On June 10, 2006, just in time for her birthday, Judy Garland appeared on a U.S. stamp.

I always think of Judy at this time of year, as the rainbow flags unfurl and the floats come down the street with their glamor-girl boys and near-nude leathermen.

Hyper-real spectaculars that would not be out of place in the Emerald City — or Munchkinland!

“Are you a friend of Dorothy?” soldiers would ask each other during World War II, using this code phrase to signal that they were gay. It was only a matter of time before the brass caught wind of it, without quite understanding its significance. In a dither that Reds and homos were sneaking into their ranks, the military spent $250,000 to find out who this diabolic den-mother of the GI homos was. Yet even the nelliest civilian could have told them (in exchange, we hope, for a little buzz-cut face action).

She was, of course, our Judy. The gal who fell from a star called Kansas. So tenderly young in The Wizard of Oz, yet already empowered by that penetrating cry in her voice.

We need only hear her tearful call of Toto! Toto! as her terrier is being bicycled away in the clutches of Miss Gulch to get that old chill, the heartachy twang of childhood injustice. (more…)

What is this? What does it mean? We don’t know. We don’t really care.

As one commonsensical Youtube commenter put it: “remove your underwear please…… it’s time for a strip search.”

“…unfortunately he was in the six-nine position — so this dude’s ass was in Eminem’s face or mouth area.”

Two convicts make love though a hole in the wall, a hole so tiny that the only object that can pass through it is a straw and the only love that can be made is one convict blowing smoke into the other’s mouth.

This is the most famous scene in the dank and languid Un Chant d’Amour (A Song of Love), an underground film made in the year 1950 — an antique prehistoric moment before the emergence of a forthright gay sensibility — by Jean Genet, France’s most acclaimed thief, pornographer and poet of perversity. (You can watch the complete 25-minute film below, after the break.)

And when I say perversity, I’m not being flip or using an egregious code word for “homosexual” favored by haters of gay people. No, Genet had — or perhaps, for the sake of his art, for the “beauty of the gesture,” affected to have — a most Satanic taste for true perversity: he once wrote that the greatest act of love was for one lover to betray the other to the Gestapo, while the accused looked on. (more…)

When unlimited amounts of explicit, well-produced pornographic material are available across the Internet, under the counter in bookstores and in a reasonable number of video stores, why is it that fleeting naked shots in movies still catch us?

From James Franco’s rear-shot swimming pool scene in Milk, to Gael Garcia Bernal’s bathtub fiasco in The Science of Sleep, to Emile Hirsch’s floating river shot in Into the Wild, brief nude shots often turn out to be the most memorable scenes from movies — not for artistic or cinematic value, but because they’re hot.

The 2007 Seth Rogan film Knocked Up featured a group of deadbeat roommates with an ambitious business plan to launch a website listing the timestamps on movie scenes with nudity. The idea is that a list of scenes with a famous actress’ nipple or bush is still of interest in a world of easy porn, and people would pay to access the site. Fleshofthestars.com was a fictional enterprise, but there’s no doubt that there’s truth beneath its concept and Hollywood producers allow those brief titillating scenes hoping it will increase a film’s popularity and earnings.

Perhaps it’s that porn stars are depersonalized and distant; we see them in the most intimate of settings but know nothing of their minds — and the ease of access desensitizes us and eliminates novelty. (more…)

“Guys…guys — what’s happening…?”

The Fat Lady has sung. The last dog has died.

And still she hangs on, clutching her barely-there 2-percentage-point victory in Indiana. From her cold, dead hands, children. From her cold, dead hands.

What I will miss most about my Hillary — for yes I am a supporter and yes I would vote for her again and yes, yes, I know, she is sooo cooked — is the way she would look at Barack Obama during the debates. That frozen glare behind the frosted smile. The slight up tilt of the forehead. God, that was priceless!

There would be ol’ Barry sawing away and saying nothing, all misty uplift about change and hope and the American people, slipping ever so carefully into just the palest of black preacher cadences, something for the home team, no Reverend Wright, of course; more Miss Diahann Carroll in an Oleg Cassini gown glossing her way through Aretha: R. E. S. P. E. C. T., ladies and gentlemen. That’s what y’all mean to me.

And there would be my Hillary in all her late-blooming, newly blondized, Georgette Klinger radiance, the robot who suddenly grew a heart and look ma, she’s even warm to the touch! All red-carpet razzle dazzle beside the dour law professor, with his down-turned lips and his solemn — here I risk a racist word — dignity. (more…)

Beware Nightcharmers!

The evil bunnyman is back to haunt our Easter morning dreams.

Not one thing or another, he appears as a sort of manthing, a creature with buff body and hellish costume head.

How many men have been led astray by this sinister hallucination, who comes always during the nighttime of the soul, chatting James Stewart out of his mind in Harvey or opening a portal into yet another mad world for Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko?

It was the bunnyman, was it not, cinema scholars, who sent Jack Nicholson right around that final bend in The Shining when the spooky cottontail was spied out of the corner of the eye, sitting eerily on a hotel bed in full head-to-toe rabbit suit, about to give a blow job.

Oh, evil is the evil bunnyman. How evil? Just ask Alice when she’s ten feet tall. (more…)