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Since you got this far, how about one more chance to subscribe?

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And if you like designs, here’s a great place to look and see more designs.

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Year ago when I was living in East Texas, I once got away for a couple of weeks and managed to spend some time at the wonderful Valley View Hot Springs at the Orient Land Trust, high up in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I’d been there a day when I noticed that something seemed a little off about my towel - the texture was different than it normally was, and they felt just a little bit lighter. It took me a minute before I realized what was happening - my towel was dry. After years of living in that gulf humidity, I’d just grown accustomed to a towel being a thing that was always slightly damp. Funny how changes in the atmosphere can affect things like that. At least I hope it is, otherwise I’ve completely failed here.

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A couple or pieces of news this week, folks.

First, I was saddened to learn that Nicole Hollander passed away late in April. She was one of the most distinctive voices in comic strips and paved the way for so much that came later. If you’re not familiar with Sylvia, do yourself a favor and hunt down one of the printed collections. And I do strongly recommend actually getting her in print, the brilliance of her line work just doesn’t translate properly to being seen online. She will be missed.

Second, I hate to do this but I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappear for a week. I’ve got a fairly major home repair project that I have to tackle this week if I want my home to continue to be habitable. Please accept my apologies, normal schedule will resume on May 14th.

And since I mentioned major home repairs, I should also say that now would be a great time for you to buy some stuff. And hey, there’s that button again.

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I happened to be going through some nudist guidebooks from the early 1980s this week, and looking at some of the pictures it struck me that nudity is only one of the things that has become legally more encroached upon in the past half century. So many things in those photographs, the playgrounds, the old hayrides, the random ropes swinging above the water, have been lost under the sway of increasing regulation and ballooning and burdensome insurance costs. The nudist youth of tomorrow may never know the pleasure of climbing around naked on a pile of truck tires, or getting thrown off a cliff into freezing cold water thirty feet below. We’ve put a lot of time, effort, and money into making ourselves feel safer these past few decades. Has it been worth it? And do we really feel safer than we did You can let me know in the comments. I have to go put on my steel-toed shoes and take out the garbage.

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Years ago, we thought that plants communicating with each other was just the stuff of Stevie Wonder albums, but apparently there’s more and more research that indicated they actually can communicate with one another through electrical impulses and chemical emissions. That the smell of newly-cut grass is actually grass warning the other grass that there’s danger about. Of course, there’s not many options the grass has to actually do something about it. If cows have evolved to eat you, it seems like your best option would have been evolving a way to avoid cows. Maybe in a few million years grass will catch up and have feet. But there’s also those plants that actually want to be eaten, all of your fruits and berries that make themselves as attractive as possible to what are basically plant predators. Some plants want to be eaten, some don’t. If plants really can communicate, I wonder what these two groups have to say about each other?

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Hi All - just a note that there will be no new Piney Bottoms strip next week. Sorry about that, I have some scheduling conflicts that ain’t gonna unconflict. The subscriber-only content will still go out on Thursday, see everybody else back here on May 3rd.

And if you’ve got your own little piece of heaven, why not cover it with stickers?

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Science Fiction is about imagining other futures, other worlds. Naturally it goes hand in hand with nudism. There have been many classic science fiction pieces depicting worlds without clothing, or with a different relationship to clothing. From these speculative pieces, we can learn that new and different ways of being are possible. Today, we take a look at just a few of some of those great nude moments in science fiction.

The Naked Robot

Izzy Lemnikov, 1957

In a near-future society where robots are factory workers, domestic servants, and soldiers, one robot, RU-452, moves beyond its programming and becomes self-aware, even taking name for itself - Roy. Longing to be human, Roy envies man’s ability to shed his clothes and go skinny dipping. Determined to make its dream come true, Roy strips its outer plating and takes a trip to the nude beach in the novel’s shocking conclusion.

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When I was young, the music program at my severely underfunded primary school consisted of a hippie woman with an autoharp who came in once a month. Our class would be marched down to a small room beside the cafeteria, where our music textbooks and an array of percussion instruments were waiting for us beneath our tiny chairs. There were maracas, wood blocks and mallets, occasional castanets , but mostly pairs of sticks to beat together. What instrument you got dependent solely on where you were in line. Those sweet, swishing, brightly painted maracas were what every kid really wanted. I always got the sticks.

The hippie with the autoharp would play records and sing at us, and we would thrash various bits of wood together with no clear idea of what keeping time actually meant. This woman was no Leonard Bernstein, actual instruction was minimal. We would open up our music textbook and sing along with one of the accompanying records, those old folk songs like “On Top of Old Smokey” or “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain.” I think the whole thing may have been managed by the Teacher’s Union as an excuse for an extended cigarette break.

Some years after all of this I picked up a LP compilation of Folk Music from the early 60s in a used book store. This was a compilation of your Oscar Brand, Susan Reed, Pete Seger school of folk revival - and it was the first time I encountered these songs with their uncensored, unadulterated lyrics. Learning that what happened on top of Old Smokey was not a meatball gone astray, but a vicious murder, was what you might call a formative moment in my worldview. I became more interested in the source material, as they say, and soon learned that most folk songs were originally not sunny bits of optimistic nonsense but songs about how life generally sucks for anyone who isn’t rich. They took those part out of the songs, chewed hardtack to pablum, and fed it back to us.

Life generally sucks for anyone who isn’t rich. That’s the lesson. It stuck me then how it might have been much a better preparation for life to have gone ahead and told us that instead of bowdlerizing the music. Of course, now that that I’m even older, I think about how we marched into that classroom and randomly some kid would get those coveted maracas but most of us would get stuck with a pair of beaten up sticks, and I wonder if maybe they weren’t trying to tell us that after all.

Also, Substack doesn’t really like me to tell you this, but you can buy stuff from me.

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I was originally working on a somewhat long essay to go with this week’s strip, but decided to just let it stand on its own. Even I get tired of hearing myself type sometimes. I’ll just say that this strip came out of a conversation I had with Brett Marcella, whom some of you might enjoy following if you aren’t already.

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This week’s joke is brought to you by that shared culture I keep mentioning. You should note how a basis of commonly understood literary characters and tropes has afforded the spread of a humorous riff which subverts those tropes in a broad way, which in this retelling is further subverted by taking that broad subversion and redirecting it towards a particular audience. And you should note that because there will be a quiz.

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Shakespeare ripped off this Thomas Morley tune to stick in As You Like It, so I might as well rip off Shakespeare ripping off Morley. Great artists steal. Mediocre artists point out that they’re stealing. I know where I stand. Happy spring, everybody.

It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green cornfield did pass,
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
Those pretty country folks would lie,
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

This carol they began that hour,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that a life was but a flower
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

And therefore take the present time,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
For love is crownèd with the prime
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

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There’s a throwaway joke in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? where Roger is reading a love poem he’s written to his wife Jessica, which proceeds along the lines of “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways… one one thousand… two one thousand… three one thousand…” It’s more just a burst of silliness than a well-structured gag, but there’s a dread feeling in the pit of my stomach that it wouldn't get past the studio executives today. In 1988, the studio would have fully trusted the audience to recognize that the joke was made from mashing together the first line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love poem with a system for counting leaps in jump rope. But I’m not sure the studio execs would have that faith in the audience any more, even if that faith is for something as small as to hope people to know a single line from one of the most famous love poems in the English Language.

Part of this lack of faith comes from who is running the studios and writing the movies these days. As Hollywood has become more and more populated with those holding degrees from Harvard, Hollywood’s faith in what the audience might know has plummeted. This might be a side effect of an Ivy League education, I suspect that when you’ve paid all that money for a degree the thought that someone out there might have learned some of the same things you learned for free could send a chill down your spine. Of course, that’s only a guess on my part. I went to a school you haven’t heard of unless you happen to live in the same county.

But it does seem that we are reaching a crisis in common culture. There has been, for centuries, a shared canon of art and literature that could be drawn from as a shared language, and that drawing helped fuel a vibrant popular culture. To this day, every time I hear the word “Chestnut,” I also hear Bullwinkle’s voice in my head saying Under the spreading chestnut tree.. The nice thing about having these layers of culture is you get a culture with real depth. Not unlike the layers you might find on a chocolate chestnut cake. But we’re rapidly shrinking down to something more like a chestnut torte. And a flourless one at that.

There are many reasons for this, the professionalization of culture is definitely part of it, but so is the massive consolidation in media, the internet rewiring everything, and even the CIA giving up on secretly funding art.

I think this matters for nudism because to be naked with strangers is an act which has a degree or two more of intimacy than your average interaction at a CVS might have. There’s a vulnerability to it. And when you step into that sauna or hot spring for the first time, having some degree of shared culture with those who are in there with you may mean you find them to be strangers, but not complete strangers. You’ll have at least something to talk about.

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I once heard steampunk described as “what happens when goths discover brown,” which seems fair enough. There’s plenty of revivals of, and fantastical elaborations upon, historical fashions and technologies these days. The whole Renaissance faire industry, the Society for Creative Anachronisms, and for those who want to be even less anchored by historical reality, there’s LARPing. Take a little bit of the past, spin some fantasy around it, have fun for the weekend.

There’s really no nudist equivalent to this, no “nudepunk,” if you will, but the possibility for such a revival is intriguing. Browsing through any historical nudist material, it’s striking just how easy it is to identify the era the images are from with pretty much no further information. And it’s more than just looking at the hairstyles. It’s not just that the preferences for the kinds of body shapes that are depicted has changed over the years, but the well of shapes those images had to be drawn from has also clearly changed. Whether it’s from differences in how undergarments leave an impression from shaping the flesh, changes in diet, changes in exercise routine, a nude body from the 1930s looks different than a nude figure form the 1950s than from now.

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In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Persis Khambatta was given the unenviable task of introducing her character of Lt. Ilia with the line “My oath of celibacy is on record,” which seems to beg the question on record with whom? Is there some branch of Starfleet that tracks the sex lives of its service members? Well, possibly. Because in an episode of Lower Decks the U.S.S. Cerritos is identified as being on record as “The horniest ship in the fleet.” Two mentions of a vague concept fifty years apart? In Star Trek, we call that cannon!

The thing is, taking the sexual comings and goings of a quasi-military service when its members are seeking out new life and new civilization makes a certain degree of sense. Because sex is one hell of a disease vector, and being able to trace back any unruly alien pathogens to their source could well be a matter of civilizational life or death.

Which brings us to Risa, the pleasure planet.

It’s the season three The Next Generation episode “Captain’s Holiday” that first introduces us to Risa, when Captain Picard vacations there. The planet is a virtual paradise whose advanced weather-control system maintains a constant pleasant sub-tropical climate, and whose friendly native species entertains a frank and open attitude towards sexuality.

Risa, was, by and large, the brainchild of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry was known for, among other things, hosting naked parties in backyard pool in his Los Angeles home. Describe Roddenberry as a nudist probably doesn’t quite hit the mark, hedonist would be the more accurate term. An early draft of “Captain’s Holiday” had Picard’s holiday happening on a highly advanced holodeck simulation, but Roddenberry stepped in to insist the locale be shifted to Risa, which he imagined as a wold where the background would be filled with entanglements of most every gender and mathematical combination, and extras costumed in outfits as skimpy as early 90s standards and practices would allow. Roddenberry essentially imagined Risa as one of his backyard pool parties gotten out of hand in precisely the way he hoped it would get out of hand.

It was executive producer Rick Berman who ended up reeling some of Roddenberry’s more excessive ideas in, and perhaps sadly the Risa realized on screen ultimately resembled less Hedonism II and more an Atlanta-area Marriott.

We get very little idea of the role of nudity in Star Trek’s world of luxury space communism. We know that traditional Betazed weddings are held with the bride and groom ceremonially naked. We know that, until a series of reforms, Ferengi women were kept segregated and completely naked. In general, nudity on Star Trek in all its incarnations is treated essentially as a joke or shameful, reflecting not how attitudes might change in the future but the attitudes of the time the work was produced. The most positive portrayal of nudity we see in all of Star Trek happens on Lower Decks, where the junior crew of the Cerritos casually shares a mixed-gender, open-plan shower room, and Lt. Boimler is teased for his “fear of communal nudity.” Sure, the nudity in Lower Decks is for a joke, but the nudity isn’t the joke.

I’d like to think there’s at least nude swimming on Risa, if only because the alternative of imagining Risa only as its depicted on screen means that somehow the gaudiest of late 80s bathing suits survived into the far future. But also because the idea of a pleasure planet implies the existence of a work rest of the universe. Risa is clearly imagined as something like a Sandals Resort. And look, I love a good resort as much as the next fellow, but unless a hell of a lot more of you click that subscribe button it’s going to be a very, very long time before I see one again.

But if Risa is the Sandals Resort of the far future, that means that even in a future of unlimited abundance, pleasure is still a limited, and controlled, resource, and that suggests a real failure of imagination. If thinking of the future means that we can only come up with a world where pleasure is confined to a single planet, where nudity is still shameful and a joke, and where people are still inexplicably wearing matching silver lamé threaded headbands with their swimsuits, we’ve really failed at imaging a better future.

Utopian fiction is hard, and trying to live deliberately towards that utopian ideal is even harder. Particularly when it almost invariably arrives at a place where one group of utopians are screaming at another group to utopians “Not that utopia!” and destroying those with whom you have small differences becomes more important than building towards something actually better.

So if there is a Starfleet department of Xenocoital Encounters, I imagine that the return trip from any visit to Risa is going to involve filling out a hell of a lot of paperwork. But that may just be because I’m so deep in the system I can’t imagine a universe without paperwork. And maybe the best way to deal with our own failure of imagination is to recognize it and laugh at it. And recognize how odd our assumptions might be if we carry them with us into Utopia.

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Ah, those Druidy Druids. So many different historical interpretations, inventions, imaginings, revivals, reimaginings, and inventions of interpreted imagined revivals. There’s your Caesar, your L'Astrée, your William Danby, and so many other literary, historical, and pseudohistorical traditions bouncing off of one another. All, ultimately, serving the purpose of their moment, whether as a symbol of national pride, mystical romanticism, or ecological fervor, when someone says Druid it’s almost impossible to know what that mean, except that whatever you think they mean is probably not what they themselves mean. So many traditions, so little time. So just for clarity’s sake, this strip is solely in the mystical tradition of groan-inducing puns.

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