In another era, Parker would have been a Hollywood comedy goddess, like Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck or Carole Lombard, playing characters who were smart, wily, ambitious, sexual beings. But where Hollywood has failed Parker, TV has come to the rescue. In HBO’s super-glossy adult comedy “Sex and the City,” which has just begun its second season, Parker is at her gawky, sexy, sly best as a 30-ish sex columnist observing the mating rituals of New York singles. Based on Candace Bushnell’s droll New York Observer columns, “Sex and the City,” like its screwball comedy forerunners of the 1930s and ’40s, appreciates the humor in the complicated socioeconomic dance of marriage-seeking. Parker’s Carrie and her three best friends work the problem of finding a mate as if they’re plotting a complicated bank heist — which, many unhappily single people in major metropolitan cities will probably tell you, is easier to accomplish than finding a non-psychotic person to date.

OK, I admit it — at first I was put off by “Sex” for reasons succinctly articulated this season by Carrie’s friend, feminist lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon): “How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?” But gradually, the show won me over. Producer Darren Star (“Melrose Place”) and regular writer Michael Patrick King juice up Bushnell’s pseudo-anthropological premise with dazzling guilty-pleasure voyeurism.

“I love a big dick. I love it inside of me. I love looking at it. I love everything about it,” exclaims Carrie’s 40-ish, well-worn, publicist pal Samantha (Kim Cattrall). But to appreciate the comic force of that speech, you have to realize that the sexually voracious, not-to-be-denied Sam is out of her mind with frustration because the otherwise perfect guy she’s dating is, as she somberly puts it, roughly the size of a gherkin. Let’s face it, you’re not going to hear dialogue like that on “Providence.” “Sex” is horny and witty, goofy and wise. Imagine Edith Wharton and Jacqueline Susann meeting for drinks at Moomba and you have some idea of its smart girl allure. “Sex” is literary sociology with a graduate degree in smut, and, boy, is it fun.

“Sex” revolves around the romantic misadventures of Carrie, Miranda, Sam and their refined, relatively naive art-dealer friend, Charlotte (Kristin Davis). The show’s structure is pretty straightforward — narrator Carrie taps away at her Powerbook, composing columns about such puzzlers as, “Are there certain things one should never say in an intimate relationship?” and “Are relationships the religion of the ’90s?” These dilemmas are then depicted in story lines involving the quartet and its acquaintances. Throughout the ensuing chaos, the girls still have many opportunities to gather ’round the bar or the coffee shop booth and debate Topic No. 1, the difficulty of finding marriageable men in New York who aren’t asses. Watching “Sex” is like eavesdropping on a conversation in the ladies’ room, and not a unisex bathroom, either — “Sex” knows the value of boundaries. Which is why “Sex” may be horny, but it’s never crude.

What sets “Sex” apart from the similarly relationship-obsessed “Ally McBeal” is that Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte are true-blue friends — they’re supportive, not envious of one another’s career or romantic successes. The second season opener of “Sex” had a denouement that sweetly illustrated the nurturing quality of female friendship at its best. Carrie has broken up with the commitment-phobic man of her dreams, known only as Mr. Big (played by Chris Noth with a degree of rogueish charm that, I believe, is illegal in several states). She runs into Big unexpectedly while she’s out on a rebound date, and it throws her off balance. She eventually sends her date home, goes to a pay phone and makes a call: “It’s me. I know things are weird between us right now but I really need to talk. Can you meet me at our place?” Carrie goes to the coffee shop and, after an anxious moment, spots — no, not Mr. Big. Miranda. Despite her earlier high-minded outburst about her friends’ conversational preoccupation with men, Miranda has answered Carrie’s call, because that’s what girlfriends are for.

I would be remiss if I didn’t at least acknowledge that “Sex” doesn’t exactly portray men in a heroic light. The show is a parade of “toxic bachelors,” “serial modelizers” and assorted other small-membered, ball-scratching, bad-breath-spewing, selfish, conceited, unfaithful, untruthful males who fail to measure up as husband material.

However, I know that some guys feel left out, bullied and dissed by girl-talk shows like “Sex and the City.” So I must inform those guys that there are two new cable shows, FX’s “The X Show” and Comedy Central’s “The Man Show,” that are allegedly designed to ease the pain of the average maligned, unappreciated, badgered, Dockered, “Titanic”-ed male. The nightly “X Show,” which features four hosts, advice segments and interviews with Playboy Playmates and sports stars, is basically a male version of “The View,” except without the sage presence of a Barbara Walters as elder statesperson. Hugh Downs, call your agent. As for “The Man Show,” fellas, listen to me: Nothing the women on “Sex and the City” say about your gender could possibly be more humiliating than what “The Man Show” says about your gender.

Hosted by Adam “Loveline” Carolla and Jimmy “Win Ben Stein’s Money” Kimmel, “The Man Show” (which premieres Wednesday) is a snarky schmuckfest dedicated to (as the hosts declare in the opener) “building a dam to hold back the tidal wave of feminism that is flooding the country. A dam to stop the river of estrogen that’s drowning us in political correctness. A dam to urinate off of when we’re really drunk!” (Hey, didn’t Comedy Central already build that dam and call it “Politically Incorrect”?) This weekly “joyous celebration of chauvinism” promises a testosterone-friendly lineup of things guys supposedly like to watch on TV, which in the first show includes women in bikinis, women jumping on a trampoline, explosions, supermodels and “one of the purest forms of entertainment” — monkeys, wearing costumes, doing people things.

Coincidentally (or not!), TNT has just launched a weekly sitcom called “The Chimp Channel,” starring actual primates doing spoofs of TV shows like “Treewatch” and “NYPD Zoo.” I don’t know where those guys on “The Man Show” get the idea that watching monkeys is strictly a male thing — I enjoy a good performing monkey act as much as the next person (Oh, that Marcel from “Friends” was pure gold!), but I am disappointed to report that “The Chimp Channel” just doesn’t cut it. The dialogue is unimaginative and sophomoric and the parodies aren’t so much funny as they are creepy. Putting a chimp in a blond wig and a “Baywatch” swimsuit with big fake Pamela Anderson boobs sure seems like animal abuse to me. Oh, jeez — I hope I didn’t just give “The Man Show” any ideas.

EW isn’t alone; the show’s just-opened curtain call is receiving perhaps the greatest huzzahs ever to greet a summer of reruns. (The Washington Post’s Tom Shales writes, “Some reruns do seem too grand for the term ‘rerun.’”) Tom Carson in Esquire hailed the rer — sorry, encores — last month; more recently, Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times, “It just may be the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century,” which in turn may be the greatest work of critical hyperbole in, oh, the past couple weeks.

What’s interesting is not so much the level of attention, considering that a) it’s a fine and witty series that b) is about the mob, allowing those fuggehdaboudit ruminations on manhood and honor and generational change that have been critical faves since “The Godfather.” It’s that this wide, mainstream attention is going to a show on HBO, a premium subscription channel available in a minority of television households, albeit a growing one.

What you don’t much hear is this question: Isn’t it a shame people have to kick out a couple hundred bucks a year to get this? Now, that may not be a critic’s job, but, effectively, they’re increasingly writing to a self-selecting group of fans who dispose growing chunks of income on supplemental entertainment — the televisual equivalent of the “lobster medallions ($10 supp.)” on a restaurant menu. (The analogy isn’t completely strained: Food critics, unlike entertainment critics, have long had to decide whether a restaurant’s prices should figure into its rating.)

This is no knock against premium channels, which deserve credit for realizing that high-quality original programming is key to attracting subscribers. In fact, they may be further mainstreaming themselves by gaining customers with shows like “The Sopranos.” In the process, though, they’re accelerating a trend: the economic multi-tiering of not just TV but all popular culture.

One factor in this emerging caste system is demographic: “Will and Grace” and “Frasier” for one bracket, WWF for another. The number of channels has allowed programmers to slice the audience many ways, and socioeconomically is one of the most popular. But another factor is simple dollars and cents: How much is information and entertainment worth to you? It’s long been possible to spend more money on accoutrements — expensive stereos, popcorn — but now consumers can drop top dollar on content too. We hear a lot about the splintering of the media audience, but it’s not just because there are so many choices. There are also a greater number of price points.

Mass pop culture used to be no-tiered; that’s what made it “mass” and “pop.” Suppose you defined an RDA of American Popular Culture (RDA-APC) — that diet of broadcast and reading that one had to ingest to be current with what co-workers were talking about, magazines were writing about and other entertainers were parodying. What did it cost in 1959, 1969? A couple of movie tickets a week? A TV set with rabbit ears, later upgraded to a nifty rooftop antenna? A transistor radio?

Today, you need cable, no question. You have probably rejected something called “basic” or “standard” cable, which is, of course, too basic even to consider: network channels, a channel-guide channel. Instead, you’ve decided you need the second option, also probably called “standard” or “basic,” which communicates that you are really getting, albeit at a premium, the de facto minimum, which it now is: cable news, Animal Planet, “South Park,” what have you. Add a couple of premium channels. Beautiful! You’re RDA-APC-TV-OK! (Oh, you’ll be wanting digital TV in a couple years. Start saving.)

You’ll want Internet access — can’t download those movie trailers without Internet access! — and though you may, like many Americans, do most of your surfing at work, that requires a white-collar job, with desk, computer, bathroom breaks and all the fixin’s. If not, or if in any case you want home access, there’s the computer, the all-you-can-eat ISP account, the second phone line to take advantage of said account. (We’re banking on those lengthy site visits, folks.) Fortunately, you won’t need that second line for long — broadband’s coming! (It’ll cost you more.)

And there are plenty of tiering opportunities left. Movie theaters are flirting with premium reserved seating, and Universal’s Edgar Bronfman Jr., suggested ticket prices should vary on the basis of movies’ budgets. The idea hasn’t caught on, but there could yet come the day when movies offer a Barney’s-to-Wal-Mart spectrum: you can pay $25 for a Will Smith fourth-of-July skyrocket or $3.50 for a romantic comedy cast entirely with Mentos commercial alumni.

Premium channels have been around — and offering marquee series like “Larry Sanders” — for a long time. But their growing reliance on original series (Showtime is heavily promoting the coming “Beggars and Choosers”) changes the TV dynamic. When the channels mainly trafficked in Hollywood films, they were offering a bulk discount on movies. The deal with original programming is just the opposite: Pay us more for the same type of programming (albeit hopefully better) you get from the networks. If the trend continues — enlisting more subscribers and drawing creative talent away from networks and basic cable — the price of critic’s-darling series could rise by a couple of Franklins a year.

Add in the overnight price increases effected when the music industry embraces a new recording format. Inflated concert prices. Tele-ticket fees to ensure a seat at the movies. Several-dollar surcharges for major museum shows — ironically, the ones with the broadest appeal, the Monets and whatnot, set you back the most. (If you want the whole list, listen to an NPR pledge drive, where hosts constantly break down the pile of loot you blow annually on pay media that could instead subsidize those charming href="http://phc.mpr.org/performances/19990130/rafiles/990130_powdermilkbiscuits_28.ram">Powdermilk Biscuits spots.) Pretty soon Entertainment Weekly, metropolitan newspapers and so on are assuming that you carry a monthly culture bill of a couple of hundred bucks, before Raisinets.

And it’s not mere elitism. Critics, contrary to popular belief, like to write about quality work; but, perhaps unavoidably, they have to write to an audience sector willing to pony up for it, even on TV. And you have to wonder whether this could ultimately affect editorial content. Magazines want to offer advertisers affluent readers. What better way to do that by focusing on those readers’ preferred media choices?

Tiering could prove good for media consumers in some ways: Many, I bet, would welcome the chance to buy all their cable channels a la carte, rather than pay for a slew they never watch. And a flexible movie-pricing plan like Bronfman’s could, ironically, benefit higher-brow indie film attendance — you could have seen “Pi” with the change under your sofa cushions. (While we’re at it, how about wealth-redistribution movie theaters, charging on a sliding income scale: From each according to his ability, to each according to his taste?) There will still be a mainstream, wherever it shifts. But it’s costing more to swim there.

It’s a very nice retirement community, but still, Livia is angry at being farmed out — so angry that she puts a hit out on her only son. Not in so many words, mind you, but in the passive-aggressive “Who, little senile me?” way that has become her MO. She rats out Tony to her dim brother-in-law Junior, the boss, telling him the top-secret information that Tony is seeing a shrink (a no-no in the Mob, for obvious security reasons), then suggests to Junior that Tony is plotting a coup. When Junior (Dominic Chianese) swears vengeance, Livia puts on a superb show of histrionics, twisting her handkerchief, beating her breast and crying, “I should have kept my mouth shut, like a MUTE! Then everybody would be happy!”

There are some mighty (and mighty difficult) moms on TV these days, like the meddlesome and smothering (but adorable) Marie on “Everybody Loves Raymond” and the deceptively sweet, white-haired, granny-gowned “Mom” on “Futurama,” who’s really a crude, avaricious industrialist bent on intergalactic market domination. But Livia Soprano trumps them all. Played with a fearless unlovability by the indomitable Marchand, Livia is part Medea, part Lady Macbeth, part Rhoda’s mother, hitting operatic heights of maternal fury and self-pity. By the end of its terrific first season, “The Sopranos” (reruns begin June 1, with the second season launching in January 2000) was as much about the power struggle between parent and child as it was about mob moves — as much about family business as Family business.

Creator-writer David Chase wasn’t merely wringing dark comedy out of opposing milieus when he sent New Jersey “waste management consultant” Tony, reeling from midlife panic attacks, off to therapy with a female shrink; he was also showing us how much these two worlds have in common. After all, the mob and therapy both deal in cause and effect: You don’t pay the protection money, we break your legs; you had lousy parents, you’re a screwed-up adult.

“The Sopranos” began with Tony’s sense of manly identity — as boss, father, husband, son — slipping away. It ended with the Prozac-fortified and newly self-aware Tony surviving both crippling depression and the attempt on his life, and emerging with renewed virility. Now he knows who his worst enemy is — his mother. Earlier we’d seen him in flashback as a little boy whose beautiful, unhappy, unfulfilled mom threatened to put out his eyes with a fork if he didn’t quit nagging her. That boy learned how to take care of himself. And that’s the first thing every mother, even one as fierce and unmaternal as Livia, dreads — becoming obsolete. The second thing is karma.

Last month’s season finale of “The Sopranos” climaxed with an enraged Tony charging into the retirement home after the failed hit, intending to smother Livia with a pillow, only to find her being carried out on a stretcher, having allegedly suffered a stroke. “I know what you did, Ma! Look at her — she’s smiling!” Tony shouts as he’s restrained by paramedics. And, indeed, she’s baring her teeth behind the oxygen mask. At its heart, “The Sopranos” is about a boy and his mother — the way “Psycho” was about a boy and his mother, except Livia is no mummified authority figure; she’s alive and growing more powerful the older she gets. Livia is toxic, for sure, taking out a lifetime of bottled-up hurt and anger toward her philandering husband on Tony. But she’s also tough and cagey, and in the scenes where she subtly gets Junior to do her bidding, she thinks like a true Godfather. “A formidable woman,” Tony’s female shrink, Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), comments in the understatement of the year.

Actually, all of the women in Tony’s life are formidable. His wife Carmela (Edie Falco), who doles out tough love to Tony like a substitute mom, is the feisty modern mob spouse, putting family before business. After Tony is wounded in the attempted hit, she urges him to think about the feds’ offer of protection: “I want my kids to have a father.” When Tony rebuffs her, explaining, “I took an oath,” she snaps back, “What are you, a kid in a treehouse?” And there’s Tony’s teenaged daughter Meadow (Jamie Lynn Sigler), who flaunts her ripe, sloe-eyed sexuality because she knows her dad just cannot deal. And, of course, there’s Dr. Melfi, whose aloofness Tony finds inscrutable, infuriating and arousing. In one scene, he tries to get his mistress to wear a sedate Melfian business suit; in another, he has a nightmare where he shows up at Melfi’s office for an appointment and finds his mother in her place.

Tony and his crew may swagger around with their guns and vendettas and broads, but, deep down, they fear women. One unforgettably wry episode was devoted to the wise-guy belief (well, in Tony’s crew, anyway) that performing cunnilingus is a sign of weakness. And as the tension between Tony and Livia grew, you started noticing the matricidal subtext to these guys’ colorful oaths of fealty; they’re always swearing on their mothers’ graves and saying stuff like, “May your mother get cancer of the eyes if you’re lyin’ to me!” Where does this fear come from? Take a guess.

Yeah, I know all this male midlife crisis and fear of emasculation stuff sounds misogynistic, but, I swear, it doesn’t play that way. “The Sopranos” is, after all, a comedy and Chase (who told Salon that he based Livia on his own mother) deeply understands the morbid humor of A) a tough guy who’s afraid of his mama, and B) a comfortable, successful boomer on the shrink’s couch whining about his wretched upbringing. The bad mother is one of psychology’s most enduring bogeywomen, and “The Sopranos” draws some satisfying giggles of horror out of the validation of Tony’s primal fear. Livia is a big-boned woman to begin with (she could eat Estelle Getty for lunch), but as the first season of “The Sopranos” ended, she seemed to loom above the action, larger than life. Livia does not go gently into the Green Grove Nursing Home, and isn’t that an adult child’s worst nightmare?

So tread lightly around dear old Mom this Mother’s Day. Bring her flowers. Take her to brunch. And when she’s not looking, disconnect the cable box, just in case.

I slumped home from the airport and went to the movies — “Payback”
starring Mel Gibson. My damaged ego was liking the name. Plus, I wanted to see it because of the ad campaign, which claims, “IT’S FUN TO ROOT FOR THE BAD GUY!” I sat in a movie theater in my own neighborhood and listened to my neighbors laugh while Mel Gibson’s character stole money from a homeless man’s hat and kidnapped a kid on his birthday and shot about 800 people in the face. I don’t know whom I hated more, Mel Gibson or the audience around me. They were having fun rooting for the bad guy, and all I wanted was for their beloved on-screen serial killer to point his gun off-screen and mow them down.

So it’s been a pretty lonely week out here in the entertainment killing
fields. The more I mope, the more alone-in-a-crowd memories keep rushing back at me. Like the moment when I was watching the Lifetime network (motto: “Television for Women”) and I first noticed that all the commercials were for cleaning products and battered women’s shelters and credit cards with pictures of cats and I realized the composite portrait of my gender the network was painting was of a woman with a black eye holding a kitty in one hand and a can of Pledge in the other, which is enough to make a girl flip over to ESPN. Or the first Sleater-Kinney show after they broke and the audience that had previously consisted almost entirely of slight, 18-year-old girls was suddenly bursting with beer-guzzling tall guys — in hats! — and I was so sick of pogoing just to see the band that when one of the tall guys bumped into me and didn’t apologize, I shoved him into the stage and his forward lurch parted the crowd the way Moses did the Red Sea. Or a They Might Be Giants show in San Francisco the day after that meanie Pete Wilson got elected governor and the huge but kindly crowd was sweetly, obliviously singing along with a good-natured song about Belgian painter James Ensor and I just stood there and stared at them, yelling, “Did you people vote?”

Like all former cult members (I was a Pentecostal until I was
16), I’ve gotten over losing my religion. But I will never get over losing
my congregation. Because I know what it’s like to be in a room where
everyone’s singing the same song. I have heard, to use a sappy word, harmony. I keep looking for it in public places, finding it occasionally. There was that one night after a Nirvana show in Dublin, singing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the sidewalk with every teenager in town.

Nature, though, sometimes trumps art. Lake Michigan has the best audience I’ve ever seen. There are whole summer weekends at certain beaches in Chicago where the promise of America is actually fulfilled, where the Mexican family barbecues next to the black family’s picnic next to a gay volleyball tournament across from where the elderly Poles stroll. In such crowds, under the sun, no one hisses and no one sits disagreeing in the dark. No one’s a spectator, or maybe everyone’s a spectator, spectating everyone else, looking people in the eye, greeting them, “Nice day, isn’t it?”

Still, I prefer good art with a good audience to a day at the beach. I
care about man, not nature. And I’m always waiting for that moment in front of a screen or a stage when my smile looks like everyone else’s, when a whole roomful of people breathe more excitement than air, when we’re backing something en masse. Did you see “Rushmore” on opening night? It was like that — rows and rows of folks giving it a break, so desperate for surprise, so hopeful. We gathered together and asked Bill Murray for grace. And Bill Murray heard our prayer.

The event seemed too good to pass up. Dr. Susan Block, a sex celebrity who is, among other items on a groaning risumi, an advice columnist, a maker of videos bearing such titles as “The Fine Art of Fellatio,” the author of “The 10 Commandments of Pleasure,” the holder of a doctorate in philosophy, a radio and cable access talk-show host and the cleavage-friendly poster child for all things sex-enlightening and self-promoting, was throwing a Valentine’s Day party to celebrate the opening of her new sexual institute, located in an old 1920s speakeasy in “the heart of downtown L.A.’s art, fashion, financial and convention district.” The invitation, on creamy, textured, heavy-bond paper, promised a Boschian garden of earthly delights: an erotic art exhibition, an “aphrodisiac buffet,” cabaret-style entertainment, impeachment erotica, a chemistry lesson in how to “use fantasy to arouse reality” and the vague but intriguing “wild orgiastic felliniesque fun.” The dress code (lingerie, pajamas, formal attire, uniform, naked in a trench coat or stylish slutwear) and the steep ticket prices ($150 for
couples, $120 for “select individuals”) made the event seem all the more
legitimate. But what sealed my resolve was the event’s charitable raison d’jtre — a portion of the proceeds would go to save those endangered paragons of polyamory, the bonobos. I envisioned glamour and revelry, dosed with social responsibility and sprinkled with transgression.

Oops.

Down a dark street of boarded-up buildings past men huddled in furtive transactions, the folding table with a small copier seems like a beacon. “Fill out these forms,” snaps the woman. “I’ll need to see ID.” Our driver’s licenses are whisked out of our hands and run through the machine, while we fill out four pages of release forms — giving our names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses. “Look this way, Miss Lloyd,” says the man. A blinding flash. “It’s all for HBO’s show ‘Real Sex,’ Miss Lloyd.”

We climb a squalid, fluorescent-drenched stairwell. “I don’t know if I want them to have my image,” mutters my friend, a brunet dead ringer for Michelle Pfeiffer who has similar ambitions. Her husband sighs, “That was weird.” I have lured them here with my own hyperbolic promises and now, the more they wish they hadn’t come, the more I thank God they did. Inside the entrance, images proliferate like an epidemic. It would be unkind to call these Barnumesque figments people; I assume people inhabit these bodies at other times but now under the merciless HBO lights, in the stark chintz of artworks that repeat vulvas and phallae like so many corporate logos, each face becomes a surface too hard and opaque to emit any light. The dress code has been largely obeyed: Women shift in sheer scarves tied around their breasts or corsets or gownlike inventions that defy the laws of physics; men light cigarettes in silken pajamas or trench coats or pose in “slime wear,” those shiny, skinlike fabrics that go taut with every move. Unlike my beleaguered friend, images are precisely what many people have come here — and paid dearly — to give away. Take me, HBO! Have your way with me! Dark, moody lighting and music might have shrouded this fact. But in this setting, the obscenity of imagery is far more striking than the imagery of obscenity.

I dressed down, wearing a little skirt and a furry hat that numerous people in attendance seem to regard as some kind of fetish totem.

“Hi Carol,” comes a voice out of nowhere.

A man with a monster spike choker and silver paint ringing his eyes like an extraterrestrial raccoon stands before me in a buttoned-up trench coat. “Remember me?” he asks. “I took your class.”

I peer closer. It is one of my recent career counseling clients, a shy, heavy-set artist. “Hello there,” I smile. “I didn’t recognize you. That’s quite a get-up.”

He smiles bashfully and begins to unbutton his coat. Still cheery as morning light, I stammer my sudden concern for my friends and beat a hasty retreat.

Max, Susan Block’s self-declared publicist, footman, butler, husband and sex slave, offers to show me the art. Gray and a little slovenly, he has the quick, weak eyes of a salesman from a
David Mamet play. He keeps touching me the way some men do, as if a little pressure on a woman’s hand will make an argument more persuasive. He points out a carving of a naked, leaping woman whose head is a giant ruffled vulva, and a small old-fashioned bottle stuffed with a pair of dirty panties. Both pieces are profoundly depressing. “We’ve got everything,” he says proudly, then segues into interview mode. “I’m the most prosecuted publisher in America. I’ve been prosecuted 20 times and I’ve spent 18 months in jail.” He ticks off the charges on his fingers. “Industrial espionage, rack ordinances (I put the first pair of tits on the streets of L.A.), conspiracy to publish …”

I protest that most porn is legal, but he will have none of it.

“You know you can’t show a woman fucking a horse –” He grabs my hands to prevent my retort. “We can’t make that distinction as artists. The minute we do that we become workers of the state.”

He excuses himself to take the microphone and issue a stirring defense of our recently exonerated president. “We’re here to celebrate the spirit of America … those people said let’s get that motherfucker, but they didn’t get him!”

He introduces LaVonne, a bespectacled black woman in an unfurling corset and G-string who seizes the mike and paws at herself while singing a bubblegum pop song, “I Touch Myself.” She doesn’t sing for us but for the camera, which kneels before her, zooming in on her crotch and hand. “You guys want to hear it again?” she cries as soon as the song is over. “HBO ran out of film.”

This time the song ends in a long, very fake orgasm. LaVonne squeals and rips off her corset. She holds her boobs and pogos around the room.

“Can you imagine enslaving tits like these?” crows Max, inaugurating the racial healing phase of the evening. “But that’s what our forefathers did!” At this majestic moment, Dr. Susan Block makes her grand appearance. She is dressed like a Victorian hysteric who has had one too many clitoral massages from her doctor and succumbed to her illness by tearing off her dress but keeping on her hat. In a way, this isn’t so far-fetched. Having grown up in a conservative Jewish household, she has acted as her own doctor, and made up her own cure.

Building upon the now-established theme of enslaved black breasts, Dr. Susan cries out in a Southern preacher’s vernacular: “Brother Roy, where is brother Roy? Come forward and be healed, Brother Roy!” Finally, a modestly dressed African-American man appears. He does not look like a member of this perv circus, but more like one of the quiet, nondescript characters who hang out in front of the seedy hotel across the street. “From black people,” she declaims, “we learned spirit.”

Then she begins to preach the way of ethical hedonism, a philosophy that she claims to have invented. The chief tenet seems to be: Do what feels good, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. But Roy and LaVonne’s presence complicates the simplicity of this message. Standing behind her, they testify as if they are in church: “Yes!” “Tell the truth!” “That’s right now!” Suzy works herself into a froth. “How dare they try to impeach our values?” she cries. Then she performs a blow job on a dildo formed in the likeness of President Clinton.

Hungry to disseminate her images, it’s Susan Block. She recently tried to get a squirt of national media attention by presenting Kenneth Starr with an award for best pornographer of the year. The theme of Clinton’s victory seems equally contrived.

Suddenly, HBO interrupts. The mike is interfering with the camera sound. “But the people can’t hear me otherwise,” she protests. “That’s OK, you’re crystal-clear on film,” the sound operator assures her. To her credit, Block opts for reality over image in this instance, but by then few people are listening and she has to beg the audience not to talk. The advertised “journey through the senses” involves sound (being quiet for the TV cameras), smell (burning sage and smelling our armpits) and finally taste (the “aphrodisiac buffet” of cheese and crackers, grapes and lox). As the small crowd veers toward the meager feast, a rock band bangs out a single tune before HBO complains that the music is too loud and the band must wait until 1 a.m. The band leader and Max nearly come to blows. Angry tears glint in two of the musicians’ eyes as they pack and go. “Get me away from this disgusting place,” one whispers.

This eruption of hostility seems to have fueled people’s spirits and the circus begins to whirl into orbit. Two six-foot women enter, one dressed as an angel, the other as a devil. LaVonne has changed into a new outfit that consists entirely of a leopard tale that fits around her butt crack and ends in a claw over her pubes.

Two gentlemen shop-talk like business men on the golfing green. “I own a gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Here, let me give you my card. Beverly Hills is like Iraq when it comes to showing erotic art.”

The other counsels him: “What you do is show the work, the police will come and shut you down. Contact the ACLU and you’ve got national coverage.” Images disguise themselves easily as political principles. In this case, the penis wags the dog.

“Your class was really good,” says my student, coming up behind me. “I got a new job. In fact, I got two new jobs.” He tells me that, being an avid fan of Dr. Susan’s hot line, he’d gotten an invitation in the mail for this party and decided to drive down from San Francisco. I’m beginning to think he’s the only person here who’s just a regular, ticket-buying pervert.

After the Rodeo Drive businessman, under the pretext of showing me some art, leads me to a briefcase full of glass vibrators and tells me that they can help strengthen the walls of my vagina; after the ubiquitous cameras become almost invisible; after Dr. Suzy whispers, “You’re going to be all right” to a drug-addled woman in a mesh pantsuit; after my poor friends find a distant wall where they stand clutching beers, it happens.

We watch the simple animal act. Two bodies intertwining, potentially making babies or pleasure or meaning, but remarkably making none of these. The overwrought attempt to make everything sexy, explicit, titillating, groovy, has created a vacuum. The two people fuck and it’s not interesting, except insofar as it’s uninteresting. He is playing to the camera; she is somewhere else. We conclude that they must be paid performers and he must be gay. Otherwise, wouldn’t there be some there there? Later I learn that these two are a married couple, porn stars Cassandra Knight and Antony Stone, whose mission together is to present “healthy, loving but exciting sex.” They smile sweetly when they say this. I feel suddenly sad for them. As with so much explicit eroticism nowadays, so much gets lost in the presentation.