If you feel like your creative life is a song you just want to keep turning up, you have come to the right place. Welcome. I admire and pity you because I understand. You'll get through it. And when you don't, you'll write about it. I'll read it and nod...

The horror genre has long served as a space for confronting female sexuality. In Darren Aronofsky's graceful and gruesome ballet film Black Swan, the doppelgänger, or evil double, is used as a trope for examining women's supposed inner doubleness--the good old Madonna...

If Playboy has served as a barometer for the evolving sexual taste of the American male, then what does its new TV programming have to say about that? After realizing that it couldn't outdo Internet porn or even other channels of the flesh without tarnishing its paradoxical wholesomely...

People say that writing a blog is like writing a journal. That's true, but only if your diary snakes in and out of the shared digital mind. When I first started Culture Sandwich, I treated it like a notebook that lived in my computer, but eventually I started...

To whom it may concern,
I leave my human life to you.
After spending so much time
typing away at poems,
courting my screensaver,
surfing great swells of web,
I've finally become a computer.

As I...

From the moment we see the schoolboys of Welton Academy transforming the tenets of their prep school; "tradition, honor, discipline, and excellence," into the eminently more playful "travesty, horror, decadence, and excrement," we know they're not waiting for Superman; they're waiting for...

Dear Vern,

Inspired by your spirited missive to Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), that most nubile of X-2 (2003) mutants, I've decided to address your contribution to film theory, Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer!: Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema and Other Important Topics in letter...

1) You have the ability to listen to Slate's Gabfest while simultaneously composing a blog post, madly consuming internet news and beating the heck out of JabbaTheHutt420 at online Scrabble.

2) At different intervals in your non-cyber life, you've found yourself with a strange desire to press "Command-F" to find...

When I was seven, my family visited a little island off the coast of Puerto Rico during hurricane season. To my younger self, the littered beaches resembled billowing garbage monsters with cans for eyes. I was in heaven. I understood the sorrow of hurricanes when the innkeeper's husband lightly touched...

If Mark Twain thought clothes made the man, Honoré de Balzac seemed to believe they made the creative demigod. In his Treatise on Elegant Living, he outlines the rules of elegantology, with particular focus on the artist with panache who soars far above the uncouth, earthly masses. Only recently released...

Jasmine Hirst

In her book, Bad Reputation, performance artist, playwright, and one-time citizen of the world of Andy Warhol and his Factory (even appearing in Warhol's and Paul Morissey's film, Women in Revolt), Penny Arcade (born Susana Ventura) has collected three...

Mind-bending, Postmodern Hot:

1. Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon

Best Known For: Heller -- Catch 22; Pynchon -- Gravity's Rainbow

What it Would Look Like: This bookish combo would breed such a wealth of mind-bending, absurdly funny, paranoid prose marvels that I wouldn't be surprised if it has...

George Haimsohn

A devoted scholar of femininity, Candy's life was a tribute to that sorceress womanhood that had cast a spell on her--the very same one she would later wield against others. Candy Darling had a way of eclipsing everything...

Warning: Spoiler alert (although, after reading this, you may realize that this is impossible)

These days, when people hear the term street art, they often picture Shepard Fairey's Obama Hope poster, yet it has a diverse...

Do you frequently wake up fully dressed, reeking of coffee, with Post-it notes stuck to your face? Are you an information junkie, a detail fiend, or a wisdom addict? If so, you're probably suffering from being a writer. But don't feel bad, I have...

Last month a YouTube video about women's periods went viral. It poked fun at the advertisements for feminine care products that feature ecstatically happy women running on beaches in white spandex, twirling in slow motion, dancing, and...

I've been reading so many posts lately that I think my mind has morphed into its own brand of blog. For those who haven't found it yet, Open Salon (OS) is an online community of bloggers who share their writing in a cybercolony hosted by Salon.com. The underlying...

Mark Simpson: The most oft-repeated cliché about Sex and the City is that "They're not really women. They're gay men." Of course, this is palpably untrue since, with the exception of Miranda, they don't wear those trawlerman beards that all gay men do these days.

But the cliché is even...

Now, I realize that Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) is no Simone de Beauvoir, but the sight of her at her computer, doing the writer's jig that turns thoughts and experiences into words still gives me the chills. The very phrase, "I...

I had a very strong reaction to a picture of Patti Smith the other day. As I gazed at the fur under her raised arms, I felt guilty and envious. That peek of hair made me think that when it came to being at...