During the Depression, Cannuli was helping out at her husband's butcher shop when a customer wouldn't pay the full price for an order of chopped goat. "The man told her what she could do with the meat. It wasn't nice. 'I had a leg of lamb,' Antoinette recalled. 'I went boof! Right over the counter. He was bleeding.'" When she was 14, she insisted on getting a paying job and began work at a Philadelphia tailor shop: "Her first day, the boss came by -- and gave her a pat on the bottom. 'I went Pow, right in the face! I said, "You touch me again and I'll poke your eyes out!"'"

The energy and ferocity of Italian women, whose power came from the land itself, are the ultimate source of my take-charge philosophy of sexual harassment, which emphasizes personal responsibility rather than external regulation and paternalistic oversight. Too many women have confused feminism, which should be about equal opportunity, with the preservation of bourgeois niceties. Antoinette Cannuli's code of life has infinitely more wisdom than what American students are getting from their politicized textbooks. Her prescription for longevity: "Keep straight. Be true. That's the main thing. Be honest."

In business from my last column, a number of Salon readers wrote to express bewilderment or dismay at their inability to find any book of essays by James Wolcott, whom I hailed as America's premiere culture critic. Well, there isn't one yet -- scandalous as that may seem when publishers have been pouring out such mud floods of academic tripe on popular culture. For a tantalizing taste of Wolcott's early work, see the enterprising letter to Salon by Damion Matthews, who dug through 25-year-old issues of newspapers and magazines in the library. Culture studies doesn't have a prayer of reform until Wolcott's work to date has been fully collected.

The major media event for me of the past three weeks was unquestionably Bravo's two-hour TV profile of Rudolf Nureyev, who represented such a brilliant image of the smoldering, Byronic artist for my generation. There is no figure in any of the arts today who has that kind of dynamism or stature -- what a loss for young people.

The still photographs and film footage of the young Nureyev were electrifying as the program traced him from his early conflicts with his macho father (who thought that a real man shouldn't be a dancer but an "engineer or doctor"). When in 1955 he left his home in the Bashkir Republic to seek his fortune as a dancer, he had to travel three days by train to get to Moscow and then another 16 hours to Leningrad, where he sought admission to the Kirov Ballet.

The documentary stressed not only Nureyev's fiery, athletic, Tatar style but his exquisite skill and passion in partnering. It was fascinating to watch his self-sculpting over time: his raw, spiky, peasant intensity clarified and hardened, and his resolute jawline emerged exactly like Joan Crawford's as she metamorphosed from dance-hall girl to megastar. There was just one missing detail: surely in the years after he defected in a famous 1961 incident at Orly Airport in Paris, the still-awkward and socially insecure Nureyev merged his persona with that of Mick Jagger. Their ephebic faces melted into one.

Another highlight was Turner Movie Channel's showing of John Schlesinger's "Darling" (1965), starring the luminous Julie Christie as a blithe spirit of Swinging '60s London. This witty, sophisticated, superbly edited film (one of my selections for a 1999 festival at the National Film Theatre) never seems to lose its freshness. My favorite lines in Frederic Raphael's script remain "One felt madly in!" and "Put away your Penguin Freud, Diana" -- upon which I built my theory of the "English epicene" in the Oscar Wilde chapters of "Sexual Personae."

Finally, I took enormous pleasure in Love Stories Channel's broadcast of the Barbra Streisand version of "A Star Is Born" (1976), one of the most absurd yet strangely engrossing entries in Hollywood's megalomania chronicles. Kris Kristofferson, by career a singer rather than actor, has never gotten sufficient credit for his sensitive, agonized portrayal of a rugged pop star in decline.

Despite the unbearably corny, faux-rock score (the musical director was schmaltz elf Paul Williams), there are many fine moments in this film -- such as the scene during the Streisand character's first visit to the Los Angeles mansion where Kristofferson very credibly improvises lyrics to a dreamy song she has been composing. It's very rare that movies catch the texture and haphazard spontaneity of collaborative art-making.

My favorite moments in "A Star Is Born" -- which I realized with consternation that I'd been watching time without number for a quarter of a century -- are when the goaded, leather-clad Kristofferson hurls a trim, black-and-white case of Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey through a glass partition at an obnoxious DJ ("Baby Jesus") and then when Streisand, finding her husband in bed with a dopy groupie, flies toward the camera like a banshee and whips a pool cue through a shelf of exploding liquor bottles. "You can trash your life, but you're not going to trash mine!" she proclaims -- which I've always felt should be a feminist rubric, far more effective than legal restraining orders for women with abusive spouses or boyfriends.

Of course we cannot omit the high-camp finale when, after the James Dean-like death crash of the Kristofferson character on the open road, Streisand, apparently concerned that the movie not be stolen by her costar, imprisons the audience for 16 more endless minutes of moping, weeping and wailing. The musical climax is a single long take in close-up as, clad in a white pantsuit (having internalized her angel man?), she sings herself from grief to acceptance to genuine ecstasy in what is supposed to be a concert hall but feels like the underground tomb in "Aida."

Nor is Streisand done with us mere mortals. As the credits slowly unfurl over a still of her with head flung back and arms extended in crucifixion mode, we are informed of her mind-boggling omnipresence in this project, beginning with her role as executive producer. One line reads "Musical concepts by Barbra Streisand" and another (the pièce de résistance) "Ms. Streisand's clothes from ... her closet."

Divas this ruthless, daring, tasteless and grand are born, not made.

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