At the end of the previous entry -- "Baseball Barf, Excreted Espresso, Carole Lombard" -- I asked readers to find the hidden film titles that peppered the deathless prose and send them in, winner and list to be posted. We finally have a victor, though competition wasn't exactly stiff: cinephile Bill Stern of Los Angeles, who is also director of the Museum of California Design. Upon compiling the list, however, this writer realized that the contest is inherently unfair, because almost any noun, and even some gerunds and a few quirky … [Read more...]
Our Great-Grandfathers’ Butts
At this unsure moment, sex doesn't seem to be on everyone's lips. A decade ago, the bodies politic were forever getting it on, at least in the then-pulsating media and groovy groves of academe. But now the topic has cooled to family-room temperature. Of course, I'm not sure about actual coital statistics -- so this could be a New York Times trend story. It's like when, as a graduate student, I read that hetero anal sex was unusually popular in Europe during the reign of Napoleon. So were Empire silhouettes. Any statistical … [Read more...]