE LATE SHIFT ANSWERS A JOCULAR 200 FROM DAVID RENSIN. 


PLUS: PLAYMATE LISA DERGAN RECOUNTS HER HUSBAND 
SCOTT PODSEDNIK'S WORLD SERIES HEROICS, COMPUTER- 
SCREEN SIRENS SIZZLE IN OUR CYBER GIRLS PICTORIAL, AND 
APRIL SHOWERS FIND OURMISS APRIL HOLLEY ANN DORROUGH 
IN NOTHING EUT RAIN BOOTS. 


Playboy (ISSN 0032-1478), March 2006, volume 53, number 3. Published monthly by Playboy in national and regional editions, Playboy, 680 
North Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60611. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, Illinois and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Cana- 
dian Publications Mail Sales Product Agreement No. 40035534. Subscriptions: in the U.S., $29.97 for 12 issues. Postmaster: Send address change to 

156 Playboy, РО. Box 2007, Harlan, Iowa 51537-4007. For subscription-related questions, call 800-999-4438, or e-mail circOny.playboy.com. 


SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking 
By Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal 
Injury, Premature Birth, And Low Birth Weight. 


GINNIFER BRUCE HARRY DEAN 
PAXTON TRIPPLEHORN SEVIGNY GOODWIN DERN STANTON 


BIGLO 


SERIES PREMIERE MARCH 12, >, 10РМ/9С| leo 
FOLLOWING THE SOPRANOS MIES 


POLYGAMY LOVES COMPANY. 


«особе Hama Bas On. me. по nanaq. HBOS, Sra ana Lo a eyes muda me Box OTe, ire