Open Internet networks are so common these days that warnings about unwanted invasions of privacy have dimmed almost to silence. With people continually posting pictures of themselves, along with private information, on websites such as MySpace and Facebook, everyone has access to strangers’ inner worlds. The Internet abounds with true ...

My favorite thing to do is to lie on my back. When things need to be moved, say a piece of trash that is fermenting under my feet, I grunt and push it aside with my toe. My least favorite thing, in general, is to do things. What could possibly ...

People—especially dopey, two-months-behind-the-times columnists like the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones—love making sweeping pronouncements about the nature of hip-hop. Music is a manifestation of the human creative spirit; it is born of a whole slew of political and economic circumstances. Duh. In that way it possesses import both ...

Larry is a phone salesman; he�s the kind of responsible American man that is �able to support [his] wife to stay at home and raise [his] children.� He�s been dying to get his hands on the camouflage Lambourgini of his dreams. But Larry�s not ...

“All in all, I’m a dumb bastard… If you’ve got to, you’ve got to.”
Thus criminal Michel Poiccard opens in a voice-over in
Jean-Luc Godard’s classic 1960 film À bout de soufflé (Breathless). Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) looks up from a trashy newspaper exhibiting a tarty semi-nude ...

Television is the opiate of the masses. Surfing channels these days, we see the screen jump from images of skinny models bickering, to bedraggled people on a desert island, to co-eds living together as they have been for the past ten years. They don’t call it a guilty pleasure ...

Who will want to watch porn when it ceases to serve our need for escapism? When it comes down to it, porn is essentially the stylized and idealized version of the sex act that can offer us some sort of reprieve from the monotony of our own bedroom activities. It is a relief from those moments when, caught in the missionary position for the umpteenth time, we look at our partner and see a drop of sweat on her brow, uneven breasts, a smallish penis, or that piece of spinach from dinner between his teeth.

Some years back, while browsing The Adventures of Pete and Pete fan sites (I obviously had lots of friends in high school), I happened upon one that listed the AIM screennames of several actors who played big roles on the show. I dutifully added the names to my buddy list ...

Two dark autumns ago, the Arcade Fire made me believe, all over again, in the all-encompassing power of rock and roll. Those were depressingly political times, and the un-political nature of the record offered me an escape. "Funeral" was a triumphant album about loss and renewal, about picking up the pieces in a cold, wintry world; it made me feel that I wasn’t the only one who was strung out and sad and suddenly and pathetically sober.

John Cameron Mitchell’s new film Shortbus raises a lot of difficult questions. For example, if A is fellating B, B is fellating C, and C is fellating A, is A fellating C? Is A fellating himself? Because that is, as I have learned, possible with serious dedication to yoga ...

There was a time when the idea of a different spin on the dry humor of The Daily Show might have made sense. Around the time that Stewart and co. produced America: The Book, they were a twister (or some other forceful natural phenomenon) of popular criticism with an immense ...

Humbert Humbert is far from a straightforward man, but he did have the decency to commit a straightforward crime. Lolita was a tender young twelve, her suitor perhaps three times that; whatever physical, metaphysical, sexual, magic or aesthetic power she may have wielded over H.H., she was a child and he was a man of immoral actions.

I am not with the times when it comes to television. Schadenfreude TV upsets me; I can’t watch it. You know what I’m talking about: the semi-scripted reality shows, the “true life” documentaries, the TV that makes you want to die. I know you remember the episode of ...

Every respectable ideology needs an encyclopedia. The editors of the Enlightenment Encyclopédie, when composing the organizational frontispiece to the work, situated religion but a few spokes away from superstitions and black magic, while the reader of the entry on “Cannibalism” interested in related themes would find himself advised to consult the “Eucharist” entry, were he to consult the book’s reference notes. The good Bolshevik editors of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, for example, were quick to minimize the entry on “Jews” in the face of the Soviet anti-Semitism of the early 1950s.