Computer enhancement has spread to still photography in advertisements, fashion pictorials, and magazine covers, where the human figure and face are subtly elongated or remodeled at will. Caricature is our ruling mode.

Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.

If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them.

French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisan intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.

I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions - which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.

Madonna is her own Hollywood studio - a popelike mogul and divine superstar in one. She has a laserlike instinct for publicity, aided by her visual genius for still photography (which none of her legion of imitators has). Unfortunately, her public life has dissolved into a series of staged photo ops.

I believe that everybody has the right to view his or her own body as a palette. However, I think intellectuals should at least try to be role models.