It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely candidate for an elite French film journal than the new release Lumberjack Gang Bang — a frank exploration of the cum-flying, ass-plowing, and mouth-jamming that can be expected when lumberjacks are stranded in the wood, due to a bridge collapse, and can’t get their weekend quota of — as the screenplay drolly puts it — “pussy banging.”

Even the tagline for the film is simple and direct, warranting, so it would seem, no further analysis: In the forest only lumberjacks can hear you beg for more!

Thus we were electrified when we picked up the December issue of Cahiers du Cahiers, which specializes in close readings of American film and bills itself as “a meta-journal” — the name means “Notes on Notes” and is one step up in mental abstraction from the now aged Cahiers du Cinéma.

“A wartime masterpiece,” raved cinéaste Jean-Baptiste Bresson, “in which the subtext is Iraq and the American soul.” The massive essay begins, as is the style of the journal, with a long, meditative anecdote on how Bresson had intended to write about Ken Burns’ The War, a 19-hour documentary on World War II that he had just seen at the Cannes Film Festival. (read the full article)

Once a week when I was a teenager, my friends and I would drive to a gay nightclub downtown. Thursday nights were alcohol-free and 16 was the age of entry. Since there were only a handful of openly gay students at each of our high schools, if even that, the only way we knew to connect with other young gay people was over the Internet and in that club.

Inside was a sea of dancing skinny, hairless teenage boys from the suburbs who looked even younger than they really were, ringed by a flock of straight girls we brought with us, who pole-danced against our thighs. The lesbians gathered in their own clusters to the side. You could hear the bassy music from outside on the patio and cigarette smoke choked the air just before indoor smoking bans hit major cities. Some of the boys would take their shirts off and sag their pants low enough that you could tell their pubes were shaved. The rest of us would sit at the tables smoking, or in my case, take occasional drags from friends’ cigarettes and talk about people who passed by.

Almost everyone in the club was under the age of 20, but there were always a couple of guys aged 27 or so in the mix, and occasionally we’d see a socially-awkward man in his 30s or 40s gawking at the young kids as if to memorize every face. We thought those guys were creepy, and talked shit about them as we talked shit about the teenage boys who were their friends. (read the full article)

It’s like this for me:

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