Matt Weinstock, Dec. 2, 1960

Dec. 2, 1960: For a second time, Matt Weinstock debunks the notion that the tear-off strips on cellophane cigarette packs should be saved as a way to raise money.  Urban myths are hard to kill, he discovers. Also on the jump, Marilyn Monroe is continually late, Maurice Zolotow writes in the latest chapter of “The Real Marilyn Monroe.”  DEAR ABBY: Please do a humane service and put something in your column about these inconsiderate women who perfume themselves so heavily that everyone in the office practically chokes when they come in. I want to cut it out and post it on the bulletin board.

Comments

[Native Angeleno]

I never particularly like Monroe's sexyness, it seemed exaggerated, unreal, like the tailfin-torpedo bras of her day, grotesque, like much of the '50s. Too much is too much. Sexy is much more subtle than out there. For me.

But reading and remembering the puritanical death around her she tried to liberate by example, i see her more clearly now. She was an avatar of the sexual freedom of the '60s, one of its teachers, the decade she never really saw, having died early on in it, like one of her final lovers, JFK, who also could not keep it in his pants.

These prototypes were celebrating freedom. And after they were gone, the dam broke, and people began to live their freedoms, to make up for their cold absence.

Gaia, do we need their like now. Many of the freedoms they unleashed have been institutionalized, but these times are but a security straitjacket corseting the fat we have allowed ourselves unlovingly, lazily, to become. Where is the joy in the expression of the beauty of the self? We're as drab as the '50s Marilyn rebelled against. That's not freedom. It's fat.

Ken Russell's "Tommy" nailed Marilyn and her church, her throngs still throbbing strongly, but as the Christ she had become by then, beloved but plastic, the reality of the yielding soft forgotten. Time for a love messiah who is not a conscious caricature of one. Followed by a new societal rebellion against the suffocating kultur of the self-police state.