The Mainly Annual EastWesterly Review / Postmodern Village Conference 2007

Muffin Driving: Cars and Cunnilingus, a Gynecological Perspective
by May Bachengill and Drs. Pieter and Margit Douchenberg

There's little this correspondent can report about this paper without blushing, but Bachengill and the Douchenbergs managed to make two of America's great passions both clinical and dull. Many picked up pointers, but few, afterwards, cared much to use them.

Testicular Manslaughter: How Low Sperm Counts Help Fuel the Conservative Cultural Crisis Machine
by C. Alice Schutenblanx

We've heard for far too long about the crisis of the American male: apparently poorly educated and blue-collar, he still manages to outearn his XX-chromosomed counterpart by at least 20%. But he also sires steadily fewer children, as a matter of stats, and in the zero-sum game of conservative politics, that's bad enough. And now that Viagra and its ilk have all but cured impotence, what's a whiny chauvinist got to complain about? The paper fascinated, but the offer of free sperm motility screenings came too close to home.

Marilyn Manslaughter: How Shock Rock is Emasculating the Red Blooded American Male and Making Us Lose in Iraq
by Colt R. O'Reilly

Make no doubt about it: O'Reilly is a true believer, but a smattering of gender-curious Goths aside, O'Reilly's rant against Marilyn Manson seems about a decade too old. But then, if you can't win the current battle, you can always complain about the last one. What will they think of next, that it's all Bill Clinton's fault? Being leery of verbal abuse, this reporter skipped the Q&A session. He's got editors enough to tell him why he's wrong.

Blow White and the Seven Narcs: Florida, the Peninsula of Unconscious Desire, a Freudian Interpretation from Mickey Mouse to the Medellin Cartel
by James Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs

That Florida was convenient for its odd mix of politics, enter-preneurship, and hardcore drug smuggling could be divined by geography. That it desires these things could only be revealed by some heavy-duty analysis. It was nice, if unnecessary, for the presenters to supply all their analysands with leather couches, but if they're right, they've managed to blow the last 30 years of cultural history into fine powder.

Entartete Kunt: the Death of Civilization and the Rise of the Dumb, Drunk Sorority Girl
By Britnee Schiele

Riffing on Hitler's idea of a society being dragged down by its degenerate art, Schiele deconstructs the irony of the Third Reich's crackdown and reconstructs it as contemporary aesthetic morality tale. Who needs art to provoke middle-crass sensibilities when our Golden Heiresses hilton themselves in and out of rehab, prison, and the consciousness of otherwise reasonable and intelligent people everywhere? Schiele leaves us with one question even Paris herself can't answer, much less the mainstream media: "Isn't there a war on?"

The Salivation Army: Rescue Dog Fetishism Meets the Age of Catastrophic International Terrorism and Global Warming-Fueled Natural Disaster
by Michael Hierboi Brown

Brown gives "dog lover" a whole new spin. This correspondent did take the free kibbles sample he handed out home to his own pooch, Positron Wobble Gluon IV, but stopped short of feeding them to him when he noticed the label read "fortified with Spanish Fly!"

Funk-da-Mentalism: Conservative Christianity Swallows Parliament and Belches Up a Black White House, or O-Bomb-a Finds His 'Roots' by Crossing Lines of Color and Christianity in America's Heartland
by Clint N. and Boots E. Collins

Deep sociological play but with a bassline from hell, the Collins brothers prove that what males under the age of 40 really want to be are black men of almost 50, but Southern Baptists too so they don't upset their mommas. In Barack they seem to have found the man they want to be. They think. Maybe. Now, what's his platform again?