I am a very reclusive, private person.
I'm a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I'm an evangelist of popular culture, but when there's only media, then there's going to be a slow debasement of language, and that's what I think we're fighting.
Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?
I remember turning 'The Sopranos' on once and within two minutes nearly throwing a brick through the screen.
Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.
We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives.
The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.
I believe that government should confine itself to the public realm and that it should be as stripped down as possible, within reason. It should not be burdened by excess bureaucracy.
Students are very gullible about the web. The only way you can really sort out information on the web is if you've had a prior training in book culture.
I guess I'm just a natural warrior.
High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces.
Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman's attention.
Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised.
I regard affirmative action as pernicious - a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.
The reason I was angry all the time was that Gloria Steinem and all those people, without reading my work, were saying all these horrible things against me.
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.
Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.
In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education.
I don't like reality shows and have never watched them, but I'm addicted to 'Real Housewives' because it's authentic old-time soap opera reborn!
Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.
I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions - which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.
No genuinely avant-garde artist should ever be on the government dole.
Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.
A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.
It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.
Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.
Madonna remains the most visible performer on the planet, as well as one of the wealthiest, but would anyone seriously say that artistic self-development is her primary motivating principle? She is too busy with Kabbalah, fashion merchandising, adoption melodramas, the gym, and ill-starred horseback riding to study art.
Bravo's 'Real Housewives' series isn't just entertainment for devoted fans like me - it's an entire all-absorbing universe of pride and passion.
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.
Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?
When anything goes, it's women who lose.
Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!
Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.
I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care.
It's aggravating that Hollywood has never gotten credit for the role it played in promoting modern design.
The moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate - which is why Mitt Romney's political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave.
Ever since Romanticism, an oppositional mode, artists have the right, and indeed the duty, to attack social convention. But it is ridiculous and in fact self-infantilizing for them to expect to be financially supported by the general public whom they are insulting.
Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.
Uncritical American boosterism - automatic endorsement of every government action - is myopic and self-defeating.
I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels.
I was the first to advocate the Web. But I am very troubled by this thing that every kid must have a laptop computer. The kids are totally in the computer age. There's a whole new brain operation that's being moulded by the computer.
Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders.
Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys.
What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions.
It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.
I'm very pro-American - my entire family escaped poverty in Italy because they rightly believed in the American dream.
Because of my own family's service (in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Massachusetts and New York National Guard), I am a strong supporter of the military and do believe that there are just wars.
My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.
Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.
