Today a celebrity sex video isn't a stigma that requires penance and smarm removal; it's a branding device, a platform enhancer, a show reel.

Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.

At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.

The days when the words Hollywood actor framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics - candidate, consultant, pundit, and Tea Party crowd extra alike - is an actor now, a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.

What's happening to movie critics is no different from what has been meted out to book, dance, theater, and fine-arts reviewers and reporters in the cultural deforestation that has driven refugees into the diffuse clatter of the Internet and Twitter, where some adapt and thrive - such as Roger Ebert - while others disappear without a twinkle.

One of the mistakes they often make is the designers over-accessorize or over-elaborate. So you realize: this would work if they removed X and Y. And actually, that's the sort of thing that translates into writing, because a lot of the time you realize, I feel I need to add something here but actually what I need to do is subtract. And then there's always the psychodrama and the tears and the rage and the feuds.

With 'Black Swan,' the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.