To feature a woman on Nightcharm’s front page she must be a creature who mirrors the pagan, crystal vision that inspires our staff to conjure all of the high quality juju we offer up to you, dear reader, week after week.

And who better to feature this week than the earth and moon-inspired blond witchy woman herself: Stevie Nicks.

When I caught Camille Paglia on tour recently she mentioned how the entirety of her new book Break, Blow, Burn was written with Nicks’ Trouble in Shangri-La spinning in the background.

Paglia considers Stevie Nicks a nature poet, a poet of the earth and sky: The planets, sun and the moon (and then some). A few audience members balked at Paglia’s statement, but I nodded my head in agreement while fingering my love beads.

As Joyce Millman from Salon reminds us: “The women in Nicks’ songs are free birds and gypsies: independent, unafraid to be alone, uncaged. In the manly world of rock ‘n’ roll, Nicks articulated a yearning female spirituality. She put her womanliness right out there, undiluted.” (more…)

The slinky, silky, secretive nature of cats is very seductive, I admit.

Many gay men love them, seem to have a psychic link to them, are like cats in their own ability to intuit every subtle wrinkle in the matrix.

In this, cats and the men who love them resemble women with PMS. Nothing is too small to set off their high- maintenance wiring. Some of these men are adorable, my best friends even. But I hate their fucking cats!

What’s wrong with me, doc. I’m a fag. I intuit, I read the ether, I channel the zeitgeist. I just don’t get cats.

I hate them because they’re not dogs. A dog runs to meet you at the door and goes into a little dance, jumping, leaping, twirling, sneezing, running circles around your feet. You are their king. This is what it feels like to be somebody’s Ultimate Top. If they knew how to turn themselves inside out, by golly, they would do it. For you. (more…)

Italian strega Camille Paglia — author of my favorite book of the summer: the electric hot-pink Break, Blow, Burn (a poetry primer for brainy imbeciles) — has finally assumed the role I always knew, always hoped, she would: Pagan High Priestess rumbling out spooky Pop Icon Prophecies that she channels from magazine photos and Access Hollywood.

Case in point: Kabbalah kibitzer Madonna and her recent tweedy romp through the August issue of Vogue:

Camille, like myself, didn’t want to miss that issue, but unlike the rest of us who casually scanned its series of staged Grand Lady Madonna photos, Paglia saw misfortune in the photos. And yet what were they but typical Vogue fare (at least to the naked, uninitiated eye). There was Madonna feeding chickens … Madonna in cozy bed with children … Madonna on the lawn in a summer dress that foamed like a wave on the ground … Madonna on horse… (more…)