BONUS NUMBER 186: SURGE

(Did You Sleep With the Models?)

Last week, in Bonus Number 185, I featured a four-page layout from Surge Studio as one of the “Shorts,” meaning pint-size features from the magazines as opposed to the usual layout length of seven or eight pages, often more. This week’s feature is a fifteen-page overload from Surge, which you’ll recall was the studio owned by Al Parker and his partner. It’s probably the longest layout we ever ran in any one of the Modernismo Publications magazines — Mandate, Honcho, Playguy.

I wish I could call it one of the best, but it’s far from that. I reiterate what I said last week, that Surge never became a top notch studio, the reasons being lack of staff, lack of expertise, equipment, and imagination, and overwork. Al Parker’s career was a full-time job. It was a bad decision on his part to expand into photography and films. No doubt he and his partner imagined they could compete with the major West Coast studios — Colt, Falcon, Zeus, and with such independent photographers as Kristen Bjorn and Len Tavares, the latter a New Yorker whose work you’ve often seen in DYSWTM? under his own name and under his pseudonym, Usher.

Today’s layout is a mixed bag with not much to recommend it. There’s a definite feel of leftovers, as though someone said, “Let’s round up everything we don’t know what to do with and send it to Honcho.” Of course there is often a turn-on element in mediocrity, and some will find arousal in each one of these Surge images. I believe, however, that most readers of our magazines, as well as present-day online viewers of this Substack and others, prefer a certain aesthetic quality in erotic photography, whether or not they ever say or even think the word “aesthetic.” Words of four letters are sure to drown it out.

The Honcho cover model on this October 1983 issue promises more than the fifteen inside pages deliver. The first model, from page 35 of the magazine, looks uncomfortable. It’s obvious what he’s waiting for, but there’s a “Hurry up and get it over with” quality in his pose and in his facial expression.

The next man, in dark glasses and leather, is more poised and seems unaware of the camera, which is as it should be with models and with actors in film and on television.

The dick shots in a photo layout are the equivalent of the money shot in porn films. Nothing to criticize there. But the four final centerfolds strike me as awkward and predictable, awash in jarring colors.

Then why, you may ask, did I approove the layout? Like every magazine editor, I had pages to fill. Then, too, there was an element of nepotism on the part of the art directors, who adored Al Parker and would gush over any pictures he submitted. When he came to New York, they took him to the Saint, their favorite disco, where the crowd fawned over them, or so they thought, as much as over Al Parker himself. The art directors also imagined that by calling him “Drew” (his real name was Drew Okun) they were his closest buddies. Perhaps they were; but Drew was well aware of the value of good media relations.

I had nothing against Al Parker, but he was never more than a professional acquaintance. I’m sorry to say that the work of Surge Studio has not aged well.

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